The Political Compass – More than Just a Meme

The Political Compass – More than Just a Meme

Despite its designers’ hopes that it might beckon in a new era of more nuanced political discourse, the political compass has largely been reduced to meme-fodder.

This popularised version of the political compass has now been around for over 20 years, and by that metric, this post is a bit late to the party, however the concept of expressing political alignment using 2 dimensions is far older than this.

The American libertarian David Nolan came up with his “Nolan Chart” way back in 1969. It is very US-centric, and was created specifically with the goal of converting people to libertarianism, however I can’t help but feel that despite this, it is just more elegant than the political compass.

The more popular incarnation, that is the subject of so many political memes, has plenty of its own limitations and biases, but it also completely fails to be memorable too (“Authoritarian-Left” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue). Thankfully John Nerst at EverythingStudies wrote a pair of posts back in 2019 that reformulate the whole idea, addressing many of the limitations, and it is his “tilted political compass” that I want to build on…

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Doing Things Differently – Adventures Raising the Next Generation

Doing Things Differently – Adventures Raising the Next Generation

It has been some time since I posted on this blog.  Writing posts that are good enough for me to consider posting takes a reasonable amount of effort, and since my last post I embarked upon a new project that significantly reduced my time available to work on such things.  Given the title of this post, it will come as no surprise that the new project in question is “everything associated with having and raising a child”.  This project is probably of limited interest to some, but there are aspects of the experience that I feel that I should share, in case it is of benefit to others.

By “doing things differently”, I refer to the process of questioning why an approach to something may be the norm, and choosing an alternative path that is more optimal (for me at least – other people’s predilections may differ).  This of course carries risks, and I try to think through as many reasons why the norm is indeed the norm, before I cavalierly leap over Chesterton’s fence.  However, if after this process, I still feel that I can make my life easier/better/more efficient with minimal risk, then I give the alternative approach a try…

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Dividends vs. Buybacks – Take My Money, I Didn’t Ask for a Refund

Dividends vs. Buybacks – Take My Money, I Didn’t Ask for a Refund

Conventional wisdom is that dividends are great – for many people they are the main reason why people invest in companies in the first place.  A dividend is your share of a company’s profits – when the company does well, they pay a dividend to their shareholders.

Within this context, the idea of “share buybacks” seems shady – rather than paying the shareholders their due, the company instead embarks on some back-room market manipulation, spending the shareholders cash to prop up the share price and net the executives a bigger bonus.

This narrative, that share buybacks are done to enrich insiders at the expense of other shareholders, and that dividends are fundamentally different, better, simpler and more honest, is incorrect and unhelpful.  It is an overly divisive way of framing a fairly technical choice, that leads people to favour a more obscure system.  In this post I hope to offer a viewpoint that explains the following…

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Free Markets and the Dangers of Optimisation Engines

Free Markets and the Dangers of Optimisation Engines

In my last post, I discussed why I think that Capitalism can be a net positive for the world, along with why it shouldn’t be used as a bogeyman that stands synonymous with all of the ills and excesses of modern society.  Some of those ideas may come across as echoing the thoughts and words of Milton Friedman, who was famous for his laissez-faire free-market economics.  Friedman made some very good arguments, however I cannot agree with his entire worldview.

The issue that I have with Milton Friedman, and the free-market capitalist policies that he championed is not with the fundamental validity of the ideas.  It is well established and demonstrable that investment is generally beneficial and free-markets generally allow for higher growth and lower prices.  The problem is instead with the extremes that he took these underlying principles to.  His philosophy was one of unyielding faith that the free market could do no wrong, and that any and all attempts to regulate the market are harmful…

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Capitalism as a Social Cause

Capitalism as a Social Cause

Even many proponents of capitalism seem to view investments as fundamentally selfish.  They just view selfishness itself as a good thing, channelling the fictional Gordon Gecko’s mantra of “Greed is Good”.  This is understandably unpalatable to many, and I think this perspective does capitalism a great disservice – twisting and misrepresenting the core concepts into something unrecognisable.

