Grieg is Lovely

My very favourite piece of music for the piano is Wedding-Day at Troldhaugen (if I am ever engaged to a woman who refuses to have that piece played at some point in the wedding or reception, I'm calling the wedding off), and Grieg is most famous for the Peer Gynt suite (perhaps more cynically, specifically for Morning Mood and In the Hall of the Mountain King), but there's so much more out there. At this very moment I am listening to Twelve Songs, Opus 33. Varen (Last Spring), but really you could listen to almost anything from his lyric pieces or Norwegian Peasant Dances and just feel content with life.

Worthy of special mention: Arietta, the Holberg suite, Haugelat (Tune from the Fairy Hill), Du Fatter ei Bolvergenes evige Gang (The Poet's Heart), and probably a whole load more which I have yet to discover.

Unfortunately my book of Grieg pieces is currently at home in Birmingham - my brother is actually learning pieces from it - but I've asked for a new copy for Christmas. I'm now actually slightly hoping not to receive a copy, just so that I have an excuse to buy myself an even bigger book of Grieg pieces.

Perspective on Anarcho-Capitalism

One way I often like think about the goal of anarcho-capitalists is not so much that we wish to abolish government, as to create a free and competitive market in governance. Many functions of the modern state - defence, legal service, healthcare, disaster insurance, education - will continue to exist in the absence of the state providing civilisation remains. I personally think that it is unlikely that these goods really need to be provided by the same organisation, or even that it is efficient for this to be the case, but hey! It's possible!

Besides which, if someone wants to live in a socialist society then why shouldn't they, so long as they don't force anyone else to be part of that society? I don't personally want any government above me, but if people truly do want governments then why, in a state of nature, should they be prevented from banding together and forming one above themselves?

Even if you don't have a government, then I think it is pretty much inevitable that one will be subject to rules. Rules are not inherently necessary for a stable society, but I think it is fair to say that:

• A stable society requires people to have the ability to plan ahead.
• For people to be able to plan ahead, it is necessary for behaviour to be predictable within certain bounds.
• These bounds must either be determined ahead of time in some way - essentially becoming rules - or must be the same over time.
• While rules are not metaphysically necessary for behavioural norms to persist, they are an obvious and usually successful way of achieving this.

Sets of rules and enforcement procedures - governances, one might say - would in an anarcho-capitalist society be the products of governance firms, or governments. We already have these governments, but unfortunately the market for them is neither free nor competitive. There are massive costs to switching between providers, the link between payment by consumers and performance by firms is virtually non-existent, and there is little to no possibility for a firm to fail and go under, freeing up resources for a competitor.

This, along with some generally accepted empirical premises, should lead us to a few conclusions.

Firstly, since free and competitive markets are possible, it is likely that a stable anarcho-capitalist society is possible. There may be some difference between the current products of government and other products currently produced by functioning markets which makes this particular competitive market impossible, but then the onus is on the statist to demonstrate this. I may at some point write a debunking of various potential arguments of this type, but I'm rather too tired and alcohol-laden to do it properly right now.

Second, since the vast majority of new products in competitive markets - somewhere in the region of 90% - fail, we should expect most prospective governances in a anarcho-capitalist system also to fail. If a firm offers a bundle of goods (we'll say personal protection, protection of property and prosecution of any trespassers against the individual) for £2500 per annum and another offers the same or better services for £2000 per annum, then that first firm will fail as surely as we are enriched by international trade.

Given this explicit admission that I expect 90% of rights-protection agencies (or DROs) to fold within a few years of starting up, do I regard anarcho-capitalism as a terrible system? No. You see, there is rather a difference between failure for a governance and failure for an existing state. For a governance, failure simply means that it fails to provide the same value for money as its competitors - it is perfectly possible that purchasing a firm's services would make a consumer massively better off (in terms of consumer surplus) and yet the firm is still not efficient enough to survive. However, a state possesses a monopoly on violence and, more to the point, people are forced to pay for its services whether or not they consume these services. Hence, failure for a state means not only that it is failing to provide value for money, but it is producing so little value for the money which it extracts that people are willing to take on severe personal risk and cost  in order to overthrow this state.

