Basic beliefs

Philosophy professor Gary Gutting believes that

In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case. This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion.

He notes that

In various ways, [philosophers such as Hume, Wittgenstein and Plantinga] have shown that everyday life is based on “basic” beliefs for which we have no good arguments. There are, for example, no more basic truths from which we can prove that the past is often a good guide to the future, that our memories are reliable, or that other people have a conscious inner life. Such beliefs simply — and quite properly — arise from our experience in the world.

The crux of the biscuit here is "'basic' beliefs for which we have no good arguments." Gutting neglects to properly qualify this statement: these "basic" beliefs have no arguments that professional philosophers consider good. But why should we restrict our evaluation of arguments to the standards of professional philosophers? Indeed, it is not necessarily a given that philosophers have any actual expertise at all in arguments.

Just because a bunch of people do something all the time doesn't necessarily mean they're good at it. Physicians before the germ theory of disease practiced medicine — if by "practice medicine" you mean they did what physicians typically did — all the time, and yet they not only did not employ effective treatment, they actively resisted even such obviously and scientifically demonstrable measures such as washing their hands before treating or even operating on patients.

Gutting gives us a clue as to what he considers a good argument: one that "logically derive[s its conclusion] from uncontroversial premises."

Gutting is absolutely correct: we cannot logically derive either atheism or theism from uncontroversial premises. What Gutting fails to mention is But Gutting himself admits that we can't logically derive anything at all from uncontroversial premises. We can derive quite a lot from controversial premises (there is no axiom in mathematics, for example, that cannot be controverted to make a new and interesting branch of mathematics), but there is no such thing as an uncontroversial premise.

Indeed if you ask any question at all of professional philosophers, you will find that, as in the debate between theism and atheism, the winners are "agnostics ...who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case." Gutting admits to this "dirty secret" in so many words: "philosophers have never been able to find arguments that settle the question of God’s existence or any of the other “big questions” we’ve been discussing for 2500 years."

This admission bears not just repeating but shouting out loud:

Philosophers have never been able to find arguments that settle the question of God’s existence or any of the other “big questions” we’ve been discussing for 2500 years.

Without exception, every philosopher I have written or spoken to directly has been at best an expert in saying "Fuck if I know" in complicated, hard-to-understand language and at worst a complete bullshit artist who asserted that he did know while desperately trying to obscure the hideous errors in his reasoning. (There are a few philosophers who are not a complete waste of intellectual space — Dan Dennett springs immediately to mind — but even these philosophers seem intelligent and perspicacious despite and not because of their philosophical education.)

Will someone please tell me why a man who admits in so many words to being a useless bullshit artist has a nice middle-class life while person such as myself who has been a useful, productive member of society for thirty years can't find a job? And can someone tell me why I should treat philosophers not just as irrelevant doofuses but with contempt tinged with a bit of envious hostility? If you can't come up with a single answer in 2,500 years, what excuse do you have for even pretending you're doing anything more intellectually meaningful than a circle jerk?

Capitalist economics

I consider myself a Good Communist. Of course, what I consider to be Good Communism differs from what many others consider to be Good Communism or Good Socialism. That's OK with me: I think we need more rather than less diversity of opinion. I'm entirely uninterested in accusations of heterodoxy; you have to assert I'm actually mistaken to get my attention.

My self-identification notwithstanding, I think it's important to study specifically capitalist economics, and study capitalist economics on its own terms. Thus I'm actually going to college to study economics and political science (with a fair helping of mathematics and history on the side). I also read Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Maxine Udall, Mark Thoma, and a few other progressive capitalist economists. (I don't bother to read the Austrian, Libertarian, "freshwater" and Republican economists: in my not-at-all humble opinion they have their heads way too far up their asses to be at all informative or enlightening.) Yes, I share IOZ's opinion that progressive capitalist economists such as Krugman have a "radicalism ... rooted like a sidewalk weed, that is to say: shallowly," who "can't quite release [their] tenacious hold on the managerial vocabulary of a late-20th-century technocrat." But I don't read these economists at all to gain insight into communism or radicalism, so I'm untroubled by their politics.

If Marx is correct (and I think he is on this point) then any new political/economic system will inherit the preceding system. If we do get a communist society, even by revolutionary means, we will inherit the capitalist system. I'm studying capitalist economics as a communist because I think it's important to understand as best we can what we will inherit.

Furthermore, the capitalist class (and, if I'm correct, the professional/managerial class) have been running the world for about 200 years. While I'm not exactly popping a boner about their competence or humanity, I think one has to admire some of the achievements of capitalism, not the least of which are feeding and housing some six billion people and creating some very impressive technology. And they have accomplished this without micromanaging economic or political affairs. I think it's important that any future communist society not sacrifice these achievements, but rather surpass them. If you intend to surpass another's achievement, I firmly believe it behooves you to deeply understand precisely how they did it.

