We Cannot Manipulate Complex Systems Like We Can Simple Systems

The more complex something is, the harder it is to manipulate without creating unintended consequences.

We are very good at manipulating those areas of nature we study through the sciences of physics and chemistry -- the least complex sciences. Almost all of our technology was created through manipulating physical and/or chemical properties. We have done a little in biotechnology, but even here what we have done are the simplest kinds of gene manipulations, where a single gene has a single effect. This covers an unimaginably small fraction of biological possibilities.

We humans are able to understand -- and, thus, manipulate -- any level of reality less complex than ourselves. Biological manipulation is extremely complex, and therefore extremely difficult, but possible. But systems/processes of equal or greater complexity than ourselves cannot be manipulated with our knowledge of the outcomes. Our (inter)actions create social networks like the various spontaneous orders of the gift, market, divine, and political economies. They emerge from our (inter)actions, but that does not mean we can manipulate them at will and get the exact results we want, as we can do with simple physical and chemical systems. Simpler systems are easiler to manipulate, and the simpler, the easier. But when we are dealing with systems more complex than ourselves, including systems we are necessarily a part of, manipulation becomes increasingly difficult. The result is ever-more unintended consequences spreading through the system, wreaking havok in uninaginable ways.

It is important to have a real understanding of the nature of complexity, and the level of complexity for whatever it is you want to understand and/or manipulate. Know what you can know and what you cannot know. To think you can know things you cannot is hubris. To think you can know what the real consequences of your interventions, regulations, barriers, etc. will be is to claim to know what you cannot know. Just because we sent a man to the moon, that does not mean we can consciously create a solution for world poverty. The two abilities are utterly unrelated. Ironically, the more we try to directly intervene, the worse we often make it for people. Those who understand complex processes understand why this is.

The Economy as Dissipative Structure

A good example of a self-organizing system on the borderland of order and chaos (which is the realm of criticality, or far-from-equilibrium state) is a hurricane. Anyone who has experienced a hurricane has the feeling that the ocean is coming onto the land from the sky. That is because the ordered part of the hurricane is the ocean; the chaotic part of the hurricane is the atmosphere. The hurricane gains order as heat-energy enters the hurricane from the ocean, and it dissipates that energy by shedding bands of rainclouds. In fact, if the hurricane is shedding its outer bands of rainclouds, that means the hurricane is strengthening. This is what one expects from what are known as dissipative structures, of which self-organizing systems, including hurricanes, are types.

Dissipative structures have to dissipate parts of themselves to maintain their structures. A self-organizing system is thus a species of dissipative structure. To have self-organization, you have to have energy in, processing, and energy out.

An economy is a self-organizing system, or spontaneous order. To have a strong economy, you have to have energy in, processing, and energy out. This can of course be literal energy, such as electricity, which is turned into work. A product and heat are the outcomes. To create the product, you have to transform the energy into work and dissipate heat -- in other words, increase entropy. We can understand other elements of the economy much better if we understand the economy as a dissipative structure. Particularly if we look at it like a hurricane. A strong economy is thus one which sheds off its "outer bands" as it strengthens. "New energy," such a the creation of new technologies, enters the system, resulting in "old energy," such as old technologies the new ones replace, being shed. If you prevent the energy from dissipating, you don't get a stronger system -- you get weakening and, eventually, system collapse. Thus efforts to protect old technologies from newer ones will weaken the economy.

All such efforts at protectionism are thus system-weakening. This includes jobs. As an economy creates new kinds of jobs, one would expect it to dissipate whatever older jobs it can dissipate (this is known as outsourcing). If one were to protect people from losing those older jobs, the result would be a weakening of the economy overall. This is a problem of the seen vs. the unseen. It is easy to see the failing business, the disappearing technology, or the lost job. It is harder to see the new business, the new technology, or the new job. But it is because of the latter that the former happens. And if you prevent the former from taking place, you actually make it more and more difficult for more energy, for new things to enter into the system. This harms everyone over the long term, including those you are "helping" over the short term.

It is only by understanding the true nature of the economy, as a self-organizing, dissipative structure, that we can come to really see and understand these things. There are unintended consequences to well-intentioned protectionist actions precisely because the economy's structure is not properly understood.

Essentialism, Collectivism, and Scarce Resources

Humans have several default ways of thinking. We are essentially tribalist, and we are essentially essentialists. Exceptions do exist, but mostly we have to unlearn tribalism and essentialism, as they are species-typical ways of thinking. It could be possible to be one or the other, without being both. One could recognize "our tribe" vs. "their tribe" and not think there is something essentially different about "them" that makes them "them" other than simply being a different group of individuals. Or consider the fact that we think of a door as having an essence that makes it "door-like," but we do not have an us-them relationship with doors. What is the difference? As my friend Michael Beeson pointed out in a Facebook conversation, it boils down to the competition for scarce resources. If we believe the world to be a zero sum game, it makes sense to want to get rid of groups competing for scarce resrouces. Tribes hate tribes who are competing against scarce resources. Racists hate other races who are competing against scarce resources. Under Marxism, the proletariat have to overthrow the bourgeoisie because the latter control all the scarce resources that are supposed to belong to the proletariat. Democrats hate Republicans, and vice versa, because both are competing for the scarce resource of political power. It becomes easier to compete against these tribes if we further essentialize them. If we have an essence that make us "us," and they have an essence that makes them "them," and we (of coruse) are good, then not-us must be not-good. Once you get rid of zero-sum thinking, though, these collectivist ideas collapse, since one comes to understand that cooperative competition creates a positive sum process that can enrich everyone without anyone losing, meaning group is not pitted against group. If we can get beyond collectivist/tribalist thinking and beyond essentialism, we can get beyond the kinds of destructive ideologies that have dominated human history. In other words, as Ernst Mayr observes in Populations, Species, and Evolution (1970), we have to replace essentialist/typologist thinking with population/individualistic thinking:

The asusmptions of population thinking are diametrically opposed to those of the typologist. The populationist stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world. What is true for the human species, that no two individuals are alike, is equally true for all other species of animals and plants. . . . All organisms and organic phenomena are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind of organic entities, form populations of which we can determine the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation. Averages are merely statistical abstractions; only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality. The ultimate conclusions of the population thinker and of the typologist are precisely the opposite. For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation is illusion, while for the populationist the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different.

He further points out that

The replacement of typological thinking by population thinking is perhaps the greatest conceptual revolution that has taken place in biology. Many of the basic concepts of the synthetic theory, such as that of natural selection and that of the population, are meaningless for the typologist.

We all need to move from typological to populationist thinking, and not just in biology. It is relevant for our social thinking, as our social processes are exactly that: evolutionary processes. The mechanisms are, to say the least, highly similar. Anyone who truly understands evolution cannot be an ideologue for long, as ideological thinking is typological thinking, and thus violates the populationist thinking of someone who truly understands evolution.

The Nature of Poetic Order

This is an amazing insight by Richard Gabriel into poetic order. I will be putting this to use in looking at my poems.

How to Destroy Philosophy (and the Arts)

A recurring theme in Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies is that there is an inverse correlation between the strength of a society's government and the strength of philosophy. China is a perfect example of this. Consider what Collins says about the development of philosophy and how this relates to how it developed -- and often failed to develop -- in China:

absence of idealism is connected more with the halting continuity of philosophical abstraction than with a more deep-rooted cultural trait. Idealism is never an early form but a sophisticated philosophical construction. A halfway house between revealed religion and rationalistic philosophy, idealism is couched at a level of abstraction which can be attained only through a long cumulative development of an intellectual network refining its concepts. (316) Idealism is of course not the only form of metaphysical abstraction. We can draw the lesson more generally. It is often asserted that the Chinese mentality is concrete and practical, with no taste for metaphysics. Yet metaphysical abstractions were periodically created in China. [...] Higher levels of abstract reflection are reached by applying epistemological considerations to conceptual problems. At least this is one route toward metaphysics, prominent in Greek, Indian, and European philosophy. The issue in China is less the absence of metaphysics than the rarity of sustained epistemological consideration. Epistemology becomes a focus when an intellectual community is balanced in debate, with sufficient continuity across the generations to give rise to specialization in the techniques of argument. Sophistical debate is a typical first step toward consideration of epistemology in its own right. (317)

The bureaucratic-political structure of China throughout the past 2000+ years, with intellectuals being the ones in charge of the bureaucracies, created a situation where there could be the philosophical equivalent to "regulatory capture," in which the politically favored group gained political power and simply crushed rivals rather than argue with them. When in power, the Confucians crushed the Buddhists and Taoists, and those two groups returned the favor (and crushed each other) when they gained power. Land and wealth were seized, taxes laid, people exiled, etc. Because there was a strong bureaucracy that was directly tied to intellectuals and education, it was easy to destroy one's opponents' intellectual networks.