I believe that, subject to the market test of anarcho-capitalism, almost every state currently in existence would fail. Hence, I believe that anarcho-capitalism provides a reasonable prospect for a better society. That said, if a small group of people were to form a single anarcho-capitalist society tomorrow, I would be sceptical of its chance of success. What I would wish to see would be numerous groups, each trying to create their utopian vision of the perfect state and society, with those which succeed to a greater extent attracting immigrants and imitators. That, I believe, is the way in which the truly good society is to be achieved.

External World Realism!

My view on perception of the external world for some time was "The fact that we see the world in a certain way is evidence for it being that way. However, there is no way to actually know we are not being deceived in some way. That said, there's no particular reason to believe that the external world would be some particular way which does not correspond to our perception of it, so it is most rational to act according beliefs based upon what we actually see." To an extent I still believe that, but this morning I was re-listening to Map and Territory when it suddenly occurred to me:

Any theory of how the external world is, must not only explain how the world is, but also why we explain it precisely as we do.

That means that any complete description of the external world must contain within it a complete description of what we perceive to be the external world. Hence, by Occam's Razor based on Solomonoff Induction, a "naive" view of the external world, that it is as we perceive it to be, must be the favoured explanation of how it actually is.

Apologies if this seems either obvious or arcane, but it means a significant amount for my confidence in my ability to know the world.

Romantic Things, Like Music and Art

On Friday, I finally (after more than a year of intending to do so) visited the Lowry Gallery in Salford. It was a fairly long walk, but it was definitely worth it. Salford Quays is a remarkably pleasant place in the sunshine. I got there around noon, had half of my lunch while checking on the current position in the World Chess Championship, and then started wandering around. The gallery itself is - well, not really small per se, but underwhelming as compared to the size of the building housing it. The artworks are an odd bunch - a mixture of urban landscapes, sketches of people, and a handful of miscellaneous other paintings and drawings. On the whole I enjoyed them. Oh, and I'm still a complete sucker for seascapes.

After that, I had a brief look round the Imperial War Museum North. Perhaps other people would find it interesting, but the museum only covers the 20th-21st Centuries and I studied quite enough of that in my History GCSE and A-level. Following this, I meandered around the Quays for a while, failed to find a bus that I was confident would take me to the city centre, caught a tram to Piccadilly Gardens instead, and got the bus back from there.

On Saturday evening, I went to a concert played by a string orchestra and a brass band at the university. It was an interesting assortment of pieces, none of which would have seen the light of day before 1900. Two of the pieces were premiers of pieces written by students of composition at the Uni, one of whom is a friend of mine - hence how I heard about the concert. I believe a recording of the piece should be appearing online at some point, most likely on YouTube, but it isn't there yet. It was a very intense piece entitled Starmaker Ceremonial and was inspired by the passage in Job when God speaks to Job:

31 “Can you bind the chains[b] of the Pleiades?
    Can you loosen Orion’s belt?
32 Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons[c]
    or lead out the Bear[d] with its cubs?
33 Do you know the laws of the heavens?
    Can you set up God’s[e] dominion over the earth?

34 “Can you raise your voice to the clouds
    and cover yourself with a flood of water?
35 Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
    Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?

The strange electronic sound, if memory serves, had something to do with a recording of the sound made by a star. I enjoyed it rather a lot, but it's not the kind of music I'd want to have on in the background. It's very much concert music which demands your attention, as opposed to easy listening or jazz which can easily be listened to while concentrating on something else.

UPDATE: a recording of the piece is now available here. Also, I originally forgot to give this post a title, so it now has one.

6 Points of Basic Economics and Simple Logic

While browsing a far-left website I came across an article entitled "6 Things Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism". The article was so stupid and so easy to refute that I thought I'd do so quickly here.

#1: The Population Can't Stop Growing under Capitalism
Sure it can. If the relative cost of raising children rises - which one would expect to happen if wages are rising - then the number of babies being born will fall. They even disprove their own point: "And, as a shrinking population ages -as it did in Japan – there is a severe shortage of workers to maintain basic services for the aging population. In the case of Japan, they had to import large amount of workers, but this is clearly not a globally viable strategy."  So the fact that, once migrants are ignored, population falls in certain capitalist countries is supposed to be evidence that population can't stop growing under population?