Here, I hope to reframe the discussion, explaining why the underlying concepts of capitalism and investment are good things in their own rights, and why those advocating for consumerism are actually wolves in sheep’s clothing.  Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though – it might help to think about some of the basics first…

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Economic Extremism – Too Much of a Good Thing

Economic Extremism – Too Much of a Good Thing

Allow me to juxtapose two viewpoints for a moment. First – what I perceive to be a fairly common view amongst neo-liberal economists:

The huge improvement in people’s standard of living over the last hundred years has been one of the biggest successes of Capitalism.  The ability of capitalists to offer loans allowed entrepreneurs to generate improved growth and employment.  With money from investors, companies have been able to achieve enormous technological advances, resulting in leaps in quality of life for many people.  The improved efficiencies of competitive industry have lowered prices of many goods, lifting millions out of poverty. 

The main thing standing in the way of even greater improvements in people’s happiness and standard of living, is that the markets are still not yet free enough.  Government is stifling the markets with regulation that raises the costs of doing business and discourages investment.  State benefits discourage workers from finding more enriching jobs, instead encouraging reliance and stagnation.

Despite the US’s historic progress in the direction of free markets, true libertarianism, in which the government is small enough to completely free the market from interference has never truly been attempted.  All of the economic and societal failings of the US can be traced back to the government interfering with the free market – whenever a problem arose, the US government attempted to introduce legislation to resolve it, rather than allowing the market to resolve it naturally. This exacerbates the problem rather than resolving it, so we should instead strive to further reduce the size of government, until true free-market libertarianism can be achieved.

Second – an alternative, equally extreme view…

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Voting Systems IV – Procedural Voting

Voting Systems IV – Procedural Voting

This post is part of a series of posts on Voting Systems.

As well as the general public voting for politicians or directly for policies, voting is also used by politicians themselves to decide on issues and pass laws.

Rather than being a “once every few years” phenomenon, this voting is part of the day-to-day workings of government. The standard operating procedure for many politicians.

This means that whilst some sort of formal procedure is needed, even the previously mentioned voting systems of Approval Voting, Score Voting, Evaluative Voting and SPAV are still far to rigid to permit the kind of nuance that is necessary in navigating the complex issues of the day. Rather like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, too simplistic an approach leads to a broken system. Legislators and governments tend to eventually find ways around a procedure if it is too restrictive, but these loopholes are accidental and therefore do not necessarily yield the best outcomes…

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Voting Systems III – Representatives

Voting Systems III – Representatives

This post is part of a series of posts on Voting Systems.

Now we move out of the simple realm of single offices and single issues. Appointing multiple politicians to represent a population is fundamental to the way in which most modern democracies work, but it is fraught with difficulty.

Proportional Representation (PR) refers to a government whose composition reflects the proportions of the population that support each party. The idea is that if 20% of the population support party A, roughly 20% of the government should be party A, etc.

That proportional representation is a desirable quality in a body of representatives shouldn’t be a controversial statement. Any particular demographic being underrepresented within the government will lead to a feeling of disenfranchisement and a loss of faith in the efficacy of a democracy. Alas, there are still a few arguments that are used to try to convince people that unrepresentative governments are somehow a good thing…

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Voting Systems II – Referenda

Voting Systems II – Referenda

This post is part of a series of posts on Voting Systems.

Leaders usually have a significant amount of power, so it is fairly easy to convince people that such elections are important, giving these elections a higher turnout than other elections (for example US Presidential Elections almost always have higher turnout than Midterm Elections). This means that we didn’t need to worry too much about low turnouts in the previous section.

This is no longer the case for referenda. Voting has a cost – at a bare minimum, it costs voters the time and effort needed to cast their ballot, and it can cost even more time and effort if a voter wants to become well informed about the issue being voted on. There are therefore several reasons why a large number of people might not vote in a particular referendum…

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Voting Systems – Electing Leaders

Voting Systems – Electing Leaders

Getting the general public’s input on how a country should be run is a fundamental tenet of democracy. This has to be done in a way that is both systematic and able to be considered fair, which is difficult to achieve without incorporating voting in some way, shape or form.

