Never been too sure about this but gave it some close observation while touching a windflower today.
So the problem is trying to experience something 100%. Windflowers are coming to the end of their season and I thought I may not see another this year as I do not plan to go out for a while. So I wanted to touch the windflower 100%, not being distracted so that I could at least have that. This is very OCD type thinking of course too, but illustrative.
When we think "I am not touching something", "now I am", "now I am not" it is very discrete and definite. I know when I am, and I know when I am not. Knowledge is very binary. You either are, or you are not, touching the flower and there is nothing in between.
But if we look at the process as it "is", and we separate what is happening from what we are thinking and knowing we get a very different experience. There is no sudden change from not touching to touching and back again. The "present moment" as it is called in Buddhism, is like a stage on which the world unfolds. It doesn't change, we occupy the "present moment" continuously, but the events change within that present. It is not so discrete. There is looking at the flower, there is the intention to touch it, the motion of the fingers toward it, being close to it but not touching, being close and touching, looking at the flower, looking at the finger, thinking I am touching, thinking is this the actual moment now, is this it, I am definitely touching it, some intention to withdraw the hand, being close and touching, being close and not touching, being far away. But it is seemless. The flower is there all the time, the hand is there all the time, the contact is rather arbitrary in reality. It is only when we think "I am touching it" does some mental stone statue get erected to mark the event and it takes on special significance.
In this way "knowledge" and "being" are quite distinct. Without knowledge things are changing both in themselves but also our perspective on them. One second looking at the flower, the next looking at its petal, its stamen, perhaps it leaf, perhaps the ground, nothing is static and discrete in reality. It is a flowing stream. But when we start to think and hammer the sign posts and way markers in to measure and record the events then we have a completely different process of steps and thinking being something separate and discrete, thins start to be made of parts and these get assembled by thoughts into discrete things.
Some say we shouldn't think because it boxes and distorts the world so much. It forces it into a particular shape and perspective and limits our appreciation of it. But as Hui Neng said in the Platform Sutra, we think you can't stop that. What is to be done however is to watch the process of thinking and see that it is quite different from the world that it is involved with.
Monday, 11 March 2019
Friday, 8 March 2019
The New Economics: Peace, Desire and Goodness
So when we get what we want we feel peace.
But do we feel peace because we have what we want, or because for a while we no longer want.
Put another way is the goal of action to fulfil desire or make desire go away?
Summary:
The answer is to do with ecstasy and being outside "yourself." Selfless people are actually ecstatic because they are bigger than their desires, which means they can adopt a position outside their desires which places them between their desires and others. So being small minded and satisfying a big desire, clears the self and makes you ecstatic for a while. But desires soon fill you up and you become stuck inside again. So really the ascetic is just trying to make the desires smaller then themselves, and the consumerist is trying to keep keep emptying the self. But the real solution I realise is neither. Its trying to become bigger and more magnanimous and more generous.
As discussed a lot in this blog what we desire is conditional. We can't desire things we don't know about. It is the job of marketers to inform us of the existence of things and then make us desire them. But until the marketer has done their job we are blissfully unaware. Indeed the job of the marketer is to make us unhappy, and then we are motivated into action to try and resolve this desire that has been created.
In this cynical view desire is like a disease and a drug addiction, it is an illness to solve.
The traditional material view is like John Locke based on practical things like food and housing. One imagines the argument goes exactly like his argument that property is a fundamental thing because we take possession of things in order to consume them. Desire is a fundamental thing because we must desire things before we are motivated to take possession of them, and then consume them. We enter a state of unrest in order to achieve the goal of desire. Without this all animals would die, they would simply remain at rest until they died. And so because motivation toward a need like food is a natural thing then desire is a natural thing and the rest of economics develops.
In Buddhism they call motivation toward a desire selfishness. The desire is limited to the body, it is the smallest wish and the action that arises from it is the smallest and most trivial action. In Adam Smith's world the economy is the sum of this population of small wishes.
Yet Adam Smith is himself a contradiction. How did he benefit from slaving for 10 years to write Wealth of Nations? Was this just a small wish? Or did he have larger things in mind like the "Wealth of Nations". He was not thinking about himself, his desire was for all of humanity. His work did not enter the market place as a tradeable commodity along side candles and matches, he meant it to be part of the Enlightenment and illuminate people in a way far more widely than just a candle. Magnanimity,Generosity, Sacrifice, Wisdom are not accounted for anywhere in his book and yet he must have exhibited these to write his book. 10 years of his life were lost sitting in a room studying and composing it, 10 years he will never have again, and he gave them to the world in this book. A book which has no room anywhere in it for that act itself. Wealth of Nation is incomplete; Modern Economics is incomplete.
Darwin
In Buddhism the wise who begin to step beyond the daily turmoil of personal desires, begin to develop deeper motivations like compassion, love, generosity, patience, tolerance, acceptance. In the case of these "big minded" persons while they have their small desires they also begin to operate in a way that may not necessarily benefit them but will benefit someone. There is a naturalistic John Locke type argument that says that we must look after our own survival because no-one else is going to and after that there is nothing to do because everyone is looking after them self. There is a great Chinese story of Hell illustrating the problem with this:
Buddha shows the person Heaven and there is a circular table with 10 bowls around it and 10 pairs of 2 meter long chopsticks. The Buddha shows the person Hell and it is exactly the same. Then as they watch the people sit at the table. In Hell they are emaciated, and while the food in the bowl is good they cannot reach it with the long chop sticks. In Heaven they are healthy and instead of trying to feed themselves they feed the person across the table from them.
The point is that not everything (indeed nothing) can be achieved alone. We live and work in a community. Economics serves to study and guide our material interactions but it cannot escape that we work together by one means or another. Adam Smith, like the proponents of Democracy, seems to forget that even in a free-market or given a vote we can chose whether to do what suits us, or we can chose to have a wider perspective. Adam Smith advises us to work in our own interests as this will make the market more "efficient". That is it will lead to money flowing to the "best" producers and lead to right products flowing to the "neediest" of consumers.
Yet as has been the debate through logic to evolution to society to science what is the "unit" of the world. It was "the word" is logic for a while, it was the "species" then the "individual" and now the "gene" in evolution, it was the "nation" for Adam Smith but is now the individual in economics, it was the "atom" and now the "string "in physics. As argued recently in this blog there is no fundamental unit. The universe is not built from "things". Well it is in one sense, but unlike an Ikea flat pack there never was a time when it was flat packed, so we don't know what the "original" units that God built it from were. We keep taking it apart into smaller bits and this is endless (even with quantum limitations I believe we'll find a way to intellectually subdivide units of energy). Limits in general live in a relationship with Regions, and they are constantly changing.
So we don't say that the absolute unit of "action" is the selfish individual. You can look at it like this. You can say that everything someone does is preceded by a desire. I only gave you my last biscuit because I got a nice feeling of friendship from it, or because I thought it would strengthen our relationship, or because in some way "I" benefited. Or perhaps I just looked at the situation and thought well one of us is going to go without the biscuit, why not make it myself for a change. What cares, just take that on the chin and feel the loss and just accept that. The alternative is the other person feeling the same.
Now of course as is often the way deep down we feel cheated by life, we feel damaged, we harbour some hatred at having been abused at some level. Even if it just a stranger stepping in front of us in a queue without due consideration. We feel aggrieved at life. Such bitterness stored up through life means it is hard to be "big", and hard to be generous. When we "give" we feel we are losing out even more in a world where we already lost. And it is even worse when the people we give to don't seem to appreciate our sacrifice. It just goes further to deepen our sadness and bitterness. Well it's a fact that we do need to think about ourselves. And we do need to take for ourselves. If we keep punishing our self by giving then we are doing to our self what we wouldn't do to someone else. If I always give my biscuits away because I don't like seeing people without a biscuit then I am ensuring there is one person without a biscuit which is myself! The key to generosity is equanimity. If we feel we are losing every time we give, we have no developed equanimity. We still have a small mind that is based upon personal desire. This is not a bad thing, there is truth to the view that each person must look after themselves first. If you are miserable you can be of little help to others. You may wish others to help you in your misery, but they are probably miserable too, and so cannot help you. In a world of small people it is like Hell in the Chinese story above, no one is free to feed another, so we must try and feed our self. It takes a Jesus or Bodhisattva in Buddhism to take the first step of sacrifice. They must forgo feeding them self and risk feeding another. Now that other may not reciprocate and get fact while the Bodhisattva gets thin, and this is the problem of co-operation studied by Axelrod and others (and which I did a final year BSc project on) and which I'll need to return to in my economic models. But the Bodhisattva has one big gain if they do it right, and turn the pain in growth, and that is they begin to develop a larger mind. But warning! care is needed. A small mind, being sacrificed makes a smaller mind. Developing gentle kindness to oneself is the first and most important step to developing it towards others. But this is not selfish desire! This is learning to view your self from the same perspective you will in future view others. It is beginning the step outside oneself, what in Greek is called Ecstasy.
Sadly we understand ecstasy today in terms of selfish desire, when we are indulged and fully fulfilled on sex or drugs, happiness brought on by pleasurable feelings. But in the ecstatic orgy we should be letting go of self control not so much as to indulge our fleeting whims and repressed fantasies but rather to let go of our self as we might in a masked ball, to experience being someone else, to experience being free from the restrictions of our identity. Presumably after Christian repression of pre-Christian ecstatic cults such stuff is now associated with the devil, with human sacrifice and general victimisation and sadism of unfortunate individuals. But utterly ironically the best way to ecstasy is not through superiority and putting up barriers between victim and self, but by the complete opposite of dropping barriers between victim and self. The devil is a deceiver who gets what he wants through trickery. We are in Lent at the moment a good time to discuss this. The devil will offer you the world, and you think your every desire is fulfilled, you believe you have gained. But the Devil never loses and never gives, it is you that is giving. After you have taken the Devil will enslave you like a fish on a hook, like a drug addict seeking their next fix. How ironic that those who seek ecstasy the quick way end up giving far more than those who seek it the slow way. If we reject the devil, and instead seek to gradually remove barriers between ourselves and others, with no obvious gain, taking the pain of loss and generosity very gradually and developing kindness to our self eventually when we are a big person we will benefit from seeing the world from a perspective outside our self. We will be in ecstasy. When we have pain or have desires they will not be centre of the world. We will see them in proper perspective alongside other people from a position of equanimity. "Equanimity" is not some intellectual idea. Through meditation we can experience it directly as a core feature of our minds. Ecstasy is the true nature of our minds. Being magnanimous and generous is the natural state. It is there all the time, but we become small minded and lose sight of it.
So in conclusion. It is not that the traditional view of desire is wrong exactly. As far as I can see now it is not quite like John Locke making the mistake of not distinguishing possession and property. It is that "desire" becomes a problem when we are small minded and we cannot see beyond it. When we are small minded having a desire is an unpleasant experience and it can consume us and take us over. When we have a mind bigger than the desire we have freedom. We can chose. Right now I have a few desires one is to sleep as I am tired, one is to finish some work, one is to go for a walk, I'm not actually hungry which is a rarity, and a desire to finish this! But none are huge, and I can pick them up and put them down and am actually very free. The problem happens with desires bigger than us. They fill us up and we lose perspective. We have no room to move and they take over. The smaller our mind the smaller a desire can do this.
Only when we have a mind bigger than a desire can we experience freedom. And what does this mean? It means that our self is bigger than desire. It means that we are not identical with desire. A human being with a big mind has a relationship with desire very similar in fact to their relationship with things. We can pick things up when we need them, and we can put them down. Likewise we can attend to that desire to go sky diving, or we can focus on the work we have to do. Nothing is so desired that we can't think of anything else. This is equanimity. It also means that when we have a desire and someone else has a desire we can take up a position of freedom between our desire and theirs. Wow think about that! we can occupy a space between our self and another! This is ecstasy. It is the basis of what is cheesily called "goodness." But it is so much deeper and more profound than what is commonly associated with goodness.
So in final conclusion. When we have a desire that is near the size of our mind then it is a relief to get rid of it, because it can totally absorb us. Now this can be a pleasurable experience, because while we are absorbed with a desire we can think of nothing else and this can actually distract us from other sufferings and desires. Perhaps I have a deep desire to be famous and I am still a nobody. However if I develop a big desire to climb Mount Everest this will distract me from my pain at being no-one. Unfortunately there is a test for this: once we have climbed Mount Everest and the desire is satisfied we no longer have the distraction and we must return to the pain of not having achieved fame. I believe this has always troubled me. It is far better to be honest about our desires to some degree and seek to address them directly rather than try to distract from them. Some desires like fame are incredibly hard to achieve and we need a conversation with Simon Cowell to tell us to just forget about it. It is painful, but pain like desire is something that is much easier when we have a big mind. If our mind is too small and the pain too big, then like a huge mouthful it will take a lot of chewing before we can swallow it. This is text book suffering, and it is what having a small mind is like. It also underlines the importance of growing our mind, and developing a perspective that is bigger and beyond our self. But suffering is good, because this is the number one way of growing.
