Spurred

"... dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tools for truth have been sharpened."

- Robert Trivers, Folly of Fools

This resonates quite deeply with my belief that all the good things come only after bad ones. Structure arises after chaos. Emotions of love arise to combat partner desertion. Feelings of loyalty develop to prevent group disunity. I'd intended to write on this for a year on already but never really got down to it. Reading Trivers's latest book gives me much needed motivation to get stuck back in it.


In another part of his introduction, he writes:

Deception within species is expected in almost all relationships, and deception possesses special powers. It always takes the lead in life, while detection of deception plays catch up. As has been said regarding rumors, the lie is halfway around the world before the truth puts its boots on. When a new deception shows up in nature, it starts rare in a world that often lacks a proper defense. As it increases in frequency, it selects for such defenses in the victim, so that eventually its spread will be halted by the appearance and spread of countermoves, but new defenses can always be bypassed and new tricks invented.

Truth—or, at least, truth detection—has been pushed back steadily over time by the propagation of deception. It always amazes me to hear some economists say that the costs of deceptive excesses in our economy (including white-collar crime) will naturally be checked by market forces. Why should the human species be immune to the general rule that where natural selection for deception is strong, deception can be selected that extracts a substantial net cost (in survival and reproduction) every generation? Certainly there is no collective force against this deception, only the relatively slow generation and evolution of counterstrategies. These lines were written in 2006, two years before the financial collapse that resulted from such practices and beliefs. I know nothing about economics and—from evolutionary logic—could not have predicted a thing about the collapse of 2008, but I have disagreed for thirty years with an alleged science called economics that has resolutely failed to ground itself in underlying knowledge, at a cost to all of us.

While I might at times be slightly more sympathetic to the value of economics as a prescriptive tool, I think Trivers couldn't have put it better. There is no underlying theoretical basis for its science either than the outdated assumption that man is rational (assumed to be equally, and on the basis of prices), and I absolutely do not believe that market forces actually help resolve economic crises. The turn to market forces to solve economic problems is an absolute cop-out.

Rational Vices, Good Ol' Business Logic And Power

I've just finished lapping up Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, an exploration of the systematic irrational behaviour of human beings.

The book is implicitly anti-corporate establishment, as it dishes out nugget after nugget of problems pertaining to the economic institutions of our global world. But perhaps it is not so implicit after all, because it attacks the most fundamental premise and stronghold of economics - that humans are completely rational beings. Yes, indeed humans are rational and thinking creatures, but dogmatic hardliner economists not only fail to account for the systematic irrationalities of humans (such as fear, anger, perceptual biases, etc, which time and again falsify economic theory) but, even worse, often deliberately omit these irrationalities to preserve the elegance of the theory (arbitrage, anyone?).

This completely flies in the face of science and knowledge, because while it is perfectly fine to encounter scenarios that oppose the logic of established theories, those inconsistencies must be addressed and put to good use to further refine what we already know. What's worse is that many of our global economic and financial institutions are designed around such narrow economic principles, and whole societies are expected to fit into those institutions. It comes as no surprise that we have economic failures, because the rationality of classical economics and humans are, to put it straightforwardly, incompatible at some important parts.

Dan Ariely gives some interesting case studies to support his argument. For instance, studies on salaries and bonuses show that huge paychecks do not guarantee better performance. So, on what grounds are bankers justifying their huge salaries? The commonplace argument is that high salaries are needed to ensure that the best men are retained for the job (or else they will move elsewhere), but this is precisely the standard free market logic that Dan Ariely strives to assert is highly flawed. So when the US$700 billion bailout package went straight back into the pockets of the people running and messing up the financial institutions, it is obviously offensive to millions of taxpayers, but what can they do against an economic logic of salary-performance that is virtually accepted as a natural law? (For more interesting findings, I strongly suggest reading the book.)

Reading The Corporation by Joel Bakan does little to placate any already-existing (and growing) sentiments I have about the state of our financially globalized world now. The corporation began in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in America and Britain as corporate entities ran by stockbrokers who sought to make money via speculation. Most of these corporate entities failed, leading to loss of livelihoods, and their respective governments were quick to persecute these stockbrokers. However, after Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine and unwittingly kickstarted the industrial revolution (yes, Joel Bakan brilliantly uses the term 'unwittingly'), corporations were revived because they were the only organized entities that could generate the huge amounts of capital needed to drive industrialization and production.

In the span of 300 years, the power balance has switched in favour of the corporation today. What started out as a damned organization that could be shut down at the whisk of a commissioner's pen, corporations today pervade every aspect of our lives and significantly control society and politics.

I digress, but in some ways I see this as similar to how sociologists trace the rise of male dominance and female oppression - capital accumulation. Because there are sociological and biological conditions under which men end up driven to accrue resources (extrinsic value) in exchange for the intrinsic value of women (in a most basic sense, reproductive capability), women in general rely on the resources that men provide and, in most patriarchal societies, become structurally dependent on men's resources.

Joel Bakan's argument sounds quite similar in that the world today hugely depends on the immense capital that can be accrued by corporations, and we are as reliant on the provisions of corporations as corporations are pervasive. Joel Bakan's angst comes from how little check and balance there is against the power of a organizational entity that is fundamentally not concerned with the welfare of society as much as it is concerned with profits.

I will eventually hope to end up in academia and presumably become a psychology researcher given my interest in the behaviour and psychology of the individual (and belief that understanding the individual will provide much insight into the issues of our world). However, my interest in philosophical, moral and social aspects also suggests otherwise; that I can't be a psychologist purely. The tendency for psychological academia to think of moral constructs as beyond the scope of psychology cannot be satisfactory to my curiosities. It is a dream that I can one day do some work that crosses the disciplines of psychology, sociology, politics, philosophy and anthropology.

Also, all the reading I'm doing, and my interests and drives, clearly makes me a heretic in SMU. Thank goodness I'll be ending my undergraduate term (and irrelevant university core modules that have only served to mess up my GPA, under which my academic capability will be cruelly judged boohoo) in a few more months.

The Conflicted Nature Of Rural Development

Six weeks of Political Science Study Mission (PSSM) research, articles, readings and analyses has taken me through the dynasties of China to the founding struggles of modern China to today's contemporary China, which is grappling with being both the country with the fastest economic growth of the world and the country with its rural areas housing some of the world's most impoverished populations.

With regards to poverty and underdevelopment, what has consistently appeared is the trade off between economic development and dedicated social welfare, which I think corroborates at least somewhat with my opinions about charity and poverty.