When the destruction of intellectual networks interrupted further development on the abstract level, philosophical doctrines during the Han were carried on at a level closer to lay concerns. When structural conditions were again favorable to skeptical and sophistical debate, in the brief generations of the Pure Conversation circles of the Three Kingdoms, abstract philosophy emerged again. (317) Why were there such long periods of stagnation, even retrogression, on the plane of abstract philosophy? It was not simply a matter of declining material supports for intellectual life; the fall of the great dynasties with their material wealth is correlated not with mediocrity but often with the opposite. The Han, T'ang, and Ming were periods when the stagnation of abstract philosophy, at least outside of Buddhism, was at its worst. Here we see the importance not of material supports for intellectual life in general, but of the particular kinds of structural underpinnings which support or stifle creativity. The deadening touch of all these stagnant dynasties was precisely the way Chinese intellectuals were controlled by material incentives linked to the selection of officials for the state. (319-320)

Collins thus suggests that those intellectuals who argue that there should be more material support for philosophy to bloom are utterly wrong. It would -- and does -- have the opposite effect. And the fact that philosophy (and the arts for the most part) have escaped into the safety of our universities is not really good news, because "Schooling, which we associate with the life of culture, often operates as a deadening of culture, preserving the ideas of the past at the expense of creativity within the present" (320). Government support and universities thus result in conservatism in the absolute worst sense of the term. It is ironic that the so-called progressives who support government support for the arts and humanities would give us the columbarium of philosophy and the arts if and to what extent they are successful.

Economics as Coevolution Across Design Spaces

In The Origin of Wealth, Eric Beinhocker suggests that

Economic evolution is not the result of evolution in a single design space, but rather, as I will propose, the result of coevolution across three design spaces. In chapter 1, I briefly introduced two terms from Richard Nelson of Columbia University: Physical and Social Technologies. Physical Technologies are what we usually think of when we think of the word technology. Physical Technologies are designs and processes for transforming matter, energy, and information in ways that are useful for human purposes, for example, turning sand into glass or into silicon chips. Social Technologies are equally important, but often less at the forefront of our minds. They are the designs, processes, and rules that humans use to organize themselves. Villages, armies, matrix organizations, paper money, the rule of law, and just-in-time inventory management are all examples of social technologies. Business Plans play the critical role of melding Physical and Social Technologies under a single strategy, and then operationally expressing the resulting designs in the economic world. We need to think of Business Plans, Physical Technologies, and Social Technologies as three distinct design spaces because each has its own unique fitness functions at work. Business Plans tend to be selected for economic reasons, but Physical and Social Technologies may evolve for other purposes. (238)

Yet mainstream economics does not seem to consider any of these to be relevant to understanding the economy. Technological changes are considered to be "external shocks," even though Schumpeter almost 100 years ago pointed out the centrality of technological evolution to understanding the economy. I am guessing Business Plans are not being studied in economics departments, either -- if anyplace, they are studied in MBA programs. And Social Technologies? With the exception of the subcategory of money, are there any economists outside of the Austrian school interested in this? I am constantly amazed at how little of the economy mainstream economists actually study. However, hings are moving in the right direction, with behavioral economics, game theory, institutional economics, evolutionary economics, the integration CAS theory and agent-based modeling, and the rise of Austrian economics. With the complexity economics paradigm shift, economics as a whole, rather than just marginal pockets, might become a real science yet.

Interacting Economies, Institutions, and the Effects on Other Economies

In The Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins argues that

intellectual creativity is no mere reflex of economics and politics. There are three layers of causality: (1) economic-political structures, which in turn shape (2) the organizations which support intellectual life; and these in turn allow the buildup of (3) networks among participants in centers of attention on intellectual controversies, which constitute the idea-substance of intellectual life. Economic-political conditions determine ideas not directly but by way of shaping, and above all by changing, the intermediate level, the organizational base of intellectual production. (324)

However, the dominant philosophy of a culture in turn affects economic-political structures. In fact, one could argue that philosophical-political structures shape the organizations with support economic life, which in turn allow the buildup of certain kinds of economic activity. Also, economic-philosophical structures shape the organizations that support political life, which in turn allow the buildup of certain kinds of political activity. In other words, if we consider the fact that civil society is made up of the gift, market, political, and divine economies, the interactions of any three affect the organizational structures of the remaining one, and thus influence its network structure. Collins is focused on how the market and political economies interact to create the institutional structures underlying evolution in the divine economy, but there is no reason we could (or should) not consider how two or three economies interact to influence another one. In fact, Collins -- in this section, at least -- ignores the effect of the gift economy. I think there is little question that science and the arts have have a significant effect on the evolution of philosophies around the world. One could spend a considerable amount of time writing papers exploring the different combinations, what institutions they create, and the effects of those institutions on different economies' networks.

The 12% Solution

If the size of the federal work force is 17 million (in 1999, so let us assume it is larger in 2012 -- not to mention state, etc. workers -- meaning we will use this entire 17 million number for the rest of this analysis, since we will also assume someone has to work for the various governments), and the labor force is 154 million in a $15 trillion economy, and we assume that this same 17 million federal workers have a net effect on the economy of $0 (which is wrong, as they in fact have a negative effect on economic growth), how much economic growth do we miss out on by having all these bureaucrats not producing economic value? 154 million - 17 million is 137 million. $15 trillion / 137 million is $109,489 in value created. $109,489 x 17 million = $1,861,313,000,000 $1,861,313,000,000 / $15 trillion = 0.124 = 12.4% Or, if you prefer, 137 million/17 million = 12.4% I went through all the monetary calculations to show the money lost to our economy because of the existence of bureaucrats. True, this is a horribly simplistic calculation. And it ignores the fact that bureaucrats reduce value in the economy. And it ignores the fact that since many bureaucrats are highly educated, they could in fact create even more money per person, so I'm willing to stand by my calculation. The U.S. could have an economy 12% larger than it is. All we have to do is free the bureaucrats.

Can a Jackson Pollock painting have a moral effect?

Art helps train us up in the complexities of the world. Jackson Pollock's paintings are statistical fractals, reflecting the complex nature of the world. Humans are comfortable within an upper and lower range of fractal complexity, and Pollock investigated this range throughout his drip painting period. As a result, viewing a Pollock painting can help train up the brain to experience more complexity precisely because it is viewing such fractal complexity at an abstract level. If viewing a Pollock helps us to see the world as it is, in its fractal complexity, then we have a more correct view of the world. When we have a right view of the world, we are more capable of performing a right action. Ought implies is. If we can't do it, then it's not moral. And if we know what actions will in fact have the outcomes we desire, our actions are ethical. By having a truer understanding of the world, our actions will be more likely to have the effect we desire, meaning our actions will be more likely to be ethical. A right understanding of the world allows us to match our moral rules to create ethical action. Art helps us understand the world. The better we understand the world, the better we can match that understanding to our moral instincts, resulting in ethical action. As a result, a Jackson Pollock painting can have a moral effect precisely because it helps us to understand truth. “Art treats illusion as illusion; therefore it does not wish to deceive; it is true” (Nietzsche, PT 184). From that foundation, combined with our moral instincts, art can result in ethical action.

The EDGE Center and Me

I have recently been made a Fellow at The EDGE Center, a think tank at UT-Dallas. EDGE stands for Entrepreneurship, Diversity, and Global Empowerment. It is a free market think tank with an interest in Austrian economics and other complexity approaches to understanding culture, economies, governments, and other aspects of civil society.

Upon suggesting to Euel Elliot and Elena Labastida, who set up The EDGE Center, that they should have a journal associated with it, I was made the editor of what will be The Journal of Globalization, Diversity, and Spontaneous Orders. It will be fun getting this journal using complexity sciences to study global orders set up and running. I think it fills a unique niche and will be a great contribution to the study of these issues. At least, I will do my best to make it a great contribution to the study of these areas and issues.

Apostacy

Humans are a social species, and as such we try to fit into groups and join groups. At the same time, we are very individualistic. We are thus at our most human when we are simultaneously social and individualistic. When we are either radical in our individualism or collectivist, though, we are at our worst, most inhuman. In the first case, we are anti-social, even sociopathic; in the second case, the individual can be sacrificed for the "common good," which inevitably leads to any number of horrors.