It is so sad to see the news about Keith Flint. He did achieve fame, and was front man to one of the defining music phenomenon of our generation. He did climb Everest. A true legend. Very deeply missed. And he gave so much to so many people. In that sense he was a bodhisattva. A blinding light in the darkness for many who wanted to party hard in the 90s and 00s. Yet after all this he was left profoundly wanting himself, and a desire that ultimately was too great for him that it consumed him. He lost control and unable to meet the demands of that devil he killed himself. His mind was too small for this whatever it was. Johnny Rotten puts it down to loneliness and lack of love. But there are many who are heart broken, and unloved who soldier on through the valley of darkness and loneliness taking each miserable day as it comes, and eking out what meagre joy their life affords them. Perhaps they have hope, or perhaps they are just big enough to just accept it. Life isn't always amazing, sometime life is just rubbish, some times a whole lifetime from birth to death can be horrendous. But it's always life, and within that some days are better than others. And from what I've written in this blog underneath the overloaded small mind, there is the big mind that lies in equanimity to the world sufferings. As discussed in the blog before this does not mean the big mind is dull the world's suffering, it means that it is big enough to see the suffering as it is without feeling overwhelmed. A baby may burst our crying if you take away their ice cream. Their whole world just collapsed. When we are older it still hurts exactly the same, but when we are bigger we can contain that sadness and just see it and let if dissipate without becoming too distressed. Something that starts, will end. This is the basic law of the world (Konadattas insight). Not everyone has teh same desires and emotions. A spider may fill one person with huge fear that they cannot bear it is not because they are small minded but because their fear is very great. Perhaps Keith Flint was not small minded, but the desire he had was too great for him. I don't suppose he ever meditated, or did any mental practice to develop that mind of his. As a result when Mayumi Kai refused to come home, whatever part she played in his mental life, it left him with a mouthful too big to chew. My only advise if I had known him would have been to start chewing on that, whatever it was, a long time before it became unbearable. You "Gotta face your fears in the wild frontier." Just gotta face your desires.
Final conclusion: ecstasy is our true nature. Free from the boundaries of self. This is not self annihilation, it is just stepping outside not always being dragged back inside the selfish perspective by desires and fears we can't manage. The way outside is what is generally called "goodness", but which is essentially trying to occupy the space between our self and others. It can hurt to give and not be recognised or receive in return, it hurts to love and not be loved in return. But when we step outside our self, outside that pain, when we are big enough and big hearted enough, big minded enough (same word in some languages) we can see it for what it is we can get freedom from it. It doesn't go away, we just sit outside it. This is ecstasy, this is true mind and heart. So when we get what we want, the desire goes away, and this returns us to freedom, but with a big heart and mind there is room in us to be free and have the desires, pains and loves all at once.
Just celebrate this post with the latest Carly Rae Jepsen offering. So we find what we want, there's "nothing like this feeling". That feeling is ecstasy it is true peace because for a while we are free, there is room in us for two. But when desires start to develop again that "you" don't satisfy then we fill up and there becomes room for only me again. And if you are Keith Flint there stops being room even for you if the desires are too big. When we are in love, and free and have room for two we must work extra hard to grow and make room for more. I think my mistake is I get lazy and actually my mind shrinks when I'm in love and that means I become even less able to weather hardship. Well done Carly some musical love again.
Now this is the real nature of the problem we face in life. This is not just a economics post, its a religious, ethics, spiritual, psychological, existential, ontological post. "New Economics" must have limits. Perhaps the goal is not unify the whole of spirituality, science, ethics and economics. It is just to define the correct boundaries of economics to avoid people justifying the indefensible with economic theory.
But do we feel peace because we have what we want, or because for a while we no longer want.
Put another way is the goal of action to fulfil desire or make desire go away?
Summary:
The answer is to do with ecstasy and being outside "yourself." Selfless people are actually ecstatic because they are bigger than their desires, which means they can adopt a position outside their desires which places them between their desires and others. So being small minded and satisfying a big desire, clears the self and makes you ecstatic for a while. But desires soon fill you up and you become stuck inside again. So really the ascetic is just trying to make the desires smaller then themselves, and the consumerist is trying to keep keep emptying the self. But the real solution I realise is neither. Its trying to become bigger and more magnanimous and more generous.
As discussed a lot in this blog what we desire is conditional. We can't desire things we don't know about. It is the job of marketers to inform us of the existence of things and then make us desire them. But until the marketer has done their job we are blissfully unaware. Indeed the job of the marketer is to make us unhappy, and then we are motivated into action to try and resolve this desire that has been created.
In this cynical view desire is like a disease and a drug addiction, it is an illness to solve.
The traditional material view is like John Locke based on practical things like food and housing. One imagines the argument goes exactly like his argument that property is a fundamental thing because we take possession of things in order to consume them. Desire is a fundamental thing because we must desire things before we are motivated to take possession of them, and then consume them. We enter a state of unrest in order to achieve the goal of desire. Without this all animals would die, they would simply remain at rest until they died. And so because motivation toward a need like food is a natural thing then desire is a natural thing and the rest of economics develops.
In Buddhism they call motivation toward a desire selfishness. The desire is limited to the body, it is the smallest wish and the action that arises from it is the smallest and most trivial action. In Adam Smith's world the economy is the sum of this population of small wishes.
Yet Adam Smith is himself a contradiction. How did he benefit from slaving for 10 years to write Wealth of Nations? Was this just a small wish? Or did he have larger things in mind like the "Wealth of Nations". He was not thinking about himself, his desire was for all of humanity. His work did not enter the market place as a tradeable commodity along side candles and matches, he meant it to be part of the Enlightenment and illuminate people in a way far more widely than just a candle. Magnanimity,Generosity, Sacrifice, Wisdom are not accounted for anywhere in his book and yet he must have exhibited these to write his book. 10 years of his life were lost sitting in a room studying and composing it, 10 years he will never have again, and he gave them to the world in this book. A book which has no room anywhere in it for that act itself. Wealth of Nation is incomplete; Modern Economics is incomplete.
Darwin
In Buddhism the wise who begin to step beyond the daily turmoil of personal desires, begin to develop deeper motivations like compassion, love, generosity, patience, tolerance, acceptance. In the case of these "big minded" persons while they have their small desires they also begin to operate in a way that may not necessarily benefit them but will benefit someone. There is a naturalistic John Locke type argument that says that we must look after our own survival because no-one else is going to and after that there is nothing to do because everyone is looking after them self. There is a great Chinese story of Hell illustrating the problem with this:
Buddha shows the person Heaven and there is a circular table with 10 bowls around it and 10 pairs of 2 meter long chopsticks. The Buddha shows the person Hell and it is exactly the same. Then as they watch the people sit at the table. In Hell they are emaciated, and while the food in the bowl is good they cannot reach it with the long chop sticks. In Heaven they are healthy and instead of trying to feed themselves they feed the person across the table from them.
The point is that not everything (indeed nothing) can be achieved alone. We live and work in a community. Economics serves to study and guide our material interactions but it cannot escape that we work together by one means or another. Adam Smith, like the proponents of Democracy, seems to forget that even in a free-market or given a vote we can chose whether to do what suits us, or we can chose to have a wider perspective. Adam Smith advises us to work in our own interests as this will make the market more "efficient". That is it will lead to money flowing to the "best" producers and lead to right products flowing to the "neediest" of consumers.
Yet as has been the debate through logic to evolution to society to science what is the "unit" of the world. It was "the word" is logic for a while, it was the "species" then the "individual" and now the "gene" in evolution, it was the "nation" for Adam Smith but is now the individual in economics, it was the "atom" and now the "string "in physics. As argued recently in this blog there is no fundamental unit. The universe is not built from "things". Well it is in one sense, but unlike an Ikea flat pack there never was a time when it was flat packed, so we don't know what the "original" units that God built it from were. We keep taking it apart into smaller bits and this is endless (even with quantum limitations I believe we'll find a way to intellectually subdivide units of energy). Limits in general live in a relationship with Regions, and they are constantly changing.
So we don't say that the absolute unit of "action" is the selfish individual. You can look at it like this. You can say that everything someone does is preceded by a desire. I only gave you my last biscuit because I got a nice feeling of friendship from it, or because I thought it would strengthen our relationship, or because in some way "I" benefited. Or perhaps I just looked at the situation and thought well one of us is going to go without the biscuit, why not make it myself for a change. What cares, just take that on the chin and feel the loss and just accept that. The alternative is the other person feeling the same.
Now of course as is often the way deep down we feel cheated by life, we feel damaged, we harbour some hatred at having been abused at some level. Even if it just a stranger stepping in front of us in a queue without due consideration. We feel aggrieved at life. Such bitterness stored up through life means it is hard to be "big", and hard to be generous. When we "give" we feel we are losing out even more in a world where we already lost. And it is even worse when the people we give to don't seem to appreciate our sacrifice. It just goes further to deepen our sadness and bitterness. Well it's a fact that we do need to think about ourselves. And we do need to take for ourselves. If we keep punishing our self by giving then we are doing to our self what we wouldn't do to someone else. If I always give my biscuits away because I don't like seeing people without a biscuit then I am ensuring there is one person without a biscuit which is myself! The key to generosity is equanimity. If we feel we are losing every time we give, we have no developed equanimity. We still have a small mind that is based upon personal desire. This is not a bad thing, there is truth to the view that each person must look after themselves first. If you are miserable you can be of little help to others. You may wish others to help you in your misery, but they are probably miserable too, and so cannot help you. In a world of small people it is like Hell in the Chinese story above, no one is free to feed another, so we must try and feed our self. It takes a Jesus or Bodhisattva in Buddhism to take the first step of sacrifice. They must forgo feeding them self and risk feeding another. Now that other may not reciprocate and get fact while the Bodhisattva gets thin, and this is the problem of co-operation studied by Axelrod and others (and which I did a final year BSc project on) and which I'll need to return to in my economic models. But the Bodhisattva has one big gain if they do it right, and turn the pain in growth, and that is they begin to develop a larger mind. But warning! care is needed. A small mind, being sacrificed makes a smaller mind. Developing gentle kindness to oneself is the first and most important step to developing it towards others. But this is not selfish desire! This is learning to view your self from the same perspective you will in future view others. It is beginning the step outside oneself, what in Greek is called Ecstasy.
Sadly we understand ecstasy today in terms of selfish desire, when we are indulged and fully fulfilled on sex or drugs, happiness brought on by pleasurable feelings. But in the ecstatic orgy we should be letting go of self control not so much as to indulge our fleeting whims and repressed fantasies but rather to let go of our self as we might in a masked ball, to experience being someone else, to experience being free from the restrictions of our identity. Presumably after Christian repression of pre-Christian ecstatic cults such stuff is now associated with the devil, with human sacrifice and general victimisation and sadism of unfortunate individuals. But utterly ironically the best way to ecstasy is not through superiority and putting up barriers between victim and self, but by the complete opposite of dropping barriers between victim and self. The devil is a deceiver who gets what he wants through trickery. We are in Lent at the moment a good time to discuss this. The devil will offer you the world, and you think your every desire is fulfilled, you believe you have gained. But the Devil never loses and never gives, it is you that is giving. After you have taken the Devil will enslave you like a fish on a hook, like a drug addict seeking their next fix. How ironic that those who seek ecstasy the quick way end up giving far more than those who seek it the slow way. If we reject the devil, and instead seek to gradually remove barriers between ourselves and others, with no obvious gain, taking the pain of loss and generosity very gradually and developing kindness to our self eventually when we are a big person we will benefit from seeing the world from a perspective outside our self. We will be in ecstasy. When we have pain or have desires they will not be centre of the world. We will see them in proper perspective alongside other people from a position of equanimity. "Equanimity" is not some intellectual idea. Through meditation we can experience it directly as a core feature of our minds. Ecstasy is the true nature of our minds. Being magnanimous and generous is the natural state. It is there all the time, but we become small minded and lose sight of it.
So in conclusion. It is not that the traditional view of desire is wrong exactly. As far as I can see now it is not quite like John Locke making the mistake of not distinguishing possession and property. It is that "desire" becomes a problem when we are small minded and we cannot see beyond it. When we are small minded having a desire is an unpleasant experience and it can consume us and take us over. When we have a mind bigger than the desire we have freedom. We can chose. Right now I have a few desires one is to sleep as I am tired, one is to finish some work, one is to go for a walk, I'm not actually hungry which is a rarity, and a desire to finish this! But none are huge, and I can pick them up and put them down and am actually very free. The problem happens with desires bigger than us. They fill us up and we lose perspective. We have no room to move and they take over. The smaller our mind the smaller a desire can do this.
Only when we have a mind bigger than a desire can we experience freedom. And what does this mean? It means that our self is bigger than desire. It means that we are not identical with desire. A human being with a big mind has a relationship with desire very similar in fact to their relationship with things. We can pick things up when we need them, and we can put them down. Likewise we can attend to that desire to go sky diving, or we can focus on the work we have to do. Nothing is so desired that we can't think of anything else. This is equanimity. It also means that when we have a desire and someone else has a desire we can take up a position of freedom between our desire and theirs. Wow think about that! we can occupy a space between our self and another! This is ecstasy. It is the basis of what is cheesily called "goodness." But it is so much deeper and more profound than what is commonly associated with goodness.
