According to Buchanan, the U.S. is looking at a budget deficit “that could approach $2 trillion.” He more conservatively puts it at $1.4 trillion. To put it in context, for Canada with a tenth of the population, it would be like a budget deficit of $140 billion.

He continues:

“We are headed either for default on our debts and bankruptcy as a nation, or something less honorable: a quiet cheapening of the debts we have incurred by inflating and destroying the dollar, robbing our creditors of what we owe them and robbing our own people of the value of what they have earned. And so it has come to this.”

My question is: is there another option? My next question is, what is the likely option that the U.S. will take?

Here on Seth Roberts’ blog, I respond to a comment by someone who suggests that low serotonin levels cause depression. (Thinking that low serotonin levels cause depression leads to solutions such as drugs that increase serotonin levels, which is convenient for the pharmaceutical industry.) In this case, the causality is exactly backwards (at least in the large majority of cases) - depression, rather, causes low serotonin levels. Change the things that cause depression, and not surprisingly the serotonin levels go up on their own.

In economics, people often talk about economic health in terms of consumer spending - that is, a healthy economy is caused by robust consumer spending. The basic problem is that here, too, this causal structure is backwards: good consumer spending is caused by healthy economic fundamentals, not the other way around. If you believe that consumer spending causes a healthy economy, you will probably be more likely to prescribe policies that give short-term boosts in consumer spending. These policies will tend to merely cover up the symptoms of - or even lead to further - economic problems. To illustrate this, during the run-up to the U.S. recession financial analyst Peter Schiff made the following analogy:

Let’s say you’re on an island, where the main economic activity is fishing. Some of the tribal elders believe that the basis of an economy is fish consumption and that to expand the economy you need people to buy more fish. Instead of expanding your fishing fleet, innovating more productive fishing techniques, and so on, you decide to get the people on the next island over to lend you fish. Your fish-buying consumer activity starts going way up. You pay for the fish with clam shell tokens (which have little value in themselves). Everyone is happy, so you start shutting down your own fishing fleet, instead trading more and more clam shell tokens for more and more fish from the next island. Your “economy” is booming. You see where this is going.

In other words:

Consumer activity is to an economy

as

Serotonin levels are to a person’s psychology

Properly understood, low levels of either are effects, not causes, of (psychological or economic) depression. If you get the basic causality wrong, you can end up with short-term crutches and policies that have negative long-term side effects.

I tend to spend time thinking about the structure of motivation - because the principle design problem of computer games is a motivational one. That is, how do I motivate a player to keep playing (where they often can put in hours upon hours of time and expend considerable effort while playing)?

Towards this end, a “progressive” increasing marginal tax rate (IMTR) has game psychology all wrong. An IMTR would be like giving the player smaller and smaller bonuses, or weaker and weaker additional powers, as they conquer more and more difficult levels. “You just defeated the Super-Gorgon-Platinum-Dragon  Level 26 Monster! Congratulations - here’s a +1 wooden shield!” (To those who have no idea what this means, you can safely assume that it is not a very good reward for the heroic feat the game player just accomplished.) Clearly, this would undermine their motivation and make them want to stop playing - rather than making them want to move further and further into the game. In other words, this sort of motivational structure doesn’t make sense as it will probably de-motivate the, in the IMTR case, taxation player.

Instead, I think that a more effective solution to the taxation problem is a horseshoe shaped taxation curve. It starts out actually quite high (say, 50%), and then its marginal rate decreases until a relatively high level of income (say, 5% at $200,000). At that point, it begins to increase again.

The practical effect of this, I think, would be dramatically different from the IMTR most socialist democracies such as the U.S. or Canada use. As you start out, the one thing that you are focused on is “How do I increase my taxable income?” because the higher your income is, the lower your marginal tax rate (at least for the foreseeable future), and so the higher your marginal net income. This is a forward-looking psychological benefit as well as a material one. As it is, many people’s focus is on how to minimize their incomes, or there is a vague unease about moving to a higher tax bracket as they consider it a diminished marginal return for often much more marginal effort - a perverse state of affairs.

On average and up to a point, people who earn more money are probably more responsible - that is, they have better skills in planning, putting larger long-term interests ahead of smaller short-term ones, and so on. Yet, a progressive tax rate system effectively says that these people should have less responsibility over their money.

