Felony Disenfranchisement

In the UK inmates are not allowed to vote, in the USA those convicted of a previous felon are not allowed to vote even when released. Countries that do afford the right to vote to inmates are in the minority. If one is to have any faith in democracy, and holds similar ideas to me as to the mechanics of society, the concept of felony disenfranchisement is wholly counter productive.

The main premise upon which I base this criticism is that the people are moulded by society. When there is poverty and injustice you will also find higher crime rates. I have spoken before about the most effective way to reduce crime in my essay “Crime and Punishment” and it had little to do with law and enforcement. If approached using game theory it is clear that people on the whole are not going to commit crimes when it is not in their best interests. Making the punishments more severe may curtail a small amount of crime but it is only tackling a tiny fraction of the picture. If society raises the conditions of the poorest people in that society with education, welfare, minimum wages, health services, good employment opportunities and so forth you also change the equation in a more productive fashion than by increasing punishments. The risks of committing crime increase when you have more to lose. If you always measure society as an average of all its people then you will never know if things are improving for a specific group of people. Society may appear to be getting wealthier however it could be the case that the poorest were becoming poorer, just at a lesser rate than the rich were getting richer. Reducing crime is a case of improving society at the bottom rather than at the top, or as an average of all spheres. It is mostly those near the bottom of society for which the risks of crime are worth taking. This is the relevant mechanism of society which I have assumed in my statement that felony disenfranchisement is counter productive.

I am not suggesting criminals are not to blame for their actions however I do also hold society accountable. By removing the vote from those who are incarcerated or have criminal records you are stacking the deck against things improving. For the most part those with criminal records are those who could be said to have been let down by society. By removing their chance to vote you eliminate the voice of those for who society is not working. This smacks horribly of the practices of the Communist Party in a large chunk of the twentieth century who would silence those who spoke against them. To look at it in another way it is like being put somewhere to live against your will and then only being allowed to move should you actually like where you were first placed.

The argument in favour of felony disenfranchisement speaks to the social contract and that criminals have chosen to brake it and therefore should not have a further say in matters. This would be a reasonable argument if at some point we had each entered into this contract consensually however we do not, we are simply born into society and expected to accept the contract by which it is operated. With no way to avoid the social contract those who dislike it are almost forced into breaking it due to their being no other exist strategy. Social change is slow, democratically or otherwise, you need the input of those with experience of what is wrong to help avoid those situations for future generations. Giving votes to criminals will not really benefit them as they have already shown the system is not suited to them by resorting to crime, it is all too late and too slow to do much for those society has already let down just by giving them a vote. It will however help future generations of people who share things they dislike about the social contract and social conditions with today's criminals.

Society is already very top down in terms of how it is shaped, capitalism ensures that those with most financial power have much more impact on things. The votes we have when we spend are presently more relevant and effective than the democratic votes we make come elections. Society ideally wants to have an equal momentum of change from all spheres so that it is not distorted out of shape. Capitalism generally increases the wealth gap and this is because it is not an even mechanism of evolution, it is weighted heavily at the top. Democracy is intended to be even and allow for consistent growth however felony disenfranchisement takes much momentum away from the essential shaping of society from the bottom up. Top down evolution is great in terms of scientific progress, innovation and the creation of infrastructure however it neglects things such as crime rates, unemployment rates and, even to a certain extent, life expectancy.

We do not even need to enter into a moral argument as to whether criminals should or shouldn't have a vote as it is so vital to the proper workings of democracy. Sadly very few democracies, if any, exist that work properly regardless of any felony disenfranchisement. Until such time that democracies do work well it is a far less pressing issue ensuring that criminals may vote. I sympathise with British leaders going against the EU and not instating ways for inmates to vote. In theory it is essential but in practice it is going to cost a lot and have very little impact. Even if it were enacted in a sufficiently functional democracy the effects would take years to be noticeable. This however does not mean we can just sit pretty and ignore the problem, it should be a sign that democratic systems have more serious problems at their core that need fixing first. I have detailed the key failings of those systems that are used today in my essay “Utopian Democracy”.

I am strongly against felony disenfranchisement in theory however in practice it is of minor social concern and our efforts should be focused on creating a functional and sustainable economic system and a democratic system that is more than just symbolic. Once we have these core social systems in place we can start to reap the benefits of simple yet obvious improvements such as voting for criminals. Although I am critical of present democracies I do have faith in the concept as the best theoretical method of governance. This is why felony disenfranchisement is still an issue which I care about despite deeming it to be presently fairly irrelevant.  

Mass Transit

Our ability to move ourselves and goods quickly and easily about the place is one of the most important aspects of human development. Without good ways to do this the global economy would come to a slow crawl. Mass transit (for which I am including personal motor vehicles and the road network in this essay) is an essential part of modern life. Mass transit operates on many levels for a variety of purposes. There is air travel which offers greatest speed but is expensive. There are cargo ships, liners and tankers which can carry vast quantities of bulky and heavy goods cheaply however they are slow and restricted to seas and oceans. We can use trains which are expensive to set up and consume quite a lot of land area but then offer a good all round package of decent speed, high efficiency and a large capacity. Last but not least is the motor vehicle which is cheap to the point of most people in the developed parts of the world owning one, they are also quick, versatile and very convenient. Most journeys for both goods and people will at some point involve a motor vehicle, even if the larger portion of the distance was spent on a boat or something else.

It is because of the cost and convenience of motor vehicles that they have been so successful. This has meant that there is a lot of infrastructure to support them which in turn has further increased the convenience and practicality of the motor vehicle. Although far more flexible than trains and railways you still need to have roads for your motor vehicles which take up a lot of space as well. Roads have been an integral part of society since its beginning and they have adapted to societies needs. Roads have become more abundant, less sightly and more dangerous, not to mention more crowded as humanity has grown and advanced and exchanged horses for motor vehicles. Hopefully humanity will continue to advance but this will put greater strain on the forms of mass transit that now exist. Typically people focus on the fact that basically all forms of modern transit use fossil fuels which are likely running very low and this can overshadow some other issues which should be addressed as well. While a loss of fossil fuels would make aviation much more expensive* it would still allow for trains, road vehicles and boats to operate electrically, which with the appropriate infrastructure to go with it would not be that much less practical. Bio fuels may also become viable, especially if we manage to manipulate micro organisms into making it for us out of our waste products. There are many scientific options available or just on the horizon that allow us to continue using our various forms of transport beyond the era of fossil fuels. The free market will start to invest in these alternate options more and more as the price of oil goes up. This will gain momentum with each advance in alternate fuels making them more competitive alternatives to oil. Provided we run out slowly rather than overnight I don't think there is too much to worry about in this regard. Things might change a little but the way of life should remain relatively similar. We can safely leave the way we power our transport systems in the hands of the free market, it has done a fantastic job with the far more important task of keeping us fed after all.

* (You would need a fuel with lots of stored energy compared to its weight to power flight, electrical propulsion would weigh far too much with present battery technology. As such we would need to chemically produce a fuel equivalent to high grade engine fuel which is a very costly process, especially if you are not powering that with fossil fuels either. )

What I deem to be a more concerning issue for our transport going forwards are linked more to efficiency, congestion and the negative impacts it has in its current forms on the places in which it passes. This is not something that the free market is so adept and solving. Traffic is one of the biggest inefficiencies in modern life, the economy must lose billions just in the man hours lost with people sat in traffic. There are benefits of living in groups, humans seem to like cities and the more we develop the greater our cities become. Population growth is not always linked with development and discussing the trends of such things is another essay entirely. We can at least say that for now there is still both growth in development and in population, meaning more cars on the roads. There are already many places that have far too many cars for the infrastructure to properly support. Per person the space taken up by a car is far far more than any other kind of vehicle - to support the need for more roads in many cities there would not be any space left for buildings!

