I first encountered the suggestion that empathy is, or should be, the basis of morality in a tiny little discussion group many years ago. It struck me as a rather odd idea, and I dismissed it glibly as lacking any principle. And that, in summary, is what this note is about.
The concept that empathy is important has filtered through to news production and I see it in commentary on social issues and decision-making. For example, this article about American social support:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-wheres-the-empathy.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article&_r=0
This is a moving piece about a man whose life fell apart and eventually ended early from entirely preventable causes, despite him living in a supposedly civilised society. But its call, its title, is 'where is the empathy?', and its final comment is asking you to have empathy for people like the man. In this article, which is merely the most recent in a line of reports, news items and commentaries, the link between empathy and morality isn't so explicit. But I still think that calling for empathy is a pernicious and ultimately counter-productive act.

First of all, it's worth mentioning that empathy is a widely-accepted basis for morality. Moral philosophers long ago realised that arbitrary codes of conduct supposedly vouchsafed by God(s) are difficult to justify or compare on that basis alone, and have sought other bases for moral systems. The typical approach is a wonderful example of a circular argument (begging the question): a moral philosopher has an intuition that something is wrong, creates a moral rule that declares that this thing is wrong in order to meet his intuition, and thereby claims to have reached his intuition as a conclusion when actually it was a premise.
Of course, if the moral rules all cohere then there is indeed a system of morality that can be used, but there are innumerable systems that are internally consistent. What most of modern philosophy does, as far as I can tell, is to use an entirely arbitrary method of deciding which rules to support and propose. One's own intuitions are barely better than divine fiat, especially given that divine fiat is basically someone else's own intuitions with some extra stories built around them.
So I'm not in any mood to accept arguments from the supposed authority of the academic field of moral philosophy.

On the other hand, what I'm complaining about isn't academic; it's in popular media. I do understand the attitude that thinks that 'if only someone understood the situation better, that person would be more generous'. I dispute the implicit assertion that empathy is the key to understanding, or necessary for treating someone well, or fairly. I don't want to get into an argument about other possibilities for the complete basis and structure of morality, so I hope to show here that using empathy as the intuitively sensible basis leads to some counter-intuitive results that make it internally inconsistent. It's incoherent nonsense, and I want to demonstrate that with some examples.

Next, let's define empathy. According to Wikipedia, it's the capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from within the other person's frame of reference: i.e the capacity to place oneself in another's shoes. But I think it's popularly used to include vicariously experiencing another's feelings. Empathy is feeling what another feels; sympathy is understanding intellectually what another feels, or feeling sad about the bad experiences of another person.
This contrast is informative: people are arguing that it is emotion and not rational thought that gives us morality. I accept that engaging people's empathy is often an effective way to encourage good behaviour, but I don't think that the empathy itself either justifies the behaviour or defines what is good. It's simply a motivating force that offers no insight into how good or bad an action is. The simple fact is that our emotions can deceive us, just as our intuitions and instincts can be wrong.
I should have noted all the examples over the last few years, but here are some:
Spock, in the updated Star Trek franchise, is not the main character he once was. Whereas in the original series he was an aspirational character, with a delicate balance struck between his powerful intellect and Kirk's supposed leadership, creativity and ability to bluff, in the updated film franchise we are explicitly shown that emotions trump reason; that pure intellect is not what makes us human. I can understand why: society has moved on, and we no longer feel as close to the barbaric past, with a need to distinguish ourselves from it by looking to a rationalist future. For centuries humans defined themselves by what they could do and animals couldn't. Now we convince ourselves of superiority by trumpeting the greatness of what we can do and our machines can't. Further, emotions are universal: everyone experiences them, and in that respect everyone is equal to others, whereas we do rank people by intellect. Basing humanity on emotionality is a very democratic basis for defining ourselves. No-one will feel inferior when we decide that emotions are all that are required, and are superior to other aspects of humanity. Instead of a barbaric past, people feel the need to reject a cold, unforgiving present run by systems and machines. I would hazard a guess that it's possible to have a warm, friendly society that nonetheless uses reason and intellect to make decisions, but that possibility isn't in people's minds.
So we claim that emotions are the defining feature of humanity. And it's blatantly untrue. We named ourselves 'homo sapiens' because we are distinct from our ancestors and other animals because we can think. We have the most powerful minds on the planet. Other animals quite clearly experience emotions and instincts, but no species has proven that it can think abstractly in the way we can. If morality, which is a different set of rules from the state of nature, can be based on one human attribute, it must be the one attribute that distinguishes us from the rest of nature, not one we share with other animals.

Of course, one film doesn't necessarily represent popular culture. What else is there? Well, we recently had an outcry over the footballer Ched Evans who was found guilty of rape, served his sentence and was due to return to football. Amongst all the fuss about bad role models (this role model fuss is mostly a waste of time; I prefer to encourage people to plough their own furrow, or not get stuck in a rut at all, rather than imitate someone else) I saw someone advocating empathy for the victim(s). In particular, many commentators were angry that he continued to protest his innocence and thought that he should not be allowed to get away with it. We were told to think of how the victim felt that her attacker could return to the high life with no approbation.
See the BBC summary here:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30699017
I haven't examined the details of what happened myself, but I will for the moment assume that the courts were right, and that he did indeed rape her. The courts found him guilty of a crime and gave him a punishment as mandated in English law. What exactly is the problem? The assumption is that he's a nasty man, hard to empathise with, whereas the woman was an innocent victim. But he has served his time, as mandated by law. Do we really want to argue that criminals should never become part of society after an offence? That's not very fair to all the reformed drug addicts, childhood criminals or passionate people who genuinely regret their crimes and want to escape their past.
Of course, a major problem seemed to be that he protests his innocence. Are we going to make people's beliefs a crime now? I fully understand the incredible frustration of self-righteous people who are utterly wrong. I spent a great deal of my life with a father at home, and bullies at school, who firmly believed (and probably believe still) that they were the saintly heroes of the world, and their occasional experiences of justice or sense were unfair. But our laws don't allow for thoughtcrime. There might be some room in sentencing and parole decisions for whether a prisoner shows genuine regret and contrition, but Mr Evans has served his time. People who want to punish him want to break the law in a specific case because they have heard about it, and they want to punish someone who seems unpleasant to them. They hate the idea that he can go back to a high-paying job and earn more than his victim. I agree that it seems unjust that he should earn so much. But the same applies to vast numbers of sportsmen (sportswomen don't tend to get paid much); these are people who often demonstrate severe character flaws and show little virtue beyond the narrow ability at sport.

Perhaps we should change the law, or sentencing guidelines, so that rapists such as he get more severe punishment. Perhaps we should somehow prevent footballers, or anyone, earning thousands of times as much as an average person. But we should not treat one man differently from all others. That is, intuitively, unfair and unjust.

What other examples are there? One that has come up quite regularly is debate about cancer drugs. Cancer drugs are invariably expensive, and new ones don't necessarily offer much. The pharmaceutical industry has run out of ideas and has already done all the easy things to find chemicals with major health benefits, and so it is making small changes or finding slight variations of chemical composition in already-established drugs to get small improvements. And it charges a lot more money for these 'new' drugs. Given concerns about publication bias or even biased research it's not clear that even these small improvements in effectiveness exist, but let's assume that they do.
We regularly see news stories about an unfortunate individual with cancer who wants some new drug but has had it refused because it is too expensive. The NHS has a limited amount of money and must judge cost-effectiveness. Some drugs achieve a level of effectiveness where NICE, the organisation that makes these decisions, hasn't decreed that the drug should never be used and allows local hospitals to decide for themselves. So sometimes we see stories about the postcode lottery that means that this cancer patient will suffer and/or die but others won't.
This hyperbole is stupid, as most of these drugs merely offer a tiny extra chance of surviving or just an extra month of life. But empathy makes people upset at the injustice of this person missing out on life when there are more opportunities to save the person. Empathy doesn't make us think of all the people whose lives would be lost or who would suffer if we took the money from their treatment in order to fund cancer care. Because we don't see the stories of other suffering people we don't think about how cancer drug money might alleviate their suffering, whatever form it might take.

