How to Think About Social Issues: Tips 7-8

7. Beware of ‘Social’ Math:

Mathematics is a very useful branch of knowledge for the study of things that exhibit constant behaviour  For studying phenomena such as Newtonian forces and unmotivated particles, math is well-suited to discovering more about them. For the study of humans and human societies though, math is useless. This is because there are no constant relations governing human action. This, in turn, is because humans are not unmotivated particles that always react in a constant manner to the same forces, but can think about and choose their course of action, and act accordingly. One plus one always equals two, but Germany plus monarchy does not always equal invading France, nor does coal plus overseas empire always equal industrial revolution. Put in the exact same circumstances and asked to choose between the same two things, it will be virtually impossible to find a choice that is made all of the time by every single individual. Even with regards to something as primordial as the choice of death versus life, some individuals will choose death. If we can not even state that individuals will always choose to preserve their own lives, how can we say anything about how they will react to various “stimuli”, and then manipulate these results with mathematical symbols?

Contrary to popular belief, these considerations also apply to the social science of economics. The reason why most mainstream economists have complacently accepted the heavy use of mathematics in their discipline is because they are unduly concerned with a mental construction of an imaginary state of affairs, known as general equilibrium, static equilibrium, or the Evenly Rotating Economy. In this construction, consumption and production data (consumer valuations, population, labour competencies, natural resources, general interest rate) are assumed to remain constant, every person is assumed to know everything about this data, and everyone, like an automaton, is assumed to repeat the same tasks day in and day out that will supposedly ‘maximize’ their material wealth. Because human thought and human action are assumed away, mathematics can be used to describe these imaginary states of equilibrium. But the conditions assumed obviously do not exist and could never exist in an actual economy populated by thinking and acting humans. This construction, when used legitimately and which can be employed without the use of mathematics, can help the economist consider certain market tendencies and mentally isolate various economic phenomena. But to imply, as the mathematical economist does, that these elaborate mathematical descriptions of an imaginary and impossible state of affairs can be used to say anything meaningful about the actual, dynamic market process actuated by thinking, acting, and unpredictable human beings is to commit a grave error.

8. Recognize that government is organized coercion:

Much nonsense has been written about what government ‘really’ is. Plato and Aristotle thought that government’s job was to make sure that people don’t just live, but ‘live well’. Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau thought that government existed because of some ‘social contract’ agreed to in ancient times, and that present generations are bound to this contract. Hegel took it to the height of absurdity, saying that the State was the embodiment of morality in the world. Mussolini’s philosophy was that the state was everything: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”.

But, what exactly is government, or the State? The answer is simple if one just thinks about how the State is different from a private organization. How does a private company collect revenue? Through payment by the consumer for products or services offered. How does the State collect revenue? Through taxation, an amount to be paid by each person to the State, regardless of services provided, and enforced by the threat of jail time or other punishments. How does a private association for the advancement of a certain cause, such as a Chinese movie fan club, advance its cause? By persuading people to watch and enjoy Chinese movies. How does the State, if it adopts the same cause as the private association, advance its cause? It can try persuasion, but it also has the power to coerce. Thus, it could require that people watch Chinese movies or they will be punished, or it could prohibit all movies that are not Chinese. We see that in both these cases, the State finances itself and advances its causes through coercion, while private associations finance themselves and advance their causes through persuasion and voluntary purchases. Thus, the State is organized coercion.

Now, for a trickier distinction. How does a private gang of bandits collect revenue? Through extortion or theft, ie. coercion. Thus, is every gang of bandits a State? Some anarchists would say that the State differs only in size and sophistication from a gang of bandits. People who believe in a limited role for organized coercion though would say that what distinguishes a State from a gang of bandits is the fact that certain people consider a certain State to be the legitimate organization of coercion in a given territory, whereas bandit gangs are illegitimate organizations of coercion. Thus, the State can be defined as an organization that can employ coercion and is considered legitimate by those living under its rule. Some separatists don’t consider the State that is currently ruling over them to be legitimate, and hence equate them to a group of oppressive bandits, but this is why in a liberal world, referendums would be available to change States or establish new ones for the dissatisfied people of a geographic region of some kind of minimum size.