Social groups are heterogeneous; collectivist groups are homogeneous. This is what distinguishes the two. This doesn't mean that there aren't common behaviors within a social group -- without common behaviors, there would be no cohesion, no cooperation, no coordination. But there can be common behaviors without full conformity. There may even be recognition of a need for changes in behavior in a social group. Collectives do not see a need for changes. Indeed, changes are a threat to the collective. So, too, is any sort of distinct behavior by any of the members of the group, for that indicates variance from the thinking of the group, which can lead to the worst sin for a collectivist: apostacy.

In religion, one becomes an apostate when one rejects the religion into which one was born and accepts another religion. We see this same attitude in other forms of collectivism. The traitor to one's class is a class apostate. The traitor to one's race is a race apostate. The traitor to one's gender is a gender apostate. The traitor to one's political party is a political apostate. The traitor to one's nation is a nation apostate. In the latter case, rejecting one's citizenship would be a kind of nation apostate, too. What connects these things is the group into which one is born is rejected for another group. From the perspective of collectivist morality, there is perhaps no greater sin.

Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, talks about collectives and apostacy in his metaphor of the ring. Rings and circularity are images of eternity – specifically, in this case, including oneself in a circle of people, and finding belonging there, and feeling that sense of eternal belonging. It is in the ring where one’s individuality can dissolve into others, but this can, as one can imagine, have tragic consequences, both in creating, and in being expelled from, the ring. The ring, or circularity, can be seen in the story of Oedipus, as he finds himself within a ring, or circle, that started and ended in his mother’s womb. Indeed, it is when Oedipus learns of the facts of his birth that he gets expelled from the ring he was trapped in. To be expelled from a ring (and thus the eternal) is tragic.

There is tragedy in rings precisely because people wish to be in rings: “Dancing in a ring is magic; a ring dance speaks to us from the ancient depths of our memories” (88-9). But how does one enter into a ring dance? Kundera gives a list of ways one of his characters, Madame Raphael, attempted to enter into one of many:

at first in the Methodist church . . . , then in the Communist Party, then in the Trotskyist Party, then in a Trotskyist splinter party, then in the movement against abortion (a child has a right to life!), then in the movement to legalize abortion (a woman has a right to her body!), then she looked for it in Marxists, in psychoanalysts, in structuralists, looked for it in Lenin, in Zen Buddhism, in Mao Tse-tung, among the followers of yoga, in the school of the nouveau roman. (89)

Finally, she finds it in two of her students, Gabrielle and Michelle. The students are her favorites, and, after the two students have given a presentation on Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, where the students are wearing cardboard horns,

The three women danced and laughed, the cardboard noses jiggled, and the class looked at them in mute horror. But by now the three dancing women were unaware of the others, they were concentrating entirely on themselves and on their sensual pleasure. Suddenly Madame Raphael stamped her foot harder and rose a few centimeters above the floor and then, with the next step, was no longer touching the ground. She pulled her two companions after her, and in a moment all three were revolving above the floor and rising slowly in a spiral. When their hair touched the ceiling, it started little by little to open. They rose higher and higher through that opening, their cardboard noses were no longer visible, and now there were only three pairs of shoes passing through the gaping hole, but these too finally vanished, while from on high, the dumbfounded students heard the fading radiant laughter of three archangels. (104)

Those outside the circle are horrified by what goes on within. The same would have been true of the audience’s reaction to watching the Oedipus plays on stage when they were first performed – as everyone at the time knew of the story separate from Sophocles’ particular presentation of it. And the circle itself, while being wonderful for those within, is also always exclusive. Those within the circle become unaware of those not in the circle – perhaps to the point of ignoring, or not even seeing, as too many Communist idealists did and do, the horrors around them.

Kundera himself admits “I too once danced in a ring” (91), as a Communist student. But “then one day I said something I should not have said, was expelled from the party, and had to leave the ring dance” (92). In other words, he became an apostate. And it is here, in his own personal story, where we learn of the tragedy of the ring dance:

That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not yet stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles. (92)

Kundera feels this most strongly when he finds himself excluded by the French surrealist poet Éluard, who failed to try to save the Czech poet Kalandra, even after André Breton requested it of him, because he “was busy dancing in a gigantic ring between Paris, Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, Sophia, and Greece, between all the socialist countries and all the world’s Communist parties, and everywhere he recited his beautiful poems about joy and brotherhood” (93). But he would not try to save the life of another.

And why not? Because Kalandra was an apostate, no longer belonged in the ring, no longer deserved eternity, no longer was a member of the collective that made it all possible. The possibility and presence of apostates is the surest indication of the presence of collectivism. Be it race, gender, the party, the nation, one's class, the worst kind of person is an apostate. I suspect that members of one kind of collective are suspicious of those who have proven themselves to be apostates of other groups. Does the person who believes someone can be a class traitor believe someone married to another ethnic group or race can truly be trusted not to become a class traitor? I suspect that, even if there is open disagreement with racists, there is a deeper sympathy for their beliefs among other collectivists.

Thus the collectivist moral system in fact makes one act in ways that are immoral. Collectivist justice similarly leads to injustice. The radical individualist who disdains others is equally capable of being immoral and unjust. It is only those who are social individualists who are capable of the full range of moral and just behaviors. This is why it is paramount to understand which set of interhuman relationships one should support and understand humans as having for them to fully express themselves as moral, just human beings.

Phishing

Apparently, if I want to get the attention of the Federal government, I should be sure to use the following words:




Perhaps I should see how many of these words I can use in a poem.

Looting

There's a pork cloud over Mexico
America's it's name.
Watch as China plots to buy our debt
Until we're bust and lame.

Conclusion: probably would make terrible poetry.

I suppose we should not be surprised that there are certain words that government intelligence agencies are on the lookout for. As a word lover, I find the list interesting. 

The Origin of Wealth

I've been enjoying Eric Beinhocker's The Origin of Wealth. If I quoted everything important in it, I would have to cite the whole thing, so far. The section I just finished reading was on the work done by Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell on Sugarscape, where they did agent-based modeling that led to bottom-up creation of a power law distribution of wealth and even the natural emergence of banks. Most notably, trade led to a power law distribution of wealth, but resulted in everyone becoming wealthier. Which one would predict from the theory of scale-free networks.

Beinhocker's book is about how complexity economics is different from traditional economics, the latter of which he argues went down the wrong path by focusing on equilibrium (an argument I have made repeatedly). However, complexity economics is not quite as new as we might think, even if it is being more mathematized now due to the existence of fast computers. He argues that complexity economics also has

a long and rich intellectual history. That history includes figures such as John von Neuman, the inventor of game theory and cellular automata; members of the "Austrian school" such as Friedrich Hayek; behavioral economists such as Herbert Simon and Daniel Kahneman; institutional economists such as Douglass North; evolutionary economists such as Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter; political scientists such as Robert Axelrod and Thomas Sshelling; and computer scientists such as John Holland and Christopher Langton. (96)

I have seen a lot of convergence in these approaches, which is perhaps not surprising. There is still some talk of equilibrium in all of these fields, even though open, dynamic, nonlinear processes such as they describe cannot possibly lead to equilibrium, but rather lead to far-from-equlibrium states, but we can't expect the way things have typically been done to become abandoned all at once. In a recent post, I talked about price theory -- traditional economics tells us to expect an equilibrium price; complexity economics tells us to expect movement around a strange attractor, resulting in a range of prices in which arbitrage is possible. Which sounds more like what happens in the real world? My theory of prices, because it has bipolar feedback and therefore leads to complex dynamics, results in a strange attractor.

I have also complained about how macroeconomics is nonsense. Complexity economics makes "No distinction between micro- and macroeconomics; macro patterns are emergent result of micro-level behaviors and interactions" (97, Table 4-1). This sounds like Steve Horwitz's work on deriving macroeconomics from microfoundations.

Finally, complexity economics is founded on methodological individualism, where the agents have incomplete information, learn and adapt, use induction, and are prone to bias and errors. The Austrian economists have been doing this for a very long time now.

I came to Austrian economics through my interest in complexity, particularly self-organization. It was the school of economics whose understanding of the economy most closely matched how I understood the universe to work. Beinhocker's book -- and his recognition of the Austrian school as a founder of complexity economics, as well as the fact that the current Austrians are integrating much of the work of the other threads mentioned in the above quote -- only confirms my initial instincts about which way of doing economics is the right one.

A Powerful Moral Argument Against High Taxation

A powerful moral argument against high taxation --and much modern governments do -- can be made. And should be made more often. The author is correct that by taking so much money away from us, it makes it more difficult to help others. But it can also make it more difficult to live up to one's obligations as well. It is among the ways governments make men less ethical.