We also regularly see a story about a dead or murdered child. I saw a story recently about a runaway truck that killed a four-year-old girl and two men and injured the girl's grandmother. The headlines and main photos were about the young girl; the men got little captions elsewhere. One of the man had just got married; the other had a family depending on him. But the tragedy was apparently the death of a child barely old enough to think clearly, with no lasting friendships, no dependents and little effort invested in her. People die every day, but I suppose maybe one story has to be the story to publish. So if this was the story, and all the other deaths just happened not to be involved, why were the adults less important? Are we sure that some human lives are more valuable than others?
My guess, although I might be wrong, is that everyone can empathise with the idea of a life cut short. Everyone can imagine their own life cut short back when they were young, and the things that they've already experienced that would not have happened. It's harder to empathise with someone who has taken a different path in life.

Of course, someone might say that we simply need more empathy; we need to learn to have empathy for everyone, including those who aren't currently in our thoughts. My examples are of empathy based on anecdote, not on full data, but if we could be aware of all the information, empathy would work properly. If my examples are simply cases of misplaced or insufficient empathy, why is some people's empathy misdirected or insufficient? If empathy needs enhancement through careful consideration, is it not the rational consideration that is the key to moral action, not the empathy that directed people the wrong way? If empathy isn't working properly but is the basis for morality, how did we define what 'working properly' is?
We defined morality first, then saw that empathy wasn't getting there, so we saw the flaw in relying on empathy as it currently is. That must mean that empathy isn't the basis for morality, or it couldn't possibly give a different result.

Not convinced yet? Let's try a different tack. Is a dog worth more than a human life? Is a teddy bear? We can form bonds not only with other people, but with pets and inanimate objects. Most children have a toy or blanket that means a lot to them, and most of us have experienced the anthropomorphisation of something, when we ascribe it a character and feelings. We don't want to hurt the feelings of our toy!
Some people form a bond with an invisible friend, their home, their country or an AI on the computer. But although we feel empathy for these things, we are deceived, because they don't experience the emotions that we feel on their behalf. A teddy bear has no emotions, and nor does a country. If empathy is the basis for morality, then we must value these things as if they had emotions that they do not, simply because empathy tells us to. Of course, if empathy needs to be tempered with thought, then, as before, we've defined morality first, and then seen that empathy leads us to the wrong conclusions. Yet again, it's clear that empathy does not define morality at all; it is morality that defines what empathy we ought to be acting on, and what we ought to feel empathy for.

Of course, philosophers haven't got it entirely wrong. Empathy often leads us to what seem like good actions. That's because we often define 'good' by reference to the effects on other people, and empathy makes us value other people's experiences. However, empathy is a blunt tool and misses some people out, and includes some things that aren't people. In the terms of Daniel Kahneman, empathy is 'thinking fast'; it's an evolutionary shortcut that is often right but which sane and rational humans should aim to replace with precise and well-defined rules.
Empathy is a shortcut for thinking about others. Empathy is feeling about others, and it comes naturally without any effort. That helps ensure that people actually do it, but doesn't make it more likely to find the truth. The amount of effort involved has no effect on being right (which is why I didn't like the idea of having a lot of best effort prizes at school and one actual prize). What people ought to say when touting empathy as the key to good behaviour is courtesy, thoughtfulness or politeness. These all involve thinking about other people. It takes effort to think about other people, whether it's the possibility of someone behind you on a narrow path wanting to get past or a married man who was run over by a truck. It takes effort to be a good person, to function in society with other people.
That's a hard message. People want to imagine that they can breeze through life doing their own thing, and people hate being expected to think about more things. A few extra things to consider all the time costs a lot of effort, and I understand that. The stress of balancing all sorts of considerations is not proportionate to the amount of time it takes to act on those considerations. And in crowded societies with millions of people, there are a lot of other people to consider. It's a lot easier to cut people up on the road because as a road-user you have the right to be using it. It's easy to scan a news story and feel sad about another small child... and easy to support a campaign to increase child protection as a consequence. It's easy to bully the person who doesn't tug on your heartstrings if it makes people laugh who you do want to impress.
It's hard to be courteous all the time, even to faceless strangers who have no hold on us. It's hard to grasp that perhaps children are harmed no more often than previously, or than adults. It's hard to do cost=benefit analyses and actively try to think of what else child protection money might be spent on. But maybe that money will come from child healthcare or education and isn't necessary.

I do understand all this. But 'easy' isn't 'right'. And every time a well-meaning person invokes empathy, he's telling everyone to value feeling over thought, and he's telling people that being right is easy; it's merely a question of listening to your instincts. I think that choosing to be thoughtless despite our abilities is positively wrong. Do you think?

The value of marketing

Our whole system of judging how prosperous we are is based on GDP. There are a huge variety of criticisms of GDP, and I don't need to rehash them here with no extra commentary; you can search for them yourself.
The point about GDP is that it's a measure of activity, and it assumes that any activity is useful. We assume this because economists have decreed that in perfect markets people all choose to do the things that make them happier and create wealth, because they know exactly what to do and how to do it. Therefore no-one will do a useless activity, because it won't have any value to anyone else; and if something does have value to someone else, then it is by definition not useless.
In essence, the fact that someone pays for something means, to an economist, that that something must have value; and if no-one will pay for something, then it has no value.

Sadly, humans are not perfect, and we do not necessarily have enough insight to know what matters to us and what will make us happy, and we don't have the ability or time to peer into the future and work out what things we will need or not need to be happy then, and plan accordingly.
We are flawed beings who can be deceived, can be wrong and can simply not eve know that there's a question to be answered, right or wrong.

In a very well-known example, a natural disaster can increase GDP by creating work to be done repairing whatever was damaged. Some modern economists have a counter-argument, which is that it won't increase GDP, because the money spent on repairs would otherwise have been spent anyway, but on other things of more value. Economists therefore, in order to avoid the ridiculous notion that a disaster is beneficial, agree that some expenditure can be wasteful. In the context of recovering from a disaster, repairs are more necessary than whatever items they replace, but they are objectively less preferable than there having been no disaster, as proven by people's preferences beforehand.
People's preferences, after a disaster, have been altered such that they suddenly prefer to buy repairs (say, a new roof after a bad storm, or a new carpet after a flood) where before they might have bought a faster PC or some exciting new gadget. However, we can legitimately compare the situation that would have happened had there been no disaster to interfere with their preferences with the situation that did occur, and we judge which is better using the prior set of preferences.
We assume that the initial set of spending plans was optimal, but that it required everything the person already had to remain as it was. Any losses are sub-optimal.

So far, so simple. That's the world of basic economic theory, phrased in my words. What's the problem? The problem, as I've told people for a very long time, is marketing. The justification for marketing is that is helps spread information; it contributes to the assumption of 'perfect information' that I mentioned previously as an important assumption behind basic economic models.
By justifying marketing this way we implictly admit that the market is flawed; if there were already perfect information then we wouldn't need a process to spread information. If people don't have the information to make optimal decisions, then using activity as a proxy for value becomes foolish (and there are plenty more criticisms of GDP and the assumptions behind promoting unfettered markets).
If we can't point to markets as accurately reflecting people's true desires and wants, because they are flawed, perhaps we need some other definition of value. That's why we still have philosophers and their corrupted cousins, politicians. Allowing perfect markets to dictate the shape of our society is one possible ideology, based on a liberal ideal that everyone should be free to pursue his own interests without interference or prejudice. I have issues with even perfect markets (which do not exist) dictating the shape of society, because markets and interactions of people seem to follow standard patterns in which some people become very disadvantaged, others become grossly wealthy and these differences perpetuate themselves across generations and friendships. This directly conflicts with the underlying liberal principle that everyone should be free to pursue his interests as much as possible, because those who end up stuck in poverty are not free to pursue their interests. There is an inherent injustice in allowing such an outcome, which we must address with various redistributive and regulatory policies if we are to stay true to the underlying justification for having markets in the first place.