Now, why would an organization that engages in coercion ever be considered legitimate? Ignorant people ascribe all sorts of god-like qualities and excellences to organized coercion, but for sound thinkers, the main purpose of organized coercion is to enforce norms of justice conducive to a free and prosperous society. But hold on, how can organized coercion provide freedom? It can conceivably do so by recognizing the just property rights of individuals and defending these property rights against internal bandits or foreign States, thus allowing these individuals freedom to use their property as they see fit. There is no freedom in a vicious jungle, when the strong can just take from the weak, and though anarchists argue that the State is not necessary in order to get out of the vicious jungle, they would probably concede that a minimal State, employing ‘public’ coercion to lessen private coercion in order to dispel the jungle, is better than the jungle itself.

Besides this main purpose, it is conceivable that organized coercion, when employed in a limited and focused way, could be used to facilitate certain outcomes, considered desirable by many people, which may not be produced by individuals interacting on a purely voluntary basis. For example, organizing a truly minimal social safety net, intervening somewhat to correct some problems that might arise with a fully private road, water, and air quality market, and occasionally aiding in land assembly for ambitious private infrastructure projects would be a few limited uses of organized coercion that I might support. Even with these though, one must always bear in mind that using organized coercion means seizing resources from a legitimate owner to devote to a purpose that would not be supported on a voluntary basis. If people always bear that fact in mind though, there is conceivably a place in a well-organized social order for a State.

But why it is important to remember that the State is nothing more than organized coercion? This is because if we do not, we risk misrepresenting what State policies actually are. For example, take the prohibition of alcohol in the US in the 1920s. This was an attempt to use the State to ‘improve the morals’ of Americans. If we remember that the State is organized coercion though, then we can realize that using the State to ‘improve the morals’ of Americans really means using the State to impose one group’s notion of personal morality onto another group by force. Organized coercion was used to stop people from peacefully drinking alcohol (prohibitionists said that alcohol-drinking led to violence, but violence was a crime already and justly so, there was no need to prohibit drinking). Rather than impartially protecting people’s property rights, the State was used by one group (the prohibitionists) against another group (people who liked alcohol) in order to impose their will on the other. In this example, the State was used as a ‘jungle’ force, for the domination of a politically weaker group by a politically stronger group. It is the jungle, except that ballots, petitions, demagoguery, propaganda, and lobbying are used by the powerful to impose their will on others instead of sticks and clubs. Keeping in mind that the State is nothing more than organized coercion helps to restrain the urge to use the State for all kinds of extravagant projects and worship it as a benevolent deity that can do anything. 

How To Think About Social Issues: Tips 5-6

5. Don’t neglect the benefits of economic calculation:

As an exchange economy becomes more complex, people are induced to engage more in indirect rather than direct exchange. Thus, rather than exchanging eggs for horses, horses for watermelons, watermelons for oranges, people realize that it is more efficient to just exchange all these goods for a common medium of exchange known as money. Historically, gold and silver became the most popular media of exchange due to their durability, portability, relative scarcity, divisibility, and uniformity. When these emerged as money, eggs, horses, watermelons, and oranges, and every other exchangeable good in the economy, can be exchanged against money, and then that money can be exchanged against all the other exchangeable goods, thus greatly facilitating the process of exchange in a complex exchange economy.

But having all exchangeable goods exchanged for money has, besides this, another very important effect that the first users of money probably did not realize; it enables economic calculation. With all exchangeable goods exchanged for money, money becomes the common denominator of economic activities. With an economic common denominator, it becomes possible to more effectively assess the successfulness of a particular productive activity. Thus, if the owner of a bakery buys the bakery and its equipment for 50 gold ounces, and calculates that he requires 5 gold ounces a month for operating expenses and to maintain the bakery, he is in a position to calculate, based on his revenue, if his investment was successful. Thus, if his revenue is 10 gold ounces a month, he would probably determine that this was a good investment, depending on how quickly he feels he needs to recover his initial upfront investment, while if his revenue is 4 gold ounces a month, not even covering his maintenance and operating expenses, he would know that this was a bad investment and would adjust accordingly. From a societal point of view, due to consumer’s sovereignty, a good investment means that scarce factors of production have been employed in a way that satisfies more urgent wants of the consumers, while a bad investment means that scarce factors of production have been employed in a way that does not satisfy the consumers as fully. Without a common economic denominator, success or failure would have to be determined by a comparison of a series of heterogeneous inputs and heterogeneous outputs. This is hard enough if only the producer’s valuations are consulted; it becomes virtually impossible when producing for the consumers and all of the millions of market exchange ratios must be known instantaneously in the mind of the producer in order to calculate.  Thus, the ability to calculate economically is vital for producers to ascertain if what they are doing accords with the demands of the consumers, and in a complex economy, money prices are necessary for this.