It is of course possible that I'm misinterpreting them and they mean not that it physically can't, merely that it would be very bad - that the population can't be allowed to stop growing. This is at least supported by what they write, quoting from two other people that "Negative or zero population growth can pose serious problems for a capitalist society always in search of new markets for its goods and requiring a continual expansion of the labor force and of the relative surplus population of the unemployed in order to meet the needs of production and profits." It's still nonsense, though. If people are getting richer, then they can spend more upon goods without requiring a larger population. Furthermore, have they never heard of Creative Destruction? In the free market loads of firms go out of business, and this is a good thing because it frees up resources for the firms which are acting efficiently. That's where new human resources come from.

#2: The Economy Can't Stop Growing under Capitalism
You say that like it's a bad thing! Perhaps they mean that growth implies consuming resources and that resources are limited. However, this is also factually wrong. There are two ways of achieving economic growth, which are a) to use more resources and b) to use the same volume of resources more efficiently. While we have spare resources, as is the case at the moment, we will use both methods of growth. If a resource is being depleted, then supply will fall and therefore the price will rise, which firstly stops growth through greater resource consumption and secondly greatly increases the returns to attempting to grow by increasing efficiency and by finding alternative resources.

As an example: consider the whale. In the 19th Century whales were caught and killed for their oil. They were almost driven to extinction. Thus, they became harder to catch and whaling became less profitable. People were on the lookout for other sources of oil, so when it was discovered in the ground there was a very quick move across to this new oil, and the practice of whaling ended pretty much completely.

#3: Capitalism Can't Plan Ahead
As David Friedman recently pointed out, this is pretty much diametrically wrong. If I have an asset then I will wish to protect it for the long term in order to sell it in the future. This rests on my being assured that I will keep possession of the the asset until the time I sell it, and thus on a secure system of property rights.

They talk of "natural limits" to the size of particular markets and assert that these are ignored. The most obvious limit is simply consumer demand, and that just isn't something which can be planned years in advance, especially for an individual market. Not by businesses, not by the state, not by any mortal who has ever lived or will live. This is something where you want a short-termist, responsive supplier of goods. Like, for example, free market firms whose profitability depends upon their responding correctly. If they mean things like global warming, then this is nothing to do with planning, simply a matter of externalities. Go read some beginner economics.

#4: It's Not in Human Nature
So what? Plenty of things aren't in human nature, this doesn't mean that they're bad (e.g. carpentry, computer programming, understanding and applying Bayes' Theorem). Plenty of things are in human nature, this doesn't mean they're good (e.g. desire for political power, nepotism, promiscuity).

#5: Environmental Degradation Disproportionately Hurts the Poor
What does this have to do with capitalism? This is a (dubious) claim about Environmental Degradation (which I suspect would worst affect major landowners, most of whom are pretty rich), which is a completely separate thing from capitalism. Perhaps you believe there is a link between the two, but you could at least say that then.

#6: The Jevons Paradox: Sustainability isn't Sustainable
The claim here is that increasing efficiency of use of resources actually leads to greater consumption of resources, because the lower cost of consumption induces people to consume more.

This is a matter of basic microeconomics.

This is a basic graph plotting the Price of a good (Y-axis) against the Quantity bought and sold (x-axis) with normal demand (that is, the higher the price, the less people buy of it) and supply (the higher the price, the more of it people are willing to produce and sell) marked by the lines D and S1. Price and quantity are in equilibrium at Q1P1, so that an equal amount of the good is being bought and sold. An increase in efficiency is an decrease in cost of production and hence an increase in supply, from S1 to S2. This leads to a new equilibrium at Q2P2. More of the good is being consumed at a lower price.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the entire cost of the good is in non-renewable resources. (This is a very reasonable assumption for our purposes, since you can always assume that the scale of the P-axis is non-linear and that the labour costs etc are below the line). Then the decrease in resources consumed due to higher efficiency is the area coloured purple, and the increase in resources consumed due to the lower cost is the area marked green. They are claiming that the green area will be larger, apparently in all cases. If they do indeed believe that it is always the case, then this claim is clearly wrong, as this graphs with different equations for supply and demand shows.

The efficiency gains massively outweigh the increased consumption. Alternatively, one can imagine a case where the increased consumption would massively outweigh the increased efficiency. Ultimately this all comes down to what economists call the Price Elasticity of Demand, which measures the relationship between a change in the price of a good and the change in the quantity demanded of that good.

