Catch-22s of our Economic System

Sometimes when I read some of the silly statements that are written about economics, even by so-called experts, I have to wonder. Mostly, I feel that very few look at the big picture. For one thing, they write about such things as "labor" or "business" or "consumers" and so forth as though these things did not consist of human beings and were somehow not related to each other.

Basically economics consist of supply and demand. If you are selling a product or service, the price you will get for it depends upon whether prospective buyers want or need the product; that is the demand. The other factor is the amount of the product or service available. The price goes up when demand is high and supply is low. It goes down when demand is low or supply is high. A good example of this is in my field, writing. The demand for written material is fairly high, but sadly too many authors are producing more than can be sold. So, for most authors, prices for their books and e-books are low compared to the effort put into their production.

The other basic tenet of economics is that profits are based on the monetary value of the quantity of items sold minus the cost of producing the items. For example, if I sell ten widgets that sell for a dollar a piece and the cost of making those widgets including overhead expenses and advertising is ninety cents, my profit is one dollar.

This brings me to the first catch-22 of the free market economy. One of the largest expenses for most manufacturers and retailers is labor costs. As a result, many businesses will cut costs by laying off people and moving their base of operations to a country where laboris cheaper. The catch-22 here is that employees are also consumers. With no salary they cannot afford to buy stuff. If many businesses cut costs in this manner, former employees (consumers) can no longer afford to buy what is offered, and you have a recession. That is why the "trickle down" theory of economics does not work. You may reduce taxes for corporations, but what good does the extra money do if nobody is buying their products?

There is a truth that says, "money goes to money." Supposedly, in our economic system everyone has an equal chance to become wealthy. This is ridiculous. People who have money to begin with have a thousand times better chance of becoming wealthier or at least staying rich than a poor person has of even becoming mildly well off. The poor have less access to education, don't have connections to people who can smooth their way through life, and are less likely to even get employment since many are minorities who are discriminated against. Also, they are usually unable to present themselves to a prospective employer in a manner that a middleclass or rich person can.

Many conservatives advocate taxing the wealthy less and giving less to poor people. This is a recipe for economic disaster. Very wealthy people must make a real effort to spend their money; usually they save most of it to pass on to their heirs or use it to gain power. Poor people and many middle-class people, on the other hand, spend every penny they can lay their hands on and usually go into debt. Spending is what drives the economy, not saving.

Even those who advocate a free laissez faire economy don't believe their own propaganda. When a large bank or corporation is on the brink of failure due to bad policies by the people who run them, they are the first ones to cry to the federal government to bail them out, with the claim that such-and-such company is too big to fail.

Another catch-22 of the corporate economic system is that the people who run large corporations are out for their own profit even if the stockholders suffer in the long run. They cook the books and use various schemes to make the company seem as though it is making money even when it is really losing it or making bad investments. Thus their huge bonuses and golden parachutes are ensured. Most of these people came up the corporate ladder not by their ability to manage but by their ability to play office politics.

The final and most important catch-22 is the monopoly power of large banks and corporations. They and their lobbyists have the ears of the people in government, Democrats as well as Republicans. In a sense, they are the government. Politicians need their money to get reelected. Large corporations own the media. They hire the best propagandists in the world, the Madison Avenue advertising firms.

We should listen to the words of Thomas Jefferson, the greatest of our founding fathers:

"Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor."

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

Why Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics Won't Work

In Science Fiction, the Three Laws of Robotics are a set of three rules written by Isaac Asimov, which most robots that appear in his fiction must obey. Introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround," the Laws state the following:

A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

If we could actually build robots who are intelligent enough to be self-aware, would these laws actually make sense. I propose not. Take the first law. In the first place, how could the robot tell a human being from another robot that looked like a human being or from a hologram of a human being. You might say, so what. As long as the robot cannot harm a human being or anything that resembles a human being, that is all to the good. But what if a humanoid robot or hologram and a real human being are both in danger. How would the robot know which one to save? As far as that goes, if two human beings are in danger at the same time, how does a robot know which one to save. (Note: this exact situation is shown in the movie I, Robot. In the movie the robot made the wrong choice.)

For certain uses, a manufacturer would not want to apply the Laws in that order. For example, suppose the robots are to be used for military purposes. In this case, the Laws built into the robot might go something like this:

A robot must obey the orders given to it by his superior officer.

A robot must protect its own existence, and those of other soldier robot, except where such orders conflict with the First Law.

A robot may only harm those human beings or robots designated as "The Enemy," by its superior officer and only if not under a flag of truce, surrendering or designated as "Prisoners of War."