If one dedicates government budget to public spending, such as health and education, there is a social safety net where minimum levels of welfare are met. However, it rarely stops here, because this is seen as stagnation in the eyes of a country that wants to press forward economically. Welfare eventually has to switch hands from public to private, and before long decentralization, where government transfers the reins of hospitals and schools to the market, leads to social welfare institutions competing on the market for their own resources and capital in order to stay afloat.

In a nutshell, when welfare becomes a privatised issue, the costs are always transfered to the consumers (in accordance with economic math). This is because non-private ventures are at odds with profit-driven aims, which are fundamental to efficient economics of firms in the private sector. Before long, even the smallest social inequalities of the poor in these rural villages are magnified, as the poorest of the lot benefit the least from market reform and economic development because they are too poor to participate.

What has always happened is that those hospitals that once guaranteed health care services become too expensive or inaccessible to the poorest (ironically the ones who need the services the most) whenever those hospitals are forced to fend for themselves on the market.

And I think China is worth giving the benefit of the doubt when it comes to whether or not the government is honest about its efforts to take care of the poor. If we look at, perhaps, Sub-saharan Africa, one can rightfully accuse corrupt governments of conceited efforts towards poverty reduction. But because China's policies are quite possibly an honest attempt at dealing with the issues of its rural poor, the intentions of the government does not confound with this issue of the trade off between economic development and social welfare dedication.

Once again, it appears that any meaningful attempt at targeting poverty should leave the market - the corporations, the economy, the private bank loans - out of the picture. Based on the historical evidence, public/social/welfare doesn't mix well with private endeavours (which I would believe is why even private firms that announce their wish to be socially responsible have to engage in an activity as perverse and convoluted as Corporate Social Responsibility, which still has profits as the bottom-line).

On Charity And Poverty

It's funny what seeing one homeless man sleeping at a void deck can do to me on the way home. I'm going to draw in lots of possible correlations on this one, so bear with me.

Poverty grows as social inequality increases. I think a great deal of why poverty exists is because the people it may concern - the upper and middle class ones who have the capacity to do something about poverty - are in fact apathetic, unaware or tolerant of poverty, especially if it can be visually avoided or is perceived to be 'too distant for one to make an impact by helping'.

GDP rarely decreases (poor regions tend to have stagnant GDPs as opposed to declining ones). Globalization and modernization is to a large extent facilitated by economic growth. Economic growth is borne out of liberalization along with all its other social collaterals - greater individualism, increased profiteering, decreased social interaction, perhaps greater alienation between persons. Technology makes us communicate far more over cyberspace than among persons, and transactions are increasingly made through machines, eliminating the need for cashiers to serve patrons. The lonely crowd phenomenon appears quite real to me, as population size grows but traditional and genuine social interaction - heartfelt conversations over coffee - becomes obsolete.

There's no surprise then if sympathy for the disadvantaged and poor is on the decline. It is precisely what economic growth, development and progress needs - an upper class exploitation of the poor, so that we can have more capital to fund market innovations. Social inequality leads to a middle class - the fence-sitting culprits who pragmatically go with the flow and often do not make a principled stand. All one needs to do is to buy the vote of the middle class, and you get political power. Once more, no surprises on whose side - the rich or the poor - the middle class is going to be on. This is also evident when government policy is scrutinized. Some policies, even in 'humane' developed societies, are clearly depriving the poor of welfare often in the pursuit of other nationalistic (and often economic) goals. But after the shock factor of the atrocious policy wears off, the resultant lack of social revolt against these policies pretty much demonstrates that most of society does not want change in favour of the poor enough to do much about it.

But that is not to say that social inequality is more serious now or that there has never been such a terribly blind eye turned towards destitution of the poor in the course of history. I think that we are innately geared towards such apathy as long as we are not the lot getting all the hard luck, and neither am I 'blaming' this on our 'nature'. If this is our nature then to some extent it is instinctive - maybe comparable to when an animal ignores a dying member of its species and moves along. I would highly believe that our 'uncaring' nature towards the poor is a significant causal factor for our species to have the capacity for social hierarchy, political systems and resultant class differences and inequalities.

But then again, it is vital that we - the vast majority that is well off enough - do not determine 'ought' from 'is'. The possibility that it is in our nature does not justify the slippery slope that poverty is normal (and therefore acceptable). Social hierarchies and political systems may have resulted from our lack of concern for the disadvantaged, but it definitely does not follow that an uncaring nature existed for the purpose of creating social hierarchies.

What then to make of charity and poverty? My guess is as good as anybody's. But if I were to think of an answer I'd pick from a potential lot, I would consider two possible and straightforward solutions.

One: Make people care. This is somewhat crazy I suppose because history has shown that going against the grain of human nature has always resulted in externalities whose costs have exceeded that of the benefits gained from going against human nature. One instance is communism where the self-interested need of the individual is violated; it just doesn't work and ends in disaster. But at this juncture, knowing that a major stumbling block towards poverty reduction is that people just do not care enough especially when the atrocity is invisible or too distant, it appears possible to encourage greater sympathy because we know what to target. Consider education avenues where moral values of human rights and compassion can be inculcated, make the plight of the poor more salient and meaningful, and (this last point appears necessary to me) keep the 'corporation' out of this. Yeah, perhaps we'll need their funding and commitment, but if any corporation is willing to help, do it without your company logo in sight. This is wishful thinking, but it would make sense not to commit the 'Corporate America' errors of the past, where branding and marketing led to the commercialization of once-sacred emotions and values. Profit-driven money simply cheapens any venture to me, and this is ingrained in the psychology of our species: when an avid reader is paid to read books, he/she actually loses the interest to read in the absence of monetary rewards.

Two: The prevalent form of aid we tend to see in the world today. Create avenues of charity and gear them towards the capacities of 'uncaring' individuals, such that the poor get help even if the helpers do not mean it. One instance is compulsory community service programmes in colleges, veiled as 'good to have's for resume-building. I don't particularly like this option for its obvious weakness of not attacking the root of the issue and its blatant use of poverty reduction as a means to some other self-serving end, but it avoids the 'clash with human nature' problem. As the scientific and historical wisdom goes, short of regressing back to a completely egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, we will always face the issue of poverty.

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Honestly though, as a fuddy-duddy (and perhaps preachy to some) deontological digression from my clinically neutral take on the issue, I believe option one, and perhaps its 'people SHOULD care' variant, is the only option worth bothering to take if one wishes to meaningfully embark on the eradication of poverty.

