Human capital



I went in to town early this morning and in a roofed and enclosed line of bus shelters, there was a homeless person covered in a sleeping bag, lying down covered head to toe. Reflex reaction was someone needs to help this person, why as a society are we allowing people to lay in the streets like this.

 

After the initial hit, the philosopher/economist kicked in. Why is this person lying there? Is it really not a homeless person but someone trying to make a political point? Perhaps this person has refused all help from local council officials of various sorts and prefers this lifestyle to others? Mental illness, drug abuse, &c.

 

On reflection today this took my thoughts back to a Socialist that enjoys writing sophistry to the letters pages of our local Gazette. He asked why should Bill Gates be sitting on $Bn of wealth while half the world starves. His answer of course is Socialism, an ism that has failed everywhere it has been tried, unless we talk of mixed economies.

 

But to answer the question why Bill Gates is rich, relative to most on this planet is 'human capital'. Strip Bill Gates of all his assets and his human capital, his life skills, training, and knowledge would allow him to thrive. Strip Tiger Woods of everything and loan him some golf clubs, he will be winning tournaments.

 

I chose not to go to school, to college, to university. I chose not to get a trade. I chose to take low paid manual work in the safe knowledge that I would never really achieve the dizzying heights of being one of the 'rich' and would stay working class while I refused to invest in human capital.

 

Top lawyers, surgeons, footballers, and internet gurus are rich because they invested time, energy, money, whatever it took in increasing their personal human capital.

 

How many people can kick a ball like David Beckham? Now how many people can say 'would you like fries with that?' The Beckham's of this world are limited, the McDonald workers are plentiful.

 

Instead of hating or feeling envy towards those that have done better than ourselves, surely we would be better off, where applicable, to invest in our own human capital and improve our own chances of success in the world?

 

With the exception of the minority that have genuine disabilities that stop them getting ahead (see Stephen Hawking for a person that more than overcame disabilities), we all have the opportunity to invest in ourselves.

 

There are numerous free courses of education available, public libraries are great places of learning for free. For those with time and money, going back to college/university or learning a trade can be a great starting point.

 

We can't all be a Bill Gates or David Beckham, but we can all start investing in our own human capital instead of eating crisps and drinking beers on the sofa in front of daytime television.

 



There is no true path



I come across a lot of people trying to figure out what their true calling, their true path in life, their mission of which if they found it they could live life with passion and to the full. Happiness incarnate, the secret formula to never having to work again.

 

I can tell you now I have followed Philosophy down the path of nihilism and asked the question of why we don't all commit suicide. Richard Dawkins can tell you we are an accident of evolution while Albert Camus can show you we stay alive out of force of habit more than anything else. Socrates can point out death is nothing to fear and Cicero can show you that life is long if you know how to live it.

 

Aristotle would have us work on the middle ground, not the endless pursuit of financial gain, neither a monkish life of abstinence and poverty. Socrates believed instead of the body beautiful, we should dedicate ourselves to improving our souls.

 

Well let me just say, after 40 years on this spinning planet, there is no absolute true path, there is no one passion, one all consuming thing that we must follow to the end of days. Am I the same person as when I was born? How about my thirteenth birthday? eighteen, twenty one, thirty?

 

The only thing I have absolutely retained from childhood is a love of reading. Fantasy fiction was my thing, now my tastes have changed and evolved and over the years I have encountered a wide range of interests.

 

No doubt my tastes, my pursuits, my aims and ambitions will change again over the next forty years. What I do know is, there is no true path other than the path you decide for yourself. Careers advisers, parents, friends, money, status, all will have an influence on the path you take, but the only true path in life is the one you give yourself, the one where you look in the mirror and you are happy with your choices.

 

Some will pursue financial gain, others to be a great parent or partner. Others will commit themselves to their art and live on subsistence wages. Some will devote themselves to helping others, while some will lie, cheat and steal their way through life.

 

The only person you are morally accountable to is the person you see in the mirror and if you can look yourself in the eye and honestly be proud of the path you have chosen, then you know you are on the right path and nothing anyone says should matter to you.

Insecurity and security overkill



Bruce Shneier - American security consultant

 

I want to talk about insecurity, why we all feel it, why we feel the need to get rid of it and why that need should stop.

 

13th January 2002, 46 year old airline pilot, Elwood Menear was checking in through security, when they found a pair of tweezers. They weren't on any banned list, but they paused, long enough for Menear to ask a sarcastic question. "Why are you worried about tweezers when I could crash the plane?" That would cost him a night in jail, suspension from US airways and months of legal battles before eventually being acquitted of 'making terroristic threats' and being able to go back to work.