The point can be extended to taxation in general. In Canada, the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) “tax” rate is a constant 9.9% of your income (if you are an employee, half of it is hidden, so it looks like you only pay 4.95%). CPP is a paternalistic savings device - that is, the government has decided that it can save better than you can, so forces you to give it money that it will return later on. Yet, does it make sense to do this ad infinitum, as a person’s marginal income grows - that is, as individuals within the body politic demonstrate financial responsibility, shouldn’t this tax rate decrease for them instead of remaining constant?

Finally, isn’t it time people took the word “progressive” back, and used it to refer to tax rates that marginally progress to lower amounts (i.e., better amounts from the view of the person being taxed)?

“[Intellectuals are] ingenious fools too clever to be wise, though brilliant at inventing the most ingenious reasons for their fatuous beliefs. But, tiresome as intellectuals can be, even they are probably much less menacing and pernicious to the world than anti-intellectuals.” - F.L. Lucas

I agree with the first point, and am thinking about the second point …

While doing research on my thesis several years ago, I inevitably started reading areas tangentially related to it. Once, I was reading about the nature of dreaming, and was led to a book called Dreaming Reality, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, where they gave a theory of dreaming (which I think is at least in most part correct).

This later led to my exploration of their more general approach to psychology, called the “Human Givens” approach, because it thinks of humans as having certain “givens” - needs and abilities - endowed by nature. If some of the needs aren’t fulfilled, it can cause various psychological problems (many of which are currently treated with drugs, and some of which can be severe, such as severe depression, suicidal tendencies, drug addiction, anorexia, and many others).

The basic human givens approach is to figure out which needs aren’t being met, and then make changes in a person’s life to get those needs met. It’s pretty simple and their practical work seems to be highly effective (they work in the U.K., where they also spend a considerable amount of time training practical caregivers in the approach).

I recently came upon a nice checklist in their 2007 book How to master anxiety, which allows you to do a quick emotional needs audit. You can use it on yourself, or on anyone you might know to get a better understanding of in what areas they might not be getting their needs met.

(p.121 How to master anxiety, by Joe Griffin, Ivan Tyrrell, Denise Winn)

How well are your emotional needs being met?

Rate, in your judgment, how well the following emotional needs are being met, on a scale of one to seven (where 1 means not met at all, and 7 means being very well met).

Do you feel secure in all major areas of your life? For instance, in your home life, work life or environment?
Do you feel you receive enough attention?
Do you think you give other people enough attention?
Do you feel in control of your life most of the time?
Do you feel part of the wider community?
Can you obtain privacy when you need to?
Do you have at least one close friend?
Do you have an intimate relationship in your life (i.e. you are totally
physically and emotionally accepted for who you are by at least one
person)?
Do you feel an emotional connection with others?
Do you have a status in life (whatever it may be) that you value and
that is acknowledged?
Are you achieving things in your life that you are proud of?
Do you feel competent in at least one major area of your life?
Are you mentally and/or physically stretched in ways which give you a
sense of meaning and purpose?

If scored any need at 3 or less, this is likely to be a major stressor.

I recommend the books in their practical series (currently, I believe the series is comprised of How to lift depression - fast, Freedom from addiction, and How to master anxiety). It is a refreshing and seemingly highly effective approach to psychology - the basic approach makes sense to me.

Perfectionists often have motivation problems - that is, they procrastinate. Clearly, their procrastination is due to some habitual movement of thought. The question is, is there a particular sort of movement of thought?

I think for many perfectionist procrastinators, it is something like follows. They think of doing something, but they think of it in a specific sort of way. Namely, they think of what it would take to complete something, in its entirety, and to complete it perfectly. This leads their mind to revolt (not surprisingly), as it senses that what it is conceptualizing could be very difficult and painful to complete.

You can experiment with this. When you catch yourself avoiding something, become clear on exactly how you are conceptualizing it. You can then reconceptualize it if you so desire. For example, instead of thinking “complete task to perfection”, you rather think “let’s just get started, and see what happens.” You can then turn this into a habit. Once you get into something and get started, as a natural perfectionist you can then decide whether you want to “perfect” it, but by then it is much, much easier to do so, if you so choose.

I have now tried this over an extended period of time, and it has worked for me so far. It started as simple introspective awareness - that is, I started asking what exactly was going through my mind when I avoided tasks that were important and that I, at one level, wanted to do.

