In his recent paper, “Thinking clearly about economic inequality”, Will Wilkinson – a research fellow at the Cato Institute in the U.S. (and prominent blogger)- mentions some reasons why Nicole Kidman is wealthy. He states: “Nicole Kidman is fabulously wealthy because millions of individuals have chosen to see a movie with Nicole Kidman in it instead of a non-Kidman movie, or instead of going bowling”. He uses Nicole as an example to illustrate how the pattern of incomes “emerges from billions upon billions of individual choices and transactions” (p 14).
I think Wilkinson is making a good point. People often talk about income distribution as though government is actually distributing national income among the citizens - like a mother deciding how large a slice of a cake to give to each of her children. If we want the cake metaphor to reflect the real world, however, we have to accommodate the fact that mother doesn’t actually bake the cake, the children do. And distribution is the result of mutually beneficial process in which individuals earn cake by contributing to its production.
Wilkinson’s mention of Nicole Kidman is also relevant to a somewhat different point that he is making, although he doesn’t make the link specifically. Nicole Kidman has dual citizenship between the U.S. and Australia. If she is viewed as a U.S. citizen for the purposes of considering the distribution of income that makes the distribution of income in the U.S. look more unequal. If she is viewed as an Australian citizen that makes Australia’s income distribution look more unequal. Who cares?
The point is, of course, that there is something peculiar about viewing income inequality as a cause for concern at a national level, when this can change just because people move across national borders. When people talk about the effects of migration on income distribution in countries like the United States and Australia they are more likely to be thinking of the migrants who make income distribution less equal by occupying the lowest rungs of the economic ladder than those who make it less equal by occupying the highest rungs on the ladder. But the questions raised about the relevance of income distribution to well-being are the same in both cases.
Wilkinson makes the point: “If you focus only on the shifting pattern of incomes among legal residents within the statistics-keeping jurisdiction ... you can easily lose track of the real story of human welfare ...” (p 14). He comments as follows on the effects of the migration of unskilled migration on economic inequality in the U.S.: ‘If were to assume a natural and mundane moral perspective, from which all people involved are taken into account and assumed to have equal worth ... what we would see is a profound reduction in both poverty and economic inequality. If the question is “What happened to the people in this scenario?” then the answer is “The poorest people became considerably wealthier, narrowing the economic gap between them and the rest”.’ (p 15).
It seems to me that this reasoning is relevant to Australia as well as to the U.S. If we are interested in the well-being of people we should be interested in the opportunities that are available to them. When you look at it carefully the concept of income inequality doesn’t have much relevance to well-being.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
How can a conservative favour centralization of power?
One of my reasons for reading Tony Abbott’s recent book, “Battlelines”, was to remind myself why I am not a conservative. The more serious reason was to find our how a politician who proudly wears the conservative label would attempt to justify proposing an amendment to the Australian constitution that would remove current restrictions on the policy areas in which the federal government has power to make laws.
In writing this book Tony Abbott, a former minister in the Howard Government who is now on the opposition front bench in the federal parliament, seems to have taken on the role of defining where the battlelines should be drawn in the approach to the next election.
One of the things Abbott is clearly trying to do in this book is to identify enduring values that will continue to bind the Liberal Party together. In the process he does a reasonably good job of minimizing the differences between Hayekian liberals and Burkean conservatives. At one point he writes: “Following Adam Smith, Liberals tend to think that government is necessary to keep the peace but otherwise should let people make mutually beneficial arrangements with each other” (p 82). If I believed that was a statement of conservative philosophy, I would not mind being called a conservative. In other places in the book, however, Abbott displays the contempt for personal freedom that is associated with traditional conservative values. For example: “The basic problem is that most Western countries have privatised the next generation. Having children tends to be regarded as a personal choice rather than a social good” (p 97).
Having now reminded myself why I am not a conservative, let me turn to Abbott’s views on federalism. The essence of his argument is as follows:
As I see it, the main problem of the federation arise from the stupidity of the central government in its choice of forms of intervention. The basic problem in both hospitals and schools prior to federal intervention was that people were unhappy with the services that state governments were providing from tax revenues. Instead of giving state governments more money to waste, the central government should have given people back some of the money they had paid in taxes so that they could purchase alternative services.