In my novel, The Isaac Project, the situation of the military wanting to change the Three Laws provides part of the conflict in the book.

One error that Isaac Asimov made was that he assumed that the intelligence of the robot would somehow be in its electronic circuitry. Actually, we know now that the intelligence of a robot would more likely be in its software. This changes the situation quite a bit, since software can have errors in it that are not always detected during testing. Also, it can be modified. Depending upon how the software is installed, it might be subjected to viruses, worms, and other sorts of malicious software tricks by unscrupulous hackers, such as our computers are now.

What is Gravity?

One of the most familiar forces is also the most mysterious, and that is gravity. In general, gravity is the force that pulls together all matter (which is anything you can physically touch). The more matter, the more gravity, so things that have a lot of matter such as planets and moons and stars pull more strongly.

The amount of matter in something is called its mass. The more massive something is, the more of a gravitational pull it exerts. As we walk on the surface of the Earth, it pulls on us, and we pull back. But since the Earth is so much more massive than we are, the pull from us is not strong enough to move the Earth, while the pull from the Earth can make us fall flat on our faces.

In addition to depending on the amount of mass, gravity also depends on how far you are from something. This is why we are stuck to the surface of the Earth instead of being pulled off into the Sun, which has many more times the gravity of the Earth.

Most of us know the effects of the mysterious force called gravity. However, the question 'what is gravity' is not easy to answer, because we don't really understand what this force actually is (if it is a force at all).

What we do know about gravity is mostly due to the work of three men, Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Kepler worked out the details of how the orbits of the moon and planets can be described mathematically. This is known as the Kepler laws of planetary motion, but it does not answer the question 'what is gravity'.

Newton, reportedly while observing an apple falling from a tree, got an inspiration that allowed him to work out how the force of gravity can be described mathematically. It later became apparent that there are some scenarios where Newton's mathematical description does not quite hold, but it still the simplest way of describing gravity. It does however also not answer the 'what is' question. Newton was uncomfortable with his own theory of gravity. He said that his theory never "assigned the cause of this power." He was unable to experimentally identify what produces the force of gravity and he refused to even offer a hypothesis as to the cause of this force on grounds that to do so was not sound science.

Einstein later worked out how the force of gravity is not quite a force, but rather an artifact of the natural movement of objects through curved four-dimensional space-time. Einstein reportedly got the inspiration for this imaginative leap in understanding of gravity by contemplating a man falling off a building. Such a falling man would not experience any force while he is falling, at least not before hitting the ground and suffering severe forces.

In his monumental 1916 work 'The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity', Albert Einstein unified his own Special Relativity, Newton's law of universal gravitation, and the crucial insight that the effects of gravity can be described by the curvature of space and time, usually called 'space-time' curvature. The radius of curvature is modified by relativistic factors, by a gravitational time dilation and by a velocity time dilation. This causes the acceleration of a falling object, as experienced by the free falling object to be larger than what Newton predicted.

So, what is gravity? The truth is that at the most fundamental level, no one really knows. This blog only summarizes the basics of Newton's and Einstein's gravity in terms of the gravitational acceleration caused by curved space-time and velocity.

We may have to wait for a theory of 'quantum gravity' to be completed for a better answer to 'what is gravity?' Quantum gravity (QG) is the field of theoretical physics attempting to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity in a self-consistent manner, or more precisely, to formulate a self-consistent theory which reduces to ordinary quantum mechanics in the limit of weak gravity (potentials much less than the speed of light squared) and which limits Einstein's general relativity to large actions (action much larger than Planck's constant). The theory must be able to predict the outcome of situations where both quantum effects and strong-field gravity are important (at the Planck scale, unless large extra dimension conjectures are correct). Although some quantum gravity theories such as string theory and other so-called theories of everything attempt to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces, others such as loop quantum gravity make no such attempt; they simply quantize the gravitational field while keeping it separate from the other forces.

So far, cosmologists, physicists and mathematicians have not arrived at a consistent theory of gravity that melds quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity.

My Top Ten Mysteries of the Universe

I'm one of those people who thinks too much. I don't just take things for granted. I'm always wondering about things that other people don't think about all. It seems to me that there are many unsolved mysteries in the universe we live in, and that the greatest mysteries concern important stuff. Science gives us partial answers and may someday give a definitive answer to some of the question I pose here. Others, obviously, will never be answered. Different religions, poets and philosophers have given various conflicting answers. You, yourself, may have an opinion concerning what the answers are which may be different from mine. Even your list may be different. That these are really the top mysteries in the universe is only my opinion.

Mystery Number 10. Is Reality All in Our Head. Each of us locked in our own head and look at the universe from our own point of view. What we personally believe is true is true -- as far as we are concerned. That is why it is usually useless for two people with opposing viewpoints to debate some fundamental issue such as the existence of God.

All of science is based on the assumption that there is an objective universe that is the same for all of us. But what proof is there that is true? Philosophers have argued this very point throughout the ages. The greatest of these in my opinion was the eighteenth century philosopher David Hume. He showed in his Treatise on Human Nature that it is impossible for us to determine this in any conclusive manner. He has had his critics, but so far, no one has been able to successfully punch holes in his conclusions.

Mystery Number 9. What is Outside the Universe? Have you ever thought about infinity? Or read what modern cosmologists have to say about the universe? Back a few centuries, people who thought about such things figured that the universe consisted of the earth which was surround by crystal spheres. Astronomers (actually astrologers) of those days never wrote about what was outside the outermost crystal sphere. Then came along Copernicus, Galileo and Newton and the universe expanded somewhat to the size of the solar system and the fixed stars out there somewhere; nobody knew how far. When astronomers gazed through more powerful telescopes and other sophisticated gear, suddenly the universe expanded to billions of light years in size.

But how far did it go? Does it stretch on forever? In the early part of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein proposed his Theory of Relativity. This and other discoveries changed everything. Cosmologists began to think of the universe as a great expanding ball (or some other shape) that had a definite limit.

Okay, that is the current view of our universe. But if our universe is a great ball (or some other shape) curved in the fourth dimension, what lies outside of it? Recent articles I have read about what modern cosmologists and physicist think about the universe speak of "multiverses." I wonder what they are like.

Mystery Number 8. Is Time Travel Possible. Before we went to the moon, space travel was considered impossible, so were speeds higher than the speed of sound, and years ago people would have scoffed that machines could do what our modern computers can or that pictures and sound could be sent through the air. Up until very recently, one thing that scientists and other thinkers were absolutely sure was impossible was travel through time, that is to go to the past or the far future and return. Recently, I've read articles in Scientific American that it may be possible after all, but energy and cost prohibitive. When the Wright brothers made their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, no one could imagine the commercial airlines of today.

Of course, those who say that we will never achieve time travel point out the paradoxes involved with travel to the past. Science-fiction time travel stories have illustrated these, and other hazards of time travel, over and over again.

Mystery Number 7. What Happens to You When You Die? Most people of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim religions would say that you go to Heaven or Hell. In some other religions, it is said that you are reborn in some other form, as an animal or another human being with most of the memories of your past lives obliterated. An atheist may say that you simply cease to exist. Somehow I can't get my mind around nonexistence. None of these possibilities have ever been proven one way or the other in a totally satisfactory manner.

In the first place, it is not clear what "you" are within your physical body. Are you simply a bunch of electrical-chemical reactions centered in your brain, like a program running in a computer? Or are "the you" that thinks about such things a sort of incorporeal vapid thing that people have given such names as "the soul," "the aura," or "the spirit?" If the latter, what happens to this invisible being at death?

Some psychics and others have claimed that they can speak to the dead. Other people have sworn that they have encountered ghosts, which may be what the spirit becomes after the body dies. Are these encounters real or simply a combination of fraud and delusion?

My hope is that my spirit is awakened on an alien planet in the far future such as in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series.

Mystery Number 6. Is Anyone Out There? The universe is vast. There are billions of stars in our own galaxy itself and billions of galaxies. Somewhere there has to be another species as intelligent and technologically inclined as us. So why haven't we heard from them? Of course, the UFO believers claim that we've been actually been visited by alien beings. The problem is that their proofs of this are not credible in a scientific sense.

Right now there are people who are listening to radio signals from all over the universe in an attempt to hear any that may be coming from an intelligent source. This effort is called SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and consists of listening to radio waves at various frequencies all over the sky. My personal opinion is that SETI is doomed to failure, not because intelligent aliens do not exist, but because of the vastness of space. Unless the aliens were located within a hundred light years or less from us, they would have to have extremely powerful transmitters beamed right us before we would detect their signals,

Mystery Number 5. How Does Intelligence Work? One of the most mysterious organs in our body is the brain. Medical specialists tell us that it operates by electrical currents, which arrive on dendrites, transmits the resulting electrical currents to other connected neurons using its axon. Different types of brain activity relate to different patterns of firing. In addition, such chemicals such as dopamine, seratonin and endomorphines are involved. Beyond that, all that is said about brain function is quite vague. For example, which signals and chemicals are involved as I write this article? No neurologist can tell me the exact the details of this. For example, which neuron fired when I thought the word "neurologist."