Perhaps in very small groups, consensus building can be used to bypass the need for voting, but as groups of people get larger, the number of possible disagreements to resolve and compromises required to reach consensus grow rapidly. This is one of the reasons why teams within a company are generally recommended to be smaller than 20 people, with 5-7 often being considered ideal.

Given that no country is this small, the need to implement a system of voting is something of an inevitability. Unfortunately, there are many ways in which voting systems can introduce issues that stand in the way of the democratic process. Issues such as gerrymandering, hyper-partisanship and voter apathy are often a direct result of the system that is used…

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Canadian Provinces & German Länder

Canadian Provinces & German Länder

This post follows on from Optimising Federalism.

Once a country is already federal, it is much more difficult to make any sort of changes to either the structure of government or the states themselves – this is part of the point of federalism after all. It is still worth considering what changes could be made, whether they would be a desirable way of solving certain issues, and whether they would be able to garner enough support to be achievable.

As with the UK in the previous posts, I shall therefore detail a possible structure for Canada and Germany that follows the same principles. This is not intended to be a serious policy proposal, as such a change would need broad support from the populations affected, as well as buy-in from the existing state governments in order to make the necessary border adjustments and constitutional amendments. This is in contrast to the UK, which would simply need a government so inclined, and a population that wasn’t violently opposed to it…

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United Federal Britain – Local Government

United Federal Britain – Local Government

This post follows on from A United Federal Britain.

Having changed all of the borders it would make sense to tidy up all of the counties. As mentioned in Legibility and Democracy, the current state of the UK’s administrative areas is a mess. Some areas are two-tier counties that have a county council as well as multiple district councils within them, while other counties are purely ceremonial and have no government function, having been split into rural and urban unitary authorities. To make matters even more confusing, some counties are two-tier, but with some districts carved out of the original ceremonial county to be unitary authorities not governed by the county council itself (e.g. Nottingham and Nottinghamshire).

In the following map, I have split each state into unitary authorities, so that there is a single consistent level of government below the state government. In a similar manner to with the states themselves, I have tried to separate urban and rural areas into separate authorities, so that local government can also avoid the pitfalls of having to cater to constituents whose requirements are too much at odds with each other…

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A United Federal Britain

A United Federal Britain

This post follows on from Optimising Federalism.

(And Northern Ireland. I considered the title “Federal United Kingdom”, then binned that for obvious reasons. Seriously, after the whole North Macedonia thing, it should be clear that deciding what a country is called is just an absolute minefield.)

Currently, there are various levels of devolved power in the UK. There are the four main countries – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Devolution is applied inconsistently across these, with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland heavily devolved with their own legislatures (the Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly and Senedd Cymru respectively). England does not have its own devolved parliament, and instead is governed directly by the national parliament at Westminster. This has given rise to what is known as the West Lothian question, which queries the legitimacy of a system in which a Scottish MP gets a vote in something that affects England but not Scotland, whilst an English MP does not have a reciprocal power as such matters are decided by the Scottish Parliament…

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Optimising Federalism

Optimising Federalism

This post follows on from In Support of Federalism.

There are many countries around the world that use Federalism as a system of government, and some work better than others.  It would be good to improve the standard of democracy around the world, and so if any countries were considering becoming federal, it would be good to know what features get the best results.  Given an existing federation, any changes will necessarily take a significant amount of time and effort to make, so again, knowing what features get the best results would be very useful in determining what changes to focus on.

Ideally, it would be good to realise all of the benefits listed in the previous two posts – legibility, antifragility, greater freedom, political incubation, a distributed economy, closer proximity to the government and less conflict.  What we need is to isolate any factors that get in the way of these benefits, so that existing federations can pursue reforms, and unitary countries can avoid predictable future issues…

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In Support of Federalism

In Support of Federalism

This post follows on from Legibility and Democracy.