So in final conclusion. When we have a desire that is near the size of our mind then it is a relief to get rid of it, because it can totally absorb us. Now this can be a pleasurable experience, because while we are absorbed with a desire we can think of nothing else and this can actually distract us from other sufferings and desires. Perhaps I have a deep desire to be famous and I am still a nobody. However if I develop a big desire to climb Mount Everest this will distract me from my pain at being no-one. Unfortunately there is a test for this: once we have climbed Mount Everest and the desire is satisfied we no longer have the distraction and we must return to the pain of not having achieved fame. I believe this has always troubled me. It is far better to be honest about our desires to some degree and seek to address them directly rather than try to distract from them. Some desires like fame are incredibly hard to achieve and we need a conversation with Simon Cowell to tell us to just forget about it. It is painful, but pain like desire is something that is much easier when we have a big mind. If our mind is too small and the pain too big, then like a huge mouthful it will take a lot of chewing before we can swallow it. This is text book suffering, and it is what having a small mind is like. It also underlines the importance of growing our mind, and developing a perspective that is bigger and beyond our self. But suffering is good, because this is the number one way of growing.
It is so sad to see the news about Keith Flint. He did achieve fame, and was front man to one of the defining music phenomenon of our generation. He did climb Everest. A true legend. Very deeply missed. And he gave so much to so many people. In that sense he was a bodhisattva. A blinding light in the darkness for many who wanted to party hard in the 90s and 00s. Yet after all this he was left profoundly wanting himself, and a desire that ultimately was too great for him that it consumed him. He lost control and unable to meet the demands of that devil he killed himself. His mind was too small for this whatever it was. Johnny Rotten puts it down to loneliness and lack of love. But there are many who are heart broken, and unloved who soldier on through the valley of darkness and loneliness taking each miserable day as it comes, and eking out what meagre joy their life affords them. Perhaps they have hope, or perhaps they are just big enough to just accept it. Life isn't always amazing, sometime life is just rubbish, some times a whole lifetime from birth to death can be horrendous. But it's always life, and within that some days are better than others. And from what I've written in this blog underneath the overloaded small mind, there is the big mind that lies in equanimity to the world sufferings. As discussed in the blog before this does not mean the big mind is dull the world's suffering, it means that it is big enough to see the suffering as it is without feeling overwhelmed. A baby may burst our crying if you take away their ice cream. Their whole world just collapsed. When we are older it still hurts exactly the same, but when we are bigger we can contain that sadness and just see it and let if dissipate without becoming too distressed. Something that starts, will end. This is the basic law of the world (Konadattas insight). Not everyone has teh same desires and emotions. A spider may fill one person with huge fear that they cannot bear it is not because they are small minded but because their fear is very great. Perhaps Keith Flint was not small minded, but the desire he had was too great for him. I don't suppose he ever meditated, or did any mental practice to develop that mind of his. As a result when Mayumi Kai refused to come home, whatever part she played in his mental life, it left him with a mouthful too big to chew. My only advise if I had known him would have been to start chewing on that, whatever it was, a long time before it became unbearable. You "Gotta face your fears in the wild frontier." Just gotta face your desires.
Final conclusion: ecstasy is our true nature. Free from the boundaries of self. This is not self annihilation, it is just stepping outside not always being dragged back inside the selfish perspective by desires and fears we can't manage. The way outside is what is generally called "goodness", but which is essentially trying to occupy the space between our self and others. It can hurt to give and not be recognised or receive in return, it hurts to love and not be loved in return. But when we step outside our self, outside that pain, when we are big enough and big hearted enough, big minded enough (same word in some languages) we can see it for what it is we can get freedom from it. It doesn't go away, we just sit outside it. This is ecstasy, this is true mind and heart. So when we get what we want, the desire goes away, and this returns us to freedom, but with a big heart and mind there is room in us to be free and have the desires, pains and loves all at once.
Just celebrate this post with the latest Carly Rae Jepsen offering. So we find what we want, there's "nothing like this feeling". That feeling is ecstasy it is true peace because for a while we are free, there is room in us for two. But when desires start to develop again that "you" don't satisfy then we fill up and there becomes room for only me again. And if you are Keith Flint there stops being room even for you if the desires are too big. When we are in love, and free and have room for two we must work extra hard to grow and make room for more. I think my mistake is I get lazy and actually my mind shrinks when I'm in love and that means I become even less able to weather hardship. Well done Carly some musical love again.
Now this is the real nature of the problem we face in life. This is not just a economics post, its a religious, ethics, spiritual, psychological, existential, ontological post. "New Economics" must have limits. Perhaps the goal is not unify the whole of spirituality, science, ethics and economics. It is just to define the correct boundaries of economics to avoid people justifying the indefensible with economic theory.
Wednesday, 6 March 2019
The New Economics: Adam Smith and Customer Information
reply to facebook discussion on this:
Its an interesting one that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I believe it is sanctioned by the "invisible hand" argument. As you know in free market: seeking profits leads suppliers to give customers what they want, and customers freely choosing what they want should filter out the rubbish from the market place. Everyone doing what they want should work. But somehow you're right the customer is ignorant. Seeing only the packaged end product they have very limited knowledge. Seems Adam Smith was only looking at "final product." Likewise tobacco business was able to able to hide the impact of smoking for half a century. And the current internet buzz is vaccines - I certainly think the fact they are not tested is a crime already. But I have this argument all the time: we can't expect the customer to be an expert on everything they buy (tho internet is what is making the difference now.) You'd expert the manufacturer to be the expert. So agreed taxation and also liability for exploitative dishonest practices. "Would the customer not have bought the product if they knew" kind of legal question. Like the one in the press now about whether undercover cops having relationships with targets committed rape... if target knew they were investigating them would they have had sex -> if not then rape. Same with products: if the customer had known that the potato was manufactured in a chemical warzone would they have eaten it... wooa legal minefield.
Its an interesting one that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I believe it is sanctioned by the "invisible hand" argument. As you know in free market: seeking profits leads suppliers to give customers what they want, and customers freely choosing what they want should filter out the rubbish from the market place. Everyone doing what they want should work. But somehow you're right the customer is ignorant. Seeing only the packaged end product they have very limited knowledge. Seems Adam Smith was only looking at "final product." Likewise tobacco business was able to able to hide the impact of smoking for half a century. And the current internet buzz is vaccines - I certainly think the fact they are not tested is a crime already. But I have this argument all the time: we can't expect the customer to be an expert on everything they buy (tho internet is what is making the difference now.) You'd expert the manufacturer to be the expert. So agreed taxation and also liability for exploitative dishonest practices. "Would the customer not have bought the product if they knew" kind of legal question. Like the one in the press now about whether undercover cops having relationships with targets committed rape... if target knew they were investigating them would they have had sex -> if not then rape. Same with products: if the customer had known that the potato was manufactured in a chemical warzone would they have eaten it... wooa legal minefield.
Context and Meaning
Always had a bit of a mental block here. But definitely got it now.
Consider the 3 instructions "Go Left", "Go Right", "Go Ahead","Turn Around" codes as "L","R","A","T".
If we are encoding entering a maze we might have a string like this:
"AALARRAALRLLA"
And once we are in this position we would leave again using the string:
"TARRLRAALLARAA"
Turn around, and then mirror your moves: A (180degress) maps to A (180degress) and L(90) -> R(270) and R(270) -> L(90).
And this works for any system isomorphic with the maze. So they don't need to be right angle turns, they could be branches on a tree.
Now what about context? This is a very trivial example but you cannot jumble up those characters. They must be performed exactly in the right sequence. And that means that the first "L" we encounter at move 3 must be preceded by two Aheads to work. If we went Left at the start it is most probable (not impossible) we would not arrive at the same place as if we went "Ahead."
In a crude way then there is a "context" at each point in the maze and the next move "means" a different thing depending upon that history and context.
We are more use to "context" in another sense however which is like Gilbert Ryle's "category Mistake."
"She sat down in a flood of tears"
is the not the same as
"She sad down in the theatre"
While she literally sits down "in" (side) the theatre, she does not sit down "inside" the flood of tears. There is not a flood of tears anywhere to sit down in. The "in" means something else, that she is "in" a state of crying.
There was a movement to link words exactly with meanings. But it was quickly realised that in different sentences words take on different uses and meanings. This is similar to the LRAT characters above. The exact purpose or use of a word like a LRAT only makes sense if you walk the maze and find out where to use it. This is the process of reading or listening. As you read (like even in this blog) you are building up a picture like a maze, so that the next word or sentence has a particular meaning. If I suddenly say that it has started raining here, that means two things now. (1) The literal fact it has started raining, but within the context of this writing (2) it is an illustration of what I am saying that what has been said before influences the mental move we make in the maze. This is actually a very complex position we have arrived at here, since I am illustrating the position we have arrived at in the maze of this blog post but arriving at this position in the blog post! Head ache.
Anyway the question remains that in films like "Inception" or "Primer" or "Matrix" where we have a choice in each scene of whether this is "waking" or a "dream" in the Inception, or the "present" or "past" in the Primer or "reality" or "virtual reality" in the Matrix. Are we to view these binary options on the same level like "Left" "Right" in the maze. Or as we usually like to think "Reality" has a special place and "Dream" is inferior.
The problem with the maze analogy of context is that usually we see one option as right and the other as wrong. If you turn Left instead of Right in the maze you just get to a different place. In Inception if you take the scene to be "waking" when it is actually "dream" you doing more than just missing the context of the film, you are confusing imaginary things with real things that we take very very seriously in reality.
This was madness and psychosis lies however. There are mental states where we are confused over reality, which can be caused by all manner of things, but in powerful cases they are the accumulation of "incorrect" thoughts that ultimately lead not just to confusion but underlying chemical and neuronal "incorrectness." If we keep making the wrong moves in the maze of meaning we will end up far away from every one else, and getting back can be a long and difficult journey.
Now that was supposed to be a short post, but has actually got to a point in my mental maze that has long interested me. Suppose we do end up on a desert island and we follow our own maze for many years without contact with other people. When we do meet other people they are likely to say we are "mad" because we are in such a different place. But does being "mad" just mean we are in a different part of the maze to other people, or like above is it in some way "really" inferior.
To my mind the ultimate test is "harm." We are in the wrong part of the maze if we start to do "harm". "Harm" by definition is undesirable. But it is complex. Some people think that war is desirable, in other words incredible harm can be viewed as beneficial. I think these people have collectively gone into the wrong part of the maze... there are a lot of them. I always argue that a part of the maze A thinks that another part of the maze B should be bombed, the ultimate test is whether A accepts if B bombs them. If Japan had had the atomic bomb would the US have welcomed Japan bombing them? The answer is No under any circumstances. And so it follows that Japan would not have accepted the bomb under any circumstances. It means that dropping the bomb was entirely the choice of America and had no value outside America's part of the maze.
In conclusion the idea that everything is just a part of the maze, and madness is just people looking at each other intolerantly from far across the maze is wrong. The reason is similar to the paradox problems in logic. If we say that everything and every point of view and every lifestyle is just a point in the maze, then where in the maze is that point of view? And if it is just a part of the maze, then other parts of the maze represent not this point of view. In other words once you put this blog entry down and walk away from it into another part of the maze, then you will also lose the maze point of view. Such a point of view means that for almost all contexts this maze analogy is not relevant. It only works when you have walked the particular path written down here.
Once you 100% relativise and bind things into context, you defeat yourself. This is Godel Paradox, Russel Paradox and my SRH. You can't be that self referential.
So the maze is a great analogy but it cannot fit 100%. There is life outside context. And madness is more than just a different type of sanity. we do need look after ourselves, and we do need to learn wise ways to walk the maze as not all places are the same. But this is not to support the dogmatic and the conservative, the laws are subtle and forcing people to stay in "safe" parts of the maze is itself just a point of view.
Consider the 3 instructions "Go Left", "Go Right", "Go Ahead","Turn Around" codes as "L","R","A","T".
If we are encoding entering a maze we might have a string like this:
"AALARRAALRLLA"
And once we are in this position we would leave again using the string:
"TARRLRAALLARAA"
Turn around, and then mirror your moves: A (180degress) maps to A (180degress) and L(90) -> R(270) and R(270) -> L(90).
And this works for any system isomorphic with the maze. So they don't need to be right angle turns, they could be branches on a tree.
Now what about context? This is a very trivial example but you cannot jumble up those characters. They must be performed exactly in the right sequence. And that means that the first "L" we encounter at move 3 must be preceded by two Aheads to work. If we went Left at the start it is most probable (not impossible) we would not arrive at the same place as if we went "Ahead."
In a crude way then there is a "context" at each point in the maze and the next move "means" a different thing depending upon that history and context.
We are more use to "context" in another sense however which is like Gilbert Ryle's "category Mistake."
"She sat down in a flood of tears"
is the not the same as
"She sad down in the theatre"
While she literally sits down "in" (side) the theatre, she does not sit down "inside" the flood of tears. There is not a flood of tears anywhere to sit down in. The "in" means something else, that she is "in" a state of crying.
There was a movement to link words exactly with meanings. But it was quickly realised that in different sentences words take on different uses and meanings. This is similar to the LRAT characters above. The exact purpose or use of a word like a LRAT only makes sense if you walk the maze and find out where to use it. This is the process of reading or listening. As you read (like even in this blog) you are building up a picture like a maze, so that the next word or sentence has a particular meaning. If I suddenly say that it has started raining here, that means two things now. (1) The literal fact it has started raining, but within the context of this writing (2) it is an illustration of what I am saying that what has been said before influences the mental move we make in the maze. This is actually a very complex position we have arrived at here, since I am illustrating the position we have arrived at in the maze of this blog post but arriving at this position in the blog post! Head ache.
