File: c:/ddc/Angel/BestIntentions/Zbeliefs.html
Date: 2009/ 2017
(C) OntoOO/ Dennis de Champeaux

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
(Bertrand Russell)

Many nations experienced around 2001 the collapse of the white collar based dot-com frenzy. Soon after economic expansion resumed with blue collar based housing constructions. Saturation of that market was ignored through exotic financial instruments, ultimately yielding a full blown financial collapse with world-wide impact.

People's perspectives get shaken by these turmoils. Still they cling to comforting beliefs and hopes. Here a few:
- Progress will resume and our children will have a better future
- Democracy may not be ideal but is still the best way to govern nations
- Most people contribute to the society
- More economic growth is essential to increase prosperity
- Technology will solve in time what humanity needs in its march to the future
- Public education needs more funding to develop better the human potential
- Hunger in the world can be solved by distributing better the abundances that the world produce
- Earth can support an unlimited population
- Income tax helps to redistribute unfair income and wealth differences

Assume being a politician. Would it be feasible to challenge these beliefs and hopes? Would it be acceptable to embrace them? Consider just the last one: "Income tax helps to redistribute unfair income and wealth differences". Progressive income tax certainly helps to change income differences in the short term. Whether income differences themselves are unfair or not, or alternatively whether differences above a certain ratio are unfair is pleasantly ambiguous. But what about the long term differences? We have progressive income taxes now for a century, which suggests that the differences should have gone down. What can our politician respond when we tell him/her that in 1953 the bottom 50% owned 8.3% of the wealth while in 2004 that percentage had dropped to 5.6%? Could the response be that the income tax was apparently still too low? Even when the top 5% pays already 50% of the personal income taxes, and they are doubly taxed through income taxes on the companies of which they own shares? Ignoring fairness: the revenues to run a state (and provide a wide range of social services) are dependent on a shrinking segment of the population. Our politician can get away with this vulnerability of a government's revenue because there is no legal upper-bound on tax-ability of minorities. And, stepping back, why must the government transfer ever increasing amounts for ever increasing needs of social services?

The belief that "Earth can support an unlimited population" is very comforting given that the world population quadrupled in the 20th century, while just another one billion is added in this decade. These actual phenomenal growths suggest that we do not need to worry about population explosions. Experts have a different stance on this topic. They claim that Earth can support only 4B people, which is certainly odd given the 7B we have already. The paradox can be resolved by the following claim: Earth can support 4B people without the use of fertilizer. The current excess depends on nitrogen synthesis using cheap energy. The latter is not guaranteed with the magic phrase of 'alternative energy' which has gained quite a following. Our politician is here in a double bind. The business world is addicted to an always growing population, which provides an always increasing demand for products and services. This generates always increasing tax revenues, which are needed to pay for entitlements and the increasing needs for social services. But can this process continue forever? Isn't a steep cliff lurking somewhere? The thought, for example, that hunger in the world is just a distribution problem is quite misleading. 'Sustainability' has been coined a while ago, really spoiling the fun of go-go government. And how would our brave politician explain to the public that babies have become problematic, while the press can still write blissfully that a family welcomed their 17th child, and our politician, and any everyone else, must keep the mouth shut about the 6 + octuplet mom?

Our politician will very likely pronounce that public education must be improved. How that must be achieved is not specified beyond the muscular phrase that we must invest more in education. Given that public education is free - for the consuming parents - our politician can score with these proclamations, while ignoring which other segment - that depend on tax revenues - must shrink its share. The phrase "Public education needs more funding to develop better the human potential" is at least more honest about the messy aspect of funding. But does it make sense? The story get rapidly unpleasant here. Sorry. Lets back up to the 19th century. It was rightfully believed then that public education would develop a hidden source of intellect in the lower strata of the societies. The side effect has been profound: all original smarts have been identified, developed and pushed upwards so that the bottom is now not only poor, as it was a century ago, but also its smarts have been depleted. That is not the end of a sad story. Intellect potential, among others, inherits - statistically - between children and parents. The bottom half of the society procreating faster and more than the top half entails that the intellect potential distribution of the society has deteriorated over time. In plain language: we - as a society - have become more stupid. Our politician has not explained this to his/her electorate. The press repeats already for decades that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, but is also unable (unwilling?) to explain its cause. Red-herring stories about brilliant parents having moronic children are absent while stories about humble parents with a brilliant child can be encountered all the time.

Awareness of the IQ-deterioration is only slowly gaining ground. Certainly not by reporting of teachers or their representatives. Federal standardized testing was introduced recently as part of the Don't Leave a Child Behind program -- many decades too late. Soon we learned about 'failing schools'. This convenient phrase keeps it ambiguous whether the teachers are below par, the incoming kid's potential are below average, or both. We still have to progress where we can face the sad truth unfolding in front of us now for a century, which was obfuscated by endless, senseless battles about the prevalence of nature versus nurture. For decades, we hear that more funding is required because the results are getting worse. But why should we believe now that more funding will actually yield better outcomes? It cannot even be ruled out at this point that less funding would yield the same result.

