Why drugs should be legalised

Hat-tip to Adam Smith

Ignore what people say, see what they do

Alex Massie reports the results of a survey of the British public regarding their opinion of the Big Society. To summarise:

• Most people don’t know what it is…
• …nevertheless, most people think it is a good idea…
• …but most people think it won’t work.

So, there are a large number of people sufficiently compos mentis to answer a survey who nevertheless can confidently assert mutually exclusive opinions on a subject they admit they know little about.

My advice is to ignore these people.

So how do you know what people really think if many people can’t be trusted to answer surveys properly? Instead of looking at the stated preference (what people say they prefer, or think), look for the revealed preference. Revealed preferences are the things people give away about themselves by their actions.

Loads of people say they would prefer a return to local specialist shops, but they do all their grocery shopping in supermarkets.

People claim that they wish they could learn an instrument/another language, but they don’t. Nearly everyone could make a good fist of trying either of those, but hardly any do. I’ve given up saying that sometimes I wish I could play an instrument – because if I wanted to, I would do so. Given my revealed preference, it appears that I don’t.

This is a really useful tool for understanding something about both yourself and society. You can happily ditch the lingering feelings of guilt or regret about not taking up something you “always wanted to” – turns out you didn’t! You can also filter out pointless news items about the kind of world people claim they want. Look to what they do, the picture will be much clearer.

Path dependence, and why the Queen is OK by me

Theoretically, markets shold converge on the optimal system, right?

When rail was beginning it’s slow spread, there were a whole range of track gauges (the width between the rails). The one that is by far the most common now isn’t necessarily the optimal one, but we are effectively stuck with it because it would now be too expensive to change. The reason we ended up with the now standard gauge of 4′ 8.5″ is that the early mining railway George Stephenson worked on happened to use that gauge, and when he took his expertise elsewhere he took the preference for that gauge with him.

Whilst the merits of some other keyboards have been overstated, there is no particular technical reason that the QWERTY layout should have become dominant. But early typing schools started teaching touch-typing with QWERTY keyboards, and so all the operatives got used to that one so there was little point anyone adopting another one.

Both of these examples show path dependence. We are where we are now because of contingent events that could have turned out differently, not necessarily because the market has opted for the technically optimal solution.

What has this to do with the Queen?

If everyone in the UK woke up tomorrow and all of us had forgotten how we ran the country so we had to start again from scratch, I suspect there wouldn’t be many people in favour choosing one family to represent us as Head of State in perpetuity. No, we’d settle for some kind of elected presidential system because that makes far more logical sense as a system.

But this ignores the path dependence of the situation we are now in, namely in a constitutional monarchy. We are where we are, and all arguments have to proceed from that fact. Given this, I support the monarchy because changing to a presidential system won’t solve any pressing problems, certainly not now, and probably not in any realistic medium to long term either. I get the arguments; but the amount of time, effort and will that would go in to changing the system to achieve approximately bugger all in practice; just isn’t worth it.

Hence, I support the monarchy, QWERTY keyboards, and standard gauge.

The ecology of cities

As water flows along streams and rivers, maybe spreads out, and creates a habitat; so money flows and creates an industrial quarter in a city. Sometimes the river is diverted, or dries up, and the watery habitat disappears, and is replaced with something else. Sometimes too, money is diverted, and the industrial habitat disappears, and is replaced with something else.

When an industrial area loses its sustaining flow of money, a typical ecological succession ensues.

First to populate the newly vacated habitat is broken glass, graffiti and litter. These pioneer species indicate that the habitat is changing. These are typically followed by Buddleia and discarded shopping trolleys – hardier species than the pioneers, but slower to colonise. These species slowly spread to dominate the area over several years.

Later, when the area seems to have reached equilibrium, giant grazing animals appear. These noisy, smelly yellow animals feed on bricks and building materials, the carcasses of the inhabitants from the earlier times. These act as “ecological engineers”, species that significantly change the habitat. Where once skeletal structures were, there now are flattened areas of rubble. Encroaching at the margins of these are the pioneer species, but more significant are the new arrivals – temporary car parks and their attendant signs, cones, and cars.

Later still, a distinct breed of human re-emerges, having been all but chased out when the money dried up. These are the artists and artisans, living at the fringes of the economy and in need of cheap space. They generally form a mutually tolerant relationship with the few light-industry humans that survived the money drought.