Third, it's an enormously powerful critique against capitalism that capitalists themselves actually know how to run a capitalist society much better than they're presently running it. If they cannot even apply the knowledge they have in the paradigm they accept, they are truly headed for the "dustbin of history".

The next Carnival of the Godless

I'll be hosting the next (146th) Carnival of the Godless on August 15. You can submit entries using the submission form. The previous carnival can be found at Cubik's Rube.

The link to the submission guidelines is broken: from memory the guidelines are that articles from theists and nontheists alike are welcome, but articles should be about atheism, agnosticism or nontheism, and/or be of interest to a predominantly atheist/agnostic/nontheist audience. I can't speak for other hosts, but I myself will silently reject articles that don't meet these broad criteria, and think a few black thoughts about submitters who inconsiderately waste my editorial time with articles and spam of interest only to the religious.

Deficit stimulus spending

Let's see if I can figure out how deficit stimulus spending works.

In the Keynesian economic model, we look to government stimulus when unemployment is substantially higher than we think is "normal". There isn't a good underlying theoretical model about what constitutes "normal" unemployment, but we know empirically that if unemployment goes below 4% to 5%, we start getting undesirable positive-feedback effects in inflation. "Too-high" unemployment means that a big chunk of our primary resource — people's time — is simply being wasted.

We also want to see excessive savings: private individuals and companies holding a lot of cash without investing it. If companies are not holding a lot of cash, then we want to look first to monetary policy: we can probably solve the problem by just printing more money. But if companies are holding a lot of cash, printing more money isn't effective: we can expect that if we just create a lot of cash, companies will just save it, since the new fiat money is by definition eroding the value of existing saved money. (We can also tell if savings are excessive and monetary policy ineffective when short-term interest rates near zero, the "zero lower bound"; printing money lowers nominal interest rates, which cannot — for reasons more complicated than I want to discuss, and that I'm not confident I understand completely — fall below zero.)

In a pure Keynesian stimulus, the government borrows money and uses the borrowed money to employ people to do something useless*. We would of course prefer that we do something useful, but the analysis is simpler if we simply ignore the use value of what we use a stimulus to build. Also, if it's justifiable to use a stimulus to do something useless, it's even more persuasive to use it to build something useful.

*Keynes suggested we pay some people money to dig holes, and others to fill them back in.

First, the government borrows $1,000,000 from the private sector when the GDP is $10,000,000: i.e. we're immediately borrowing 10% of GDP. The $1,000,000 is for all intents and purposes stuffed in a mattress: remember, we look to a Keynesian stimulus only when we see excessive saving the private sector. And, since we look to a Keynesian stimulus only when nominal interest rates are low, we can borrow the $1,000,000 at a relatively low interest rate. The nominal 10 year treasury rate, the rate at which the government borrows money from the private sector, is 2.94% as of Friday, July 30; given that we expect inflation to run about 2% per annum long term (one of the effects we're trying to achieve with a stimulus is to raise the interest rate), the real interest rate (nominal interest minus inflation) is 0.94%. The technical term for such a low interest rate is "free money" or "it's raining soup: grab a bucket!" Borrowing $1,000,000 will cost us (assuming the government makes interest payments as they accrue, and we don't compound the interest) a total of 0.0294 * 10 * $1,000,000 + $1,000,000 = $1,294,000.

We spend the $1,000,000 principal over one year: six months to pay people to dig holes, six months to fill them in. So immediately we have raised the GDP by $1,000,000: Our GDP is now $11,000,000, so our deficit is $1,000,000 / $11,000,000 = 9.09%. Furthermore, we collect some of that money directly back in taxes the first year. Figuring a 20% tax rate, we collect $200,000 back in taxes from the workers we're paying to dig and fill in holes. We'll stuff this money in the mattress and use it to make interest payments. So effectively, we immediately reduce our total debt burden to $1,094,000.

But that's not all: we're giving this money to people who are themselves not saving. They thus must spend their money ($800,000) on food, rent, clothes, etc. This spending will raise GDP by $800,000, and the government will receive another $160,000 in taxes. And those getting the $800,000 will spend the remaining $640,000, which will be taxed and itself spent. There's probably an calculus formula that will give the precise answer, but a quick Excel spreadsheet shows that the total effect on GDP will be a few bucks short of $5,000,000, and the government will collect the $1,000,000 in taxes in the first year.

Christianity promises loaves and fishes; socialism delivers them to your door!

Of course this is a very superficial analysis. I'm making a lot of unrealistic assumptions, perfect efficiency, everything spent and consumed in one year, nothing ever saved or taken out in rent and profits, etc. In reality, our 5:1 bang for the buck turns out to be more like 1.2 to 1.5:1 (or so I'm informed by reliable sources). But even 1.5:1 ain't chopped liver: for every dollar spent, we're getting $0.50 in free GDP. And that's not counting what we pay people to actually build. If we're smart, we'll get not just the macroeconomic effects but a bridge, or a road, or a museum, which has social value itself.

