Well, it sells books
There is more than a passing resemblance between the cover of Jo Rees’ new book Platinum and the covers of Michel Houellebecq’s and Platform. Same designer? Same model?
Archive for May, 2009
Rational actors
One of the most illuminating insights from the study of economics is that of man as a rational maximiser of utility. Putting aside the valid quirks of organisational limitation and bounded rationality, inherent bias and behavioural economics, the idea that people do what they do because it works for them is very powerful. It’s also very democratic and empowering. People don’t do things you think of as bad or wrong because they are naive or foolish, they do it because, for them, it makes sense.
Treating people as rational means giving them credit to know what’s best for themselves, rather than adopting paternalist policies. If you want to change behaviour (itself a dubious objective requiring much caution) you have to do more than simply educate people. Education only changes behaviour when there was a lack of information before. If there was no dearth of information, education is just the annoying imposition of another viewpoint. It will have little impact except to waste money and annoy those being ‘educated’.
If you really want to change behaviour, give people credit for knowing their own minds, don’t tell them what to think, but change the incentives. This sometimes offers radically different policy solutions.
This theme has recurred a couple of times in the last week: once when examining UK government policy on teenage pregnancy (as part of my MPA studies) and once when reading an article about the book Portfolios of the Poor in The Economist. In the former case, I was struck that government policy both aims to make life better for teenage mothers – providing them with better facilities, better housing, better job and educational opportunities – while also trying to decrease the numbers of teenage mothers through education. Lisa Arai makes a good case that this doesn’t conform to a rational model, where teenage girls have children because that offers them a better life option. In the latter case, people living in poverty have been shown not to be financially naive spendthrifts, but highly sophisticated, rational consumption-smoothers. Applying rational models to these policy challenges produces very different solutions.
In what other areas would assuming rational behaviour make a huge policy difference?
Incoming
Out of interest, this is the effect of a link from Marginal Revolution on your blog traffic. I’m not entirely sure why Tyler linked to me linking to Wehr in the World, linking to his own comments, but I guess it’s an example of economizing your PR. Trail, monitor, link.
Kay, Day and CSR
The economist, academic, author and serial non-exec John Kay and the BBC Business reporter Peter Day came to speak at a work event last week. I’m a big John Kay fan, having read most of his books and columns. However, this was the first time that I’d met him. He didn’t disappoint, except for sounding less Scottish than I’d imagined he would.
John’s best line, in my opinion, was going further than asking whether businesses should engage in ‘corporate social responsibility’ to actually ask by what right they did this – recognising that their choices for charitable causes may not be the same as their customers’ or shareholders’. This has stuck with me, not least because I walk past a branch of bath-bomb outlet Lush (complete with TRAINS NOT PLANES! window poster) on my way to and from work.
Peter Day, on the other hand, I have never particularly taken to. He seemed much more qualified to ask questions than to answer them. This makes him both a good choice for a business reporter and a poor choice of panel member. However, to give him credit, he gave a good answer to a question from the floor about the role of the media in the current crisis, staunchly defending Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor who seems to be unfairly loathed for having the audacity to do his job well while being in the posession of a slightly odd voice.
Failing the crazy test
An unusally poor post by Lemmus Lemmus (real name?) at The Church of Rationality. He (I imagine Lemmus is male) samples 30 pages of Ayn Rand and is not impressed. I am not usually one to stick up for Rand, on the grounds that seeing who does is a faily good heuristic for screening monomaniac crazies. However, on this occasion I will break my own rule. Lemmus:
If we accept that life is an end in itself, by which she means (as is clear from the context) that the preservation of human life must be the one and only aim of ethics…
I disagree with the bit after the comma. You can’t say “by which she means” and then create a straw man like that. Or you shouldn’t. Or both.
The question is over whether you aggregate life being all that matters, and whose life you are talking about. Is the life social (all life matters, the Lemmus reading) or non-existent and personal (my life is all that matters). Rand cared about her life, and nobody else’s. If she could save somebody else at no real cost and wanted to, then fine. If she could but didn’t, fine too. Barbarous, some claim, but consistent.
Lemmus again:
Quality of life doesn’t seem to be a concern for her.