The two major forces we have discussed - population explosion and moronization - have been causes, or contributors, in all disasters of the 20th century and will plausibly cause even more havoc in this century. Note that public education being free, has been a contributing factor in the population explosion and in the subsequent IQ-potential decline. These two forces have been recursively entangled, which makes their cause and effects opaque -- which has confused the experts trying to deal with this Gordian knot.

Technology is one of the bright spots in the 20th century - hands down. Serving a hot meal at an altitude of 37000ft to several hundred people (with a choice) is routinely done in transatlantic flights. This never fails to amaze me (while it also amazes me that people complain about 'airline food'). Without technology we would not enjoy the quality of life we have thus far. If the level of luxury, or plain survival, is not sustainable - as suggested above -, we cannot blame the scientists, engineers and the companies, which have produced an amazing array of products and services. Assuming "Technology will solve in time what humanity needs in its march to the future" is, however, another matter. It looks like that humanity is now devoting more efforts to fix self inflicted damages than creating new breakthroughs. Examples are: cleanup of Superfund sites (polluted due to cold-war time activities), finding ways to reduce CO2 emissions, locking up increasing segments of the population, dealing with stress induced mental health problems, etc. And then there is the judgment question whether technology will keep up with what is ahead of us. Meadows et al have created a world simulation that runs up to 2100, which predicts an ominous future, see the figure:

While this model was created around 1971, only little adjustments had to be made since then. The thick red line about the oil production is a later addition. Someone also added the line labeled "estimated population without collapse". This addition is wishful thinking - if not pathological optimism - in top form. There is nothing in the Meadows-model that justifies this addition. It is likely based on the hope that human ingenuity will prevail. That may be the case, but a prudent politician would question racing forward based on such hope.

There is yet another cloud on the horizon. New technology is still expanding, based on the breakthroughs of Science in the 19th and early 20th century. Ultimately technology needs new findings in theoretical sciences. Experts are now worrying that theoretical physics is stagnated for close to 40 years. Genetics is, however, where rapid progress is now occurring. Assuming success and affordability is fine positive thinking, but gambling humanity's survival on it is at least questionable.

What to think about: "More economic growth is essential to increase prosperity"? Governments panic when an economy is shrinking or stagnating because they are responsible for social services on which majorities depend. Their concern is now not to increase prosperity but to preserve current prosperity. Their "holy" yardstick is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which measures, in essence, economic activity. This metric simply sums up all activities, whether an activity is "good" or "bad". This metric is good enough for the Government's concern: will taxation revenues keep flowing in to keep large segments of the society afloat?

As observed by many, the GDP metric has at least two major defects:
-- "real" prosperity is not captured
-- whether or not resources are "plundered" is not visible
To explain these defects consider the analogy of a nation's economy with the operations of a company. A nation's GDP corresponds then with a company's "strange" metric of adding a year's income and expenses. The latter's metric is still useful because it allows to compare the sizes of, say, IBM and your neighborhood grocery store. But it does not reveal whether either of these companies made a profit or lost money. A nation's GDP similarly does not capture whether the nation's activity are "good", say producing consumer products, or "bad/unfortunate", repairing the impacts of a natural disaster, building more jails, devoting more resources to defense, education, healthcare, etc. (Why are education and healthcare at the "bad" side? Just consider a company reimbursing education expenses for employees and providing health benefits; these expenditures are certainly not revenues for this company. Both of these activities "repair defects" in a society and hence belong to the unfortunate side - likely quite a surprise to most.)

More serious is that a nation does not have the equivalent of a company's balance sheet. A balance sheet describes the assets and debts of a company. The (natural) resources of a nation are not represented anywhere. There is no notion that the world's resources are depleted and that every nation is loosing its share of these resources. Plundering the world's resources has been going on for millennia and has resulted in societies to collapse and vanish. We appear to ignore what history reveals to us. Hence the statement "more economic growth is essential to increase prosperity" shows more our naivety than an advice to be followed at this junction, especially in the light of the Meadows-model - even when our politician, as many predecessors, ventures to debate its validity.

[Attempts have been made to provide an alternative to the GDP metric that make a distinction between "good" and "bad/unfortunate" economic activities. One of those metrics (Genuine Progress Indicator) suggests that the quality of life in the US peaked around 1973 and has slowly gone down ever since.]

Whether or not "Most people contribute to the society" is, obviously, a sensitive topic. An easy denial can be obtained by putting the bar very high for what we mean by a contribution. Virtually no one can match the genius of taming fire, inventing the wheel, assembling a spear, establishing an empire, conceiving and proving the Pythagorean theorem, etc. But what about the more modest criterion of paying once's dues to society? By looking with the microscoop at "who earns what and pays what" in The Netherlands we obtain for 2005:

The bottom 70% earns 43% of all income and pays 17% of the total income taxes.