The Dubai Scare Makes The Market Look Stupid

The latest market plunge caused by investors dumping shares after Dubai's shock request to suspend loan repayments makes me believe more so now than ever before that the capitalist market system is really incompatible with realistic human nature. In theory, it's supposed to work because humans are expected to behave in a rational, self-interested manner which, to some extent, is true. But in a system where the sum total actions of all individuals acting in a rational manner in the system is supposed to result in an overall good, it is extremely susceptible to nonsense outcomes where tremendous losses are experienced and unnecessary unhappiness is created when everyone acts irrationally also due to human nature, such as when everyone panics, acts defensively (so that the prisoner's dilemma situation becomes an all-lose scenario) or behaves unintelligently due to a lack of complete information with which to make rational decisions.

I'm a little more lenient on the last point, as the reason for incomplete information is often due to the lack of liberal freedom, and illiberal conditions can only be created because politics undermines the 'efficiency' of the market (created by either the presence of monopolies or redistributive governments). Political influence thus results in withheld information and/or individual liberty constrained by unnatural economic flows. But otherwise, capitalism and free markets simply create room for the avalanches caused by snowflakes who don't see themselves as responsible.

I guess where one really stands on this depends on what one deems as the real direction of human nature. But while I believe it is true that humans are self-interested, each individual's psychological reactions to situations, particularly ambiguous ones that are notoriously created by the uncertainty of the market, makes each supposedly 'rational' self-interested action irrational instead. In other words, we do not meet the human condition that capitalism expects for its free market mechanism to work. I suppose this begs the question of what social system really works then, since communism has proven to be the opposite end of the spectrum and has been a great fiasco as well. Socialism? Haha. We're digressing already.

Politics > Economics? Tough Call In Our Revenue-Driven World

SMU has recently raised its parking fees to tackle over-demand. I've always joked about the economic principle of supply and demand never really happening in reality when I point at crowded stalls with crazy queues around school and quip that they should raise prices to counter the problem. But such an action ever only benefits, at the end of the day, the 'market' which is largely an abstraction that certain people attempt to divorce from reality.

So I somewhat mock-applauded the decision because it was bold, it was sudden, it was - I believe - ignorant and it was, yet in a completely objective sense, practical. Let the price mechanism rebalance the situation. Economics textbook stuff. Want a parking lot? Pay a higher price. The price doesn't match your utility? Don't park! Problem should be solved and it's win-win - the school makes more revenue if the numbers don't dwindle, the ones who can pay can now have the luxury of less congestion.

But as expected, the market HARDLY ever works out. What ensued after that is typical of the everyday struggle between politics and economics. After the person in charge sent out the email notifying the school of the parking fee raise, student activism (of sorts) kicked in. People aren't normally happy that they can't have their pie and eat it too, so a few voices are raised and soon people are going to start petitioning or pulling the Student Association into this. Cookie points for our dear representative body soon, yay. To the credit of the student body, the carpark service hasn't exactly been up to par to begin with.

Of course, the most positive outcome to this would probably be that the demands cause innovation to occur and the school somehow builds a bigger and more efficient parking lot such that prices still remain low and demand can remain high. But such structural changes seldom take place because of a whole host of 'inefficient' reasons - the school is lazy, the school can get away with it, people can't deal with the construction, nobody wants to bother because students have a lifespan of about 4 years (duh) which is too little to care, etc. If politics triumphs, then the school will be forced to keep the prices low again and congestion will remain. But I suppose it's alright if people don't mind struggling for a parking lot if it means getting one that is cheaper, but at the expense of parking lot security. The utility comparison becomes: ($2.60/hr + parking lot insecurity) > ($3.00/hr + parking lot security), which equates to 40 cents per hour being waaaay too expensive for a higher assurance of parking lot spaces. There's no improvement, but it's okay as long as I don't ostensibly pay more. People can be funny that way.

We see this played out in Government, Union and Corporation battles across the globe regularly. Inflation forces prices to rise, workers protest against wage cuts, the market mechanism gets jammed, and we get workers who are perceived by economists as people who spend half their time believing in the power of revolt and the other half pretending to work. Wages remain high, costs stay high, and we continue pondering why the prices just don't stop rising. Hmm.

Only time will tell what will happen with regards to the SMU carpark saga. One has a hunch though that sometimes it is really money that garners political power in Singapore and the cream in$titution of the lot at $MU.


Note: My dispassionate perspective on the issue doesn't mean I do not feel the ball-squeeze for carpark users who have obviously been bearing the brunt of what is clearly rotten carpark service for quite some time, and then now this. This write-up is merely a lamentation about the vicissitudes of daily strife we wish we could come to embrace as normal, whichever side you're on.

Abused Medicine

It is remarkable to me how economists can continue to push on and not be disillusioned about the disconnect between their work and reality. I'm not saying that what economists do are naive, useless or unrealistic. In fact, I think economics should represent the ideal state of affairs of transactions and give-and-take. But there are many things in reality that will always distort economics and affect the elasticity of the supply-demand of some resources.

Off-handedly I can think of the following very basic supply-demand distortions:

Minimum wages/employment
When an industry experiences lessened demand for its good or an oversupply in production, a firm should do something to reduce cost in order to stay afloat, and a part of this is linked to employment conditions. A free market dictates that wages are fluid in order for it to function well and should decrease when costs rise. But the reality is that labour often organises itself to resist such wage-decline and employment changes.

Lack of labour fluidity
In a nutshell, the free market states that the system always remains in equilibrium because of resource mobility. In the arena of labour, when one industry declines, another has to rise and this should pose no problems as labour can relocate itself to fill up the demand in those new industries. But this hardly happens easily. When a worker faces the prospect of leaving his/her current job for another, he/she has to learn new skills and sometimes give up a whole way of life. The global free market also largely overlooks the fact that traveling across borders, implicitly asserted as necessary, poses a great deal of inertia.

Marketing
Another supply-demand curve distortion is marketing. It basically seeks to exploit consumer psychology to somehow keep demand high despite price increases. Price should be an indicator to the consumer of his/her utility for the good, and by right if the good doesn't change, a price increase should reduce consumer demand for it. But because of marketing, the price mechanism is affected and consumers continue purchasing goods despite price increases.

These things often create distortions that have to be compensated somewhere else in the market, but the repercussions aren't often traded off one-to-one, also because the consequences are unforeseen.


There are more I can think of if I decide to stretch my imagination, but the idea of economics being largely idealistic and somewhat utopian remains given how it can be distorted. I'm still for the idea that its role as an objective, neutral and rational prescription for policy or other matters is great, but in the hands of self-interested people with the know-how for exploitation and utility maximization (which just sounds downright political to me) this doesn't quite make sense.