Morality In One Lesson (Ethics and Justice in . . . )

If we take morality to be "of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong" and ethics as "the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group, culture, etc.," we have the conditions for a morality that is both constant and evolves. Morality involves rules -- one cannot do X to anyone one considers to be a "person" -- that delineate moral action. The existence of rules, though, does not preclude evolution. With the above stated rule, we have moral action that can evolve as our definition of "person" evolves. And notice that this fits with the definition of ethics given, since it is action within a particular social context. Not murdering your brother would be a moral action that is also an ethical action in every culture (since one's brother is always considered to be a person, regardless of culture). Not murdering your wife would be an ethical action in one culture, while murdering her would not necessarily be unethical in another, because of the differing definitions of "person" in each context. (This does not preclude a metaethical rule by which one can judge the ethics of being able to murder one's wife, though.) The moral rule of "one cannot go X to anyone one considers to be a person" is thus found in every cultural situation (morals), while differing in expression from culture to culture (ethics). What is not universal, and what is in part culturally determined (and can evolve, as cultures evolve) is who gets defined as a "person" and who does not.

Moral truth, then, is the moral rule, around which the ethical expressions orbit/evolve. Now, one can have a moral rule prohibiting murder, where murder is defined as "one should never purposefully kill, except in self-defense, a person" and another rule "every member of the species Homo sapiens is a human being" that would be an ethical rule, that would result in the moral-ethical rule "one should never purposefully kill, except in self-defense, a member of the species Homo sapiens". This is how one gets constancy with change.

But perhaps we should try to generalize the moral rule. Can we reduce it down to one moral rule?

"You may not intentionally harm any person, except to defend against or punish an equal or greater harm against yourself or another person."

 Harm would of course include murder, theft, rape, and "bearing false witness," which is lying to harm another. A person is anyone you can empathize with. This is the variable that leads one to ethics.

This definition of morality would also mean that there would be both a moral ethics (such as involving who is or is not defined as a person) and a nonmoral ethics. What would be included in a nonmoral ethics? It would be things that do not fit the moral rule, yet fits the above definition of ethics. Thus, Jewish and Muslim prohibition on the eating of pork would be an issue of ethics, but not of morals. Such a prohibition comes about in order to help people avoid illness, and is affected by the feeling of disgust.

It also occurs to me that there would also be a moral justice and a nonmoral justice. A moral justice would involve the second half of the above statement, involving defense and punishment. However, there is also a nonmoral justice, as demonstrated by the ultimatum game, in which a person is given money and has to split the money with a second, who can choose whether or not to accept the offer -- with the consequence that if the second turns down the offer, neither get money. The ultimatum game shows people will reject low offers, because they think them to be unfair. This is nonmoral because you cannot harm someone by preventing them from getting what the did not already have, but only by taking from then what is already theirs.

Of course, again, this all requires much more to work.

An Information-Theoretic Primer on Complexity, Self-Organization, and Emergence

An Information-Theoretic Primer on Complexity, Self-Organization, and Emergence

Given my book Diaphysics, how can I not be interested in this? 

The Author and the Narrator

I was looking at a poem I wrote recently and posted on my poetry blog, Too You, Too Me, Too Us, and I began to think about how such a poem could be misinterpreted as being about an episode in the author's life. Since I am the author, I am certainly in a situation to address whether or not this particular poem is about something in my life. It is not. Those who know me have nothing to fear: no such arguments in fact take place between Anna and me.

So why did I write the poem? Well, on one of my recent songs, I made a typo, leaving off the "ng" of young in a line that had "I was too young." A commenter on my poetry blog pointed it out, hoping it was intentional, but suspecting, based on the context, that I had in fact mean "too young." I thought the idea of "too you" was an interesting one, too, and decided to write a poem around that idea.

The outcome was the above poem. A poem or a story has both an author and a narrator. They are not necessarily the same. Very often they are not the same. It is a fallacy to equate the author with the narrator in a creative work like a poem, short story, or novel. Looking to an author's biography can help one to understand his works, but not by confusing the experiences of the author with the characters and/or narrators of his works.

Markets and Morality

Herbert Gintis on markets and morality. I am glad this is a current topic, given my current interests. Which only means I need to step on it if I'm going to strike while the iron's hot. As Gintis points out, markets make one more moral, not less.

Political Ideology, Tribalism, and Morality

Here is an article that confirms my thesis that one only feels empathy -- meaning, one only acts morally -- toward those one considers to be in one's tribe. It turns out that knowing someone's ideology affects whether or not you empathize with them. But what does it say that Republicans are slightly less empathetic (96%) toward other Republicans than Democrats are to Democrats (100%), but more empathetic to Democrats (9.5%) than Democrats are to them (0%)? Indeed, politics makes people mean. But this is really only just a particular example of our tribalism.

The Social Sources of Cultural Creativity

Randall Collins' theory in The Sociology of Philosophies is, essentially, Nietzschean in nature.

He argues that agonal relations are what drive philosophical change. This results in what he calls the "law of small numbers," meaning only a few sets of philosophies can emerge -- too few, and there are splits; too many, and there is synthesis. Agonal relations are what drive both.

But there is more to it than this that makes the idea Nietzschean. Nietzsche argued that societies with strong cultures were small and diverse, but with freedom of movement and cosmopolitan in nature. There had to be both conflict and an ability to move around freely and exchange ideas. But there could not be true uniformity, even if there was enough commonality to allow for the exchange of ideas. Nietzsche's ideals were the independent German states and the ancient Greek city-states.

Collins:

The substantive contents of philosophy are different in China and Greece; the similarities are at the level of the network structure. In both the law of small numbers was operative early, as multiple factions emerged to fill the new intellectual attention space. In both cases the precipitating conditions involved political pluralism, the cosmopolitanism of commercial development and literacy, and a breakdown of traditional religious practices. (146)

He points out that the same is true of the development of ancient Indian philosophy as well (177).

If you want a vibrant development of philosophical ideas, you need political pluralism, the cosmopolitanism created by free trade and education, and a breakdown of the dominant world view. If you have increasing political unity, trade barriers, a less educated (in a real sense of high levels of learning vs. mere signalling) public, and a dominant world view, you are not going to have a vibrant philosophical community.

Nor are you going to have a vibrant artistic community. Consider the times when the Western arts became most creative: the tragic age of Greece, the Renaissance, and Modernism. Each were times of high political pluralism, free movement of goods and people, an emphasis on more widespread learning, and the breakdown of dominant ideologies. It is no coincidence that Modernism emerged in the aftermath of WWI.

Nietzsche argued that the strength of a culture is inversely proportional to the power of the government within that society. A strong government/political economy means a weak gift economy. The United States is facing a time of stagnant art, literature, and philosophy. It is no coincident that it is coinciding with a time when we are becoming more politically united (vs. the ideal political plurality of the 50 different states), with less economic freedom, where learning is being replaced with schooling-as-signalling, and where the political ideology is identical in the two dominant parties. The fact that we are generally disunited religiously is in fact a point in our favor. But we are practically all united in the religion of politics, where we try to emphasize false differences in order to justify our choice of tribe. We will have to reverse all these trends if we want a culturally vibrant, creative United States.

Toward a Theory of Moral Change and Constancy

A moral action is a right action in the right circumstances for the right reason. It has a narrative structure. Like language, it has a grammar. A subject acts on or in relation to an object. Specifically, a character acts in relation to another person. This is related to the idea of virtue ethics, where one develops one’s character by always aiming at the beautiful/good(to kalon). From this character (ethos), one acts to achieve certain goals. One’s ethos affects what goals one wishes to achieve, but it cannot necessarily tell you how to achieve that goal. That is where the science of praxeology comes in. Praxeology tells us what actions to take to achieve our goals, no matter what our goals may be. One uses one’s character to judge whether the actions are themselves good (the ends do not justify the means). Thus, for there to be a fully moral action, a person of good character must engage in a good action capable of achieving the desired goal, which itself should be good. If you do this, what you have done is good. If you fail to choose the right action, what you have done is bad (we would not tell an architect who built a bad bridge out of ignorance that he was, nevertheless, a good architect because he meant well). If you have a bad goal, and you use the right action to achieve it, then what you did is evil. If you are of bad character, but you engage in good action that results in a good outcome, then what you have done is what was described by Bernard Mandeville in his The Fable of the Bees. It turns out a considerable amount of good can come from this latter structure, but since I am talking about morality in its fullest expression, we will leave that aside. However, if spontaneous orders are beautiful, or at least potentially so, then we have an idea of what virtue should aim at. This will bring us back to the issues of the varieties of economies. As I have pointed out before, moral instincts --> moral spontaneous order --> moral reasoning. That is morality in a nutshell.