The same numbers for the US in 2007:

The bottom 75% earns 31% of all income and pays 13% of the total income taxes.

It is doubtful that in 1900 - before income taxes became permanent - a majority of the population were net-consumers. At this point, we hurry to explain that it does not make sense to blame any net-consumer for his/her predicament: it is the result of a century of well intended policies that have had unforeseen side effects (as we saw with public education). Those who complain about welfare cheats and/or blame immigrants are invited to ponder the situation that most native citizens are net-consumers also in the society.

Getting the blame-game out of the way, we still need to worry - from a macro-perspective - that a growing, majority of the population is "superfluous". Is it caused by the moronization process? Is it the result of automation, accelerated by Information Technology? Either way, can we keep pushing people in cheap service jobs? Medical billing has been a reservoir to absorb excess labor, which is part of the healthcare price-tag debacle. We want to proceed with these "solutions"?

The thought that democracy is not the best way to govern nations is a hard sell, although one may wonder why there are still exceptions to an "obvious" superiority of the democracy: the guarantee that leaders are thrown out whether they do a good job or not. While we do not want to question here this "obvious" quality, we must wonder whether the democracies as we know them need a "make-over" to deal with the problems we have outlined above.

To get a better grip on candidate fixes for our democracies we need first a closer look at public education and health care, both belonging to the cost/unfortunate side of the economy. Both of them are services with convoluted ways how the service providers are reimbursed.

The cost of public education is around $10k/child/year. Very few parents pay enough taxes to cover these expenses.

The cost of healthcare in 2009 was $8160/person/year. Again, very few people pay enough in taxes to cover these expenses.

There are no market forces between service consumer and service provider, which is a key source of the problems we have described already. In addition, there is no transparency; one cannot shop around; there is over consumption; and - crucial - continuous quality & productivity improvement are alien concepts in both service sectors; ...

What must be delivered by these services is ill defined. Parents believe that their children must be developed, but they don't pay. The public sector needs sufficiently educated citizens to run the country at minimal costs. Teachers must produce hard knowledge (language & math), but claim also the value of contradictory soft goals:
- being a strong individual and being a team player
- conforming to rules and willing to stand up when necessary
- being empathetic and being able to enforce an unpleasant consequence
- being right conscious and knowing one's obligations
- having good self esteem and accepting one's limitations
- being methodical as well as serendipitous
- seeing the world with unbounded possibilities and being realistic
- etc.
Given that there were - during a century - no explicit, realistic, agreed upon targets for teachers and schools it is very hard if not impossible to manage them. The recent introduction of Common Core continues to be 'controversial'.

Healthcare has similarly ill defined targets. One would think that quality is a key target, but healthcare has the highest lethal accident rating of any segment in the economy. Ethical standards are lacking, which causes people who want to end their suffering to be kept alive (to milk the system?) and people are kept alive, up to decades, for which there is no rational (to milk the system?). Cost-benefit discussions are off limits to the general public. The price-tag of US healthcare (due to administrative overhead, lack of eRecords, etc.) is out of control - excess of $1.5T/ year (2017).

In short, public education and healthcare, both co-responsible for the moronization of the society and for the out of control population explosion, reside in a different parallel universe of the regular economy. In other words: our democracies have lost control of these entitlements; they have become the proverbial, untouchable 3rd rails for our politician.

Our democracies emerged during the turmoils of the French revolution. Rights enjoyed before by the aristocracy were given to all citizens. Often we are reminded that these rights regard absence of limitations, not entitlements to, say, possessions. There is another dimension as well: obligations (aristocratic 'noblesse oblige') were "forgotten" to be assigned to all citizens. Voting rights being limited in the 19th century blocked the civil rights movements to take off, but they certainly did in the 20th century. Its results - in the absence of civil obligations - is plausibly the core problem of our democracies, which are beyond the purview of our politician.

No, we do not want to critique civil rights movements, we lament instead the omissions of (civil) obligations in our constitutions, as for example the requirement of:
- economic self-sufficiency of individuals/ families of large majorities,
- sustainability of a society's economy (i.e. not relying on plundering the Earth's resources)

These omissions allow our politicians, and the political parties, to pander during elections with new entitlements, lower taxes and more environmental plunder that exploit our infantile, self-centered, short term, reckless stances.

Combine this with an economy guided by a GDP metric, which gives a rosy delusion of what we are up to and what our collective assets are.

Things are not looking too good for the remaining hope: "Progress will resume and our children will have a better future". We need a lot of magic to pull that one off. How? Let's hope that our elected politician will soon see the need for draconic interventions, given that we are not able to change our ways ourselves.