I was spurred to think about my infamous ex-girlfriend recently. Infamous, I say, amongst those who know me, because she serves as a convenient reference point for proving that anyone else is a wonderful person. But I did learn a few things from the experience, and it might be worth sharing them here.  I won't be exaggerating, nor angling for sympathy... just reciting what I've learned.

K wanted me to be bent around her little finger, and would have large tantrums (day-long tantrums were common; I once timed 5 hours solid of crying, closely followed by 3 more) if she didn't get her way. I was not to talk to other women, or my friends, but be devoted to her, to the exclusion of all other cares. I wasn't to have hobbies that made demands on my time, nor worry about my degree.

I saw a recent news story by a woman who had escaped an abusive relationship. She described how the man had fallen in love with her, been very charming, but had gradually become abusive. She described how the man induced an emotional dependence on him, so that when he quit his job and wanted to move away from her friends and social network, she did because she was naive and would do anything for true love. Another life ruined by the 'true love' myth, unlike all those lives utterly unruined by pornography or action films, men's equivalent enjoyment.
She was isolated, and gradually his behaviour became worse. He hit her, and was enormously contrite afterwards. She forgave him because she was sorry for him and his emotional issues. And it happened again and again, and she accepted it because she was kind and loving and wanted to help him. The abusive relationship was not based on physical fear, but excessive generosity and a desire to cure him of his own demons.

I sympathised. K, my evil ex-girlfriend, was similar. She liked to try to manipulate me by being hurtful. This might take the form of insults (she's the only girlfriend I've had who openly thought I was ugly), or the ever-so-subtle hints that she was desirable and could find attention elsewhere. The idea, presumably was to draw attention to how lucky I was and to my devotion to her, and spur me into whatever action she required. I doubt that I'd be gullible enough to be spurred into action even if I did love someone doing that; I have a stubborn streak that will outlast granite. But here we meet lesson number 1:
Every single time you tell your partner something hurtful, whether it's deliberately trying to invoke jealousy, being directly insulting, threatening to leave or simply asking directly 'don't you love me [enough to do that]?' you are actually telling your partner 'caring for me will cause you pain'. By setting up conflicts between your partner's love (if any) and desire for you, and your partner's character or other wants, you are stunting the growth of any love.
By teaching your partner this lesson, you ensure that you will get only stupid, masochistic or uncaring partners.

K also had an impressive ability to ask questions such as "are we ok?" I find this a very strange question to ask. Presumably she knew if she was alright or not and only lacked my opinion out of the two of us, but she didn't ask "Are you ok [with things]?" She said "we", which is the clue we need to work out what she really cared about. It wasn't me, and my feelings, but Us: the Relationship.
I rapidly took to capitalising it in a not-so-subtle display of displeasure. I had a strange idea that I would be valued as an individual in a relationship, not as merely a means to create the ideal state of being, which is The Relationship.
I have over the years had other girlfriends, and I have had arguments with them from time to time about previous girlfriends. With the notable exception of the evil K I am very fond of my ex-girlfriends, and pretty much all my 'flings'. If they come up in conversation I speak of them warmly. This has pained the odd woman, who would prefer me to dislike them. The unreservedly insane K went from being utterly in love to trying to tear out my hair and then sending me hate-mail.
I have been told and read that the desire for me to be on bad terms with them is so that they'll be less of a 'threat'. Clearly someone I've been out with I have some modicum of attraction to, and my current woman's status as my one-and-only is threatened. But if I hate all the ex-girlfriends, there's no threat. This only makes sense as part of rather warped attitude to relationships.
If you truly love someone, that love is not conditional. You want the best for that person: you wish them joy and happiness, and there's probably some degree of selfishness mixed in there, so that you want that joy and happiness to happen with you. Two millenia ago when Christianity was being invented people knew that unconditional love was the greatest and most precious. God loves us unconditionally; this is so central to the religion that it was the name of the campaign the Christian Union had to convert people when I was an undergraduate.
If you love someone, you won't impose the condition that that person loves you back, or spends time only with you, and you won't impose the condition that the person has to be in a relationship with you for you to love them. If, when a relationship ends, you find yourself hating your ex-partner then you didn't love that person properly in the first place.
There are plenty of people out there whose selfishness is always greater than their love. They need to stifle the object of their love: to hoard it and obsess about it. They care about themselves, or else The Relationship, a sort of Trojan Horse for this invidious attitude. By making everything about The Relationship they conceal the obvious selfishness, because both people should be doing things for The Relationship. There is no other person called Relationship. There are only people, who deserve not to be lied to.
With the contemptible K, I never told her I loved her. In fact, I specifically denied it on many occasions when she pressed me on the subject. I am, apparently, a cold-hearted ba**#@/] who is incapable of loving someone. I did admit to caring about her, although I never confessed the thought running through my mind that I care about humanity as a whole, and that one can care that another's welfare is bad. I couldn't be bothered with a week-long tantrum. She of course swore her undying love for me, a love that evaporated like dry ice in a volcano when we broke up.
I am tempted now to break up with any girlfriend just to check that she's a decent person who cares about me to some extent.
Lesson 2: there is no Relationship, a thing to be perfected beyond the two of you. There is you, and your partner.
It's normal to want to share the good times with your loved ones, but if you can't imagine liking your partner after hearing, upfront and with no cheating, that your partner is falling out of love with you (and in love with someone else), then you need to think about why you're with that person, and wasting the person's time.
I am annoyed that the common opinion is that people who do not fall in love easily are derided as malfunctioning dead-ends who cheat and waste your time, but the people who do not even understand love, and act on jealousy and selfishness before turning into raging animals, are simply naive innocents, hurt once again by the cruel world.