But he quotes this direct from Rand:
To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.
Happiness is about quality of life, no?
And that’s it with Ayn Rand and me. Of course I could read all of her books and see whether she has addressed this rather obvious objection anywhere, but given that time is a scarce resource I prefer to spend mine on stuff that promises to be more worthwhile.
Change the gender of that paragraph’s subject, ’Ayn Rand’ to ‘Lemmus Lemmus’ and ‘books’ to ‘posts’, and I agree. Or at least, it would be if I adopted that kind of absolutist approach to analysing somebody’s body of thought.
Advertising on banknotes
An idle thought: apart from the vulgarity, would there be any disadvantage to allowing advertising on banknotes, and might this note help government fund printing them? Advertisements could be restricted to a small, standard area, so as nobody could be in any doubt as to them corrupting the general recognition of the note, and the frequency with which such advertisements changed may even prevent fraud, by forcing fraudsters to change their designs regularly. I know that in many places (like Scotland and Hong Kong) private banks issue notes bearing their logos – so why not go all the way?
Sten Weekend
A great joint hen and stag weekend this, with Helen joining Moira’s gang of girls for some hire wire fun, and myself joining Russ and the lads to go shooting near Harlow. Then back to thhe new Chez Bowdrey for gin and tonic and snacks before a meal at Davy’s. I have a few photos on Flickr.
Aberfaldy
We had a bottle of 2005 Tim Adams Aberfaldy Shiraz to celebrate Helen’s birthday a couple of weeks ago. The Aberfaldy is the only single-vineyard Tim Adams wine, sourced from a red loam and limestone vineyard planted in 1904. It’s by some distance the best Aussie wine I’ve ever tasted: oily enough to have a full taste and lingering strong flavour, but not too greasy. We have the rest of the case to keep, and I think it will age very well. Maybe one on every birthday for the next few years?
What is this?
Fact! After having spent a good five minutes on this site, I still can barely understand whether it is a movement, a party, or some combination of the two. And just how does ‘WAI D’ mean ‘your choice’? In what language? It seems I am not the only one confused.
What I think
As a mental exercise, I have tried to answer the question ‘what do I believe’ in the fewest possible words. This is my best attempt to date.
Epistemology, identity and language. Existence is an irrelevant concept, its validity unprovable and utterly insignificant. Nouns (and thus language) are built on convenient euphemisms and abstractions. You never cross the same river twice: the water has changed and so have you. Identity is feigned. Human communication and universal grammar depends on our ability to form and adapt abstractions: people, rivers, nouns. We process these with verbs, and infer them with argument. We build these abstractions into knowledge. Often we don’t correct enough for evolved biases because we’ve evolved not to. The knowledge we create contains a lot of euphemism and abstraction, (and contorts these into a priori truisms) but also bundles up some important, fundamental and a posteriori physical laws. You dropped an apple, it fell: ‘you’ and the ‘apple’ are abstractions, the revealed law is as close as we will get to experiencing truth. It doesn’t matter who senses this truth, or how. Truth is platform-independent.
Philosophy of science. A unified theory of everything may require multiple universes, although the existence of such universes would pose no new practical problems, in the same way as the existence of previous and future timeframes pose no new practical problems. While we work towards a unified theory we should bear in mind that while we travel through time unintentionally we also exist in the past, ‘now’.
Ethics. There are no ethical facts, and so there cannot be ethical knowledge. Statements of right and wrong are statements of strong (‘sanctified’) preference. Pride, joy, guilt and shame exist as evolved responses to guide pro-social behaviour that favours reproduction. These combine with the self-interest of others to set ‘ethical norms’ and outline ‘natural justice’. There is no ‘good life’ in the absence of an objective; there are no ‘inalienable rights’ outside of contract.
Political philosophy. Because of the inter-generational problem, liberty exists only in polities with the right of exit and entry. The availability of new frontiers increases the quantum of liberty in the universe, through competitive bidding – polities need people as much as people need polities. Escape to space is a genetic necessity.
Economics. Markets are an externalisation of the process of human reasoning. They benefit from the same power, speed and logic, but are subject to the same behavioural biases as individuals and crowds.