The most popular alternatives to that liberal ideal are ones that involve some level of compulsion; theocracies involve compelling everyone to comply with the religious laws of the state religion, whether they believe in the religion or not (and claiming not to believe can be a crime as well). Less extreme alternatives do involve some level of enforcement of independent judgements of value, often called 'the nanny state'.
We therefore have no perfect system. In perfect free markets, we get a sad divergence from equal opportunities and in nanny states through to theocracies and dictatorships we have some level of compulsion preventing dissenters from achieving what would be of greatest value to them. Even western countries therefore end up striking a balance, in which the state does forbid, regulate or mandate activities beyond those which maintain the market.

Incidentally, the way that some economists abdicate responsibility for determining what is of value is often perceived by humanities students as immoral in itself. Our society necessarily must choose a system by which we conduct our affairs, and the consequences of that system are ones we have chosen and must therefore support. We cannot legitimately say that just because the consequences of markets are emergent properties of complex systems we have no responsibility for them, or that because the consequences can't be traced to any one decision again there is no responsibility for them. Markets and their outcomes are one ideal that can be criticised even if (especially if?) the outcomes are unpredictable and uncontrollable.

But, to return to natural disasters, I concluded that we can assume that people's preferences before the disaster were correct and that the disaster, by inducing expenditure on other things, set the economy back (and by implication, human wellbeing or value). Alternatively, if long-term studies of natural disasters are to be believed, our preferences typically allocate too few resources to upgrading existing infrastructure, and the trigger of a natural disaster can increase long-term growth by forcing us to invest in things that need it. In that case, our initial preferences were wrong (i.e did not actually lead to our greatest happiness, as measured by the value exchanged in the economy)

I know perfectly well that our preferences are wildly inappropriate for achieving our own goals, even isolated from others. When we combine our preferences with those of others to create interactions that we do not foresee, we simply add even more to the problem. For example, most people will agree that it would be wonderful if all children in our society could have a fair chance at 'making it' in life, however that child defines it. But at the same time, most parents will do their best to bypass meritocratic systems that guard success. Families will pay for extra tuition, cadge jobs from friends or simply support children through unpaid internships, all of which destroys a system that otherwise would be more fair. When one person does this, the system looks to be fair for everyone else, so things are still alright, but when everyone does it as much as they can then success becomes a function of your family's wealth and connections.
The famous examples of this are thought experiments like the prisoners' dilemma or the tragedy of the commons, in which individuals combine to act in ways that harm them because individually they think that they benefit from the action. Kant's categorical imperative goes some way to fixing this, but people prefer to be hypocritical than principled when they think about these things at all.

Not only are our preferences poor in isolation, and exceptionally poor when combined with the preferences of others, but they are also hugely malleable. And this, despite all the waffle I've already written, is my focus for today. Human happiness seems to depend on unmeasured things such as inherent character (for example, I'm perenially discontented), good company, friendship, family and, importantly, circumstances.
People can be happy in Africa; people were happy in mediaeval times and previously, and yet the modern western world has GDPs so much greater that one would expect us to be in permanent nirvana. Humans adapt to what they see around them. People who become paralysed rate themselves, after 6 months, as happy as those who won the lottery six months ago. They will live in very different worlds, and objectively we can look at the two and know that we prefer one a lot more than the other if we were to choose, but most people live their lives dealing with friends, family, colleagues and personal challenges, and those can be good or bad in any situation.
Given this basic summary of a very interesting branch of psychology, it's obvious that the situation that would make us most unhappy is one in which the world we see around us presents us with things that we would like but cannot achieve or own, since we adapt to be happy with what we see.

Does that sounds familiar? That's what our version of capitalism does to us. Not only are we presented with super-rich idols whose lifestyles we can never hope to emulate, but we are constantly bombarded with possible new purchases from companies desperate to gouge a little extra money from us. If marketing and advertising didn't work, it wouldn't be a successful business. Marketing companies market themselves on their ability to create demand for products and services. A tiny fraction of marketing is telling people that the need they knew they had can be satisfied best with a product they didn't already know about. That's the economic justification for marketing; that it spreads information, making the market more like the economic models that have 'perfect information' for market participants.
But marketing is not about information. It's about creating needs that people did not previously have. Even without the subtle or the obvious manipulation, the simple fact that people are exposed to such an enormous quantity of possible goods probably makes them unhappy, as they can't buy them all!
The market economy is predicated on the assumption that people are machines with unchanging, transitive preferences, but that's not true. Our preferences change, and we always have more preferences. We always want something else once we have what we previously wanted.
Advertising expenditure alone (ignoring the vast amount of other things that go into the marketing industry) in the US in 2013 was $171.05bn. About this much was agreed by another source too. The US economy was $16,768bn in 2013. So far, a mere 1% of GDP. But paying 1% on every transaction is a big deal!
It's not just advertising expenditure that matters. What about all those things people are persuaded to buy that they don't need to?
Fashion is a pet hate of mine. Fashion is a sub-category of planned obsolescence and applies not only to clothing, but many products. Different styles are an enormous part of marketing and utterly superfluous. Apple, a company that hardly needs an introduction, has enough cash reserves to buy small countries and recently announced the biggest ever quarterly profit in American history of £18bn. Apple is renowned for making sleekly-styled products that often don't do much more than the previous one; creating demand through style is much easier than through substance (a topic I have much more to talk about). Not only does it hoover up over 90% of the profits on handsets in the market and not pay much tax, but it has released a new handset almost every year.
How long do handsets last? That's a tricky question. People seem to be much more careless with their phones than I am, and I don't feel the need to upgrade very often, so I'm a bad example, but I doubt that many people queuing for an upgrade at Apple shops for the last few releases really needed that next version. Had it not even existed, would they have been dissatisfied with their previous phone?
I need to be careful here, as we earlier saw that people tend not to invest in upgrades enough. But that was when considering infrastructure damaged by natural disasters. Infrastructure is generally left for longer than a year. I've not seen anyone rebuilding the Caravan Bridge in Izmir (Turkey; built in 850BC) recently. Infrastructure helps everyone go about their other tasks and its value lies in affecting lots of people in small ways.
I can't put a figure on how many iphones, or how much digital hardware in general, were not really needed, because there are small advances all the time in computing and everyone will have a different threshold at which there have been enough advances that they will genuinely get more benefit from a new item than from keeping the money for something else. However, marketing and style changes certainly accelerate this process. Apple makes 90% of the profit because of its style, not because it is hugely advanced. 

The US apparel industry is worth $225bn. Fashion makes people buy new clothes; planned obsolescence makes them throw out old ones. I can't understand the need to buy new clothes all the time. If something suits you, it'll suit you until it breaks or you get fat. Someone has already done a back-of-the-envelope calculation for me, finding that globally fashion is about 2% of GDP. If you don't trust the extrapolation, clothing fashion alone was up to $400bn in 2008. This source suggests that it was $250bn in 2013, so there seems to be reasonable agreement (we're not factors of 10 out or more). Now, 2% is of global GDP, so I guess clothing fashion might be more that that in western economies alone.