PED = (% change in quantity demanded) / (% change in price)

Thus, a higher PED implies a greater tendency for consumers to increase or reduce consumption of a good in response to a change in price. If PED=-1, then total consumer expenditure on a good will remain constant following a price change; if PED>-1, then a price cut will decrease consumer expenditure, and demand is said to be inelastic; conversely if PED<-1, then a price cut will increase consumer expenditure, and demand is said to be elastic. Hence we can see that the cases where greater efficiency leads to greater consumption of non-renewables will be those where demand is elastic. So their claim that greater efficiency will lead to greater consumption relies on the empirical claim that, in most situations, the PED for goods creating pollution is high.

The problem with this is that there are plenty of polluting goods with low PEDs. For example, fuel to heat houses (when prices of essentials rise, people tend to just grin and bear it rather than freeze) and to power cars (the car itself is a very large part of the cost of driving, and road taxes are at least noticeable. Both are (almost) fixed costs, which remain constant regardless of how much driving you're doing; hence, by the time people decide that driving isn't worth the costs for the benefit it brings, the benefits are probably fairly small). Indeed, most transport has fairly large fixed costs - aircraft, ships, etc - so a rising cost of fuel is unlikely to massively affect the use of transport.

What about their empirical example? Well, this was in the middle of the industrial revolution, so it's hardly surprising that coal usage was increasing. Really, an intelligent lower-sixth economics student could have worked out all of this.

By faith and not by sight?

There's a song called By Faith which we frequently sing at Church. It's a great fun song, with an upbeat tune and a very catchy chorus. You can see the original version here, although I'm personally more keen on the live version at church. The chorus goes:

We will stand as children of the promise,
We will fix our eyes on you our souls' reward,
'Til the race is finished and the work is done
We'll walk be faith and not by sight.

Not by sight? We're going to believe without evidence? That's ridiculous. Evidence is precisely what makes it reasonable to hold a belief. There is no virtue to be gained by holding specific beliefs unless they are true, and if they are true then there should be plenty of evidence for them. I highly recommend C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, and in particular this chapter to any Christian who thinks that "faith" is enough for a belief in our God.

What about the song? I've taken to singing "by faith, not just by sight." which is good enough for myself but I don't think it's good enough in general. People are going to be influenced by what they are singing with the Church's fervent endorsement, and if they're learning anti-epistemological habits from it then in the long run that's not good for either truth or for the church. The less Christians feel the need to justify our beliefs, the less effort we will put into investigating our beliefs. If we conclude that Christianity is probably false, then we should shrug, say "Any belief which can be destroyed by truth, should be." and move on. If we conclude that it is probably true, then hallelujah! Let's go out and convert everyone, surer and better-equipped than ever we were before!

Response to Huemer on Free Will

Michael Huemer has an interesting article claiming to prove the existence of free will. His argument runs roughly as follows:

1. We should refrain from believing falsehoods. (Premise)
2. Whatever should be done, can be done. (Premise)
3. If hard determinism is true, then whatever can be done, is done. (Premise)
4. I believe that Free Will exists. (Premise)
5. We can refrain from believing falsehoods. (From 1,2)
6. If hard determinism is true, then we refrain from believing falsehoods. (From 3,5)
7. If hard determinism is true, then Free Will exists. (From 4,6)
8. Free Will exists. (7 implies that hard determinism is false)

Premise 1 shall examine in a moment.

Premise 2 is the "should implies can" principle, the idea that one cannot be expected to do anything which they are incapable of doing.

Premise 3 is, like 2, undeniably true. Determinism is the idea that things could only have gone as they have gone, and can only go in one way.

Premise 4 is something we'll have to take his word for. However, as it so happens I (on balance, it's far from something I'm certain of) also believe in free will, so we'll take it as given.

The remaining steps follow through naturally.

Premise 1, however, I believe, contains an assumption of free will. Why? Because if free will does not exist, then we have severe reason to doubt the existence of moral responsibility for our actions. If so, it is hard to see how we "should" do things. The claim that we "should" refrain from believing falsehoods therefore seems to contain the implicit assumption that we have free will. Huemer's argument therefore relies upon circular logic.

However, this does not make the argument useless. It provides a very strong case against the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility.