Un radioso futuro (alle spalle)

Isaac Newton disse che aveva potuto vedere lontano grazie al fatto di stare “sulle spalle di giganti”. Ho l’ impressione che avrebbe potuto vedere ben poco se fosse stato costretto a pagare questo privilegio..

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction
himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his
taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another
over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of
man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have
been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature,
when she made them ... like the air in which we
breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable
of confinement or exclusive appropriation

Thomas Jefferson

Alex Tabarrok: Launching the innovation renaissance

Per chi vuol capire il segreto di una società dinamica e innovativa, la cosa migliore è guardare alla Firenze del Rinascimento:

… Thus, in Florence, the epicenter of the Renaissance, we see five factors propelling that city's innovation: patents, prizes, education, global markets, and cosmopolitanism, an openness to ideas from around the world…

… il dinamismo pietrificato di Kang Duck-Bong è un monito eloquente…

La tentazione di liquidare il problema è forte: vuoi più innovazione? Rafforza i brevetti. Comincio allora con le conclusioni e tiro le somme sull’ utilità di questo strumento:

After hundreds of years of experience, there is surprisingly little evidence that patents actually do promote the progress of science and the useful arts…

Sono affermazioni pesanti, ma fatte sulla scorta di un attento vaglio dei dati… “nel nome della rosa”, per esempio:

roses are a good test for the power of patents because, whether they are patented or not, roses are registered so we have good data on rose innovation as well as on rose patents.9 In fact, a majority of new roses created between 1930 and 1970 — 84 percent in total — were never patented.10 Thus, most rose innovation is not due to patents, and even without patents we would have plenty of new roses…

Ma peggio sembrano i cosiddetti “brevetti difensivi”:

Defensive patenting, as this practice is called, is basically a waste. It's a prisoner's dilemma in which two (or more) firms spend resources patenting only in order to trade patent rights with each other — the same outcome that would happen under a system of weaker patent rights. 

Ma com’ è mai possibile che i brevetti non stimolino l’ innovazione?

Rather than increase innovation, however, firms with lots of patents seemed to decrease research and development.13 To understand why this might occur, imagine an industry where patents are weak and innovation is rapid, so firms must innovate just to survive. In this kind of environment, firms will not hesitate to introduce technologies even if the new technologies make their own previous technologies redundant. Firms innovate because they know that if they don't, someone else will. In this kind of industry, instead of stimulating innovation strong patents may create a "resting on laurels" effect. A firm with strong patents may reduce innovation, secure in the knowledge that patents protect it.

Tutto risolto? Tutto chiarito? Magari, i brevetti funzionano piuttosto bene in molti settori (peccato):

Patents have a better track record for generating innovative pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceutical innovation is expensive; it costs about $1 billion to research and develop the average new drug.18 The costs of imitating a new drug, however, are very low. A billion dollars for the first pill, 50 cents for the second. As a result, it's not surprising that the managers of pharmaceutical firms — unlike those in almost all other industries — report that patent protection is important for innovation.

In sintesi: i brevetti funzionano dove il rapporto tra costi d’ innovazione e costi d’ imitazione è particolarmente elevato. A questo punto qualcuno trasecola pensando ai “costi di copiatura”: è così facile copiare, basta dare una sbirciatina. Esatto? No:

Thomas Keller has been called the best chef in America. His restaurant, the French Laundry, is regularly listed among the world's finest. There are only 14 tables so it's nearly impossible to get a seat, and if you do get a seat, the prices are high. But why bother? In The French Laundry Cookbook Keller presents his exact recipes. Stay at home, follow the recipe, save yourself the time and trouble of traveling to Napa, and you can still enjoy a meal every bit as good as at the French Laundry. Convinced? I hope not. Imitation is not as easy as it appears even with an exact recipe. What is true about recipes and the French Laundry is also true about innovation in general.

Inventare contemporaneamente all’ insaputa dell’ altro sembra una coincidenza sbalorditiva. Tutt’ altro:

In reality, the majority of patent cases do not involve copying but independent invention.23 In the paradigmatic patent case the alleged infringer not only doesn't copy the patented idea, the alleged infringer doesn't even know that a patent on the idea exists. Independent invention is common. Well-known cases
include Newton and Leibniz with the calculus and Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray and Johann Philipp Reis with the telephone. We think that Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler worked together to produce the gasoline-powered
automobile, but they never met. Their invention was simultaneous (Daimler-Benz became a company only years later). If independent invention i  the norm for worldclass innovations, is it any surprise that independent invention is the norm for more ordinary innovation?

Ora sappiamo che spesso i brevetti non stimolano l’ innovazione; resta da affrontare i casi più paradossali: quelli in cui la riducono!

In addition to often being unnecessary, patents can reduce innovation. In many industries, innovation is a
cumulative process with new innovations building on older innovations. The problem is that under a strong patent
regime, old innovators can block new competitors. Instead of promoting innovation, patents have become a way to veto innovation. In the software, semiconductor and biotech sectors, for example, a new product can require the use of hundreds or even thousands of previous patents, giving each patent owner veto-power over innovation…

Per altri i brevetti assolvono a una funzione rilevante… che non è “innovare”, bensì per “litigare”:

In 2011 Apple, HTC, RIM, Nokia and Google were all suing one another in various combinations over patent rights to smartphone technology… To protect themselves from thousands of potential veto threats, big firms like Google, Microsoft and Apple have gone on a patent buying spree, paying billions for patent arsenals. Firms aren't buying the arsenals to gain access to new technology. They are buying old patents so that they can threaten to counter-sue any firm trying to veto their innovation…

E in tutto questo bailamme, chi ci rimette le penne?

Small firms are often the source of radical innovation, the type of innovation that threatens big firms, so the rise of the patent arsenal could decrease truly important innovations.

Poi ci sono i brevetti sui “mezzi” per innovare, il caso dei topolini brevettati per sperimentare medicinali contro il cancro è esemplare:

What the tale of the OncoMouse tells us is that patents in research tools and fields with cumulative innovation can be much costlier than patents for consumer products. A patent on a new toaster, a new rose or even a new pharmaceutical will reduce the consumption of these products, but a patent on a new mouse reduces new ideas.

Morale:

Innovators need time to recoup their sunk costs, but why should every useful, non-obvious and novel idea be granted a 20-year patent? Maximizing innovation requires treating different industries differently.

Pensiamo ora a qualche soluzione: innanzitutto meglio brevettare le cose piuttosto che le idee:

Edison famously said "genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."31 A patent system should reward the 99 percent perspiration, not the 1 percent inspiration. In inventing the light bulb, for example, Edison laboriously experimented with some 6,000 possible materials for the filament before hitting upon bamboo. If Edison were to patent the light bulb today, he would not need to go to such lengths. Instead, Edison could patent the use of an "electrical resistor for the production of electromagnetic radiation," a patent that would have covered oven elements as well as light bulbs… Broad claims reduce the incentives of future inventors to invest the sunk costs that are necessary to create actual working products. What has happened in recent decades is that the patent court has allowed much broader claims, and just as the 1895 Supreme Court described, this has created injustice and discouraged innovation…

Proseguiamo con i premi:

On April 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne rocketed more than 100 kilometers into space, launching private space exploration into the 21st century and winning Burt Rutan and his team the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. After falling into disuse in the 20th century, prizes have seen a resurgence in the 21st…

Cosa c’ è che non va con i premi:

The major vice of a prize fund is that it replaces a decentralized process for rewarding innovation with a political process. Under patents, many thousands of medical consumers decide which products to buy or not buy, generating a flow of payments that in sum total rewards producers for medical innovation. No one person
or group is in charge of deciding which pharmaceuticals to reward or by how much to reward them. In contrast, under a prize fund both the size of the innovation fund and how it is divided became political decisions… The Medical Innovation Prize Fund, as a mandatory replacement for patents, has two problems: It's a) difficult to estimate the true value of a patent and b) difficult to avoid politicization of the reward process…

Soluzioni:

The economist Michael Kremer has made a clever proposal that avoids both of these problems.44 Kremer suggests that patents be auctioned, much like electromagnetic spectrum bands or timber licenses are auctioned today. In an open auction with plenty of bidders, the winning bid will be a good estimate of the true value of the patent. In Kremer's proposal, after holding the auction the government will then roll, say, a 10-sided die. Nine times out of 10 the patent would not be sold to the high bidder but to the government at the auction price plus a markup.

