Shifting BordersAug 20, 20204 min readOriginally published in The PendulumOver the course of its history, Ireland has been in a struggle with its neighbor, England, for independence. The friction has ebbed and flowed through the years, as has the method of control that was exerted by one island on another. Whether it was through the violent extinguishing of an Irish rebellion against imperialism in 1798, political pressures that exacerbated the horrific state of the commoners in Ireland during the potato famine which lasted for seven haunting years from 1845 to 1852, or the religious put-down of certain sects deemed to be unfit for quarter in British held land, the country has always struggled with England and its historic refusal to grant autonomy to its people. If one were to look at the sum of Ireland’s history and British attitudes, one would likely infer that Ireland should have very little hope of ever being granted home rule in its entirety. But like so many other matters of the status quo in Europe, borders, autonomy, and one country’s relation with another seem to be more non-violently in flux than they have ever been.There have been two primary drivers of England’s desire to maintain its grasp on Ireland, as well as its other colonies, that at different times have carried different weight to those in power. The first reason, unsurprisingly, is monetary incentivization. As European powers exploded into the New World and wrestled with their closely situated neighbors for land, the benefit of maintaining foreign regions was quickly instilled. From Persia to Rome, the synonymy of the aggregate land held by an empire to its wealth and power is self-evident. Holding land means the ability to sell and trade the goods of a nation directly within the country. The dominant country could tax the domestic population of the division of land being held, often to a greater degree than one’s own indigenous population. The conqueror or settler also was the beneficiary of natural resources and human capital of the people under its will. These base reasons were and are still drivers for nations to extend their influence beyond their own borders. But, the economics of England maintaining its relationship with Northern Ireland are shifting. Firstly, the United Kingdom’s Exchequer, the British equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service, currently pays a €12.1 billion subsidy to its holding of Northern Ireland. This subsidy is an astounding fraction of Northern Ireland's nominal GDP which was €43 billion in 2018. Northern Ireland is the least profitable member of the United Kingdom. It has the lowest employment rates of any member states of the UK. If England feels most driven in its politics by the fiscal outcome of its holdings, Northern Ireland no longer holds the glimmer that it once did.The second driver of England’s maintenance of the Ulster region of Ireland is Britain’s ruling class pride in the control it exerts and its own perception of its role on the world stage. Historically, no ruling class has ever responded amicably to a subjugated nation insisting on being the master of its own fate. Britain’s history, from the American Revolution to the Boer War, is riddled with conflicts between itself and colonies who have tried, some with more luck than others, to cast off rulers from far off lands. As England itself has shifted over the course of its existence from a monarchy to a political system so strictly adherent to democracy that it utilizes national referendums to decide its fate, the pride of a few means increasingly less. According to a poll conducted by Lord Ashcroft on how United Kingdom members would vote in a referendum to decide Northern Ireland’s remainder in the UK, only 35% of individuals believe that Northern Ireland should remain. Instead of the rest of the voters being of the belief that Northern Ireland should leave, nearly 60% were of no opinion at all and believe that “it is for the people of Northern Ireland to decide.” A majority of 60% would be an unheard of landslide in comparison to the unpredictable vote splits from the previous referendums that have gripped British politics over the past years. The poll indicates that either an apathy on the part of those in the United Kingdom regarding Northern Ireland or an increase in their regard for the autonomy of the member states of the United Kingdom is on the rise. In either case, Great Britain is shifting to an attitude that wants the Northern Irish to make a decision about their own independence and the reunification of the whole of Ireland. What then, if given the opportunity to choose for themselves, would the people of Northern Ireland elect to do?Ireland’s attitude towards its independence over time has never been static. For many years the aggregate attitude of the Irish people was amicable, or at least not violently opposed to, the idea of British rule in Ireland. The feeling changed sharply in the wake of the Easter Rising in 1916 when a group of revolutionaries declared independence from Britain and took control of the city of Dublin for three days. In the aftermath, the British responded violently and the retribution turned public opinion against Britain. This sway in public opinion resulted in the independence of The Republic of Ireland through an act of the same name. This act did not include Ulster, the region heavily comprised of Protestants and those of Scottish descent. Northern Ireland has since been in favor of remaining, but not without fierce disagreement on both sides. Over the years, attitudes in Northern Ireland have also been shifting regarding its own reunification with the Republic of Ireland as well. In another poll conducted by Lord Ashcroft, 51% of the Northern Irish respondents stated that they would be in favor of leaving the United Kingdom. Much like the other recent referendums in the British Isles, a referendum to decide the fate of Northern Ireland would nearly be a coin toss.As the geopolitical norms of Europe ebb and flow and the standing of nations in relation to each other are reevaluated, there is an opportunity for Ireland to alter its standing opposed to England. Evidence does not give any strong suggestion that Northern Ireland, given the opportunity will choose one way or another. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the people of Northern Ireland will be given the opportunity to choose.