But that's why sometimes I still have my reservations for blaming free markets alone for the plight of the third world, the lower class and the poor - it is really the people who want to run the free market in a political manner that results in the class inequalities of today. Sweatshops wouldn't happen if corrupted governments and their poor regulations can be exploited to keep labour oppressed (recall institutional strength - good legal frameworks - as an importance precursor for free markets), and fast food companies wouldn't be on such a roll if policy wasn't so strongly dependent on commercial interests (recall the separation of the state and economics as cardinally ideal). Seriously, what kind of justification can one conjure up to lobby against improved safety guidelines for workers?

That's why it looks kind of like abused medicine to me; something created in order to cure but instead misused as a drug.

The Giant Corporation: The New Government?

It just suddenly struck me that if the evolution of big corporations (like, REALLY big - think ConAgra, DuPont and Mitsubishi, who have a stake in almost everything from broilers, cattle, crops, flour, automobiles, chemicals, tobacco to shipping) and the reality of their monopoly status is anything to go by, I think we are truly seeing a new form of governance emerging. Actually, if the traditional definition of a state is slightly tweaked, giant corporations won't merely be new forms of governance; they WILL be the new governments.

The Persistence of Realism

Realist literature emphasizing the unexpired role of the state will always draw our attention back to how different states, all essentially representations of governance and power, have robustly existed to this present day. In the process, their intellectual underpinnings have been battered by inquiry and skepticism in the light of capitalism and globalisation, but they have pulled through with little scratches. States still exert their authority on people in our modern day and age (perhaps even more so than ever) and in a remarkable way their physical evolution appears ever so insignificant, despite some changes that people who are only scratching at the surface exclaim about.

For example, some will assert that states have less physical control over people now that violence has lost its trendiness. Let's not consider third world countries for obvious reasons, but even in developed states, their control over populations is still as gripping as ever through non-physical means, such as policy driven by economics - your livelihood is now in the hands of bureaucrats who have ties and interests in certain industries. This is somewhat indirect control, but still as powerful as ever. Still, others may look at the global world today and point out that many global players now have the power to influence a powerful country like the US because of interconnectedness through trade and globalisation. But, do recall that it is precisely a system like this that the US wants and every country that is playing the global trade game today often had no choice but to join in, in the process having their traditions and cultures infiltrated by Americanisation (Ikenberry, 2002). This once again points to the realist nature of state self-interest.

The evolution process of states is remarkably sly and efficient. States waged war a few centuries ago to get power and expand territories because physical power through technological weaponry was the key. Monarchies rose as a result and colonialism became popular as undeveloped countries could be exploited for their resources. Later, the laws established by the international community after World War II outlawed violence and discrimination while upholding human rights and rule of law (paving the way for the spread of democracy while demolishing monarchies, colonialists, autocracies and dictatorships). States didn't sit still on that; to survive they embraced the new ideal - capitalism - and created new routes for conquest by seemingly focusing on economics rather than politics, while at the same time blocking off the surveillance of human rights by using the rule of law as a disguise for legitimacy. Legitimacy creates the moral support for a state to engage in its political dealings - The US was now free to impose itself on undemocratic countries as they were perceived as evil.

It is like how we think that a company that plants its own trees in order to produce paper is being environmentally considerate and therefore not 'bad', when in fact the mass production of the same types of trees in one plot of land (monoculture) is extremely detrimental to the ecosystem and we let it go unchallenged.

And even then, to think of states as now focusing on economics rather than politics seems to fall short of the defining nature of politics and power. I think it is actually more correct to say that economics is now the new form of politics that governments have come to employ in order to further their own interests.

The Growth of the Political Corporation

State and liberty are directly opposed, so they say. Capitalists, liberal economists and right-wing intellectuals will assert the undermining of the state when the free market prevails. When the history of agriculture and cattle farming is observed, such production has evolved from one where the unit of production is the self-reliant family - each family produced its own food from seed to plate with little surplus and with little purchase of capital - to one that consisted of many firms breaking up the production process and a lot of specialisation between a century to half a century ago (which would be argued to be a good example of a properly working free market) to one that is now shaped like an hourglass in our contemporary society - thousands of farmers at the top (production) and millions of consumers at the bottom, with only about four behemoth corporations in the middle controlling the entire process. The power relations are incredibly skewed in favour of these big corporations - one can pretend to imagine how competitive such a market can be. They have plenty of leverage in their hands.

These corporations got to where they are through mergers and acquisitions, in the process carrying out horizontal and vertical integration. It is hard to topple these big corporations because they have resources to waste in order to distort the market in their favour (and, as an afterthought, physical damage to them is not an option since war has been deemed illegal and being cut off from the goods they supply you might kill you). Their place in society has been cemented by their involvement with populations of people through the provision of services. In effect, they have so many dealings in a complex, inter-related web of production such that they have profoundly infiltrated the lives of people and have become indispensable, and interestingly this is much like states do.

This is where it begins to hit me that there is little that distinguishes a giant, integrated and monopolistic corporation from a state - both are revenue-collecting, bureaucratic, conquest-driven, coercive and politically powerful forms of governing/dominating a population. The political power of monopolies and governments require little elaboration. With political power, monopolies and governments have the capacity to reduce the liberties of people through coercion. Monopolistic corporations seek to gain ground and get bigger, as much as governments have been doing through imperialism, colonialism and war in the past. Both giant corporations and governments are characteristically administrative, impersonal and bureaucratic. Most importantly, corporations and governments both seek revenue from the people they 'serve', one through the sale of products and the other through taxation. It is this exchange of services for money that creates a social contract between the service-provider and the people, and in effect a form of state accountability and legitimacy is established. Conquest and taxation has historically been the precedent for states to gain basic legitimacy for existence in the eyes of their own citizens (Tilly, 1975).

At this moment, such a link between a corporation and governance may still seem unclear, but given the free rein that big corporations are increasingly bestowed with now (much of which is, admittedly, earned), there seems little to stop these corporations from casting their nets further and even taking over government functions once the time is right. Already, Big-Four-ish corporations are attempting to control more than just what they initially started out to do. Having more hands in different sectors of the market serves to facilitate the corporation's ability to control and establish power. As Hefferman (1998) argues, "economic power, not efficiency, predicts survival", directly refuting the assertion that it is efficiency which enables a firm to stay afloat in the competitive market. Even if this hypothesis is true though, I wouldn't expect it to happen any time soon - such a new world order would require a thorough remoulding of people's understanding of government before it can be accepted as politics. But we have seen it happen before when people replaced their chiefs with emperors, their emperors with dictators, their dictators with autocrats, and their autocrats with diplomats. Every one of these leaders have been politicians. The new guy might just be the corporate rat - and 'rat' might even be old.