Anyway the question remains that in films like "Inception" or "Primer" or "Matrix" where we have a choice in each scene of whether this is "waking" or a "dream" in the Inception, or the "present" or "past" in the Primer or "reality" or "virtual reality" in the Matrix. Are we to view these binary options on the same level like "Left" "Right" in the maze. Or as we usually like to think "Reality" has a special place and "Dream" is inferior.
The problem with the maze analogy of context is that usually we see one option as right and the other as wrong. If you turn Left instead of Right in the maze you just get to a different place. In Inception if you take the scene to be "waking" when it is actually "dream" you doing more than just missing the context of the film, you are confusing imaginary things with real things that we take very very seriously in reality.
This was madness and psychosis lies however. There are mental states where we are confused over reality, which can be caused by all manner of things, but in powerful cases they are the accumulation of "incorrect" thoughts that ultimately lead not just to confusion but underlying chemical and neuronal "incorrectness." If we keep making the wrong moves in the maze of meaning we will end up far away from every one else, and getting back can be a long and difficult journey.
Now that was supposed to be a short post, but has actually got to a point in my mental maze that has long interested me. Suppose we do end up on a desert island and we follow our own maze for many years without contact with other people. When we do meet other people they are likely to say we are "mad" because we are in such a different place. But does being "mad" just mean we are in a different part of the maze to other people, or like above is it in some way "really" inferior.
To my mind the ultimate test is "harm." We are in the wrong part of the maze if we start to do "harm". "Harm" by definition is undesirable. But it is complex. Some people think that war is desirable, in other words incredible harm can be viewed as beneficial. I think these people have collectively gone into the wrong part of the maze... there are a lot of them. I always argue that a part of the maze A thinks that another part of the maze B should be bombed, the ultimate test is whether A accepts if B bombs them. If Japan had had the atomic bomb would the US have welcomed Japan bombing them? The answer is No under any circumstances. And so it follows that Japan would not have accepted the bomb under any circumstances. It means that dropping the bomb was entirely the choice of America and had no value outside America's part of the maze.
In conclusion the idea that everything is just a part of the maze, and madness is just people looking at each other intolerantly from far across the maze is wrong. The reason is similar to the paradox problems in logic. If we say that everything and every point of view and every lifestyle is just a point in the maze, then where in the maze is that point of view? And if it is just a part of the maze, then other parts of the maze represent not this point of view. In other words once you put this blog entry down and walk away from it into another part of the maze, then you will also lose the maze point of view. Such a point of view means that for almost all contexts this maze analogy is not relevant. It only works when you have walked the particular path written down here.
Once you 100% relativise and bind things into context, you defeat yourself. This is Godel Paradox, Russel Paradox and my SRH. You can't be that self referential.
So the maze is a great analogy but it cannot fit 100%. There is life outside context. And madness is more than just a different type of sanity. we do need look after ourselves, and we do need to learn wise ways to walk the maze as not all places are the same. But this is not to support the dogmatic and the conservative, the laws are subtle and forcing people to stay in "safe" parts of the maze is itself just a point of view.
Tuesday, 5 March 2019
The New Economics: Positive Feedback
Shall take a break from this for a while to complete other things and think, but one thing needs to be added.
Capitalism and free markets can lead to extreme, but they aren't supposed to.
Supply/Demand pricing means that as a demand out strips a supply the price rises, and since a market is composed of people with varying wealth this means that few and fewer people can afford the item so demand drops to match supply. Conversely as supply outstrips demand then the price falls which encourages demand.
Perhaps I don't understand my economics properly but desire and demand should be separate as pre- post- pricing factors. We can lower the price of spoiled food as far as we want and people won't buy it, because it will make them ill.
Lets assume there is a bell curve over the social desire. That is most people are roughly the same, and there is Normal distribution of individual desires. This would fit with Darwinian evolution, that to exploit opportunities humans have a range of appetites from which selection can chose.
Then "relative pricing" works over the top of that to create demand. Relative pricing because £1 to someone with £5 I'm hypothesising is the same as £100 to someone with £500. At least that is better than absolute pricing where £1 is the same to everyone. So if no underlying desire then no price will cause any demand. But when there is a social demand then the two factors of distribution of desires, and distribution of wealth will combine to control the demand at each price.
As discussed desires change. So new technology and fashions can exploit previously unwanted resources causing social desire to develop. I didn't mention before and wanted to here: we are used to technology changing every year, and revolutionary changes every lifetime (computers being this lifetime, electricity the previous generation, steam power a few generations ago) but this is a new phenomenon. Palaeolithic stone tools did not change for well over 300,000 years. People made them exactly the same way for a million generations.
This means that desires did not change for a million generations either! I put this down to a very stable culture, there was no need to change, this is something i would incidentally associate with happiness. I personally view the Genesis story of being cast out of the Garden of Eden as the mythical human memory of the loss of this period in time. So social desires can we stable, but modern economics (as discussed as huge length in this blog) because technology and machines produce efficiency requires constant new innovation to create jobs (so people can ask for salaries). And also to create growth so that capitalists have new things to invest in. This is a fundamental problem with the current system, but not the one I wanted to discuss here.
Supply/Demand, as mentioned, should lead to falling demand for rare things. If a rhino horn is worth £10,000 who can buy it. But conversely it means that anyone who can get a rhino horn will be rich. You might think that high prices would stimulate investment in the "industry" and rhino farms would be made to supply horns. But the turn over of horns is very low, there is not the mass social demand available to stimulate mass production, not least because of bans on ivory. But rhinos are also expensive to keep, and you get one horn per rhino which unlike heifers must be grown for many, many years. You cannot milk rhino ivory like you do cows. As a result ivory will always be very expensive and the demand low. It means that "free market" economics cannot help the rhino. At the moment the hope is that conservation and the money from wildlife tourism will maintain their populations. But it only needs one poacher to get through and a rhino is lost, and with such high prices there are many poor people prepared to try anything. Market forces also work against ivory because the scarcer it is the higher the price, so there is a financial incentive to stockpile and actually make the rhino extinct. Then the warehouse of ivory will be priceless! In this way scarcity leads to a positive feedback plunge to the bottom. The rarer things become the higher the price and the incentive to make them even rarer increases. Such is the inhumanity of some markets.
And behind all this is the plight of a living thing with its own desires and wishes to live a happy life. Sadly animals don't get a vote nor do they get to participate in human markets so as to influence market forces. It relies upon humans entirely to think about what they are doing in these markets. This is where Adam Smith is completely wrong. Free-markets only work for agents within the market being selfish, because anything outside the market cannot influence the market. Its a completely anthropocentric economic theory, and one biased even in the human realm to the owners of capital. I wrote a song once while working on the shop floor which began:
Staring down the barrel of my wage
Feeling inside a rage
That the owners get to say what goes
Get to say where the money goes.
As discussed also human desire is not randomly distributed. There are social desires which everyone shares. This may be because of biology and physical nature in that we all desire food of some type, or transport, but also because of trends. When things become "viral" there is a positive feedback. The more popular it is, the more popular it becomes. I mentioned the Huia Bird in the last post. Everything would have been alright except for a sudden fashion for their feathers. As with the rhino huge demand and increasing prices led people to exploit the bird to extinction. I imagine it would have been easy to catch a few and set up Huia farms but it was a fast buck gold rush and no one was thinking ahead. With fashions you need make money fast while the opportunity exists.
Completely unlike the Palaeolithic existence where life and desire was stable, in the excitable unstable world of Western markets fashions can last as little as one season. It is in the interests of producers to keep fashions changing so that people are always throwing things away, and therefore giving money to the producers for new things. It is even illegal in the UK for a listed company not to seek profit. This is how important the interests of investors and capitalists are! Ignore the customer and the employees, it is the investor that matters. All companies are forced to maximise their throughput, and that means getting customers to keep buying somehow. We see this in mobile phones, computers, cars, medicine, even houses these days. No one is supposed to be stationary, and they must keep working and spending to keep the economy spinning. From having the whole population on 5 pills a day, to constantly buying and selling houses, individuals in modern economies are always pursuing a quicksand of changing desires and expectations. And the true cost of course is that the natural world is being chewed up ever faster to keep the throughput of materials through the voracious Western economies just to keep the dividends and rent coming for the capitalists.
It is a problem that is getting worse. "Development", the new word for Colonisation, is the process by which traditional economies are transformed into these fast spinning engines of wealth. The drivers obviously are the same as in the West: the capitalists looking for new investments and returns on their wealth (i.e. opportunities to get richer for free). Everyone in Capitalism knows that for something to work it must be marketed well. "Development" is sold as making the lives of people better. But if it made people's lives better but cost investors it would not happen: investors are the key. But, as well analysed in this blog, does development mean that people have been unhappy for all of human history before the rise of modern economics? Wealth is relative, and the Palaeolithic achieving their meagre stable social desires were as happy as anyone today. Indeed probably happier because they were not always running to catch up with volatile markets and changing social desires. Essentially there were less ways for them to be unfulfilled and so unhappy.
So it is not just the natural world that ends up exploited by modern economics, even the human world has been exploited. These are the vast and fundamental problems that the new economics must solve.
Capitalism and free markets can lead to extreme, but they aren't supposed to.
Supply/Demand pricing means that as a demand out strips a supply the price rises, and since a market is composed of people with varying wealth this means that few and fewer people can afford the item so demand drops to match supply. Conversely as supply outstrips demand then the price falls which encourages demand.
Perhaps I don't understand my economics properly but desire and demand should be separate as pre- post- pricing factors. We can lower the price of spoiled food as far as we want and people won't buy it, because it will make them ill.
Lets assume there is a bell curve over the social desire. That is most people are roughly the same, and there is Normal distribution of individual desires. This would fit with Darwinian evolution, that to exploit opportunities humans have a range of appetites from which selection can chose.
Then "relative pricing" works over the top of that to create demand. Relative pricing because £1 to someone with £5 I'm hypothesising is the same as £100 to someone with £500. At least that is better than absolute pricing where £1 is the same to everyone. So if no underlying desire then no price will cause any demand. But when there is a social demand then the two factors of distribution of desires, and distribution of wealth will combine to control the demand at each price.
As discussed desires change. So new technology and fashions can exploit previously unwanted resources causing social desire to develop. I didn't mention before and wanted to here: we are used to technology changing every year, and revolutionary changes every lifetime (computers being this lifetime, electricity the previous generation, steam power a few generations ago) but this is a new phenomenon. Palaeolithic stone tools did not change for well over 300,000 years. People made them exactly the same way for a million generations.
Supply/Demand, as mentioned, should lead to falling demand for rare things. If a rhino horn is worth £10,000 who can buy it. But conversely it means that anyone who can get a rhino horn will be rich. You might think that high prices would stimulate investment in the "industry" and rhino farms would be made to supply horns. But the turn over of horns is very low, there is not the mass social demand available to stimulate mass production, not least because of bans on ivory. But rhinos are also expensive to keep, and you get one horn per rhino which unlike heifers must be grown for many, many years. You cannot milk rhino ivory like you do cows. As a result ivory will always be very expensive and the demand low. It means that "free market" economics cannot help the rhino. At the moment the hope is that conservation and the money from wildlife tourism will maintain their populations. But it only needs one poacher to get through and a rhino is lost, and with such high prices there are many poor people prepared to try anything. Market forces also work against ivory because the scarcer it is the higher the price, so there is a financial incentive to stockpile and actually make the rhino extinct. Then the warehouse of ivory will be priceless! In this way scarcity leads to a positive feedback plunge to the bottom. The rarer things become the higher the price and the incentive to make them even rarer increases. Such is the inhumanity of some markets.
And behind all this is the plight of a living thing with its own desires and wishes to live a happy life. Sadly animals don't get a vote nor do they get to participate in human markets so as to influence market forces. It relies upon humans entirely to think about what they are doing in these markets. This is where Adam Smith is completely wrong. Free-markets only work for agents within the market being selfish, because anything outside the market cannot influence the market. Its a completely anthropocentric economic theory, and one biased even in the human realm to the owners of capital. I wrote a song once while working on the shop floor which began:
Staring down the barrel of my wage
Feeling inside a rage
That the owners get to say what goes
Get to say where the money goes.
As discussed also human desire is not randomly distributed. There are social desires which everyone shares. This may be because of biology and physical nature in that we all desire food of some type, or transport, but also because of trends. When things become "viral" there is a positive feedback. The more popular it is, the more popular it becomes. I mentioned the Huia Bird in the last post. Everything would have been alright except for a sudden fashion for their feathers. As with the rhino huge demand and increasing prices led people to exploit the bird to extinction. I imagine it would have been easy to catch a few and set up Huia farms but it was a fast buck gold rush and no one was thinking ahead. With fashions you need make money fast while the opportunity exists.