Altra soluzione: puntare sull’ intelligenza delle persone. Ora come ora andiamo malino, persino nella patria che da sempre accoglie i cervelli migranti:

Productivity means working smarter, getting more from the same inputs of labor and capital. From 1947 to about 1973 productivity increased rapidly; we were working smarter and getting the benefits in the post-WWII boom. Beginning around 1973, however, productivity grew more slowly and more of our economic growth came from working harder; for example, from increasing the share of women in the workforce. Nothing wrong with hard work, but if productivity had continued to grow along the 1947-1973 trend then wages today would be more than 50% higher than they are now. In terms of innovation, if productivity had continued to grow along the 1947-1973 trend then we would be living today in the world of 2076 instead of the world of 2011. The post-1973 period has been called the Great Stagnation…

Dobbiamo cominciare con l’ ammettere che oggi l’ università è sopravvalutata, persino nella patria delle università:

College has been oversold, and in the process the amount of education actually going on in college has declined as colleges have dumbed down classes and inflated grades to accommodate students who would be better off in apprentice and on-the-job training programs. As the number of students attending college has grown, the number of workers with university education but high school jobs has increased. Baggage porters and bellhops don't need college degrees, but in 2008 17.4 percent of them had at least a bachelor's degree and 45 percent had some college education… More than half of the college graduates in the humanities end up in jobs that do not require a college degree. Not surprisingly, these graduates do not get a big "college bonus."…

Paradosso: vanno meglio i paesi che hanno puntato su diplomi e scuole professionali:

It may seem odd that at the same time that the United States is failing to get people through high school, it is also pushing too many students into college. But let's compare the situation with Germany's. As we said earlier, 97 percent of German students graduate from high school, but only a third of these students go on to college. In the United States we graduate fewer students from high school, but nearly two-thirds of those we graduate go to college, almost twice as many as in Germany.73 So are German students undereducated? Not at all…

E poi ricordate: non conta la laurea (a volte nemmeno dove la prendete): conta il tipo di laurea:

American students are also not studying the fields with the greatest potential for increasing economic growth. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor's degrees in computer and information science. Not bad, but here is the surprise: We graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! In comparison, the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts in 2009 — more than double the number of 25 years ago! Figure three shows some of the relevant data. Few fields have been as revolutionized in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor's degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance? There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology and journalism, but graduates in these fields are less likely to
find work in their field than graduates in computer science, microbiology and chemical engineering…

Rischiamo di perderci il meglio, per evitaro: puntare sull’ immigrazione qualificata:

The U.S. policy toward high-skill immigrants is truly bizarre. Annually we allow approximately 120,000 employment visas, which cover people of extraordinary ability, professionals with advanced degrees, and other skilled workers. The number is absurdly low for a country with a workforce of 150 million. As a result, it can be years, even decades, before a high-skilled individual is granted a U.S. visa…

Altra soluzione: migliori insegnanti, migliori studenti, migliore società… capite bene il brivido che ci percorre quando si viene a sapere che:

Teachers used to come from the top ranks of their college classes, but today 47 percent of America's teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes…

Innovazione contro welfare-warfare:

But at the level of government, the innovation nation competes with the warfare and welfare state

E’ forse questo uno stato che mette l’ innovazione al suo centro?

Altro freno: le regole. Esempio nel campo delle costruzioni:

Building in the United States today, for example, requires navigating a thicket of environmental, zoning and aesthetic regulations that vary not only state by state but also county by county. If building a house is difficult, try building an airport. Passenger travel has more than tripled since deregulation in 1978, but in that time only one major new airport has been built, namely, Denver's. That airport is now the fourth busiest in the world. Indeed the top seven busiest airports are all in the United States, not so much because we are big but because without new construction we are forced to overcrowd our existing infrastructure.89 The result is delays and inefficiency. Meanwhile, China is building 50 to 100 new airports over the next 10 years.

Da dove arriverà l’ innovazione di domani:

Education is stagnating in the United States but booming in China. In 1998, Chinese universities were accepting a million new students a year; today it's closer to 6 million. Needless to say, Chinese students are not majoring in dance and sociology; 41 percent of the undergraduate degrees and 50 percent of the graduate degrees are in science and engineering. There are now more scientists and engineers in China than in the United States.

Più consumatori di idee, più idee:

The United States benefits not just from more idea creators in China, India and the rest of the world but also from more idea consumers. Recall the problem of rare diseases. People with a rare disease are doubly unlucky: They have a disease and only a few people with whom to share the costs of developing a cure. Misery loves company because company can help pay for research and development. More consumers mean a greater willingness to pay for ideas, ideas that benefit the world. Consider, if China and India were as rich as the United States is now, the market for cancer drugs would be 8.3 times as large as it is now. Larger markets mean greater incentives to invest in research and development, and that means more innovation.

Tirando le somme, ecco allora la ricetta per un problema che in realtà non puo’ avere ricette: puntare solo sui brevetti è illusorio, bisogna innovare le politiche dell’ innovazione ricorrendo a premi, aste e quant’ altro; insegnanti, abbiamo bisogno di voi, sveglia! Finché rattrappite sotto l’ ala del sindacato sarete sempre inservibili, sottopagati e vittime di uno strisciante disprezzo sociale; l’ università di massa è un tappo: più selezione, più diplomi qualificati e più scuola professionale per liberare le accademie; rivedere a fondo il sistema di immigrazione per favorire i talenti che vengono da fuori; welfare e innovazione sono come botte piena e moglie ubriaca: decidiamo cosa vogliamo essere e dove vogliamo investire; anche le regole migliori, quando si cumulano, ostruiscono l’ azione dei più innovativi; costruire un unico mondo, un unico mercato, è la cosa migliore per avere “idee uniche”.

… brevetto Gillette…

Libri sull’ irrilevanza dei libri

Orma ci si sente in dovere di scovare una causa materiale per tutto: dietro ogni fenomeno si annida un gene, un neurone, un interesse (materiale, per l’ appunto) che lo spiega al meglio.

Il fatto curioso è che ci si sente anche in dovere di scrivere libri per annunciare al mondo le proprie scoperte e convincere il prossimo. Evidentemente si ripone una certa fiducia nelle proprie idee.

Un attimo, ma le idee non sono oggetti immateriali?

Per il materialista duro e puro “scrivere un libro” suona un po’ come un’ autodenuncia.

… after all, he and I write books trying to change people's minds. If we were consistent materialists we would put down our pens and start offering people large bribes to become xyz…

Deirdre Mccloskey parla di  Matt Riedley

Un buon titolista

I clienti dei ristoranti dovrebbero poter fumare?

Gli studenti delle scuole dovrebbero imparare l’ evoluzionismo o l’ Intelolligent Design?

I cattolici dovrebbero sussidiare la pratica dell’ aborto?

Dovrei togliermi le scarpe quando entro in casa tua?

… smoke art…

Ho come l’ impressione che tutte e quattro le domande abbiano la stessa risposta. Il saggio per illustrarla non saprei scriverlo, anche se conosco già il titolo: "How Property Rights Solve Problems".

Vanità delle vanità

… we generally choose to use vague terms like “tall” or “red” even though the English language allows us to say “6 foot 5.2 inches” or to define a color in terms of CMYK…

Il perché di questa scelta è avvolto in un mistero mai dipanato a dovere.

E a nulla vale ipotizzare l’ utilità della parola vaga nell’ opera di depistaggio di chi ascolta: il linguaggio vago viene usato anche in contesti dove gli interessi degli interlocutori sono perfettamente allineati.

Ma forse, per capire meglio il "mistero” di cui parlo, è utile un esempio:

… for example, the speaker may need the listener to pick up a friend at the airport, and want to describe the friend’s height. Both players have the same utility function, so there is no conflict of interest…

E il problema dove sta (dirà ancora qualcuno)?