In general, we already account for 'brand loyalty' as an asset. Companies try to place a value on customers' loyalty to them. Companies are only allowed to do this where the 'goodwill' has actually been paid for (i.e someone bought the company and therefore paid a certain amount for the brand it bought); they can't value it themselves and report that. So although many mergers and acquisitions in the corporate world are overpriced, the large number of companies that have not had brand value actually traded will make any survey of goodwill in accounts an under-estimate. Sadly I can't do such a survey because I don't have the time or access to Companies House. But accountants regularly see very large goodwill values compared to the more tangible assets of a company; frequently bigger than other assets combined.
But I have found a news bulletin about goodwill impairments on the STOXX 600 index, presumably the top 600 European listed businesses, or some variation thereof. In order to impair goodwill, at least that much needs to have been recognised beforehand, and in 2012 impairments were 66.4bn Euros.
More precisely, it turns out that Duff and Phelps looked at over 5000 publicly traded US companies and found that goodwill was about 12.5% of the other total assets (taken from this dissertation). Although this goodwill isn't all branding, these figures are a valuable demonstration of the magnitude of branding in the modern world.
If 1/9 of all assets owned by companies is goodwill, and even 1/3 of that is branding, that's still 1/27, or roughly 4% of the stock exchange (except that it's larger in large companies, which are the ones listed in the famous indices such as the FTSE 100). If GDP corresponds to valuation (and it ought, since in a perfect market low returns on capital will mean it gets invested elsewhere until returns are equal) that's 4% of GDP.

These examples show that the various tricks of marketing are big. Style, products, adverts, inbuilt obsolescence and branding are overlapping areas but not all the same. If we add 1% for adverts to 4% for branding to 2% for clothing fashion we can see that we're getting into a lot of expenditure already.

There are plenty more examples. What about music, a relatively small industry at $47.4bn per year, globally? Psychology studies show that we like what we've heard before. We can easily grasp this by looking at music across different cultures. Western music based on the octave and the pythagorean note system (give or take some tiny fractions) is different from Indian music, Chinese music or Indonesian music. Are there really genetic differences between us that determine music taste? No, of course not. We like what we've grown up with.
The same applies on  a smaller scale. If you are played music repeatedly, you will usually express more interest and enjoyment from hearing it again (unless you consciously disliked it the first few times). People's taste in music doesn't spring entirely from some internal aesthetic sense, but from associated memories and from repetition and accustomisation. You can train yourself to like new music... and so can other people. That's why radio stations are paid to play certain tracks. That's how so much of manufactured pop works, and why it works. Pop artists are not necessarily better than unsuccessful local bands: there's a whole subsection of the industry devoted to promoting music that might as well have been arbitrarily chosen (and in the case of Pop Idol and X-Factor, pretty much was).
As Noel Gallagher, a famous singer, recently noted, music is about selling a character as well as music. He was complaining that modern bands are too bland, but his words made an important point. In his day, you created news stories and got people enthused about you as a person; you built a personal brand. Nowadays it all relies on repeat plays and mass exposure through PR outfits. I don't think either approach is very much 'about the music'.

I don't know how big the 'impulse buy' market is, but it's got to be significant. Although the sweets at supermarket tills are the most obvious example, impulse buys happen all the time, in many places. Children are great targets, having more impulses and less self-control. I doubt that crisps, sweets and snacks bought on impulse are an enormous market, so maybe the direct economic cost is small, but news stories have proliferated about the obesity epidemic in the western world, and there are many documentaries about the evils of food marketing. Food marketing plays into the chaos sown by the rest of marketing, because people's unhappiness finds small outlets. Just as poor people will console themselves from their stressful lives by making more impulse buys, rather than fewer, as would be appropriate for their poverty, so people in general demonstrate their dissatisfaction with materialism, purchasing what they can, which is often food.
Of course, there are also reams of writing about how advertising and celebrity gossip makes people ashamed of their bodies, which also makes people unhappy and prone to comfort-purchasing and comfort-eating.

With the addition of many more examples, even the overlaps between them won't stop us reaching over 10% of GDP. I look around as I walk down the street and most of the stuff seems pointless; far more than the 10% I'm going with. I do regard myself as a liberal person, and I understand that not everyone shares my tastes. That's why I'm happy for some people to save the environment by avoiding meat, whereas I do it by avoiding heating and oil-based transport.
But where people's tastes have been created or manipulated, and interference has ensured that they want new things, I think it's important to question that interference, and whether it's a good thing.

Even beyond the pointless products, there are people who claim that large numbers of middle-management jobs are pointless. Some people think that the legions of desk-based lackeys we have in the western world are mostly working towards nothing. We all know stories of days filled with pointless meetings; this article talks about how half people's time is wasted. Paper-pushers create more demand for paper-pushers but very little actually happens to that paper at the far end. Also, people work better when they're happy.
So even if people are in an organisation purportedly doing something useful, is the person? Is a PR team useful for a good organisation? Would it need someone to manage public relations if they tend to be good anyway? I don't know, but some people question that too.

Finally, not all activity is equal. We have a limited amount of human capital in the world. If there are some problems that really need exceptional people to solve them, then we haven't got a proper market. Markets are able to adjust supply to meet demand or vice versa, but there are only so many workers in the world, and there is a limited supply of exceptional people who have been well-educated to use their talents. Market forces might offer someone a lot of money for creating demand, and so the talented people might work on something unproductive, and then not only are we wasting money on creating more waste, but we are wasting people.
If there really are problems that require talented people to solve, then by allocating the talented people elsewhere we might be wasting the time of other people who are working on solving the problem, and we might be holding ourselves back by delaying genuine advances in knowledge and technology.
When people suggest that some sort of state direction of activity is inefficient, I think back to the private-sector inefficiencies I've seen of empire-building, ego-massaging, fire-and-go bosses, and I think of the enormous waste in direction of our economies, and I think that if the only argument is inefficiency, I'll win that one. Most useful private-sector research comes on the back of state-funded academia anyway, yet it claims the credit for all the economic value that was realised.
When we think of progress, we think of innovations. Glasses that allow so many of us to see; surgical procedures that allow us to survive; great plays and songs that keep us entertained through centuries of listening. As I say often, we are homo sapiens, the thinking man. What distinguishes us from other apes is our technology and culture. I've seen good arguments for calling us homo narrans, (storytelling man) or trading man, but homo sapiens is not only the most obvious distinction, but also an aspirational one. It is progress that makes us proud, not shifting widgets and tat a bit more efficiently. Research and culture should be our focus, not by-products.

When we see children playing in playgroup, we see a lot of activity. We would never dream of calling that productive. Yet the children are enjoying themselves, and people look back fondly on their childhood. When children get unhappy, it's because we've regimented them in order to advance their knowledge and perhaps teach them some culture. When we measure GDP, we're measuring activity, and we blithely assume that all the toiling workers must be working towards something even though we've set no direction. After all, we wouldn't adopt a system that did nothing and made people unhappy, would we?

I recently experienced two incidents that have made me once again return to the nature of offence. What is offence, why do we experience it, and when do (and should) we take it?

The importance of intent
The OED, the record of the English language, suggests that offence is as broad as 'wounding the feelings'. It is, in the widest definition, a subjective, personal experience bound by the rules of courtesy, and taking their place in the hierarchy of moral demands (if there is one).
On the other hand, someone's feelings can be hurt by the circumstances of life, with no moral implications whatsoever. A person's feelings might be wounded by failing to spear a fish whilst all alone on a desert island simply because life experience has demonstrated the person's lack of perfect skill. Yet it is only in a joking manner that anyone would suggest that life, or the fish, have offended the lone hunter.
Offence, to me, also involves deliberate intent. It requires another being to take aim at those feelings and launch a salvo.
Imagine that someone from the planet Zog, where the word 'reality' is a truly unacceptable dirty word, meets someone from La-la Land, where they typically use 'sanity' as their dirty word, and 'reality' is a perfectly acceptable description of their experiences. Neither has any familiarity with the culture of the other.
When the citizen of La-la Land uses 'reality' in conversation, who is at fault?

The assumption of intent?
I have been informed that saying things that are offensive to another is always blameworthy, but in this hypothetical situation (yes, 'hypothetical' is an adjective) I see no fault. If the citizen of Zog takes offence, surely it can be resolved by discovering their cultural differences? Personally, I would say that taking offence demonstrates a distinct lack of imagination, tolerance and openness, as the citizen of Zog is implicitly denying the possibility of any cultural differences despite knowing that La-la Land is far away and very different. Even when people are from more similar backgrounds, such as back here in reality, the point still holds: if another person otherwise seems inoffensive, why assume that something that you take to be grossly indecent is intended to be offensive?