Physical space is one big problem for motor vehicles, another is the required coordination to smoothly keep things flowing. Each person controlling their own vehicle makes driving in high volumes of traffic painfully inefficient. For one thing the stop start nature of driving in traffic is incredibly fuel inefficient but it is also needlessly slow. It is impossible for each person to be able to drive so as to optimise the flow of the local road network even if they try and be a considerate and efficient driver. It would however be quite an easy task for a computer to coordinate traffic. Then it could continually integrate and flow without ever needing to stop, cars would join a flow traffic from junctions like meshing cogs. You don’t need to reduce the number of journeys people are taking, nor the number of people to reduce traffic, you can simply reduce the time each journey takes. It would almost certainly be a safer system than trusting the control of cars to the public to have a computer network controlling speeds and direction on the roads.

Even if computers could perfectly coordinate traffic to optimise efficiency there are still concerns over both the volume of the traffic and to the affect it has on the surrounding area. While it may seem a little precious of me and hold less weight than some of the more practical concerns addressed in this essay, I dislike cars on roads. They are fast, heavy and consequently dangerous. They are noisy and dirty and unsightly. They act as vast barricades to the wild, cutting up ecosystems into fragile isolated pockets. Many roads get so fast and wide that they literally must be bridged in order to cross them within our cities. The motor vehicle dominates the road and makes using them for any other mode of transport (bicycle, horse etc) very unappealing. A road can ruin an area simply by proxy and while not the greatest ill in the world, is none the less certainly not a good thing and deserving of thought towards improving them.

Solutions exist with present technology however they would require vast initial investments to set up and would need an infrastructure rivalling road networks to be comparably convenient. It is not certain that humanity will abandon roads or personal vehicles by any means and not just because of the set-up costs of any alternatives. Although the free market will find an alternative to fossil fuels when required it is under no such pressure to solve congestion, pollution and other unwanted inefficiencies from personal vehicles. With the infrastructure already in place it will always be more appealing to work with what we have in economic terms. Solutions to congestion that keep roads will be found first and probably retained for the foreseeable future, perhaps people will spread more evenly. Taking a transport system either above ground level or below it does a great deal to tackle the problems of dissecting ecosystems, of being unsafe and unpleasant, and for coexisting with current roads. Unfortunately it increases the cost substantially and poses far greater engineering challenges.

It would not be practical to either set-up a new mass transit system overnight, nor would it be possible to simply stop using cars and so any new system would need to overlap with the road networks without disrupting them as they were built and then slowly adopted. This means the new system would have to be better in almost every way than cars as it would be competing with them. This is another huge reason why it is unlikely that we shall move away from personal motor vehicles and roads any time soon, if ever.

The image in my mind of such a system to rival cars and roads is like a mono rail with lots of individual carriages, all small but of a few sizes, some decked out to take a loaded pallet while most carry people. They are roomier than cars due to having no controls, no engine, no fuel and the seats facing inward, yet they occupy less space than cars being narrower and shorter. They run on a rail network that laces through the city out of the way of normal goings on. They run on electricity so are clean and quiet as a result. These rails weave through the city, sometimes along the side of wide roads, sometimes suspended above them and occasionally even going underground. There are stops in many more places than you would find for buses or trains, in the busy areas they are like pit lanes that won't hold up any other traffic by stopping in them while on the quieter routes the pods will stop any where to let people on and off. Each stop simply has a button which summons a nearby empty pod, some simply circulate around empty waiting for calls while other sit in holding bays out of the way awaiting peak times. The wait for a pod to arrive is never more than a minute and often much less, they arrive, open their doors and await for passengers to embark. Each has a control panel that is simple to use and allows people to quickly plug in their destination. Most people will have a card, rather like the Oyster card used in the London Underground that can simply be swiped to deal with any charges. They would also have pre loaded frequent destinations to further increase the ease of use. Once the destination is selected the pod moves off, it's route will be planned by a central computer that knows all of the journeys going on within the network. It will be able to adjust speeds and routing to ensure that the journey is as quick as possible while having the least acceleration and deceleration of the pod to reduce energy consumption too. Special pods could be called upon, the goods ones for easy city stock deliveries, larger ones for family trips and space for shopping or perhaps even high speed ones capable of going on motorway tracks that eventually link cities together. It is very optimistic to think that a network capable of operating within a city would also be capable of safe high speed intercity travel and conventional modern trains and mag-lev like they have in Japan and China might still be the best way to go long distances quickly and cheaply on land.

This brief description sounds all rather sci-fi and fanciful but it is well within our technological capabilities to produce one much like it. It would be safer, cleaner, quicker and more efficient than cars and roads, it would allow people to read or work while going places rather than having to drive and it would consume far less space in urban areas. It would combine the personal freedom and convenience of the personal motor car with more automated and efficient train style of transport. Although I have said that it is economic forces that make this idea impractical rather than technological difficulties or because it would be a downgrade on the present system, I have a perfect analogy for how these economic forces hinder it which I must share. Anyone familiar with chemistry will know that reactions that produce energy still need an initial investment energy to get them started which is called the activation energy. Petrol burns with air to produce lots of energy however petrol does not explode or burn with exposure to air, it needs a spark to start it all off. The transit system I have suggested yields more economic energy than the one we currently use as it more efficient, if it were already in place the economy would be better off as a result. The set up costs for the infrastructure however provide a vast activation energy investment that makes us quite stable where we presently are, we would need a lot more than just a spark to get us over the hurdle.

Such a spark is unlikely to come from the private sector, perhaps an ambitious company could pioneer an example system in a single town but getting permission to build all the places it would need to, as well as the time it would take to offer any return on this investment all make it highly unlikely to happen. The only way I can see a serious attempt to improve upon cars within society is for the public sector to initiate the massive undertakings. If cars were still around to compete it would be fine for private companies to own networks for towns as they would be forced to offer competitive prices however if personal cars vanished and no comparable alternative was there private sectors could not be trusted to properly maintain networks, keep prices low and so forth. In the UK we have some excellent case studies of how you can ruin a service by failing to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of private and public sector control. This is particularly the case with geographic monopolies such as a transport network. As a result even our present train network struggles to compete with cars on most fronts. The best solution to this is a joint affair of ownership and control where the state owns all the networks and rents them to companies which are responsible for maintaining and running them. The terms of the leasing would be dictated by the performances of the most efficient companies, with fines imposed for things going wrong which would allow for a form of competition to keep things running optimally and an incentive to maintain the infrastructure. Companies that could offer lower fares would be those that were more likely to get the contracts to run networks and this would keep prices low even without cars to compete.

It is an undertaking of this magnitude which is one of the best ways for a nation to progress out of the economic turmoil presently faced by many developed countries. It would put them in great stead to remain developed for the next chapter of humanity. Sadly this is this kind of radical long term thinking that is somewhat lost in most short term democratic system. The stagnation of transport methods serves as a nice example of the present situation of humanity. We are stuck in a functional but inefficient rut that is not well suited to the obvious challenges facing us in the future.

The wider economic, political and social problems aside, mass transit remains one of the foundations of modern society. My aim with this essay is to highlight issues surrounding our present systems which seem to fall under the radar of public debate. The proposed solutions were more of an attempt to show how good things could be. It is hard to appreciate the failings of our roads when having a car is so much better than not having one for most things. Even if we compare our present system to those in our history we will get a good feeling about what we have. Imagine never sitting in traffic again, never having to take your vehicle to the garage or find somewhere to park again. Imagine never having another crash or getting a fine for speeding. Imagine living near a main transport route and still enjoying a peaceful home life or being able to relax around them with your children and dogs while out and about. As we cannot rely upon the free market to provide us with better transport systems our best hope is that someone in the rare position of being able to implement a better system, even if only in a very localised area, has an urge to make a difference, driven not by profit by by their loathing of sitting in traffic and the other various inefficiencies of roads. Simply by talking about these transport problems we increase the odds that the right person has said urges to improve things.

People moan about traffic on a local scale plenty I'm sure but I fear we are often missing the main reasons why and are therefore taking action that is not the most appropriate. It is the uncooperative nature of driving on roads, the size per person that a car takes up and the stop start nature of town and city driving that causes roads to become grossly inefficient rather that just the sheer volume. We need to see the problem on a bigger scale that also takes the long term future into account. Buses and trains will help to reduce the volume on roads but can't ever replace the door to door on demand convenience of the car and therefore don't solve the problem very well, they simply ward off symptoms. There are few distinct and measurable correlations with the progress of humanity, one would be life expectancy and another would be our ability to move things about the place. We have reached a point where we are getting worse at moving some things about, most notably the hubs of society – the cities. This situation of regression should ring alarm bells that something should be done. It is not so much fuel that threatens our ability to transport things effectively but the actual mechanisms we employ to do it.

