In defense of trolls

The Ranking of Human Values

Let us rank what we value. In the end, we will conclude that we ought to be kind to trolls.

Thinking beats speaking because thoughtless speech is just noise.

Yet action speaks louder than words. This means acting is better than speaking.

Is acting better than thinking? Probably not because we also claim that the pen is stronger than the sword. He who lives by the sword dies by it. He who lives by the pen lives forever. Besides, when we’re thinking, we practice silence, and librarians will swear us all to that.

So there it is. Thinking is better than acting, which is then better than speaking.

What then is the point of protecting free speech if it is the lowest form of human interaction?

The answer lies in realizing that we also value compassion. We say that no man is an island, and that when the bell tolls, it tolls for all. We sense that the weakest have only speech. They can plead with the strong to spare them, but that’s about it. And the thinker, if he truly thinks, knows that there’s no point in thinking if he cannot protect the weak. The thinker understands the sense of justice that John Rawls imagined. He thinks that if he could choose his company or society, the thinker would choose to be born into a family of thinkers, and not warriors or orators.

When we see a troll earning his meager pay on canned ad hominem, we thank the Supreme Being that we weren’t born to be trolls. They’re there by an unfortunate act of God when He gave out talents. Trolls wish they could think or act, but all they have are meaningless words. And meager pay.

The pseudo-righteous proclaim that we shouldn’t feed the trolls. True enough. But the higher duty is to think and find ways to have a society where the undeserving rich wouldn’t be able to hire trolls.

In the end, we are all trolls. There are trolls, and there are trolls.

On Thought Leaders, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Sustainability

By Orlando Roncesvalles (January, 2020)

There’s an unfair amount of cheesy buzzwords out there.

It hit me one day when I came across something called “Thought Leaders.” My first reaction was to ask, “Are you kidding?” – addressed to no one in particular. When I think I’m thinking, I’m being me, moi. I’m doing the Cartesian thing (you know the drill: Cogito, ergo sum). Anyone without a working brain is just a rock, if not a pebble (but a glistening grain of sand can still capture the human imagination). This is a long-winded way of saying that if someone is “thought-leading” you or me, he’s not making sense. Never mind that Wikipedia defines “.. a thought leader [as] an individual or firm that is recognized as an authority in a specialized field .. whose expertise is sought and often rewarded.”

One commentator once cynically described a thought leader as “.. a discussion facilitator at think tank dinners where guests talk about what it’s like to live in poverty while the wait staff glides through the room thinking bitter thoughts” (David Brooks of The New York Times, way back in 2013). In short, a thought leader is an intellectually bankrupt idea wanting to be paid big bucks. How can you be thinking if your puny brain is being led by its nostrils? That wait staff in Brooks’s satire was the smart one, if poorly paid.

Pretty much the same can be said of something called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). A somewhat extreme view, usually attributed to Milton Friedman, the economist, is that CSR is, like thought leadership, somewhat of an oxymoron. It’s neither social nor responsible. It isn’t needed at all and wouldn’t even exist without a budget. That budget comes from excess profits. Economists understand that Friedman saw the problem as a lack of competition. The textbook says that with easy exit and entry, the long-run profit is just enough to compensate shareholders, even as corporations use the most efficient technology to minimize costs and sell products at reasonable (affordable) prices.

The other (also somewhat extreme) view is that CSR is a worthwhile cause, like climate change. We need to restrain corporate “greed” through signaling devices (“My product is green or organic, not produced by slave or child labor, and I’m an NGO-certified good guy”), or by outright regulation. In this public relations ecosystem, CSR validates monopolistic pricing and ultra-high CEO compensation, or it runs on the fiction that regulators cannot be bought. Is there a middle ground? I admit to not knowing, though I believe that Friedman is right if corporations dealt only with private goods (those without negative externalities like pollution). In a world where corporations produce public goods or bads, governmental regulation must be brought in, although this leads to a problem of how to prevent something called regulatory capture. Perhaps that’s just too difficult a problem, especially in countries run like pineapple republics where cozy relations between corporations and their regulators are an open secret.

Finally, I come to that bane of all banes. The word is “sustainability.” If something is not sustainable, it must be sinister and will, sooner than later, destroy our souls. Think of single-use plastic clogging the planet’s oceans if not our stomachs. Ponder the futility of islanders heading to an upland that will anyway be washed away by climate change. We are doomed beyond recognition, never mind repair. Unless we see the light of sustainable. Yeah, right.

These words pretty much suffer in translation. Thought leader is tagasugod ng pag-iisip. CSR wimps out as katungkulan ng korporasyon para sa madla. Sustainability comes through as pananatili ng kinabukasan. Although I kind of like the last even if it suggests a Luddite itch for all things old.

To Thought Leaders, I say, “Talk is cheap. Let others speak too. You lose credibility otherwise.” To corporations practicing CSR, “We’re on to your tricks.” To those waving the banner of Sustainability, “You look like a kissing cousin of CSR.” Perhaps the antidote is to impose an excise tax on those selling CSR products, or to confront the sustainability activist with a question. “What exactly would you suggest we do?” If the answer won’t pass the Cartesian existential smell test, then we know it was just hot air, if not a sigh. The climate change folks will sorely disapprove.