The idea of “personhood” is central to my theory of morality. But so is the fact that we have moral instincts, which are part of our repertoire of instincts, or cultural universals.  In the same way that we do not have a choice but to language when we are surrounded by language users, because we have a language instinct, and in the same way the particular language spoken by those around us is what determines what language we use, even if we can learn more languages later in life and, with some of the greatest poets, introduce elements of other languages into the mother language, morality is similarly both universal and learned. That is, we all have a moral instinct much like we have a language instinct. The fact that there is variation of moral expression is no more an argument against the existence of this instinct than is the presence of variation among languages an argument against the existence of an instinct. The fact that we can identify grammatically-structured sounds as a language certainly suggests that there must be some commonality among the languages to make them identifiable as being the same thing. The same would be true of morality. We can identify the moral codes of a given culture. How, unless there were commonalities with other moral codes that make them identifiable as such? Further, there are gene variations that can derail language learning, in much the same way there are gene variations that can derail moral learning.

The bottom line is that there is an inherited moral sense. Or senses. They become developed as they are expressed due to the moral environment in which the person in question is raised. The Westermarck effect, which is expressed more strongly in girls than in boys, and which is expressed toward those with whom one has been raised up to about the age of 6, results in the moral prohibitions against incest. There are variations on this, with cousin marriages prohibited in some places, but not in others, for example. But this prohibition against marrying cousins is a pretty recent development, and is a considerable extension of the incest avoidance principle. There are those who may object that there have been societies that allowed or even outright encouraged incest, such as the tradition of alternate generations of ancient Egyptian rulers marrying their sisters, but if we look closely, we can discover how these are not in fact violations, but demonstrate the variety of ways we define “personhood.”

Egyptian rulers were not considered persons, but were rather considered divine. This divinity was reinforced through the alternating generations of brother-sister marriages, which both reinforced the ruling line and reflected Egyptian mythology, which included stories of divine incest. This is why society did not object, and in fact thought it right. Insofar as brothers and sisters are raised apart, no Westermarck effect can develop. But if they are raised together, we should expect to see less fertility in such unions. Historically, when we see these kinds of incestuous marriages, these are the patterns we see. Incest only “feels wrong” when the Westermarck effect can properly develop. Thus, these so-called “exceptions” are shown to not really be exceptions. Sexual morality evolves, but within clear parameters.

Another example is murder. What is murder? Murder is the purposeful killing of a person. A person is anyone considered to be equal to you insofar as they are a “fellow human being.” Different societies have different definitions of what constitutes a person. In some societies, women, children (especially female children), deformed children, slaves, members of other tribes, members of other religions, people who have the wrong ideology, unborn children, and/or criminals are not considered to be persons. Darwin suggested that our morality increased as our notion of who is in our tribe expanded. You could, over the centuries, go from all male members of the tribe to all members of the tribe to slaves (at which point slavery becomes immoral) to other tribes to other religions to other ideologies. Eventually we come to those who consider all human beings to be persons. And we see a development of the concept of personhood being applied to animals.

However, we see in a variety of cultures rituals that make certain individuals no longer considered to be persons. To perform a human sacrifice of a member of your tribe, you first have to perform a ritual to remove them from the tribe. Jews and Muslims have to kill animals as they do because they have to be as kind to the animals as possible. This suggests a certain concept of animal personhood, since a ritual must be performed to kill the animal for food. And in places with capital punishment, a ritual (court proceedings) is performed that removes the human being on trial from society and strips him of his personhood so that he can be killed. Those who oppose the death penalty essentially disagree that this ritual performs this function. Those who oppose abortion essentially extend personhood back to conception (in the most extreme cases). The disagreements in these areas involve both definitions of personhood and whether or not certain rituals can in fact remove someone’s personhood. And this is also extended to a variety of violent acts we can make toward each other. The more developed our sense of the other’s personhood, the less violence we can justify to ourselves we can do to them. This would expand to rape as well, as this is a violation of an individual’s personhood in denying them a choice in sexual matters.

From our evolved sense of property rights is where our opposition to theft emerges. Out of our instinct for property emerges individualism itself and ritual. Thus, we need to understand our evolutionary relationship to territory/property rights to understand our morality and our artistic expressions, which develop out of ritual. As we have seen, too, ritual performs certain social realities, including whether or not someone is considered a person, or a full person (as adulthood rituals perform into becoming). Ritual then also points to how we may facilitate more people’s inclusion into our societies, encouraging us and them to consider more and more people to be persons.

But there are more subtle morals, manners, etc. Kenrick et al gives us the dynamic mechanism by which even the most subtle variations in morality can emerge from a universal core. I cannot recommend his two articles on this topic. More work needs to be done in this promising area.

If morality is the right action in the right circumstances, then moral action is the right action for and in the right economy. Consider the following:

Gift economy

What makes one a good artist? What makes one a bad artist?

What makes one a good scientist? What makes one a bad scientist?

What makes one a good philanthropist? What makes one a bad philanthropist?

That is, what constitutes good action within the gift economy?

Market economy

What makes one a good entrepreneur? What makes one a bad entrepreneur?

What makes one a good salesman? What makes one a bad salesman?

What makes one a good capitalist? What makes one a bad capitalist?

What makes one a good financier? What makes one a bad financier?

What makes one a good banker? What makes one a bad banker?

That is, what constitutes good action within the market economy?

Political economy

What makes good governance? What makes bad governance?

What makes one a good governor/executive? What makes one a bad governor/executive?

What makes one a good legislator? What makes one a bad legislator?

What makes one a good judge? What makes one a bad judge?

What makes one a good citizen? What makes one a bad citizen?

That is, what constitutes good action in the political economy?

Divine economy

What makes one a good pastor/religious leader? What makes one a bad pastor/religious leader?

What makes one a good believer? What makes one a bad believer?

What makes one good? What makes one bad? What makes one evil?

That is, what constitutes good action in the divine economy?

Each has actions that are good within that economy. However, what is good action in one economy is not good action in another economy.

And I haven't even brought up the issue of justice, which certainly deserves increased development. Since personhood is central to my theory of morality, I will say we must beware of dehumanizing theories of justice.

And then, this is also all connected to the Gravesean theory of  psychosocial evolution.

I feel a complete model of morality coming about.

Moral Actions in the Economies

Ethics is based on character (ethos); morality is based on action. The ethical person aims at the beautiful/good; the actions one takes to achieve those actions are moral actions.

I have written a series of posts on the different kinds of economies, and the actions one takes to participate in those economies. I previously suggested that "it seems to me that when we confuse these orders and the actions appropriate to them, we may in fact be acting unethically." Given my distinctions above, I would now reword it to state that one would be acting immorally. This would make sense if morality is based on action.

The different economies each have different actions associated with them.

Consider the following scenarios.

If you apply market action (mutual exchange) to:

the political economy, you are bribing

the gift economy, you are buying the scientific or artistic outcome you want, regardless of its truth, goodness, or beauty

the divine economy, you are scamming people

If you apply political action (master-slave) to:

the market economy, you are stealing

the gift economy, you are censoring to prevent the discovery of truth, goodness, or beauty

the divine economy, you are imposing your morals/values

If you apply gift action (love of others) to:

the market economy, you actually place your business in danger of losing profit and, thus, of shutting down and losing people their jobs (this is the situation Milton Friedman famously described when asked if corporations should behave altruistically, and he argued that if they did so, they would be acting unethically)

the political economy, you get the welfare state or socialism

the divine economy, you get outright destruction of the divine economy, or nihilism

If you apply divine action (sacrifice) to:

the market economy, you undermine the profits necessary for your business to survive (similarly to if you try to apply the gift economy to the market economy)

the political economy, you get theocracy

the gift economy, you get self-censorship (of science, one's art, etc.) to avoid offense

This list is a first approximation of the moral issues at play in confusing one's actions and one's economies. Note that it is really the misapplication of the gift economy to the others that creates the problems we see today. This is a surprising outcome, unless one realized the gift economy is the latest one to emerge. It may be that, in its birthing process, a new economy gets overapplied in its actions and values to the other economies.

As I said, this is a first approximation. I am certainly open to suggestions, modifications, etc. This is an idea I am thinking through, and revisions are expected and necessary. So please, critique, comment, suggest!

Bipolar Feedback Prices

According to mainstream (neoclassical) economics, price is determined by the negative feedback of  both supply and demand interacting with one another. As the supply of a good goes up relative to demand, the price goes down; as demand for it goes up relative to supply, the price goes down.

Underlying the supply of a given good, there are producer costs affecting how much will be produced. The law of diminishing returns (negative feedback) says that you will get less and less value out of something over time. You can only get so much work out of people, at incrementally lower levels. You can only get so much work out of a machine. Crops can only be grown at a certain 2-D density.