Completely unlike the Palaeolithic existence where life and desire was stable, in the excitable unstable world of Western markets fashions can last as little as one season. It is in the interests of producers to keep fashions changing so that people are always throwing things away, and therefore giving money to the producers for new things. It is even illegal in the UK for a listed company not to seek profit. This is how important the interests of investors and capitalists are! Ignore the customer and the employees, it is the investor that matters. All companies are forced to maximise their throughput, and that means getting customers to keep buying somehow. We see this in mobile phones, computers, cars, medicine, even houses these days. No one is supposed to be stationary, and they must keep working and spending to keep the economy spinning. From having the whole population on 5 pills a day, to constantly buying and selling houses, individuals in modern economies are always pursuing a quicksand of changing desires and expectations. And the true cost of course is that the natural world is being chewed up ever faster to keep the throughput of materials through the voracious Western economies just to keep the dividends and rent coming for the capitalists.
It is a problem that is getting worse. "Development", the new word for Colonisation, is the process by which traditional economies are transformed into these fast spinning engines of wealth. The drivers obviously are the same as in the West: the capitalists looking for new investments and returns on their wealth (i.e. opportunities to get richer for free). Everyone in Capitalism knows that for something to work it must be marketed well. "Development" is sold as making the lives of people better. But if it made people's lives better but cost investors it would not happen: investors are the key. But, as well analysed in this blog, does development mean that people have been unhappy for all of human history before the rise of modern economics? Wealth is relative, and the Palaeolithic achieving their meagre stable social desires were as happy as anyone today. Indeed probably happier because they were not always running to catch up with volatile markets and changing social desires. Essentially there were less ways for them to be unfulfilled and so unhappy.
So it is not just the natural world that ends up exploited by modern economics, even the human world has been exploited. These are the vast and fundamental problems that the new economics must solve.
Monday, 4 March 2019
The New Economics: Social vs Personal Wealth
So the question was:
who is richer: the person who just wants an apple with an apple, or the person who wants an apple and a BMW with both.
The answer is that there are 2 types of wealth at play here:
(1) Personal Wealth is like your favourite music. You may like a song by Ariana Grande.
(2) Social Wealth is like the music that is cool. You may feel more comfortable saying to some people you like Mozart.
The two can often be in conflict. It may be cool to like a certain band. They may be in the media all the time, everyone may be very excited by them, and it may raise your social status to say you like them. However if you actually enjoy listening to another type of music then you have a conflict.
But it is more complex. I'll call this the Magic Lamp. eBay is like a magic lamp in that we can order almost anything. But a true Magic Lamp would mean you can ask for anything even things that you never even heard or thought of before. When the genie gives you a wish you might say I want a sea food pizza. But suppose there was a vegetable called a 'wonnunk' that was more incredible than anything you had ever tasted, yet no one had ever tasted it because it was unknown (anagram!) to everyone. It had no name, and no one knew what it tasted like. How would you ask the Genie of the Lamp for it? Perhaps you would just ask for a vegetable that is more amazing that anything I have ever eaten before. Then you call that a wonnunk. And refer to it like this again. (Altho we are in Perry Paradox territory because after you have tasted it, if you were to ask for a vegetable "more amazing that anything I have ever eaten before" (call that Handle1) the genie couldn't give you a wonnunk cos you have tasted it now. Handle1 is self referential so it is flexible and changes what it refers to each time.) But whichever way we go asking directly or indirectly Magic Lamps depend on our experience, and our experience is both Personal and Social.
Personal and Social Experience
We may have travelled and found a thing we really like in a market abroad. This becomes our new personal favourite thing. Mine is karela. However where I live karela is unknown, and is not something I would serve to my friends as it is quite unlike anything in the West. My society prefers quite bland flavours, while I personally like very distinct and strong flavours. When a dinner party comes if I was to serve karela with no consciousness of my society I would be very unpopular, and would spoil the evening. The same as someone who likes chilli serving lots of chilli, it would make people very uncomfortable and they would actually dislike you for it. This is all social. I'm sure in a society that uses chilli a lot, like Mexico, people would be more tolerant and understanding if you served it at a dinner party.
So our tastes are actually influenced a great deal by what we know and expect. And the types of experiences we have and what we expect are informed a lot by our society.
I would imagine that if there was such a thing as a wonnunk that was unknown to all of human history it would actually not taste very pleasant because it would be a taste quite unknown to us. Now we might develop a taste for it like karela but it would take time. I always feel that bitter beer is like this too. I did not like it when I first tasted it. But because my society likes it, I tried again and again until I developed an expectation and tolerance for it. Now I quite like it.
There are only 5 tastes and the examples I give of karela and bitter beer are both bitter which is famously not as palatable as sweet, salty or MSG. Nevertheless bitterness is crucial to things like chocolate (especially 90% dark) and coffee but it takes some time.
Conclusion
So the length discussion again arrives at a complex picture of how our desires are a mixture of our societies expectations, and how we fit into those. There is a strong social element to our desires. I am likely to like the things that people I respect like. However there is under this personal taste too, which sometimes rejects the expectations of the society. It is funny how coffee has taken the place of tea as the drink of the empire not least because of the Boston Tea party where it became a political statement. I really do prefer tea but is that because I am British?
So when we speak of wealth it does depend very much where we are, it is relative. In Papua New Guinea I would feel very wealthy with a headdress like this:
It would mean I could take part in dance and festival and be a respected even envied person. However in New York I would get odd looks, while a BMW would do the same in New York and be an oddity in Papua New Guinea.
However this is not to say that things are fixed. Things change continuously. I may like karela today, but come back in a year and I do not like it any more.
This is why free markets are so important. Feather headdresses may be very fashionable for a while and anyone with one is very wealthy. But fashions change and the person with a warehouse of headdresses may suddenly find that they are worthless. The value of things ultiately is simply how the society values it.
This also illustrates the unsolved problem of modern economics and the environment. This beautiful bird is a New Zealand Huia and is unfortunately an artists impression because they are now extinct due to feather collecting for hats. All those hats are in the bin now as the fashion has changed, but we are left with the extinction of this species. Markets based just upon the relative and conditional whims of human likes and dislikes are very dangerous.
So within a market model we cannot just have personal desire (as my current models have). We need "fashions" to full reflect the social element of desire. Research suggests we like the music we hear the most often. This is why people from different cultures like different music. Do people like Punk music or Dance music because they like the music or the culture or both? Advertising must works to mould desires else companies would not spend millions on it. Desire it seems is a social thing and yet we don't entirely learn all our desires. Perhaps differences in our individual experiences and genes are enough to account for differences between people (a discussion of individual choice to be had there! how do we chose if what we chose from is based on our experiences - we can be creative in creating desires and change the culture in so doing).
Differences are also at different scales, we can be instrumental in forming a sub-culture which grows in popularity. The sub-culture informs our desires, and we inform it. As it grows uniformity between a growing number of people makes the culture more rigid. Perhaps this is why in the West we eventually break out of mainstream culture because we wish to feel that we are instrumental in the tastes of the culture again, rather than just passive recipients learning what to like and dislike. Which raises the question can we actively develop what we like and dislike?
So Schopenhauer says : "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants." (This is SRH again.) But is this true? I may want to like Ariana Grande so that I can enjoy going to concerts with my friends. But what if I just don't like her music? Or I may want to like the girl I am dating, but what if I now prefer someone else. Or my friends all like meat, but I don't. This is all possible because there is the social side to desire, the need and wish to conform, that is quite separate from the actual experience of likes and dislikes.
On an aside in Buddhism freedom is accepting our circumstances. If we find we have been given tickets to an Ariana Grande concert and we just don't like the music, it's no great struggle to go along and just experience what we experience. Perhaps we might like one song, but even what we hate just experience it peacefully - at least be creative... perhaps its a funny story for your spocial group of classical music fans. Likewise if we don't get tickets to the concert we were really dying to go to, that may feel horrible but we sit with it and just experience that too. Like and Dislike are not the only things in the world, and getting what we want isn't that important. Even the best economics cannot give everyone what they want all the time. Accepting that fact is actually even more valuable than having a good economic system!
So how do I conclude this long blog entry? Individual desires are currently modelled in my models by random real numbers. But in fact what we desire is almost learned from the market itself. A new product turning up may take a long time to becomes popular, or maybe not at all.
So we should have a "social desire" for each product, and then define individual desires as relative to this. Individual variation is built upon the social movements. Current mdoesl are effectively saying that "social desire" is just an epiphenomenon of individual desires. But Papua New Guinea tribes people all wanting feather head dresses and the people of Indonesia mostly liking Gamelan music is not a coincidence. Being brought up in a society gives us the basis from which we have individual variation.
We also need to allow for desires to change. But perhaps ignore this as we're supposed to be testing which is the best economy.
It means then that satisfaction can still be measured on an individual basis, but that the social element is built into our "desire profiles."
Not entirely happy with that. Perhaps "Satisfaction" should explicitly include two components. The personal and the social. So that wanting things that are not wanted by the society has a social cost on satisfaction.
Now this is all mirrored by the economy. Because wanting rare things is difficult. No one is making them and they are expensive. As a result we make compromises and buy less ideal more popular things at lower prices. The result however is similar to the existing models: we expect to get some level of satisfaction for a unit of money. We make choices so as to maximise the satisfaction that each unit of money gives. I can see this in myself, if I have a long run of very satisfying cheap purchases then my expectations of the £1 are high, and I see something less satisfying for a £1 as not worth it. In my own case because I get a lot of satisfaction from walking, thinking and other free things £1 must do a lot to be worth it. However if I have an expensive night, and have been buying £5 drinks all night, then I will buy a £1 packet of rubbish crisps and not feel ripped off. Expected satisfaction levels per unit of currency are relative to our history. Note the current model equates satisfaction and currency.
Current model also does not allow for substitution. Every entity is different, and we have random desire of it. In reality if we can't afford a BMW we can buy a Vauxhall. An interesting example because actually they do almost the same thing. A bit of acceleration and upholstery is not worth the extra £30k alone. The £30k comes from social satisfaction. BMW advertising has made the car socially desirable, and we buy BMW not because we particularly want it, but because society wants it and then as a result we want it.
This is getting complex, and I have run out of time and energy to continue this. But in conclusion it is interesting how our desires are not very much ours and belong to our society. Markets may make wanting rare things hard, so we are more likely to go for more common cheaper things. But there is a parallel system where our desires themselves are built from social norms, and being part of a social group and proving that by what we want is part of desire itself. We are very likely to share our parents tastes.
Now just to raise one question. Is social membership itself a desire. In which case we make compromise over what we want like say Ariana Grande in order to "belong". Or is desire itself socially constructed? Lots to think about after this post.
who is richer: the person who just wants an apple with an apple, or the person who wants an apple and a BMW with both.
The answer is that there are 2 types of wealth at play here:
(1) Personal Wealth is like your favourite music. You may like a song by Ariana Grande.
(2) Social Wealth is like the music that is cool. You may feel more comfortable saying to some people you like Mozart.
The two can often be in conflict. It may be cool to like a certain band. They may be in the media all the time, everyone may be very excited by them, and it may raise your social status to say you like them. However if you actually enjoy listening to another type of music then you have a conflict.
But it is more complex. I'll call this the Magic Lamp. eBay is like a magic lamp in that we can order almost anything. But a true Magic Lamp would mean you can ask for anything even things that you never even heard or thought of before. When the genie gives you a wish you might say I want a sea food pizza. But suppose there was a vegetable called a 'wonnunk' that was more incredible than anything you had ever tasted, yet no one had ever tasted it because it was unknown (anagram!) to everyone. It had no name, and no one knew what it tasted like. How would you ask the Genie of the Lamp for it? Perhaps you would just ask for a vegetable that is more amazing that anything I have ever eaten before. Then you call that a wonnunk. And refer to it like this again. (Altho we are in Perry Paradox territory because after you have tasted it, if you were to ask for a vegetable "more amazing that anything I have ever eaten before" (call that Handle1) the genie couldn't give you a wonnunk cos you have tasted it now. Handle1 is self referential so it is flexible and changes what it refers to each time.) But whichever way we go asking directly or indirectly Magic Lamps depend on our experience, and our experience is both Personal and Social.
Personal and Social Experience
We may have travelled and found a thing we really like in a market abroad. This becomes our new personal favourite thing. Mine is karela. However where I live karela is unknown, and is not something I would serve to my friends as it is quite unlike anything in the West. My society prefers quite bland flavours, while I personally like very distinct and strong flavours. When a dinner party comes if I was to serve karela with no consciousness of my society I would be very unpopular, and would spoil the evening. The same as someone who likes chilli serving lots of chilli, it would make people very uncomfortable and they would actually dislike you for it. This is all social. I'm sure in a society that uses chilli a lot, like Mexico, people would be more tolerant and understanding if you served it at a dinner party.
So our tastes are actually influenced a great deal by what we know and expect. And the types of experiences we have and what we expect are informed a lot by our society.
I would imagine that if there was such a thing as a wonnunk that was unknown to all of human history it would actually not taste very pleasant because it would be a taste quite unknown to us. Now we might develop a taste for it like karela but it would take time. I always feel that bitter beer is like this too. I did not like it when I first tasted it. But because my society likes it, I tried again and again until I developed an expectation and tolerance for it. Now I quite like it.
There are only 5 tastes and the examples I give of karela and bitter beer are both bitter which is famously not as palatable as sweet, salty or MSG. Nevertheless bitterness is crucial to things like chocolate (especially 90% dark) and coffee but it takes some time.