Implications

Have we then created the robot that actually destroys its master when we allow corporations to assume political power? The objective and rational free market may breed a new form of statism if corporations rise to the level of government. Or is this merely another evolutionary path for states to prevail, as we have seen through the ages the rise of monarchies, autocracies, democracies and now corporations depending on what is fashionable (and provides access to political power) at that moment in time?

The important takeaway for me at least is that the corporation could very well completely replace the government one day, and that would be normal. Some might even hail it as 'progress'. It's not the Microsofts and McDonalds'es we're looking at, but rather the ones who can creep right into the very fabric of society such that everything you wear, eat and do has something to do with them. That's what makes corporations like Cargill and ConAgra scary - they're obscure and almost unheard of, but they mastermind the production of many of the things we purchase, from where the crops and cattle are grown to the shipment, transport and logistics, right down to the smallest chemical additives and ingredients in our food. Maybe in the future, the CEO of Singapore Dominance Pte. Ltd. could really be our prime minister, or the head of some Big-4 company could be the hegemonic president of the world. It would probably be some dude who broke down trade walls across the globe and has his fingers in many pies. In that hypothetical future, we would allow some corporate person to make policy decisions for us - who better than a shrewd business man in an economic world huh? It's just the emperor wearing new clothes.

Still, there is something universal (and thus intellectually beautiful) about how it unfolds. At the very heart of it, human nature drives each outcome. States are a spectre of the collective will of power-hungry people.



Bibliography

Hefferman, W. D. (1998). Agriculture and monopoly capital, Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, 50(3), 46-61.

Ikenberry, G. J. (ed.) (2002). American Unipolarity: The Sources of Persistence and Decline" in America Unrivalled: The Future of the Balance of Power, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 285-310.

Tilly, C. (1975). The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Between The Throes Of Light And Dark

I was reading about Wu Jinglian, arguably China's most famous (and possibly notorious) economist, in the International Herald Tribune today. He was an aggressive liberal (some would assert that he's a social liberal, but his views were definitely very liberal back in the 70s and 80s for China) and a straight-talking idealist, who helped steer China into economic openness which led to the explosion of her economic growth. He's so famous, in fact, that the locals have named current Chinese economics as "Market Wu".

(Sometimes, aggression knows no end, and it's no longer about the ideas but pride. Wu, at 79 years of age, is now targeted for political incarceration for not being able to keep his mouth shut.)

And then I thought, there really isn't anything wrong with being an idealist as long as one is grounded in the reality of how the world really works. There's always room for a liberal thought to linger in the hopes of achieving what it always wishes it could - cooperation, absolute gains for all, open trade, overall maximisation of utility, the growth of wealth of nations, and the subordination of the power of tyranny to the right of man and the individual.

But that dream usually turns into the nightmare of some big organisation trying or claiming to do the job demanded of these imaginary rational men, and then a movie like Battle in Seattle comes along to slap the fucking beejezus out of the daydreamer. It is a seriously good movie and wake up call for anyone who needs to know the collateral damage of global and trade openness.

This movie also provides a good perspective of what it is to stand up for something to believe in, something we will never get on our little Sunny Island.

Affirmation

Here's why economics matters. To me at least, it's not so much the pursuit of a perfect system in which the world can run its resources, because I doubt that there can ever be such a thing, but it's the fact that economics shapes reality because it concerns every layperson. It's the reality of who's getting what part of the pie and how is that part of the pie attained. Am I going to work for it? Am I going to receive it through welfare? Is it going to be taken from me? These questions are going to be answered by the form of politics that my country employs.

Economics, and what kind of economy a tribe, a kingdom or a state is going to have, is the driving force and the legitimacy behind power and politics. Politics is power, because it refers to governance and the legal use of force, and power can only be gained when one controls resources.

The history of man is peppered with battles that have been waged for the attainment of resources. Modern history has seen us shift the basis of power from a physical one to one of economic ideology. The fight between the Democrats and Republicans is essentially due to the difference in economic management - more socialist (and left-wing) or more conservative (and right wing)? The cold war was a battle between capitalism and communism. Americans are dissatisfied with Obama because of the inadequate validity of his economic agenda which have turned out to be rather expensive, ineffective and socialist, which is disappointing in today's world where we are still trying to move on from the Keynesian era of full employment as the goal. Politicians are battling it out every election day to promise better economic packages because this is what matters to the people most - how much less will you be taxed?

Politics exists because power drives the world. Power is about the ability to gain control over people. The control of people is gained through the manipulation of the economy, because people depend on resources.

That's why economics is important, because if everyone knew to some degree the impact that the economy of our state has on our lives, then we would know how to revolt, how to vote and how to decide what kind of country we want to have and live in. We would know the extent of our rights and how to differentiate between a government that is serving us well and a government that is just pulling political bull. We would know if we would rather live in a competitive society or one that redistributes wealth. We would look at the ideologies expounded by our leaders with more enlightened eyes. We would know where on earth we're going.

BSM

I've just returned from my 12-day stay in China, where I visited Xi'an, Kunming and Lijiang. I've missed drinking water straight off the tap. It's been a trip where I've learnt much more than I'd bargained for.

We toured companies and talked to people deep in the action of Xi'an's incredible economic expansion over the past decade or so. Quite a bit of life's philosophies were shared by these people spearheading the up-and-coming force that drives the growth of Xi'an.

China has attained a somewhat positive state of economy where the basis of her capitalism is in service to the people. Many enlightened enterprises understand the important roles they and their competitors play in the business economy, and believe that the goods they produce must firstly be good for their consumers, which is in contrast with the inefficient communist economy and the selfish nature of American capitalism.

The importance of 关系 was also clearly highlighted as I observed its extension to relations with not only competitors and partners, but the government. China's government structure is complicated. If I were to set up a firm in China, I would have to establish good relations with each government department before I can be cleared or directed to the next relevant department. It isn't as straightforward as the system in Singapore.

I've also found that social grace is pretty much lacking in China, and there are reasons for this. I've noticed that if I were driving on a road, it's okay someone to cut my lane (the way we would totally frown upon in Singapore) because it's mutual - later on it will be okay for me to cut someone else's. Traffic is all about give and take. Likewise, it's okay for me to stand in the way or shove someone aside for my own convenience, because someone else will scold me or remind me about it, and nobody feels bad for being reprimanded or being told what to do there. As a result, acts of social awareness and being considerate is very low, as nobody really bears the brunt of failing to think ahead of their actions.