Good ideas bear repeatingAug 6, 20202 min read"Silence is Stupid, Argument is Foolish" is the title of Bryan Caplan's most recent post published on The Library of Economics and Liberty blog. Caplan explains his rules for whether or not to engage friends and strangers in an argument:Public debates aside, I now only engage in intellectual arguments with thinkers who play by the rules. What rules? For starters: remain calm, take nothing personally, use probabilities, face hypotheticals head-on, and spurn Social Desirability Bias like the plague. If I hear someone talking about ideas who ignores these rules, I take evasive action. If cornered, I change the subject.Why? Because I now realize that arguing with unreasonable people is foolish.Caplan's rules reflect that of Proverbs 26:4-5:Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.In addition to a heuristic that determines the usefulness of an engagement, Caplan demonstrates another applicable rule: good ideas bear repeating. The Caplan post and the proverb were written on different continents, in different languages, under highly variant cultural norms, with a 2,700 year gap between their initial propagation. While the replication of the idea put forth in both quotes is repetitive and unoriginal, (it is unlikely that Solomon was the first human to verbalize the waste of time that ensues from arguing with unreasonable people) the unoriginality does not detract from the argument, it bolsters it. If an idea can be declared independently by an ancient middle-eastern prophet and a professor of economics in Virginia, there is a likely degree of efficacy to it.It could be stated that while Caplan's argument is true, it would be more efficient to simply tweet out the original proverb rather than taking the time to type and edit a few hundred word blog post of completely original phrasing. While he certainly could have done this while still managing to be informative to his followers, what helps his idea to be so convincing is that the viewer can connect the dots between Caplan's blog post and other vignettes that support his sentiments.If one states something truthful (or dishonest) it can be counted on that it is not the first utterance of that truth. This should not dissuade one from writing and speaking more. It should encourage the reproduction of good ideas and ultimately strengthen them. A useful piece of knowledge only stated once is essentially useless. An axiom repeated a thousand different ways is impossible to ignore.
Career GoalsAug 5, 20206 min readUpdated: Aug 10, 2020A variation of the axiom “choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” has been repeated to me by countless friends, teachers, parents, and mentors throughout my life. It's pithy advice which lacks much reasonable pushback. Of course, if you thoroughly enjoy your work; it will never quite register in your mind as a task. What should get pushback is whether or not that axiom can be utilized to better guide a career choice.-Ashley Mears is a sociologist at Boston University and whose research hones in on what society and its various subsections value and how that value is priced. In her paper titled Working for Free in the VIP: Relational Work and the Production of Consent she explores why individuals--particularly young women in the NYC/Miami party circuit--will accept non-monetary compensation for the service that they convey to clubs in those cities.Mears describes the market of "girls," as they are referred to, who club promoters build relationships with and have accompanied them to a a particular club in order to boost its profile through the presence of beautiful women. The promoter's role is to meet models at events, through existing relationships, or on the street. The promoters then foster a relationship that looks similar to a friendship with the girls and ultimately invites them to bottle service clubs. The service provided by the promoters (i.e. bringing beautiful women to attend parties) is a roll which clubs will pay promoters for directly. The girls also provide a service in the form of "bodily capital." There presence in the clubs make those places desirable places to be. Intuition says that the club promoters serve as employers of the women who accompany them and thus yield their employees a percentage of the revenue. Intuition is wrong here. The girls who attend the parties seldom receive a cut of the pay and are instead compensated through complimentary food, drinks, and, in some circumstances, drugs and housing. Mears puts together an interesting picture of the reason that the exchange occurs in such an unorthodox way. One of the most telling reasons, Mears explains, is that if the girls are provided a wage for their labor they become uninterested because"it would make it feel like work" as one of the girls interviews stated. If the service that the girls were providing was to become directly financially incentivized by a wage, they would no longer enjoy it.It is difficult to discern whether the reasoning that the girls provided was deeply human or deeply nonsensical. My instinct is to say nonsensical. Of course being paid a sum of money to do something that I would most likely be doing anyway sounds like a dream scenario that only a lucky percentage of humans get to experience. I have not entirely abandoned this instinct, but it may be that monetary incentives can actually strip away the fulfillment one gets from an event.