In this story, a vague statement is just a strange strategy… for example, imagine the message space is “tall” and “short”. A vague language has the speaker say “tall” when the friend is above six feet, say “short” if below five foot eight, and play a mixed strategy if the height is inbetween. A precise strategy picks some cutoff, says “tall” is above the cutoff, and “short” otherwise.

A one-line proof shows that the precise language always gives higher utility to both players than the vague language.

L’ esempio è utile poiché illustra quanto siano poco calzanti quelle spiegazione che troviamo naturali di primo acchito:

So what explains vagueness…?

It’s not a matter of using a more limited vocabulary: in the example above, “tall” and “short” are the only words in both the vague or the precise cases.

It’s also not a matter of context-flexibility. In both the vague and precise cases, we still need some sense of what tall means when referring to coffee and what tall means when referring to NBA players.

It’s not even a matter of the impossibility of precision: the phrase “tall” can precisely refer to an interval, or precisely refer to a distribution…

Primo tentativo di soluzione:

… may be people use vague speech because they have a vague understanding of the world; that is, people do not actually form, say, a subjective probability distribution over the height of who they are talking about…

Direi poco soddisfacente: perché mai un’ incertezza non potrebbe tradursi in una probabilità soggettiva?

Veniamo a qualcosa di meglio:

… vagueness can actually help search…

Un modo per minimizzare il rischio di malintesi. Esempio:

Imagine asking someone to grab a blue book for you, and imagine that we have slight perceptual differences in how we see color.

If blue is precisely defined, then your friend will first look through your blue books (as he perceives them), and if he does not see the book you want, will have to search through the rest of your collection at random.

If blue is vaguely defined, your friend will first look through all the books he considers “bluish”, and only after doing that will search the rest of your collection. When there is a sufficient lack of overlap in our conceptions of blue, the vague search will be quicker….

Bart Lipman - Why is language vague?

Troppa avanguardia? An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art

#cowen

Molti amanti della musica lamentano da sempre la presenza ingombrante di avanguardie artistiche astruse e incomprensibili. Si puo’ liquidare questa posizione come retrograda, oppure si puo’ giustificarne il senso. Oggi provo a simpatizzare con la seconda opzione.

Il mondo dell’ arte è davvero strano, difficilmente inquadrabile negli schemi tradizionali:

… Artists both produce and consume their own work… artists seek not only profit, but also fame, critical praise, the satisfaction of creating works that speak to them personally and the enjoyment which flows from artistic labor. Most generally, artists produce works of a type which pleases themselves, in addition to pleasing the market…

Per un qualche motivo capita che l’ artista cessi di rivolgersi al pubblico per concentrarsi unicamente sulla sua musa:

… Beethoven wrote his late string quartets to satisfy his creative urges, knowing the works were too complex to satisfy a wide public audience at the time. Donatello and Michelangelo, perhaps the best-known sculptors from the Italian Renaissance, would walk away from commissions if they could not determine the content of the project… James Joyce chose a level of esoterica for his Finnegans Wake that excluded most of the world’s readers, even intellectually inclined ones…

Cominciamo innanzitutto a capire come mai artisti e intellettuali in genere odino l mercato:

The trade-off between pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits may help to explain the notorious antipathy of many artists towards the market. The market “disciplines” the artist and forces him to pay a price for producing the art he most desires. Artists typically feel that market incentives lower the quality of art… and forces him to pay a price for producing the art he most desires. Artists typically feel that market incentives lower the quality of art… Intuitively, the more the artist works in the art sector the more income he loses from a shift to higher satisfaction, but less saleable, art. An amateur artist who receives most of his income from labor in the manufacturing sector can afford to produce his own brand of art at little loss in income….

Ora è chiaro perché gli artisti più significativi – almeno un tempo – fossero ricchi di famiglia: l’ arte pura è una melodiosa sirena soprattutto per l’ ereditiere:

French cultural activity, for instance, relied heavily upon family funds and bequests. French painters who lived from family wealth include Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, Seurat, Degas, Manet, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Moreau; the list of writers includes Baudelaire, Verlaine, Flaubert, and Proust…

Capiamo anche perché certe avanguardie un po’ cervellotiche siano possibili soprattutto in presenza di sussidio governativo; il fatto è che tutto cio’ crea una spirale perversa:

… The dependence of artistic satisfaction on government support introduces a possible bias into decision making. As government support increases, artists turn away from market sales and art wages fall. Thus, as government support increases, the market appears to become more philistine and the argument for government funding appears stronger…

Ma cos’ è esattamente l’ avanguardia?

…Art is typically considered avant-garde if the style is offbeat and the product appeals to a select few. John Cage’s compositions or James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake provide paradigmatic examples of avant-garde art. We can hypothesize that artists prefer these styles for their artistic complexity and novelty, the same factors that make them inaccessible to the public and popular with high-brow critics…

Si ha sempre la sensazione che le arti visive guidino lo sviluppo delle arti in generale. I pittori son sempre più “avanti”, seguono i musicisti, poi arriva il teatro e buoni ultimi i cineasti. La spiegazione è abbastanza semplice:

… When creative labor accounts for only one percent of total cost, however, an offer to lower artistic wages to zero will probably not induce the shareholders to move in less popular directions. Thus, artistic products tend to fit into money-making popular culture genres when shareholders have a strong influence on the final product, and tend more towards the avant-garde when shareholders are absent or have little influence…

Film is a more capital intensive medium than theatre and theatre is a more capital intensive medium than painting.

Si noti anche che l’ avanguardia è un fenomeno tipico dei paesi ricchi:

… avant-garde art have flourished to such a considerable degree in wealthy capitalist countries.

High art in general has flourished in relatively prosperous societies. The high art of the Renaissance came from Florence and the Italian city-states, the richest part of the Western world in their day. Periclean Athens was a relatively wealthy trading city. Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven, and the French Impressionists all relied upon growing propserity to sustain their activities…

Avant-garde art, a product of recent times, tends to flourish only in extremely wealthy societies. Avant-garde artists such as John Cage or Nam June Paik can earn a living in wealthy capitalist societies; we cannot imagine such artists having managed to support themselves in Colonial America, for instance.

Il motivo è abbastanza semplice:

… In 1875 it required 1800 hours of labor to earn enough income to feed oneself, today it requires just 260 hours (Fogel, 1999). This effective increase in income is used to purchase “leisure time,” time to do what we like rather than what we must. One application of this general result is that as the wealth of society increases the number of market sales required to support an artist decreases. Thus, the wealthier the society the more liberated the artist…

Un altro fenomeno dell’ arte contemporanea è la forte divergenza tra cultura alta e cultura bassa (cultural split):

Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were very successful with public audiences, both in the concert arena and with their sheet music. Today we have many renowned composers - Carter, Boulez, Babbitt, and many others - who receive high critical plaudits but have virtually no public audience. At the same time many popular artists - George Michael, Michael Bolton, Paula Abdul - sell millions of recordings but may not pass into the history books or receive critical praise. We observe similar phenomena in painting and literature. The most renowned painters of the Italian Renaissance created styles that appealed to a broad public, whereas the most renowned painters today have moved in a less popular direction. Similarly, John Grisham sells more copies than Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Claude Simon does. In earlier times, renowned writers, such as Dickens, Balzac, or Hugo were the bestselling authors of their day but this phenomena appears to become progressively rarer. An examination of modern best-seller lists also illustrates this tendency…

Spiegazione:

The divergence between high and low culture over time follows from several factors… as an artist’s income increases, whether from general economic growth or an increase in the demand for art, the artist becomes more willing to sacrifice income in return for the non-pecuniary benefits of higher satisfaction art. Economic growth also tends to lower capital costs and so… the preferences of artists come to play a larger and larger… role in genres once considered purely popular. For the artist, economic growth brings liberation from the market…

But not all artists are motivated by non-pecuniary benefits. As the size of the market increases, many artists become more avant-garde but the number of “crowd pleaser” artists will increase as well. Mass culture will attain greater size and scope. As both popular and avant-garde sectors grow, we will observe an apparent divergence of high and low culture. The avant-garde artists have a smaller chance of taking the greatest market share, and the crowd pleaser artists have a smaller chance of winning critical acclaim…

Come colmare lo iato? Estendere i mercati e rendere l’ arte “riproducibile” puo’ aiutare

… A uniform increase in the size of market will therefore tend to homogenize the choices of artists. Artist’s previously focused on market sales will take some of their higher wages in the form of aesthetic satisfaction while artist’s who previously focused only on satisfying their own tastes will be induced to conform more closley to market demands…

Un’ ultima osservazione: le tasse incrementano la qualità dell’ arte prodotta:

Taxes can increase the number of artists and the quality of art because taxation increases non-pecuniary returns relative to pecuniary returns… The intuition behind proposition 3.2 is straightforward - a tax on money income leaves the non-pecuniary return to labor in the arts untaxed… Consider, for example, a wage tax of 100%; in such a case every artist would produce only to satisfy their own aesthetic demands.