These humans encourage a trickle of money to re-enter the area, at which point the noisy smelly yellow animals begin to reappear although these ones, unlike their forerunners, begin to convert the temporary car parks back into new buildings.

The climax community of such a succession is one of superficially attractive but over-priced city-living, and computer games developers. Typical species thus include young city professionals (lawyers, accountants, consultants) and computer programmers. The former head to the city centre to graze during the day and return at night; the latter graze in the area during the day and leave at night to rest elsewhere.

Human nature, and why you shouldn’t get in a tizzy about it

I’m currently reading Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand, sub-titled “Why dense cities, nuclear power, genetically modified crops, restored wildlands, radical science and geoengineering are essential”. It’s a cracking book, with a light touch of style that leavens a wide-ranging, quote-heavy discussion on a lot of environmental issues.

A standard eco-pessimist could announce almost triumphantly in 1992:

“Modern humanity is rapidly destroying the natural world on which it depends for its survival. Everywhere on our planet, the picture is the same. Forests are being cut down, wetlands drained, coral reefs grubbed up, agricultural lands eroded, salinised, desertified, or simply paved over. Pollution is now generalised – our groundwater, streams, rivers, estuaries, seas and oceans, the air we breathe, the food we eat, are all affected. Just about every living creature on earth now contains in its body traces of agricultural and industrial chemicals – many of which are known or suspected carcinogens or mutagens.

As a result of our activities, it is probable that thousands of species are being made extinct every day. Only a fraction of these are known to science… By destroying the natural world in this way we are making our planet progressively less habitable. If current trends persist, in no more than a few decades it will cease to be capable of supporting complex forms of life.”

(That was Edward Goldsmith’s opening salvo in The Way: An Ecological Worldview. His worries are accurate individually, but they are selective, one-sided, and over-aggregated into a paralysing spasm of angst.)

I don’t entirely agree with Brand’s point that Goldsmith’s fears are “accurate individually”, but I agree with his general conclusion of a “paralysing spasm of angst”.

The question to ask of that statement is: What is it for? What is the point? No doubt it made Goldsmith feel better in writing it, but what could it possibly achieve? It’s all very well “alerting” people to what you perceive to be the state of affairs, but as I’ve said before, “raising awareness” can be a complete waste of  time, if not actively unhelpful. Reading that paragraph, assuming you take it as correct, how do you feel? Do you feel energised to go and find out about what he is talking about, to understand the problems, and to find and implement solutions? Or do you feel like it is all too much, and why bother trying?

This is the perpetual problem that environmentalism has – presenting your view in order to impress upon people the magnitude of the problem as you see it makes the whole situation seem an insoluble mess.

However, a lot of people do find out more, they do look for causes (if not necessarily solutions), so the awareness raising isn’t necessarily wasted. But all too many people come to the conclusion that the problem is human greed. The obvious corrollary to this is that if we solve or eliminate greed, the problems will be solved.

Let’s step back a bit from the idea of greed. It’s an emotive term, let’s think about it. Think about greed as being a subset of the more general human desire to want more stuff. Not all stuff-wanting is bad. A starving man wants more stuff – to eat – so that he doesn’t die. He also wants more stuff so that his family doesn’t die either. He will then want more stuff so that he and his family are protected to some degree from the elements and from misfortune; and then so there is surplus, enabling his children to go to school instead of having to work. And so on. At some point on this scale of actually having more stuff, people declare that the point at which all reasonable demands are satisfied, and that any more is just plain old greed. Probably, most people think that that point is just a little bit above where they are on the having stuff scale.

So, the point at which greed starts depends on where you are on the scale, and anyway it is the result of a hard-wiring that we have which makes us want more stuff because, for essentially all of evolutionary time, we have only ever been a couple of pieces of stuff away from death. That’s quite an incentive.

Now, consider diving in football. Diving is a perfectly rational response for as long as the potential benefit (getting a free kick or penalty) outweighs the risk (being caught and booked). Apart from the diver no-one really likes diving, so lets get rid of it! According to the greed-causes-environmental-problems hypothesis, what we need to do is instruct the players to slightly diminish their will to win. After all, if we were all less greedy we wouldn’t have environmental problems, right? So if footballers were all less keen to win we wouldn’t have any more diving. Yeah right.

Newsflash: human action is dictated by human incentives. Get used to it.

You won’t get rid of greed, however the hell you define it. Even if it were true that greed does cause environmental problems you won’t “solve” greed, so you’d better look somewhere else for your solutions.

