Category: Uncategorized

Greetings, all. Today is Thanksgiving Day in the US. Among all the American holidays, this one is my favorite. Never mind the genesis and history of this tradition — some of it is not very pretty. What matters to me is the idea of thanksgiving.

Gratitude is one of the most healthy emotions we have. Life is not always nice but every now and then it is good for our mental health to pause and say, “I am thankful that I have so much to be thankful about.”

Here’s the Sanskrit mantra that expresses my core desire

• • • लोकाः समस्ताः सुखिनो भवन्तु
    • Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu.
    • May all beings be happy.

Happy Thanksgiving Day.

As a liberal — in the classical sense of the word meaning one who believes in liberty — I have special respect for Albert Jay Nock (1870 – 1945), the American libertarian who was a radical anti-statist.

It’s astonishing to me how much our views match. Perhaps I am one of Nock’s reincarnations. (I should write about reincarnation one of these days.) Like him, I am a philosophical anarchist: I hold the state in contempt and believe that it lacks moral legitimacy but I am also against the use of violence to overthrow the state. Like him, I am opposed to centralization, regulation, the income tax, state welfare, majoritarian democracy and state mandated education. Continue reading “Like Albert J Nock, I’m an Anarchist”

James Buchanan proposed a simple test to distinguish economists from non-economists. It was that economists would not agree with the old adage that “whatever is worth doing, is worth doing well.” If you’re confused by that, you aren’t an economist.

Economists know that everything has costs and benefits. Not just this or that thing but everything. That includes good things and bad things. Even good things have costs, and bad things have benefits. Furthermore, economists “think at the margin.” And finally, there’s such a thing as “sunk costs.”

To keep this brief, let’s just say that an economist would stop before reaching that nebulous “well done” stage. He would stop when the marginal cost exceeds the marginal benefit. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing as long as the net benefit is positive. And then stop.

Back to our topic at hand on billionaires (the previous bits are part 1 and part 2.) Continue reading “Billionaires are Different — Part 3”

I concluded the previous part of this piece with the claim that “it is not possible to create wealth without also creating inequality. Inequality in a modern free society is a healthy sign, just as inequality in an un-free society signals disease.”

There are different ways of amassing wealth. In the past, most of what was produced was consumed. That’s because nearly everyone was almost uniformly poor in the past. There wasn’t much left over, and therefore there was not much accumulated wealth.

Still over hundreds of years, wealth in the form of precious metals and gems accumulated in certain parts of the world, which tempted barbarian invaders to do their killing and plundering. That’s the old way to acquire wealth: don’t bother producing any wealth, just take it from others by force.

Then around 250 years ago, some people figured out how to use energy sources (fossil fuels like coal) effectively and wealth production took off. That’s the first Industrial Revolution. That made it possible to produce a lot more wealth and gradually people started climbing out of extreme poverty. Continue reading “Billionaires are Different — Part 2”

South Korea is weird. Meaning, it is “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.”

The last bit was not always true. It was a military dictatorship or autocracy until 1997 when it became a modern democracy with the election of Kim Dae-jung. Here’s some interesting facts about South Korea from the wiki: Continue reading “South Korea is Weird”

Billionaires are Better

Let me tell you about the billionaires. They are different from you and me. They create and possess immense wealth, and they benefit society immeasurably. They are different from you and me. They are better. [1]

The rest of this piece is a justification of the previous bit. To get started, it’s important to properly understand what we mean by rich people. They have more wealth compared to the non-rich. What’s wealth? It is whatever we as a collective commonly value.

Wealth is always reported in monetary terms (Bill Gates is worth $113 billion, for example) but money is not wealth: it’s only convenient to measure wealth in terms of units of money. This distinction is very important. Those who are unable to make that distinction end up writing nonsense, as did one opinion writer of the New York Times [2] recently. More about that later. Continue reading “Billionaires are Different”

We all have an intuitive understanding of our world. We make sense of the world by looking at it through “common sense” lenses. These are almost instinctive, or hard-wired as they say in computerese. And the surprising truth is that nearly all of these intuitions are wrong. They are incompatible with the world we live in today.

Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 200,000 years (or maybe even 300,000 years). For nearly all of that extended time, humans lived in small bands of around 150 individuals and survived as hunter-gatherers. Continue reading “Why we misapprehend the world”

Dr Jacob Bronowski (1908 – 1974) the wiki informs us, was

“a British mathematician and historian. He is best known for developing a humanistic approach to science, and as the presenter and writer of the thirteen part 1973 BBC television documentary series, and accompanying book, The Ascent of Man, which led to his regard as “one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals”.”

This is the ending sequence of episode 11 of the series recorded at the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz in German occupied Poland. Around one million people were killed there between 1940 and 1945. Continue reading “Dr Bronowski at Auschwitz”

I like Scott Adams. He’s down to earth, quite clever, knows how to make it. His book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life outlines his system. He says — and I agree 100% — that goals are for losers. Winners don’t set goals; they create a system, and then work as hard as they can. If you have a good system, you will make it. The focus is on the process, not the outcome.[1]

Another point he makes is that passion is overrated. Many successful people would ascribe their success to their passion and advise people to follow their passion, but there are many more failures who also followed their passion. Continue reading “Scott Adams on Goals”

We take the existence of governments for granted. This is understandable since we have been under some form of government all our lives, and we also believe that some form of government must have existed for as long as recorded history. Government appears to be something as natural as the air we breathe, and therefore we are easily persuaded that it must be as necessary as air. Not just necessary but also that it is a net positive. This does not stand scrutiny, however.

Just as people don’t ordinarily ask “what precisely is air; why do we need it?” so too people don’t ask questions such as “what precisely is government; can society exist without government; what form of government is good; etc?” It takes special effort to pose and answer questions such as those. That is left to students of political philosophy and political science.[1] Continue reading “What is the Government?”