Modern governments, therefore, provide very considerable incentives for avant-garde and high art, to the extent that creators pursue non-pecuniary benefits. High marginal rates of income taxation encourage artists to increase the supply of avant-garde and high art. This indirect support of high art and the avant-garde may be far greater than the direct effects of government support.

Insomma, un paese ad alta tassazione e con una cultura in buona parte sussidiata produce un eccesso di avanguardie e di qualità artistica: la lamentazione di molti musicofili sarebbe quindi giustificata.

Tyler Cowen Alexander Tabarrok - An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture

Insegnare San Tommaso o Don Ciotti?

Nelle scuole italiche, come alternativa alla tanto paventata “ora di legalità”, si potrebbe proporre l’ “ora di illegalità”: il contenuto edificante è assicurato, soprattutto alle elementari.

A volte - lo avete notato anche voi? - i paesaggi “deturpati” dagli imbrattatori sono più creativi di quelli “deturpati” dalle ordinanze.

Fatevi solo una domanda: Italia, addì, anno del Signore 2012… è più civile infrangere una legge o promulgarla?

Today my guess is that making laws is on average worse than breaking them…

Vediamo ora, dopo aver predicato, come razzoliamo. Dilemma: per educare la bimba, meglio nascondere o ostentare la presenza in macchina di un segnalatore-autovelox?

… my colleague Alan Stockman faced this dilemma when his oldest daughter Gwendolyn turned three and curious.

Alan opted for the hide-the-detector strategy, lest Gwendolyn get the idea that all rules are made to be broken.

The truth, of course, is that some rules are made to be broken and others are not, but philosophers as subtle as Saint Thomas Aquinas have grappled with the question of where to draw the line.

For Aquinas the key criterion was conformity with natural law, which is all well and good for a
sophisticated adult, but Alan didn’t think his three-year-old was quite prepared to grasp the concept of a natural speed limit.

So to maintain his daughter’s respect for the rule of law, Alan lived without a radar detector for a few years. There would be time enough, as Gwendolyn grew older, to show her that between black and white there are many shades of gray.

I told Alan he had the analysis half right and half wrong. The part he had right was this: It’s true that a very young child is likely to be confused if you tell her that some laws are bad while others are good. But it’s wrong to conclude, as Alan did, that very young children should be allowed to
believe that all laws are good.

My own inclination is to go the opposite route, by teaching the very young that all laws
are bad. As those children grow older and more sophisticated, they can be gradually introduced to the advanced Aquinean concept that some laws are actually just.

You walk a thin line with these things. I do want my daughter to know that policemen are good, in the sense that if you are lost they will help you find your way home. But I also want her to know that policemen are bad, in the sense that they enforce a lot of bad laws. I’ve talked to her
about this paradox, and she has no trouble grasping it.

0,45… e altri numeretti

Gesù è Dio?

Ci sono buone probabilità che sia così. Io direi un 45%.

Nelle meditazioni sul “Credo” si sgranano alcuni argomenti-a-priori che rendono la comparsa e l' azione di Gesù prevedibile, almeno in parte.

Manteniamoci prudenti e ammettiamo che questi argomenti consentano di stimare vera al 25% una storia come quella dell’ uomo/dio morto sulla croce per redimerci dai peccati e giudicarci al termine della nostra vita terrena.

Passando poi all' evidenza storica, la testimonianza dell’ esistenza di Gesù ci è data dai Vangeli, ma quanto è sensato appoggiarsi a documenti del genere?

Lo scettico non crede alla divinità di Gesù, ma nemmeno si meraviglia che esista qualcosa come i Vangeli: si tratta pur sempre di storie empatiche che l’ uomo potrebbe produrre indipendentemente dai fatti o condizionato dai suoi bias una volta esposto a fatti ben diversi da quelli che riporta.

Adottiamo pure una prospetiva moderatamente scettica e diciamo che l’ esistenza dei Vangeli, a prescindere dall’ esistenza reale di Gesù, sia probabile al 50%.

Certo che, proprio per quanto appena detto in una prospettiva scettica, se poi Gesù è esistito e ha realmente fatto quel che narrano i Vangeli, allora l’ esistenza della scritture non sorprende più nessuno: diciamo che è un fatto probabile al 90%.

Con questi tre numeretti possiamo ora calcolare la probabilità che Gesù sia Dio: 45%. Niente male per essere una tra le tante ipotesi in campo!

I numeretti sono provocatori, forse a questo punto è meglio usare le parole e dire che l’ ipotesi di un Gesù/Dio è plausibile.

… altri numeretti molto “umani”…

Ma questo calcolo serve alla fede?

Secondo alcuni sì:

many… believe that there is a God on the basis of testimony; that is, because their parents or teachers or priest tell them that there is a God, and they think their parents or whoever are knowledgeable and trustworthy.

It seems to me that religious experience provides a good reason for believing—so long as that experience is overwhelming, and you don’t know of any strong objections to the existence of God. If we didn’t believe that what it seems to us obvious that we are experiencing is really there, when there are no good reasons for doubting that that thing is really there, we couldn’t believe anything. And the testimony of others that there is a God also provides a good reason for believing—so long as everyone tells us the same thing, and we don’t know of any strong reasons why they might be mistaken.

If we didn’t believe what others told us, for example, about history or geography, until we had checked it out for ourselves, we would have very few beliefs.

But I think that very few people have overwhelming religious experiences, and in the modern world most people come into contact not merely with those who tell them that there is a God but also with those who tell them that there is no God, and most people are aware of strong objections to the existence of God.

So I think that most people in the modern world need to have their experiences or the testimony of others reinforced by reasons to suppose that the objections to the existence of God do not work. But instead or as well as such reasons, they also need a positive argument for the existence of God which starts from very obvious observable data if they are to have good reason to believe that there is a God…

Di altro avviso sembra essere Don Giussani:

… non è il ragionamento astratto che fa crescere, che allarga la mente, ma il trovare nell’umanità un momento di verità raggiunta e detta. È la grande inversione di metodo che segna il passaggio dal senso religioso alla fede: non è
più un ricercare pieno di incognite, ma la sorpresa di un fatto accaduto nella storia degli uomini…

Sia chiaro, se Gesù diventa una mera “sorpresa”, allora il 25% di cui sopra si comprime drammaticamente indebolendo ogni base razionale per la fede in lui.

Probabilmente sì…

… scusate, stavo interrogandomi sull' esistenza di Dio affidandomi unicamente alla mia testa. La conclusione “probabilmente sì” mi sembra la più plausibile.

Ma perché? Perché è la “teoria del tutto” più semplice a nostra disposizione.

Ricordiamoci che più “semplice” è l’ ipotesi, più crescono le probabilità che sia vera.