Underlying the demand for a given good, we have the law of diminishing marginal utility (negative feedback), which affects how much demand one has for a given good at a given time. I will likely pay more for the first apple than for the second. I will probably not buy more apples than I can eat before they rot. Thus, my demand for a given good decreases the more of that good I have.

Again, this is traditional, neoclassical economics. From this we get our supply and demand curves, and from their intersection, we get the market clearing price. This is the equilibrium price.

But this is wrong. This is not how prices come about.

The problem is that with only negative feedback, we have only half the equation. What if there is positive feedback? Let us look at what would happen in a positive feedback-only economy.

The positive feedback version of the law of diminishing returns is the law of increasing returns. How can we have increasing returns? If the marginal cost of producing something decreases with each unit created, we would have increasing returns. Software is a good example of this. So would be e-books (paper books abide by the law of diminishing returns). However, there is another example of this outside of knowledge/information-based products, and that is the agglomeration economies of cities. The existence of spillover effects and mass production creates increasing returns (at least for a while, in the latter case). Thus, increasing urbanization and increasing virtualization result in increased positive feedback.

The positive feedback version of the law of diminishing marginal utility is the law of increasing marginal utility. While it is true that individual consumers must necessarily abide by the law of diminishing marginal utility, groups do not. Fads cause more and more product to get purchased. Of course, there are various mechanisms that can drive a fad, from those that drive fashion fads to those that drive things like housing bubbles. The former may be accurately described by things like Keynes' "animal spirits," but the latter likely have underlying mechanisms more accurately described by Austrian Business Cycle Theory. Whatever the case, if you can get a lot of people buying something, you can get positive feedback.

As pointed out above, negative feedback results in equilibrium. Positive feedback, however, results in boom-bust cycles and multiple equilibria. If you had a positive feedback fire, it would get hotter and hotter over time, until it suddenly became too hot and burned itself out. This is the description of a bubble, be it a housing bubble or a fad.

But note that negative feedback models, which give us the equilibrium theory of prices, is based on viewing people as individuals. The individual producer has diminishing returns; the individual consumer has diminishing marginal utility. However, if we view the economy as being a group of people, producers can have increasing returns and consumers have increasing marginal utility. This can cause one to come to the conclusion that a future of abundance is possible (and if an abundance economy is possible, socialism is possible). Such people would have to ignore the fact that increasing returns are not infinite, and in fact result in not just boom, but bust as well. But one can nevertheless see why they would make such an error.

However, if we understand people as being what they in fact are, both individuals and social, we have to consider both negative and positive feedback processes simultaneously.

With both kinds of feedback, supply is determined by both diminishing and increasing returns, demand is determined by both diminishing and increasing marginal utility. Both interact. Thus, the supply of a good cannot reach an equilibrium point, but must always fluctuate in ways that are incalculable and unpredictable. For the same reason, demand cannot reach an equilibrium, but must always fluctuate in ways that are incalculable and unpredictable. Thus, we would not have the smooth curves we see when we draw supply and demand curves, but lines that would instead look more like the graph for a given stock over time. Worse, these two complex processes then have to interact to create the price of that good. Thus, price is inherently incalculable and unpredictable. Without the ability to calculate what the price "should" be, if there is not any such thing as a market clearing price, dreams of even market socialism must fall away.

Bipolar feedback drives a large number of complex, creative processes. The economy is but one kind of such a process. As we can see, we have bipolar feedback (increasing vs. diminishing returns/marginal utility) underlying both supply and demand, which are themselves bipolar feedback processes. This is complex, creative process on top of complex, creative process. The economy thus becomes increasingly incalculable, the more such processes we realize are part of the economy.

Power is Addictive

The Daily Mail reports that political power is literally addicting:

‎Cocaine works in a similar way, which can have varied effects from increasing alertness, confidence, energy, feelings of well-being and euphoria, but also anxiety, paranoia and restlessness.

Power has almost identical effects to cocaine and too much of it can produce too much dopamine leading to more negative effects such as arrogance and impatience.

Power also makes one more aggressive and sexually active (sex scandals, anyone?). But look at this list. Do we really want people in power who are anxious and paranoid? But, as it turns out, getting political power is what makes you anxious and paranoid. If you are confident to the point of arrogance and paranoid, that seems the perfect cocktail for centralizing power. It is perhaps no wonder people with power try to centralize it around them.


Only by decentralizing power, distributing it as widely as possible, can we overcome these deeply primitive drives. If you want to know what politicians are really like, learn about primate dominance behaviors. Power is primitive, it is atavistic. Politics is the least human(e) form of organization.

Storge

When talking about kinds of love, we are familiar with eros, philia, and agape. But it turns out there is also storge. This is defined as "the love of a parent toward a child," but has become in social psychology "the form of love between friends." If storge is familial love and friendship, this frees up philia for object-love (which would include such objects as sophos) and agape for the more inclusive "love of mankind." It would also draw attention to the relationship between friends and family. Still, the fact of overlap shows how complex these different kinds of love are, even in a language like Greek, that has four terms for it.

What We Love and What We Do

I have been thinking more lately on something I posted not long ago on the different kinds of human interactions. I want to expand on what I said there, looking at how these kinds of interactions are related to different kinds of love.

Our social interactions begin at home. We find in the home eros, or sexual love, on which our sexual relationships are founded. I eros my wife. For the rest of the family, there is agape, or familial (brotherly) love, on which our relationships with those we are related to are based. I agape my children. And if we consider friendships as an extension of family, we can then include philia. Philia, however, is also used for the love of things, ideas, etc. "Philosophy" is of course the "love of wisdom," and "philanthropy" is the "love of mankind."

Within the home we find all of the aforeblogged interactions. We gift each other, we engage in any number of exchanges/barters, we sacrifice for each other, and there is even some level of politics at play. Thus we find the gift economy, the political economy, the market economy, and the divine economy all at work in the household -- something which should not be surprising, given "economics" means "rule of the household."

Of course, we are talking about the strongest of our strong bonds in the household. In our extended societies most of our bonds are weak bonds -- some downright ephemeral. Each of the aforementioned economies have developed into their own spontaneous orders, with their own kinds of philia.

Love of mankind give us our gift economies. That love of mankind can be direct, in philanthropy, or indirect, in philosophy, science, the arts, or literature. These economies are based on the development of reputation.

Love of God gives us our divine economies.

And then there are two varieties of love of self:

1.) Love of power gives us our political economies.

2.) Love of gain gives us our market economies.

There are of course moral and immoral versions of each of these. Take the market economy. We get the word "market" and "merchant" from the Roman god Mercury, who was the god of merchants, but also of thieves. Both are certainly ways of improving one's material conditions, even if one is based on force and is zero-sum and the other is based on mutual benefit and is positive-sum. The more theft-like one's exchange interaction, the less moral that behavior is. And it does not matter if you rob the person yourself or have a third party do it for you.

One can do this with each of these. Lying about your accomplishments to gain reputation is how one is unethical in the gift economy (to a degree, this is turning love of others into love of self, which is what makes it unethical, not being in the right economy). Centralized power is less ethical than decentralized power. Sacrificing others is less ethical than sacrificing self. There are of course degrees between these extremes. Further, it seems to me that when we confuse these orders and the actions appropriate to them, we may in fact be acting unethically. Perhaps that is too far -- but it is something that needs to be thought through. As, I would argue, is true of all of the above.

Finally, if the flipside of love is hate, and our inherited tribalism causes us to see an enemy when we have love of one's own, what does this say about people's attitudes toward those orders with which they do not self-identify?

Anti-Ritual Collectivism

It occurs to me that one of the main features of collectivism is that it is anti-ritual. Collectivism is to be differentiated from social individualism by the fact that social animals are simultaneously distinct individuals and engage in interactions with members of their same species, usually those closely related to them. Lobe-finned fish are social individuals; schooling fish like herring are collectivist in nature. The former recognize territory; the latter have no territory. The evolution of territorialism resulted in the evolution of ritual such that territory could be protected while, at the same time, mating could occur. Herring do not engage in rituals -- they merely spawn en masse.

The mating ritual, stemming from the evolution of territory/property, eventually evolved into other interaction rituals, including politics, religion, science, market exchange, etc. Among our rituals are those that can include or exclude others from our group. A notable one is the ritual we engage in so we can kill another human being because they, themselves, engaged in a crime so bad we want them to be removed from our society. There are certainly pro-life, moral, and sociological arguments to be made against capital punishment, but I do have to wonder how many collectivists are against it simply because one has to engage in a ritual for capital punishment to take place.