Honesty.
Whom do you find more creepy: the person who admits on the first date that he's into whips and chains, or the person who goes out on a load of dates with someone and begins to dream of marriage and children?
Again, the immediate cultural connotations are that someone kinky is the nasty person.
But I struggle to understand why honesty is so unpleasant. Not everyone's interested in marriage, and children are definitely a huge and life-changing goal. It's grossly unfair to get far into a serious relationship without sharing these life goals.
With the reprehensible K, I was always careful to be honest. Often that would be a tangled web of subtly avoiding answering the question in order to avoid missing dinner, sleep and breakfast, but frequently I admitted outright that I did not love her (and I rapidly came to despise her, and eventually I gave up on even affording her the general care that I believed I owed to all humanity. She was quite inhuman).
Every time she heard the truth about our relationship, she'd have an angry weepy fit. I learned a great many tricks for avoiding conversations and distracting her (and some not so subtle ways of ignoring dodgy subjects).
But even when I managed to avoid the hissy-fits, I didn't enjoy the suspense of never knowing if conflict was going to arise. I did quite like the puzzle of phrasing things carefully, but there are more fun puzzles to attempt.
Lesson 3: By punishing me for being myself, K did not change reality. She simply ensured that I didn't want to share it with her. If you are ever tempted to become angry with someone when they tell you the truth, think hard about how much you value both the truth and sharing your life with that person.

Cowardice
When our relationship was ending, and in many other relationships besides, people have called it cowardly to stay with someone rather than outright tell them that they're not wanted.
Cowardly to stay with someone? Or just damage limitation and kindness? She needed to take some responsibility for herself. If you get upset at truth, don't expect it.
On a similar note, we're always told that it's cowardly to break up with someone from a distance, in an impersonal way. Text messaging is worst, e-mail poor, and face-to-face best. Impersonal is bad, and it's cowardly to do otherwise. But by invoking the word 'cowardly', these people already tell us what's really behind this. There is something to fear, and it's the outsized response.
For every cowardly man who breaks up with a woman from a distance, there's a spiteful, vengeful monster who wants to be able to punish him for being honest. If a man doesn't trust a woman to behave like an adult, it's best that the relationship ends, and the woman should think carefully about her own behaviour before deriding his. This is an important one, but it's just a sub-set of Lesson 3.

Should a banker earn more than a nurse

I was delighted to see something that looked interesting on the radio, and listened to Michael Sandel host a debate about this subject with increasing dejection. I like Sandel; I appreciate what he says. I suppose it's partly because I already think what he teaches in his lectures than it always disappoints me to hear him: I wonder why I can't be a highly-respected philosophy professor.

But then, he writes academic articles as well as his more public teaching, which are probably a step apart.
Nonetheless, this debate annoyed me because I wasn't there to answer any of the points made. So here I will make my own case.

A banker should not be paid hugely more than a nurse. Even a perfectly operating market only tells us what is in demand and in short supply. It does not give us a moral outcome unless we explicitly state that we absolve ourselves of all responsibility for making general decisions and subjugate ourselves to the market. There are people who think that because a perfect market distributes resources efficiently we can deduce that they are necessarily moral.
I disagree. I am a fan of efficiency, as evidenced in daily life, writing and speech. But although I do seek efficiency in achieving my goals, and disapprove of inefficiency in others' achievements, I do not make it my only goal: it is always a necessary part of the means, but never an end. It can't be a goal in itself; we need to achieve something else efficiently. Distributing resources efficiently according to the balance of human decisions (and ability to pay) is not intrinsically moral. If everyone gets a vote in what is right then we can have the tyranny of the majority: the persecution of minorities and so on. We guard against this with constitutions and bills of rights precisely because this is not moral. This is the easy argument of principle even before we get onto rich people raising prices for goods that others get more from. Markets judge the usefulness of a good from what a purchaser pays for it. That means that those with less money get less say in what is useful, and in what is moral, if we assume that market distribution is moral. That seems to me like disenfranchisement and slavery. Markets are the means by which people acquire what they choose, once we have decided on moral entitlements.
Of course, this is the case even if we have perfect markets. We don't. This is an impossibility, and economists like to pretend that markets approximate efficiency despite their known imperfections (unknown ones are assumed not to exist). But when it comes to justice, is approximate good enough? Is it enough that someone from the right house is convicted of murder? Yes, I know that's a bit of a spurious comparison, but if a few people do inordinately well out of a system that works mostly well, it's a very poor argument to say that we should not make things fairer because the system we have approximates quite well to fairness and therefore should be taken as a proxy for it.
We use markets as a tool, not an end. Just like GDP, they are a marker for sensible distribution because the two are correlated for much of human experience. But as with GDP, the link is neither perfect nor does it necessarily extrapolate either into the future or further into even freer (anarchic) markets.
Should we decree that everything is chance, including talent and the timing of birth that makes the talent useful? I don't like this one either. It is true that it is only by chance that my parents' son has the talents I have, but anyone else with different abilities would not be me. I deserve the products of my talent and effort precisely because they are inseparable from being me. They define who I am. Timing seems irrelevant. Why should we deny everyone ipods because it is only through an accident of birth that they even have the opportunity to use one (rather than being born centuries ago)? The implicit assumption is that there is a soul sitting in a timeless zone that is sucked into the world with an equal chance of being any one baby, and that we should be judging souls, not people. I think that a person is inseparable from the skills and attributes with which he is born: they make the person.
If we decide that even the effort you put into work is not your own, because it is determined by parental encouragement and social background, we are effectively denying the notion of individual responsibility for one's actions. It's a common thing to do, but it has awfully wide implications. Crime, punishment, morality and justice are definitely nonsensical if we do this. We don't want to do this.
Splitting talent and effort is not easy. The two feed into each other. But even if we could, I don't think we should for questions of how much pay one earns.
Are bankers more talented? They possibly are more able than nurses, and could do a nurse's job given training. Do they work harder? Definitely not. They might put in the hours, but that doesn't compare to a 12-hour night shift turning oldies, getting shouted at and delivering medicine.