The ability to calculate economically is one of the great benefits of a free-market, or capitalist, system of production. In a fully socialist economy, exchanges, let alone monetary exchanges, have been banned, and hence there is no common denominator. The planners will have no way of knowing how well their investments are doing either from the standpoint of the consumers or even from the standpoint of themselves. If the planners decide that they want to produce steel, without a market for the producers’ goods necessary for producing steel, no money prices are assigned to these goods based on their alternate uses in the economy, and hence the planners will have no idea what the most economical way of achieving even their own goals will be.

Even without full socialism though where a monetary market does exist, as in the modern world, there are still institutions that do not calculate economically. Government bureaucracies generally do not try to make the most money possible with their activities, but have other goals for the employment of the resources under their control. But if they are not aiming at making monetary profit, they cannot employ economic calculation properly, and hence end up stabbing in the dark (from the point of view of consumer satisfaction as demonstrated through voluntary exchanges), taking actions without a market-based assessment of the opportunity costs (any alternative uses of the resources) involved because they cannot use economic calculation to do so as the profit-seeking businessman can. For example, consider the decision of whether to turn a section of a city street into a pedestrian-only street. If the street is owned privately, economic calculation can help with the decision. Are the expected revenues from pedestrian tolls or perhaps the expected benefits to stores on the street enough to outweigh the lost revenues from car tolls or the lost business of motorists at the stores? Because this decision is based on expectations, a wrong decision could certainly be made, but at least there is a standard for ascertaining that the decision was wrong (losses as opposed to profits) and after a while, street entrepreneurs, based on these experiments, will have a better idea of which portions to make pedestrian-only and which not.

On the other hand, if the street is owned by a government, unless the government just wants to make monopoly profits, they will generally not charge at the revenue-optimization point in a quest for profits, but will have other goals. The decision will be made based on the personal feelings and hunches of the bureaucrats involved. Maybe the government is a “pedestrian-friendly” or a “car-friendly” regime and will make their decision this way? Perhaps the bureaucrat just thinks that “it would be nice” if this section was pedestrian-only. In any case, the decision will tend to be more arbitrary from the point of view of the consumers than the private decision, due to the lack of economic calculation and the profit-and-loss motive. The more bureaucracy extends across the economy, the more sections of the economy cannot calculate economically and rationally allocate their resources and the more the demands of bureaucrats tend to dominate rather than the demands of the consumers.

All this is not to say that a social thinker may not want the demands of bureaucrats to override the demands of the consumers in certain special cases. It is, however, fallacious to propose plans for socializing industries or adopting a fully socialist system without even mentioning the great potential benefits that economic calculation provides by helping and encouraging profit-seeking businessmen to serve the consumers in an economical fashion.        

6. Methodologically, choose individualism:

Another common mistake of social scientists is to subscribe, knowingly or unknowingly, to methodological holism, rather than methodological individualism. Methodological holism is when a collective, rather than an individual human, is taken as the basic unit of analysis, to which motivations and anthropomorphic characteristics are assigned. Thus, it is said that ‘England’, or ‘the workers’, want to do this or that, for this or that reason. But England is a term signifying a geographical region or a term signifying a grouping of all the individuals currently living in that geographical region. It cannot ‘go to war’ or ‘protect its interests’ or have a ‘national character’ because it is not an individual, acting human. Men living in that geographical region can form associations that convince or compel others to ‘go to war’ or engage in certain economic or cultural activities, but these associations are always just the aggregate of its constituent individuals, never an entity with its own mind that can be analyzed other than by analyzing the individuals who make it up.The same thing applies with ‘the workers’, a term that in this context tends to signify people that are paid a wage for performing manual labour of some kind. ‘The workers’ cannot think, feel, or want, anything, only individual workers can do this, and sometimes the interests of one worker and the interests of another will clash.

Methodological individualism, by contrast, recognizes that the only entities in society that can think, feel, have a character, and act, are individual human beings. The methodological individualist does not deny that individuals can form associations to pursue common interests, or exercise hegemonic bonds over other individuals and compel them to do certain things, but when studying these associations one must never speak of them as individual humans, they are only aggregates, often temporary aggregates, of individuals, and must be studied as such.