Finding the best way to govern a country is an ongoing struggle throughout the world.  The introduction of the concept of legibility suggested that federations might be a good middle ground providing both legibility and democracy for the electorate.  Widening the scope beyond this, there are many other advantages of federations over unitary states…

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Legibility and Democracy

Legibility and Democracy

I. The Importance of Legibility

Legibility in the context I am using it here refers fundamentally to the understandability of a system.

It might seem obvious that more understandability is better, but understandability also implies simplicity, and simplicity is not necessarily always good.  For example, with governmental policy, as addressed in James C. Scott’s book “Seeing Like a State” (Archive), a drive for legibility can result in adverse situations such as city planners neglecting important complexities that are necessary for a healthy society, or agricultural reforms that promote monocultures and deplete the soil.  This idea of legibility can be applied more widely, to cover any kind of system, process or theory – there is a balance between a theory being legible enough that it can be understood, and being nuanced enough that it gets the correct answers…

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Dedomic Utilitarianism

Dedomic Utilitarianism

This post loosely follows on from Resolving Moral Dilemmas using Uncertainty and Insanity.

Utilitarianism – A Brief Background

My aim here is not to provide yet another response to all of the common challenges to Utilitarianism.  A fairly good background of the challenges Utilitarianism has been faced with over the years can be found by reading through its Wikipedia article.  Alternatively for an even deeper dive, this article gives a very thorough summary of such things.  The issue is, that having fended off these initial criticisms, the philosophy of Utilitarianism has encountered a few problems which are not so easily dispatched.  Of the different types of Utilitarianism, some resolve certain problems, and others resolve other problems, but all reveal their own cracks in turn. It is on these deeper issues that I intend to focus…

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Heavy Tailed Distributions and the States of Randomness

Heavy Tailed Distributions and the States of Randomness

I. Normality

The “Normal Distribution” (also called the Gaussian Distribution) is a very useful and well-studied tool for analysing data.  It is however often misapplied, despite the efforts of Benoit Mandelbrot and Nassim Taleb to raise awareness of areas where it might be inappropriate to use.  One reason people may be tempted to overuse it might be its name, which is a little too suggestive of it being some kind of “standard”, so henceforth I will use its alternative name to avoid perpetuating this any more than is inevitable.

The trouble is, that everyone is so familiar with the Gaussian Distribution, that it is very seductive to shoehorn your data into it and try to use the familiar techniques to analyse your data.  When people see a “bell curve”, their first thought is usually “looks like it is Gaussian distributed”, meaning that the data behaves like it has been sampled from the graph below…

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Relentless Positivity

Relentless Positivity

The Pursuit of Happiness

The pursuit of happiness is something of a universal human endeavour. As such, one could consider it odd that we are so divided about how to achieve happiness – after all, it is something we have been trying to reach as a society since time immemorial.  Unfortunately this view neglects the fact that the pursuit of happiness is such a significant motivator for people, that there are an enormous number of people and organisations out there trying to convince people that their method is the one, in order to gain influence, profit or status.  In this environment, it is difficult to filter the noise and disinformation from the genuine signal of how to live a happy life…

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Resolving Moral Dilemmas using Uncertainty and Insanity

Resolving Moral Dilemmas using Uncertainty and Insanity

One of the main criticisms of Consequentialism is that it leads to a state where anything not forbidden is mandatory.  In order to optimise future consequences, no choice has absolutely zero effect either way, which is what would be required for it to be merely permissible.  The seemingly innocuous question of “should I eat a sandwich for lunch?” becomes something with a morally absolute right and wrong answer. Even if the extent of forbiddenness or mandatoriness is variable by the severity of the consequences, we are left with a system in which any expression of free will is fundamentally negative.  An automaton that always picked the morally mandatory option would be a better person than anyone that ever chose differently. This outlook neglects uncertainty however – in an uncertain world, there is necessarily a grey area between things with obvious positive consequences and obvious negative consequences. In these situations, it is reasonable to consider the grey area to be permissible choices, as there is no way to determine which choice is better…

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Comments on UBI posts

Comments on UBI posts

This post relates to the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

This makes the fourteenth post in a row on UBI. For a blog that isn’t explicitly about Universal Basic Income, some might consider this excessive! I shall be moving on to other topics shortly, but a round-up of comments and further thoughts on this sequence of posts seems appropriate.