Bankers' talent could be said to earn them more than nurses' effort. That might be what we want as a society: to reward talent heavily. But we're not. University professors are intelligent people, capable of being rich bankers if they choose. Doctors are usually intelligent people, easily rivals for bankers in the league of talents, but not paid as much. This is because we have market distortions.

Doctors' work is provided almost entirely by the state, at set levels of pay. Bankers' work isn't state-controlled, but they are in the special position of controlling the markets which set their pay. They share this position with company directors, who control selections onto remuneration boards. Most importantly, bankers, directors and others with economic power can afford the political donations, meals and lobbying (or campaigning, for those who get fully into politics) to suborn government into ensuring that their work is needed, allowed and well-rewarded.

Government doesn't directly set pay levels, but it does decree what is legal and what amounts to conning others, it sets and (supposedly) enforces tax rates and it (fails to) regulate companies that distort markets by becoming too large or engaging in unsound practices.

That our current system amplifies the differences in talent is obvious from the differences in pay. The top-earning bankers and executives are paid millions of pounds: each million is the pay of 20 well-qualified, talented people.

It is not believable to suggest that these people have more talent than 20 senior staff members, all of whom are good at their jobs, especially when evidence suggests that hedge-fund managers and directors are more products of chance (combined with enough sense not to be a disaster) than exceptional ability (I'm thinking of studies that show that you'd expect half of hedge-fund managers to do well if each time a decision crops up half of them choose each side, and that the numbers achieving notoriety and then failing are consistent with the random bobble of chance).

We have a system that rewards luck and enables those lucky enough to be catapulted into wealth to engineer things so that they do not lose it. That is very different from rewarding talent and effort.

Insecure Communications

I read this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/opinion/roger-cohen-the-discretion-of-nicholas-winton.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=0
in praise of Sir Nicholas Winton, a man who quietly saved hundreds of children from death but never boasted about it. The article notes that this was standard for his age, and that our modern society struggles to comprehend his action, because we live in a world where people self-promote or perish, and communication is easy and expected.
As the article notes, this is a very new thing. Modern communications technology has only emerged in the last couple of decades. It has certainly been possible to send messages instantaneously around the world for over a century; the telephone is a relatively old invention, and the telegraph accomplished something similar before that. But modern communications has made us behave very differently with our instant communications; they are now almost free and readily accessible. That combines poorly with a dramatic shift in culture towards being open, unrestrained and emotionally disinhibited to the point that the boundary between self and other barely exists. We vocalise our every thought, and then have long arguments about why people are so offensive or whether something should have been said at all: the last rearguard action of the idea that perhaps people should think before sharing.
I realise that we could have a long discussion about the benefits and costs of sharing our feelings. Recent evidence has shown that encouraging people to open up about bad events and 'repressed' memories actually seems to cause more harm than good, and that this therapy was perhaps the brainchild of an especially extraverted psychologist who ignored the fact that most people need more privacy and have internal lives. I could admit that many relationships go awry because of poor communication, and that couples are often more forgiving of each other when each others' attitudes are fully explained and understood by both sides.
But I don't want to dredge up every point on either side. I think that if people started to discuss the value of  opening up that would be success enough, because it seems to me that it's highly affected by personality and culture. And not just by over-arching culture, but little sub-cultures, such as within a family or neighbourhood.
This matters a lot to me, because I was raised differently from my peers, and my inclination is not to leap enthusiastically onto new communication innovations, so I'm now even further behind in the 'progress' of modern communications. I was coaxed onto Facebook almost as soon as it was available by my girlfriend of the time, who had come over from the US and already knew of it, and I use Facebook quite a lot. But I use it from my computer, and I mostly share my thoughts on politics and economics, more akin to the subjects that would have been discussed in public 50 years ago, rather than sharing pictures of my dinners and fluffy animals as fleeting diversions.

Modern life revolves around not even Facebook any more, but more instantaneous messaging, such as Twitter, Snapchat and sundry others that I haven't even heard of yet. Communication happens constantly, from people's ever more powerful mobile phones; people walk the streets with their minds on their phones, people chat with their friends in person whilst also having their phone in one hand, keeping others involved at the same time. Should a friend disappear to the loo, the phone will take over for a blessed minute or two of escape from having to sit and think for a moment.
I understand that. I like to fill my time with what I enjoy. I plug myself into podcasts when walking to the supermarket, even though it's only a 5-10 minute walk. But I do miss the thinking time, and I know I'm missing it. Sometimes on journeys I do just sit for a while and let my mind wander; it's very relaxing, rather than focussing on this or that, be it a podcast or a text conversation.
Again, better-qualified people than me have noted that thinking time is beneficial. We use it to process tasks that we put away for another time; we rest and recuperate; we indulge in creativity; we let our minds wander and actually consider some of the things we've encountered, bringing more in-depth and critical thought to bear. The lack of these things can affect a whole society.
But yet again, I'll content myself with noting that this debate exists.

