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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Minimum pricing is wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I recently saw this article online:
http://mobile.slate.com/articles/life/family/2013/02/abusive_parents_what_do_grown_children_owe_the_mothers_and_fathers_who_made.html

It's a very good article, and got me thinking. A quotation will illustrate the track of my thought:
'The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.

Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.

They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.

These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.' -Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

I am constantly enjoined to forgive my father, along with platitudes that he can't be all bad, and that everyone deserves some care and love. I always thought that this was part people not understanding, and part them reacting to my dislike for him by trying to moderate the opinions they heard.
As the article says, even some good qualities don't redeem a mostly evil person. I also happen to think that the argument doesn't apply to my father, but that's another story (about the sum of many small annoyances).

However, people don't always just take a contrary point of view. I do, myself, a lot of the time: it's part of my questioning nature (I like to think). I think this writer is correct: people say it because they have a general idea that I shouldn't let 'bad' emotions fester. I want to address this concept. If I want to avoid giving nasty people 'power over me', as people often like to call holding grudges, it's best done by not letting them get away with things and weakly rolling over and telling myself it's fine. That sort of self-delusion is not healthy. It's wrong even if I can't do anything about it. Morality doesn't depend on the likelihood of justice actually being done. It's not alright if someone's wronged me: that's an oxymoron. It's wrong if someone's wronged me.

This begins to explain the link between the article on abusive parents and A Brave New World. Every time someone tells me just to make my peace with my father, it rankles: it goes against my very nature. I might have the wrong moral principles (again, another argument) but I do value them highly. Principles are an essential part of who I am. And yet making peace with someone evil is ignoring every moral qualm about them; it's the ultimate act of mercy, but the people who push for it, which seems to be an overwhelming proportion of the population, talk of it as necessary for my well-being. If I try hard enough, perhaps I can dismiss wrongs and injustices and be at peace with a world that inflicts them.

 It's this supposed link between my well-being and throwing aside morality that really disturbs me. I've been urged many times effectively to forget my moral concerns and think instead of my mental health. I'm not convinced that paying attentiont to morality is bad for one's health, but even  if it is, that's too high a price to pay for a little bit of well-being.
This is a symptom of a wider problem in society: our focus on ourselves at the expense of moral principles. Greed is good, after all, so it must be good to forgive wrong-doers if it helps me. But even ignoring the  parallels with capitalism and some of the nastier assumptions/requirements of economics, it shows that a lot of people genuinely value 'adjustment' over morality. It shows that people cannot imagine that I'd have a moral concern about it, and so the appeal to self-interest then makes sense. If all these people urging forgiveness had a notion of justice, or understood that justice takes precedence over self-interest, they'd never suggest such a ludicrous notion as forgetting a lost childhood (or mother) and making friends with the person who caused it.
When society wrongs us, many people become small-minded: they focus on individuals they know who exemplify some sort of unfairness. A recent survey found that the people who will suffer from the recent round of cuts of government benefits all despise each other as being scroungers: people spoke of the people down the road who clearly got too much. None of them cares that it's a load of politicians and bankers who made the cuts necessary (to an extent: it's certainly an argument you'd expect to hear a lot but didn't come up).
That's because we've all learned from a young age to 'forgive and forget', because that's good for us. There's even a revolting prayer I first heard on the lips of an equally revolting (now ex) girlfriend: 'give us the serenity to accept those things we cannot change'. I know that the interpretation of the prayer can vary from person to person, but the general intent seems to me the same. It's saying 'please let me throw away my moral principles and accept whatever injustices are bothering me'. 
If well-being is more important than other concerns, a recent study showing that people with attachment anxiety have weaker immune systems suggests that everyone who worries about their partner, gets upset and starts rows, or cares about cheating should just discard their concerns and move on with life. The double-standard here annoys me. I can imagine someone trying to justify it as being about the future, rather than the past, but I don't think that changes anything.
This focus on forgiveness and humility worked well to spread Christianity through the oppressed classes of the world. It makes people easily-dominated and persuades them to accept what they shouldn't. As an individual, if someone really can find that serenity, it might benefit the person's health. But it diminishes him as a person. A respectable human knows right and wrong, cares about morality and isn't a doormat to be trampled. For every act of unearned forgiveness there's an act of unjustified wrongdoing. If we get too deeply into the mindset of forgiveness, we forget what makes us human: our memories, sentience and morality. 'Closure' on my grudges is also closure on my humanity.

