Indian Giver

A politically incorrect phrase if ever there was one as I have no idea of its origins but it refers to someone who gives you something as a gift and then at some point asks for the gift back, presumably on the pretense that it was just a loan.

I mention this as I was asked about the lotto gift conundrum, i.e. someone gives you a lotto ticket presumably as birthday present or some such reason and low and behold you win the big prize of let’s say $5M, the conundrum at least in some people’s minds is that they may have an obligation to the giver of the ticket to share their new found bounty and if they do what amount is sufficient to discharge this obligation.

This doesn’t stand much logical scrutiny now does it?

Let’s change the scenario just a little. When you give the Lotto gift you have the potential to turn say a small gift, say $5 into a large gift say $5M. What if it is the other way around, you provide a higher priced gift that suddenly turns into a small value gift, eg You give someone an expensive set of Waterford Crystal Water glasses that set you back $1,000 for six glasses and the person you give them slips, drops and smashes the lot, turning them into zero. Would you be surprised if they turned to you and said, that was rubbish gift a load of broken glasses how about some more? Yes thought so.

How about a bloke goes into a bar orders a drink, gets into his car afterwards and drives into a bus killing 10 people. Is the bar staff responsible for this? (in NZ we have in part made them so but that is another story)  Surely the bloke in the car is really the responsible party.

What about a gun seller who sells a gun to someone who accidentally uses it to shoot a hunting companion. Is the gun seller responsible for the death?

In all of the above when there is a negative consequence we quite readily see the dividing line between us and the negative consequence, if we are the gift giver, bar staff or gun seller.

When there is a positive outcome that could ascribe a benefit to us (a share in a big win) we start to see shades of grey or “obligations”

There really is no difference just the outcome.

What if the giver purchased two tickets and gave one as a gift and kept one and that one was the winner, do you think they would feel they should share the winnings with the receiver of the gift who but for some bad luck could have gotten the winning ticket. No didn’t think so.

So there really is no logical obligation is there, but what about that other kind of reasoning the emotional kind. People trying to sell you products have known for thousands of years that if you give someone something then they are inclined to feel some obligation in return and may well buy something from your store.

I had a direct experience of this in Florence when a street hawker approached me and tried to sell me some scarves or hat or something I don’t recall. I told him no thanks and promptly ignored him. At which point he grabbed my hand and shoved a couple of carved animals into my hand “for you” “I give for you” says he and having regained my attention he whipped out some sort of flute and played a quick tune on the flute, then offering to sell me one. No thanks mate says I, already told you I wasn’t interested. He was most put out, he had given me a gift and put on a show, it was now my turn to anti up. When he realised I was immune to his charms such as they were he demanded back his gift, the carved animals, which I gave him and he then stormed off. (actually if he just asked about the animals I might have given some money for those, they were quite good but I digress)

So there is a sharing contract within humans and it usually works, I look after you, you look after me. When one of us breaks the contract we tend to get upset, like my hawker. The fact that I didn’t want to contract with him was his problem. If I had entered his shop and he had put on the same routine my inclination to go along with the trade would have been much stronger.

So to the lotto winner and the gift giver. I think it is inevitable that you would provide some reciprocal gift in return not because it is logical but because of the unspoken social contract. 

Like most gift giving the level would be commensurate with the initial gift and the relationship with the giver. In some cases your conscience could be soothed for little money in other cases it is going to cost you plenty.

It is all about the social contract that we have with our other human beings and about how we should treat them. Everyone has a copy of the contract that they keep memorised in their head. The problem is all of us have made our own copy with various clauses that others may or may not have.

Dopey Media

Name a drug that was discovered and brought to market by a government, any government any time anywhere. I have some spare time so I will wait while you think about it. Try googling it, I don’t mind.

Did you google it, if you did you will likely find an article or two pumping up the role that fundamental research plays in the development of drugs and even the development of actual drugs in a research lab. Great, well done, thanks very much we appreciate your efforts research folk really I do. But….. (who didn’t see that coming) none of them made it to market without a private company in the mix who picked up where the researches left off and actually got them into the hands of patients and that is what counts. Having the cure for cancer on a shelf in a lab is no use to anyone, distribution to the consumer (patient) is what makes it useful.