Please note the list I gave above. Collectivists are typically anti-religion, anti-market, anti-property (the foundation of all rituals), and even anti-politics insofar as they would typically prefer an apolitical ruler/central planner. They typically present their anti-ritual stance as stemming from their rationalism -- however, this rationalism is of the Continental/Cartesian variety rather than the Scottish Enlightenment version. It is perhaps not surprising that the Scottish version of rationality is both not anti-ritual and social individualistic. Collectivists are still pro-science only because science is perceived to be anti-ritual -- so the ignorance of its fundamental ritualistic nature protects it. For now.

We can see, then, that to the extent that lobe-finned fishes evolved from schooling fish, collectivism is more primitive than social individualism. Thus collectivists are hyper-atavists. As is anti-ritualism.

The Intellectual Ritual

Randall Collins applies his idea of interaction rituals specifically to intellectuals. He is of course focusing on philosophers in his work, but the fact of the matter is that this description is equally applicable whether the intellectuals are philosophers, historians, scientists, or artists. In each case, social interactions are vital, and can make the difference between being a major intellectual and a minor one.

This, then, is the intellectual ritual. Intellectuals gather, focus their attention for a time on one of their members, who delivers a sustained discourse. That discourse itself builds on elements from the past, affirming and continuing or negating. Old sacred objects, previously charged up, are recharged with attention, or degraded from their sacredness and expelled from the life of the community; new candidate sacred objects are offered for sanctification. By reference to texts past and texts future, the intellectual community keeps up the consciousness of its projects, transcending all particular occasions on which they were enacted. Hence the peculiar guiding sacred object---truth, wisdom, sometimes also the activity of seeking or research---as both eternal and embodied in the flow of time. (29)

In a real sense intellectuals have taken over the role once exclusively held by priests. The above is certainly what priests of all religions have done and do. The fact that we do these things in different institutions doesn't make a difference. In fact, Collins makes the point that

The entire macro-social structure, of non-intellectuals as well, is anchored on ritual interactions. What we call structure is a shorthand way of describing repetitive patterns, encounters that people keep coming back to, a recycling of rituals. This larger structure has the feel of externality; it seems thing-like, compulsory, resistant to change. This sense of constraint arises in part because the major institutions as repetitive networks are based on their distinctive IRs, which have generated emotional commitments to their identifying symbols. (29-30)

In other words, institutions matter. They are places where we engage in particular rituals relevant to the creation and participation in particular social orders. Imagine the power of combining the understanding of rituals with institutional analysis and with spontaneous order theory.

This also creates a particular understanding of the individual who is both an individual and a participant in the social order (similar to Hayek's discussion of the individualism of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers):

As individuals move through this grid of encounters, they generate their own histories of ritual participation. We may call this an interaction ritual chain. Each person acquires a personal repertoire of symbols loaded with membership significance. Depending on the degree of cosmopolitanism and social density of the group situations to which they have been exposed, they will have a symbolic repertoire of varying degrees of abstraction and reification, of different generalized and particularized contents. This constitutes their cultural capital." (29)

We are our interaction ritual chains. And participation in the intellectual rituals within intellectual institutions is what makes one an intellectual.

Interaction Rituals

Sociology studies the social interactions of humans (which may be the same as saying sociology studies humans). Sociology is typically understood to be its own area of study, but I am increasingly convinced that sociology ought to be understood to be a metadiscipline that covers disciplines such as economics, the sociology of science, the sociology of artistic production, etc. Another way of looking at it, sociology should be understood to cover the market economy, the gift economies, the political economy, and the divine economy, as well as the interactions of those economies. As such, sociology is the study of spontaneous orders. Or should be.

I believe this is how Randall Collins understands sociology. In The Sociology of Philosophies, Collins points out that when two or more people interact, they engage in what are called "interaction rituals." He points out that

The following are the ingredients of any interaction ritual:

1. a group of at least two people is physically assembled;

2. they focus attention on the same object or action, and each becomes aware that the other is maintaining this focus;

3. they share a common mood or emotion.

4. The mutual focus of attention and the shared mood cumulatively intensify...[until]...participants are temporarily united in a shared reality, and experience a boundary or membrane between that situation and whoever is outside it.

5. As a result, the participants feel they are members of a group, with moral obligations to one another. Their relationship becomes symbolized by whatever they focused on during their ritual interaction.

6. Individuals who participate in IRs are filled with emotional energy, in proportion to the intensity of the interaction. Durkheim called this energy "moral force"

These encounters produce an ongoing flow of social motivations, as people come away from each situation with a store of charged symbols (which can be called cultural capital, or CC), and with emotional energies. Persons are attracted to those situations in which they can make the best use of their previously acquired cultural capital and symbolic resources to focus discursive action and thereby generate further solidarity. Individual lives are chains of interaction rituals; the meshing of these chains constitutes everything that is social structure in all its myriad shapes. (22-24)

If each spontaneous order has its own interaction rituals -- as one would expect to be the case if there are different kinds of human interactions -- then one would expect, from Collins' description of IR participants as creating solidarity with others in that group, meaning there is also a sense of exclusion of those not doing so, that our tribalistic instincts will kick in. In other words, those who think of themselves as being in the political economy will have an inclusive attitude toward others in the political economy and an exclusive attitude toward others in the other economies. More, they will seek to bring everyone else into their tribe, whose rituals make sense to them (whereas the rituals of the other "tribes" make no sense and, thus, must be wrong -- even morally wrong).

Consider the implications of this. Those familiar with the rituals of the market economy will want to try to impose them on, say, the political economy. Such people would talk about making the government more efficient or even profitable. Those familiar with the rituals of the gift economy will want to try to make the government act more like philanthropies, helping the poor, supporting the arts and sciences, etc. Those familiar with the rituals of the divine economy will want to try to make the government more theocratic and will use rhetoric like "sacrifice." Equally, those familiar with the interaction rituals of the political economy will want to replace the rituals of the other economies with its own, such as replacing true philanthropy with government subsidy programs.

I think we can now make sense of much of what takes place in society. We can both understand what is going on within a given spontaneous order, why people prefer one spontaneous order over another, and the problems that arise when we try to impose the interaction rituals appropriate to one order on another. We need to understand better the different kinds of interaction rituals and how they give rise to their different spontaneous orders as people engage in interaction chains. This should be the primary job of anyone working in the social sciences.

President Faust on Kickstarter

I have a project -- President Faust - on Kickstarter. Help me write my play!

Illegal Home-Made Food

When I was growing up, my elementary school used to hold various fund raisers. People would bring home baked goods to sell. My mom would make cookies and fudge -- her two most popular treats. Especially her fudge and her chocolate chip cookies.

It would also be common for people to bring home canned green beans, corn, and other vegetables for special school events, to be cooked and served.

All of this is now illegal.

Was it done for the stated excuse, health concerns?

Of course not.

It was done because corporations pushed for that legislation, so that people would have to buy store-bought vegetables and baked goods.

Big government and big business are two sides of the same coin.

How Food Subsidies Make Us Ill

When I gave up grains for Lent, I began to feel much better. I no longer felt bloated, my late-night acid reflux went away, my morning nausea went away. Naturally, come Easter, I ate a pizza. All of those symptoms returned. With a vengeance.

I suspected I was allergic to wheat. It turns out I was right. More specifically, I am allergic to gluten. I have all the symptoms of standard gluten allergy. For someone who loves pasta, this is about as bad as news can get.

It turns out that at least 6% of the population is allergic to wheat. Perhaps more, since I was never diagnosed. It turns out that wheat causes all sorts of digestive problems in laboratory rats, and it may be that practically everyone is negatively affected by wheat. If you have digestive problems, I recommend giving up wheat for a while to find out if that's the problem.

My natural tendency is to think about any social implications of things like this. Like the fact that the U.S. government subsidizing corn-based ethanol drove up corn prices, causing Mexicans to switch from corn to wheat tortillas, causing increased obesity in Mexico.

Corn subsidies have also driven the use of high fructose corn syrup, which is 55% fructose (vs. 50-50 for regular sucrose, or table sugar). High amounts of sugar is bad enough for us (and tends to cover the taste of food rather than emphasize it), but fructose does not trigger the "full" response of your stomach. Thus, you are more likely to ingest more calories for anything with high fructose corn syrup than products with regular sugar.

Sugar subsidies also drive down the price of sugar, making it more readily available for addition to foods to make them more calorie-rich. The result is more type-2 diabetes, which I am sure is under-reported, and thus poorer health.

The pattern of agricultural subsidies in the U.S. creates overly sweet, low-nutrition, weak-tasting food. Europe too subsidizes agriculture, but their patterns of subsidies is different. The French are more likely to subsidize champagne grape farmers in order to maintain the French reputation for producing champagne than to subsidize mega-agribusiness -- though they are equally guilty of this. Subsidies more often than not create bad food that create poor health.

