I have a vision of a common humanity, and certainly we live in a strange and dark time for such a vision. A global elite of fewer and fewer people with capital and power concentrated ever more intensely into their hands has declared open shooting in what is emerging as a global civil war. In this war, I stand firmly on the side of the 99%.

When faced with such stark establishment, when we are all marginilised, it's easy to slide into a general distrust of everything established. This is corrosive. In particular, it worries me that because we (a) live in a technological society but (b) most people are excluded (through lack of education or interest) from a real understanding of what underpins our lives, then anti-political-establishment (good) and anti-economic-establishment (good) is fusing with anti-scientific-establishment (bad). Why bad? Because science is the highest pinnacle of human knowledge ever achieved. Unlike previous thought, it relies on being able to change your mind in light of new evidence, rather than fashion, authority, or (purely) intuition. Come the revolution, I would hope for a humanity that reached for the stars. But that could only happen for a humanity that understood what stars were, and how to get there. And that requires relying on evidence, mathematics, physics and biology. These, too, are our weapons against those who would manipulate us, rule us, blind us.

We have an intellectual responsibility to be proportional. If there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, we have a duty to check that evidence first, and mainly, and offer the critics as much time as they deserve. Since this amounts to #1.9% of the community, devoting an hour to global warming means the sceptics deserve about 68.4 seconds. Vaccines have been established by mass double blind trials and ongoing live data. Studies displaying autism and vaccines as correlata amount to 0.00003% of the total, and both were later withdrawn. I think you can guess what I intend as a proportionate response.

The third biggest killer in the West is medical mismanagement - shocking, tragic, and one must be vigilant and suspicious. But medical progress means we live longer and better than ever before. Baby, bathwater, goodnight.

For the last 34 years or so, we've seen the capitalist establishment transform from a cold-war, Keynesian apparatus with some degree of social welfare into a hypermonetarist, ultra-militarised servant of the superrich, with a pronounced hostility to anything that stands in its way. For years, rich people have been annoyed by a model of society whereby people can access services paid for by their taxes. 'We could be selling them these services', was the thought. Still, the fact states had centralised into rich honey pots was also a sexy prospect - the superrich are not interested in saving the tax payer money either. In the UK, a cursory glance at the history of PPP and PFI demonstrates this amply. Via the mass media, inculcating a dogma of selfishness into the popular consciousness has the benefit of being an apparently universal ideology that, indexed to the reality of extreme inequality, tends to only actually benefit the organised ruling class, whilst tending to fracture all other people meaning no recognition of common interest for the majority thus infected. Whatever your creed, the ruling classes of today have forced class warfare upon you. The superrich have declared all relations of kindness and compassion are now enemies of the state - whether secular welfare or even religion. (Note that, in the US, it is the most dogmatic and virulent conservative Christians who give the most to the poor via charity, but it is also the same group that tends to support the policies that ensure there are poor people). The superrich have declared war on all of us. It's now up to us to respond.

So, I've never written a blog before, etc.

Some people write for money. Some people write for fame. Some people write for the simple pleasure of writing. I have no choice in the matter. Every word here is simply a reaction to what I am seeing unfold in front of my eyes. What follows is one long reaction to what I perceive as enormous injustice. If you fancy analysing what is no doubt simply a perverse, subjective delusion, and not at all a real call to arms in a dark time, then please do so.

I read somewhere that homo neanderthalis, it is thought, took care of their sick and elderly. This appears to be a very ancient facet of the human family. In many ways, modern humans are better innovators then our close hominid cousins and ancestors - what we try nowadays never worked in the past. Many of these innovations are wonderful - we have burst the constricting bounds of tribal life and developed global networks quite unanticipated. Some of the ethics of the tribe ought to be retained, I would argue. Especially in a time where we truly can feed and clothe everybody. But we don't. Why? 

There are very many clever mathematical arguments that purport to explain this situation. In the main, they are to do with prices, wages, inflation, interest, and so forth - concepts far removed from our remote ancestors. Well, perhaps I am too thick to understand them. I'm so stupid, that when I see a pile of clothes and food, and a pile of naked hungry humans, the only maths I am capable of is simple addition. 

But wait! Clearly I've simply misunderstood modern economics, even Marx would have scoffed at such simplicity. If you simply give people things - effectively, make the price of goods equal to zero, then all madness follows. Demand for free goods is effectively infinite, whereas the productive capabilities of societies are finite. The result ought to be obvious even to someone as bad at maths as me.

However, what if the model of a consumer we are using is far simpler than a real human being - the evidence for this is apparent in every family. It is easy to explain this to someone ignorant of economics, harder to explain it to an economics undergrad, impossible to explain it to an economics post-grad.

In later posts, I'll put some more flesh on the above.

All that matters for now is the simple recognition that what 'scarcity' refers to in say, the Old Stone Age, is not what it refers to in, say, the modern UK.