But there's a second question. Once the two strangers have explained the differences, should there be offence if 'reality' is once again mentioned?
This disgustingly dirty word is so shocking that all Zog citizens have a Pavlovian emotional response; they have been conditioned to be ... what exactly? What words replace 'offence'? Are they hurt by a word, no matter the context? Are they angry and outraged that a taboo has been broken, and conformity lost?
I don't know. For me, offence comes from intent. If I were the citizen of Zog, I would need to consider whether my new acquaintance had said it deliberately, just to play on my dislike, or had used it the way he normally used it. It's offensive to me that someone would try to offend me, but the second option lacks the intent that I need in order to take offence.
But if he used the word in his normal way, there would still be a couple of options that some people might think are different. He might have temporarily forgotten about my dislike of the word, because he's so used to using the word normally, or he might have used it in its normal meaning despite remembering that I dislike it.

Where does responsibility lie for self-control?
Who should bear the burden of controlling themselves in order to avoid this arbitrary hurt to feelings? Should Zog expect La-la Land to change its speech, or should La-la Land expect Zog to understand its language?

Once again, I have been told that the burden is on the speaker. The speaker must make allowance for the emotions of the recipient.
I disagree. The problem arises from the hearer. It is the hearer's arbitrary response that is causing the problem. Furthermore, a speaker might have an intended target, but can be heard by many, who might have many different arbitrary emotional responses. A speaker cannot cater to them all.

In the language of Daniel Kahneman and his psychological studies, offence is a 'system 1' response: it is an intuitive shortcut that saves us time and the trouble of thinking things through to get to the right answer.
As he has extensively documented, we rely on such cognitive illusions extensively, often without realising that one exists. Just as when you see an optical illusion and cannot escape the appearance created by the circuitry of your optical system, so it is with offence and other mental shortcuts: the appearance of being right exists, no matter what logic seems to say.
But just as with optical illusions, intuitions must always give way to reasoned thought. We cannot base our morality on intuitions and shortcuts (even if that's how most modern philosophers do it nowadays).

By suggesting that the speaker must change, the hearer is effectively arguing that his own emotions are more the responsibility of someone else than himself! If the hearer is truly so devoid of self-control that his emotions simply follow sensory triggers with no interpretation or modulation then the hearer might be unable to take responsibility for anything (and belongs in a mental home for those incapable of taking responsibility for themselves).
But no matter how uncontrollable these emotions are, they remain the hearer's, and they remain subjective and arbitrary. They are arbitrary in the sense that although physical pain is universal (it follows painful actions for everyone except a few unfortunate people who lack the nerves but still suffer the physical harm), rude words mean nothing to people who speak other languages. Offence is a learned response; it is arbitrary in that is is dependent on our conditioning, just like Pavlov's dogs only drooled at the sound of a bell after being trained to associate the bell with food. Offence is built on notions of fairness and courtesy that we (mostly) have to learn or develop.

And yet when offence is taken at something another person does not intend to be offensive, it is distinctly unfair and discourteous. It implies malign intent when there was none; it places blame on someone for ignoring a responsibility the person did not agree to, nor possibly know he had. That seems to be to be completely at odds with the rational underpinning of offence, and is itself quite offensive because it says that an innocent person has transgressed; it labels a decent, honest person as ill-willed.

I can see no valid reason for giving other people responsibility for our own emotions directly. They can be responsible for nasty actions, that through their nastiness indirectly cause us bad feelings, but that's a very different situation. If we are to be responsible for each others' emotions, then I might meet you one day when I happen to feel grumpy, and respond to a cheerful greeting with a surge of anger. Your cheerfulness would highlight to me my own grumpiness, and make me feel bad about it, and so I could legitimately take offence at your negative effect on my emotions.
Yet actually, I would be the one being rude and surly; my own bad mood is my own business, and taking it out on others, especially those nice enough to greet me happily, is itself offensive because it is unfair and impolite.
I view emotions as, amongst other things, internal to the person who experiences them. As I mentioned in passing earlier, they are under the control of that person, who can learn to ignore them at worst, or learn to feel different emotions. But even if they are abstract influences on us, only manipulated by others, I do not think that they are a valid end measurement for morality. Morality and truth are not about the underlying emotions that people feel, but if they have any useful meaning at all it is in the fact that they are separate from our subjective whims.
A person's effect on your emotions is therefore not, in itself, any way to judge the morality of an action. The use of emotions to judge truth is a whole new subject which we'll leave for another time.

Examples of the wide-ranging impact of our notions of offence
This rather long discussion about something seemingly trivial, as it's relatively harmless compared to crimes and corruption, is actually very important. Notions of offence control all our dialogue, often in very problematic ways.
1. 'Fat-ism'
The fat crusade has taught us to avoid talking about obesity, or mentioning weight to fat people. It turns out that the truth is offensive; yet their emotional response, based on their own personal circumstances, ought to be thoroughly their own. If their emotional response is so detrimental to their health (panic-eating, or worse depression) that it really needs to be avoided, then such people need special homes where they can be safe from the truth. It is a big imposition to expect every other person to acknowledge, be permanently aware of, and careful to avoid all one's own insecurities and problems. On the other hand, it is much less rude to impute to a person the ability to behave rationally and be self-controlled, which is what a person does who speaks the truth.
For those of us who think that knowing the truth has intrinsic value, there's a further benefit to not having it censored.
The fat lobby has gone so far as to say that medical research is a conspiracy to make them feel bad (not all of them, I know). This demonstrates the extreme results that come from assuming that emotions trump truth. If emotions come first, then not only are 'everyday' conversations ruined (along with political and economic discourse), but emotions come before the progress of all humanity, as represented by research and the discovery of new truths.

2. Children
I recently had a brief exchange about the desirability of parents doing the best for their children at the expense of equality of opportunity. When I contrasted these two generally accepted ideas, and pointed out how they conflict, I managed to offend someone (on behalf of all parents) who found it unacceptable to label parents as immoral (because they destroy the chances of other children when they buy their own children advantages such as personal tutors in what should be a level, merit-based selection).
Just as with the unhealthiness of fat, or even the normal usage of the word 'reality' (or 'oriental' in the US and UK), the speaker is merely a messenger of truth as he perceives it. I am not insulting parents when I make a coherent argument from their individual actions to an overall undesirable result. The connection is real, and reality is no more offensive than the desert island was to our hunter all those paragraphs ago.
If parents really don't want to be connected to the undesirable result, with its moral connotations, they shouldn't shut down debate, or take offence to try to shut me up. A person is entitled to delusion, but is not entitled to have others support or partake in it. The parents should stop doing something that directly causes the problem.
The problem of children in public discourse is a wider one yet. It seems to be a universal assumption that children's lives are worth more than adults'. I assume that this comes from parents' devotion to their own children; their emotions for their own children make them sympathize with the loss of other parents. Yet this attitude that emotions can somehow dictate moral truth leads us to some deeply disturbing conclusions. If it's more of a tragedy when someone who is deeply loved dies, is it then acceptable to purge tramps and orphans from the world?
I have the view that human life is of equal moral worth. It might be offensive to people that I lack interest in the murder of a child, but it is not my fault that there is a deep hypocrisy in many people's opinions that my lack of interest demonstrates to them. The truth that valuing children highly necessarily implies valuing others less is uncomfortable to those who want the former without the latter, but it is not offensive of me to make them aware of this logical deduction.
If all this talk of child deaths is too much, consider the cases of corrupt dictators. It is commonly accepted that is right and proper for parents to do what they can for their children. Dictators' families often become millionaires or billionaires via the sale of national assets. Sometimes this is even done legally, as the dictator is able to make the laws. Yet the sale of a country's oil via shell companies in BVI for family profit is regarded as corruption.
We must accept that although it is right for parents to feel devoted to their children, it is also right for them to acknowledge a higher calling of behaving morally. Behaving morally is separate and distinct from any emotional drive or impact. In fact, many people would say that morality is a system specifically for controlling our emotional excesses.


