Politics – Page 101 – a sibilant intake of breath

10 billion humans in 2100

The population division of the United Nations now estimates that the global human population in 2100 will be 10.1 billion.

While it is challenging to comment accurately and appropriately on the consequences of global population growth, it does seem fair to say that the difficulty associated with providing any particular global standard of living increases as the total global population does. In particular, providing energy for ten billion people to live decent lives – without wrecking the climate – seems like it will be a major undertaking.

Smartphones and location data

There have been some worrisome revelations recently about Apple and Google tracking people by the location of their cell phones. In Google’s case, the tracking may be part of an advertising strategy.

It seems like online privacy is really a losing battle these days. Perhaps consumer anger about these latest tracking allegations will encourage regulators to keep a closer eye on what sort of monitoring technologies are being deployed without the full understanding of consumers.

Iggy pot

As shown in a video from the Canadian Press, Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff was asked whether he had ever smoked marijuana. Here is what I think he said in response:

I have smoked pot as a young man, yes. I did not. And it’s one of the reasons. And I urge young people not to repeat the experience. It did not ruin my life. I just think there are a lot more important and interesting things to do with your life, including a glass of wine after dinner. I mean, let’s all relax here.

The Globe and Mail captioned the video: “Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff admits he smoked marijuana when he was younger, but he says, he prefers a nice glass of wine.”

If that’s what it comes down to – a matter of preference – I feel obligated to ask about the severe double standard that exists in the law now. Ignatieff’s drug of choice is available in all of Canada’s finest restaurants. They will bring it to you for free in first class on Air Canada. And yet if you prefer the other drug he has tried, you risk being branded as a criminal, fined, and potentially imprisoned.

It doesn’t make sense to apply a harsh legal regime to drugs that are less harmful than alcohol. If we grant adults the sovereign right to poison themselves with alcohol or nicotine or caffeine, we should acknowledge the same right with regard to marijuana, MDMA, and other comparatively benign substances.

Bum me out, and I’ll ignore you

My friend Lauren sent me a link to an article by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger entitled: The Long Death of Environmentalism.

It contains much that is of interest, but one passage stood out for me:

John Jost, a leading political psychologist at New York University, recently demonstrated that much of the partisan divide on global warming can be explained through the psychological concept of system justification. It turns out that many Americans have a strong psychological need to maintain a positive view of the existing social order. When Gore said “we are going to have to change the way we live our lives” he could not have uttered a statement better tailored to trigger system justification among a substantial number of Americans.

‘A strong psychological need to maintain a positive view of the existing social order’ probably contributes to the Lindzen Fallacy.

Options for the civically minded

For people who feel a sense of civic duty – a determination to do what they can to improve the laws and policies of their society – it seems to me that there are multiple valid avenues through which to apply your efforts.

The most overt may be entering politics, but it is an option that carries many costs. You might have to spend a lot of time at small-town barbecues wearing a silly apron, to try to convince voters that you’re an ordinary guy like them and not some fancy-school elitist. You might also have to lie about or conceal beliefs that go beyond what the mainstream is willing to accept (better not be an atheist, for instance). Still, if you do take the political route and find yourself in a position of influence, at least you have a pretty defensible mandate to try to implement the ideas you campaigned on.

The civil service is another option. The influence and the constraints of the civil service are both tied to the same role: providing advice. Being someone who provides advice gives you the freedom to use your judgment and the best available evidence to suggest a course of action. The trouble is, you can always be over-ruled by your superiors or by the people who ultimately make the decisions. Civil servants therefore have a moderate level of freedom for expressing their honestly-held and well-justified views, but little certainty that their advice will ever make a difference.

Journalists and academics have the most freedom to speak and defend their arguments in public, but they have even less certainty that their efforts will ever produce concrete changes. Judges, by contrast, know their judgments will have concrete effects, but they don’t know whether that influence will be confined entirely to the case at hand, or whether it will become a more influential precedent.

Setting aside the advantages and disadvantages of different roles, I think it is important to acknowledge that people in all of these roles can be doing their civic duty, in the sense of trying to serve the best interests of their country and the world more broadly. It is possible to serve those interests through obedience – for instance, those who put themselves in physical danger for the good of others – but it is also possible to serve them through honest and open criticism. All governments have made serious mistakes in the past and face major challenges today. If we are to navigate successfully to a safe and comfortable future, there needs to be energetic and open debate based on the best evidence available.