I bear grudges because although I know I can't change some things right now, I get my serenity from dreaming of them made right. The past is indeed the past, but we shouldn't forget it. We should learn from it.

Imperfect markets

Markets are typically said to be the best way to distribute our resources. In general, I don't dispute this: I think that some necessities need to be distributed differently, to prevent poor people being priced out of the market, or to ensure coverage, but luxuries and items with plenty of substitutes suit markets well.
However, I do take issue with any suggestion that markets approach perfection, which is often assumed as axiomatic to economic theory. Markets cannot approach perfection. Perfect markets can approach perfection, but that's a tautology: we never deal with perfect markets.

This post is about the efficient market hypothesis, which I was reading about a couple of days ago during remedial GCSE maths (financial reporting work).
Weak efficiency is when prices can no longer be predicted from past movements. If they can be, then people are not acting on that possibility, which means that the price does not accurately reflect information. Prices should follow a 'random walk', in which each future movement is a new event.
Semi-strong efficiency is when prices incorporate all publicly available information.
Strong efficiency is when prices incorporate all information.
If markets are semi-strong efficient, inside information is required to beat the market.
If markets are semi-strong efficient or better, then someone with incomplete knowledge (i.e a human) should trust the market price instead of his own estimate of the price. The problem with this is that the market price is accurate precisely because it is an average of everyone's estimates, and therefore incorporates the information these people know. If one person free-rides on this accuracy, nothing changes, but when it becomes widely accepted that the market is right, information is removed from the estimate, which also becomes much more chaotic as everyone clusters around believing that the 'true' value is very close to the quoted market price, ensuring that small actions can have big effects. This is a double effect of the clustering of people's estimates and the removal of information. It will no doubt be exacerbated by the tendency of those with estimates furthest from the market price to doubt their information the most. Humans have an inbuilt fallacy called 'anchoring' which contributes to this.

Hence, if semi-strong or strong efficiency is accepted, it is rapidly lost by the free-rider problem of people taking advantage of the supposed information conveyed by the price. I have been told that this will be corrected by people who do know what is right taking the opportunity to make a profit, but this assumes that there is one person who knows accurately what the value is: the precise lack of which led to us creating the market in the first place. It also assumes that the market will self-correct. If there is a self-sustaining chaos, or movement away from the 'true' value, then any attempt to use knowledge will fail, being subject to chaos just like random bets.

Given this tendency of markets to degenerate to self-referential prices, there are two ways to beat the market: to use insider information in a semi-strong market, or to be lucky. In fact, if the market becomes self-referential, one can either invest in complex algorithms that predict human behaviour, in an attempt to understand how such self-referential human systems behave, or one can realise that the purpose of the market is no longer being served, and withdraw from it to start again.

Our big banks have, of course, gone for the complicated algorithm option.
So, why do we have hordes of speculators?

The solution would be to prevent the system being self-referential. We want a market that accumulates estimates and averages them, without these being biased by knowing the final result. We need to cut the feedback loop: the contributors to a market need to be blind to the price. That's a problem when the point of a market is to allow them to get a sensible and consistent price.
How else can we avoid the feedback loop that removes information? We can cut it through time, by delaying transactions until after bids, but delays come at a cost, and the next round in a continuous market will be affected by the last round no matter the timing.
In fact, we must tackle speculation itself: the ability to feed round the loop many times. We can't cut the loop perfectly, but if we make transactions cost, then following the loop round will incur a cost that will deter people who are not interested in what the market is for. This cost will hit legitimate users as well. We could also limit derivatives; these specifically refer to market price, and are therefore part of the self-referentiality of the market. Some are necessary, in order to deal with risk, but the freedom to overpower the market with them can disrupt the proper functioning of the market.
I would love to do a cost-benefit analysis of the liquidity added to the market for legitimate use weighed against the cost of greater market imperfection through self-reference. But sadly I don't know enough economics or maths.