How To Think About Social Issues: Tips 3-4

3. Don’t neglect the benefits of exchange and the division of labour:

Based on the action axiom stated in tip #1 (that humans act in an attempt to substitute a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory state of affairs, from their own subjective point of view), we can deduce the following axiom that also cannot be denied by anyone: that when a voluntary exchange is made between two parties, both parties must expect to gain, at the time of making the exchange, or else the exchange would not have been made. Thus, if John gives Jim $1 in exchange for one of Jim’s pineapples, John must expect that he will benefit more from having a pineapple than he would from having $1. The great potential benefits that could be realized through the simple act of an interpersonal exchange of goods that are valued differently by the two parties should not be ignored or thrown away lightly.

 It could be objected that it is conceivable that John could have made a mistake, perhaps realizing after the exchange that he did not actually like pineapples as much as he remembered he did and thus if he could turn back the clock, given his new knowledge, he would not have made the exchange. While this is true, there is, however, no reason to believe that such situations would be very common, because people like John will quickly change their exchanging conduct in the future once they realize that their valuations have changed. There is even less reason to believe that any outside observer could have the capacity to recognize John’s subjective-valuational mistakes quicker than John himself.  

The benefits of interpersonal exchange are supplemented by the fact that the division of labour among more people is more efficient than autarchic production. First, if someone specializes in performing a task, preferably a task for which he has a natural propensity, he will generally become more efficient at performing that task than if he had remained a generalist. Secondly, and more remarkably, even if one person is superior in every kind of production to another, it is still more productive for the two to exchange because time and effort are scarce. Thus, if the superior person specializes in his comparative advantage (the area of production in which he is most superior to others) while the inferior person specializes in his comparative advantage (the area of production in which he is least inferior to others), the total amount of production can be increased, simply through the two specializing and exchanging their products. It is due to these facts that societies of humans developed, because peaceful societies that enable exchange, specialization, and the division of labour are more productive than autarchic isolation. None of these things require war or coercion to attain, all they require is that the people involved realize the fact that peaceful social cooperation and exchange is more productive and act on this fact. One should thus consider the matter very carefully before proposing to interfere with these beneficial, primordial phenomena through coercion.

4. Incentives matter:

The way the free-market works, and indeed any system of production must work, is to provide incentives for people to produce things that others want to be produced. In the free-market, producers are incentivized to produce things that the consumers are willing to pay for (Note: most people are both producers and consumers), because the consumers monetarily reward them for doing so through their numerous decisions to patronize or not patronize a business, buy or not buy a product. People are incentivized to work in lines that the consumers deem important, save resources to devote to future production, invest in lines that the consumers deem important, and successfully bear the uncertainty of the future, being rewarded for anticipating future demands of the consumers or adjusting production so as to better reflect consumer desires. In the free-market, the incentives that the consumers offer to exercise their sovereignty over the production process take the form of monetary rewards. Producers may partially disregard the consumer in their use of resources for the sake of psychic gains (such as a decision not to get involved in the liquor industry for subjective moral reasons, even though doing so would be the most monetarily profitable course), but doing so means forfeiting some of the monetary reward they would have received.

Now, if people, in their capacity as producers, receive monetary rewards depending on how well they serve the consumers, then it must follow that inequality of wealth and incomes is a necessary part of the free-market incentive system, it cannot be otherwise. Whenever money is taken coercively from the producer for the benefit of others, this incentive system is consequently weakened by the extent of the money taken. In a fully egalitarian socialist system, this incentive system is completely destroyed, and the government must then use punishment and the threat of punishment to get people to produce. Without being slaves of the government though, the more money that is taken from the wealthy and given to less wealthy people, the less the market system of production can function efficiently. This is not to say that a sound social thinker cannot advocate any redistributive policies, only that when doing so, he cannot neglect the effects of these policies on the incentive structure of the free-market system of production.