Firstly – I have created a dedicated page collating all of the posts (except the appendix) into a single article so that it can be read and linked to more easily.

Secondly – thank you to all those that read the posts, and to those that commented (either here, or in places that I posted links). I have had several interesting discussions about various aspects of UBI, some of which helped me to consider the policy from even more angles, and others that pointed me towards useful data that I had not previously encountered.

A summary of various questions, criticisms and discussions is given below…

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Arguments for a UBI – Appendix

Arguments for a UBI – Appendix

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

The United States

Having seen the complexities of the existing UK tax code and devised a much simpler way of doing a very similar thing, it is tempting to try to do the same with the US, however there are a couple of additional complexities to note before we can get started in earnest.

Firstly, the states can levy their own income taxes in addition to the federal income tax.  We will ignore state taxes, and look simply at the federal tax code.  Secondly, there are a huge number of special cases, loopholes and adjustments that apply when calculating US income tax, meaning that the effective rate people end up paying is often lower than the one that can be easily calculated using the headline rates.  This is unavoidable without considerable analysis, but the easily calculated rates should suffice at least for an initial comparison with the hypothetical Universal Basic Income based regime…

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Arguments for a UBI – Conclusion

Arguments for a UBI – Conclusion

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

Implementation Possibilities

Having addressed the idea of a Universal Basic Income from a wide range of perspectives, it is hopefully not unthinkable that such a policy could generate a similarly wide base of support, given the right framing.  If the same policy can appeal to socialists, capitalists, conservatives and liberals alike, whilst being both practical and affordable, it is clearly in need of more attention.  The issue is, that it is quite a dramatic policy shift that would be politically untenable to achieve in one fell swoop…

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Arguments for a UBI – The Philosopher

Arguments for a UBI – The Philosopher

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

The Land Dividend

In the depths of pre-history, before all of the land in the world was parcelled up and owned by individuals and organisations, the human population was quite low, and it was possible for a stone-age human to hunt, forage and maybe even subsistence farm on some land to eke out a meagre existence.  Life was hard, the margin of error was thin, a bad winter or a poor harvest could be fatal; yet in this anarchist’s dream world, unless another marauding tribe came to drive you away, you could live on and extract as much wealth from this land as you were able or inclined to…

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Arguments for a UBI – The Economist

Arguments for a UBI – The Economist

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

Effective Stimulus

One of the problems with the economy as it stands is the positive feedback loop of recessions.  When times are good, things work well: people spend money, which allows businesses to pay their staff, who can then spend their money and so on.  Every pound or dollar spent flows around the economy several times, facilitating growth and prosperity.  When the economy slows however, people see hard times ahead, and will try to save money, reducing their expenditure, which in turn reduces businesses’ income.  These businesses feel the squeeze and may lay off staff, who then have even less money to spare, exacerbating the problem, reducing the flow of money and making a recession more likely.  The concept of a stimulus is an idea originally thought up by the economist John Maynard Keynes: the government can inject money into the system, often by funding large infrastructure programmes, or more recently by giving it to banks to lend out.  This has the effect of increasing the flow of money again, with the hope that this will kick-start the economy, improve employment, and get things back to normal…

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Arguments for a UBI – The Entrepreneur

Arguments for a UBI – The Entrepreneur

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

More Stability

Entrepreneurialism is a risky business – most start-ups fail, losing the entrepreneur money, and yet as a whole, it is a process that is hugely beneficial for the economy, as it generates significant employment and innovation.  Unfortunately, this tendency to fail makes entrepreneurialism something that most people cannot risk.  If you are not already fairly wealthy, leaving a job to pursue an idea that may or may not generate any income is unaffordable right from the start.  Even for people with some money behind them, it can be difficult to make ends meet in the period between the initial capital outlay and when the company becomes revenue generating…

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Arguments for a UBI – The Capitalist