I want to discuss the difference between having the ability and having the obligation. I'm an introvert with a pleasant and extensive internal life. I enjoy talking to other people and I do quite a lot of it. But I grew up in a family where we adhered to some distinctly old-fashioned approaches to life. We mostly sat round the table for meals. I learned only to shake hands with someone the first time I met him or when concluding a business deal, not at every coming or going. My mother called her father once a week on Tuesdays and regarded that as a close relationship; just as I would save up the events of the school day and relate them all at once when I got home, so it was easy to save up the events of the week and discuss them all at once.
When I went away on trips, I took photos with a film camera and when I got back I'd tell my mother the highlights of my trip, but it would be a few days at best before I could show everyone any pictures, if they'd even come out nicely at all.
The pace of life was slower, and that's not necessarily a good thing. It would have been nice to take hundreds of photos, check that they were good when I was taking them, and upload them as soon as I came back so that we could all see them as I talked about things the first time. Although I remembered what I'd done and had a better grasp of the timings and over-arching narrative of my life because of the need to relate it later, freeing up that brain capacity for something else in life might be a good thing.
I only got a mobile phone when I went to university because the college didn't provide landlines in its accommodation and my mother wanted to stay in touch without me needing to waste lots of money on payphones. I only started using the internet when I went to university because we were a bit behind as a family and because I hadn't needed it; I saw my friends at school and arranged to see them at other times in person.
At university I started using e-mails more. Lots of important information was e-mailed and I had a computer in my room. I still met people in the common room and didn't quite understand how they managed to co-ordinate with each other so well. On the other hand it takes a moment to go to the common room, and I used it as a place to relax and meet people, and the few people who cared to meet me knew that they could find me there when I was free. Some people never went there and just met friends without ever getting to know the wider community. I found that a bit insular, and if a quiet person like me found it insular there's clearly something to discuss.
So it was that as everyone else leapt on the mobile phone bandwagon I somehow didn't even notice it passing. And now that everyone is starting to use e-mails again, only on their phones, I find I'm ahead of the pack, because I still use e-mails by spending a lot of time on my computers at home.

However, everyone else has grown up with instant communication at all times. My closest relationship was with my mother, with whom I'd talk once a week. Once a week is my standard; that's what we both found good for a person we loved enormously, found interesting and shared political and economic discussions with. People my age become anxious if they receive no message from a friend in a day or even less. People need instantly to share their emotions, via updates about their activities. If you're feeling good because you bought ice cream, you only feel great if you let everyone else know as well so that they can buoy you up. If you feel bad because you dropped your ice cream, the only way to deal with emotional blow is to seek the support of your friends at once.
It's an extravert's world in which emotions only have meaning when validated by others, and in which self-control and independence are lost. Resilience is achieved not through personal development, but through social networks. I understand that people have different levels of resilience, and not everyone can deal with every blow very well. I was glad of my family and friends when my mother died. I happened to get a call on my phone just a couple of minutes after I'd watched her breaths erratically fade to nothing, and the sequence of calls afterwards was heart-warming. But it was also tiring. I'm an introvert.
So of course as modern communications developed people used them to strengthen social networks and to seek and offer support. But no-one seems to have considered how much support we should outsource to the network. Resilience is something that needs to be practiced in order to develop. You don't magically become able to deal with shocks when they occur if a lost fingernail is a tragedy requiring external help. You don't learn to take pleasure in the simple beauty of things and of merely being alive if you can only conjure up a stunted seed of a positive emotion which needs the nurture of others to grow into something special.
I know that people have been insecure for a long time, and I know that 75% of the population (depending on the estimate) is extraverted. When you're insecure it's good to be able to get validation. It's good to get instant gratification without holding yourself in uncertainty for ages. When you have an insatiable need for more and more social contact you're going to take advantage of things that allow you that contact.
I personally don't think it's healthy. Mobile phones for some people are addictions, and people need the extravert's hit of as much social contact as possible, no matter the quality. It begins to eat into genuine interactions, as face-to-face conversations become only partial so that the participants can continue communicating to the many people who might be hooked on the other end of the invisible network. It's a burden of constant contact that insecure extraverts willingly take on. They no longer have to learn to deal with life or themselves. Whereas I deal with my emotions and the highs and lows of life, and might share them with someone I trust later on when it comes up, it seems that everyone else needs people available to support them on demand. That demand is tiring.
Modern technology has unleashed the built-up need for more and more communication, but not many people have considered whether there is an appropriate level of communication. I was happy with less, and when technology limited us all, I was relatively content. But now technology allows more, some people have raced away. They're entitled to do so, although as I've said I think it might well be unhealthy for them and for society more widely. But as they communicated more and more, people grew accustomed to it and came to expect it, and I resent that.
I don't need to chat all day every day; I don't want to start text conversations when doing something else, and I wouldn't want to even if I had a phone that worked well enough for it to be as fast as typing. Messages are for storing; conversations by voice are for instant communication. If actually talking seems to get things done too quickly, or peters out because there's nothing to say, then the conclusion is that we should stop and talk again later when we have something to say. The constant contact is a demand; it's an obligation to show that you're close to someone, and it's actually quite time-consuming. By failing to deal with life ourselves, and insisting that others are there all the time, we actually ensure that we become more insular at the same time as technology frees us up to be less insular. We're all so isolated in our social bubbles of demanding social engagement that we don't have time for looking out. And as more and more time is demanded by our 'friends', so those people on the outside get less and less.
Modern communications has allowed some people to achieve their dream of constant contact, even for no purpose. For me, communication needs to have purpose. I don't need to hear from people just to feel validated. I miss my friends because our conversations were interesting and I pick up where we left off without thought of how long any break might have been.
Other people seem to think that bonds fade and die if not constantly built. Maybe for them it's true, because they never learned to hold onto things, to remember conversations and interactions for later. But for me the friendships of my youth endure even with people I haven't seen, and will do even if I die without seeing them again. History doesn't change just because it's longer ago.