The Value of Life

We act as if human life is beyond monetary values in the west, as if we will pay any cost to preserve life but this is evidently untrue. This is an illusion that both society and state are happy to go on pretending or believing as it brings comfort and keeps order. We may well give anything and everything to preserve our own lives or the lives of those we love but to what lengths would society go to preserve those lives? While society may in some cases go to extreme lengths to preserve a few lives in exceptional circumstances this is not the norm, we may personally go to any lengths to avoid death in some situations but, as I shall attempt to show, this is not always possible and we must place a value on our selves so as to guide us in many of our choices.

In economic terms the value of a life is an easy calculation based on estimated remaining working life and that persons salary. This assumes that each person is just a tool capable of performing useful work and does not take into account the affections other people might have for the person in question. This more sentimental angle would bring us to a different figure based on how much each of our friends and family (including ourselves) would give to keep us in their lives. Even if in each case it was everything that people would be willing to give the final figure is still a finite monetary figure, as is the economy's way of evaluation. The concept of sparing no expense in the pursuit of saving lives is paradoxical as part of the cost of everything is made up from pieces of peoples lives, be that the time invested in the work or any risks involved in that work. We could only permit the top of the range safety features in cars as an example of how society could be more focused on saving lives and less so on saving money. The problem with doing this is that it is a lot more work and resources to produce only vehicles with the best safety features which would mean people have to invest more into getting them. Safer cars cost more and this cost is paid for in life, the only fundamental currency people have at their disposal. The argument boils down to something like would you rather sell some additional hours from your life now or risk not having those hours later. In neither scenario are the hours really yours. You can even work out which is the correct choice based on the risks, your earning capacity and the cost although this does assume at best that you don't enjoy working and at worst that it is comparable to being dead. Almost every choice we make is a gamble with some or all of our life with the returns being a bit more life or some enhancement to it. We buy the cheap car to save some life in paying for it at the risk of having an accident and losing it all.

It is in this regard that we often seem more callous with our own lives than those of our friends and family. We must do most of our gambling with our own lives, each time we cross the road or eat something it is ourselves we put at risk, however small. Certainly our friends and family can support us financially or invest in reducing risk on our behalf (such as a parent buying their child a bike helmet) but this only accounts for a portion of the gambles we take on a daily basis. As I already asserted we not only have an economic value but also a sentimental value to those close to us and so it is in their interests we minimise our own risks, however it is far less at their expense if we conform to their wishes than it is our own. In essence we are both at risk if I am careless with my life yet only I am really able to pay the costs of lowering our shared risks associated with my life. This is why our parents often seem overbearing and patronizing, generally we are a very important person in their lives and so they advise us continually to reduce our risks while often not taking their own advice. While a bit of an obscure statement and entirely unconfirmable I would assert that if a parent were to become one of their offspring somehow they would act either as themselves or the child but certainly not as per the will of the parent towards the child before the transmogrification.

For those we don't know it is easier to ascribe a monetary value upon their life but it may seem impossible to place one upon ourselves or loved ones. When asked what value we would place on our own lives and those of our loved one we might well say priceless, not measurable financially. and we might truly believe that however our actions would betray this statement. Earlier when I gave the example about the car safety I suggested you could work out which was the correct choice (the expensive safe car or the cheap dangerous one) given various bits of data. We can use a similar method to work this backwards and calculate what people actually value their own lives at in a monetary sense based on their actions. To do this we need to assume that people are always correct in their choices which is a risky assumption that cannot be relied on, however with the average of your values from many different choices you would get a good approximation. This leads to some unpleasant conclusions, the most notable being that, from what ever angle you look at it, richer peoples lives are worth more than poor peoples. Those who earn more are more valuable to society, if not directly to the majority of people then certainly towards capital. Those with more money will make choices that show they value their life and those of their friends and family highly in monetary terms compared to the actions of poorer people. This is not a law but a strong trend, there will be plenty of exceptions where wealthy people live very recklessly but not enough to upset the correlation.

When asked about the relative values of human life most westerners will say that it is equal for all people, or if they do differentiate it will be based on age, health or perhaps even potential such as a very bright person or a very good person. They will not entertain the idea that wealth begats a more valuable life despite the fact that our capitalism directed choices indicate exactly that. Morally we try and act as if we were operating within a communist state and economy. I am unsure as to why we cling to this belief against all the clear evidence. It could be that it undermines our self esteem if we accept that wealthier people than us are more of a person than we are. It could be that it is very hard to value other people due the the simplifications and assumptions of the methods I suggested making people unwilling to try, people value things differently and so it is far simpler to make everyone equal. It could be religious tradition that has kept these values of equality strong within society. It could be the stigma of fascism that has steered society away from accepting a reality where we do all have values like any other commodity. More likely it is a combination of these factors and perhaps others too.

The real question is does this illusion matter? Does it cause any inherent problems in society? This issue causes me difficulties as I am a lover of truth yet I too, despite the evidence, believe that life is precious and worth more than the monetary value we can place on it. I also believe that we have an equal right to exist regardless of your wealth. ( The right to an existence within a society is a slightly different matter as it does depend on your actions, which should they be criminal starts to pose problems but we can assume in this instance that all in question are not impinging on the freedoms of others). I live with the paradox that means I think the well paid doctor is worth more than the layabout however I think they have an equal right to exist. The justification of this paradox is that they are measured in entirely different currencies which are not directly linked. The value of a person is an economic concept which applies only where money is relevant. Beyond that scope this method of valuation has no uses. In areas where money is not a factor you should be using a moral currency to assess the value of people. You are able to relate in this manner what the present exchange rate is between moral currency and real money however you are unable to infer things about one based on the values given by the other.

Each society will have a different country wide average value of life based on the opulence of that nation. You will find this very apparent if you travel to a range of countries, the more developed ones will have much more health and safety regulations, rules will be stricter and better upheld. This is for the simple reason that it is not economically practical to invest more into preserving life than it is worth, the country will become worse off, the people it is saving are costing them more than they are returning to the society on average. As a country develops and its people command more wealth the whole nation become more precious regarding life, the state will be seen to go to greater lengths to preserve it and people will act more cautiously placing a higher premium on themselves. Certainly much of this is due to an aversion to being sued rather than the higher values of life directly but this amounts to exactly the same thing, it is because the values of life are increasing that people are willing to invest in legal protection against loss of life, injury and so forth.

By increasing the wealth of a nation you not only make life more valuable in economic terms but you also increase the value of morality. This is why it is often said that some people are only moral because they can afford it and some are only immoral because they cannot. This does not mean that the rich are more moral than the poor in action or belief nor does it say anything about the morals themselves, all it does is illustrate that the exchange rate between moral currency and real money changes as monetary wealth increases. We have no tangible or quantifiable way to redeem moral currency and so things are related in monetary terms which distorts our perceptions of morality a little.

Most of how the world works is inseparably linked to money and so the moral value of a person is generally less relevant than their monetary value. The social illusion of wealth not relating to how we treat people at least helps to preserve the important idea that there is a value outside of wealth to which we can give each life in this ethereal moral currency. It supports the idea that there is more to life than money. I therefore see little problems with having this social illusion despite it having the feel of misinformation and the occasional noble yet impractical actions of people. The correlation between an increase in wealth, efficiency, technology and productivity of a nation and an increase of the economic value of life of its citizens gives us some evidence that life and morals are more important than money as we invest ever more into them as and when we get more to invest. We give what we are able to in the pursuit of such things and so this too should give direction for the evolution of society, to place itself in ever better positions to be able to give more towards life and morality. We should not be advancing in production and technology not so we can have more stuff but so we can have more morals and more life.

I have bitten off rather more than I can chew on this topic which really deserves a book rather than an essay. There are many areas which I have not touched on that are relevant to this topic and those which I have included are given in the briefest possible terms. The value of life spills into many different disciplines from philosophy to economics to psychology which I have not explained when they crop up either. All of these factors muddy the waters and make it hard to make any clear statements about things without resorting to gross assumptions.