For several years now, software engineers and scientists have been trying to make computers intelligent. Their successes have been limited, probably because we don't really know how the brain does what it does.

One thing that always intrigued me is how intelligent animals are, even animals with much smaller brains than ours. For example, an insect can hardly be said to have a brain at all, merely a tiny nervous system. Nonetheless, if I'm sitting at my desk and a fly is buzzing around my head, I can swat at it and wave my hands around, and it persists its pestiness. As soon as I go get a fly swatter, it hides. How does it know that I can kill it with a fly swatter, but that my hands are relatively useless in harming it?

Mystery Number 4. What is Life? Scientists may be closing in on the answer to this one. A definition of life that I lifted from Wikepedia follows: "Life is a condition that distinguishes, organisms from inorganic objects, i.e. non-life objects or dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally. In terms, life is an organism that feeds on negative entropy." The problem here is that some inorganic objects have one or more of these attributes, yet are not living. For example, some chemicals such as sugar can grow crystals under certain conditions. Fire can be said to consume materials and grow thereby. Also, certain primitive organisms, such as viruses, are close to being nothing more than a collection of chemicals.

The thing is, although scientists have concluded that living organisms are simply complicated constructs of chemicals, no one yet has produced an actual living organism artificially. Frankenstein, where are you that we need you?

Mystery Number 3. What is Gravity? Although we are all familiar with gravity since it is what keeps us from flying off this earth in space, what makes it work is still a mystery. Isaac Newton first figured out the laws that govern gravitational effects back in the sixteen hundreds. Since then, no one has come up with a definitive explanation of how gravity does what it does. For one thing, gravity works at a distance although the gravitational attraction between two bodies weakens quite rapidly with distance. Nonetheless, the furthermost galaxy in the universe has some gravitational effect on earth, although quite negligible.

Albert Einstein proposed that a mass produced a kind of dent in space, the larger the mass, the greater the dent. But space is mostly nothing. How can nothing have a dent in it? Other scientists have proposed such explanations as some sort of particle called a graviton. But they have failed to detect such a particle. Hence, concrete evidence for either of these theories is still lacking verifiability.

Mystery Number 2. What is Everything Made of? Back in the ancient times, alchemists believed that matter consisted of four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. The amount of each element in the substance gave it its fundamental characteristics. But later investigators discovered that the so-called basic elements were actually combinations of more elementary chemicals. For example, water consisted of two gases, hydrogen and oxygen. As for fire, it was really a process, not a substance at all. Finally, theorists, such as Isaac Newton, thought that substances that were really elementary, such as hydrogen and oxygen, when divided into their smallest components were composed of hard indivisible bits called atoms. This atomic theory lasted until the twentieth century, when it was discovered that atoms themselves were composed of smaller parts called protons, neutrons and electrons.

But scientists are never satisfied. They found that these elementary particles could be split further into even more elementary particles. And so was born our present quantum theories. The latest thinking on the composition of matter and energy is that everything is composed of some kind of multidimensional loops called "strings." I've read several articles about quantum theory and string theory, but it's so complicated with strange concepts that I wonder whether even the physicists who propose these theories really understand them. Also, from what the articles seem to be saying is that none of these theories are cast in concrete yet. They all seem to have certain holes and inconsistencies in them.

All of which had left me baffled.

Mystery Number 1. Where Did Everything Come From? Now for the big one. Where did the universe come from? According to current scientific thought, the universe began with "The Big Bang" about ten or twenty billion years ago. Fine. I'll buy that. But what caused "The Big Bang?" Some cosmologists think that the universe may reach a certain point in its expansion and then collapse on itself, causing another "Big Bang." Hence the universe keeps oscillating between expansion and collapse. But this still begs the question of where all the stuff came from originally.

Now, I know that a lot of religious folk will say that God created the universe, either as the Big Bang or as a whole a few thousand years ago, depending upon their particular faith. Nonetheless, this still begs the question. For now we must ask, Where did God come from?"

Perhaps the answer lies in Mystery Number 10. It may all be in my head.

Afterward. Some of what I've said about the big ten questions may be inaccurate or said with tongue-in-cheek. If you wish to know what scientific theories are current and what scientists and others really have to say about these questions, tons of information are on the Internet. I also highly recommend Carl Sagan's TV series and accompanying book, Cosmos, as an introduction to these concepts. Although it is a little out of date, it is a good place to start learning about the science of cosmology. A little reading about philosophy would be good too, especially the seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. Also, there are many histories of science available.

In the future, if I get the urge, I may discuss each of these questions in more detail.