I also suppose we are prone to judging them socially in a negative manner because of the advanced nature of their development. If someone behaved in a socially obnoxious manner in the slums of India or Africa, I wouldn't think so much of it. But in a modern civilisation like China's with so much promise, I can't help but think that there is still quite a bit lacking.

Lijiang is a beautiful town with many plains, farms and mountains that have, quite unfortunately in my opinion, been marred by an expanding and modernising economy fuelled by tourism that is disgustingly milking their culture for money. Aside from the small city area that has clubs blasting Chinese techno with girls dressed in ethnic costumes grinding each other, the villages have extremely scenic views of nature with horses and boats to ride on.

After more than a week of immersing in Chinese culture, I think my English started going down the drain. While my Chinese has definitely improved in leaps and bounds (it's still not fantastic, but this is compared to how incorrigible my Chinese has been in the past), I'm becoming more prone to thinking in terms of Chinese and the translation process in my head sometimes messes up my thought processes because of the language switching. I've even got a couple of Chinese songs irritatingly stuck in my head because of the KTV sessions where nobody sings English songs.

But I think Chinese language is very naturally poetic.

I think I've also learnt the price of self esteem and dignity. There are some pressing things I will need to think through, re-evaluate and deal with, and with urgency, because I don't know how much more of these thoughts circling my mind I can take.

Although the weather here can't compare at all to China's, I'm just glad to be back right now.




Audio Candy:
陈淑桦 - 东方之珠

Eating The Economic Pie

China has recently stated that she intends to encourage spending and increase imports from other countries. When China makes a statement like that, you'd ignore it at your own peril. If she really achieves what she intends to, it could very well signal a global economic shift, which technically might be for the better (since a major big-ass permanent exporter represents a market system glut of sorts in it's blatant one-sidedness).

If all that global visiting going on lately by China leaders and her attendance at the economic forum at Davos doesn't signify China's assertion that she intends to open up and become an active player, I don't know what is. Along with this could come a day when the world has no choice but to turn to China, because they will start calling the shots and we will have no choice but to obey.


I'm getting some dough from the GST offset package. I suppose this means I'm being manipulated within some larger financial scheme that our bigwigs are tweaking the system with, but I guess I'll feel less guilty when I watch my next movie knowing that the money is going to a bigger noble cause and will be used to stimulate the economy which will guarantee more jobs for our fellow men and probably not a pay-raise for some other inconspicuous and smart people. Hurray!




Only two things are certain in this world: Death and taxes.

Audio Candy:
Rob Pattinson - Never Think

FFS

A horde of opinionated people have sprung up giving their $.02 after Obama secured the USS789 billion stimulus package. Maybe I'm joining them too.

Before this, the Republicans were considering a US$700 billion bailout for major corporations who fucked the US economic system up.


"With 700 billion dollars, you could give everyone on the planet $100, which is more than a sizable percentage of them will make this year.

With 700 billion dollars, you could give every citizen of the United States $2000 - of course, it sort of works the other way around, doesn't it? We're the ones that will be giving the $2000 to foot the bill for this.

Instead, for 700 billion dollars, we are rewarding companies that were mismanaged. Which means, I presume, that a very small number of already-absurdly-wealthy old white guys will be made even wealthier. And I will still be left trying to make ends meet every month.

I'm sure there's a huge amount about this that I don't understand, but what I do understand is that I am being asked to pay for irresponsible management of huge companies, and I also understand that this is not capitalism. This is corporate welfare. This is a handout. And it's a bunch of wealthy people in government rewarding themselves, propping up their own portfolios, and rewarding their buddies on wall street, completely without regard for those of us who foot the bill."


In terms closer to home, it's something like this. A completely screwed up professor commits a crapload of errors over a couple of terms, and then approaches the Dean and says, "I'm really sorry about my mistakes, but I need money to make up for them. Not only that, I'd like a bonus too!" And the Dean approves the request, and gets the students to pay higher school fees.

At one time people were wondering, if the 2nd bailout got through like the first one did, whether we were wasting a crisis.

Obama's call for the stimulus package while refusing to help the major financial players is a good way to go and would potentially save many jobs. Ceasing tax cuts for the rich would begin putting a stop to corporate America's hold on state politics and public policy, which means we would finally see some proper, smart and at least logical decisions being made for once. People have accused Obama of being socialist especially when he's considered seizing errant banks and corporations that have gone bankrupt instead of giving them money 'to stay afloat' but I couldn't think them any more ignorant right now.




Audio Candy:
Stars - One More Night

Lazy Ramble

If this week is anything to go by, it would've been one of the most physically gruelling and demanding weeks I've ever had and yet strangely I don't feel a thing. Today being Sunday marks a week since the 42km run and between now and then I've played soccer 3 times and attended 2 days of Capoeira Batizado.

Most people don't fully recover from a marathon until at least slightly over a week after it; I must say I've surprised myself when I was back on the pitch on Wednesday. Perhaps it's a physical peak at the moment, so clearing my IPPT soon should be a prudent choice, not particularly because it is rather constrained by the fact that my window will end mid next month.

I've practically slimed all of today away, the climax of which would be a short badminton session with my brother who is even slimier and much a wuss which is only mildly pardonable because he's still in primary 5. After merely 10 minutes of game, he started complaining that his arm felt wobbly and that he was tired and didn't feel like playing anymore. I'll give him awhile more before I'll have to whip him into shape because this really just can't do. :\



Anyway I tried talking to him about politics and economics awhile ago, hoping to pique some interest and get his lazy mind to start rolling its wheels. I've always seen a side of economics that exists beyond its textbook idealism and unrealistic, pompous way of insisting how the world should work - very much the side that is killed by school, syllabi and excessive math - and have always been fascinated with the simple truths that undergird it. The idea that influence is determined by incentives and everything that is vital for survival is more or less a limited resource, giving rise to the supply and demand curve and just about everything else that follows.

And the fascination with this links up with my bigger interest in the way people work and how and why they behave the way they do, especially within the context of a group or social framework which often overrides individual personality traits, which is one of the reasons why I study psychology and have grown to love social psychology as a more specific subject very much. My interest in organisational behaviour then also stems from the same concept - that given adequate tools, we can tinker with the system and work with people like chess pieces and how each piece is placed produces a unique outcome.