But don't worry about that, the same government that created the bad food that contributed to your bad health are trying to provide your health care now.

Epidemics and Economies -- Network Theory, Constructal Theory, and Spontaneous Order Theory

Epidemiology studies the way diseases spread. Insofar as this spread can be understood through scale-free network theory and, thus, through constructal theory, there is really not much difference among understanding the spread of disease and the spread of ideas, whether technological, scientific, or artistic, and the spread of goods through an economy.

The flows of diseases, ideas, good, traffic, money, immigrants, etc. are all described using constructal theory, which underlies network theory. All give rise to the same network structures, with power law distributions. If you understand the structure of flows, you can understand much in the social sciences, psychology, the biological sciences, and even the physical sciences. Diseases, ideas, goods, etc. all do in fact flow like rivers. The fact that they are rivers layers on top of rivers does not mean the basic structures differ -- the only difference is in the complexity created from the overlaps and nested hierarchies. Yes, it matters which kinds of networks one is looking at, be it hierarchical or scale-free (all the ones mentioned above are scale-free), but many of the principles are the same.

Hierarchical networks are embedded in the scale-free networks, and have to be understood as such. If you mistake a scale-free network for a hierarchical network, you can make errors in judgement that can in fact kill people. If you understand the economy as being a hierarchical network rather than a scale-free network, you will make the mistake of thinking central planning (as one finds in firms) for an economy possible. Can one plan an epidemic? Of course not. But the same thing that will stop an epidemic will collapse an economy -- destruction of the most-connected nodes (in the case of an epidemic, targeting the most connected nodes/people with medicine to stop the spread). The person who understands spontaneous orders understands epidemics as well.

Egalitarian Psychology and Society

I have had several discussions of late on the egalitarian level of Gravesean psychology. In the past I have talked about Gravesean psychology from a political perspective, particularly focusing on the evolution toward bleeding-heart libertarianism, but there seems to be considerable confusion when it comes to the relations among the dominant political views, particularly within the egalitarian level.

The Renaissance gave rise to the Enlightenment and, thus, to Modernism (the Entrepreneurial level of Gravesean psychology). The Enlightenment was itself divided into two camps, which one could very loosely divide into "left" and "right." The "left" -- which did in fact evolve into the egalitarian left -- was represented by the continental thinkers, like Descartes and Voltaire. They believed in constructivist rationalism -- they believed that they could reconstruct the world into something more rational. To us, they would be considered quite libertarian overall, however. We would also consider the "right" to be quite libertarian -- and not the least reason being that it includes such people as the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers (Locke, Adam Smith, Hume, etc.) and Burke (more typically viewed as "conservative"). However, they differ in their view of reason and society. They believed that reason was not the end-all-be-all, that emotions underlay them. Further, they did not believe that one could rationally construct a society; rather, society evolved organically. It was, to use Hayek's term, a spontaneous order that slowly evolved in relation to tradition. Darwin was influenced by this tradition, and it underlies his theory of natural selection.

There was a reaction to the Age of Reason, and that was Romanticism. Out of Romanticism, particularly philosophical Romanticism, we get postmodernism. Both are part of egalitarian psychology. Rousseau is the foundational thinker, and we are still reaping the consequences of his ideas on education and society. For Rousseau, man was good, but was corrupted by society. Hegel viewed human relations as a master-slave dialectic and, thus, as power relations. He viewed Romanticism and the State as where all the world was evolving. Marx disagreed that the State was the end-point, but otherwise agreed with Rousseau and Hegel -- proposing a post-state communist utopia that would shed the shackles of society. The dialectic would conclude with the slaves (the proletariat) overthrowing the masters (the bourgeoisie), thus power and mastery over themselves. Communist anarchy would work because, after all, men were good, just corrupted by society (and property). This is the direct path toward what we understand as leftism.

Nietzsche reacted against these ideas, but did so within that world view (at least for a while), even pointing out that he himself was a Romantic. He thus came up with a right-wing version of Romantic/egalitarian thinking. Existentialism developed out of Nietzsche's ideas -- both those they understood (more or less, pre-Zarathustra), and a version of those they misunderstood (from Zarathustra, on). With Heidegger, we get an explicitly right-wing version of the egalitarian world view, which gets developed more by Leo Strauss and by others of the postmodern right into neoconservatism. Like the left, neoconservatives are concerned primarily with democracy and the spread of democracy. Their almost exclusively political concerns (and view of everything through a political lens) derives from the fact that postmodernists view everything as power relations.

What we typically understand as postmodern philosophy -- which is really only the final stage of postmodern/egalitarian psychology -- developed out of the synthesis of both left and right egalitarianism. Contemporary progressivism and neoconservatism both come out of this perspective. Indeed, one sees very little difference between the two world views, regardless of the sound and fury signifying nothing coming out of both camps about the other. If Obama were a Republican, would any of the neoconservatives complain about a single thing he has done? If Bush 43 were a Democrat, would any of the postmodern progressives have complained about anything he did (expanding Medicare to include medication, No Child Left Behind, etc.)? Both sides see democratic government as a force for good, as being good in and of itself. Anything wanted by a democratic government is thus good -- thus the complaints from right and left about an "unelected judiciary" deciding whether or not a given piece of legislation is Constitutional. If the people/representatives decide to do something, it is legal in this view. What matters is who has the most power.

I suppose the average person would see my description as being negative, but I have in fact only described the psychosocial situation. From left to right, communism, socialism, the welfare state, and neoconservatism are all potential directions egalitarian psychology can go. All evolved out of the constructivist rationalism of continental Enlightenment thinkers. To a certain degree, contemporary libertarianism is the version of egalitarian psychology which evolved out of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, particularly among the anarcho-capitalists. What matters is if one is fundamentally at an egalitarian level of psychology -- regardless of how one thinks egalitarianism can come about (socialism, welfare, or free markets). However, given that the egalitarian level is simultaneously radically individualistic and collectivist (rather than seeing humans as social individuals, which is a completely different way of understanding humans) simultaneously, we should not be surprised if we find few true libertarians (and no classical liberals, who are at the Enlightenment/Entrepreneurial level of psychology) at this level.

What we would expect to see, then, is social evolution into experiments in society -- communism, socialism, progressivism, welfare statism -- i.e., discontinuous change being pushed constantly. We would expect a society that pushes change for the sake of change, a constant overturning, identity politics emerging out of a concern for expressing one's authentic self, and a desire to expand social democracy throughout the world -- where democracy is determined less by the structure of the government than by the outcomes. We should not be surprised if this sounds like contemporary Europe and the direction in which the United States is heading.

Pragmatarianism

I have been invited to review the idea of Pragmatarianism. What is pragmatarianism? It is a tax idea, that people should be able to direct their taxes to whatever government programs they want. That way, taxes are less forced on us, and we have at least the appearance of voluntarism.

Let us assume for a moment the legitimacy of taxation as currently practiced. Under pragmatarianism, I could donate all my money to, say, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Certainly this would force people to literally put their money where their mouths are. Those who think the NEH and/or NEA should receive greater funding would be able to direct their money to those programs. Other than expose the rank hypocrisy of most NEA supporters (who want to spend YOUR money, not THEIR money), would this in fact increase NEA funding? How many people do in fact want to support the NEA?

I have heard about this idea before. I have heard it argued that military spending would go down, suggesting we would defund future wars, but I find that improbable. A significant portion (about 1/3) of the population is conservative and, thus, pro-military. These people are more likely to support the military with their tax dollars, at the expense of welfare. But don't worry, because another third of the population is liberal, and would direct their money to welfare programs. One has to wonder what difference any of this would make. Perhaps the individual taxpayer feels better about where their money is going, but I also see how this can result in much deeper divisions in the country, where people become resentful that their neighbors are not supporting their pet projects.

Also, consider the potential for corruption. An agriculture company receiving subsidies would of course want to support the Ag Dept so that much of the taxes they donated would return back to them. Of course, only corporations could do this, so they would be able to reduce their tax burden considerably through such methods. Further, one could imagine corporations approaching wealthy people, paying them to donate their tax dollars to the departments that hand out their subsidies. The net effect of something like this would be to effectively reduce the taxes of the wealthiest people. The poor and middle class would not be approaches simply because there are so many with so little.

A better approach would be to have a program like pragmatarianism, except private donations are 100% tax deductible. This would effectively privatize most government activities, and it is well established that the private sector does better with money than does the government. This would have the effect of reducing the size of government not just because it is starved of money, but because its duties have in fact been privatized. This would be a pragmatarianism I could sign up with wholeheartedly.