Helping kids pay for college

These days, it seems like having a university degree is the equivalent of having a high school diploma in previous generations – it is simply the requirement in order to even be considered for most professional jobs.

At the same time, university is expensive and comes at a time when people do not have savings or earnings of their own. For many people, the late teens and twenties will be the poorest time in their life, as they are no longer fully provided for by parents but cannot yet get jobs good enough to let them live in comfort. In most cases, they definitely cannot get jobs that pay the cost of living and university tuition, while not requiring so much time and commitment that it undermines their ability to study and benefit from school.

A case can be made that people who choose to have children have some level of moral obligation to help pay for university, in the event that their kids can get in and want to go. Providing such a transfer of wealth to one’s children could help set them on a good path for their entire life. It provides a useful qualification, as well as a key venue to meet future friends, allies, and potential spouses. It is enormously more useful than a lump-sum inheritance received much later in life, when their personal trajectory will already have been basically established. You will also be contributing to the development of an educated and productive populace.

People who themselves went to college probably have a bit more of an obligation to provide a similar opportunity, especially if they received financial help from their own parents. Even for those who didn’t, it is worth bearing in mind that school used to cost a lot less, so people going today have more need for help.

An obligation to help pay for university adds significantly to the total cost of having children, but nobody should be under the illusion that doing so will be cheap. If you don’t feel inclined to invest significantly in your children, my recommendation would be getting a couple of friendly dogs instead.

On a semi-related note, university education is also a smart thing to consider when choosing a spouse. There seems to be a lot of evidence that the more educated a person’s mother is, the better they are likely to do in school, work, and life generally.

Georgia’s drug courts

Ira Glass recently produced an especially interesting episode of This American Life, talking about a particular drug court in the United States: Very Tough Love.

One potential advantage of the fiscal mess states like Canada and the United States have gotten themselves into is that it might help drive the advancement of more sensible drug policies. Our current approach is excessively punitive, fails to respect the sovereignty of the individual over their body, and is needlessly costly and destructive.

Pinker on intelligence

Here is an interesting passage from Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate:

In any case, there is now ample evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be linked to features in the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glucose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of the variation in life outcomes such as income and social status. (p.150 paperback)

Conceptually, we can separate the question “Is there a physical/biological/genetic basis to intelligence” from the question “What moral implications does that have for society?” Still, it seems clear to me that there are moral implications that arise from the diversity in human intelligence. They are, however, connected to tricky moral problems, like what it means to ‘deserve’ one’s level of success or failure.

Commonalities in Marxist and Nazi ideology

There is an interesting passage in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate in which he argues that the Nazi and Marxist ideologies share important ideological assumptions that partly explain why each produces large-scale human suffering:

The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful. Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share. It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can only come from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryans or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It doesn’t matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.

The ideology of group-against-group struggle explains the similar outcomes of Marxist and Nazism. (p.157 paperback, emphasis mine)

To me, the key corrective to the excesses of any ideology that tries to build utopias is to recognize that human thinking and planning are flawed, and that we must respect the welfare and rights of individuals. We should not become so convinced in the rightness of our cause that we become willing to utterly trample others in order to achieve it. Even when confronted with hostile ideologies which we cannot tolerate, we should not be ruthless toward our opponents. Rather, we should consider the extent to which the aims we are seeking to achieve justify the means through which we are seeking to achieve them. We should also bear in mind the possibility that we are wrong or misled, and design systems of government to limit how much harm governments themselves can do.

Fostering cooperation

Coordination of technical standards is probably the most routine sort of international relations. Everyone can agree that it is useful when phone calls and letters can successfully operate across international borders, and that it is useful when roads, rail lines, electrical connections, and other linkages are available and standardized.

The practicality of these tasks aside, it does seem probable that they would help to foster good relations between countries. When engineers from Country X see that engineers from Country Y are a lot like them, it is plausible that they generalize that feeling into a certain sense of general commonality.

It would be interesting to see some data and analysis on the role technical cooperation has played in fostering good relations. Routine work like communication interlinkages could be one topic of study. The same could be true for more exotic undertakings, like joint space missions.

As discussed before, it is also possible that the existing level of cooperation between states could break down if the world became sufficiently unstable.