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.