The Malthusian Problem

There is much concern over population growth at present. I cannot say with any certainty but the impression I get is that this concern is mainly coming from the more developed areas of the world where quality of life is better. This somewhat stands to reason as the quality of life attained in the more developed areas of the world is not sustainable. Not only is the world population growing but it is also becoming more developed as well, both of which put more strain on finite natural resources such as oil and space. As such those living least sustainably will find themselves under most pressure to change. This might just be an economic pressure but it could escalate to conflicts. Although lowering populations is only a short term solution to having an unsustainable lifestyle it is often still the favoured option of those living comfortable lives. The only real solution is living a sustainable lifestyle which would be a much bigger sacrifice to them than it is for the rest of the world hence our relative aversion to it.

People seem to forget the advantages a vast population bring when presented with the problem of unsustainable living. A huge part of our ability to live luxuriously is the efficiency brought about through division of labour. The less people we have the lower our potential efficiency in this regard. More people also means more geniuses to bring us wonderful things and advance humanity further. Scientific progress is the other major factor contributing to our present luxury. On top of this a large population helps to provide for minorities. Imagine a population so small that there was only one blind person and only one in a wheel chair, how much support would be in place and available for these people? Certainly no companies would exist making products to aid them as they would not be economically viable. More people comes out significantly ahead in pros and cons compared to less people, which can only really argue lack of space and other resources in its favour.

Simply put, any time there is a debate about the problems of population levels and growth it should always be made abundantly clear that it is part of the bigger problem of sustainability and that there is only one actual solution to which population levels have no real bearing. We could have a potentially infinite population that would survive to the end of the universe if we all lived sustainably and spread ourselves across the stars. We could have a vast population here on Earth that live as long as the Earth remains and, again, we lived sustainably. The only limit would be space yet we have proven fairly industrious at utilizing space above and below. The question the developed world dares not ask is what they would have to give up in order to actually live sustainably. Many think of returning to the land and having to live like people did a millennia ago, which is a fairly good way towards living a sustainable life yet not the only path open, which is just as well as it is a very space inefficient way to live. We either have the technology or it is at our fingertips to live very closely to how we do now and remain sustainable. The problem is that there is no infrastructure or significant government policy that supports and enforces sustainable living. As such, most of the technology has remained out of reach or undeveloped thus leaving it woefully inadequate to compete in the market. This in turn makes matters seem worse and ensures it will be harder to make a transition to a sustainable lifestyle. If someone tells you there are too many people in the world you should tell them to go and live a sustainable life themselves before they complain about population. Any reasoned logical argument against high population must concede it is only a delay tactic at best and that the only long term solution is sustainability.

There are other arguments against population beyond maintaining our current lifestyle as long as possible in terms of consumption. While some people thrive in city life and love to be surrounded by others it is not for every one. Overcrowding reduces the quality of life for people who enjoy space, nature, peace and quiet. Fortunately we are a long way of this being a valid argument against population levels. Roughly half of the global population live in crowded built up urban areas yet these area's combined only occupy about three percent of the total land area of the Earth. The population of the planet would have to drastically increase for their to be insufficient rural living areas to meet demands. We would hit the cap of natural resources and growing land as a limiting factor to further growth before we would start to run out of rural living land.

The real irony is that we think we need to control our own population levels as we have advanced beyond our environmental and evolutionary constraints. This is an arrogant and somewhat dangerous position to hold. Calling it a food chain is misleading, it, like every other natural process, is a cycle. Many things feed from humans despite the fact that we place ourselves atop the food chain. We claim we have no natural predators yet succumb all the time to various diseases. Yes, our predators are vastly smaller than us and for the most part don't consume that much of us. You might say we have antibiotics and other medicines within our arsenal against the very small predators however we operate in entirely different worlds. The very small live and die so fast that mutate far quicker than we are able. Vast populations will spring up and just as quickly die off again , like who civilizations rising and falling within just a few days. The evolutionary process for those that are very small and live very quickly relative to us happens much faster. As soon as a successful strain of something mutates it quickly multiplies and spreads. The tools we use to combat harmful bacteria and our other micro-organism predators expediate their evolution, we kill off swathes clearing the path for the few survivors to flourish. As soon as something evolves to be immune to our defences it will spread like wildfire among us. We cannot rely on evolution to protect us and are as a result locked in an ongoing scientific battle with micro-organisms to develop cures, effective antibiotics and immunisations.