Modern society was amazed and impressed by Sir Nicholas Winton. He had the internal purpose and drive to do something good, and he knew it was the right thing even without anyone else knowing what he'd done. There is no doubt that when he thought of the lives he'd saved he knew he'd done the right thing... and that was enough. He was a man of principle who didn't need others to confirm his thoughts. He could think for himself.

And although I can only dream of having saved people's lives, I sometimes wish modern society would relate its respect for Sir Nicholas to its disdain for me and work out what it really feels. I have grown up in a different culture and I have different needs in life. A little bit of patience and tolerance would be lovely. Perhaps if I share this online with the social network I'll get it?

It's my privilege

I've included a lot of personal stories here. It might get boring, but I think they're relevant.
There was recently a flurry of fuss about a male computer programmer who said that he didn't share male privilege and didn't see why he should acknowledge it, as feminists suggest. I agree with him; male privilege seems to me to be very much like the doctrine of original sin. It's something the preachers have invented for which I should be ashamed and beg forgiveness, no matter what my actions actually are.
    In many ways I had a privileged childhood. I was born into a highly-educated family with parents who didn't stint on books, literary references or pressure to succeed. I went to one of the best schools in the country, did well there and went to the most famous university in the world. A cursory glance at my CV would place me at the very centre of the privilege bullseye. But the whole point of highlighting privilege is that people judge others by superficial characteristics. The feminist side of that is that it's wrong to judge a woman simply because she has breasts, or on the size of them, but the principle is a good one that feminists would do well to follow more widely.
    I was an awkward child. When I was very small my mother asked me to bring the next load of washing down, so I did. She was annoyed with me when she found that I hadn't put it on as well, but not too angry because she remembered what she'd said. She knew that I had difficulty dealing with people, so when I turned up at prep school (having got the highest marks they'd seen in the entrance exam, despite getting very annoyed with myself for having got a question wrong) she told me just to say the first thing in my head. She reiterated this as we arrived; just say what's on my mind and things would be alright. I was unwilling, but I did. As we walked along I saw another boy with very big buck teeth, and I exclaimed "Oooh, ugly!" If only I had seen the ugliness inside him, I'd have run away screaming instead.
    Of course my mother hadn't had that in mind, but it was my first thought on seeing him. I wasn't stupid; I had other thoughts that maybe he was a nice boy and wouldn't like being thought ugly, but I trusted my mother when she said people would accept me. It was one of the three times in my life that my trust was misplaced.
    I was good at school. My mother once got a moment of pure joy when she overheard two other mothers talking. One remarked to the other "James has done very well this year. He could get the form prize." And James' mother sadly replied "No, he's in [my] class." And I was not popular. At prep school I used to answer the teacher's questions, interact and learn. I even corrected our maths teacher, Miss Cooper, on her maths! And I corrected her on her spelling of my name (in private at the end of the lesson), for which she told me off. My mother wrote to the headmaster about that.
    But that interactive approach to learning was gradually beaten out of me. I had a few acquaintances who played table tennis as well, but I was mostly a target for insults and occasional scuffles from my peers. At one point a boy who was normally not too bad kicked me viciously on the shins because he was trying to push in front of me for lunch, and I was outraged enough actually to kick back. He did queue behind me. At that age we didn't normally go in for such vicious assaults. From then on I developed a reputation as violent as well as being fun to pick on.
    During my childhood I was often attacked. One week some older boys tried to hunt me down every break because I was slippery and good at dodging and they felt they already had power over everyone else. I didn't bow and scrape to them or pay my respects to the status they felt they had; I just tried to mind my own business.
    In upper school (11+) I had a hockey ball thrown at me from a few metres away because I was sitting quietly waiting for class and didn't move out of the way when some boys wanted to use my space for a mini hockey game. I threw it back in his face. I was assaulted with a hockey stick because I had the temerity to intercept someone's pass and academic boys like me had no place showing up boys who wanted to be popular and sporty.  I was going to beat him to a pulp but I'd smashed my fingers blocking his blow and went to hospital instead. I still have the scars.
    One older boy had his friend try to hold me while he hit me with a metal chair because I'd been beating them at cards. I cracked his skull with a plastic biro I had in my pocket. Another time we were out on the fields waiting for the rugby teacher and a crowd of boys decided to play the game of overpowering me. They encircled me and tried to take me down. I shook a few of them off and their own fear of what I might do and of being shown up kept them at bay, very much like a hunting pack. When the teacher arrived he just ignored them: I'd have given them all detention at the very least. During a game of British Bulldog one of two catchers singled me out for over 15 runs and failed to catch me before finally getting me in a stand-off. He declared that he was going to ignore the rules (such as they were) and make me suffer. I punched him on the jaw three times and watched his face fall as he started to cry, and then I finished the 'run', but the other boys, quite remarkably for a game of bulldog, called an end to the game and went to check that he was alright. They had a go at me for being so unpleasant.
    Once a baying pack of my 'peers' saw me playing cards with three friends and after a lot of jeering and taunting one of them stole some of my cards to amuse the others. My friends wanted me to ignore it and accept the loss as they would have done, but it irked me. I walked after him and threw a chair at him. He was trapped in a ring of his friends and gave at least some of the cards back. Yet another time an older boy wanted me to do a lot of chores setting up an event and after I'd done more than a quarter of the work that was for 6 of us to complete I said I wouldn't. The others hadn't made any effort to work. He picked up a kitchen knife and came at me, so I punched him in the face too. He was nonplussed for a moment before giving up on me; he at least had only been bluffing.
    These are just some of the highlights of my youth. There are many, many more incidents, a few of which I'm much more ashamed of. The boys wanted me to give them the respect they felt they deserved; it was their privilege. I'm guessing here, but I think that they spent a lot of time and effort gaining status amongst each other and couldn't stand the fact that I didn't acknowledge their hierarchy or the place within it that they wanted to give me. They felt like they had the right to use my body, my space and my property as their playthings, to amuse them on a whim and they never grasped why I didn't accept this give and take of life, in which I give and they take. They wanted my dignity, and I never gave it away. This is why I hate people who talk about being able to laugh at yourself as if it's the height of being civilized. You know what it means to me? It means humiliation; it means degrading myself just for other people's pleasure; it means ceding control of my life to others just to try to fit in. If you want to laugh at me, take a long, hard look at yourself.
    Maybe if I'd been one these privileged little twerps I'd be touting the value of laughing at oneself as an essential part of social life, because for them it was. They never experienced the other side, when being laughed at was all you could expect. They could rely on their social capital to make it just a brief joke rather than incessant abasement. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean I need to join in. No-one else might, but I at least value myself. I preferred the grudging fear I earned to degrading myself. I liked the nickname 'Psycho', which was their way of reconciling my ability to beat them up with my academic success, two things that they didn't think should go together.
    But according to some feminists I'm privileged because I'm a white man. According to them I've sailed through life never experiencing the trials and tribulations of being different, of not fitting in or of being regarded as a social inferior. I have thoughtlessly enjoyed the bounty of life without realising how others suffer. Even though the bullies wanted to control my life and body, I can't share the 'lived experience' of women whose bodies men desire and sometimes want to control, because I'm a white man.
