(My) ideal society
August 2, 2009
Thoughts on Life
This essay will be in beta version, longer than any Google product. Some assumptions
I am an individual.
I care about my life and happiness
There are other entities around. To different degrees, animals, persons, robots (future) also have feelings and personal ambitions. I interact with them. They will influence my level of well-being.
Happiness
The really wise people realized that happiness comes from the inside and that it should be our natural state. Reality in itself is neutral: nothing is good or bad! If you are feeling bad is just because you are having negative thoughts about what’s happening.
If you can control your mind whenever you start putting “good or bad” labels on what’s happening, then you’re on the good track!
Bad news: this is pretty hard to achieve!
Good news: like any other skill, you can practice and become better at it! Try to become more aware of your thoughts and feelings whenever you start feeling discomfort about life. Try to live more in the present moment, the only time that exists! Still, times will come when reality seems to suck! Well, good news again: you can still take the usual approach and try to change the reality around you a bit! That’s also okay!
My rule of thumb is:
Change my life so that I like it at least 80% of the time.
Control my mind at least 80% of the times it goes wrong.
Claim: the resulting 4% of despair can be handled without big existential crisis! ;)
Okay, so now about changing life…
The Big Life Loop
Define your interests and goals in life
Look for solutions to achieve these
Go ahead and do it!
According to what happens:
IF (enjoying life big time) GOTO 3) and keep on doing it
IF (having fun but sometimes doesn’t work) GOTO 2) and look for better solutions
IF(life SUCKS) GOTO 1) and change your life!
Restricting yourself to Win-Win Solutions
The fast-track to achieve your goals may cause harm to others (getting rich by robbing a bank, exploiting child labor or emitting pollutions to a river). I believe this can always be avoided.
If it seems impossible, it’s probably because you didn’t invest enough time looking for solutions. I’m not sure about people suffering from conditions like extreme poverty, disease or lack of freedom, however there are many positive examples coming even from those. In the meanwhile, the clever strategy for the fortunate ones, is to help the unfortunate to expand their choices. Quoting Dalai Lama, “the intelligent way to be selfish is to work for the welfare of the others”.
The Game Theory perspective
For those of you who like a bit of computer-science in the picture, here it goes. We are living in a very complex multi-agent, real-time, dynamic environment. Agents have individual interests that they try to maximize. Depending on the strategies they follow, the system will change and agents will be rewarded something according to how much the current state matches their goals.
What are the individual strategies that work, if followed by everyone? Clearly the strategy “I win, you lose” is not sustainable. You are entering a zero-sum game there! Nothing is being produced. If this was the predominant attitude of the agents, no wealth would be created and sooner or later everybody is losing, losing big time! On the other hand, “win-win” strategies clearly lead the system progressively to better states in which individuals have more reward (although perhaps at slower rates).
Why are we not there yet, then? Because it demands huge amounts of social organization!
Mechanism Design is a field of Game Theory that tries to study the effects of choosing the rules of the game. As a society, we should always design rules, that even if all players are being selfish, while respecting the rules, the outcome would be an improvement in the global well-being.
Socialism, market-economy and social-democracies
Human history is rich in different approaches of organizing the economy. By economy I mean: allocation of resources. Wealth is created by producing more goods or services. This is done by people working, with the help of technology. How do we chose how to allocate the available resources (people, tools, energy, etc.)?
Socialism defends a centralized decision on how to allocate available resources. The state decides who does what and how. Wealth is distributed equally among people (Note: I’m talking about theory here. Don’t send me an email mentioning the Soviet Union!).
Market-economy follows a decentralized approach. Production (offer) is a consequence of consumption (demand). Wealth is given to the owners of the means of production and to the producers (by means of a salary, also established by market rules).
Which one works better?
In terms of productivity: market economy. How could a central committee decide to create a Google?! Who needs a search engine?! Only specialists in their own fields, with will to take risks, are able to decide if an idea is worth pursuing or not.
In terms of wealth distribution: socialism. Unless it’s a corrupt socialist society (like pretty much everything we have seen so far), wealth will be distributed more evenly and everyone has about the same life standard.
Can we get the best of both worlds? We want a lot for everyone!!
Well, social democracies have been trying to do this. Northern European countries are perhaps the best example. Does it work? By almost every standard, yes! What’s the idea behind it? Basically you let a market economy work freely, but when things go wrong the state comes to the rescue. If you get fired, the state will pay you part of your salary, this way you will continue to consume and others can continue producing. Your kids can go to school for free so that they have good opportunities, and if you need medical assistance this is also provided freely by the state.
Perfect! So what’s missing?
In my opinion not much. We just have to continue improving in matters such as: sustainability, transparency in the markets, direct democracy and even more respect for the rights of minorities. We also have urgently to finish with the “casino-economy” of speculation in financial markets, with no correspondence to real wealth production. But that’s coming. World leaders are also worried about that.
(My) ideal society
Each individual is respected as such and has the freedom and the means to pursue its own interests without having to harm the others.
Don’t know how it looks like. It’s a pretty simple (non-constructive) definition, however. I’m sure mathematicians like it.
The risks
Most of the richer countries in the world seem to have found formulas that work pretty well (I’m excluding the US here, because they can’t stop going into war). They are not perfect, they have a lot of problems, but they are dynamic and they are always looking for the best directions to folow.
What about the poorer countries? Are they on the good track? It seems that this is also the case in general. Everybody knows that China, Russia, Brasil and India are the big emerging countries. They are becoming richer, life-expectancy is increasing, number of children per couple is decreasing, education is improving. At the scale of human-kind history, these countries are as fast as rockets!
(to be continued…)
Yes, “to be continued…”, what’s the surprise? Never saw that on TV? :P