Conclusion
So the length discussion again arrives at a complex picture of how our desires are a mixture of our societies expectations, and how we fit into those. There is a strong social element to our desires. I am likely to like the things that people I respect like. However there is under this personal taste too, which sometimes rejects the expectations of the society. It is funny how coffee has taken the place of tea as the drink of the empire not least because of the Boston Tea party where it became a political statement. I really do prefer tea but is that because I am British?
So when we speak of wealth it does depend very much where we are, it is relative. In Papua New Guinea I would feel very wealthy with a headdress like this:
However this is not to say that things are fixed. Things change continuously. I may like karela today, but come back in a year and I do not like it any more.
This is why free markets are so important. Feather headdresses may be very fashionable for a while and anyone with one is very wealthy. But fashions change and the person with a warehouse of headdresses may suddenly find that they are worthless. The value of things ultiately is simply how the society values it.
This also illustrates the unsolved problem of modern economics and the environment. This beautiful bird is a New Zealand Huia and is unfortunately an artists impression because they are now extinct due to feather collecting for hats. All those hats are in the bin now as the fashion has changed, but we are left with the extinction of this species. Markets based just upon the relative and conditional whims of human likes and dislikes are very dangerous.
So within a market model we cannot just have personal desire (as my current models have). We need "fashions" to full reflect the social element of desire. Research suggests we like the music we hear the most often. This is why people from different cultures like different music. Do people like Punk music or Dance music because they like the music or the culture or both? Advertising must works to mould desires else companies would not spend millions on it. Desire it seems is a social thing and yet we don't entirely learn all our desires. Perhaps differences in our individual experiences and genes are enough to account for differences between people (a discussion of individual choice to be had there! how do we chose if what we chose from is based on our experiences - we can be creative in creating desires and change the culture in so doing).
Differences are also at different scales, we can be instrumental in forming a sub-culture which grows in popularity. The sub-culture informs our desires, and we inform it. As it grows uniformity between a growing number of people makes the culture more rigid. Perhaps this is why in the West we eventually break out of mainstream culture because we wish to feel that we are instrumental in the tastes of the culture again, rather than just passive recipients learning what to like and dislike. Which raises the question can we actively develop what we like and dislike?
So Schopenhauer says : "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants." (This is SRH again.) But is this true? I may want to like Ariana Grande so that I can enjoy going to concerts with my friends. But what if I just don't like her music? Or I may want to like the girl I am dating, but what if I now prefer someone else. Or my friends all like meat, but I don't. This is all possible because there is the social side to desire, the need and wish to conform, that is quite separate from the actual experience of likes and dislikes.
On an aside in Buddhism freedom is accepting our circumstances. If we find we have been given tickets to an Ariana Grande concert and we just don't like the music, it's no great struggle to go along and just experience what we experience. Perhaps we might like one song, but even what we hate just experience it peacefully - at least be creative... perhaps its a funny story for your spocial group of classical music fans. Likewise if we don't get tickets to the concert we were really dying to go to, that may feel horrible but we sit with it and just experience that too. Like and Dislike are not the only things in the world, and getting what we want isn't that important. Even the best economics cannot give everyone what they want all the time. Accepting that fact is actually even more valuable than having a good economic system!
So how do I conclude this long blog entry? Individual desires are currently modelled in my models by random real numbers. But in fact what we desire is almost learned from the market itself. A new product turning up may take a long time to becomes popular, or maybe not at all.
So we should have a "social desire" for each product, and then define individual desires as relative to this. Individual variation is built upon the social movements. Current mdoesl are effectively saying that "social desire" is just an epiphenomenon of individual desires. But Papua New Guinea tribes people all wanting feather head dresses and the people of Indonesia mostly liking Gamelan music is not a coincidence. Being brought up in a society gives us the basis from which we have individual variation.
We also need to allow for desires to change. But perhaps ignore this as we're supposed to be testing which is the best economy.
It means then that satisfaction can still be measured on an individual basis, but that the social element is built into our "desire profiles."
Not entirely happy with that. Perhaps "Satisfaction" should explicitly include two components. The personal and the social. So that wanting things that are not wanted by the society has a social cost on satisfaction.
Now this is all mirrored by the economy. Because wanting rare things is difficult. No one is making them and they are expensive. As a result we make compromises and buy less ideal more popular things at lower prices. The result however is similar to the existing models: we expect to get some level of satisfaction for a unit of money. We make choices so as to maximise the satisfaction that each unit of money gives. I can see this in myself, if I have a long run of very satisfying cheap purchases then my expectations of the £1 are high, and I see something less satisfying for a £1 as not worth it. In my own case because I get a lot of satisfaction from walking, thinking and other free things £1 must do a lot to be worth it. However if I have an expensive night, and have been buying £5 drinks all night, then I will buy a £1 packet of rubbish crisps and not feel ripped off. Expected satisfaction levels per unit of currency are relative to our history. Note the current model equates satisfaction and currency.
Current model also does not allow for substitution. Every entity is different, and we have random desire of it. In reality if we can't afford a BMW we can buy a Vauxhall. An interesting example because actually they do almost the same thing. A bit of acceleration and upholstery is not worth the extra £30k alone. The £30k comes from social satisfaction. BMW advertising has made the car socially desirable, and we buy BMW not because we particularly want it, but because society wants it and then as a result we want it.
This is getting complex, and I have run out of time and energy to continue this. But in conclusion it is interesting how our desires are not very much ours and belong to our society. Markets may make wanting rare things hard, so we are more likely to go for more common cheaper things. But there is a parallel system where our desires themselves are built from social norms, and being part of a social group and proving that by what we want is part of desire itself. We are very likely to share our parents tastes.
Now just to raise one question. Is social membership itself a desire. In which case we make compromise over what we want like say Ariana Grande in order to "belong". Or is desire itself socially constructed? Lots to think about after this post.
How Fast is C# versus C benchmark maths
Walked the usual territory regarding my economic models. Making them bigger makes them very slow, could I speed them up writing them in C rather than C#. Have been here many times.
Long story short the most important speed up lies in the code algorithm efficiency itself.
An example with genetic algorithm some years ago. Tried C, tried a faster computer. But the 10x speed up came with how I added errors. Initially I was literally copying the DNA bit by bit and deciding whether to mutate it on each copy. Obviously very time consuming. "memcpy" followed by using Exponential Distribution to decide the gaps between the mutations and flipping just a handful of bits made this bottleneck trivial time wise.
Bottlenecks obey Pareto's Law or 80/20. Computer spends 80% of its time running through 20% of code.Write first, discover that 20% and optimise that. This is the best approach.
Anyway redid my usual Mandelbrot calculation to confirm this. Obviously this only tests basic ALU maths operations. But illustrative of which bits really benefit from moving to C.
The Function:
void Mandelbrot(int xn, int yn, double x0, double y0, double xi, double yi, int* r)
{
double xp = x0, yp;
for (int x = 0; x < xn; x++)
{
yp = y0;
for (int y = 0; y < yn; y++)
{
int c = 0;
double a = xp, b = yp, b1 = 0;
while (c++ < 16384 && a * a + b * b < 4)
{
b1 = 2 * a * b + yp;
a = a * a - b * b + xp;
b = b1;
}
r[x * yn + y] = c;
yp += yi;
}
xp += xi;
}
}
C and C# are identical except that 'r' is passed 'ref r'.
C# unsafe DLL
Long story short the most important speed up lies in the code algorithm efficiency itself.
An example with genetic algorithm some years ago. Tried C, tried a faster computer. But the 10x speed up came with how I added errors. Initially I was literally copying the DNA bit by bit and deciding whether to mutate it on each copy. Obviously very time consuming. "memcpy" followed by using Exponential Distribution to decide the gaps between the mutations and flipping just a handful of bits made this bottleneck trivial time wise.
Bottlenecks obey Pareto's Law or 80/20. Computer spends 80% of its time running through 20% of code.Write first, discover that 20% and optimise that. This is the best approach.
Anyway redid my usual Mandelbrot calculation to confirm this. Obviously this only tests basic ALU maths operations. But illustrative of which bits really benefit from moving to C.
The Function:
void Mandelbrot(int xn, int yn, double x0, double y0, double xi, double yi, int* r)
{
double xp = x0, yp;
for (int x = 0; x < xn; x++)
{
yp = y0;
for (int y = 0; y < yn; y++)
{
int c = 0;
double a = xp, b = yp, b1 = 0;
while (c++ < 16384 && a * a + b * b < 4)
{
b1 = 2 * a * b + yp;
a = a * a - b * b + xp;
b = b1;
}
r[x * yn + y] = c;
yp += yi;
}
xp += xi;
}
}
C and C# are identical except that 'r' is passed 'ref r'.
The call in C, C#, and I called via a DLL to compare also:
C#
int[] r = new int[SIZE * SIZE];
Mandel(SIZE, SIZE, -1, -1, 2.0d / SIZE, 2.0d / SIZE, ref r);
C# unsafe DLL
[DllImport("mandelbrot.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
unsafe public static extern void Mandelbrot(int xn, int yn, double x0, double y0, double xi, double yi, int* r);
unsafe
{
int arraysize = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(int)) * SIZE * SIZE;
int* r1 = (int*)Marshal.AllocHGlobal(arraysize).ToPointer();
Mandelbrot(SIZE, SIZE, -1, -1, 2.0d / SIZE, 2.0d / SIZE, r1);
}
C
int* r = (int*)calloc(SIZE * SIZE, sizeof(int));
Mandelbrot(SIZE, SIZE, -1, -1, 2.0 / SIZE, 2.0 / SIZE, r);
Compiled with Visual Studio Community 2018. C compiled with Microsoft C++ compiler to release x64 with -O2 optimisation.
Executed on i5-3340M @ 2.70GHz with 6.00GB RAM
The results with SIZE = 2000 (that is r[4000000] i.e. 4e6 points from the set):
C# 98.5secs
C# DLL 94.6secs
C 94.8secs
Amazingly C# was only 4% slower!!! Lesson learned that with mathematics at least C# and C compilers and executables can't do much different.
ToDo: I should just check that because I'm not using the result the compilers might have cut corners. But they must have done the calculation else why did it take 1.5 minutes.
ToDo: I should just check that because I'm not using the result the compilers might have cut corners. But they must have done the calculation else why did it take 1.5 minutes.
Saturday, 2 March 2019
Anti-Semitism, Prosemitism and Judeophobia
Anti-semitism is still plaguing the UK political landscape. Indeed the plight of the Jews is a story that has dominated the interests of the Western hemisphere for well over a century. As I've expressed before I'm uncomfortable about people being referred to by their race. As Jordon Peterson (the youtube expert du jour) expertly expresses at the start of this video, problems occur when you promote people's group identity above their individual identity. People are individuals first, and their characteristics come second. Deep stuff here which I won't discuss, but said a lot in the blog already.
The mistake a racist makes is to have some view of a race, and then to judge everyone who belongs to that race by their prejudice. Obviously we treat people in reality on a person by person basis. People have freedom, we have choice, we have rights, we have individuality. I may be a Jew but I am to be judged as myself firstly. Indeed an individual may completely reject their Jewishness. My parents may be Jewish, doesn't mean I have to pay any attention to them. My parents may be black, but I can live my whole life without ever even noticing. Unlikely in the racially mixed West, but more likely in a place where everyone is the same colour. This is not to say we totally ignore our characteristics. If I have no legs then I will move around in a certain way and I won't be taking part in running races. This way of moving will be different from people with two legs. But my way is good for me, and that is all that matters. I may be grouped as a disabled, but this is only relative to people with two legs. It is not a grouping that effects me as an individual. I am what I am to copy Kei$ha.
Jordan Peterson is identifying the problem of identifying people by their grouping. An easy trap to fall into in organisations. If we are planning access to a venue in a city it would be useful to define categories of people. Those who are able to use stairs, those who needs ramps, those who need something else. Grouping makes this easy to manage, and when people arrive they conform to a group by using the access designed for that group. They might fill out a form asking them to tick which type of mobility they have. Now suppose that queues form. People belonging to the rarest mobility type may find it easier to gain access to the venue, and this may lead to people queuing for more common types of access to claim discrimination and preferential maltreatment of their type. To complete.
Yet in the West while we talk about individual freedom, responsibility and liberty there is also a lot of talk about "Jews." And the problem appears to be that there are people in the West who dislike Jews. Most famously it was the Nazis. Dislike of Jews has a name, it is called antisemitism. And anyone with a prejudice against Jews is called an antisemite. So an antisemite might say "I don't like him because he is a Jew." Now it is fine for the antisemite to not like him, but the problem is he doesn't like him because he is a Jew. Exactly as said above the antisemite is judging him not as a person, but as the member of a group. With this type of thinking you can have people being put in prison or worse just because they are members of a group without ever having committed any crime themselves. That is why it is so dangerous.
But look. You have people being given nationality of Israel just because they are Jews. This is exactly the same mistake that the antisemite makes. We might call this prosemitic thinking and it is equally dangerous because it might mean people don't get put in prison because they are Jews, or people being put in prison because they are Non-Jews (gentiles).
You can also have people being protected just because they are Jews. When the political world seeks to crush antisemitism it is actually standing up for the victims of antisemitism based on their race alone. It is giving preferential support to a particular race. This means that the establishment is doing more for race crime against Jews than it is other groups. Again this is the danger of such thinking.