    It wasn't the harshest of childhoods. I didn't grow up amongst dangerous people who might have killed me or seriously injured me. I wasn't terrorised by gangs with weapons or people who had any power over my family or neighbourhood. But I was picked on by people who wanted to humiliate me specifically, to show their dominance and to assert their right to interfere with my life: to assert their privileged status. For much of my school life I was locked in a battle. Outside of school I was part of a well-off family in a lovely area. It sounds nice, but it wasn't all sweetness and light. My alcoholic miser of a father was a horror to deal with and my crippled blind mother was as wise and caring as anyone can ever be, but I still had to help my sister do the housework from a very young age. While my friends were being driven around to each others' houses, getting nice toys and later in life going out on the town with a few notes handed them by their parents I had to cadge lifts and later on cycle around town.
    My school ran a series of field trips abroad, all of which my mother insisted I go on. My father gave her a mean allowance from his income but she insisted, and I got a lot from those trips. But the other boys would fritter away spending money on those trips like it was water. I just soaked up the culture of ancient Greece and Rome and took photos with my camera; I had no choice of stopping for a rest in a cafe, so I walked throughout the day.
    When I was older and went on expeditions I worked very hard on the fundraising. I worked more than 100 hours for both expeditions whilst others did the minimum of 30 or even fewer. They decreed that we would share the funds raised to discount our costs evenly, and decreed that even people who hadn't done the minimum could make up the rest by paying. We accepted one such boy on our trip to Iceland who hadn't done any of our training or previous trips. When we were out on the icecap he lost his food and we had to turn back. Once we were back he found his food at the bottom of his bag, but the expedition was already ruined. I loved those expeditions, but when the third one came round I wanted no part of raising money for other people who didn't even need it.
    There is no recognised category that I can be pigeonholed into that explains my experiences and validates them. I'm not black, female or even ginger. I was specifically targetted because I'm me, not because of some surface characteristic I can blame people's prejudices on. The feminism that I like is the version that says we should treat everyone with due courtesy and respect; that being bad is wrong. I have no time for do-gooding that says that if we offer help to some broad categories of people the issue will be addressed. The problem is wider than any one form of prejudice; the problem is bullying and discrimination for any reason. At school bullying is the problem and discrimination is a problem mostly because it is a reason for bullying. If we leave bullying alone but solve discrimination, so that victims are picked randomly rather than due to a defined set of characteristics, we will still have abused children.
    I might seem like I came out of my school life rather well. I won most of the battles at school, be they of wits or fists. I wasn't cowed like some of my friends and I kept my dignity and pride. It felt like I'd won, but looking back there are clear effects beyond those surface victories. I sacrificed and changed in order to achieve what I did.
    Remember what I said about engaging with teachers at prep school? Modern educators say that engagement and interaction is essential to learning fastest and best. By the time I was at upper school I'd learned not to stand out in class. I never hazarded an unusual answer or one of which I was unsure because the penalty for getting it wrong became so severe. I never experimented with new ideas or bounced them off the teacher; I learned to guess in my head and compare my answers to the teacher's when they were revealed, to explain differences as best I could in the privacy of my own mind. That's because other boys would jeer and taunt if I got things wrong, sometimes openly in class in front of the teacher.
    I remember one confused English teacher who liked to give us rankings for our homework. He'd ask us to shout "yes" or "no" and if we said "yes" he'd give our ranking and mark in front of the whole class. The whole exercise seemed pointless to me because he'd give us the marked work back as well. On one occasion I said "no", but of course enough other people said "yes" that everyone could work out that I'd only come second in the form that time. It was many days before the jeering and taunting for only being second stopped, and even after the next week's results people still harked back to the glory day when I only came second.
    With that sort of penalty I was of course at pains to provide as little ammunition as possible, and mostly I succeeded. I never shared my marks; I learned to keep them secret. I would hide my work as soon as the teacher delivered it back. I hated those teachers who left a pile of work at the front for us to burrow through and nose at others' marks. People always rushed to try to beat me to the pile and get a glimpse of my work just in the hope of being able to make another juicy taunt.
    By the time I left school I was no longer the socially awkward but curious child I had been. I had been schooled to be quiet, secretive and private just to protect myself. Privacy doesn't just protect criminals; it protects every form of social outcast. Anti-privacy campaigners should spend a couple of decades being bullied. My tactics worked, but I wasn't who I had been. I had learned to watch for threats at all times. People laughing usually meant they were laughing at me, unless I knew what the joke was. Sometimes they hoped I'd join in but I wasn't fool enough to pretend. I'd seen and heard them play that trick on others, of laughing at people when those people were joining in and trying to fit in but didn't understand the joke. I didn't give them that pleasure. Every push, shove or borrowed piece of property was an attempt at exerting or displaying dominance that needed to be forcefully squashed because if you give an inch, they'll end up taking a mile.
    It was with that outlook on life that I came to university. There I met people, men and women, who genuinely were privileged. They'd never been bullied; they'd had rosy and pleasant childhoods. A standard topic of conversation was how useless someone was at household chores such as washing clothes or cooking, things I'd been doing for over a decade. Did the quiet, awkward boy who trusted no-one fit in? Of course not. In our first week someone gave me an almighty hit in the back in the queue for a club. He'd been a bit unpleasant earlier, but probably was just childishly acting out or maybe trying to impress a girl. But I came from a world where that was a grievous affront; where allowing myself to be hit set a dangerous precedent that could spiral out of control, especially in the back. My body isn't for hitting, ever. I punched him a few times before the shocked group of students caught my eye and then the bouncer led me away.
    It turns out that a lot of the time when people are laughing it's not at me, but I still hate the sound of laughter when I don't know the joke. You can't unlearn a childhood's lessons that easily. And you can't fit in with a group of people when you're suspicious that everything you didn't hear is a snide comment about how funny it is that you think you're welcome when actually they all hate you. I never fell for that because I was suspicious, but learning to be suspicious is itself a mental scar that I'll never completely shake. People who know me might not notice it, but even if I mostly trust them I'm still alert for signs that things are not what they seem; that I'm only being tolerated as an unwitting amusement. I see such signs all the time, but each time I consciously force myself to ignore them. Rejection and ill-will are no longer standard in my life, but I can't help still watching for them. It could be classed as the mental illness of paranoia, except that when I was a boy the suspicions were entirely warranted. I still have trouble with what some people see as banter. Is it picking on me; is it bullying again; how much of it is meant? At what level is the joke?
    This is my privilege: of being trained to trust no-one, of not forming nice and easy social bonds because it's so rarely worked out for me in the past. I don't have other black people or other women to trust as compatriots in oppression. I'm one of the misfits from school and undergraduate life who knows that anyone and sometimes everyone might be against me. I've seen the ugly faces of the mob, including normally friendly people, as they came for me, and I've felt alone. And although I fought back on my own where some victims feel terrible and lost, it still doesn't feel like privilege.
    I don't need to delve into my personal experiences to make an abstract argument, but I hope they help illustrate my point. By describing my lived experiences I hope it makes the argument that much more visceral.