The central government does not need additional power in order to achieve contestable service provision. It just needs to stop propping up inefficient state bureaucracies and give power back to the people.
In concluding I would like to commend Tony Abbott for presenting his views in a forthright manner. It is nice to be able to disagree with quite a lot of the things he has written and yet still feel that, as politicians go, Tony Abbott is not a bad bloke.
In writing this book Tony Abbott, a former minister in the Howard Government who is now on the opposition front bench in the federal parliament, seems to have taken on the role of defining where the battlelines should be drawn in the approach to the next election.
One of the things Abbott is clearly trying to do in this book is to identify enduring values that will continue to bind the Liberal Party together. In the process he does a reasonably good job of minimizing the differences between Hayekian liberals and Burkean conservatives. At one point he writes: “Following Adam Smith, Liberals tend to think that government is necessary to keep the peace but otherwise should let people make mutually beneficial arrangements with each other” (p 82). If I believed that was a statement of conservative philosophy, I would not mind being called a conservative. In other places in the book, however, Abbott displays the contempt for personal freedom that is associated with traditional conservative values. For example: “The basic problem is that most Western countries have privatised the next generation. Having children tends to be regarded as a personal choice rather than a social good” (p 97).
Having now reminded myself why I am not a conservative, let me turn to Abbott’s views on federalism. The essence of his argument is as follows:
- When nothing else seems to solve problems, voters always expect the central government to ‘do something’.
- After more than 50 years of increasing federal government involvement in matters that were formerly the exclusive responsibility of the states, the federation has become dysfunctional. “There are few problems in contemporary Australia that a dysfunctional federation doesn’t make worse”.
- Current attempts to end the “blame game” between different levels of government are not going to work. Someone has to have the legal power to take responsibility.
- The only credible way to fix the problem is to give the central government the legal power to call the shots i.e. to over-ride the states.
- The argument that the states form a bulwark against the potential tyranny of the national government is “far-fetched”. Australia has states because this was the price of becoming a nation, not because the fathers of federation thought that an intermediate level of government was necessary to avoid tyranny.
As I see it, the main problem of the federation arise from the stupidity of the central government in its choice of forms of intervention. The basic problem in both hospitals and schools prior to federal intervention was that people were unhappy with the services that state governments were providing from tax revenues. Instead of giving state governments more money to waste, the central government should have given people back some of the money they had paid in taxes so that they could purchase alternative services.
The central government does not need additional power in order to achieve contestable service provision. It just needs to stop propping up inefficient state bureaucracies and give power back to the people.
In concluding I would like to commend Tony Abbott for presenting his views in a forthright manner. It is nice to be able to disagree with quite a lot of the things he has written and yet still feel that, as politicians go, Tony Abbott is not a bad bloke.
Postscript: August
2018
Nine years on it is obvious that the defining characteristic
of Tony Abbott’s policy stance hasn’t been centralism, Hayekian liberalism or
Burkean conservatism. The defining characteristic has been his attitude to
climate change.
It is possible to point to some differences between his
current approach to climate change, the approach he adopted when prime minister
and the approach adopted in Battlelines.
However, I see reasonable consistency in his position on this issue. In Battlelines he wrote:
“It sounds like common sense to minimise human impact on the
environment and to reduce the human contribution to increased atmospheric gas
concentrations. It doesn’t make much sense, though, to impose certain and substantial
costs on the economy now in order to avoid unknown and perhaps even benign
changes in the future”.
In a recent speech Abbott said:
“I have never thought that reducing emissions should be a
fundamental goal of policy, just something that’s worth doing if the cost is
modest.
I have never thought that climate change was, to quote Kevin
Rudd, the ‘great moral challenge of our generation’.
It was an issue, that’s all, and – at least on the actual
changes we’ve so far seen – not a very significant one compared to man’s
inhumanity to man; maintaining and improving living standards; and even to many
other environmental issues such as degraded bush and waterways, particulate
pollution, water quality in the third world, deforestation, and urban
overcrowding.”
In my view Tony Abbott has shown too little recognition of
the risks associated with climate change. He would be on firmer ground to argue
that emissions reduction targets do little to mitigate those risks.
As politicians go, Abbott seems to have been fairly
consistent in his views. However, I have revised my view that he is “not a bad
bloke”. His recent behaviour in destabilizing the leadership of the Liberal
Party has been appalling.
