Back to Basics Again

This post is (again) somewhat influenced by Rosling but additionally Ridley's How Innovation Works, Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and Smil's Numbers don't Lie. The problem is obvious: many recent events have been surprising from almost any historical perspective. There has been a military conflict in Europe since February 2022 despite that fact that its cost to Russia has been (this far) very high compared to its gains. Governments normally want to avoid costly, unpredictable affairs. There is a military conflict in Palestine, too, as a result of a coordinated terrorist attack by Hamas on mostly civilians October 2023. The rationale of this action is even more difficult to understand given that the Hamas leaders probably knew Israel's response is going to be strong enough to incapacitate Hamas.¹

Does this mean that everything we thought we knew about historical development was wrong? There may have been a general trend of peace and prosperity for a while. But in addition to Ukraine and Palestine, Haiti is almost in a state of war, and things do not look very good in Myanmar, either. Some European countries that have been democratic with strong institutions are now turning autocratic. And from a different perspective, many people fear that social order could collapse due to artificial intelligence.

Since there are disruptions, are there some trends that we could still rely on? Like Rosling, let's start with population and poverty.

The figure is from https://pip.worldbank.org/home. $2.15 per day is (as of 2024) considered the limit of absolute poverty. Obviously, both the number and proportion of people living in absolute poverty has been decreasing a lot. In 1980 about 40% of the world population lived in absolute poverty, now about 9.2%.

Once a large majority of people becomes less poor, there are positive consequences as Rosling indicates. Children can go to school. People can afford basic healthcare and better food and sanitation. It is even possible (I don't think Rosling wrote this) that people become more social and more interested in improving their environment. Moreover, the World Bank statistics indicate that there are much less homicides in rich and middle income countries than in low income countries.

But this is where optimistic thinking may have let us down. Many scholars thought that more wealth would automatically mean more democracy and less wars.² Maybe this has never been automatic. Economic and political trends have made most of Europe, much of Asia, much of South America and some of Africa much nicer than they were, say, 60 years ago.³ Did we just get lucky? Did the postwar institutions just "get things done"? Did we just (most often) manage to elect the right people to govern  states/countries/international organizations?⁴ Did we somehow manage to develop exactly the right kind of technology when it was needed, and that drove both the economy and the society?

To be continued, I hope ..

1 Harari assumed in 21 Lessons that both the Ukrainian and Palestine conflicts would remain frozen.

2 Harari stated in Sapiens that it would be unthinkable to have a conflict between two wealthy countries because it is too costly.

3 I'm excluding North America not because I think things have gotten worse there but because it was already quite rich and stable 60 years ago.

4 Ridley would probably say that our postwar wealth and peace was because of innovative companies, not governments. But companies need laws and institutions in order to functions. 

Plato again

 If you ever read Plato, it's not a surprise that Laws is not his best work. It took me quite a while to get through it and the overall impression is .. mixed. The flow of the dialogue is boring: the Athenian preaches to his two companions, sometimes the details are excessive (how many minae would be the penalty of giving a false statement of you are rich/middle class/poor) and sometimes an argument is given without too much justification (the population of a city should be exactly 5040 because it's a nice number).

Let's try dissect a part of Laws. This argument is sprinkled a bit here and there within the dialog but it goes like this: virtue is the basis of laws and laws are there to uphold virtuous behaviour (and obviously prevent vice). Laws should cover every aspect off social interactions of a city (at least it seems so) including religious rites and practices, organization of city administration and courts, trades (Plato does not like tradesmen a lot) and family/inheritance. Some of the "degrees" given by the Athenian even resemble the Old Testament (who should marry a widow and take care of her children).

Plato was getting old while writing Laws and that may explain his support of tradition. All dances, hymns and poems must be presented exactly as they were, no changes allowed. It's morally (and probably legally) wrong to be an atheist. A big part of the authority of the state/city lies on its similarity with a human being who has a soul that is obviously divine. The argument is kind of weak here. We must believe that humans have a soul because we are rational. Moreover, heavenly bodies have souls, too, otherwise they would not move. And since we admit that the sun has a soul, we somehow must believe that it is divine. Thus, gods exist. And everyday experience shows that they are interested in humans. Thus: follow the religious practices of your city (or they might be displeased).

Let's say something about the organization of the book (actually Laws consists of 10 books). The Greeks established cities and colonies. In the first book the Athenian discusses how a city should be founded. Then the discussion for a while falls into the first principles of laws (see the previous paragraph) and covers land usage, temples and families. This dialogue has a long discussion about education, too. 

Back to Modern

The Open Stax series of good quality textbooks is available for free. I've enjoyed reading social science for a chance, and it's very nice to get a recent perspective on sociology (some readers may have noticed that I've previously read some old classics).

Like any decent textbook, Sociology 2e mentions "modernism" as a way of thinking of development. Briefly, this can mean that agencies like the U.S. foreign aid and international organizations encourage developing countries to imitate the culture, business and government of rich countries - that is, to modernize. This idea was later (already in the 1960's) seen as a kind of cultural imperialism - developing countries should find they our ways rather than follow a fixed pattern.