Another problem is that in the particular case of antisemitism there is a confusion over whether antisemitism is a race or a religious hate crime. In the most recent UK statistics hate crime against Jews is actually classed as a religious hate crime. Such hate crimes make up only 10% of race and religious hate crimes. So naturally classing antisemitism as such means it is hugely over represented making up over 50% of all religious hate crimes. Yet hate crimes against Islam are called Islamophobia suggesting that hate against Jews is really Judeophobia. The name antisemitism based upon Semite suggest otherwise that hate crime against Jews is really a race crime and should be classified along with White, Black, Asian etc race crimes. An obvious problem here is that really Jews and Palestinians for example are both Semitic (along with lots of other tribes) so hate crimes against both groups would be classified together. Never-the-less if we move Jewish religious hate crime into race crime we get the following picture:
So we can see the problem with the political hard line against antisemitism. It is not that antisemitism shouldn't be stamped out. It is that there is a lot of racism that needs to be stamped out. In particular lots of minority races appear to be experiencing racism even more than Jews. An individual Jew in the UK will report a race crime every 391 years, while other minorities every 318 years. I imagine the Gypsies are included in this. Importantly they are equal victims of the Holocaust alongside Jews, and yet the high profile focus on Jewish protection has rather pushed them to the side lines, in fact has rather discriminated against them. This in fact is racism.
Also important is the huge amount of race crime directed at White people. For every 10 race crimes reported by White people Jews will report 14. This is not to say that this is not terrible, but it illustrates that race hate happens to literally everyone not just Jews and the focus on antisemitism is discriminatory itself.
The problem for the state is not to stamp out antisemitism. It is to stamp out racism.
But there are other problems. The Labour party in the UK is clearly being specifically targeted as antisemitic. We know reports have identified the Tory party as even more racist that the Labour party. Racism is not something only the Labour is involved with. It seems the call to stamp out racism within the Labour party and not to to stamp out racism in the Tory party is highly suspicious. It is also known that IHRA has asked British political parties to ratify a new definition of Antisemitism that includes criticism of the nation of Israel. There is nothing good to say about this.
What is needed is a return to the very serious issue of anti-racism, and for groups using racism as a cynical political device to be named and shamed. British politics also needs more transparency and politicians being afraid to speak out for fear of a lynching by the media and pressure groups to be made a hate crime in itself. If the Labour party does not want to adopt the proposals of the IHRA they should be able to open up public debate on the subject and not live in fear. Using the memory of the Holocaust to drive a political agenda is also hugely offensive to the people who died in the Holocaust who would like their names remembered for the suffering and injustice they experienced. What happened can never be changed and the IHRA should remember that themselves. Driving a political agenda today is for the living not the dead and nothing to do with Holocaust remembrance. Holocaust remembrance is also nothing to do with race. It is a human tragedy that involved millions of people of many identities. Some were gay germans, some gay jews, some russain jews, some gay russians, some gypsies, some disabled germans, some gay disabled russians, some women, some men. There was no single identity amongst Holocaust victims, and no racial unity. It was a crime against Humanity and not something to be exploited by a particular interest group. As Jordan Peterson reminds us we should think of the individuals first before applying any group identity.
The mistake a racist makes is to have some view of a race, and then to judge everyone who belongs to that race by their prejudice. Obviously we treat people in reality on a person by person basis. People have freedom, we have choice, we have rights, we have individuality. I may be a Jew but I am to be judged as myself firstly. Indeed an individual may completely reject their Jewishness. My parents may be Jewish, doesn't mean I have to pay any attention to them. My parents may be black, but I can live my whole life without ever even noticing. Unlikely in the racially mixed West, but more likely in a place where everyone is the same colour. This is not to say we totally ignore our characteristics. If I have no legs then I will move around in a certain way and I won't be taking part in running races. This way of moving will be different from people with two legs. But my way is good for me, and that is all that matters. I may be grouped as a disabled, but this is only relative to people with two legs. It is not a grouping that effects me as an individual. I am what I am to copy Kei$ha.
Yet in the West while we talk about individual freedom, responsibility and liberty there is also a lot of talk about "Jews." And the problem appears to be that there are people in the West who dislike Jews. Most famously it was the Nazis. Dislike of Jews has a name, it is called antisemitism. And anyone with a prejudice against Jews is called an antisemite. So an antisemite might say "I don't like him because he is a Jew." Now it is fine for the antisemite to not like him, but the problem is he doesn't like him because he is a Jew. Exactly as said above the antisemite is judging him not as a person, but as the member of a group. With this type of thinking you can have people being put in prison or worse just because they are members of a group without ever having committed any crime themselves. That is why it is so dangerous.
But look. You have people being given nationality of Israel just because they are Jews. This is exactly the same mistake that the antisemite makes. We might call this prosemitic thinking and it is equally dangerous because it might mean people don't get put in prison because they are Jews, or people being put in prison because they are Non-Jews (gentiles).
You can also have people being protected just because they are Jews. When the political world seeks to crush antisemitism it is actually standing up for the victims of antisemitism based on their race alone. It is giving preferential support to a particular race. This means that the establishment is doing more for race crime against Jews than it is other groups. Again this is the danger of such thinking.
Another problem is that in the particular case of antisemitism there is a confusion over whether antisemitism is a race or a religious hate crime. In the most recent UK statistics hate crime against Jews is actually classed as a religious hate crime. Such hate crimes make up only 10% of race and religious hate crimes. So naturally classing antisemitism as such means it is hugely over represented making up over 50% of all religious hate crimes. Yet hate crimes against Islam are called Islamophobia suggesting that hate against Jews is really Judeophobia. The name antisemitism based upon Semite suggest otherwise that hate crime against Jews is really a race crime and should be classified along with White, Black, Asian etc race crimes. An obvious problem here is that really Jews and Palestinians for example are both Semitic (along with lots of other tribes) so hate crimes against both groups would be classified together. Never-the-less if we move Jewish religious hate crime into race crime we get the following picture:
| Race | Reported Crimes | Population | Years an individual must wait to
experience a race hate crime
|
| Mixed | 1109 | 1224400 | 1103 |
| Asian | 5759 | 4213531 | 732 |
| Black | 2896 | 1864890 | 643 |
| White | 94643 | 48209395 | 509 |
| Jewish | 672 | 263346 | 391 |
| Other | 219 | 69750 | 318 |
So we can see the problem with the political hard line against antisemitism. It is not that antisemitism shouldn't be stamped out. It is that there is a lot of racism that needs to be stamped out. In particular lots of minority races appear to be experiencing racism even more than Jews. An individual Jew in the UK will report a race crime every 391 years, while other minorities every 318 years. I imagine the Gypsies are included in this. Importantly they are equal victims of the Holocaust alongside Jews, and yet the high profile focus on Jewish protection has rather pushed them to the side lines, in fact has rather discriminated against them. This in fact is racism.
Also important is the huge amount of race crime directed at White people. For every 10 race crimes reported by White people Jews will report 14. This is not to say that this is not terrible, but it illustrates that race hate happens to literally everyone not just Jews and the focus on antisemitism is discriminatory itself.
The problem for the state is not to stamp out antisemitism. It is to stamp out racism.
But there are other problems. The Labour party in the UK is clearly being specifically targeted as antisemitic. We know reports have identified the Tory party as even more racist that the Labour party. Racism is not something only the Labour is involved with. It seems the call to stamp out racism within the Labour party and not to to stamp out racism in the Tory party is highly suspicious. It is also known that IHRA has asked British political parties to ratify a new definition of Antisemitism that includes criticism of the nation of Israel. There is nothing good to say about this.
- British politics is democratic and pressure groups cannot bully political parties into adopting policy.
- To make criticism of Israel a race crime, would entitle every country to do the same, and worse to define their national identity racially. If we accept this there is no reason that England could not become a White Nation. Criticism of English politics would then be a race crime against the White Race.
- This type of political behaviour only conforms to the stereotype of a Jewish Lobby which confirms the prejudices of racists and does nothing to stop racism. A non-race based approach to anti-racism (that is an approach that is not itself racist) is the only way that all races will accept.
What is needed is a return to the very serious issue of anti-racism, and for groups using racism as a cynical political device to be named and shamed. British politics also needs more transparency and politicians being afraid to speak out for fear of a lynching by the media and pressure groups to be made a hate crime in itself. If the Labour party does not want to adopt the proposals of the IHRA they should be able to open up public debate on the subject and not live in fear. Using the memory of the Holocaust to drive a political agenda is also hugely offensive to the people who died in the Holocaust who would like their names remembered for the suffering and injustice they experienced. What happened can never be changed and the IHRA should remember that themselves. Driving a political agenda today is for the living not the dead and nothing to do with Holocaust remembrance. Holocaust remembrance is also nothing to do with race. It is a human tragedy that involved millions of people of many identities. Some were gay germans, some gay jews, some russain jews, some gay russians, some gypsies, some disabled germans, some gay disabled russians, some women, some men. There was no single identity amongst Holocaust victims, and no racial unity. It was a crime against Humanity and not something to be exploited by a particular interest group. As Jordan Peterson reminds us we should think of the individuals first before applying any group identity.
The New Economics: puzzle
So the new analysis of wealth has got stuck on an old question.
Let us define wealth as getting what you want. People feel poor when they can't get things they want, and rich people enjoy getting what they want.
But people have different wants. Some people want easy to get things like watching a sun rise, and some people want very hard to get things like a BMW.
Given two people who have everything they want then who is the more wealthy? The one with many things like the BMW and the house overlooking San Francisco Bay or the one who only wanted an apple.
To my mind at least the one with the apple is the more wealthy. The problem with the one with many things is that there is a lot that can go wrong. The car may break down, the house may get burgled. So there is an anxiety with having many things.
When we don't want things they become neutral. This doesn't mean we don't notice them. We can walk through a forest and not want to take any of the trees with us because they are neutral. But it doesn't mean that we don't have an experience. The forest will be owned by someone, and it doesn't have to be ours to have that experience. Some will say that we "own" our experience. But that experience is gone very quickly so what is there to own. We are however left with lasting memories, and perhaps photos and selfies etc. We can say we own these. But if someone sold their memories would we buy them? The value of memories is that we had the experience. The memories (as memories) are of little value without the original experience. And we can't own that experience.
What in fact happens here is very critical. If we like an experience, we often want to own it. Like going to a concert to see our favourite singer. Sadly the experience is quite short perhaps only a hour. When the experience is gone, we want to own it somehow. We have pictures, we buy the album if we didn't already do to at least re-experience the songs, we buy merchandise, we speak to other fans to share our memories and try and relive it. But the truth that we do need to sit down and accept is that it is gone. We have had that experience and it is gone. The fact we are sad, is actually a good thing, because it means that for that short 1 hour we were doing something we really liked. The sadder we are, the more it meant. But the only way to deal with this is just to feel that sadness. It is part of the ups and downs of life. If that sadness if unbearable what we are discovering is that we need to pay more attention to our life. It means that we do not like our life, we do not like our ordinary experiences and we want to run away into happy experiences like seeing our singer. Running away from what we are never works. At some stage we simply have to just sit down and start to take in the pain and unhappiness. In small amounts like letting water out of a drinking fountain. At first it may seem still full of unhappiness. But eventually letting little bits out we will empty all the feeling we don't like and find it easier just to feel what we feel. The point here about experience is that it cannot be owned. The truly happy people allow experiences to come and go in real time, both good and bad. When nice feelings end they don't go searching for them again (too much), and when bad feelings start they don't go running away (too much). They have some equanimity. This is the key to true happiness.
But memories can be like virtual reality and we like to experience them again. In Wordsworth's poem "I wandered lonely as a cloud" he ends:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Here he is reliving his memories. He is not trying to go back to the say when he first saw them, that is gone, but he is able to re-experience that afresh through his memories. It doesn't have to be his memory. If he could buy that memory off someone then it would be just as good. This is pure aesthetisism.
So the person with the apple has no anxieties unlike the person with many things to worry about. But the person with many things has an extra thing that the person with the apple doesn't have and that is status. Living in the San Francisco Bay area means that they get respect from lots of people. People who cannot afford to live in this area may well want to do so, and those that can find that they are separated from the poorer people. Whether or not the rich people get what they want stops being the point, being distinct from poor people becomes a thing in itself. Now as discussed the person who only wants an apple will not live in the San Francisco Bay area, but the person who wants a BMW is much more likely to do so. Status separates people based upon only the physical material view of wealth, but as discussed if you need lots of things to be satisfied you may well be less satisfied than the person who is happy with just an apple.
If you go the San Francisco Bay you probably won't find people any more happy than anywhere else. But the opposite is not true. Being excluded by the rich and being viewed as low status is damaging on wealth and health. The person who is happy with only the apple, but also be happy with being low status (or at least low status defined by the people living in San Francisco Bay). Human and Animal societies have pecking orders and even if materially you are satisfied, you have the problem of surviving the status system. Everyone in the West is actually wealthy. No one in the West has any material reason not to be satisfied. Even the homeless person has every opportunity to get off the streets, and they have food charities around every corner. Unhappiness and dissatisfaction in the West is entirely generated by the status system. The UK has the most extreme status system in the West possibly with the exception of India (which the UK ruled for several centuries so is that a coincidence?). US also has some of the worst inequality in the world. The materially poor in both places, despite probably being materially satisfied are made to feel unworthy and poor. Discussed a lot in the blog that wealth is actually relative and this is why.