-Sam Bowles is a Behavioral Economist at the Santa Fe Institute whose research surrounds to the various dimensions behind human decision making. In an episode of National Public Radios's Hidden Brain, Bowles uses an anecdote from his own life to demonstrate the complicated nature of human motivation:Well, the story is about me, and it's even worse than you say. My kids were very helpful around the house, and they did a lot. I was a single dad, and they were great. And as they became teenagers, they began to want to buy clothes and a lot of things like that. And I thought, well, you know, a good way to accommodate this is that instead of them just doing stuff around the house, cleaning dishes and helping me in lots of ways, I would issue a price list. And then they could get paid for the stuff that they used to do for free. Of course, I thought it was a brilliant idea, and we agreed on the price list - seemed reasonable. I posted it on the fridge. And what happened? Nothing. They stopped work entirely. They didn't do a thing. And they were not selfish because, as I say, they'd been helping me a lot doing a lot of work. But once it was for pay, it didn't seem to be the same thing. Now, it's true that, you know, when a particular item they wanted to buy, well, then they might do the lawn. But they ended up doing much less than before. And I had to bring the thing to a halt and say, let's go back to just us doing stuff together... I talked to the kids about it. They didn't really have a good explanation of what happened. But looking back on it now, I think what happened was this - they actually enjoyed doing stuff together around the house, and they kind of thought they should help me out. They didn't want to see me doing all this stuff by myself. And so it was something that they both enjoyed intrinsically and felt some obligation to do. But when I offered to pay them for it, it made them think differently about it, and it made it a matter of choice. So I think I made the mistake that Adam Smith never made, which is to treat the moral sentiments - that is, the ideas of value contributing to others and so on - to treat them as if they're somehow separate from or just additive to the incentives that come from material interests and money.A hasty takeaway from these two notes would be that those who are compensated well do not have particularly high levels of happiness, but that is not the case. Money is still tied to happiness for obvious reasons of health and security, amongst others. Money correlates to happiness, but so does job satisfaction. Thus the answer cannot be to pursue lucrative, uninteresting jobs in order to maximize happiness. How then does one simultaneously try to maximize his or her financial gain from employment while optimizing job satisfaction and enjoyment without the financial compensation extracting the joy you may get from an action?-For a recent college graduate like myself, once the basic tenets of a job such as desired wage and location have been met, what is the correct proportion of tasks within a job which I should derive a genuine joy from outside of the workplace? I spend my free time reading, doing data visualization, contacting strangers about their areas of expertise, and writing. If an employer gave me a job offer with a description outlining the previously listed tasks as the role; I would surely jump on the opportunity, regardless of the industry. In this scenario, how do I prevent the sudden compensation for what I would have been doing anyway from wrecking the joy I garner from those things?Like the "girls" in Mears research, what I believe to be the compensating factor in the work would have to change. If I receive enough financial compensation to feed and house myself and my family, anything above that wage becomes less important as a compensating factor. The true compensation that I am receiving are the roles and responsibilities themselves. If I get a job in which the primary function is creating pictures of reality using python data visualization, that particular task is a very real part of the compensation. The experience is a payment to nearly the same degree that the salary is. In James Mattis' memoir of his career in the Marine Corps he frequently emphasizes the fact that when there was a new position that he was asked to consider taking over, he owed it to the United States to answer the call because the nation has afforded him a 40 year education in how to complete the job. It is apparent throughout his memoir that there is little Mattis values more than learning. He states early in the book that, "If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you." Mattis is obsessed with education. He loves it and he needs it. If Mattis loves learning to the extreme degree he does, why is he not soured by the Marine Corps who financially compensated him to complete his "40 year education?" Why didn't the Marine Corps become "like work" to Mattis? It never became work because money was not the factor that he considered to be compensation. Mattis never says, "I was asked if I was up to the job of Secretary of Defense and I decided that I owe it to the nation due to the aggregate millions of dollars that the American tax payer has given me over the years." It is the education he received that is the defining compensation and he says so.The approach of James Mattis and the club "girls" to work is the one that I hope to embrace as I embark on my career. Internalizing the idea that the job roles that mimic what I would be doing on Saturday for no money is part of the salary itself.