You may recall from biology at school we were shown a graph for natural variation in populations over time for rabbits and foxes called the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey system. They both would undulate up and down like a sine wave however they would be slightly out of phase with one another. The fox population would rise and eat more rabbits causing their population to decline. This in turn would reduce the food supply for the foxes who would in turn start to decline in number. This would then allow the rabbits to thrive again thus restarting the whole cycle. This simplified example shows a trend that is applicable in a wide sphere of events not limited to just biology. As humanities population and density increases we improve the odds for the micro-organisms in evolving a resilient or impressively contagious strain. A graph against population levels of known human diseases and parasites and of humanity over time would not look much like the neat fox and rabbit relationship however a similar process is going on. The success of micro-organisms is far more based on adaptations than it is on resources, particularly when those resources entail human hosts which are typically abundant. While the fox and rabbit will respond more directly to the population levels of the other, the prey of the pathogen will be more inclined towards stability until an adaptation occurs in the pathogen which is then more liable to cause a sharp and rapid decline in population of their hosts. The way in which disease spread and mutate is more random and spontaneous than the slower more continual change of larger organisms. Human ecosystems are hard to isolate in the same way a rabbit and fox system is, they are also dependant on far more factors such as war and scientific discovery than it is on our predators abundance. Even so, you would see spikes and troughs such as the effect of the bubonic plague or black death in the mid fourteen century if you were to create such a graph.

It may look as if the global human population has been growing continually for a long time and is picking up pace. This is understandable and somewhat masks the very real relationship between humans and their natural predators. In the distant past humanity was more isolated into smaller ecosystems like the rabbits and foxes as our ability to travel was much more restricted. With many isolated ecosystems the undulations in human population due to the efficacy of predators would tend to average out so as to seem non-existent. As our ability to move about increased the number of effective ecosystems we occupied in regards micro-organisms fell quickly. In the modern day we effectively occupy just one huge ecosystem with the odd tiny pocked of isolated indigenous peoples such as Amazonian tribes. One of the best reasons to leave these tribes undisturbed is that they may one day be the key to the survival and continuation of our species due to their isolation from potential pathogens. Despite our ecosystems merging and falling in number we have not had an epidemic in a very long time. This is a result of the vast scientific progress occurring alongside our ability to travel more quickly and freely. By merging our ecosystems we lose the ability to average out any undulations in population as a result of our natural predators however there having not been an epidemic for such a long time means we should not expect to see any undulations any way. The only thing our prolonged and steep population growth ensures is that future epidemics will be far more severe in the ease in which they spread and the numbers that they affect.

All this is to say that population levels are not the most worthy or relevant subjects for debate. We live in an effectively closed system that is highly effective at self regulation which is often described as the Gaia hypothesis. We are not yet so above this system that we need to burden ourselves with performing its role. We can happily go on breeding and living with total disregard for the consequences and sooner or later Gaia will rebalance the scales for us. Living sustainably is one key way to limit the number of potential mechanisms by which we can upset the balance an incur a rebalancing change in the system. This however does not solve the issue of our natural predators for which we probably need to populate more isolated ecosystems to ensure our ongoing safety. In the modern world this really means populating new planets which is some way off. We may well encounter some serious epidemics that wipe out significant portions of the global population before we get round to populating new worlds however it is very unlikely that any would completely wipe us out or basically reset all progress as would be the case if only isolated human ecosystems survived. It is not in a parasites best interests to efficiently wipe out all of its hosts as that ensures its own demise as well. Natural variance within species also serves as good protection against such outbreaks.

I shall simply conclude by reiterating that attempts to limit human populations solve no long term problems and would mostly just limit our capacity as a species. Living sustainably is the only solution and ironically facilitates and maintains a greater population. A greater population also theoretically reduces the time it will take us to populate new worlds with more great minds able to work on the problem, more division of labour to make that work efficient and more pressure on space generating a demand for more. This in turn is the most obvious way in which we can escape the restraints of Gaia which will ultimately limit our population of it's own accord thus further making attempts to limit our population seem like wasted effort.  