But why do people plump for the greed hypothesis (and by implication the non-greed solution)? Because the presentation of environmental problems as an existential crisis that can only be understood or appreciated in the abstract invites similarly abstract, existential solutions.

If the problem is presented in discrete chunks, solutions are easier to conceptualise, develop, and ultimately implement. And you don’t have to change human nature to do it.

The World is Changing. Or is it?

Why can fifty thousand volunteers successfully coauthor Wikipedia, the most serious online alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then turn around and give it away for free? … Without a broadly accepted analytic model to explain these phenomena, we tend to treat them as curiosities, perhaps transient fads, possibly of significance in one market segment or another. We should try instead to see them for what they are: a new mode of production emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world— those that are the most fully computer networked and for which information goods and services have come to occupy the highest-valued roles. [emphasis added]

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

I’ve just started studying a course entitled Networks and the Digital Revolution: Economic Myths and Realities. The first lecture discussed whether or not the “network economy” is really all that new.

Here, the book suffers from a problem common to others in this genre. Benkler provides a wealth of anecdotes to illustrate the new economy’s revolutionary nature, but little information on magnitudes. How new? How large? How much? Cooperative, social production itself is hardly novel, as any reader of “I, Pencil” can attest. Before the Web page, there was the pamphlet; before the Internet, the telegraph; before the Yahoo directory, the phone book; before the personal computer, electric service, the refrigerator, the washing machine, the telephone, and the VCR. In short, such breathlessly touted phenomena as network effects, the rapid diffusion of technological innovation, and highly valued intangible assets are not novel. [Emphasis added]

Peter Klein, reviewing Benkler

I can see the idea that in some senses network effects are not new and that there have been world-changing new networks before, of which teh interwebs is merely the latest.  I’m not convinced about the I, Pencil comparison though. I’ve blogged recently about the legendary essay I, Pencil, so go there if you don’t know what the hell I’m going on about. My take on it was that it was the price mechanism (as opposed to central planning) that coordinated all the countless people and activities required to produce a pencil, and that all those people weren’t working directly to create a pencil, they were just responding to incentives through prices. But with Benkler’s example of Wikipedia, there is no price mechanism to do the coordinating. Sure there are kudos and esteem to be had for contributing, but as nice as they are people need to pay rent and bills and for that you need money, not respect. So I’m not convinced that I, Pencil and the system it describes fully accounts for Benkler’s “new mode of production”. It may indeed not be new, but I don’t think I, Pencil captures why.

Toasters, pencils, and collective intelligence

Matt Ridley claims that

Human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon

Look around your home, think about the stuff you own and the services you use. Could you have produced any of it on your own? Even if you are handy at carpentry, could you have built even the simplest item of furniture when you consider that you first need to harvest the wood and shape it with metal tools. How much could you – on your own – produce from primary materials, from ore and wood and hydrocarbons?

I, Pencil is a classic essay which talks about how no-one – literally no-one – knows how to make something as simple as a pencil. We depend entirely on a complex and unguided network of people filling there own particular role to produce what we take for granted.

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding!

In this TED Talk, Thomas Thwaites describes his mission to build a toaster from scratch. Maximum points for effort, but the final specimen really hammers home how much we depend on the actions of other people.

In his own TED Talk of last year, Matt Ridley was pursuing the theory behind the practice of Thwaites was demonstrating – ideas having sex.

Do we need universities?

With the current hoo-hah in the UK surrounding the proposed tuition fees increase, I thought I’d explore the idea of whether we even need universities at all?

Information used to expensive and hard to come by, so it made sense to have institutions which could amass this information and dispense it to those who needed to learn it. Information is now somewhere between cheap and free, so what is the role of the university? It no longer has a monopoly on information, so its roles are:

• A place to engage with others who are learning and teaching
• An assessor, to validate the learning you have done

Contact time can be pretty crap. I didn’t find many lectures any more useful than sitting down with a textbook and some articles (and the usefulness declined as the number of lecturers using Powerpoint increased, so this is definitely trending in the wrong direction). Seminars were sometimes good, but were a tiny proportion of the week. Contact time should be part of the enriching experience of going to university, but it often isn’t.

That leaves the role of a university as an assessor, which is pretty damn useful. But if that is all you really need, why not just cut it back to that? My template for low-cost degrees is as follows:

• The “university” publishes a syllabus of material that you will be examined on, along with example requirements and exam questions etc.
• The university examines you on it.