In Battlelines Abbott
posed the question: “How can Australians, individually and collectively come
closer to being their ‘best selves’ and what can the Liberal Party do to bring
this about?” Abbott should think more about his own contribution in that regard.
He hasn’t even been able to avoid doing harm to the electoral prospects of the
Liberal Party. If Abbott’s recent failure to be his best self assists a Labor government
to come to power in the near future we are likely to see not only deeper cuts
in carbon emissions and higher energy prices, but also the adoption of policies
that will make citizens increasingly subject to government regulation in many
aspects of their lives.
Monday, August 3, 2009
How can consciousness be explained?
Before reading “Out of Our Heads”, a recently published book by the philosopher Alva Noё’, I would not have questioned Francis Crick’s claim that “you, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules” (quoted by Noё on p 5).
If someone had asked me how I felt about that statement before I read this book I would probably have shrugged my shoulders and said that it was just one of those things we have to accept whether we like it or not. I might have added, however, that I thought that Friedrich Hayek made a good point over 50 years ago (in “The Sensory Order”) when he said that the type of explanation that the physical sciences aim for is not applicable to “mental events”. Hayek argued that human decisions are the result of the whole of the human mind (or personality) and we cannot reduce them to something else.
Alva Noё goes further than Hayek in casting doubt on the capacity of neuroscience to explain consciousness. He claims: It is misguided to search for neural correlates of consciousness – at least if these are understood, as they sometimes are, to be neural structures or processes that are alone sufficient for consciousness. There are no such neural structures. How could there be? (p 185).
Noё suggests: “To understand the sources of experience we need to see those neural processes in the context of the conscious being’s active relation to the world around it. ... Consciousness of the world around us is something that we do: we enact it, with the world’s help, in our dynamic living activities. It is not something that happens in us” (p 64).
He further explains: “The brain does not generate consciousness the way a stove generates heat. A better comparison would be with a musical instrument. Instruments don’t make music or generate sounds on their own. They enable people to make music or produce sounds” (p 64).
This is obviously a very different explanation of consciousness than that provided by Francis Crick. Noё doesn’t discuss the views of other neuroscientists, such as Antonio Damasio, that seem to me to be more similar to his own view. For example, Damasio writes: “The secret of making consciousness may well be this: that the plotting of a relationship between any object and the organism becomes the feeling of a feeling” (“The Feeling of What Happens”, p 313).
It will be interesting to see whether Noё’s view becomes widely accepted. Daniel Dennett’s comment (on the dust jacket) suggests that those with different views may consider this book to be a worthy challenge: “Those of us who disagree with its main conclusions have our work cut out for us”. In “Freedom Evolves” Dennett takes as his starting point that we are “each made of mindless robots and nothing else” (roughly a hundred trillion cells) and sets himself the task of explaining the evolution of human consciousness. Dennett’s explanation is that human consciousness evolved for sharing ideas i.e. it is associated with the development of language and the enhanced survival capacity of groups in which reflective agents accepted responsibility for their actions.
Noё has a very different view of when consciousness began. He views life as the lower bound of consciousness: “once you see the organism as a unity, as more than just a process, you are, in effect, recognizing its primitive agency, its possession of interests, needs, and a point of view. That is, you are recognizing its at least incipient mindfulness” (p 41).
That is the part of Noё’s view of consciousness that I have most difficulty accepting. Attempting to explain the capacity of humans to reflect upon their own actions is a different project than attempting to explain the incipient mindfulness shown by a bacterium – even accepting that both forms of behaviour are enacted with the world’s help by organisms engaged in dynamic living activities.
Finally, how would I respond now if asked how I feel about the quote from Francis Crick at the beginning of this post? I would say that Alva Noё has persuaded me that Francis Crick’s claim is as misguided as attributing music solely to the components of musical instruments.
If someone had asked me how I felt about that statement before I read this book I would probably have shrugged my shoulders and said that it was just one of those things we have to accept whether we like it or not. I might have added, however, that I thought that Friedrich Hayek made a good point over 50 years ago (in “The Sensory Order”) when he said that the type of explanation that the physical sciences aim for is not applicable to “mental events”. Hayek argued that human decisions are the result of the whole of the human mind (or personality) and we cannot reduce them to something else.