Sandy Hook and Star Craft

There have been many school shootings all over the world for the past one hundred and fifty years. While I cannot deny that they are on the increase in nominal terms, both in frequency and in death toll, if one considers the population growth over that time frame and measure incidents per person it would be a more more stable figure, it may well even be in decline. The frequency has remained more constant over the time period and it tends to be the death toll which is rising which could be attributed to technological developments just as easily as social ones. Even if school shootings are on a relative decline it is not fast enough. Each has had the impact of a once in a life time tragedy such as the Twin Towers yet the memory of Dunblane was still vivid when Colombine occurred. Being British our media is highly focused on UK and US events but the rest of the world has had its fair share as well with Germany having two double digit death toll school shootings since the new millennium. The Sandy Hook shootings in the latter part of last year being from America were getting a lot of media attention which brought the memories and feelings back yet again. It is profoundly sad yet also exasperating. Most crimes are unpleasant, most tragedies seem cruel and senseless yet most crimes have motive and most tragedies have at least an explanation. Where one cannot see motive or reason there can be no solution and this was how I felt about school shootings.

The school shootings where a single person was shot are more likely to have been like any other shooting and with much of the same fathomable motives, just located at a school and so bolstering the figures. It is the incidents where people indiscriminately shoot at anyone that are most concerning as they are so abhorrent yet so seemingly insoluble. While struggling with the problem as to why people would commit such a atrocious act it hit me like one of those hidden image visual tricks that you stare at until you lose focus and a three dimensional shape emerges from the page. The problem itself was the reason, it is simply because it is so atrocious that people are drawn to it, like climbing the highest mountain. Shooting up a school indiscriminately is about the most damaging, inhumane, immoral and cruel act that can be easily achieved by people without control over armies or munitions stock piles. It is an act of individual terrorism against society that lashes out hitting everyone around them. Should a person become removed enough from society to feel both isolated and persecuted then they could harbour enough hatred to take action and would not be fettered by morality, only motivated by impact. It is because schools are such an obvious target in terms of ease for effect that they are a social weak spot which means that there will be those that try to exploit it. Does this mean we need to increase security in schools? No, probably not, it would be very hard and expensive to make it effective and would then only shift the most viable targets to shopping precincts or theme parks.

It is not helped that the media lay all the cards on the table and show the world what a devastating blow it is to society. This in effect showcases the idea to others, which is the best solution I can find as to why there are so many recurrences of school shootings. Does this imply we should censor the media? No, probably not again. Censorship is an ugly business and in these situations it would seem to somehow deny the grief of those who lost people. Censorship is also more likely to make people mistrust and fear the state which in itself would help create an environment where people are more likely to want to damage society. While advertising the idea of a school shooting is not great it is far better than the alternative which is a world of more secrets and less freedoms. Free speech, as with any freedom, comes with dangers and responsibilities which we have not yet mastered. This however is no reason to about turn on an important principle.

It is all to easy to blame the media for many of the modern social ills but one of the downsides of a democracy is that you must reap what you sow. The media only provide what we want, capitalism ensures this, if media is successfully pandering to our more base interests then it is we who are weak and immoral and not them. The media may help to enable us and our morbid lusts but we the people are very much the primary enabler in that relationship. To solve the media problem we need to go far deeper and improve the whole of society so that they no longer are able to sucker us in with sinister details, tribalism, figures to hate and sensationalism. I am not suggesting that in an “improved society” such events as school shootings would not be broadcast due to a lack of interest nor am I suggesting that it is immoral to take an interest in a horrific event. I believe the opposite in fact, that open information and an empathic sharing of grief is a great aid in the healing and improving process both on a personal and social level. I am simply trying to illustrate that the media, while far from helpful, is not a single solution to stopping school shootings.

One area I do still hold the media both responsible and in contempt is factual accuracy or simply the reporting of opinion as if they were facts. In the recent Sandy Hook school shooting a major American news network suggested that Star Craft II could be in part responsible for the culprits actions. The idea that any game really makes people more violent in real life is fairly thin and frankly laughable but the idea that Star Craft II is making people more violent is like saying the same about chess. The painful irony is that Star Craft is preventing far more school shootings than it is inducing. Criminal satires that are said to glorify violence such as Grand Theft Auto tend to be light relief played casually or with friends in private. Star Craft however has a huge community and following. It is a way young people can meet and interact with like minded folk and share in something where they are accepted. There are professional tournaments going on all over the world and conventions where players can transcend the online communities by seeing each other in the flesh. There are big stars and the all important fans and then there are sponsors who provide the money to fuel much of this. Unsurprisingly it is both quite a geeky community and quite a young one too however this makes them highly accepting of others and the perfect environment for the more disenfranchised youths in society. Most people are entirely unaware that all this goes on and would be amazed at what they found if the delved into the hidden worlds of the less mainstream social communities. Players winning hundred of thousands of dollars and being revered like sports legends complete with thousands of people looking unusually comfortable in themselves. Although I am not really involved in the Star Craft scene I have been fortunate enough to be involved in a very similar one for a card game called Magic the Gathering. Being a part of the Magic scene is one of the most instrumental and significant parts of who I am, it provided valuable support and experience and it allowed me to meet some of my dearest friends. There are huge cultural benefits to being part of a global scene as well, especially one that is friendly and accepting by nature. I am not good in social situations, the less well I know people and the larger the group the worse I find the experience. At a Magic tournament I am surrounded by hundreds, perhaps thousands of other Magic players and I am completely at home, able to hold a conversation with anyone as if I had known them all my life. Having personal experience of how such a community helped me in so many aspects of my life and knowing that it has done the same for so many others makes me highly defensible when they are demonized or stigmatised by more mainstream culture. It is not only morally unsavoury to implicate things we know very little about in atrocities but it is very damaging to the growth of the communities. If parents see media coverage condemning an activity they are far more likely to stop their children from getting involved. This will deny them the opportunity to find alternate communities within society that might best suit them. This in turn could lead to them becoming the kind of isolated disenfranchised individual that could massacre a school.