 

Bruce Schneier commented, "There are precisely two things that have made air travel safer since 9/11: locks on cockpit doors, and teaching passengers that they have to fight back. ‘You can argue that there’s a third – sky marshals. But actually, once you tell people you have them, you don’t really need them. It’s the idea of sky marshals that makes us safer, not the marshals themselves."

 

And the point Schneier was making is, no matter how much 'stuff' you ban, terrorists will always be one step ahead. They are prepared to die on that plane, that's the difference.

 

So why do Governments want to make air travel so obnoxiously, tediously, painful? Not because they think it will make a jot of difference to actual safety, rather that it will ease the minds of it's citizens and offer 'security' and peace of mind.

 

Gone are the days of Hobbes' 'Brutal and short lives' and in are the creature comforts and complete switched off, uber safe lifestyles of Western Civilisations. We want to feel safe, we pay taxes so our Government will protect us from all harm and we need that security blanket that no one can hurt us.

 

News flash: Driving your car is more dangerous than flying in a plane. Our brains are all screwed up, to correct Aristotle, we are capable of rational thought, but we are not rational beings.

 

We react to things rather than listen to expert advice and think things through with a rational brain and we allow Governments to smother us in 'security blankets' that make life pretty unbearable whilst at the same time not really increasing our security at all.

 

In fact, when seatbelt laws were enforced in Britain, people felt 'safer' so they took greater risks on the roads. Far safer if compulsory steel spikes were fitted to steering wheels to impale our hearts in event of a crash and we would doubtless see road fatalities drop rather dramatically.

 

As comfortable Westerners we crave the pipe and slippers and look to Government to supply it, when in fact we should be more accepting of risk, to a degree, embrace freedoms more and live a happier lifestyle.

 

 

 



Knowledge and courage



Knowledge and courage contribute in turn to greatness. I say to you increase your knowledge because you are what you know. With small amounts of knowledge you can only act in a small arena. Expanding your knowledge base, increases the stage to play on. A truly wise person has the world as a stage.

 

But you also need courage. Without courage wisdom is sterile. You will not step on to the stage, you will not display your knowledge, you will not impact the world in any sort of positive way without action. Which is why you must seek both knowledge and courage if you are to achieve greatness.

Be the oracle



 

 

In your affairs, create suspense. The oracle of Delphi would talk in a manner where interpretation was difficult and could be construed to mean different things. This is how you should conduct your affairs.

 

Never reveal all your plans openly and straightforward, rather play your cards close to your chest. Drop hints, let slip small inconsequential things you have playing in your mind.

 

In this way if a big plan pays off, people will be surprised and genuinely pleased at your success. If however it goes pear shaped, as so often happens in life, there is no room for criticism or mockery at failed plans.

 

Make plans, work on them, try your best, but keep those plans close until either successful completion or a re-working on a theme. Keep the mystery around you and earn that respect.

On being a true individual

All things are now at their peak, above all being a true individual. It takes more today to make one sage than seven in years gone by, and more to deal with a single person than an entire nation in the past. - Gracián, Baltasar

 

If we think back to Aristotle, a true Polymath of his time, he conquered various sciences and philosophical path ways. Now with the rapid advancement of information, technology and science, it would take a person a life times study to scratch the surface of one strand of science, for instance, those that devote their lives to the study of the fruit fly.

 

New branches of Mathematics are occurring all the time, no one person could hope to have a thorough knowledge of all mathematics, perhaps in Plato's academy, where you could not enter without a working knowledge of geometry, you could master mathematics, but now, think yourself lucky if you call yourself master of a few branches.

 

To be sage now, with the world no longer your city, town or village, but rather the whole world, with new ethical and moral problems being unearthed on a daily basis, we cannot hope to be able to answer every dilemma satisfactorily, but then again, Philosophy never promised us answers, just more questions.

 

This being said, we should not be depressed by the thought that it is more difficult now to become a true individual, if anything, the Democratisation of information has made it easier for each of us to achieve our true potential to be an individual, even easier than those in the past. The hard work has been done for us, we just need to pick up where others left off and carve our own paths in history, no matter what that may be.

 

If we act with 'true selfishness' in the sense Adam Smith advocated, we can all leave an indelible mark on the world, it is simply choice as to whether or not we want to strive or not.