    And even though I'm an adult with a job, I still don't feel privileged. Life still doesn't open up for me. Some young adults like myself have houses already, helped by their doting and helpful parents who have put up deposits and guaranteed the mortgages, or in some cases bought the house outright. My father rented out my old bedroom and gave me two days to come to the house and clear it out, when I have no car and had other commitments. He left my childhood in bin bags on the side of the road and I rescued it because I came as soon as I could and the binmen were late that day. It's now in my father's garage, and he leaves the door open all the time. I expect a number of burglars have been through my belongings and already taken anything of value.
    Some young workers live with their parents, and have meals cooked for them, and their clothes washed. Some people just get to go home to relax for a nice weekend when they need to unwind. That's family privilege. One person I know got utterly pampered while she studied for professional exams; I had a life to live. Another person owns two houses because his parents bought one and he made so much money renting rooms in London and not paying for his own accommodation that he rapidly got a big deposit for a second one. That's economic privilege. Many people have their friends and family pull strings to get jobs. We might charitably say that the reason children do so well in their parents' professions is that they learned a lot about the work from their parents,  but connections seem as likely an answer. Fully 95% of media jobs go to people with family already in the media. My parents were well-educated, but they have no social network. Even if my father did, I'm not sure he'd use it to help me, or that being introduced to someone on his recommendation would be beneficial. I have no invisible web of contacts to catch me if I seem to be falling. I have to rely on the hope of a meritocracy, and it's a dream, not reality. I have no social privilege, despite the sound of my voice.
    I'm fit and healthy; I go to the gym a lot and I am, apparently, not too ugly. But no-one thought to tell me so until a few years ago. My life has been a litany of rejection or being too awkward even to be in a position to be rejected. I haven't sailed through life with men keen to bask in reflected glory and women fawning over me, keen to be picked out as my next victim. I apparently have looks privilege, but it's privilege that you only experience if you also have the social arrogance to use it. I had learned never to reach out to people, as the best way to avoid the scorn that always follows. Maybe I should have reached out and endured the scorn, and learned to do whatever people wanted in exchange for human contact, but I was stubborn and independent, and I'm still proud of that. Perhaps if I were ugly I'd get nasty looks on the street or have been even less popular. But I've hardly had a great time; my social experiences of my youth are still in the bottom end of the scale.
    Once I'm in work you might think things would be alright. I've got the job, I'm capable and dealing with adults. But adults aren't as free from bigotry and discrimination as we'd like to think. My last office had quite a few non-white staff, and a lot of women, including many working part-time arrangements. But although we had unconscious bias training about small cultural differences that can lead to misunderstandings, and were exhorted to manage people as individuals with sensitivity, I still don't fit in. The training was for diversity reasons, to alert us to how different cultures behave differently. But my managers clearly didn't think more widely about whether the man who doesn't watch popular television and therefore doesn't engage in team conversations is actually not a 'team-player'. They didn't think that perhaps introverts prefer not to focus their work on as many conversations with people as possible; they didn't think that getting twice as much work done (or more) as others made up for the fact that the client said that they didn't see much of me. That would normally be a good thing when it would have been to waste their time asking questions to which we already had the answers. My managers didn't like me forming my own opinions and, when we disagreed, writing up our conclusion as being agreed by my manager rather than being my own opinion.
    There is a great book out there about how introverts are discriminated against in the wider world, called 'Quiet'. You can't identify an introvert from a superficial characteristic, nor invite introverts to additional help sessions to make up for their failure to be normal. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of traits that are discriminated against but which aren't directly observable. I'm a quiet man who questions how things are done. I don't engage with social hierarchies nor see any reason to work late if I've got my work done by 5pm (or, to be honest, if I haven't; there's always next day for work, barring tight deadlines, and if I've been given too much work it's clearly not a one-person job). I fall through the cracks because the things that rile people about me aren't my skin colour or other surface things. That doesn't make discrimination against me any less bigoted, irrational or unpleasant.
   What about slow privilege? There are hordes of people who saunter along narrow paths and pavements with no thought for those behind or even in front of them. There are countless times that I've had to stop in front of people walking towards me and scowl at their suddenly shocked faces as they find that no, I don't magically disappear if they ignore me. I've been held up behind people walking in the middle of the corridor or path, or walking abreast of each other, so many times it must be in the hundreds of thousands by now. Talk about microaggressions! Is it oppression of people who want to move at a decent pace? Is it privilege of the slow who have never had to think about how they never get held up? Or is it best described as utter thoughtlessness; gross rudeness and sheer lack of consideration for other people?