Dangling drugs

ALTERNATE UNIVERSES

 

Here’s an imaginary conversation between an “underground” economist (UE) and a wannabe journalist-blogger (WJ) recently on the drug problem and the economy.

 

WJ: Why do people do drugs, knowing it’s a crime?

 

UE: A crime is also subject to the laws of economics.

 

W: I don’t understand. Is there an economics of crime?

 

U: Economists are crazy people. They think that their thinking applies to anything. There’s even an economics of religion that explains how religious leaders can stop typhoons or earthquakes, and how the good book can predict the end of the world. But that’s another story.

 

W: I still don’t get it. Crime is a bad, not a good. My economics book says the economy produces goods and services, not bads.

 

U: No bads? Your teacher didn’t teach you right, or you learned wrong.

 

W: (Sobbing). How can you be so mean? I went to the (… mentions a top school of economics in the country).

 

U: There, there.. It’s not the end of the world. A good becomes a bad when you don’t want any more of it, and demand becomes supply.

 

W: You mean that the good is just the opposite of the bad?

 

U: (to himself) I give up. Maybe this explains why bloggers are wannabe journalists.

 

U: (continuing) Well, not exactly. You can sell a good you don’t want but you have to find someone who will want your bad (he thinks it’s a good).

 

W: Now I’m even more confused. Sellers sell bads and buyers buy goods?

 

U: Haha. Now you get it. Illegal drugs are sold by those who don’t want it. Now, if only I could sell our corrupt politicians, I’d be rich, but who would buy?

 

W: Yes, who will buy corrupt politicians?

 

U: You’d be surprised. They buy each other. Ask your pseudo-friendly PR practitioner; she’ll tell you who’s buying whom. They’re addicted to each other no end. They even party with each other, all the time looking old and decrepit, even when they’re young. It’s all very strange.

 

W: But we’ve strayed. So, again, why do drugs exist?

 

U: OK, back to square zero. Drugs aren’t inherently bad. Poison in small amounts is medicine. The problem is when you take in too much. How to prevent the “taking too much” is an economic problem.

 

W: (brightens up) Ok, now I get it. The trick is to educate ourselves to limit drugs and politicians! But nowadays, we pretend to kill drugs but glorify the politicians who like the idea of drugs to keep themselves in office. We need politicians who, like doctors, prescribe drugs as medicine so they won’t have any more jobs. I remember an economist who had a theory of “creative destruction.”

 

U: And you thought creative destruction explained only the business cycle and the stock markets. By the way, you’re on to something there when you got to thinking that drugs and corrupt politicians are similar. If there were only a few bad politicians, we could just string them up. But if they’re all over, we’re dead.

 

W: (already dead) ..

 

U: (also dead) ..

 

Narrator out of nowhere: The moral is simple. Economists, as bad as they are, say that you can’t just outlaw bads. Good night.

 

 

 

Hacienda Luisita and the wisdom of King Solomon

Land reform has become an exercise of “fair division,” a state of affairs exemplified when two children are given a cake to share, and the parent has to decide what the fair portions are.

The academic solution is well settled.  Let one child divide the cake, and let the other choose which part he wants.  These solutions can be called Solomonic bargains because of the Biblical story about King Solomon and the baby that was being contested by two claimant “mothers.”

Economic performance – what do the experts say?

In a major newspaper, three economic experts gave their reviews of the Philippine economy since 2001. Supposedly, this is to educate ourselves ahead of the annual ritual called SONA.

One, Tomas Africa, said that the government did well in sending Filipinos to jobs abroad, but failed to provide good-quality or high-paying jobs in the local economy.

Another, Cielito Habito, said that a fiscal crisis was avoided by a substantial increase in the value added tax in 2005.  Still, the “efficiency” by which the government collects tax has reportedly not improved.  The end result was an inability not only to pare down foreign debts of the government but also to fund crucial expenditures for education, health, agriculture, and infrastructure.

A third, Cayetano Paderanga, Jr., said that economic performance was good in terms of GDP growth (because of OFW remittances), a lowering of the inflation rate, and a relatively strong peso.  But the record in job creation and reduction of poverty was not as good.

Logos for libertarians and their opponents

One is from a blog called The Economist’s Cookbook.  The other is from SanctePater.

Now, would Coca Cola and American Express have any cause to sue for some kind of trade mark infringement?

Case law says the negative.  Parody is now considered fair use.  And parody is also a defense against libel.  Hoo-Hah!

Hypocrites – why the Philippines is poor II

Here’s another hint at what has kept the Philippines poor. We are more like Jamaica than Barbados, which is to say we openly embrace “nationalism”, “democracy”, and “social justice”, but something makes it all fall apart along the way. Economists call that something Okun’s Leaky Bucket. The idea is that if something good has to be done, the do-gooder takes a cut, legally or otherwise.

If we are serious about eliminating poverty, we should embrace the good old-fashioned work ethic (a la Barbados), which is very likely correlated with the existence of institutions that promote productivity, the one sure ingredient of the wealth of nations.

But see my earlier post on why we are poor.