3. Sexual advances:
the offence taken by women when men think that they might be interested in sex (or when men mention sex). A recent article in the Guardian was by a 'nerdy girl' who was annoyed when despite admitting her interest in sex and even hook-ups, she was told by nerdy men at a convention that women are not interested in sex. She pointed out that they were being stupid, as she had conclusively disproven that assertion.
As a comment on her article explained, the lifetime of being told you're sweet, the joys of being handsome only to family, and never having a woman make you feel attractive, contrast with the privilege of being a socially able, attractive woman. Hints that she thinks a man should take as obvious appear very different to someone who's experienced more practical jokes mocking him than genuine offers, or who has listened to a flirty woman complain about how another man mistook her friendship for something else.
I don't want to go too deeply into relationship and courtship issues, because there's far too much to say. The relevant problem here is that there are many women who not only show no interest in sex (possibly for social reasons, not because they really are uninterested), but who actively take offence when a man mentions it or thinks that they might be interested.
This is extra disincentive for a man to be open and honest with a woman who initially admits that she likes sex. Some women will say that at one moment, and yet be offended the next at the thought. Maybe they just feel like it gets too much too quickly, or they were dipping their toes in new attitudes that they don't really like, but by taking offence they create a barrier to other women, and men, having fulfilling relationships.
A man must be ever aware that assuming that a woman might want sex can lead not only to immediate rejection, but to unpleasant social consequences beyond that, even if he backs off as soon as she first tells him she's not interested. For a nerd, with limited social capital in the first place, that potential loss would be devastating. Social capital is a rare and precious thing that he cannot squander, unlike the popular men who can even rape their girlfriends and still have others keen to fill the vacancy.
Taking offence in this instance distorts a whole population's ability to achieve the relationships its members want, and communicate effectively about them.
As a side note, there are issues here about what one assumes about others. I have argued that one should not assume offensive intent, and yet here I am supporting the nerdy men who made an assumption. I think the assumptions are different; assuming offence is about expecting control of someone else, but assuming a lack of sexual interest is self-preservation and courtesy.
Nonetheless, it's worth noting that people do seem extraordinarily unable to deal with uncertainty, in all areas of thought (from scientific conclusions, through statistics, to ambiguous meanings and assumptions about meaning that should be delayed until proven through further enquiry).

4. New Atheism:
the fuss about Richard Dawkins' stupid tweet about Muslims. Wrong tweet, but I want to focus on some of the responses, which jumped straight to taking offence because he mentioned Muslims, without engaging with his arguments about how religion, and Islam especially at the moment, suppresses free thought, novel ideas and hence progress. Offence was a default response that bypassed the rational brain, and is so powerful that, like many cognitive delusions, the brain thinks it's right even after a little consideration. But you can't stop someone stating the truth as he sees it when so much is at stake by telling him that the truth is offensive. If religious people want Dawkins to shut up, they need to explain to Dawkins why it is not the truth; they need to engage and communicate as rational human beings, not preprogrammed automatons of offence.
Although if Dawkins were trumpeting obviously false statements he would be bigoted, no-one accepts the simple duty to explain why he's wrong. This is because it's a complex debate that Dawkins would stand a decent chance of winning; his statements are not obviously wrong.
Offence shuts down that enlightening and important debate, making atheists feel more marginalised and unaccepted, forcing them to adopt ever less nuanced and informative stances and thereby destroying useful public debate.


Whatever the emotional bubble is, it is not the responsibility of other people to leave it unpopped.
Offence can only ever prevent debate and discussion; it is, in most modern contexts, emotions taking the place of reason, rather than being guided by reason. Offence serves to hide the truth and censor speech.
I recognise that emotions are important in our personal lives. But if we make our emotions other people's responsibility, we accept the principles that underlie dystopian states. If I am responsible for your emotions, can I not feed you a new drug, called soma, that renders you permanently happy? And if we are all to bear responsibility for each others' emotions, should I not feed that drug to everyone? Having made you all happy and compliant, is there really any harm in directing your lives as I wish, splitting you into classes and otherwise dominating your lives, since your happiness remains completely assured?
For those who missed the reference to 1984, this is the basis of the fictional dystopian state that most people have roundly rejected as deeply disturbing. Of course, happiness does not have to come from drugs. Propaganda can control information, to make sure that you are happy. If offence, and therefore personal feelings, take precedence over truth, then it necessarily follows that censorship is completely desirable and necessary. Offence is censorship, but through social pressure and 'moral' implication, rather than physical or economic power. It is an attempt to control people.

http://patriotpost.us/opinion/19581
This article makes an interesting case that censorship and the restriction on what we say changes us for the worse. Censorship can come not only from deliberate restrictions on what is published, but also extreme consequences from misinterpretations of what we say.

There is only one reason we attempt to control people, and that's to prevent crime. We don't want people to commit physical actions that endanger others. That's what offence should be for. We don't want people to be malign or malicious: those things are offensive too.
It is possible for something to be rude even without intent; the lack of thought shows a lack of consideration for others and a selfishness that we cannot accept in society. But determining where the responsibility lies is a vital precursor to taking offence. There must be valid reasoning behind the emotion, or the emotion is false; it is an imposition on a completely innocent person, which is itself unjust.
So, is the truth offensive? Is injustice acceptable if driven by emotion? Are censorship and control necessary? Where do your priorities lie: truth, freedom and justice, or animalistic responses?

I came across an advert which, to paraphrase, said 'True quality isn't in the quality, but in the brand'. It was an aspirational advert trying to suggest that driving the car would make you extraordinarily happy. There are a lot of such advertisements, trying to use brand rather than quality. I find the sale of fake dreams objectionable, and will consider this and other side of branding: the creation of social status.

there are numerous psychological studies suggesting that people were as happy years ago before current technological innovation. Famously, lottery winners and paraplegics are about as happy as each other a year after the event.
Advertising creates desires that people did not have. When it tells people that they can buy an emotional state (which is generally utterly untrue) it breeds discontentment.
Advertising helps markets by making markets closer to the assumption of perfect information. When it oversteps that boundary and starts doing more profitable things like creating new demand it's detracting from human society.
There have even been studies specifically on cars, which find that people drastically overrate the importance of car brand in their decisions. Most modern cars are decent and comfortable but people pay a premium. Those who spend that premium on something like a memorable holiday report themselves as far happier afterwards.
One could say that if you're going to be irrational, you pay the price. But demand lowers prices and therefore affect me. I don't want high demand for pointless goods and low demand for things I value that could have higher production because then I have to pay more. If that high demand is artificially created by playing on human frailty then I will continue to argue that this is a bad thing.
Furthermore, I rely on the rest of humanity for progress and social goods. It takes more than just me to do research, uncover new truths, and to maintain the environment. If humanity is distracted by artificially-created desires that do not contribute to these goals then I suffer. I have no measure of the value of goods that were bought to replace items that already did the job well, nor the value of the human labour that went into them that could have done research. I wish I did.
 Growth is currently the target for our policitians to chase, rather than something like the Gini coefficient or even just low unemployment (which does at least get some mention in the news). Growth is measured by transactions, with the assumption that these transactions create value.
Advertising that creates an as-yet unfulfilled desire is not creating value for people: it's destroying people's overall 'sum' of value in their lives.
Therefore chasing growth could lead us to consume finite natural resources even faster all for the sake of satisfying desires that don't even need to be there.
The argument for consuming finite resources now is often that growth necessarily implies technological innovation that will benefit future generations more than the resources will. If growth is actually fuelled by satisfaction of arbitrarily-created desires in the current population, then this argument makes no sense. 
I think there's a distinct problem with selling the idea that one can buy social status in society as a whole. There's no doubt that amongst, say baseball card collectors, acquisition of a rare player buys status... but no baseball card collector would assume that the purchase will impress anyone else, and most collectors do it for love of collecting, not the status.