[… c’ è stato un furto, tutti hanno visto Vallanzasca nei paraggi e, oltretutto, ci sono le sue impronte digitali in loco; in commissariato si formulano due ipotesi: 1. il ladro è Vallanzasca e 2. il ladro è uno sconosciuto travestito da Vallanzasca dotato di un marchingegno di sua invenzione per riprodurre impronte digitali false. Voi per quale ipotesi propendete? Scommetto per la più “semplice”…]

Pensate solo al materialista che riflette sull’ origine delle cose: è costretto a postulare che da sempre esistono parecchie particelle (fatte così e cosà), parecchie leggi (che funzionano così e cosà) e una serie di coincidenze sbalorditive.

Fondamentale: quando dico che “X puo’ fare questo e non quello” lancio un messaggio molto più complesso rispetto a quando dico che “X puo’ fare tutto”. Se poi oltre a X devo metterci anche Y e Z, tutto diventa più complicato.

In assenza di possibili verifiche, non è più saggio postulare un’ unica causa intelligente?

Dovendo spiegare “tutto”, esiste forse un’ ipotesi più semplice di quella che assume l’ esistenza di un Dio?

… le foto di Dio scattate dalla Nasa…

… theism is a very simple hypothesis… It postulates the existence of one entity (one god, not many gods), with very few very simply describable properties…

… a person with no limits to his power, knowledge, freedom, and life is the simplest kind of person there could be…

Infinite power is power with zero limits. Infinite knowledge is knowledge with zero limits because it involves no limit (except one imposed by logic) to the number of well-justified true beliefs…

Perfect freedom means that the person’s choices are unlimited by irrational desires…

Eternity means no temporal limit to life…

And God being ontologically necessary, meaning that there are no others on whom he depends, obviously fits well with his other properties…

It is also simpler to suppose that God
has these properties essentially, for that makes God a more unified being; it means that the divine properties not merely do not, but could not, come apart…

And it is simpler to suppose that God is what he is solely in virtue of his essential properties; that is, he has no underlying ‘thisness’—for that is a more economical supposition…

…

Sesta meditazione del Credo niceno: Inferno e Paradiso

A quanto pare il Paradiso non è proprio una ricompensa:

… only those who love doing actions which are good for their own sake would be happy there in Haeven…

Inferno? Perché il “confino”:

God has good reason to allow people to hurt others in this world, in order to give them and those others significant choices between good and evil and the opportunities to form their characters. But there is no good reason for God to allow people to go on hurting others in another world after their characters are formed. So those who have allowed themselves to become totally bad people will be a collection of unfulfilled desires, and that will inevitably be an unhappy state, which would constitute living in Hell…

Inferno? Una questione di rispetto.

… he must respect that choice and permit them permanently to reject him and all that he stands for. Otherwise in creating humans God would be like a puppet master who ensures that in the end every human does what he (God) wants, and has no ultimate freedom to determine the sort of person they are to be.

Quinta meditazione del “Credo” niceano: la Chiesa

“Osservate il Sabato”, ecco un comandamento essenziale!

Che me ne faccio della tavola su cui è inciso il “non uccidere”: lo sapevo già! E con me lo sapevano tutti. Ma la “rivelazione” divina diventa imprescindibile quando si tratta di capire che è nostro dovere “osservare il Sabato”.

Per il cattolico l’ “eccellenza” è un dovere, ma perseguirla presenta almeno due inconvenienti: 1) è faticoso: provatevi voi; 2) è oscura: chiari sono solo i doveri minimi.

Perché Dio c’ impone obblighi che difficilmente avremmo adempiuto spontaneamente? Due ragioni svettano sulle altre:

1. per creare nella società un costume che faciliti il coordinamento dei comportamenti umani: se le incertezze ambientali diminuiscono tutti possono perseguire meglio i rispettivi obiettivi indipendentemente da quali essi siano. Lo dicono i teologi, e la scienza sociale più avanzata gentilmente conferma (vedi F.A. von Hayek).

2. per rendere “importanti” certe azioni al fine di favorire la felicità umana: l’ uomo è felice quando si realizza nel compimento di opere “importanti”. Lo dicono i teologi, e la psicologia evolutiva gentilmente conferma (vedi Jonathan Haidt).

Mi soffermo ancora un attimo sul punto due con un esempio: noi sappiamo che per aiutare il prossimo le forme di volontariato sono irrazionali; meglio sarebbe che il benefattore si impegni in cio’ che sa fare per poi devolvere il ricavato a “professionisti dell’ aiuto”. Eppure i “volontari” animati dalle migliori intenzioni pullulano, e non sono certo stupidi. Perché? Bè, adesso lo sappiamo: perché oltre a voler aiutare il prossimo intendono aumentare il loro benessere interiore “realizzandosi” partecipando in prima persona a una missione “importante”.

Altro esempio:

…the prohibition of divorce is obviously a considerable burden on those whose marriages seem to have broken down. Why should God make divorce difficult or impossible —say, for a wife to divorce a cruel (though not unfaithful) husband? These instructions have never been seen as forbidding a temporary separation in such circumstances, but why should not the wife marry again? An apparent breakdown of marriage may be repairable. But that is much more likely to happen if the spouses regard themselves as bound by their original commitment never to give up attempting to overcome difficulties in the marriage. And even if all the attempts of some couples to make their marriages work fail, the persistence of these couples in this task will encourage other couples to try harder to make their marriages work; and these other couples may succeed in this task. And further, if separated spouses do not remarry, that will bring home to others considering marriage the seriousness of the marriage commitment and deter them from entering into marriage too lightly…

Per connettere la morale con la felicità dell’ uomo si rende necessaria una rivelazione. Nel Credo si menzionano i profeti, Gesù e la Chiesa. Evidentemente occorre una rivelazione sempre aggiornata che muti al mutare del contesto.

L’ “usura” è stata proibita per più di 1300 anni, ma oggi?:

Jews of Old Testament times and the Christian Church for its first 1,300 years taught (as Islam still teaches) that usury, that is, lending money to someone on condition of receiving it back with interest, is wrong. But the societies to which that teaching was addressed were ones in which it was mainly the rich who lent money to the poor at a high rate of interest; when someone could not feed their family, they borrowed money from a rich man. God has very good reason to tell people of such societies not to receive interest on money: it would be very cruel for the rich individuals to demand interest from the poor. Yet in our modern commercial society it is often people of modest income who lend money to financial institutions which earn a lot of money for their shareholders, some of whom are very rich, by the use to which they put the borrowed money.

Ancient societies did not have financial institutions of the modern kind. It is not a necessary truth of morality that people have an obligation not to receive interest on money which they lend to financial institutions, and God surely has no reason for imposing such an obligation; although surely he still has very good reason to forbid lending to poor people at high rates of interest.

Sarei curioso di ascoltare una storiella del genere,,, che ne so… per il celibato dei sacerdoti, diciamo.

Cambiano i contesti e cambiano anche linguaggi ed esigenze, abbiamo bisogno di una rivelazione continua, di un’ incarnazione continua: abbiamo bisogno di una Chiesa.

To be easily comprehensible in some society, it is often best if teaching is expressed within the presuppositions of that society. For example, if a society thinks that the world consists of two parts, the Earth and the Dome of the Sky which covers it, then it will understand the doctrine of creation most easily if you tell it that God made the Earth and its Dome. But of course we believe that the world consists not of the Earth and its Dome, but of stars and planets. And maybe it consists also of a lot of other things about which we do not know. So why not convey the doctrine of creation by saying ‘God created everything’? But even that is not quite correct. He did not create himself. And does ‘everything’ include numbers and the truths of arithmetic? Surely 2 + 2 = 4, whether or not there is a God.

It must be possible to teach the essence of the doctrine of creation to relatively simple people without having to solve all these philosophical questions in the process. But that means teaching it in a way that takes for granted the presuppositions of the society about what exists, apart from God, and saying that that (for example) the Earth and its Dome is what God created.

Even if teaching in one culture is not expressed in terms of false presuppositions, it may be expressed in ways that do not provide answers to questions which worry a different culture which has different concepts and lives in
different circumstances; and so teaching may need to be re-expressed for a different culture in a different way.

 

 

Quarta meditazione sul Credo niceano: espiazione

Oggi vorrei meditare il fatto che il Dio incarnato fu crocifisso per noi. Insomma, pagò con la sua vita per noi.