A quick example of a psychological effect which complicates my assertions is that we a beings of relativity and of experience. We become used to how life is and are less able to give up things we have. If life gets steadily better we remain content yet if it gets worse we quickly become miserable. Some people are obviously better or worse suited to changes and will react in different ways but if we accept the general premise we can draw some conclusions about the overall trends in society. It implies that although life gains monetary value as its situations improves it loses what I can only describe as used value. A new car is worth some amount but after it has been used it will be worth less, some cars hold their value far better than others. When the life of a rich person in some way becomes “used” due to some misfortune that diminishes the quality or value of that life it loses far more value to the person wielding that life than would be the case if the same misfortune occurred to a poorer person. I am not sure as to the relevance of this observation, nor to where it fits in exactly into the whole picture of the value of life. In some respects it warns against advance in society which is preposterous. The remedy hopefully lies in the sphere of psychology as one commensurate with the advance of society cannot exist in a purely economic form. I shall explore this concept a little further in an upcoming essay on the state of man which I am presently working on.

To conclude I do not think the illusions of life being invaluable are a concern for society. They serve as a reminder that life and morality are more important than money and therefore as a pointer to the direction forwards for society. We would all do well to avert the misinformation of the illusion and remember there are two distinct currencies to evaluate people. When money is involved in the equation it is unwise to forget the monetary value of people however distasteful. Any attempt to use the monetary value of people outside the scope of things relating to money, such as philosophy or theology, will lead however to moral bankruptcy. It is hard to say what the value we should use is even if we can give this currency a name and is really the subject of yet another essay. We can at least be content to say that we can make assumptions regarding the moral currency and theoretically tinker with it entirely without affecting the monetary values of life. We can be happy to know that there is no direct link between each persons moral and monetary worth. If we believe that people have equal values in the moral currency then you should be strongly in favour of minimising the wealth gap. If you believe people have different moral values you would be illogical to assert that anyone doesn't deserve more if it were practical to offer more.

Rage Against the Machine

Emotion is to the organism as morality is to society. Both emotions and morality act as a guide towards actions in the best interests of the appropriate bodies. Neither morality or emotion however are able to act as a comprehensive informant of the best course of action, largely because of the complexity and difference of life now as when compared to that of the very first humans. Indeed emotion and morality are often at war with one another guiding towards different actions. It becomes even more complicated and chaotic when emotions are sparked that are based on morality such as guilt over a selfish action. The conflict of internal opinions is not helped by the fact that morality is shifting all the time as society evolves. There is no solid grounding on which to work, it becomes easier to look to the rules of society for moral guidance than it is to reason ones self as to what is best for society. The law safeguards against most kinds of immoral action and acts a little like a stopping block for many peoples moral compass. There is a grey area both sides of the law, one of legal things that are immoral, or more precisely detrimental to society, and on the other of legal things which are moral or certainly of no detriment to society.

As a brief aside I think that law should be much more open to interpretation rather than attempt to be precise and all encompassing. We would likely be a more moral people if we were to allow a jury the trust and freedom to assess what is right and what is wrong for each specific situation that arises rather than following the letter of the law. People would have to think more about right and wrong rather than what loopholes they can find in the system. This would mean that both society as a whole was more morally aware and that justice would be more appropriate in the courts.

So returning to the conflict of emotional and moral impetus towards action it is hard to say which will win out in any given situation for any individual person. Which drive wins will depend on so many things from mood, to beliefs, to will power, to previous experience and so forth. It is far more appropriate to look at it on a macro scale rather than at a personal level where we can make some much safer assertions. The first safe assertion being that a higher proportion of people will perform an act detrimental to society if it is legal than they would the same act if illegal. In practise this is not always the case, I believe the UK has a higher per capita use of illegal drugs than other European countries where they are legal however I would suggest this trend is down to other social differences as other anomalies would also be.

When faced with a choice that is beneficial to the individual there will be emotions promoting that action, when there may be some detriment to others there will be some morality opposing that action. The tie breaker in such situations may well be whether the action is permissible by society or not. We get very angry with individuals and groups of people who are seen to do immoral things however I cannot lay too much blame at their feet. It is the system which is at fault, the people merely fill the roles society lays out to be occupied. It is almost always the system which is to blame for the problems in society, from crime rates, to the recent financial crisis to political corruption. It is not the greed of the bankers who caused the financial crisis, it is the relaxed and unsustainable policies controlling the finance sector that are the real cause. You could put the most moral upstanding people in those positions who may refuse to do certain things on principle however the demand placed on them by the rest of society would quickly change their methods or see them replaced by others with less scruples.

Big companies and rich people would be foolish not to seek the best ways to reduce expenditure through taxation and expenses loopholes. It is not done because these people are immoral but because the people have a natural drive for self interest and have that drive condoned by society. The competition so desired from capitalism ensures that every loophole will be exploited by industry as those that don't will fall by the way side over time. It is not our duty to castigate those that legitimately take immoral actions in their own interests for we would likely do the same. It is our duty to safeguard against ever being in that position by changing the system so no such position exists.

Legislating against exploits in the system is one way to improve society however it is only part of a more general method towards improving society which is to align the emotional and the moral responses in people. This means by way of incentive and disincentive making each choice an individual might face have an option that is both in the best interests of the individual and of the society simultaneously. There is a lot of misdirected anger floating about the societies of the world today, we like to have things to blame and we seem to have a preference for these things being people. Our anger would be much better use if directed at the system which lead to these events rather than the unfortunate people having to work within a faulty system.

Frugality

Money buys most of life's essentials but it does not buy happiness. This cliqued adage has been expressed in many different forms by many wise persons. It is however a hard lesson to learn and cannot be fully appreciated simply through hearing or reading it. It is after all very easy to imagine something that would bring us joy or comfort or entertainment and to then conceive a mechanism by which money could procure the imagined thing. It is also the case that a lack of money can be very stressful when bills and dependants are part of the equation. Removing that stress and worry obviously also contribute to happiness. So why is it that so many great minds would have us believe that money really can't be used to acquire happiness?

I don't intend to argue that money cannot purchase happiness however I would assert that the happiness obtained through material ownership and financial procurement is of a fleeting short term nature and suffers from diminishing returns. It is like taking a pill to get pain relief, it masks or distracts from the discomfort but it does not cure the cause of the pain. I cannot offer any proof of this assertion as subjective emotional theories are hard to to quantify. All my beliefs on this matter are born from experience. I used to be quite a collector having numerous collections from cards and models to spirits and guitars, from paints to CDs, I even have a collection of drinking glasses. I had a disposable income from working while living with my parents and invested most of it into furthering these collections. The act of choosing and then buying the next addition to whatever collection brought me joy and so I continued in this vein of working and collecting.

A few things then happened in my life involving realisations and lifestyle choices which vividly illuminated the process of my spending and collecting. I had always known I was quite lazy or work shy as every school report I had ever received said so. I was in the final stages of my education and had decided to put the effort in at the last stage and get an impressive result so as to make getting jobs and good pay easier in later life. I had been testing and practising for some card tournaments which was one of my hobbies and had put in a surprising amount of effort for a lazy person. I had also developed quite a thorough preparation technique for these card tournaments which I was sure would translate well into working for exams and decided to give it a go. After a couple of days getting absolutely nowhere with my exam prep the answer to my laziness hit me like a tonne of bricks. Unlike my card hobby I didn't care about my degree or much of what I was being taught and so could not spark up the enthusiasm to invest any time in it. This further implied I didn't care about the sorts of things my degree would lead me into employment wise. I knew from that moment getting a good degree was pretty irrelevant as any job I would then get with it I would have a similar apathy towards as the degree itself and would progress very little in that role.

There was no point in forcing myself to jump through hoops when all that would achieve is to present me with ever more hoops I didn't want to jump through. I then put in the minimum effort to complete my course and not have what little time investment I had given be completely wasted and started to conceive of ways I could earn a living while also being interested in what I was doing. I remember lecturing one of my house mates who was beaming after they had received a near one hundred percent mark on one of their papers. To pass with the top grade only required seventy percent and so to my mind any extra effort expended in order to raise the mark above that point was completely wasted and so rather than congratulate my friend I berated them for poor time management. This dawning realisation all hinged around the notion of not wasting ones time in inefficient work as a result of apathy or simply needles work.