As a society we are rather hypocritical when it comes to the youth, either we forgot what it was like being young or we convince ourselves times have changed enough that children need treating very differently. We try to shield the young from drugs and sex and other dangerous freedoms however we do relatively little in the way of alternatives. Being young is about trying things and making mistakes so that you may be a wise and sensible adult with valuable life experience. In the early teens we go from being children to wannabe adults. You see this transformation in many animals too. We poke around trying out grown up things for size trying to gauge where we fit in to the world and what sort of person we are. As a society we seem to quash many of the opportunities teenagers might have to do much of this valuable growing.

While I offer no single solution to preventing school shootings I strongly believe that the various non mainstream communities represent one of the best buffers we have against it. They are less known and harder to stumble into than the more obvious communities within society and need all the help they can get in promoting their existence and benefits. The internet is helping many of these communities grow but there are also some concerns that the internet is contributing to the feeling of isolation within society. The kicker for the gaming communities is that they encourage events such as tournaments and conventions where people travel too and meet in person. They get the best of both worlds, lots of people with lots of connections all without distance constraints from the internet complete with real social intercourse and cultural experience all with the protective fall-back of the activity in question. They are the the kinds of community that are most likely to be suitable for those feeling isolated within a more mainstream environment and therefore are more important than things like baseball clubs and school discos for preventing internal attacks

upon society. The cultural idea of the geek has changed, or more the emotional response the concept of a geek evokes. Within my lifetime it has gone from being a label that comes with some stigma to being an acceptable norm. While the geek might be recognisable based on appearance cultural acceptance has not gone quite as far as the activities of the geek, or other similar term. Most would probably say that geeks do stuff on computers which might well be accurate but is hardly specific. It is no longer the label of the geek that comes with stigma attached but rather the activities that they are more likely to do. The media rather than fuelling current popular opinion on games would be doing society a big favour if it kept to facts and relevant information. Perhaps even going out on a limb and showing what a positive force these underground communities can be for our under catered for youth would be one of the best things a media outlet could do to make up for years of blame.

The internet has helped bring small pockets of gamers together into large worldwide communities but it is also having some rather significant effects on the physical world. It is changing our town centres, certain shops are becoming obsolete and others are taking their place. I have spoken a lot about the merits of having activities suitable for youths and promoting underground communities. One of the best places for both of these things is the local games shop which not only sells a wide array of different gaming products all with their own associated communities but also serves as a meeting and mingling place for people of all ages. They are typically places to play games first and shops second, often they have back rooms or upstairs where tables and chairs fill the room purely to play games. They provide real social interaction and activities within a safe environment and serve as a gateway into bigger more global communities. Games shops offer society a service by providing what is essentially the equivalent of a pub or bar for gamers. The internet however is a better place to get gaming products from and so these shops are losing business. Games are not consumable like alcohol. If the shop fails then with it goes the places to meet and socialise. Personally I think such places are so valuable to society that I would subsidize them centrally to ensure people always had a local games shop to go and play games in regardless of where people bought their games. As I am not in charge of government spending I instead vote with my wallet and support my local business. I buy all my games from my local shop instead of online in the hope it will keep its doors open till 10pm most nights, have enough interest to keep putting on events, to keep its store copies of games up to date and have enough floor space to allow for at least thirty gamers to freely play games. One of the best instances to shop local is the games store because of all the incidental benefits that they bring with them and so I dedicate this article to Clifton Road Games for helping to improve society and preventing acts of social terrorism.

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.