That’s it. Why pay £9000 a year for derisory contact time and bad lecturers droning on in front of cluttered Powerpoint slides? If you have the gumption to find material yourself and keep disciplined about learning, why not just pay for the validation at the end?

All generalised objections to this are irrelevant. Yes, some courses need expensive lab facilities – it’s not for those courses. Yes, some universities have excellent contact time – it’s not intended to replace those. Yes, some people still need to be led by the nose through their education – it’s not for them. Yes, some people really want the university experience – to which I say “Go forth to a normal university and have a great time!”. But some people don’t want or need those things, and some courses don’t require it either.

Let people choose. I could definitely have done my MSc like that – the material was close enough to what I had already done, all I really needed was the validation. It would have saved money and I could have carried on working and not moved to the other end of the country.

Say what you mean, mean what you say

If you ask people “Do you believe in UFOs?”, some will answer “yes” and some will answer “no”. Some of them will be wrong, but nearly all of them will be answering a different question to the one you actually asked.

The correct answer to the question; and it is the correct answer, as in the one that demonstrably accords with logic and evidence; is “yes”.  If you do not believe in UFOs then you are mistaken.  A UFO is an Unidentified Flying Object, nothing more; therefore whenever someone sees something in the sky that they cannot identify they have spotted a UFO.

But that’s probably not the question that people answered was it? They answered the question “Do you believe in aliens?”, or “Do aliens exist?”, which is pretty much the same question. The (almost certainly) correct answer to the question; and it is the (almost certainly) correct answer, as in the one that demonstrably accords with logic and evidence; is “yes”.  If you do not believe in aliens then you are (almost certainly) mistaken. This galaxy contains between 100 and 400 billion stars, and there are around 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe (all data courtesy of Wikipedia). The chances that Earth is the only planet with life are not great, to say the least.

Am I being pedantic? Yes, but with good reason. The way we speak and the words we use affect how we think, so if we make lazy assumptions about what people mean when they ask a certain question or make a certain statement, we will probably get our thinking wrong. Why is this important? Listen to the news. Whenever an item comes up regarding something allegedly disagreeable that someone is doing (earning a bonus for being a banker, wearing a burqa, saying something hateful); the discussion segues quickly from how awful it is to the need for Something To Be Done. Usually a ban or punitive tax. There is no (or in a sane society, should be no) logical connection between “I don’t like this” and “This should not be allowed”.

Try it. When someone asks you a question about something fairly contentious or involved, think about the question carefully before you answer it. You may come across a different angle on the situation that you hadn’t considered before. When you hear a casual statement, especially one you hear a lot, challenge it. “Are you saying that…?”. Chances are they didn’t really mean what they said, they meant something else.

When things are necessary, but not sufficient

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Barbara Kingsolver and her family went self-sufficient in food – the book covers the first year of the new life. It is clear from the book that this carries many benefits, in particular a better relationship with food and a greater awareness of the natural world. I think both of these things are desirable. But the book also talks a lot about the alleged iniquities and disadvantages of what we could loosely call industrial farming. No doubt some things such as subsidies do unfairly benefit these practices, and no doubt there are some disadvantages. But the value of a reliable cheap supply of food can be easy to forget. If there is not a reliable cheap supply of food, then all other considerations in life become secondary to securing food. Barbara Kingsolver can live self-sufficiently because there is a massive economy populated with people that are not living self-sufficiently, they are specialising and so providing us with all the trappings and safety nets of the modern world we take for granted. This is not to disparage her choice – as with most choices of making a living, it is an honourable one (and sounds great fun too!).

I’m considering getting involved with Birmingham’s Local Exchange Trading System. You trade your time and skills for credits (called “Hearts”) which you can use to purchase the time and skills of others. Now, almost by definition this will be much less efficient than trading and working in the normal cash economy, but… I like the idea of trade strengthening ties in the local area. I’m not from round these parts and anything that helps develop my roots here is welcome.

In both cases we have a highly developed modern system – industrial farming, global economy – which people want to turn away from, at least implicitly. I think this is mistaken. Yes, industrial farming divorces us from food and the world around us (this is partly a good thing and partly not); and yes, the cash economy can be impersonal and alienating. But they are both absolutely necessary to give us the physical security and opportunities that we have today. Instead of turning away from these systems for not being what they were never meant to be, we should look at them as utterly necessary, just not necessarily sufficient.