Alva Noё goes further than Hayek in casting doubt on the capacity of neuroscience to explain consciousness. He claims: It is misguided to search for neural correlates of consciousness – at least if these are understood, as they sometimes are, to be neural structures or processes that are alone sufficient for consciousness. There are no such neural structures. How could there be? (p 185).
Noё suggests: “To understand the sources of experience we need to see those neural processes in the context of the conscious being’s active relation to the world around it. ... Consciousness of the world around us is something that we do: we enact it, with the world’s help, in our dynamic living activities. It is not something that happens in us” (p 64).
He further explains: “The brain does not generate consciousness the way a stove generates heat. A better comparison would be with a musical instrument. Instruments don’t make music or generate sounds on their own. They enable people to make music or produce sounds” (p 64).
This is obviously a very different explanation of consciousness than that provided by Francis Crick. Noё doesn’t discuss the views of other neuroscientists, such as Antonio Damasio, that seem to me to be more similar to his own view. For example, Damasio writes: “The secret of making consciousness may well be this: that the plotting of a relationship between any object and the organism becomes the feeling of a feeling” (“The Feeling of What Happens”, p 313).
It will be interesting to see whether Noё’s view becomes widely accepted. Daniel Dennett’s comment (on the dust jacket) suggests that those with different views may consider this book to be a worthy challenge: “Those of us who disagree with its main conclusions have our work cut out for us”. In “Freedom Evolves” Dennett takes as his starting point that we are “each made of mindless robots and nothing else” (roughly a hundred trillion cells) and sets himself the task of explaining the evolution of human consciousness. Dennett’s explanation is that human consciousness evolved for sharing ideas i.e. it is associated with the development of language and the enhanced survival capacity of groups in which reflective agents accepted responsibility for their actions.
Noё has a very different view of when consciousness began. He views life as the lower bound of consciousness: “once you see the organism as a unity, as more than just a process, you are, in effect, recognizing its primitive agency, its possession of interests, needs, and a point of view. That is, you are recognizing its at least incipient mindfulness” (p 41).
That is the part of Noё’s view of consciousness that I have most difficulty accepting. Attempting to explain the capacity of humans to reflect upon their own actions is a different project than attempting to explain the incipient mindfulness shown by a bacterium – even accepting that both forms of behaviour are enacted with the world’s help by organisms engaged in dynamic living activities.
Finally, how would I respond now if asked how I feel about the quote from Francis Crick at the beginning of this post? I would say that Alva Noё has persuaded me that Francis Crick’s claim is as misguided as attributing music solely to the components of musical instruments.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
What is diaphysics?
Some readers might be wondering whether diaphysics has something to do with the views of L. Ron Hubbard. It doesn’t. If you thought it did you were probably confusing it with dianetics.
Diaphysics is the title of a book by Troy Camplin, an interdisciplinary scholar, poet and short story writer, who maintains the blog, Interdisciplinary World. The book was published recently by University Press of America. (I bought my copy from Amazon.)
Troy defines diaphysics as “a set of natural laws that manifest themselves in different ways at different levels of complexity, which then give rise to new levels of complexity” (p vi).
So, what does that mean? The levels of complexity are levels of reality (or perhaps stages in the evolution of reality). The first level is pure energy. This gives rise to the second level, quantum physics, which gives rise to chemistry. From this level we get the emergence of biology and the evolutionary processes that result eventually in various levels of human thinking (276 -278). The higher levels of reality are more complex than the lower levels of reality. “With emergence into each new level, those new levels are able to use more and different kinds of information and energy not available to the levels below them” (99).
Troy’s theory is that “a common thread” runs through the emergence from each level of complexity to the greater level of complexity that follows it. He is proposing “a mechanism for creation of more objects, and more complex objects and emergent orders of complexity ...”. “Evolution occurs such that the fitness landscapes evolve towards increasing smoothness ... . Once smoothness, or a new symmetry, is reached, a new set of fitness landscapes emerge with the emergence of the new, more complex level from the far-from-equilibrium state” (267).