So the person with many things, at least within the society, will be better off not because they have many things, but because society will attribute them a higher status. Having the correct accent when speaking, having manners, a good family name, being the right race are some of the other things that affect one's status. This type of "wealth" is what makes life easy for upper class people, and harder for lower class people. The BMW then is not about the car itself but about the status.
In UK its more complex. The aristocracy will look down their noses at the BMW. That my great grandmother would have said was "vulgar." Any criminal or lottery winner can buy or steal a BMW. That possession means nothing in true upper class circles. Class is defined by your deference to the status system. You respect those above you, and you behave in a self controlled and knowing way. Nothing worse than embarrassing the upper classes by doing or saying the wrong thing. It is a game that knits actually respectful and desirable characteristics into a formal system that protects the aristocracy. My mother says of the UK gentry she knew how courteous and respectful they were to everyone regardless of class. But they would never allow people to transcend class and they would never step down in class.
Animals are already adapted to their environment and know how to survive. Humans didn't add anything to this. What humans did was take basic material needs and turn them into a complex social class system. With the upper classes controlling the resources of the poor classes. When we talk about wealth in human circles we are talking about the system of control and status. Not the material value, but purely the social value of things. Humans know how to live the idea of a 3rd world is fake. People are in poverty because social structures have restricted their access to land and resources. Rich elites in 3rd world countries control the movement of resources and that is what causes poverty. Those rich elites include the Western Imperialists who first colonised those countries and set up the corrupt system that now flourish. Not least is the system on international finance that ensures that most of the wealth of countries is extracted into the Western financial system either as payment of debts, or through offshore accounts that hide the wealth of whole nations.
SO returning to the original question who is most wealthy depends upon what you mean. True wealth means simply the person who has what they want. It can be a sunrise or an apple or a BMW. But what I will call False Wealth is what other people think of your wealth. If I have a gold bath it is just a bath made of gold, it is of no value to me at all. But it demonstrates physical wealth which in a society that measures people by their material wealth confers status. But in UK aristocracy that would actually serve to lower ones status because it is "common", "vulgar" and ironically "cheap" to have a gold bath. True social value would be running a bank or having some award from the Queen. Demonstrating some worth that could not be simply bought by a lottery winner, and preferably some status that occurred over several generations. Class cannot be sold over the counter is how the aristocracy would like to view it. But which ever way status is a social phenomenon and not a material or personal one.
For me if you buy something for yourself because other people want it you are actually being dishonest to yourself. If it is for you, then buy what you want. But we don't live on an Island and rarely buy just for us. If you are buying with other people in mind, like buying the family car that your wife and children want rather than just thinking of yourself then that is actually the highest class there is. That is the kind of behaviour that gets noticed not just on Earth but also in Heaven. Thinking of other people is actually the path to true happiness. This doesn't mean not thinking of yourself, but it means treating others as you do yourself, so that you don't see a difference in the value of what other people want and yourself. This transformation is the way to be Really Truly Wealthy.
So in fact the initial assumption was wrong. Wealth is not getting what you want. Wealth is everyone caring that we all get what we want.
Now how do I add that into the economic models? Perhaps first I need be clear how this achieves a greater outcome that what Adam Smith's Invisible Hand (IH) achieves.
The IH says that in a free market then people buying what they want gives money to the producers and encourages them to make more which brings the price down. Conversely things that people don't want get less cash and so profits drop and encourage business to close or change to making what people do want. Producers seeking individual profit and consumers seeking lowest prices means that everyone gets what they want as efficiently as possible.
This is a pure material production machine. It ignores status obviously and it ignores people.
A common example is doing work for a friend. It is common practice to offer a friend a lower price. Cynically we might say this happens because we trust the friend and so expect to get savings ourself in return.
But importantly this is not the whole truth. Humans care about each other. Not entirely egalitarian, when running to someone's aid we will we place family and friends first. While this looks selfish we will often place family and friends before our self. We also have the heroes who place their own lives at risk to help complete strangers. This is actually normal human behaviour. To be celebrated but something we all have more or less. It is not present in Adam Smith or economics.
I may do overtime for a client who cannot afford but needs my help. I step aside from my "professional" capacity and work as an individual on a person to person basic. This is why I say that Capitalism actually puts a barrier between people because as a Professional we only do things for payment, not out of welfare for the client as a person.
I need to stop here. But the new question then is how, and what benefit is there, is adding to economic models person-to-person interactions outside the exchange system. In particular somehow measuring the wealth that arrives not materially but through caring for another.
Let us define wealth as getting what you want. People feel poor when they can't get things they want, and rich people enjoy getting what they want.
But people have different wants. Some people want easy to get things like watching a sun rise, and some people want very hard to get things like a BMW.
Given two people who have everything they want then who is the more wealthy? The one with many things like the BMW and the house overlooking San Francisco Bay or the one who only wanted an apple.
To my mind at least the one with the apple is the more wealthy. The problem with the one with many things is that there is a lot that can go wrong. The car may break down, the house may get burgled. So there is an anxiety with having many things.
When we don't want things they become neutral. This doesn't mean we don't notice them. We can walk through a forest and not want to take any of the trees with us because they are neutral. But it doesn't mean that we don't have an experience. The forest will be owned by someone, and it doesn't have to be ours to have that experience. Some will say that we "own" our experience. But that experience is gone very quickly so what is there to own. We are however left with lasting memories, and perhaps photos and selfies etc. We can say we own these. But if someone sold their memories would we buy them? The value of memories is that we had the experience. The memories (as memories) are of little value without the original experience. And we can't own that experience.
What in fact happens here is very critical. If we like an experience, we often want to own it. Like going to a concert to see our favourite singer. Sadly the experience is quite short perhaps only a hour. When the experience is gone, we want to own it somehow. We have pictures, we buy the album if we didn't already do to at least re-experience the songs, we buy merchandise, we speak to other fans to share our memories and try and relive it. But the truth that we do need to sit down and accept is that it is gone. We have had that experience and it is gone. The fact we are sad, is actually a good thing, because it means that for that short 1 hour we were doing something we really liked. The sadder we are, the more it meant. But the only way to deal with this is just to feel that sadness. It is part of the ups and downs of life. If that sadness if unbearable what we are discovering is that we need to pay more attention to our life. It means that we do not like our life, we do not like our ordinary experiences and we want to run away into happy experiences like seeing our singer. Running away from what we are never works. At some stage we simply have to just sit down and start to take in the pain and unhappiness. In small amounts like letting water out of a drinking fountain. At first it may seem still full of unhappiness. But eventually letting little bits out we will empty all the feeling we don't like and find it easier just to feel what we feel. The point here about experience is that it cannot be owned. The truly happy people allow experiences to come and go in real time, both good and bad. When nice feelings end they don't go searching for them again (too much), and when bad feelings start they don't go running away (too much). They have some equanimity. This is the key to true happiness.
But memories can be like virtual reality and we like to experience them again. In Wordsworth's poem "I wandered lonely as a cloud" he ends:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Here he is reliving his memories. He is not trying to go back to the say when he first saw them, that is gone, but he is able to re-experience that afresh through his memories. It doesn't have to be his memory. If he could buy that memory off someone then it would be just as good. This is pure aesthetisism.
So the person with the apple has no anxieties unlike the person with many things to worry about. But the person with many things has an extra thing that the person with the apple doesn't have and that is status. Living in the San Francisco Bay area means that they get respect from lots of people. People who cannot afford to live in this area may well want to do so, and those that can find that they are separated from the poorer people. Whether or not the rich people get what they want stops being the point, being distinct from poor people becomes a thing in itself. Now as discussed the person who only wants an apple will not live in the San Francisco Bay area, but the person who wants a BMW is much more likely to do so. Status separates people based upon only the physical material view of wealth, but as discussed if you need lots of things to be satisfied you may well be less satisfied than the person who is happy with just an apple.
If you go the San Francisco Bay you probably won't find people any more happy than anywhere else. But the opposite is not true. Being excluded by the rich and being viewed as low status is damaging on wealth and health. The person who is happy with only the apple, but also be happy with being low status (or at least low status defined by the people living in San Francisco Bay). Human and Animal societies have pecking orders and even if materially you are satisfied, you have the problem of surviving the status system. Everyone in the West is actually wealthy. No one in the West has any material reason not to be satisfied. Even the homeless person has every opportunity to get off the streets, and they have food charities around every corner. Unhappiness and dissatisfaction in the West is entirely generated by the status system. The UK has the most extreme status system in the West possibly with the exception of India (which the UK ruled for several centuries so is that a coincidence?). US also has some of the worst inequality in the world. The materially poor in both places, despite probably being materially satisfied are made to feel unworthy and poor. Discussed a lot in the blog that wealth is actually relative and this is why.
So the person with many things, at least within the society, will be better off not because they have many things, but because society will attribute them a higher status. Having the correct accent when speaking, having manners, a good family name, being the right race are some of the other things that affect one's status. This type of "wealth" is what makes life easy for upper class people, and harder for lower class people. The BMW then is not about the car itself but about the status.
In UK its more complex. The aristocracy will look down their noses at the BMW. That my great grandmother would have said was "vulgar." Any criminal or lottery winner can buy or steal a BMW. That possession means nothing in true upper class circles. Class is defined by your deference to the status system. You respect those above you, and you behave in a self controlled and knowing way. Nothing worse than embarrassing the upper classes by doing or saying the wrong thing. It is a game that knits actually respectful and desirable characteristics into a formal system that protects the aristocracy. My mother says of the UK gentry she knew how courteous and respectful they were to everyone regardless of class. But they would never allow people to transcend class and they would never step down in class.
Animals are already adapted to their environment and know how to survive. Humans didn't add anything to this. What humans did was take basic material needs and turn them into a complex social class system. With the upper classes controlling the resources of the poor classes. When we talk about wealth in human circles we are talking about the system of control and status. Not the material value, but purely the social value of things. Humans know how to live the idea of a 3rd world is fake. People are in poverty because social structures have restricted their access to land and resources. Rich elites in 3rd world countries control the movement of resources and that is what causes poverty. Those rich elites include the Western Imperialists who first colonised those countries and set up the corrupt system that now flourish. Not least is the system on international finance that ensures that most of the wealth of countries is extracted into the Western financial system either as payment of debts, or through offshore accounts that hide the wealth of whole nations.
SO returning to the original question who is most wealthy depends upon what you mean. True wealth means simply the person who has what they want. It can be a sunrise or an apple or a BMW. But what I will call False Wealth is what other people think of your wealth. If I have a gold bath it is just a bath made of gold, it is of no value to me at all. But it demonstrates physical wealth which in a society that measures people by their material wealth confers status. But in UK aristocracy that would actually serve to lower ones status because it is "common", "vulgar" and ironically "cheap" to have a gold bath. True social value would be running a bank or having some award from the Queen. Demonstrating some worth that could not be simply bought by a lottery winner, and preferably some status that occurred over several generations. Class cannot be sold over the counter is how the aristocracy would like to view it. But which ever way status is a social phenomenon and not a material or personal one.
For me if you buy something for yourself because other people want it you are actually being dishonest to yourself. If it is for you, then buy what you want. But we don't live on an Island and rarely buy just for us. If you are buying with other people in mind, like buying the family car that your wife and children want rather than just thinking of yourself then that is actually the highest class there is. That is the kind of behaviour that gets noticed not just on Earth but also in Heaven. Thinking of other people is actually the path to true happiness. This doesn't mean not thinking of yourself, but it means treating others as you do yourself, so that you don't see a difference in the value of what other people want and yourself. This transformation is the way to be Really Truly Wealthy.
So in fact the initial assumption was wrong. Wealth is not getting what you want. Wealth is everyone caring that we all get what we want.
Now how do I add that into the economic models? Perhaps first I need be clear how this achieves a greater outcome that what Adam Smith's Invisible Hand (IH) achieves.
The IH says that in a free market then people buying what they want gives money to the producers and encourages them to make more which brings the price down. Conversely things that people don't want get less cash and so profits drop and encourage business to close or change to making what people do want. Producers seeking individual profit and consumers seeking lowest prices means that everyone gets what they want as efficiently as possible.
This is a pure material production machine. It ignores status obviously and it ignores people.
A common example is doing work for a friend. It is common practice to offer a friend a lower price. Cynically we might say this happens because we trust the friend and so expect to get savings ourself in return.
But importantly this is not the whole truth. Humans care about each other. Not entirely egalitarian, when running to someone's aid we will we place family and friends first. While this looks selfish we will often place family and friends before our self. We also have the heroes who place their own lives at risk to help complete strangers. This is actually normal human behaviour. To be celebrated but something we all have more or less. It is not present in Adam Smith or economics.
I may do overtime for a client who cannot afford but needs my help. I step aside from my "professional" capacity and work as an individual on a person to person basic. This is why I say that Capitalism actually puts a barrier between people because as a Professional we only do things for payment, not out of welfare for the client as a person.
I need to stop here. But the new question then is how, and what benefit is there, is adding to economic models person-to-person interactions outside the exchange system. In particular somehow measuring the wealth that arrives not materially but through caring for another.
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