My card hobby had a professional tournament scene and was one of the only things I had found where I could properly apply myself and so I decided that I would try and get involved in competition rather than finding a job after I was done with the education system. To do this required lots of travelling on an inconsistent and far from certain income. For the next two years I had no fixed abode, no job, no steady income and effectively no possessions. I lived out of a rucksack which had little more than spare clothes and a toothbrush in it. My collections were suddenly useless, I had no place to put them and no way to carry them around. All my possessions got boxed and put into storage or given to people who would make better use of them. It was a truly liberating experience that I fully did not expect, I was suddenly free from all these ties, I thought I cared about these collections and material things but as soon as I had accepted I wouldn't have the money to enlarge them or the house to frame them in I felt less burdened. Cast off thine shackles of ownership for it is a reciprocal arrangement and the inanimate partner is not a loving or caring one! It was as if I had shed an entirely superfluous weight, I no longer had to think about these material things, plan for them or worry about them. It was as if I was an overweight person who by a single choice suddenly lost all the excess. The thin person expends less energy to move around and does so more freely and swiftly and this is exactly how I felt without my possessions.

From this time onwards money has simply been a means to an end for me rather than an end in itself. Money buys food, transport and other consumables and services that allow you to live and act as you chose. I no longer buy things just to own them, if I come by a book once I have read it I will pass it to someone who I think will enjoy it. There is no point me keeping it, I will not read it again and it will just take up space, time and energy, all be it a very small amount. I have stopped playing professional cards as I found it tiring and stressful to do full time and had gained more than enough experience from the time and have been settled for over five years living fairly normally in a house with a job. Practically everything I have now is something I had before I boxed it all away, most of what is “new “ has been given to me by relatives and friends rather than having been purchased new. I live my life by a number of philosophies and the one which relates to frugality and money is that by giving up our time we can obtain money however by giving up money you cannot really buy time. (you can invest in time saving devices or pay for other people to do things so you don't have to which is a sensible use of money when the ratio of your pay and the time saved are right, you can even invest in good healthcare which will statistically increase your life expectancy and these are all pseudo ways of using time to buy money and although they do not discredit my philosophy on the matter they are certainly worthy of inclusion in your calculations as to what is a sensible income and what are worthy expenditures and so will change the definition of “needs”). As such you never want to have more money than you need, much like my house mates exam score, any extra money you acquire in your life is time you have wasted working when you could have been living. It all then comes down to an assessment of what you need to buy to determine how much you need to work. Most people approach this from the other direction, they need to work and so do as society normally does which for the most part is a standard five days a week, eight hours a day. This amount of work provides them more money than they need and so they spend the rest on whatever. Returning to my weight analogy this is rather like being given ever larger plates of food to eat and always finishing everything rather than eating till you are full or eating to your RDA of calories and nutrients. The obvious result of eating everything every time is that you will get fat!

Being work shy as I am I would always prefer to spend more efficiently and more frugally thus freeing up more of my time for other pursuits. The jobs I have ended up doing are ones in which I am able to perform a part time role or control my workload so that I can maintain a good balance of spending and hours worked. I also favour jobs that I enjoy rather than those offering higher pay. This may seem at odds with my assertions regarding the efficiency of time spent earning to free time however that assertion does not account for the enjoyment of the work. If you could rank how much you didn't want to do something on a quantifiable scale it would become mathematically very obvious why one should pay close attention to both pay and enjoyment. If something pays X but I dislike doing it Y amount then a job I enjoy Y/2 I should chose to do in preference provided it pays at least X/2. This is a gross over simplification but does demonstrate how to account for work enjoyment. The more I have lived by my frugal philosophies the more I have come to appreciate their merits, not just for me and my life but also potentially for society. I am happier, more able to spend time furthering myself and am far less wasteful.

Humanity has had such advancements in technique and technology that only a fraction of the required hours of labour per person are now needed to support the basics of life compared to how they were just a few centuries ago. People used to work full time because if they didn't they would start to go hungry. Rather than working less as we have got more efficient and making houses, transporting things and producing food and clothes we have instead redirected that essential labour into non essential jobs. Buckminster Fuller was all to aware of this trend as he describes in this passage:

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

There are several reasons why it would be pragmatic for society yo adopt a more frugal approach to living ranging from the personal liberating experiences I have described having, to environmental issues, to plain old efficiency. Broadly there are two ways to optimise any process, either you do it as quickly as possible or you do it with the least energy possible. A good example of this is driving where you can try to go as fast as you can such as in a race or by using as little fuel as possible. The way to achieve either result is the exact opposite of the other, to go quickly you should either have your foot on the accelerator or the brake at all times while the most fuel efficient requires you to have the least pedal use possible. Living frugally is like driving to maximise fuel efficiency however humanity seems to act as if it were in a race. This could be attributed to tradition where it has been the case that you needed to race to survive, the workings of the economy or our individual associations of what denotes status.

While I would say all three causes of societies pace are at play I believe the economy is the biggest driver of this trend. It creates an environment where frugality is in many ways punished. If you do not spend or invest capital it will diminish in value as a result of inflation, by doing nothing you are losing out. It is a self perpetuating vicious cycle, banks and investors use the money of others to invigorate the growth of the economy. Everyone has to do this else they will lose out due to inflation in much the same way companies have to be seen to be growing to not be failing. The water level is rising as it were and everyone has to keep swimming faster and faster to stay afloat.

An obvious question at this stage is why is the water level rising, what is the reason for inflation, but this is a hard question. I have covered this to some extent in my series on economics but will try and describe in different terms here for convenience. Consumption of goods, minting new currency, unproductive labour, interest to be paid on loans and investments made using non-real assets all contribute to inflation to varying degrees however it is clear that some of these are the result of people avoiding the effects of inflation. This is why I describe it as a vicious cycle, the causes are also the effects and so a positive feedback mechanism is created and the oxymoronic statement that inflation causes inflation may be made. It is certainly not the sole cause of inflation but it is significant, particularly as it is in the investors interests to maintain the cycle as they are able to skim off the top. No body wants it too high however as it spirals out of control with no one being able to afford loans and no one having any faith in the value of money.

I asserted that there are two ways to optimise a system or operation, either the most efficient route or the quickest and I gave the example of the two polar ends of driving with the least pedal use or the most. Being fuel efficient or going quickly are both merits and the predominant one will depend on the situation. The merits are unfortunately diametrically opposed and mean you cannot have the best of both worlds, if you are fuel efficient you must go slower and if you are quick you must consume more fuel. The same is true of the economy, inflation promotes certain kinds of habit which are beneficial and some that are detrimental while deflation reverses those effects.

Under a moderate amount of inflation the maximum growth of the economy will be seen . Discounting all other effects such as faith in a currency or the relevance of day to day stability greater inflation would cause greater impetus for growth however in reality these many other factors that mean the rate of growth does not carry on increasing beyond a certain point. The growth of the economy is always seen to be a good thing as it implies we have more choice as consumers and more employment. A question few people seem to ask is whether growth is actually such a good thing? What is the cost of growing at the fastest rate possible?

One of the downsides of the fastest possible growth is the creation of work for the sake of work, as Buckminster Fuller alluded to in his quote with the inspectors of inspectors. It is also in the production of commodities which serve little purpose, they do not aid any task nor really enhance the quality of life. Any example of such a commodity will likely make me come off as snobbish and so in an act of self sacrifice in the name of clarity I would suggest that the majority of items that could be procured from your average gift shop to be the kinds of commodity in question. Another drawback of the fastest possible economy is that, much like the fastest possible car, it pays little regard to the rate of consumption of natural resources. It uses as much that is available at the time as it is able to do whatever it can. Overall then the cost that is paid for having the fastest possible rate of growth is that we are very resource inefficient, both in terms of human labour and of natural resources.