So what I hear you ask. Well today on the radio I heard a women campaigning and explaining how you could buy and import Hep C generic drugs into NZ because we do not current provide these through Pharmac with the only option being self-funding of the patent holders drugs at a very high price. We are talking $60k - $100k  for a course of medication (I think but she didn’t actually say) vs some $6k. So it is easy to see the attraction and let’s be honest with ourselves if I was dying of Hep C and could use her system to fix the problem I probably would.

But….. Yep another one, why is she allowed on the radio to promote this idea? Here is what she is actually suggesting in the long term. A drug company (don’t know which one) invested a ton of money developing the drug and getting it FDA approved to bring it to market. This costs on average $4 Bn USD and can be as much as $11 Bn. To give that some perspective the Health budget in NZ is only $11 Bn USD total. To make this worth their while they charge like wounded bulls for as long as they can or put another way until their patent runs out (20 years). At which point every other drug company in the world copies their drug and starts grabbing their market and the price inevitably tumbles.

In the case of the Hep C drug China and India in particular have decided to ignore US patents so drug companies in those companies start manufacturing at a cheap price straight away as they have not had to part out with the $4 Bn the other company did.

NZ plays ball and only uses patent medicines until the patent runs out and then we buy the cheapest we can get. If you don’t act that way then private drug companies will stop spending the $4 Bn to bring the drugs to market, and as we know, no one else is doing it, therefore no new drugs, i.e. the cure for Hep C would never make it out of the lab.

So the wide spread popularisation of her cunning scheme helps 20 years of Hep C patients (before the patent runs out) but condemns everyone else to potentially no new drugs as a result. 

Like I said I may well do the same as her if I had Hep C what I certainly would not do is allow her a powerful spot on my radio show (if I had one) to promote an idea that could harm many many people (the ones who won’t get new drugs) in favour of helping a few.

The lack of critical thinking of our modern media continues to astound. 

That's not fair...

Children go through a period of acute awareness of a type of justice as they discover that the world is unfair. They first discover that there are rules and that sometimes these can be used to their advantage. A complaint of “jimmy has two trucks and I have none” will likely motivate an adult to take one truck of jimmy for my benefit. Mostly we grow out of this childishness as we realise that trucks are earned not given.

So chalked on the sidewalk today as I went for a lunchtime stroll was, “10% of NZers have 60% of the wealth, while 40% have just 3%”. This is a statistic from a recent Statistics NZ survey on wealth distribution in NZ as at 2015 and is an accurate reporting of at least what part of the report says.

I don’t know the motivation of the sidewalk chalk messenger but I suspect they wrote it because they felt it was wrong in a childlike response to a supposed injustice. Because in itself the quote tells us nothing about the situation or even if it is a good or a bad idea. It needed at a minimum a qualifier such as “large wealth inequality can lead to rebellion” (think French revolution if you want a famous example, let them eat cake and all that)

But is wealth inequality a bad thing, accepting that excess inequality is, but is this split particularly bad and why. I don’t pretend to know but some thoughts occur.

One household is a group of students and another is a couple just about to retire. No one would expect equal wealth between these groups now would they. Likely as not the students have no wealth and the retiring couple might own a house at the very least. But this is just a run of life variance, kids have no money adults have more money, wow who knew.

How about one person purchased a house in Auckland 10 years ago for $300k and one purchased one in Invercargill for the same amount, both equal at that stage, but now the Auckland house is worth $1M and Invercargill house is worth $350k. Again so what?  A big wealth disparity but both have one house each to live in, neither is really any better off unless Ms Auckland sells up and moves to Invercargill.

One couple decide not to have kids and another couple has three kids. Pretty sure the no kids group will have more money but perhaps a less fulfilled life depending on your value set. Would the couple with the kids feel worse off, even though they will be less wealthy?

Choices can make a big difference for example the South Islands richest man (at one stage) never left home and eventually took possession of his parents’ house, purchased only one car that he used rarely, would walk to the library to read the paper and never left the country and seldom left his home town. No kids, no pets, no hobbies (except making money), no life, but he died really wealthy but so what. I have met a lot of poor people who were much wealthier than him.

But I hear you say, there are really poor people who have nothing and really rich who have everything. Well the poverty is relative is my first comment, better to be poor in NZ than India or China and they have really rich people too.

Those really wealthy people also pay a lot of tax (yep even with their loopholes and fancy accountants) As we have also heard this week that 40% of households pay no net direct tax. The wealthy also invest in business etc which provide jobs and having a lot of gold bars or fancy cars does not make you healthier or necessarily happier.

Sure wealth inequality might not be a good thing but we need to get past the sandpit stage and provide better arguments than a bald quote designed to elicit whining “that’s not fair…” type response. 