I read a few pages of the book today in Skytrain (Bangkok has a very good public transport system) on my phone, checked my bank account balance (disappointing) with the same phone and after stepping out, added some money to my Skytrain card. All of this was done with modern efficiency. So maybe there's still something in modernism, after all. Furthermore, most good universities (Thailand's Chulalongkorn is now ranked in top 300 in the world) emphasize modern practices in business, health, technology etc. Would this mean that everything in every country is going to be uniform and boring, like a new "end of history"? Emm .. we have a global pandemic, probably a big recession looming, turbulent politics, private companies providing space flight .. so, no.

Everything new is good again

Here are some notes about two books that share an optimistic world view: The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and Factfulness by Ola Rosling. Both the books state that the world is now a much better place than a few generations ago, though some may feel nostalgic about the good old times. They were really not that good. As Rosling points out, in the 1970's there were some high income countries, lots of poor countries with big populations, and only a few inbetween. Now the situation has thoroughly changed -- though cooperation, trade and technology.

Ridley's book reflect his political stance: trade and communication bring wealth and innovation, government control stifles them. Additionally, he points out that doomsday prophets have been wrong, and often their message has been based on false assumptions (like the famous The Limits to Growth that seems to have predicted that our oil reverses would be depleted within 20 to 50 years). Some of his analysis is very good. With some issues he ignores the "bigger framework"*. And since he is an optimist, he dares to predict a pretty good run for the world for the next 10 years. That 10
years has now almost passed. It hasn't been quite that rosy. For example he could not have predicted the spread of disinformation and hatred through social media. On the other hand, as Rosling would say “When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them."

*Ridley uses the case of acid rain as an example of an exaggerated doomsday scenario. According to him in the 1980's scientists and media often stated that German forests were dying because of acid rain, though "the truth is that there were small pockets of damage to forests in the 1980s some of which were caused by pests, others by natural senescence or competition and a few by local pollution. There was no great forest die-off due to acid rain." This can be the case. Media attention can lead to regulations like amendments of the U.S. Clean Ait Act to combat acid rain tough the Clean Air Act by itself may have been sufficient. But I'd like to discuss another example. Leaded gasoline is toxic. There was a lengthy process where scientists and activists fought to inform the public and legislators about the health hazard. The opponents were of course the Ethyl Corporation (the producer of "anti-knock agent" that contained lead) and its lobbyists. Eventually the toxicity of leaded gasoline was recognized and it was banned by the aforementioned Clean Air Act. This was not an exaggerated doomsday scenario. It has been estimated (research mentioned in Freakonomics) that declining exposure to lead is responsible for an up to 56% decline in crime from 1992 to 2002.

Everything new is bad again

In her article "Can we live without irony" in the Stone Reader,  Christy Wampole writes about hipsters and their world view. If life becomes "an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise?"

Ms. Wampole's anguish is understandable, but months after reading her essay I suddenly remembered that I had heard the argument before, and often from Roger Scruton who is one of the contributors of Stone Reader, too. In 1994 in "Upon Nothing", Mr Scruton had this to say about Derrida "The Derridean style refrains from stating anything. [.. ] Derrida’s style abounds in childish wordplay, in invented words and deformations of syntax, in a wild and seemingly pointless erudition."

Plato boozing

"No one should be allowed to taste wine until they are eighteen; from eighteen to thirty they may take a little; but when they have reached forty years, they may be initiated into the mystery of drinking."
Plato: Laws

Hmm. It's true that Laws has much less charm than most other Plato's work, but sometimes you come across great wisdom :)

Merry Christmas, cyborgs

Professor Timo Honkela's book Rauhankone (~ Algorithms for Peace) takes on a bold task: how could computers prevent misunderstandings and conflicts? Mr Honkela* is a linguist and AI expert, and his basic idea is (in principle) simple: we have already created quite good machine translation systems, but they only concern the "plain information" level in our language exchanges. We should be able to go deeper.

Honkela proposes that using computers and computer networks we could enable direct consultations with very large collections of people: millions or even hundreds of millions. We could then use computers to analyze the "minutes" of such meetings. Moreover, use digital personal assistants in communication and anger control.

Algorithms feature in Harari's Homo Deus, too, but in a broader context. Harari sees a raise of new kind of thinking that is even an alternative to humanism, and calls it dataism. The proponents of dataism see data and algorithms valuable as such, not only because they are useful for humans. Western capitalism defeated socialism (and fascism) not because it was ethical, but because it enabled faster and better data processing. This view is exaggerated but not without merit. Harare even names Aaron Swartz a "martyr of dataism" because he wanted to "liberate" scientific articles i.e. upload them to be freely accessible.


* I haven't met Mr Honkela but apparently my grandmother was his first primary school teacher. Finland is a small place and the town of Kalajoki even smaller.