As soon as adverts start trying to persuade people that anyone can buy status that should impress the whole population, two things happen.
Firstly, people buy status because we're more homo rivalis than homo economicus or sapiens, and we compete. That means that everyone else buys status who can. So the end result is that if you paid, you're as happy as before but poorer, and if you didn't, you're unhappier because you have less status than others.
It's a vicious cycle that can simply repeat itself until everyone is both poorer and unhappier, except the very rich, who have bought it all but find that it doesn't bring the happiness they see in the adverts, and they still have hopes and dreams that are sometimes dashed.
Secondly, everyone who has invested in this system therefore has a vested interest in supporting and promoting it and its universality. Therefore interesting and otherwise content people, like our baseball card collectors, who have separate social hierarchies, can be mistreated because they aren't conforming and thereby justifying someone else's investment. Obviously that's most apparent at school, but I don't think the attitude suddenly dies in adulthood. People who have been told by an advertisement that a purchase will buy them respect get frustrated and angry with those who do not grant extra status, rather than with their own beliefs.
As a sad and lonely misfit myself I found that spending time with out-groups was very pleasant. Typically even those with other interests were happy to deal with and respect someone who was polite and tolerant. This was not the case with those who believed that their mainstream culture was more than simply just a bit more popular (or who believed that popularity mattered, failing to distinguish between mob rule and democracy). Those who believed that their own culture was universal expected to be treated as having status by everyone, even when they had achieved it through things that the rest of us did not respect.
The assumption of universality is of course shockingly unpleasant when it comes to other things, like religious dogma or other moral codes. Here, instead, it just makes for false dreams and intolerance.

Of course, I would like most of all if the assumption of universality of status from purchases solely intended for status were to be replaced by status from well-chosen purchases of any sort, or even better, with status from character.
But if people accept that status within their small group of like-minded people does not translate to status as a whole, I think they'll be less likely to rely on it and more likely to use more universal means of dealing with others, such as politeness and other virtues which anyone can appreciate and respect.

And, if that settles in, we might even begin to find people valuing the judicious use of leisure time for self-improvement, rather than to earn more money by working overtime in order to buy more status. And if people no longer associate high incomes with social status, I think that the competition intrinsic to humanity will find a new outlet. If people give status to leisure time, we'll all be required to work less. If people give status to knowledge, we'll see more research. Anything would be an improvement.

Minimum pricing is wrong

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22250584

As usual, I've been inspired by a news story. This one is a little argument over minimum pricing of alcohol. The Scottish government has apparently had inaccurate and biased submissions from the drinks industry, which opposes minimum pricing. This is hardly shocking. What is shocking is that governments continue to trust industry sources' information and opinions when looking into regulation of that industry.

That's not my subject for today. I want to express my revulsion for the concepts behind minimum pricing.
The argument is, as implied in the BBC news article, that low alcohol prices encourage drinking at home. People get hammered on their own, without the social pressure or regulation that they'd experience in a pub. Low alcohol prices supposedly also mean that people buy more alcohol (they have a set alcohol budget and buy as much as they can within that budget).
The correlation of negative effects with low alcohol prices are apparently indisputable, as is the direction of causation.

'Dr McCambridge said: "Our study showed that the alcohol industry, including both the producers and the big supermarkets, consistently oppose affective approaches to alcohol polices by misrepresenting strong evidence of what works. There is an international consensus in the research community that the approach of the Scottish government is the correct one." '

I suspect it's actually a spelling error, but the use of the word 'affective' is central to my point today. A minimum price may be effective (it has an effect), but it is also an emotional (affective) response that is incompletely thought-through.

I can't comment on the strength of the evidence over whether the harms of alcohol really are greater when it's cheaper. I do know that many alcoholics are relatively wealthy people who will continue to buy alcohol even if the minimum price is a bit higher, regulated by government. I suppose that minimum pricing is intended to hit the binge drinkers who stock up before a big night out.

However, these are not the only people who buy cheap alcohol. I know that binge-drinking is more prevalent amongst young people, but young people are also the ones who are poor and often buy cheap alcohol for moderate drinking; something to go with a meal with friends, or to have one drink whilst watching television in the evenings.
Minimum pricing will reduce these people's quality of life, not increase it. Meals with friends will cost more. Perfectly reasonable consumption will no longer be possible for their low level of income. Why should they be punished for the actions of others?

If we have a playpark that some children are drawing graffiti on, do we start charging an entrance fee? That will help keep away the poor children and the children with mean parents. No doubt children who wish to draw graffiti are mostly poorly supervised and are frequently from poorer backgrounds, and will not pay the entrance fee. So we will have protected the playpark, but at what cost? We will have rendered it a luxury for the rich and excluded legitimate use by poor or neglected children.

If a child in a class misbehaves and the teacher does not see who did it, he can hold the entire class behind. This neatly ensures that he does indeed punish the offender for the misbehaviour. But he also punishes the rest of the class for something that they did not do. This sort of injustice is called collective punishment and at an adult level is regarded as so offensive that it is banned by the Geneva Convention on Human Rights.
It is a fundamental part of law (both English and Continental, I think) that if the perpetrator of a crime cannot be identified or punished then the innocent shall not be punished as collateral damage. This I know because I recently listened to a very interesting discussion on the radio about prosecuting twins, and how they are often acquitted because of the inability to prove which of them comitted a crime.

So why, given this, do we think it perfectly acceptable to punish harmless purchasing of alcohol solely in order to make some alcohol abuse more expensive?

We should punish the offenders. When there is disorder in town centres, arrest and fine the offenders. When there is loud noise in residential areas, fine the offenders. Where a poor person is harmlessly drinking at home, fine the ... oh wait, why should this person pay more? An increase in price is collective punishment of those whose means do not stretch to casually consuming expensive products.
It's saying 'those poor people make all the trouble, so let's make them all pay for it'. It's based on grossly offensive tribal/class thinking, or possibly a simple lack of thought. Either way, it is unacceptable for researchers to recommend it, or for governments to implement it.

I do not care if utility is maximised by punishing the innocent. I do not care if the most solid economic research ever conducted shows that liver disease will be entirely eradicated by punishing the innocent. Economics and social science can show wonderful consequences for their interests (i.e the effect only on anti-social behaviour and alcoholic disease), but the consequences for others must be considered too, and must be given priority. An economist might say that this is an externality of the programme that must be internalised, but it's a specific type of externality. It does not affect just anyone else in society. This externality affects only poor drinkers. These sorts of discriminatory rules should be avoided, as it's impossible to recompense poor drinkers specifically.

This is not limited to minimum alcohol pricing. It's also relevant to the fat tax, which is even more pernicious because fat is healthy and necessary, and it's actually refined sugar that is more unhealthy. No matter which we tax, though, it's over-consumption that is the problem, not any form of consumption. Taxes punish those who do enough exercise to burn off their calories, or those who need the calories to power their exercise. By making exercising more expensive, a fat tax designed to promote health might reduce it, ensuring that the poor can only afford to be in mediocre health, not fit and active as is best.

Apart from a distinct inability to think of the wider consequences and escape the blinkers of thinking that a solution for a problem has no other effects, one cause of these ridiculous proposals is that the NHS must care for all people, but people's choices affect how much care they need. We have a destruction of accountability: we are not holding people accountable for their own health.
We need a safety net. Not all health issues are caused by the individual who suffers them, and a major function of society is to protect people from the mishaps and chance brutality of nature.

But some health problems are caused by the individual, and collective responsibility for such issues is wrong. By making the state pay for these problems, we encourage it to interfere with personal freedom in a bid to reduce its costs.
What we need is for these issues to cost a person money. We could charge people extra money for treatments of alcoholic liver disease and obesity-related heart disease. But we have made it a vital part of the NHS that it is free at the point of delivery (except dentistry, eye care, adult social care, sufficient physiotherapy and prescriptions).
There remains an alternative. We need an insurance system in which people pay for the risks they incur. Heavy drinkers would pay more as they drink, but not for the alcohol which can be consumed in moderation. They would pay for the 'heavy' part of heavy drinking. Obese people would pay for their over-consumption, rather than everyone paying for any form of consumption.
The only place where a tax works is smoking, because there is no safe limit. Smoking is always harmful, and so a tax is appropriate.