Under deflation however the reverse is the case. The value of money will increase over time and so there is no rush to invest or spend it. People and companies will only spend what they need to, any upgrades or improvements to production techniques would need to be significantly more effective than those within inflation to be economically viable and so everything would slow down. Less jobs would exist as less things we being bought and so less things would be produced and so less resources would be consumed and so forth in a self perpetuating cycle. Ultimately a theoretical humanity operating under perpetual deflation would produce, work and consume far more in line with what it needed rather than what it could. We are still full steam ahead with the finance sector stoking the fires as much as they can however the planet is starting to go into the red on the fuel gauge. We are suffering significant diminishing returns of quality of life for our labours yet still seem besotted by the notion of growth. Historically humanities situation has been appropriate for driving as quickly as possible however our situation is changing and a better approach may be to ease off the pedals and try to save some fuel for the next bit of our journey.

This is all a bit easier said than done, while governments do have much control over their countries economy they have very little control over the global economy and must fall in line with how it works or be effectively isolated from it. Global trade is of huge importance to most nations, certainly all of the large economies and so no nation can easily go it alone. Changing the global economy to a deflating one would need a concerted global cooperation and effort. It would likely be far more challenging than implementing a single currency. It would also have to happen very gradually so as not to severally disrupt peoples lives with jobs being lost too rapidly.

I have focused on the economic and environmental advantages to society obtained by a more frugal approach to living. These are significant because of the time we live in, the personal advantages of an appreciation of frugality however will always be beneficial. Living in a society operating with stability under deflation will imbue an element of that frugality to each of its citizens in much the same way that inflation encourages consumerist lifestyles. Freedom is gained by individuals in the more frugal society both by an increase in available time through less work and also from the unburdening of a material life style. One could argue that more freedom is lost by a reduced freedom of choice in spending however that is hard to quantify and really depends on what is lost. I am not advocating a bare minimum living with no luxury or superfluous spending, with most things a balance is best and this is no exception. Living in a society with no growth would be as frustrating as driving behind someone trying to be as fuel efficient as possible! Given that we hover around the point of maximum growth there is only one direction to go in order to find the balance and so I am an advocate of reducing growth by curtailing inflation. I am sure the optimal balance of growth and frugality is impossible to calculate and will change and undulate with the progress of society, one can at least presume it is around zero percent inflation over a long enough time period. At a guess right now the optimal balance would be less than that having spent so long at the polar extreme but that is an immaterial assertion as there is no way to do anything without a time frame.

As with all cyclic feedback loops we do not entirely need the world leaders to get together and work out a sensible economic plan to enhance the global quality of life and curtail environmental issues. The economy is like a democracy in which we vote with our money. If enough people try and live frugally then the change will be driven from the other direction. If we only work and spend as much as we need, reuse where we can and buy better quality commodities that last longer where we cannot then the economy will follow suit and operate more as if it were under deflation imposed by legislation. We may not all control investment banks or write economic policy but we can do our part and live by example. It may not have much effect on the global economy but it will have a more pronounced effect on your life and I strongly believe in a good way.

The Marriage of Left and Right Wing Ideals

I have mentioned in previous essays that I believe there to be two kinds of utopian, those that trust in people and strive to set them free and those that would be as a shepherd to their flock. I am very much of the former school of thinking as I believe it to be the only sustainable option, more effective in the long term and morally more acceptable. For politicians, leaders and social engineers who are trying to improve what we already have rather than envisage some ultimate aim there are also two types. These two different approaches are often called the left wing and the right wing however these labels are highly ambiguous and cover many political aspects and so I shall clarify which aspect I will be referring to in this essay.

Typically the right wants to lower taxes so people have more choice in where they spend their money which in economic terms is like the first kind of utopian. The left thinks it is in the best interests of society to increase public spending for amenities and services. If you go far enough left you arrive at communism where the whole economy is state run. The left wing approach is akin to the unsustainable utopian method however I find my self politically left of the middle for the current climate in this narrow definition of the two.

The reason for my ideal scenario being to the right while my pragmatic approach being towards the left is the nature of money and the wealth gap. With an optimal wealth gap it really wouldn't make that much difference if government was to sway from left to right assuming that when to the left only useful amenities were funded. This is the reason the right wing utopia is more sustainable, it is never in danger of making the wrong call, people are voting with their money all the time which keeps most things in accord with desires. With the wealth gap as it is however the rich have most of the economic voting power and the poor are forced into things and lose much of the freedom right wing politics promote. The wealth gap is the most significant social problem and left wing politics tends to reduce while it right wing ones will increase it. This is why I lean to the left in present politics despite fundamentally not supporting the principle.

Communism did very well at reducing the wealth gap however no real economic choice or financial voting power was afforded by the system and so the benefits of low wealth gap were completely wasted. The extreme left solved one problem but made matters worse by removing the freedom required to make use of having a low wealth gap. We have seen how communisms have failed and we are now begging to see the first glimpses of how the right manifested in capitalism will ultimately fail if not properly balanced. Ironically the end result looks a lot like that of the communist failures in that there are many poor people scraping a living with a few controlling all the power and wealth. They arrive at the same destination if unchecked, but by completely different routes.

Presently we strike a sensible balance in society between the left and right with much of the economy running itself in a free(ish) market while pumping taxes back into a selection of services we all tend to agree are highly worthy or important to society such as education. In the UK you can be treated free of charge by the NHS or you can go private which will render you a quicker and better service for a cost. Anyone who has the money and inclination to use private health care would rather their taxes were reduced and the NHS was not funded publicly (perhaps they would be happy to fund it in a sort of charitable way but in game theory terms it is not in their best financial interests and that is what counts). People who cannot afford private health care would much rather the NHS was publicly funded thus in part subsidised by the rich.

A park is a more difficult example as it offers a small amount of utility to everyone however not all the people that effectively pay for public parks will make use of them and so are unfairly charged. Those people will lose out as they will have less money to spend elsewhere and so will not be able to express their wishes for how that money should be spent. Parks that charged entrance however would attract very few users and would somewhat ruin the utility of the park for many people. Both parks and the NHS are left wing wealth redistribution mechanisms that reduce the wealth gap and are of benefit to society however they do this at the cost clouding the true wishes of the people. In a perfect free market economy the choices people make while spending their money are such effective democratic votes that many things run themselves far more effectively than any government could hope to achieve. Left wing public spending and wealth redistribution mechanisms can detract from the smooth working of this democracy via free market ideal.

Education, health, defence and infrastructure are all quite safe places for public spending as they offer a lot of added value. You may never use the railway however it being there for others has caused the town to grow which in turn has given your business a boost, or the new park down the road you never go to but that has increased property values in your area. Economists call these secondary effects externalities and they need not just be positive. Emissions from cars cause many negative externalities that are not strictly represented in the cost. With most externalities it is hard to assess the cost of value of the benefits derived beyond the intended purpose. People will pay the cost for something only if it is in their interest to do so, the cost or benefit to others will be far less frequently considered. I will only contribute to a railway company if I use their services however I am certain to derive other indirect benefits from the service regardless of how much money I have given them.

A good mechanism to redistribute wealth without ruining the desirable free market democracy is government subsidies on things with beneficial externalities and taxes on those things with negative externalities. People will always have a price threshold where alternatives or abstinence become more appealing. Often the highest price someone is willing to pay for something is lower than the cost of providing the service or product. Subsidies reduce the cost of providing something and so allow more people to make use of it. This is exactly the same for the taxes but in reverse. As taxes are levied on things with negative externalities the price will rise above more and more peoples threshold and so they will seek alternatives (these also have the positive effect of improving the free market democracy to account for non-monetary factors and thus better serve society). It is a fair assumption to state that on average the richer the person the higher the thresholds for spending and so taxes on negative externalities act as wealth redistribution. It is also fair to state that the things with the greatest number of beneficial externalities are those that are most widely used. The more widely used a subsidised service is the greater the extent of the wealth redistribution.

If you could fairly assess how much added utility something like a park or a railway network offered the average person and subsidise them by no more than that value then you neatly sidestep the problem of perverting the economic democracy. If these subsidies are raised by taxes of things with negative externalities then you have achieved a pragmatic compromise between left and right wing ideals. That is a lot of ifs but it is very easy to implement a system akin to this without disruption to other social systems which is rarely the case for utopian ideas. Another compromise between left and right wing ideals is a business model I have suggested in other essays. Unlike the tax/subsidy approach to externalities it would be very hard to implement within society, certainly to any immediate time scale.

The business model is an amalgamation of capitalism and communism but on a much smaller scale so that the best of both can be obtained while minimising the drawbacks of both. Rather than have company ownership as a tradeable commodity the shares of all companies should be apportioned to the workforce based on the proportion of their labours for that company. Employees would still be afforded wages but they would also get dividends from the the company shares they were party to based on their employment. The employees would also have some say in how much of the profits to reinvest and how much to take as a bonus to pay. Assuming all employees of a company worked the same number of hours then they would all be eligible for the same dividends pay out which would be based on the companies performance and thus have incentive to do the best possible job. This is essentially an extended profit sharing scheme which many of the best employers (for big companies) such as the John Lewis Partnership and the Cooperative already use to some extent. Wages are still paid so as to reward responsibility, difficulty, prerequisite training and/or the undesirability of any given role and retain all the advantages of supply and demand in the labour market that capitalism brings to the table.

This business model is another compromise between the left and right wing ideals that allows the positive influences of capitalism to go on uninterrupted while curtailing the damaging side effect of the amalgamation of wealth and the natural tendency for the wealth gap to increase under capitalism. What would be fantastic is a purely right wing method in which the wealth gap is reduced without affecting the choices of people. This however seems like a paradox. Society is almost by definition a compromise. The aim of society is not to make it as good for any given individual as possible but to make the sum of all persons goodness the greatest possible. Within this remit it is possible to fine tune the individuals received goodness to somewhat near their optimal but it is impossible to be spot on with each account simply due to the variance in peoples desires, habits and beliefs. The left wing method of providing services and infrastructure for citizens is the best way to increase the total sum of goodness within society. It must however be approached from a right wing perspective so as to maximise the individuals freedom and goodness. It must also do this for the more important economic reasons as money is the blood of society and it only operates effectively in capitalist free market situations. Perhaps a system devoid of money, or at least its pernicious natural tendencies, would be able to offer every citizen a deal that was completely fair for them without leaving any behind, but again due to the paradoxical nature of this suggestion I struggle to envisage how that might look. Left wing politics are good for plugging the hole in the monetary system and I would wager even the most right wing of people would rather have relatively high public funding than a system without money. The task ahead of humanity, assuming no better alternative to money can be found is to temper its flow to be in the best interests of society. Given its inherent flaws the solutions to each problem always appear to be a mixture of left and right wing ideals.

I have given two examples of ways in which a marriage of the opposed political schools is the socio-economic optimal solution for a hypothetical utopia however this logic needs to be applied to every area in society where there is interaction between the state and the individual or between private and public sector. There is no single rule for how this overlap should be dealt with. The railways, the education system and the health service are all very different institutions that offer different services with the intent of reaching different social goals. A left right compromise in any of those examples should allow innovation and efficiency to naturally flourish, they should prevent the wealth gap from widening, they should maximise the freedoms of individuals and they should make society better. The aims of all are the same but the route to achieving each needs to be specific to the area in question and so many more essays are required. Tim Harford described a wonderful utopian left right compromise for a health service in his book The Undercover Economist. That system has been in place in Singapore to for about twenty years and has yielded impressive results thus far. In many ways this essay is a summary of the utopian elements in that book but I omitted any reference to the health service idea as it was already covered far better by Harford. For a clarification on any of the ideas expressed in this essay I would highly recommend reading the Undercover Economist.

Education

The basic format for modern education is in many places attributable to Plato. More academic disciplines have arisen over time and as more and more youths are educated the system has become further institutionalised. I wish to muse over how aligned the education system is with the current social climate. Having only really experienced the English school system I will be exclusively talking about it, however I am sure most countries education systems will share many attributes with it and so hopefully the essay will still make some valid points for readers anywhere in the world.

Education is a wonderful thing but we seem to now view it as something which must be applied to you by an institution and not something that just happens as people live their lives. Schools may teach most of us to read and write however we learn to speak just by interaction with other people who can already speak. The suggestion that education is wasted on the young has some truth to it but perhaps this may not be inherently due to their age and rather because of how society treats the young. We deem youths less capable of making their own choices and have made education compulsory for them. Forced learning is not as effective as passive learning or when an individual chooses to learn something themselves. The difficulty is creating an environment where passive learning is maximised and the desire to learn things is greatest. Education is most beneficial to the young as they have most time to make use of it and so regardless of how “wasted” it may be there is no suggestion of leaving it until it can be fully appreciated by more mature people. It simply makes it clear that the aim of an education system should be to offer as many useful life skills to youths that can be effectively and willingly learnt.

I doubt any would argue that the aim of any education system would be to create a skilled and productive work force that are well rounded and contented people who can easily get along with the rest of society. I am concerned that in order to regulate a vast nationwide system it has become too quantitative which has resulted in it deviating from the ideal aims. All subjects are graded on the same linear scale to represent some level of aptitude from the student. Employers use these gradings to assess potential employees and society scrutinises schools based on them too. My first criticism of this way of quantitatively comparing schools and people by a single grade in the subject they have taken is that is it a very ambiguous measure. Success in a subject is based on the basic aptitude of the student, the effort they then put into the exam/coursework and the relationship they have with the teacher. It also will be affected by things like how well the student takes exams and their state of mind around the time of the assessments. The information a grade offers might mean the student is very bright or it might mean they went to a good school or that they worked very hard. There are levels of qualification that are sufficiently demanding to prove that the student had good teachers, good aptitude and worked hard such as a PhD from a prestigious university but prior to this stage you still don't get very complete picture of a person from their grades.

The second issue I have with the grade system is that it creates false incentives within the education system. Exams were initially intended as a way of measuring someone's abilities in a subject however the failings of exams in their ability to really provide an accurate measure of all that much means that people prepare for the exam rather than learning or educating. Exam techniques are taught, the common questions are repeatedly covered, unsubtle clues are given as to what will be on the papers so those taking the exams may commit a few pieces of key information to memory rather than having to understand a concept. Exams are to the stage now where you will get marked down for using an alternate method to the syllabus standard for reaching an answer even if it is the correct one and your workings are clearly shown. Exams are very much a man made thing that are only really self serving. They do not prepare you for anything in the real world nor offer any useful skills to contribute to society. By using exams as the primary way to measure the effectiveness of education and students then we turn the who system into something that prepares you to do well in exams rather than educate you. Certainly there is overlap between the two but it will distort the efficiency much like trade barriers distort the efficiency of the global economy.

The next point for concern is the subjects themselves which seem to be aimed at providing skills for the highest earning jobs rather than offering skills more in proportion to the kinds of job available and required throughout society. Practical skills are taught less in schools than purely academic ones and the scope to vary what one studies is small for younger age groups. It seems to be the accepted view that those who don't get on well at school go off somewhere and learn a practical trade. It is almost as if the school system is weeding out the less academic people from the very start and not even bothering to cater for their needs, leaving it to independent bodies to offer certification for various tasks that are much more integral to the operation of society than most of the top jobs down the academic path. Token subjects like design and technology and home economics or whatever more politically correct name they have been given these days can be taken by those still in compulsory education but they take much the same format as the other more academic subjects with coursework and written exams.

Intellect is a very difficult thing to describe and even harder to measure, it is comprised of many different elements including coordination, logic, linguistic, social, memory, creativity, speed, spacial awareness and visualisation, reasoning, experience and many more. Academic achievements only measure a couple of these properties of intelligence, which is already only a portion of what a grade represents. All the aspects of intellects are of great use to society and in performing jobs and enriching peoples lives but the education system chooses to focus on a few. This is certainly problematic in that it will be wasting good potential but it is also damaging to those who are not suited to the education system but are still by all accounts bright, skilled and capable people. I personally know some good examples of these people who have a chip on their shoulder because they think society views them as stupid resulting from their lack of academic achievement. These people have become blacksmiths at the very top of the trade, skilled plumbers at a young age or professional gamers, none of which are the trades of someone without intellect and ability. My feeling is that these people would be much happier had the school system nurtured their kinds of skill alongside nurturing academic skills in those others with more aptitude and interest in those subjects. Had they achieved the same level of grade as other students in school but in different areas that reward different things then they would have not been disenfranchised with the system and felt outcast by society. I suspect they would have had direction earlier in their lives and so wasted less time post school to find their feet and would be happier as a result.