Training to be a fighter pilot

There is one of those urban legends that suggests the US air force used to go to video arcades and look for future fighter pilots.
Personally I have my doubts that this ever occurred but I am sure it made the kids wasting their time and quarters feel better that rather than skipping school they were training to be fighter pilots.

When I was at university I did a fair few hours training to be a fighter pilot myself. Specifically on a game called Defender the premise was you were defending 10 people on a planet by flying your fighter ship against the alien invaders. A pretty generic set up.

The mechanics of the game involved a landscape that stretched past one screen full meaning you couldn't see what was going on across the entire battlefield only the bit you were currently in. There was a radar screen where you could get an idea of the remainder of the battlefield activity.
You had control of your ship for up, down thrust forward and reverse direction and of course shoot with a couple of less important bomb etc options thrown in.
The aliens were varied in their speeds and abilities and all attacked simultaneously across the battlefield. In a nutshell it was pretty complex and fast paced.

I was reminded of all of this the other day when driving which in some regards is just like the game without the shooting bit, I have control of left, right, thrust, brake etc and there are any number of aliens on the roads of varying speed and ability trying to get me. Well perhaps not trying to get me but it can seem that way.

And I tend to treat it just like the game, I watch all the variables and estimate collision points and track a safe path through the obstacles. Compared with the speed of the defender game, driving has less variables and is much slower paced so not that difficult.

My wife is not always comfortable with my decision making and tends to wish I braked or slowed down earlier, or at all, as sometimes I have calculated the car will be gone before I reach that point and don't brake at all. She worries that the driver will not act as I anticipate and so I should be more cautions by braking earlier. To a point she is correct, sometimes people don't act as I have predicted and I have to adjust sometimes quickly and it is very annoying. If I suffer from road rage at all it is this "stupid" choice that a driver makes that annoy or the other trait I notice is slow decision making or incomplete data decisions, such as arriving at a give way sign, coming to almost a complete halt and then looking for any traffic, why not look while approaching?

So I have now realised that the apparent lack of driving decision making skill exhibited on the roads is actually a lack of time playing video games during your younger years when your brain was still developing.
Did playing video games enhance my ability (such as it is) to handle a variable data set and make decisions, I would certainly love to see some research on the topic, or is this just a case of personal bias after all we know from surveys that just about everyone thinks they are better than average when driving. So potentially I am an undiscovered Top Gun candidate or deluded about my driving ability.....

Me Vs We

Jeremy Bentham is most associated with utilitarianism a philosophy which can be boiled down to "the greatest good for the greatest number"

It is the basis for any number of rationing systems with Pharmac and drug buying being a good example in this country.
Some drugs don't get purchased and some people go without treatment because the drugs are really expensive and would therefore use up the budget which could be better spent helping a larger number of people with less expensive drugs. Until the day that you need the expensive drugs people generally accept this as a reasonable basis for decision making, the greatest number of people are assisted within the budget available.

The rights of the individual have an even longer history which from an english law perspective can trace their origins back to the Magna Carta signed in 1215 which established the rights of the subjects vs the powers of the king.

But which is supreme, the rights of the individual or the rights of the society, or group. How you answer this question may well tell me which side of the political spectrum you are likely to fall on.

Those to the right of the spectrum tend to champion individual, you know individual responsibility, reward for effort, my money not the states taxes, small government, big market (a collection of individuals effectively)

Those to the left tend to champion collective goods or groups, increased taxes to assist... (insert group of choice) Protection of the enviroment, gay rights, womens rights etc.

Of course these domains are not clear cut and plenty of "right wingers" can be concerned about gay rights etc but if you listen to the way the ideas are discussed it is effectively group (we) vs the individual (me).

The possible reason why left wingers seem more virtuous as they care about "others" or groups, right wingers appear to care only for themselves "individuals"

This is a bit simplistic though isn't it, both groups seek to advance all, it is where the emphasis goes that counts.

"Tomorrow Me"

A smart chap I know talked with me recently about “today me” and “tomorrow me” as if they were two different things. It was his explanation as to why we don’t eat right, stop smoking, drink less, save more etc which are all things that have an impact on your future but not that much on your today. His inference was that we actually are disconnected from our future selves and regard the future me as an alternative person.