Un atto del genere ha senso o è pura assurdità?

Prima considerazione:

… What has gone wrong is that we humans have lived bad human lives. A proper offering would be a perfect human life which might well end in a death by execution, which we can offer to God as our reparation. Maybe one human life, however perfect, would not equate in quantity of goodness to the badness of
so many human lives. But it is up to the wronged person to deem when a sufficient reparation has been made; and one truly perfect life would surely be a proper amount of reparation for God to deem that reparation (and penance)
enough had been made…

Seconda considerazione:

… if a wrongdoer has no means to make reparation, a well-wisher may often provide him with the means; the wrongdoer can then choose whether or not to
use that means for that purpose. Suppose that I owe you some service; for example, suppose that I have promised to clean your house and that you have already paid me to do this. Suppose also that I have spent the money but
omitted to clean the house at the promised time, and that I have now had an accident which makes me unable to clean the house. Clearly I owe you repentance and apology; but I must also try to get someone else to clean the house. Even if you don’t badly need the house to be cleaned, you may think it important that I should be involved in getting it cleaned; it matters that I should take responsibility for what I have omitted to do. So you may encourage a third person to offer to me to clean the house on my behalf. If I accept this offer, I am involved in providing the reparation; and when the house is cleared, you can forgive me…

I suggest that the Christian claim that Jesus saved us from our sins may be best understood in that way: God could help us to make atonement for our sins and those of our ancestors. By becoming incarnate and living a perfect human life in Jesus, God provided an act of reparation of which we can avail ourselves. God was both the wronged person (the victim of our wrongdoing) and also the one who, thinking it so important that we should take our wrongdoing seriously, made available the reparation for us to offer back to him…

Ma per qualcuno è già assurdo il concetto di “peccato originale” da cui si parte: perché mai dovremmo pagare per il comportamento del nostro progenitore?

Strana meraviglia visto che lo studio della genetica ci rende familiari dinamiche analoghe che accettiamo senza battere ciglio senza etichettarle come “assurde”:

… for example, if boys smoke a lot before puberty, that affects their genes in such a way that their children tend to be more obese than they would be otherwise. See New Scientist, 7 January 2006. Obesity clearly makes certain good actions harder to do…

Si potrebbe dire che lo accettiamo come fatto senza ritenerlo “giusto”. Che dire allora quando riscontriamo che…

… even the English law requires that before you can claim what you inherit from your dead parents you must pay their debts. To inherit a debt is not to inherit guilt. For we were not the agents of our ancestors’ wrongdoing, but we have inherited a responsibility to make atonement for this debt of ‘original sin’, as far as we can—perhaps by making some reparation…

Terza meditazione del “Credo” niceano: immacolata concezione

La nascita da una Vergine. Perché?

But is there any a priori reason for supposing that, if God was to become incarnate, he would choose to do so by means of a ‘virgin birth’?

It would mean that Jesus came into existence as a human on earth partly by the normal process by which all humans come into existence, and partly as a result of a quite abnormal process. It would thus be a historical event symbolizing the doctrine of the Incarnation, that Jesus is partly of human origin and so has a human nature, and partly of divine origin and so has a divine nature.

This event would help those who learnt about it later to understand the doctrine of the Incarnation.

That God should bring about a historical event which symbolized what was happening at a deeper level seems to me to have a fairly low but not totally insignificant degree of prior probability.

Seconda meditazione del “Credo” niceano: incarnazione

Meditiamo ora il mistero dell’ Incarnazione.

Una volta capito di cosa parliamo quando parliamo di Dio, la sua “incarnazione” non è poi un evento cosi sorprendente per una persona con un po’ di sale in zucca:

… It is an obvious general fact about the world that humans not merely suffer but do much wrong. How will a loving God respond to the suffering and wrongdoing of these feeble but partly rational creatures whom he has made? I will argue… that a priori we would expect God to respond to our suffering and wrongdoing by himself living a human life….

Esplicitiamo meglio con un esempio questa dinamica:

Suppose that, my country has been unjustly attacked, and the government has introduced conscription in order to raise an army to defend the country.

All young men between 18 and 30 are ‘called up’ to serve in the army; older men under 50 may volunteer. The government however allows parents of those aged between 18 and 21 to ‘veto’ a call-up. Suppose that I have a 19-year old son; and, although most parents veto their young sons ‘call up’, I refuse to do so because of the gravity of the threat to the country’s independence. Suppose also that I am 45 years old, and so have no legal obligation to serve.

Plausibly since I am forcing my son to endure the hardship and danger of military service, I have a moral obligation to him to volunteer myself. In circumstances of this kind the sharing must not be entirely incognito. The parent needs not merely to share the child’s suffering, but to show him that he is doing so.

Hence it seems to me highly plausible to suppose that, given the amount of pain and suffering which God allows humans to endure, it would be obligatory on God to share a human life of suffering.

This would be achieved by a divine person becoming incarnate as a human and living a life containing much suffering ending with the great crisis which all humans have to face: the crisis of death.

Prima meditazione del Credo niceno: la Trinità

Dopo Padre Nostro e Ave Maria, dedichiamoci al “Credo”: non si tratta solo di formule esoteriche da rimasticare come come ciacolatorie, bensì di affermazioni ragionevoli dotate di senso probailistico.

Il mistero della Trinità occupa tutta la prima parte: pensandoci bene, il fatto che Dio si presenti nelle tre persone è un’ ipotesi tutt’ altro che improbabile:

Suppose the Father existed alone. For a person to exist alone, when he could cause others to exist and interact with him, would be bad. A divine person is a perfectly good person, and that involves being a loving person. A loving person needs someone to love; and perfect love is love of an equal, totally mutual love, which is what is involved in a perfect marriage. While, of course, the love of a parent for a child is of immense value, it is not the love of equals; and what makes it as valuable as it is, is that the parent is seeking to make the child… into an equal.

A perfectly good solitary person would seek to bring about another such person, with whom to share all that she has… goodness is diffusive: it spreads itself. The Father will bring into existence another divine person with whom to share his rule of the universe. Following tradition, let us call that other person ‘Son’.

A twosome can be selfish. A marriage in which husband and wife are interested only in each other and do not seek to spread the love they have for each other is a deficient marriage. Of course the obvious way, but not the only way, in which they can spread their love is by having children. The love of the Father for the Son must include a wish to cooperate with the Son in further total sharing with an equal; and hence the need for a third member of the Trinity, whom, following tradition, we may call the Holy Spirit, whom they will love and by whom they will be loved. A universe in which there was only sharing and not cooperation in further sharing would have been a deficient universe; it would have lacked a certain kind of goodness. The Father and the Son would have been less than perfectly good unless they sought to spread their mutual love of cooperating in further sharing with an equal…

… anyone who really loves someone will seek the good of that person by finding some third person for him to love and be loved by. This demand can of course only be satisfied by having no less than three divine persons…

Certo che immaginarsi un essere dissociato in tre persone è dura. O no?

It wa s Freud, the modern founder of psychoanalysis, who helped us to see how a person can have two systems of belief to some extent independent of each other.

Freud described people who sometimes, when performing some actions, act only on one system of beliefs and are not guided by beliefs of the other system; and conversely.

Although all the beliefs of such a person are accessible to him, he refuses to admit to his consciousness the beliefs of the one system when he is acting in the light of the other system of beliefs. Thus, to take a well-worn example, a mother may refuse to acknowledge to herself a belief that her son is dead or to allow some of her actions to be guided by it. When asked if she believes that he is dead, she says ‘No’, and this is an honest reply, for it is guided by those beliefs of which she is conscious. Yet other actions of hers may be guided by the belief that her son is dead (even though she does not admit that belief to consciousness); for instance, she may throw away some of his possessions.

The refusal to admit a belief to consciousness is of course itself also something that the mother refuses to admit to herself to be happening.

the Freudian account of such cases helps us to see the possibility of a person intentionally keeping a lesser belief system separate from her main belief system, and simultaneously doing different actions guided by different sets of beliefs, of both of which she is consciously aware—all for some very good reason.