Arguments for a UBI – The Capitalist

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

Removal of Market Distortion

It is a frequently made argument, that minimum wages distort the market. Either forcing companies to pay more for a certain activity than it is really worth to them, or rendering someone unemployable if their skills are not worth the minimum wage that a company is allowed to pay.  This is an unavoidable negative consequence of a minimum wage law, yet without it, companies would be allowed to pay many people so little that they would struggle to survive.  After all, what is their alternative – if no-one is willing to pay them any more money, their only other option is to not work, and either live off state benefits, or starve.  The provision of Universal Basic Income would mean that everyone was able to survive, and could then augment their earnings with additional employment income.  This would remove the requirement for a minimum wage, as everyone would have enough income to survive, which would then free up the companies to pay the market rate for the work they required…

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Arguments for a UBI – The Socialist

Arguments for a UBI – The Socialist

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

A Robust Safety Net

One of the main issues with social safety nets as they stand currently is known as the “Poverty Trap”.  This is the phenomenon whereby benefits are curtailed when someone finds a job, in such a way that they are worse off than before.  This can happen in several different ways – either the reduction in benefits occurs at the same rate or faster than the increase in job related income, meaning that the additional time (and opportunity cost) spent working has either zero or negative net effect on income.  Alternatively, some benefits are removed entirely when a job is found, which is detrimental when that job is part time or a “zero-hours contract”, again resulting in a lower income than before.  This kind of benefit structure actively discourages people to find jobs, as unless they are able to walk into a reasonably paid, full time position, they are better off unemployed.  This then means that unless they can weather a period of even lower financial security, they are not able to gain work experience to enable them to seek better jobs…

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Arguments for a UBI – The Liberal

Arguments for a UBI – The Liberal

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

Less Vilification of the Poor

A common attack levied against people at the lower end of the income spectrum, ultimately used to justify cutting state benefits, is that of benefit fraud.  People affording lavish lifestyles funded entirely by the state, or people sneakily augmenting this income by working a few hours cash-in-hand.  This spectre serves to drive wedges between the rich and the poor, and to tarnish all people down on their luck as lazy, scheming and probably criminal to boot.  The argument that your hard-earned taxes are going towards buying a family of nine a second widescreen TV can be both emotive and hard to refute.  Despite the fact that this kind of occurrence is very rare, there will always be someone that manages to do it somehow, and when they are caught, it will spur yet another wave of anti-poor vitriol…

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Arguments for a UBI – The Libertarian

Arguments for a UBI – The Libertarian

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

Freedom from Gouging

Price gouging is a specific type of market failure that occurs when someone’s life is at stake.  As an example, in drought conditions, even though water may quite legitimately be expensive, it is possible for a water seller to make even higher profits than this, due to the desperation of the people in question.  If they had the time to shop around, they might be able to buy water at the (albeit expensive, due to the shortage) market rate, but they do not have time – they are dying of thirst, so would give the water seller the deeds to their house if it meant not dying.  There is a similar problem with money – ultimately in modern society we need money to survive.  It is essential for food, water and shelter, and without it your life is at risk.  People in desperate need of money are willing to do all sorts of things that they ordinarily wouldn’t even consider…

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Arguments for a UBI – The Conservative

Arguments for a UBI – The Conservative

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

Less Bureaucracy, More Responsibility

In modern times, there seems to be a consensus in economically developed countries, that some form of social safety net is called for.  The extent of it may be a matter of significant debate, with conservatives preferring minimal intervention and others desiring more, but it is uncontroversial to say that at some level, one is needed.  From the fact that it can take time to find a new job if one finds oneself unemployed, to the fact that industries change, and people need to update their skill-sets to remain employable, there is a well-accepted need to balance “survival of the fittest” with compassion and dignity.  The intention of this section is not to convince anyone that some level of state assistance is required, as those believing that this is not the case are likely very few in number; but instead to extol the virtues of a Universal Basic Income from a “small government” conservative perspective, over other more mainstream forms of state assistance programs…

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Arguments for a UBI – The Realist