Not only that, but injecting $1,000,000 to pay people to do something completely useless changes the money/stuff ratio, which should increase inflation. If we can inflation up to an average of 2% for the 10 years we're holding the loan, our real interest rate becomes 0.94% which is couch-cushion money.

It's important to understand that a stimulus works only when there is a substantial imbalance between savings and employment, low interest rates, and low inflation. When you have full employment, just enough savings to guarantee liquidity, healthy inflation and interest rates, stimulus (paying people to dig holes) has a negative effect on GDP and just wastes money, time and effort.

Epistemological relativism

I love webcomics!



Jesus and Mo

Superiority

XKCD

Money and labor

Reader Comrade PhysioProf suggests that tying money to labor hours would help the ontological interpretation of money. It's not a bad idea, but it suffers from the same modeling problems as having money track prices.

Actual physical time spent is indubitably an important component of labor, but it's not the whole story. If we're going to track labor, we have to track socially necessary abstract labor.

In Starship Troopers*, Heinlein (among others; I'm sure he's simply repeating another's argument) oh-so-profoundly notes that an hour spent making a mud pie is not equivalent to an hour spent making (IIRC) an apple tart. I suppose Heinlein cannot be faulted for this error; the noted philosopher George Santayana admits to the same error himself. But an error it is, an error that Marx avoids in the earliest chapters of Capital, by introducing the notion of socially necessary abstract labor time. Marx does not, I think, adequately define this notion; he relies on our intuition to carry the ontological burden. But he does make clear that he is not simply comparing raw hours to raw hours.

*Ayn Rand fans take heed: If you're going to write an eliminationist manifesto disguised as a work of fiction, complete with wooden characters and an implausible plot, you cannot do much better than Starship Troopers.

Marx explicitly defines labor as time spent producing commodities; if you're not spending your time producing commodities, you're not laboring. But how you spend your time is as important as what you spend your time doing. Our intuition and ordinary observation can supply several more fundamental components of labor time.

First, we have intensity and intrinsic desirability of labor time. One person who slacks off will produce less in the same amount of time as another who hustles. And eight hours in an air-conditioned office sitting in a Herman Miller chair seems intuitively more intrinsically desirable than the same amount of time up to one's crotch in shit cleaning out a sewage system. It's not so easy to actually measure — especially to get a scalar (numerical) measurement rather than just a comparative measurement — these fundamentally subjective considerations.

Second, we have to amortize the time spent acquiring a skill. An hour with a physician does not just consume just an hour of her own time: we must factor in her own years of medical school, internship and residency, as well as the time of her professors, instructors, and trainers to provide her education. And they themselves are skilled professionals, so we amortize their skill acquisition time. It's possible to measure all this time, but it's a decidedly non-trivial task.

Third, we have the organizational context (which underlies the "socially necessary" component of Marx's term): ceteris paribus, one person spending 8 hours using modern equipment in an efficient cooperative environment will produce more than someone using obsolete equipment in an inefficient environment.

Even if we try to use time as some component of what we think money represents, we must still have money represent some output or result of a complicated model. This is not to say that we shouldn't try to measure socially necessary abstract labor time — a quantity that money in a capitalist framework does not effectively measure at all — just that it is not as straightforward a task as directly measuring more-or-less fundamental properties of physical objects such as length, mass, etc.

Defining Prosperity Down

Paul Krugman worries we're Defining Prosperity Down:

Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal. ...

I’d like to imagine that public outrage will prevent this outcome. But while Americans are indeed angry, their anger is unfocused. And so I worry that our governing elite, which just isn’t all that into the unemployed, will allow the jobs slump to go on and on and on.

One less stupid idea

Sadly, sometimes an atheist is someone with one less stupid idea than a theist. Atheism is no guarantee of intelligence, common sense, or any sort of virtue.

There are some people it's just not worth arguing with. I'm certainly more interested in condemning this asshole than working through the the logic of the ethical issues. There are no very complicated ethical issues: it's uncivilized, undignified, obnoxious and rude to leer at women. End of story. And I have better things to do than try to chip through this asshole's self-righteous misogynist blather, a task as full of the-stupid-it-burns futility as discussing the ontological argument with Metacrock. Especially since PZ has said all that needs to be said on the subject. All you can do is shake your head, mutter, "Wow, what a creep," and move on to something sensible.

Any time someone complains that everyone who disagrees with him is being dogmatic and close-minded, you can be pretty sure you have a crackpot on your hands.

Carnival of the Godless, No. 145

The Carnival of the Godly is up at Cubic's Rube, but it doesn't seem very godly to me.