 

 

 



My reputation



My reputation is because I do what I say I am going to do when I said I would, and I refuse to compromise quality or ethics for any reason. I will not be late and I will not tolerate anyone else being late. I will not lie and I will not tolerate being lied to. I deliver the best possible product I can to the best of my ability every time and I expect the same from those who do business with me. This makes me a total pain to do business with because I have a standard by which I perform and I expect those who do business with me to perform to the same standard. Because of this, I am known as an asshole. Better to get this reputation for the right reasons instead of the wrong reasons.

What constitutes a 'good life'?

25 Centuries ago, Greek philosophers asked what constitutes a good life? We are still trying to figure out the answer. The only thing certain about ethical enquiry, is that nothing is certain; but that doesn't stop us asking the question and coming to our own conclusions.

 

For some of us, we turn to religion to guide our morality, to say this is the word of God, this is how morality is spelled out, this is how we should behave in our mortal time here for if we do not, the gates of Heaven may be barred to us when we are judged.

 

This in my interpretation is morality by fear and morality by fear in my opinion is not a morally true path. If our moral path is chosen by fear, for example, we choose not to kill or rape or steal only because of fear of God or in fear of police intervention, then are we really living a moral life at all?

 

This of course goes back to Plato's analogy of 'Gyges ring' which states for example, if we were invisible and had no way of being detected, we would simply fall in to evil ways of murder and rape and theft! This is the belief we live moral lives out of fear, not out of choice and given true freedom, we would all be living out our base animal desires.

 

For Aristotle the question was not so much "What is the right thing to do?" but more "What is the best way to live?" Aristotle came to the conclusion of 'Eudaimonia' a sort of flourishing and this was to be achieved by aspiring to moral excellence. This Aristotle would bring about the greatest happiness to a persons soul.

 

Jeremy Bentham created 'utilitarianism' that being maximisation of pleasure and minimisation of pain. Utilitarianism is a flourishing and popular philosophy today for obvious reasons, unfortunately many people have not actually read the original source and bastardised the original Philosophy to suit their own interpretations.

 



Monty Python concluded that it was ‘nothing very special’: ‘try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then …’

 

Jean Paul Sartre believed we are 'condemned to be free' we are our own authors of the meaning of our own lives. By this Sartre meant there is no religious punishment, only that the punishment may well be social ostracisation.

 

This plays well with Darwin's 'theory of evolution' and more recently supported by Richard Dawkins that we are simply an accident of nature and we should live a more moral life as a way to live a good life, because the moral life would maximise our overall happiness. Perhaps a selfish reason but no more selfish than doing the right thing out of fear.

 

Then again Machiavelli's advice to princes everywhere was 'It is better to feared than to be loved'. We see this almost daily on the news and in our lives where people either singularly or in gangs, prefer to instil fear in others to maximise their happiness quota, of course, there's always a bigger fish...

 

So do we live a good life now for a ticket to a better world after our mortal death? Or should we do as the ancient Greeks insisted and make man the measure of all things? Shouldn't we as privileged with the power of logic and choice over our base instincts strive for the higher moral ground? Shouldn't we all try to do the right thing by each other?

 

Until we reach a satisfactory consensus I doubt humanity will ever be able to 'get along' together and the debate of what constitutes a 'good life' may well rage on another 25 centuries.

Moral coding in a world of consumerism

 



 

Funny thing happened today, not something I did, something I didn't do, I didn't say hello. I say hello to neighbours, ex workmates, friends, associates, acquaintances all the time, or some derivative of it.

Some reason today when I saw this person that I get on with well and previously worked with, I didn't shout to say hello. They probably won't mind as they didn't see me, but because I hold myself to high standards it bugs me not acknowledging a person I know.

Which actually made me think about my own moral code and rightly or wrongly I by default tend to follow a chivalric code, more specifically:

• To protect the weak and defenceless
• To refrain from giving offence
• To live by honour
• To despise pecuniary reward
• To fight for the welfare of all
• To obey those placed in authority
• To eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit
• To keep faith
• At all times speak the truth
• To persevere to the end in any enterprise begun
• To respect the honour of women
• Never to refuse a challenge from an equal
• Never to turn the back on a foe
• Rather die honest than live shamelessly

So were not in medieval times any more, so the world is going to hell in a handbag, maybe. So with all the bad in the world, what's the point of having a code of ethics?

 

I was raised to do the right thing, I was raised not to do what the law tells me to do, but rather to do the right thing. I was raised to have manners, respect, protect the weak, stand up for others (and this has cost me a job previously).

 

I follow the maxim that everything I own and love can be taken from me, but my moral code can never be taken from me, it's what identifies a person as who they are. Let me be judged by my actions, not my words, not my job, not my salary, but by my moral code in action.