Arguments for a UBI – The Realist

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

Demonstration of Viability for the UK

It is a complaint often made about a Universal Basic Income, that it would be impossible to finance.  Using the UK as an example, I will demonstrate that this is not the case, by estimating the likely actual cost of such a programme, showing that it is in fact no more unrealistic than the system of state benefits in place now.  I have used the UK government’s statistics for the financial demographics of the UK

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Arguments for a UBI – The Accountant

Arguments for a UBI – The Accountant

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

Simple Tax Code

In countries that try to have a progressive tax system, income taxes can be exceedingly complicated.  The tendency is to try not to tax people very much when they are earning less than a certain amount, then to increase the percentage that their income is taxed at, as that income increases.  This is seen as preferable to taxing everyone at the same rate, as although 20% of a £10,000 income is much less than 20% of a £100,000 income, that £2,000 is essential for the first person to be able to eat, whereas the person earning £100,000 could spare a lot more than £20,000 before even noticing the difference…

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Arguments for a Universal Basic Income – Introduction

Arguments for a Universal Basic Income – Introduction

The concept of a Universal Basic Income is one that goes beyond the more general idea of “Benefits” or “Welfare”.  Payments from the government to the poorest in society have long been the norm in developed economies; indeed, whilst it was a novel concept when Sir Thomas More published his “Utopia” in 1516, the following half millennium has seen his arguments become quite mainstream.  He writes:

“Petty larceny isn’t bad enough to deserve the death penalty. And no penalty on earth will stop people from stealing, if it’s their only way of getting food.”

However, most of these payment systems come with some sort of limitation, usually quite reasonable sounding: they may be means tested, so that the less poor you are, the less you get; they may be dependent on how much you have paid into them previously, more like a savings plan or employment insurance; they may not pay anyone that has a job, as these people need it less; or they may require you to spend all of your savings before you receive any payments, as if you have savings, you do not need assistance…

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Two Letter Words

Two Letter Words

Personally, I enjoy playing Scrabble – it is an excellent game. There is a slight problem with it though – it manages to straddle the gulf between language, which is highly flexible, ever changing and more than a little subjective, and competition, which leads people to seek to optimise heavily, bending into unrecognisability any rules that are not laid down in cast iron.

This split personality leads to conflicts, the most obvious one being which dictionary to use. This particular conflict has been neatly resolved in the English language by everyone agreeing to use “Collins Scrabble Words” (CSW, previously known as SOWPODS). Oh wait, that isn’t the case at all – the US, Canada and Thailand use the “Tournament Word List (TWL, derived from Merriam-Webster). Be that as it may, I am going to talk about CSW/SOWPODS here, because I am in the UK…

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Genetic Modification

Genetic Modification

Reading things like this article make me understand why Taleb comes across as so abrasive and frustrated in his books. Anyone saying “we’ve had X for decades, DECADES, and nothing bad has happened, surely this is evidence that it is fine” has completely and absolutely missed the entire reason that heavy tailed distributions are problematic. Say it with me one more time –

Sampling from heavy tailed distributions looks just like sampling from thin tailed distributions until an event in the tail occurs.

We have had the internet for decades, and everyone thought it would usher in a new era of knowledge sharing and democracy. Few predicted that it would so effectively facilitate the death of quality journalism and the rise of populism and fake news…

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Rethinking Education

Rethinking Education

The Blind Leading the Blind

The sizes of classes in schools has been a hot topic for years. Clearly 40 children in a class together don’t get enough instruction time from the teacher, giving rise to calls to invest more heavily in education so that class sizes can be reduced. I am inclined to think that this does not go far enough – it is a sticking plaster over a much deeper problem with the entire system of education which we rely on.

Class sizes even as low as 15-20 still leave the teachers in either a lecturing role, or spending less than half an hour per day with each student one to one.  This results in the vast majority of interactions at schools being between children and other children. Every year, school takes up around 20% of all the waking hours of children (1140/5840 hours), but add to this after school clubs, extra curricular activities and going out to play with friends, it is easy to see that children can spend a majority of their interaction time interacting with other children, rather than adults. This results in children developing their own independent cultures and norms, further distancing themselves from adults and adult interaction (not to mention exacerbating the perception by adults of children as silly and immature)…

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Bayesian Updating

Bayesian Updating

Question

You have a randomly biased coin picked from the uniform distribution U(0,1).  It is flipped 3 times and comes up heads twice and tails once.  What is probability that 4th flip is a head?

