A Long Answer To A Short Question.

I do apologise for the length of this answer but it is something I have been wrestling with for a couple of years, and this appears to be an ideal opportunity to try and establish a baseline of thought.

In Nov 2018 I was approached by Brenton Groves to study the academic definitions or differences between concrete and abstract. That started with an evaluation of 20^th Century manifestos such as climate change, nuclear energy, postmodernism, identity politics. He used me to clean his office and prepare for what he knew was coming. In the first pile of material there was an article “From Chaos to Order” written by one Daniel Wild alongside “How Identity Politics Divides Us.” The last paragraph in the former was “if enough people straighten themselves out, perhaps our culture and nation will avoid being destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah”.

I had spent a number of years dabbling in this sort of material but Brenton convinced me to get serious. Being a pragmatic scientist, I had to start from scratch. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, to Descartes and then through Rousseau to Kant and Nietzsche with a bit of Jung, Freud and Piaget and Dostoyevsky thrown in.

I grew to understand why Dostoyevsky said that man was in love with suffering, remove one suffering and it will be replaced by another. I really got hung up on Kant, just couldn’t get my head around it. In many ways all he was saying is that he couldn’t find the answers so stop asking the questions. 

At that point I decided that this philosophical material was beyond me. I think you must be brought up with that thought pattern, it is hard to learn later in life. So, I set about thinking about more pragmatic ways of saying what I thought needed saying. The correspondence we had in the last quarter of 2019 lead to some interesting pragmatic research ideas on explaining issues to the next generation. I am still excited about those concepts. The Cost of Housing and The Return on Super. See attached. But the bigger question was still nagging at me as I wrote on 17/12/19

“But I will leave you with a conundrum I have been trying to get my head around.

The pareto principle has been well documented and researched in many areas. It appears to be an accepted law of nature. 

Then how can we strive for equality. Who says everybody wants equality? Many who worked for us didn’t even want equality of opportunity they just wanted to come to work and do a job, it was a break from home.

Creating equality of opportunity in itself is impossible as some will see opportunities others do not.”

I went into the New Year thinking this was going to be the year of Pareto. Big Mistake. As I found out Pareto was 120 years after Kant. The two had very different backgrounds, different cultures and went about things in different ways. Yet it appears both became socially isolated Kant through arrogance and Pareto through ideology. While Kant appeared to modify his beliefs in order to appease his Christian beliefs, Pareto worked tirelessly to try and find answers others had walked away from.

Pareto was only 4 years younger than Nietzsche and it is interesting to compare and contrast their approach given they lived in the same timeframe. Nietzsche talks a lot about suffering, slave morality and implies the morality of society is wrongheaded because people did not want to be meek, or humble, or turn the other cheek. Pareto talks with facts. His work on the incomes and production is many countries defined the herd so to speak. 

Stephen Hicks in Explaining Postmodernism does a great job in running through the history of philosophical thought from Hume and Kant all the way through to Rorty. Their underlying premise is that firstly they know the problem and secondly, they know the answer. Just as Kant was driven by Christian doctrine, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida and Rorty were driven by their belief in Marx and socialism.

Pareto was ostracised for his belief in free speech and free markets. He chose to change his political views as a result of his research instead of the others that changed their research to fit their views. Hicks points out why there are not any Pareto disciples left in the Universities, they simply would not survive in today’s academic world.

So, we had two trails of philosophical thought. The subjective view that resulted in Richard Rorty writing “objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings, not of accurate representation of something non-human”. And the objective view of Pareto which has since died out.

Pareto used objective facts to define a historical view of society. Philosophy was supposed to study fundamental questions of existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind and language, however it made a turn into the indoctrination of youth into new political and social norms.

The result is that today we do not have sociologists who are prepared to follow the numbers, they want to put values/principles in place not to be moved.

The attached blog I wrote last week answers your question in the short form. The question is much broader and encompasses all regulation, and this comes back to the legal process versus a risk management process. How much regulation is enough to achieve the objectives without shutting down the economy and society? To answer that question is you must have the courage to quantify the objective. And the answer one death is too many is the greatest cop out. If that were the case then we shouldn’t be driving cars or flying in aeroplanes. 

So there are two issues that need to be dealt with:

1. Quantification of what the regulation is trying to achieve, given that it is impossible to have 100% success. Number of lives lost, disturbance to the environment. (The left has relied on the precautionary principle to say, none.)
2. Determination of how much regulation is required before you reach the point of diminishing returns, again given it is impossible to completely regulate human behaviour.

What does too much red tape mean?

Kurt’s research on red tape was on the money. 

$65Bn in projects held up at a cost of $?Mill.

Result 94% failure.

Any manager would stop the whole project immediately. The argument that if the environment wins once it is worth it needs to be dispelled.