As is obvious I have been mulling this over and it is a good conceptual framework to consider things from. The best example of “today me” and “tomorrow me” is having a great time at a party and reaching for that next drink knowing that there is a likely hood that you will awake with a raging hangover tomorrow. Apart from your mental impairment brought on by alcohol ingestion we all know that too many drinks makes us feel sick the next day and yet often times we carry on drinking... because the hangover is a problem for “tomorrow me” to deal with “today me” is fine and having a good time. 12 hours later when “today me” is hungover “today me” has all sorts of issues with “yesterday me” but gets on with drinking water, sleeping or whatever to deal with the hangover.    

So why the disconnect, well I think we casually think about time as a sort of a ribbon or a path that we trundle along, we have a sort of general idea of a linear progress. This is of course how it looks when you look back over your life. Looking forward we also have general outline of how it will go because we have all met people older than ourselves and the general plot line is somewhat standard we start as babies grow up live for a while and decline. Yes there are people who’s line is interrupted but we are all generally on the same path.

But it is a very wide path we can weave left and right as we go along and the future is not really a ribbon. You see when we are out partying we can actually chose which “tomorrow me” we get, drink lots of booze and become “hungover me”, drink nothing but water become “not hungover me” two completely separate dots in the future from where we can start. So projecting forward you potentially have a scattered lot of dots that you can choose to pick as your “tomorrow me” instead of a just trudging along the path.

I have now begun to think of life as like the milky way which appears in the sky as a strip of clustered stars so if you went from one narrow end to the other if forms a sort of a path (the way) but hoping form one star to another would give you an almost infinite number of ways to get from one end to the other and each star is not really connected to the last one. The possibilities of who “tomorrow me” might be do not need to relate to “today me”

Which brings us to just “me” because I decide what “tomorrow me” looks like. No matter how you got to be “today me”, be it skill and brilliance or bad luck and terrible circumstances we all know that “tomorrow me” is at least in part a function of “today me” and there is no one on the planet who is as interested in “tomorrow you” as you.

When you meet “tomorrow me” will you be pleased? 

Capacity

Capacity: actual or potential ability to perform, yield, or withstand


I hear a lot about the ills of society these days and naturally this discourse tends to focus on the underprivileged which makes sense. Inevitably these underprivileged folk share some things in common and in particular they suffer from some “disability” which prevents them from getting on in society. I am using the word disability in a very wide sense such as a lack of education or skills as well as a physical or mental disability.

So here is a little thought experiment.

Think of a nomadic hunter gatherer tribe of say 20 odd people, basically a family unit making its way in the world as best it can. This is the human reality not so long ago (in a geological time frame). As the tribe hunts game and the like it will experience the usual tribulations of life such as some members aging to a point where they cannot hunt effectively or one of the tribe might get injured in a hunt and some of the 20 might be infants who can’t contribute to food gathering.

These “unproductive” members of the tribe will be supported by the rest and life will be fine. However for the sake of argument let’s assume you need at least 10 hunters out of 20 to make the system work ie each hunter can support one other person. This is what I am referring to as the Capacity of the tribe.

What would happen to the tribe if there were only 8 hunters and 12 young old or weak members? Not sure but it is bound to be bad for at least 4 members of the 12 to bring things into balance. If nothing changed then presumably all the tribe would slowly weaken and everyone would die in the long run.

So what?

Well all groups have a carrying capacity even our really complex industrialised societies. It is not so easy to see but it must still be there after all as nothing has really changed from the tribe days in terms of providing enough resources for all.

But I have never heard a conversation about whether or not we can “afford” the numbers of disabled persons that we carry in society. To be truthful I am not even sure how you would work it out and I know that the idea will seem a bit icky to some people because in the brutal world of our ancient ancestors some or all of the 4 would have been left to die and you could infer that is my idea for dealing with our disadvantaged (which it is not).

This idea potentially matters because let’s just assume the number works out to be 40% of society needs to be productive to support the other 60%. Let’s further assume that we currently sit at 62% unproductive. (there are a lot of kids and older folk out there) Then any attempt to fix the problem that does not address this issue is doomed to failure so it is important that we know.

The current solutions all really boil down to have the rich give some of their surplus to the poor. In comes in various packages but this is the central idea nine times out of ten. However if we are beyond capacity this will result in the death of the total tribe.

In NZ in 2006 (the latest census figures I could easily find) the population was just over 4M and the number of people in full time work was 1.4M so the 35% of the population supports the remainder. (yes I know part time work etc. but it isn’t going to get past 40% ) Bet you thought it was more than that.