It's almost as if being influenced by the environment and social contexts is the deterministic aspect of life with individuality and personality representing the free-will side of things, and as if God was applying his own concept of economics to the blueprint of life and the way things work. Social contexts and personality then represent 2 limited resources to be tinkered with, resulting in human behaviour.

I'm not sure if my brother quite saw it that way. :]



I'm watching Superman Returns on Channel 5 now. I've always thought the biblical sentiment behind the Superman concept is rather well symbolised. Superman Returns avoids any subtlety in recreating those connections. Jor-El, the father of Superman, tells his son, "Even though you've been raised as a human being you're not one of them. They can be a great people, Kal-El. They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all—their capacity for good—I have sent them you, my only son." The plot also includes a resurrection scene.



Holidays always present opportunity for experimenting and trying new things out. At least for me they should represent a chance to do something new. So Angie and I dabbled in paints and I tried a bit of acrylic painting.







Quantum physics - The dreams stuff is made of.

Audio Candy:
Gym Class Heroes - Shoot Down The Stars

Paint Your Face And Proclaim Thy Warrior Song

Ah, fuck t3h people. Heheheheh!

It's hard to imagine that the male lead in City of Ember is supposed to be 12 years old. It's interesting to note how he has been modeled to portray a black, emo-grungy look with generally dark features and clothing and skinny jeans, showing that the box office is definitely keeping up with the times.

The movie reminds me of the Allegory of the Cave, or more fondly known as Plato's Cave, where, in a nutshell, reality is what people perceive it to be even when it is not necessarily 'real' in the objective sense of the word, and that even if subjected to the visibility of the 'real' state of things, one may not accept them as more real than what he has always known. And even if one attains enlightenment by somehow stepping out of the cave and then returns to it, those who believe in the reality of the cave may not welcome him and his enlightened state back. But this is a very thin summary of an extremely fascinating concept.

The movie seems to allegorize other things too, one of which is the concept of faith or truth - an enlightened minority's profound belief in a 'truth' out there - and the incarceration of those who know of it by the ignorantly conforming majority, and it could be in terms of theology or politics. It also touches on propaganda and scarce resources, which is interesting considering its rather young-audience slant.



I went for a long-needed aimless run again today, though I stuck to a more familiar route by travelling along Hougang to Eunos before cutting into the Aljunied side and travelling down towards Bugis and town area. Form was off, and I was getting pretty bad blisters, so I stopped running there and walked home along the NEL route. I need a pair of proper running shoes lest my Standard Chartered 42km run this Sunday will be a disaster.

Running and drowning in music almost feels dreamy to me, where a thousand things swirl through my mind in a rather uninhibited and haphazard fashion and I don't recall most of those things when I'm finally sober again.

I do remember toying with the thought of the knowledge of time as a limited resource though. Like what if, from a very early time, a cunning capitalist somehow gained control of the knowledge of time? There'd be no public clocks and no watches, and only through this capitalist's firm or corporation can you acquire the service of 'knowing what time it is' and having to pay for it. The alternative to this would definitely be learning how to use other manual tools to estimate the time yourself, but that's beside the point. It's quite a fascinating paradigm of thought, I think, and it made me wonder if there are any 'limited' resources right now that could have been exploited in such a manner that we are completely unaware of its inherently original 'public good' state.

Anyway I saw an Adidas outdoor bus stop advertisement that went:

"Crossing the finishing line.
You can never buy that feeling."

But Adidas can definitely sell it to you.




Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

Audio Candy:
Boy Hits Car - Lovefurypassionenergy

Meltdown

An example of all hell breaking loose due to a lack of economic regulation: Free foosball tables.

All we need are a few tables and we'll see hoggers free-riding off the low cost limited resource.

Anyway, come to think of it, economics is the only field in which it is possible for two people to get the Nobel prize for saying completely opposite things.




It's like. Economists know hundreds of ways to make love but don't know any women.

Audio Candy:
The Script - The Man Who Can't Be Moved

Beyond Keynesian

The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

- John Maynard Keynes




Audio Candy:
I Am Ghost - This Is Home

Freakonomics

Being non-committally involved in FTB proved to be quite an experience. Once you're not in OBS as a freshie in a blur-kok FTB group it actually doesn't look all that crappy anymore.

Isaac pointed out that 'The Good Earth' is a retarded thing to call anything in OBS because the irony is that this place would really have been the good Earth in the sense that it would've been untarnished nature near the beach if OBS hadn't been set up in its place.

We pushed the limits of trying to avoid work and also ended up generating the stupidest of conversations.

There was once we were having dinner and Rachel Seah came over to tell us to help her shift out tables. We were nowhere near willing to do the saikang and after a bit the discussion veered towards shifting a permanent table to the girl's toilet. Someone else suggested we could charge people 20 cents for using the toilet. Then I said that if anyone objects we can say that it's a free market world anyway. Then I think it was Isaac who quipped that we would end up having to clean the toilet because we have privatised it and it is within our best interests to maintain it.

The next day, Alvin, Isaac and I were getting bored being station masters for a really uninteresting game so when we found a praying mantis they naturally went into 大惊小怪 mode while I ended up being at one with one of my gazillion little pets around the world.

This is Isaac pretending to be a praying mantis himself in the background.

This really freaked Angie out LOL.

But the bug is like how at one with me.

So anyway we eventually put it in a bottle, and after a while of really retarded analogising (is there such a word?) of the circumstance of the praying mantis with that of state minions under a dictatorship, I decided to let it go.

That's when I said, "hmm, actually why did I only think of letting the praying mantis go now? I could have let it go 5 minutes ago. Or I could let it go 5 minutes later. What really triggers my intent to let it go only now?"

To which Isaac replied, "it is because you have used up your utility of keeping the praying mantis in the bottle." So I said, "y'know what, actually I could just end up continuing to keep the praying mantis in the bottle even though my utility is diminished just to prove that utility is crap."

Then Alvin stepped in with the clincher: "well, in that case you are now deriving new utility from attempting to prove that utility is crap."

The praying mantis that gave us more utility than we could've imagined.

Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what if I was an ant, and she fell on me. Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny.
- Jack Handey

Audio Candy:
David Cook - Always Be My Baby

And There Is Discord In The Garden, Tonight

I job-searched and did some random calling earlier on wednesday and some company called me back yesterday while I was still at camp. Eunos, 1845h today, I was told, so I headed down for the supposed interview.