Indeed even people who do not suffer from a Freudian divided mind can sometimes perform simultaneously two quite separate tasks (for example, having a conversation with someone and writing a letter to someone else) in directing which quite distinct beliefs are involved, which we can recognize as ‘on the way to’ a divided mind in which we have two different sets of beliefs…

A volte RS mi lascia sbigottito, certo che si capisce meglio il rispetto che gli tributava Richard Dawkins quando, parlando di lui, affermava: “sul fronte opposto uno dei pochi a parlar chiaro e a prendere sul serio le tesi che difende”.

Richard Swinburne – Was Jesus God?

Probabilmente sì…

… scusate, stavo chiedendomi se per caso Dio esiste e cercando di rispondere affidandomi solo alla mia testa. Trovo la conclusione “probabilmente sì” la più plausibile.

Ma perché? Perché è la “teoria del tutto” più semplice a nostra disposizione.

Ricordiamoci che più “semplice” è l’ ipotesi, più crescono le probabilità che sia vera.

[… c’ è stato un furto, tutti hanno visto Vallanzasca nei paraggi e, oltretutto, ci sono le sue impronte digitali in loco; in commissariato si formulano due ipotesi: 1. il ladro è Vallanzasca e 2. il ladro è uno sconosciuto travestito da Vallanzasca dotato di un marchingegno di sua invenzione per riprodurre impronte digitali false. Voi per quale ipotesi propendete? Scommetto per la più “semplice”…]

Pensate solo al materialista che riflette sull’ origine delle cose: è costretto a postulare che da sempre esistono parecchie particelle (fatte così e cosà), parecchie leggi (che funzionano così e cosà) e una serie di coincidenze sbalorditive.

Fondamentale: quando dico che “X puo’ fare questo e non quello” lancio un messaggio molto più complesso rispetto a quando dico che “X puo’ fare tutto”. Se poi oltre a X devo metterci anche Y e Z, tutto diventa più complicato.

In assenza di possibili verifiche, non è più saggio postulare un’ unica causa intelligente?

Dovendo spiegare “tutto”, esiste forse un’ ipotesi più semplice di quella che assume l’ esistenza di un Dio?

 

… le foto di Dio scattate dalla Nasa…

… theism is a very simple hypothesis… It postulates the existence of one entity (one god, not many gods), with very few very simply describable properties…

… a person with no limits to his power, knowledge, freedom, and life is the simplest kind of person there could be…

Infinite power is power with zero limits. Infinite knowledge is knowledge with zero limits because it involves no limit (except one imposed by logic) to the number of well-justified true beliefs…

Perfect freedom means that the person’s choices are unlimited by irrational desires…

Eternity means no temporal limit to life…

And God being ontologically necessary, meaning that there are no others on whom he depends, obviously fits well with his other properties…

It is also simpler to suppose that God
has these properties essentially, for that makes God a more unified being; it means that the divine properties not merely do not, but could not, come apart…

And it is simpler to suppose that God is what he is solely in virtue of his essential properties; that is, he has no underlying ‘thisness’—for that is a more economical supposition…

 

…

La “brain society” e le rughe di Topolino

Charles Murray – Coming apart

Nelle società contemporanee un’ élite sempre più ristretta tende a isolarsi e a vivere in un mondo a parte. Il guaio (o la fortuna) è che non si tratta semplicemente di “nobili” o di “ricconi” – come in passato –, bensì di “intelligentoni” (che cumulano ricchezza in breve tempo). Un’ élite cognitiva, dunque.

Il resto della popolazione si stacca dal vertice come mai era avvenuto prima e a questo scollamento contribuisce in modo rilevante una disaffezione dei ceti popolari verso le cosiddette quattro “founding virtues”: industriosità, religiosità, onestà e attaccamento ai valori familiari.

Tanto per capirsi, non avere una famiglia stabile è un guaio, soprattutto per chi non puo’ permettersi un lusso del genere. E indovinate un po’ chi fallisce più spesso quando si tratta di costruirne una?

Oggi, rispetto a ieri, nelle classi medie e medio basse, sono in molti a credere di poter rinunciare a una famiglia unita, magari istigati dalle star hollywoodiane o da qualche socio-psico-filosofo che predica la “liberazione del desiderio” per le masse. Salvo che, guardando bene ai dati, anche solo il semplice celibato pesa sulle entrate future del soggetto.

Altro esempio: l’ ateismo, sempre più diffuso negli strati bassi della società, in ultima analisi è un lusso per pochi. Non tutti hanno gli strumenti per sostituire la carica motivazionale di un “pensiero devoto”.

Altro esempio: sostituire la tradizionale etica dell’ “hard-working” con il piagnisteo continuo della cultura sindacal-democratica è un capriccio che alla lunga si paga caro senza neanche accorgersene.

Ora, a qualcuno la cosa apparirà strana, ma in una società fortemente meritocratica questi lussi erodono la condizione di chi se li concede ancor più  che non in una cultura plutocratica o nobiliare, dove per lo meno alle classi subalterne era pur sempre assegnato un ruolo stabile che le garantiva dalla “caduta libera”.

Per capire la cultura delle classi elevate, la cosa migliore è affidarsi ai telefilm americani, il più emblematico è Thirtysomething:

Two women in their late twenties or early thirties wearing tailored business outfits are seated at a table.

A vase with a minimalist arrangement of irises and forsythia is visible in the background. On the table in front of the women are their drinks—both of them wine, served in classic long-stemmed glasses.

Nary a peanut or a pretzel is in sight. One of the women is talking about a man she has started dating. He is attractive, funny, good in bed, she says, but there’s a problem: He wears polyester shirts. “Am I allowed to have a relationship with someone who wears polyester shirts?” she asks.

She is Hope Murdoch, the female protagonist. She ends up marrying the man who wore the polyester shirts, who is sartorially correct by the time we see him. Hope went to Princeton. She is a writer who put a promising career on hold when she had a baby.

He is Michael Steadman, one of two partners in a fledgling advertising agency in Philadelphia. He went to the University of Pennsylvania (the Ivy League one). Hope and Michael live with their sevenmonth- old daughter in an apartment with high ceilings, oldfashioned woodwork, and etched-glass windows. Gradschool- like bookcases are untidily crammed with books. An Art Deco poster is on the wall.

A Native American blanket is draped over the top of the sofa. In the remaining forty-five minutes, we get dialogue that includes a reference to left brain/right brain differences and an exchange about evolutionary sexual selection that begins, “You’ve got a bunch of Australopithecines out on the savanna, right?” The Steadmans buy a $278 baby stroller (1987 dollars). Michael shops for new backpacking gear at a high-end outdoors store, probably REI.

No one wears suits at the office. Michael’s best friend is a professor at Haverford. Hope breast-feeds her baby in a fashionable restaurant. Hope can’t find a babysitter. Three of the four candidates she interviews are too stupid to be left with her child and the other is too Teutonic. Hope refuses to spend a night away from the baby (“I have to be available to her all the time”). Michael drives a car so cool that I couldn’t identify the make. All this, in just the first episode. The culture depicted in thirtysomething had no precedent, with its characters who were educated at elite schools, who discussed intellectually esoteric subjects, and whose sex lives were emotionally complicated and therefore needed to be talked about…

Negli anni 60 in america non esisteva un vero abisso tra upper e working class, almeno negli stili di vita:

Ernest Hemingway was right in his supposed exchange with F. Scott Fitzgerald.5 In 1963, the main difference between the old-money rich and everybody else was mainly that they had more money…

Take, for example, the woman who was the embodiment of the different world of the rich, Marjorie Merriweather Post.

Heiress to the founder of the company that became General Foods, one of the wealthiest women in America, she owned palatial homes in Washington, Palm Beach, and on Long Island, furnished with antiques and objets from the castles of Europe.