How to Think About Social Issues: Intro and Tips 1-2

Introduction:

The following is a list of tips I have compiled to help you think more clearly and systematically about social issues. By social issues I mean any question relating to the functioning of human societies. These are commonly divided into economic issues, political issues, and social issues, but I see no need for such a, largely arbitrary, division, so I will use the all-encompassing ‘social’, designating ‘having to do with human societies’, instead. In practice, views on social issues tend to be related closely to views on government policy. Government policies are the decisions about how much and in what ways to use the coercive power of government, the organization of coercion considered legitimate in a geographically-bounded territory. The act of systematically thinking about and analyzing social issues is known as social science, and its practitioners, social scientists. The social sciences are often derided by natural scientists for being based on wishy-washy emotions and unsubstantiated opinions, and consequently not producing anything of value. While I would agree that this is true about a lot of the social science that is being done today, it need not be so. Social science can be just as rigorous as the natural sciences, provided that its epistemological differences are recognized and that rigorous analytical logic is not discarded in favour of relativistic opinions. Keeping the following tips in mind while thinking about social issues can help in this endeavour:

1. Mind your epistemology:

The social sciences and the natural sciences have different epistemological statuses. In the natural sciences, experiments are done by attempting to isolate one relevant variable, and then observing what effect changing that variable has on the result. This method is unavailable to the social scientist. History has sometimes been described as the laboratory experiment of the social sciences, but this is false. In history, variables cannot be fully isolated, a historical period must be compared with another wholesale, with all of their respective complicated variables of all kinds. For example, arguably the closest thing to a laboratory experiment in the social sciences were the fates of West and East Germany when the West adopted free-market institutions and the East was communist. Unsurprisingly for free-market economists, the West thrived economically while the East stagnated, and various people from the miserable East tried to escape to the relatively happy West. But, for the strict epistemologist, even this is not good enough to conclude empirically that capitalism is better than socialism. Perhaps the people in the East were less skilled at certain tasks or were less concerned with material improvement than those in the West? Perhaps natural resources were less favourably placed? Perhaps (and this probably was a big factor), the West got to associate and trade with more prosperous countries than the East, who could only associate with the Soviet bloc? The point is that historical situations have too many complex variables to serve as fully satisfactory laboratory experiments.

In that case though, how does the social scientist know anything about his subject matter? Luckily, the social scientist does enjoy an advantage over the natural scientist in one regard: he is what he is studying, that is, the social scientist is a human, and his subject matter is the study of human societies. Thus, the social scientist can learn truths about humans through introspection and logical deduction. For instance, the basic axiom behind most social science is the axiom that humans act in an attempt to substitute a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory state of affairs, from their own subjective point of view. This statement cannot be refuted; doing so would mean an attempt to substitute a less satisfactory state of affairs (where the statement is not refuted) for a more satisfactory state of affairs (where the statement is refuted). Though impossible, the attempt was made nonetheless, and since action is not about achieving desired ends but attempting to achieve desired ends, the statement is confirmed in the very act of trying to refute it. From this simple axiom, complemented by well-known, broad empirical truths such as the greater productivity of the division of labour, the core of economic theory is logically deduced (such as the law of marginal utility, the price structure of the market, the incentive structure, etc…).

An example will help to illustrate this epistemological point. Sometimes, when analyzing a period of history, two thinkers agree on the facts, but differ on their interpretation and their relevance to social theory. A good example of this is the history of industrialism in the 19^th century and its effect on the wages of industrial workers. Every respectable historian agrees that real wages were going up over the course of the 19^th century, but, according to their views of economic theory, they disagree over the causal relation involved in this event. A socialist-leaning or labour union-sympathizing historian will tend to argue that it was the rise of the power of labour unions (a fact that is not denied by anyone) that led to the increase in the wages of industrial workers. Without this, according to the Marxist view of how wage rates are determined, the employers would have left the employees with the same real wage rates (enough so that they survive and procreate) and would have pocketed the surplus created by the growth of industry for themselves.

By contrast, historians sympathetic to the free-market will tend to argue that it was through the significant accumulation of capital and through technological improvements over this period (another fact that is not denied by anyone) that the real wages of industrial workers rose. This is because, according to free-market economic theory, wage rates are determined just like any other factor of production, and when one class of factors of production (capital goods) becomes more abundant, labour, a complementary factor of production to capital goods, without which capital goods are useless, becomes relatively scarcer and productive and hence more valuable, thus securing higher real wage rates for those willing to expend labour in this more productive structure of production. In cases such as these, calls to ‘let the facts speak for themselves’ are disingenuous, the facts say different things depending on what theory you interpret them with!   