As it turned out, it was some MLM business slyly disguised as "various positions available, earn up to $800 in 2 weeks" in the Classifieds, which I suppose I really should've guessed. But it didn't turn out so bad because this is, afterall, not the first time I've been 'tricked' (of sorts) into ending up sitting at some seemingly casual round table in a lobby-like office with posters of products and good performance workers on the walls.

In fact, I ended up talking to one of the high-flyers in the company one-on-one for my interview, and she turned out to be my NYJC and SMU senior who was from SIS and had graduated already. So while she gave me her usual rundown of the MLM-skeptics' review, I guess I stunned her by throwing in some of my personal principles and philosophies and why I wouldn't wanna join or be the right person for MLM even though I don't frown upon it and am hence not a skeptic, validating my point by referencing stuff I've been reading. And then I said that it's not the first time I've been approached by MLM people and that I could probably recite to her the pyramidal staff hierarchy and tell her what products her company sells.

When I was done with what I had to say, there was a brief semi-awkward silence but I knew it was because she knew she had absolutely nothing to say that could convince me to be a part of it. So we ended up chit-chatting about school and life and all kinds of random shit, and I started dictating the conversation somewhat. I really struck a perfect chord when I pointed out that it's important that we do what we believe in and not listen to other people and end up in a "dead-end 8-5 job" and she fervently agreed. MLM people seriously like to hear stuff like that hahar. It's quite amusing when the supposed manipulator gets manipulated.

For a moment the conversation revolved around me for a bit and when somehow she asked me what I was reading, I could almost feel the thud of her jaw hitting the table when I brandished my "Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies" and "The Beauty Myth" books and I think I was smirking at the typicality when she took out her book titled along the lines of "How to Seal the Deal" or "How to Stay in Charge" or something like that.

We exchanged numbers and she said that while she's disappointed that I can't be a part of her team, she's happy that she has made a new friend. It's been a mildly fascinating evening where I felt like I simply wasted her time in the bigger scheme of things.



It's been awhile since I last took a long walk through town plugged into my MP3 player, so I zen-ed out and strolled from City Hall through to Orchard. I've always found escape in the surreality of being completely alone in a crowded place, and with the music volume up and people walking almost shoulder to shoulder at some parts along the streets highlighted by fancy lights, it recreates a sensation of being underwater, almost drowning, knowing that it's turbulent as hell around you but you can't hear a thing, like you aren't a part of it or anything at all.



I'm one-third through Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies and I'm done with Morality of Markets. It was interesting reading about how economists argue for the free market and some of their premises are actually quite ingenious. But because it is difficult to set in stone a schema of sorts for the concepts of ethics and morality, many arguments get pushed to their limits and end up being philosophical debates by virtue of their largely normative values. The gist is that any form of coercion against personal freedoms and rights, which are supposedly divinely endowed, is considered immoral and hence government intervention, which is basically seen as the right to use force, is also considered immoral. The idea is that the free market, with perfect competition and all that jazz, will provide the best form of wealth creation and ensure that people abide by a code of moral ethics in the long run because in order to survive you have to be cooperative, trustworthy, benevolent etc with the aim of serving your fellow man and ensuring that you get what you need in return.

However, I just find it hard to completely buy this argument because the reality is that there are way too many hopeful assumptions here. People are not angels afterall. I have a hunch that these arguments were formulated only because a response was needed primarily against state intervention and the generally romanticised and strict adherence to religion, which is largely perceived to be against the idea of material gain, private enterprise and capitalism.

We can point to the workings of the free market that result in shit happening like sustained poverty in third world countries and even the Darfur conflict, with the Sudanese government benefitting from China, India and Japan's trade patronage. A fatalistic balance can result if everybody's utility is met, even if these incur devastating externalities.

So far, Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies has made the very cogent point that economists equate happiness with utility, but happiness is hardly a utility because while our needs are met, we may not be any happier (would it be death by lethal injection or hanging, sir?).



A personal favourite from FailBlog.org:








Don't anthropomorphize computers - they hate it.

Audio Candy:
Gina René - U Must Be

The Importance Of Stupidity

Some time ago Justin and I were having some warped conversation (nothing new there) and the importance of stupidity was brought to light. For the record, Justin contributed significantly to this article.

In line with realist thought, life only ensues 2 main things - to survive and procreate. Accordingly, it is found that stupidity is what ensures that the status quos of these 2 main things are met.

Stupidity is the logical corollary to intelligence. As a species, it just so happens that, as a result of a huge reliance of brain utilisation, humans lose touch with instinct and ingrained primal intuition. Alot of what we do are then mentally processed outcomes from a stimulus of some sort. The remainder that's left to instinct are often boring stuff like breathing and, perhaps not so dully, split-second reactions. But essentially, most else is subjected to mental processing before execution. The neocortex ensures that we don't act purely on instinct.

So naturally, since brain usage isn't particularly a function of instinct, some people then start to suck at using their brains, creating a dichotomy between smart and stupid. To paint a clearer picture, if the disparity between intelligence levels were likened to that of a bird's instinctive ability to fly, many of us would have relatively similar intelligence levels. On the flipside, if the ability to fly were likened to that of our intelligence, you'd see a great deal of birds screw up and fly into trees and planes. But birds hardly ever mess up, and I think this relevantly shows how stupid we can be as humans in a comparative sense.

Once some potentially smart people start to realise that a great number of humans are crap at using their brains, they will improve themselves in order to exploit others.

In the modern world, consumption is a major function of survival. For the purposes of this narrow-minded article, and in applying Occam's razor, I'm excluding anything else that may determine survival as a prime factor (because many things seem to overlap with consumption anyway and I'm lazy). Stupid people are drivers of the economy. Do we really need 20 pairs of shoes? Do we really need a bigger car? Do we really need that Rolex watch? Quite clearly, nope, we don't. Economic utility of goods purchased, especially consumer goods, is only 'justified' inasmuch as the social value ascribed to these goods. Given that the normative social value we get from a good is determined by the producers of said good, it just says that, by applying Occam's razor once again, it's mere stupidity that determines consumption for economic goods, especially social goods.

And to top it all off, stupid people kinda fool themselves willingly in this sense.

Relevantly, marriage and babies for the procreation of our species are often primarily derivatives of stupidity and I don't think I have to explain that much. Just do a search on funny quotes about marriage. Not the serious ones; as they say to be wise you can't take life too seriously.

Hence, stupidity plays a vital role in life. If you're shit-stupid but know it, then you're already on the path to improvement, because sociologically and for current human development, intelligence disparity has its importance cause. Deductively then, people must either be extremely intelligent and capable or not intelligent at all. So sums up the importance of stupidity.

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

Audio Candy:
Taproot - I