This is a question that we can answer using Bayesian Updating, but unlike most simple examples of Bayes Theorem, we are not updating a single probability but an entire probability distribution.  There are many very good explanations of how to apply Bayes Theorem to update a single probability (video, article).  The principle is the same for updating a distribution, but it is a little more involved…

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Combining Rationality and Antifragility

Combining Rationality and Antifragility

Bridging the gap between Traditionalism and Modernism

Traditionalism is manifest in a confidence that the way we have always done things is the best.  Modernism by contrast is a term used to describe the almost monomaniacal application of “scientific principles” to optimise every aspect of life.  Whilst in many ways the opposite of traditionalism, this confidence in the correctness of the approach is something that both modernism and traditionalism very much have in common.  The planned, orderly approach to things that modernism advocated, resulted in both huge advances and huge catastrophes in the ‘50s and ‘60s – huge rockets that could reach the moon, monoculture farming turning large areas of the planet into arid dust bowls, glittering skyscrapers providing homes and office space for thousands of people, sterile grid-based cities devoid of culture or community.  Clearly modernism was not all bad, but the negative consequences were remarkably far-reaching – if we view traditionalism and modernism as opposite ends of a spectrum, can we find a middle, and will this middle allow us to reap the benefits given by both approaches, avoiding the drawbacks of either…

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Maturity – Sophistication vs. Stultification

Maturity – Sophistication vs. Stultification

Maturity shouldn’t mean being boring. Instead it should be an awareness of when it is appropriate to goof off. Often maturity is seen as the ability to remain sombre and unexcitable – this is a great shame. Whilst the ability to remain calm and unflustered is very valuable, being older and more mature should not prevent people from having fun, enjoying life and being spontaneous. The misconception that being mature means that you can’t have any fun is borne out of an over-application of the idea that there are situations where sombreness is appropriate. If you are unable to determine in which situations it is acceptable to be silly, you learn to err on the side of caution, applying a sombre attitude even when it is not warranted…

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Computus – Calculating the Date of Easter

Computus – Calculating the Date of Easter

This may seem like an odd topic, but it is nevertheless quite interesting. Quite aside from any ecclesiastical purposes, it is useful to know when Easter is going to be, as in many countries there are public holidays associated with it. As well as telling you when you might be able to get 16 days off by only using 8 days of leave (or alternatively, telling you when all the places you want to go will be super busy), Easter has significant financial implications too. Supermarkets usually have much higher sales volumes, and of course, banks and the stock market are closed for four days in a row. The calculation of the date of Easter is of such historical importance that it even has its own name – “Computus”.

Lots of businesses use Microsoft Excel for all manner of purposes – often financial. Therefore it would probably be useful to be able to calculate the date of Easter in an Excel formula. Hahaha. Let’s get started shall we…

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Why We Should Vote

Why We Should Vote

I have recently been rather vexed by intelligent people making arguments against participating in the democratic process. After having several conversations, and reading several articles espousing the benefits of voter apathy, I can contain myself no longer, and must write down my counter argument for the benefit of my own sanity. For those who already agree that voting is important, hopefully this serves as a useful range of perspectives, but for anyone that disagrees, I hope that my frustration with the arguments against voting does not seep through too much, and put people off…

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What is Rationality?

What is Rationality?

The Rationalist Movement, embodied by communities such as LessWrong and SlateStarCodex uses the term Rationality in a very particular way. As such, it is useful to be able to express this meaning to people, when trying to describe what the movement is, and what it is trying to accomplish. On a personal level, I have struggled greatly to adequately explain to other people not already familiar with the community and its values, the core of what Rationality is, and why they should care. There are several places trying to explain this but all are quite long-winded…

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