The point is: who is an economy for? Is it for people who need and desire stuff? Is it for the people who produce the things others want and need? Is it for those who create wealth and jobs? Of course, it is 'for' all of these people. But who gets what and why? Who decides? The 'market'? The market consists in the above people. 

The market emerges from the economic activity of individuals like an image emerges from the strokes of a paint brush or, better, like the shape of a termite mound emerges from the activities of the termites.

We are not eusocial insects, but we can and do act like them. We are not predatory mammals but we can and do act like them. And there are things we do for which there few or no parallels with other species, such as species conservation. When I look at humans conserving species, I see a glimpse of something extraordinary - something that belies the thrust of John Gray's philosophy. Humans can be exceptional. There are no excuses for being cruel, lazy, blind, limited, ignorant - we can and do improve all over the place. There are many reasons why we are not better. Let me bang on about just one.

No one really knows what it was like to live in those stone age societies that lasted long enough to leave enough evidence for us to know something about them. We can, however, conjecture. David Deutsch (not an archaeologist or anthropologist, mind) conjectures that all long-lived stone age societies had a major factor in common: the main criterion for social success lay in keeping things the same. That is, winners of social competition were those who could conform the best. If that is at all right, for the longest period of anatomically modern human history, the criterion for success was conformity to past rules. Modern society, by contrast, innovates, busts and booms, over very short time scales. Archaeologists in a thousand years time will probably be in much the same situation as us when it comes to distinguishing  between different epochs of stone age technology - flint napping didn't change all that much, for example. When they dig up our goods, however, they will be able to date an early 90s Amstrad from a late 00s Apple with relative ease. We change fast these days, we make mistakes but we can learn from them without dying.

Better to let the theory die than the man.

Stone age people hit on winning formulas, but found it hard to adapt to new circumstances, Easter Island is probably a case that demonstrates this. Perhaps there are lessons here for climate change, etc.

The point I'm rambling towards is that we are still the same bodies as those stone age ancestors of ours. Our cultures, too, have inherited, in a not-straightforwardly-Darwinian sense, aspects of those ancients cultures too, I conjecture. The difference is, we live in very different circumstances, but our moral intuitions might not have 'caught up'. Certainly, there are clever people who recognise this - and know how to exploit it. Fear of free riders was an important moral precept in hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies, and also easy to vet. In our vast, complex and interdependent economies, such intuitions are difficult to apply. But the emotional reasoning that accompanies such intuitions has not gone away, and those apologists for the super rich exploit such simplistic reasoning to distract attention away from those who rob us in a way much more complicated than old tribal intuitions can follow. The foolers fool us by tapping into our most ancient parts.

We trust those old evolved instincts because they pertain to the most vital part of us - reproduction, survival, social acceptance.

In real life we don't act like unthinking replicators, or as simple models of rational agents aggregating utility, or anything of the sort. That is not to dismiss two hundred years of excellent scholarship. It is a call to do better, and not to rely solely on such methodologies in making up our minds about what to value. Because life all comes down to value.

Economists can't measure value simpliciter. They must use more indirect means. They can't even really measure 'happiness', pace some interesting developments (more work needs to be done here). They can measure price, however. So that's our stand in. That's where our formal reasoning begins, it's foundation. On the other hand, philosophy departments reason about morality and ethics, sometimes even a pure analysis of value. The two strands of thought are divergent. This situation fits in nicely with what the super-rich want. This isn't a conspiracy, it is actually what makes the most sense given our society. However, in real life, we value over both domains, whether buying commodities like charity, setting up welfare states, or what have you. As mathematical sophistication grows, as economists begin to 'price' things like rainforests, it ought to become clearer that evaluation can quantify over various domains, but quantity is itself the result of prior evaluation, over the means at our disposal. If we value people being fed and clothed more than worshiping celebrities, for example, we should pay carers more than musicians.

All arguments to the contrary, no matter their internal consistency, have the consequence we have a society like ours - where the mountain of goods doesn't go to those who need it most but to those who have gathered enough of symbolic value (money) to afford it.

When faced with the mountain of orthodox economic reasoning, with the reality of the industrial complex, with armies, police, states, transnational corporations, mighty leaders, authority of every stripe, it is easy to quail. It is easy to in fact blame those who are powerless and join in with the tremendous 'flow of things' - the flow of cruelty downwards and the flow of benefits upwards. Ask yourself this: does this benefit me? I am asking you to simply be selfish - why be altruistic towards the rich? Why refrain from being altruistic to your brothers and sisters? Look around you, recognise those who are really in a position similar to you. Don't shy away. Because the mighty are desperate, they have maddened you with divisive lies for a century. They don't want you to simply recognise what is your interest.

Anyway, I'm spent. Hopefully further posts will be more coherent!