But where there are threshold effects, a blanket tax is unfair and disporportionately harms the poor. A minimum price only harms the poor. Neither is acceptable.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-20357131
I came across this truly shocking article some time ago. It's shocking for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's very sad that someone can lose his job over a comment made in a private setting, even if it was visible to others.
His freedom to think and say what he likes should be paramount and I'm glad that the court found that he was in the right. I am a little curious about what legal technicalities might prevent him from recouping the loss of earnings he must surely have had.

What is equally disgusting, however, is the self-righteous tone he takes over his bigotry. Something has indeed poisoned the atmosphere in Britain, and it's people like him who believe that all men are equal, but some are more equal than others. What on earth is equality too far? Is he only in favour of equality a bit, but not when others start getting the privileges to which he's entitled?
I'm also impressed at the euphemism of 'people who believe in traditional marriage' for 'sickening intolerant people'; these people are entitled to believe what they please, but I have no problem with them being outcasts from society if the vast majority of people find their views unacceptable.

It seems that society is a battleground, and this man is fighting to protect his right to be nasty to other people whilst claiming that others making him an outcast is terrible. Hypocrisy is the most terrible thing of all, and he needs to apply some thought to his opinions.

I saw today that the legal case brought against Lord Sugar by a winning Apprentice contestant (who by winning the television show was entitled to a well-paid job at Lord Sugar's company) has failed. Lord Sugar has been quite acerbic about it, saying that she is a liar and an opportunist who thought that she could blackmail him for money.

That is clearly what the court, on the whole, thought, although I was surprised to read that his witness evidence included a statement that he'd found her paranoid and suspicious. These two important qualities of people who are familiar with the world seem to me to have no bearing on the truth of the case at hand. This is character assassination and it's sad that it seems, from the news report, to be an important part of the legal system.

However, when we move away from the disputed facts of this one case we'll see that her position is very common. She has argued that she was recruited for a highly-paid job that required a skilled candidate and gave important responsibilities, but that she was instead a grossly overpaid secretary, doing menial labour when she had work to do at all.

This is what any suspicious person would have deduced of a job that was the prize of a gimmicky television show rather than a geniune opening with serious recruitment, but since the court case is over I can't demolish Lord Sugar's argument.
However, I do think that the same general situation applies to many jobs. My own job was preceded by a long recruitment process involving online application, online testing, two assessment days and a number of written tests. After this supposedly stringent selection process the intake of trainees was given secretarial work to do for months until the busy period of the year. For example, someone was asked to shred thousands of pages of documents, which, given the shredder's capacity for only a few pages at a time, took a few hours.

We were told that we were selected for a difficult training scheme, but the initial training was for multiple-choice assessments of rote memory. I will agree that learning stuff by rote is difficult, but I don't think it requires any great talent, as assessed during recruitment.
The training involved some maths, and we were taken over simple calculations that are taught before GCSE (e.g extrapolation and interpolation) as if they were works of genius rather than something any adult could deduce without any training at all.
I wrote at length about the more word-driven parts of the training, and how we were fed 'facts' without being allowed to question them, and required to reproduce them without comment; we were expected to regurgitate definitions in essays even when we had not only used the definition earlier in an exam, but obviously understood it through the context of what came next. Tools were actually lists of things to consider that common sense would make anyone think about, and we were expected to recite these tools (and their names) in preference over making insightful points about the situation being assessed. There's plenty more to write about it, but not here.

Outside of training, we are asked to collect data. We do Google searches and note what we find, and someone senior will do the analysis. I am, at the moment, collecting telephone numbers from websites. A senior analyst will do the data processing we want done; I will be sent off to collect more.

I heard a friend in consultancy say something similar; her work involves following checklists of things to do with the client and some basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel.

I am sure that many people find this, and there's certainly a problem. I would tend to say that we're not being given good enough jobs; that promotion is too slow, but there are other answers. If I, and presumably most of the other trainees in my job, were given training about the job, including doing the job, we would be able to be senior colleagues in half the time.
It rankles to see old men running everything when the expertise needed to run things differs from that (if any) required for the job, and can be quickly acquired. Waiting for 20 years until I'm old enough to have a go at a high-paying, responsible job looks like a form of indentured servitude that people usually condemn.

On the other hand, it could be that the experience of those years really is vital, and the intelligence and aptitude that we've been tested for is actually not important. In this case it seems a bit silly to waste our time on assessments, or even on university education itself (ignoring personal benefits, such as friendships or culture). Since we're supposed to be drones who don't think about how we'd do things ourselves, or question the opinions we're being taught as facts, why bother with a university education that, for the purposes of most graduate recruitment, is good only for transferable skills such as thought and insight?
Given that even people who study business at university get the same treatment as those with merely transferable skills, it doesn't look like this is the answer, although it could be that business studies is such a soft subject that its relevance is balanced by the general quality of the education or candidates.

I'm not sure which answer is correct, but I don't see that it can be neither. Either the complex selection of new graduates is necessary because their rapid learning will make them better workers, faster, in which case they need the opportunity to learn; or there's no need to provide rapid advancement for them because rapid learning won't be good enough: the experience of dealing with multiple situations is the only thing that counts.

At the moment I am, barring the occasional piece of work that goes unnoticed because I solve the problem so quickly, an overpaid secretarial worker. I don't understand how this suits anyone. Because I am doing simple work, I am not getting the training or experience I want. Because I am overpaid for the work I am doing my employer is not getting the efficiency it wants.

I do understand that all work, even at the highest levels, involves a certain amount of relatively unskilled work. No CEO can avoid walking the corridors to meetings, because they do not miraculously appear around him. Everyone must check e-mails and write responses, often relaying information that has already been decided.
However, I'm not going to get the experience I need to get better jobs by doing admin. work for other people. If others do analysis whilst I do data collection for them, how can I get experience of doing analysis (although I have plenty already, as it happens)?

This leads me on to wider questions. Is the population now over-educated for the work our economy gives us? Are we merely vastly inappropriately educated?
The indentured aspect of things enhances inequality; every difficulty anyone faces from a background with no support is a diffculty that someone with a good background can avoid. A rich person who jumps a few levels of the hierarchy by joining Daddy's company escapes the indentured servitude that anyone without such oppotunities seems to need to go through. Once this is accomplished, inevitably that person is more experienced at the best jobs, and no matter how much harder and better-paying jobs overall become, the top jobs will always be occupied by those who had a short-cut to avoid the long way round.
If we want true social mobility in a society which gives people from all backgrounds all opportunities and allows the best performers to get the top jobs, then we need to avoid big hurdles to promotion that the privileged will never experience. We can't artificially create hurdles for rich people only, which would be inefficient even if we could; we need to remove the barriers that affect everyone else.
A major barrier is any sort of investment of time. This applies to generic graduate recruitment jobs as well as research careers. A PhD is not vocational training: it is a price to pay in order to have a chance at a career in academia or other research. What training one does get from a PhD could easily  be completed in 6 months if it were distilled down to the training only.

It might be considered greedy of me to want better opportunities to get to positions of responsibility which are well-remunerated. But I think that one of the reasons these posts are so overpaid is the false belief that the people in them are rare and extraordinary people who are not easily replaced. If this is partly because of poor opportunities below them (and partly just hero-worship and good networking/PR) then the lack of supply is entirely correctable.
If we get more people wanting the top jobs and able to do them then wages will inevitably fall, and accountability will increase. If by running a company into the ground you render yourself unemployable because employers can trust plenty of new applicants for the role of running a company, you'll be less likely to do so and get away with it.

So if we were to make promotion faster, we'd pay less money and get better performance. We could even pay less money to the secretarial workers not in training. What's not to like?