The passage quoted above seems to be at the heart of the theory, but I don’t understand it. The author seems to be saying that there is a natural law at work such that as the fitness landscape becomes smoother a new fitness landscape must emerge. I don’t see a common mechanism by which smoothness of the fitness landscape always results in the emergence of a more complex level, but that may just reflect the limits of my cognitive capacities. The nature of the common mechanism that Troy is attempting to describe remains a mystery to me.
It would be nice to think that there might be a common thread, that is not beyond my understanding, that could explain the evolution of complexity from the big bang to modern civilization. I am content enough, however, to be able to understand what Friedrich Hayek wrote about the relatively recent evolution of modern society:
“It is because it was not dependent on organisation but grew up as a spontaneous order that the structure of modern society has attained that degree of complexity which it possesses and which far exceeds any that could have been achieved by deliberate organization. In fact, of course, the rules which made the growth of the complex order possible were initially not designed in expectation of that result; but those people who happened to adopt suitable rules developed a complex civilization which then often spread to others” LLL, Vol. I, p 50.
Before I end this review I must commend Troy Camplin for the many nicely written passages in his book. For example: “ ... in a region of phase transition, in an edge-of- chaos regime, we have complex interactions, swirls and eddies, a combination of the predictable and unpredictable. In other words it is like a good story, which can be neither purely ordered and predictable nor disordered and unpredictable, but must have elements of both in order to be enjoyed” (272).
Troy’s book is not just an attempt to identify a common thread in our past. He also speculates about the future direction of human development. Diaphysics is probably the most ambitious book I have ever attempted to read.
Diaphysics is the title of a book by Troy Camplin, an interdisciplinary scholar, poet and short story writer, who maintains the blog, Interdisciplinary World. The book was published recently by University Press of America. (I bought my copy from Amazon.)
Troy defines diaphysics as “a set of natural laws that manifest themselves in different ways at different levels of complexity, which then give rise to new levels of complexity” (p vi).
So, what does that mean? The levels of complexity are levels of reality (or perhaps stages in the evolution of reality). The first level is pure energy. This gives rise to the second level, quantum physics, which gives rise to chemistry. From this level we get the emergence of biology and the evolutionary processes that result eventually in various levels of human thinking (276 -278). The higher levels of reality are more complex than the lower levels of reality. “With emergence into each new level, those new levels are able to use more and different kinds of information and energy not available to the levels below them” (99).
Troy’s theory is that “a common thread” runs through the emergence from each level of complexity to the greater level of complexity that follows it. He is proposing “a mechanism for creation of more objects, and more complex objects and emergent orders of complexity ...”. “Evolution occurs such that the fitness landscapes evolve towards increasing smoothness ... . Once smoothness, or a new symmetry, is reached, a new set of fitness landscapes emerge with the emergence of the new, more complex level from the far-from-equilibrium state” (267).
The passage quoted above seems to be at the heart of the theory, but I don’t understand it. The author seems to be saying that there is a natural law at work such that as the fitness landscape becomes smoother a new fitness landscape must emerge. I don’t see a common mechanism by which smoothness of the fitness landscape always results in the emergence of a more complex level, but that may just reflect the limits of my cognitive capacities. The nature of the common mechanism that Troy is attempting to describe remains a mystery to me.
It would be nice to think that there might be a common thread, that is not beyond my understanding, that could explain the evolution of complexity from the big bang to modern civilization. I am content enough, however, to be able to understand what Friedrich Hayek wrote about the relatively recent evolution of modern society:
“It is because it was not dependent on organisation but grew up as a spontaneous order that the structure of modern society has attained that degree of complexity which it possesses and which far exceeds any that could have been achieved by deliberate organization. In fact, of course, the rules which made the growth of the complex order possible were initially not designed in expectation of that result; but those people who happened to adopt suitable rules developed a complex civilization which then often spread to others” LLL, Vol. I, p 50.
Before I end this review I must commend Troy Camplin for the many nicely written passages in his book. For example: “ ... in a region of phase transition, in an edge-of- chaos regime, we have complex interactions, swirls and eddies, a combination of the predictable and unpredictable. In other words it is like a good story, which can be neither purely ordered and predictable nor disordered and unpredictable, but must have elements of both in order to be enjoyed” (272).
Troy’s book is not just an attempt to identify a common thread in our past. He also speculates about the future direction of human development. Diaphysics is probably the most ambitious book I have ever attempted to read.
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