Of course, not every social issue can be fully analyzed using deductive theory, but the knowledge provided by correct deductive theorizing is irrefutable, and every subsequent empirical examination of social issues must take it into account. For instance, the question of whether to have intellectual property laws is one such question. Economic theory tells us that there are some possible economic gains that will redound to the direct benefit of the inventor of a useful new technology, such as increased prestige and first-mover advantages, but that a lot of the benefits of this technology take the form of positive externalities, something that benefits other market participants without the producer of the externality being remunerated fully for these benefits. Thus, intellectual property laws are one way to help internalize this externality, by granting the innovator a temporary monopoly privilege over the marketing of his invention, which could conceivably result in more innovators being willing to innovate, as they will be able to expect remuneration more in line with the benefits that this technology would bring. On the other hand, economic theory also tells us that monopoly privileges result in harm to the consumers, as there is no competition in the provision of the monopolized good, allowing the monopolists to raise prices higher than otherwise. Also, intellectual property serves to stifle future innovations, as future innovators fear being sued by the holder of the patent for building off of the work done by the patent-holding innovator. Furthermore, any attempt to correctly guess at what people ‘would have’ paid for the use of the technology outside of their actual, concrete choices made on the market is fraught with difficulties. In this case, economic theory does not tell us which of these results will predominate, and empirical studies can prove useful (although never as conclusive as in the natural sciences) here. The empiricist social scientist who seeks to disprove deductive economic theory based off of empirical results alone, without any plausible, logical, theoretical argument as to why the previous theory was wrong, is guilty of a grave epistemological error though.

2. Remember that value is subjective:

A mistake frequently made by social scientists is to substitute their own value judgements for those of the people they are studying. For example, a social scientist, hypothetically, may say that while the economy may be freer in the United States, people are not as healthy in the US as they are in the UK, a country with less economic freedom and a socialized healthcare system, therefore the UK’s government is adopting ‘better’ policies than the US government. But, for the subjectivist, this conclusion does not necessarily follow. He recognises that according to some people’s value judgements, health may not be as important as other economic goods, such as eating greasy food. He would say that health is only a measure of economic efficiency when the people choose health over other goods, which they can only do in a free-market system, and that comparisons between the health levels of countries with free-market healthcare systems (not that the current US has that, but never mind that for now) and ones that force their citizens to pay for a certain amount of healthcare are really quite arbitrary from the point of view of the two countries’ economic efficiency. It would be just like if a social scientist in the past had ranked the countries according to the number of Bibles that were sold within their borders, and chastised countries with a low ranking.

Every individual has a different scale of value, and the only way that the social scientist can observe this scale of value is through the actions of individual people. For instance, the only way of knowing whether Bob prefers, at a given time, 2 pounds of apples costing him a dollar, 2 pounds of tomatoes costing him a dollar, or anything else that could be done with the dollar, is to observe his purchasing decisions in the grocery store. Surveys won’t do it, because the person might be lying, the person may not have really thought about the question, or the person’s value scales may have changed between the time he took the survey and the time he actually made his purchasing decisions. Thus, subjective judgements of value can only be demonstrated by individuals acting voluntarily, and cannot be known for sure by a statesman, social scientist, or anyone else before this action occurs. 

Welcome!

Hi everyone, I'm Brian The Ponderer and this is my blog, Thinking About Human Society.

I will be posting my thoughts and reflections on various social and political issues and on methodologies for thinking about these issues.

The posts are not meant for academic publication, so I will not use citations or references extensively. Suffice it to say that my thinking has been heavily influenced by four great thinkers in particular: Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, George Reisman, and Murray Rothbard.

As anyone familiar with these thinkers will know, and as readers may notice while reading my posts, my positions on most social issues could be described as having a generally libertarian orientation. Though some may disagree, I do not think that this constitutes a libertarian 'bias'. Before being exposed to the works of the three thinkers mentioned above, I was not a libertarian at all, in fact, I once dreamed of becoming a civil servant!

I will start this blog off with a methodological piece, consisting of 30 tips that I have formulated to help me think about social issues more clearly. I will post 2 tips a day.

I hope that my readers will get something out of this blog. I dare not hope that everyone will agree with everything that I say. If enough readers are encouraged, by this blog, simply to think about and consider the issues and methodologies I bring up, I will be more than satisfied.

 Again, welcome!