    As I wrote previously, the problem is that humans are bigoted and thoughtless, not that some identifiable categories are clearly the subject of particular bigotry. The more we focus on one type of bigotry, or escaping from it (which is what 'privilege' means in this context) the less we're focussing on bigotry itself as a problem. It doesn't matter if it's white privilege, male privilege, economic privilege, social privilege, health privilege, attractiveness privilege or anything else. You create a name for your own special interest; the excuse for your mistreatment, and you steal attention from others without names. I'm sure there are blacks, gays, women, and oldies who have had worse experiences. But they will be people at one end of a scale that stretches a long way into experiences more positive than mine.
    Let me drag you all the way back to white computer nerds. Are they privileged? Well, in the sense that they have not been discriminated against because they're black or women, yes they are. But have these men, who were often bullied at school, necessarily experienced less hassle and bigotry than all women? Absolutely not. A high-school cheerleader and prom queen (not a term we really have in the UK, but it's recognised enough) cannot possibly self-righteously complain that these nerds have had a nicer life than she has. Not only that, but the experiences of bullied children are all awful no matter the excuse. I'm sure some people might even argue that being able to blame your bullying on some well-known bias like racism makes it easier to bear than simply being a misfit who doesn't belong in the brutish society we call civilisation.
    So having discussed privilege, I now want to say that we need to stop talking about specific privilege. What matters is any form of judging people by shorthand, biased methods. It doesn't matter if a worker is one of the legally protected categories of people (sex, age, sexuality, race, religion), but that's not all there is to it. We haven't won the anti-discrimination fight at that point. It also doesn't matter if you like one worker and share his interests and dislike another because you don't. We just need to teach people to judge based only on the relevant things. People need to learn to be impartial and disinterested if we want any justice in the world, and that's a really hard thing to get folks behind. But it's even harder if we're only campaigning on part of the subject.

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?