Education increases knowledge and understanding which in turn increases the freedom of an individual. Compulsory education is somewhat ironic in that you remove a freedom in order to increase freedom. In an ideal world I think there is no need of compulsory education, people would appreciate the benefit of being educated, education would be of better quality and enjoyability (this is not anything against the teachers I have had in my life many of whom did remarkably well given the confines of the system they worked within and are, by all accounts, great teachers, this essay is about the problems inherent with the way society operates its education system and not those within it), and not being forced to go would make students appreciate it much more. I am not sure how viable it would be to make education non-compulsory in a country like the UK. I fear those who were disenfranchised, in bad schools, have disinterested guardians or who were not very academic

would suffer and end up with lower grades, higher conviction rates, lower employment rates and other such statistics. In effect non compulsory education would likely widen the wealth gap in the UK and similar countries. Before a society could make education optional it would need to boast an excellent school system and more importantly it would need to have all members of society above a certain level of poverty. This level of poverty I have discussed before in other essays and may be defined as the lowest income above where criminal activities are not a more economically viable alternative. This is easy to describe but very hard to measure or calculate as it not only depends on the financial returns of minimum wage employment verses crime but all of the externalities as well such as the risks, the time investments, the social status and so forth would need to be factored in. Assuming 99.99% of your society is above that theoretical level of poverty then you are in great position and could make it better still by making education non-compulsory.

Other improvements that could be made to the education system are much harder to clearly describe and are somewhat more ambiguous. I would like to see more choice of subjects and specialization at a younger age with the ability to completely drop all conventional academic studies after they have basic maths and the ability to read and write. I would like to see better measures of performance in subjects that are as close as possible to the students aptitude in that subject. I would like to see more things taught in schools that have no bearing on any subject and are purely for the benefit of living within a society such as how the political system works, how the economy works, some psychology so as to foster a greater understanding of self in people, how to gut a fish, change a tire and wire a plug. If I were to write a curriculum it would have only basic science, maths and English and then lots of more useful life skills such as those previously mentioned. It would then have a selection of options including all the present academic studies such as Biology and History as well as many more that are much more removed from writing and facts such as gardening. Things like music, art, drama, D&T and home economics would have very little in the way of examinations or academic portions and would rely on the performances and produce of the students to succeed. I would like to see teachers rated by ex student review and life achievements and I would like to see students rated most by their teachers who have had the most chance to observe their skills and potential. Certainly this brings with it new problems such as favouritism but it does align the incentives and information most closely.

Education is a great thing for society as a whole and for individuals as well. It increases the freedom of people and allows society to carry on with the skills, experience and understandings of our ancestors. There is no doubt that it is a useful and worthy endeavour nor that it is of most benefit to the young. Much of what is done in the aim of providing education is based on tradition and the kinds of education that were required historically. Not so long ago education was only available to the privileged few who would never need any trades or practical skills and so it is easier to see why the academic subjects formed as they did. Society has changed faster than the education system has evolved to suit it and now everyone goes to school yet we all still focus learnings on what only a few can end up making use of. The growth of population and the increase in school attendance on top of that has caused the need to standardize and institutionalise which has lead to the focus on examinations rather than education. History offers us a great explanation as to why there are problems in the system and is an extra confirmation that there is no important reason for it to be as it now is.

I listed many of the changes I would make to improve the system yet gave no real justifications for those changes or how they could be sensibly implemented. Some may be more obvious than others but I shall take this opportunity to expand on a few so as to pain a more colourful picture. I discussed a lack of choice of subject matter that increases as age decreases in students. The only purely academic skills that seem important to operate within society are basic maths, literacy and a grasp of some of the fundamental aspects of the physical sciences. Even these are not essential for all lines of work although would still likely be helpful. Most of these skills could be covered by quite an early age and then dropped all together should the student wish. Other subjects would make use of the skills and reinforce them from different perspectives and English, maths and the sciences would still be subject options for those that take interest in them. Education is about engaging minds and the best way to do that is by being interesting. Students are forced to take subjects they find dull and teachers are forced to teach within strict guidelines (largely to get uniformity for examinations). This makes the experience less fun for both groups of people but is a problem that can be approached at two ends. By giving students a wide choice of subjects to choose from that could include plenty of seemingly non-educational, non-useful or low demand topics such as game strategy, soap opera study or costume design, then you increase the chances of having interested students. By relaxing curriculum guidelines the teachers themselves can cherry pick the bits they find most interesting, the enthusiastic teacher is far easier to learn from and engage with. At younger ages attention spans are shorter but there is much more scope to learn ancillary skills alongside the intended ones. Simply by having a group of youths engaged and involved in a new task they will be learning a great deal of different things. You learn through experience and so schools should offer a wealth of experience, sadly much of my memories of school involve being bored sat in a selection of repetitive classrooms.

Roughly speaking I would group those within compulsory school age into three categories based on age. The first would be very much as it is now and ideally would end when the basic maths and literacy was achieved. In this period I would not offer any optional subjects nor aptitude testing or grading. The middle group would suddenly have lots of options as to their studies and these would be the most relaxed and fun seeming ones although a mild form of performance/aptitude grading would start to be given for subjects that the students have chosen. The only subjects I would presently think wise to maintain as compulsory are those which encourage physical activity such as PE. I would however like to offer a much wider range of ways in which students could be physically active and so those people who were no good at things like football could do horse riding or hiking or military style training. A light restriction on choice could be something like a minimum of two physical subjects to be included within a students selection. The third and final group would also have only their chosen subjects however these would be a little more restricted than the middle group. Likely there would be less subjects as the detail to which they were taught would be increased and thus require more time. A requirement to maintain some physical studies seems sensible but an additional requirement to do a minimum number of “useful” subjects would also be included. These useful subjects would be aimed specifically at providing the skills required by specific industries or groups of industry. An example could be a course on electrics that would obviously lead to the role of electrician, or chemistry which could lead to a selection of roles in the chemical, oil (sadly arms) and pharmaceutical industries. This group would be from around thirteen years to around sixteen.

After this point education would still be offered and would continue to narrow down subjects allowing people to specialise. Some might have all they need by this point and enter the working world instead of further education however external qualifications would be brought in house as much as possible. This is very similar to present non compulsory education however I would focus more on trying to keep the institutions highly linked. An example of this would be those doing practical intern-ships and those doing an academic degree would share the university experience and have the option to move to a different place from the family home and live in student accommodation cheaply together. This would help to stop alienating portions of society and break down the English class system a little further as well as some of the other suggestions.

Even these few changes I have suggested and described in slightly more detail would be very hard to implement in one sweeping change and as with everything in society would offer the best results if it were gradually moved towards with incremental adjustments. The relaxing of the curriculum could be quite easily accomplished without too much upset. More subjects could be offered slowly and compulsory ones could be made optional. A number of subjects are slowly changing how they are examined with increasing weight given to coursework. There are plenty of drawbacks to coursework as the only real alternative to exams however it is a step in the right direction giving options to how people can have themselves assessed and play to their strengths. These changes are all practical with our current system in place and would pave the way for the more complex changes suggested. One of the biggest requirements to improve the education system is funding. Ideally teachers would be paid a comparable wage to doctors and have a lower burden of bureaucracy to attract the best candidates and allow them to focus on the purpose of their job. Offering loads of subjects that are interesting to youths is also going to be both expensive and logistically more challenging. It may be the case that teachers of the more fringe subjects are based at more than one school. Society needs to alter its economy in order to channel enough funds at the education system to make most of these suggestions sensible in state schools. The perfect education system requires the perfect society so as to have sufficient funding, the appropriate incentives to achieve , the best learning environment, high levels of social trust and so forth. Many would likely argue that education is the way towards a perfect society but at least it doesn't need to be perfect to point you in the right direction. We should improve society for the sake of improving education and at the same time we should improve education to improve society.