This sort of approach is also the basis of one of the techniques in the book Getting Things Done, where David Allen recommends habitually asking the question “what’s the next action I can take?” For perfectionists, I would take it even a step further back - “how can I just get this started, and see what happens?”

When someone has too little freedom, we say that they experience tyranny. Typically, this is where the analysis ends, with the idea that more and more freedom is an unlimited good. I think that this is wrong.

For example, there is a word, which is related to ‘liberty’, that reflects a sense of too much freedom - libertine, as in dissolute or licentious. (The word libertine comes from libertinus, and originally meant a freedman, that is, someone freed from slavery.) Following from this, on first approach we could be tempted to say that high levels of external pressure result in tyranny, but that low levels result in libertinism and we could call that optimal spot in the middle liberty.

Yet, this isn’t quite it. When a person has high levels of personal responsibility, it is natural to think that the optimal state for them is lower levels of external constraint than that of a person with low levels of personal responsibility. As a child grows up, for example, they are accorded more and more freedom, as their personal responsibility increases. It follows that there are two relevant variables in determining whether a person is at the optimal spot - first, the levels of external constraint, second, their levels of personal responsibility. It is in cases where there are low levels of personal responsibility combined with low levels of external constraint that people typically fall into what we call libertinism.

This transfers naturally to political analysis. When a people have low levels of external constraint, and high levels of personal responsibility, we say that they have liberty. However, this is where political analysis usually runs aground - for we say simply that high levels of external constraint result in tyranny. Following from the previous analysis, this isn’t quite right. If people have low levels of personal responsibility, high levels of external constraint might be optimal for them - and I’ll use the phrase benevolent paternalism to describe this.

We can think of there being quadrants that describe the major possibilities here:

Low external constraint and High personal responsibility = liberty = good
High external constraint and High personal responsibility = tyranny = bad
Low external constraint and Low personal responsibility = libertinism = bad
High external constraint (of a benevolent kind) and Low personal responsibility = benevolent paternalism = good

(There is a fifth important type, High external constraint (of a malevolent kind) and Low personal responsibility = malevolent paternalism = bad.)

The basic idea is that people need some match of external and internal constraints in order to have an optimal situation.

The problem with many libertarians is that these people, themselves, typically are very intelligent and have high levels of personal responsibility. So for them, low levels of external constraint are optimal. What does not follow, however, is that their personal situation applies to most of the rest of society. Yet they argue as if it did. (It is a similar problem with upper-class intellectuals grappling with social problems - they think that people in, say, the lower classes, would respond to a given situation as they - the upper-class intellectuals - would. Yet, this is often not the case.)

When a people have low levels of external constraint and low levels of personal responsibility, society falls into libertinism. Arguably, our society has moved closer to this situation over the past 100 years. This leaves a vacuum for external constraint, and usually what results is some form of tyranny (understood in the general sense, what is called malevolent paternalism above) - although one can hope for some form of benevolent paternalism. The only way out of this, and towards what most people think is truly desirable - that is, liberty defined as low external constraint and high personal responsibility - is to create people with good characters (that is, knowledgeable and virtuous people).

Our society seems fixated on the right to speech, but there is little emphasis in daily rhetoric put on the right to quiet - that is, not having other people bombard you with noxious sound and images.

Which leads me to Personal Entertainment Devices (PEDs) and flying. Although PEDs open up a lot of possibilities for making airplane travel more interesting, and making the time go more quickly, they also open up another possibility.

On a recent flight with Air Canada, they had PEDs installed on the back of everyone’s seat. It is easy to see the PEDs of someone next to you, or in front of you if you’re in an aisle seat. Because they are personalized, the restrictions on what is being displayed (for example, movie content) have been relaxed. Some movies now contain relatively graphic violence, for example.

So what happens if someone is watching a movie and you don’t want to see what they’re seeing? Inevitably, you are going to catch glimpses of it - and can certainly see it out of the corner of your eye. What if your child is on the flight, and someone has a movie going that you don’t want your child seeing?

This point applies more broadly, to people playing movies on their laptops and so on in public spaces. What is the proper sort of etiquette for public spaces when it comes to these sorts of devices?

“What was the Australian term for the Greens? Watermelons. Green on the outside, red in the middle.”

Taken from the comments section on an article about the recent New Zealand election.