She summered in the Adirondacks, at Camp Topridge, surrounded by her private 207 acres of forest and lakes. She took her sailing vacations on Sea Cloud, the largest privately owned sailing yacht in the world, and flew in her own Vickers Viscount airliner, with a passenger cabin decorated as a living room, probably the largest privately owned aircraft in the world. Hers was not a life familiar to many other Americans. But, with trivial exceptions, it was different only in the things that money could buy. When her guests assembled for dinner, the men wore black tie, a footman stood behind every chair, the silver was sterling, and the china had gold leaf. But the soup was likely to be beef consommé, the main course was almost always roast beef, steak, lamb chops, or broiled chicken, the starch was almost certainly potato, and the vegetable was likely to be broccoli au gratin.6 The books on the shelves of her libraries were a run-of-the-mill mix of popular fiction and nonfiction.

She screened the latest films in the privacy of her homes, but the films her guests watched were standard Hollywood products. The wealthy had only a very few pastimes—polo and foxhunting are the only two I can think of, and they engaged only a fraction of the rich—that were different from pastimes in the rest of America. By and large Mrs. Post, like others among America’s wealthy, spent her leisure time doing the same kinds of things that other Americans did…

Murray illustra la nuova cultura upper class prendendo in considerazione i loro bar, i loro uffici, le loro vacanze, come curano la salute, le condotte sessuali, gli orientamenti politici, cosa ascoltano alla radio e alla TV… leggiamo solo un passaggio relativo alla cura dei bimbi:

The children of the new upper class are the object of intense planning from the moment the woman learns she is pregnant.

She sets about researching her choice of obstetrician immediately (if she hasn’t already done it in anticipation of the pregnancy), and her requirements are stringent. She does not drink alcohol or allow herself to be exposed even to secondhand smoke during her pregnancy.

She makes sure her nutritional intake exactly mirrors the optimal diet and takes classes (along with her husband) to prepare for a natural childbirth—a C-section is a last resort. She gains no more and no less than the prescribed weight during her pregnancy.

She breast-feeds her newborn, usually to the complete exclusion of formula, and tracks the infant’s growth with the appropriate length and weight charts continually.

The infant is bombarded with intellectual stimulation from the moment of birth, and sometimes from the moment that it is known that conception has occurred.

The mobile over the infant’s crib and the toys with which he is provided are designed to  induce every possible bit of neural growth within the child’s cerebral cortex. By the time the child is a toddler, some new-upper-class mothers return to their careers, turning over daytime child care to a nanny (sometimes selected in part for the second language that the parents think the child should learn) or to a high-end preschool during the day…

Rispetto agli anni sessanta la vita dell’ élite si è trasferita su un altro pianeta, i genitori non riconoscerebbero i loro figli. Ma per il resto della società non sembra cambiato granché. 

Perhaps the most general cultural difference—one that can be bad or good depending on individual cases—is that mainstream America is a lot more relaxed than the new upper class about their children.

I don’t mean that other American parents care less, but that, as a group, they are less inclined than upper-class parents to obsess about how smart their baby is…

one of the major preoccupations of upper-class parents during their children’s teenage years, the college admissions process, is almost entirely absent in mainstream America.

Only a small proportion of colleges in the United States are hard to get into. Everywhere else, all you have to do is apply and attach a halfway decent high school transcript and ACT or SAT score.

Diversi fattori hanno scremato la nuova élite, innanzitutto il fatto che oggi il “cervello” conti come non mai:

In the early 1990s, Bill Gates was asked what competitor worried him the most. Goldman Sachs, Gates answered. He explained: “Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war, or we won’t have a future. I don’t worry about Lotus or IBM, because the smartest guys would rather come to work for Microsoft. Our competitors for IQ are investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.”

Persino l’ intelligenza pura ai limiti dell’ autismo, ieri destinata a soffrire, oggi spadroneggia:

What was someone with exceptional mathematical ability worth on the job market a hundred years ago if he did not have interpersonal skills or common sense? Not much. The private sector had only a few jobs such as actuary that might make him worth hiring. His best chance was to go into academia and try to become a professor of mathematics. His options were not much wider in 1960. What is a person with the same skill set worth today? If he is a wizard programmer, as people with exceptional mathematical ability tend to be, he is worth six figures to Microsoft or Google. If he is a fine pure mathematician, some quant funds can realistically offer him the prospect of great wealth

Purtroppo l’ intelligenza è un fattore che produce molta discriminazione, sia attiva che passiva:

The human impulse behind the isolation of the new upper class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk. Cognitive segregation was bound to start developing as soon as unusually smart people began to have the opportunity to hang out with other unusually smart people. The yearning for that kind of opportunity starts young. To have exceptional cognitive ability isolates a young person as no other ability does. The teenager with exceptional athletic ability who becomes the star quarterback has lots of people who are eager to be his friends even if he is shy or socially awkward. The teenager with exceptional interpersonal ability is one of the most well-liked kids in school—that’s what exceptional interpersonal ability does for you. But the math star who possesses only average interpersonal ability is seen as an oddball…

All’ isolamento del secchione dotato è seguita la concentrazione di un élite cognitiva, hanno pensato a tutto le università di prestigio con il loro calibrato setaccio:

… the typical classroom in an elite school has no one outside the top decile of cognitive talent, and many who are in the top hundredth or thousandth of the distribution. Both sets of students are technically “college educated” when they get their BAs, but that’s where the similarity stops. Given this concentration of academic talent in a relatively few colleges and universities, the original problem has been replaced by its opposite. Instead of feeling sorry for the exceptionally able student who has no one to talk to, we need to worry about what happens when exceptionally able students hang out only with one another.

Entrare nel giusto College ti cambia la vita, ma pure lì in fondo sembra di vedere sempre le solite facce. Ma come, il merito non doveva liberare la mobilità sociale? Colpa del solito aumma aumma che blocca l’ ascensore sociale? Non proprio:

In The Price of Admission, journalist Daniel Golden documents the ways in which elite schools manage to find room for the children of alums, big donors, celebrities, athletes, the elite college’s own faculty, and wealthy parents whose estates might eventually make their heirs into big donors.20 The question is this: What would the freshman class look like if all of these considerations were eliminated and the decisions were made purely on the basis of test scores, extracurricular achievements, teacher recommendations, and high school transcripts? Answer: Socioeconomically, the change in the class profile would range from minuscule to zero… The reason that upper-middle-class children dominate the population of elite schools is that the parents of the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children…

Il college prestigioso segnala l’ intelligenza di chi lo frequenta, ma ricordiamo che l’ intelligenza non è qualcosa che si costruisce a scuola:

Educational attainment is correlated with IQ, but education does not have much effect on IQ after the child enters elementary school. By that, I do not mean that the absence of any education after age 6 wouldn’t make a difference, nor that exceptions do not exist…

Come sono cambiate dunque le cose? Una volta ci si sposava tra ricchi unendo le fortune e creando imperi e dinastie, oggi, poiché i college sono la più importante agenzia matrimoniale e in pochi college si concentrano le intelligenze migliori del paese, ci si sposerà tra “intelligentoni”, si avranno figli “intelligentoni” che frequenteranno i migliori college e s’ impossesseranno dei lavori più lucrosi…

… Highly disproportionate numbers of exceptionally able children in the next generation will come from parents in the uppermiddle class, and more specifically from parents who are already part of the broad elite…

… per questa via meritocratica si cumuleranno ricchezze sempre più imponenti e si attuerà una secessione sociale sempre più marcata…

“During the late twentieth century, in other words, the well educated and the affluent increasingly segmented themselves off from the rest of American society.”4 They were reminded of a phrase coined by Robert Reich when he first described the new class of symbolic analysts back in 1991: “The secession of the successful.”

Murray passa ad ispezionare l’ enclave dove oggi vive la ricchissima “élite cognitiva”, ecco una piccola parte della foto.

Previewing trends for the upper-middle class as a whole that I will present in detail in part 2, inhabitants of SuperZips are more likely to be married than elsewhere, less likely to have experienced divorce, and less likely to have children living in households with single mothers. The men in SuperZips are more likely to be in the labor force than other American men and less likely to be unemployed. They also work longer hours than other Americans. Crime in urban SuperZips is low, and crime in suburban SuperZips is rare. One of the most distinctive aspects of the SuperZips is their ethnic profile. As of 2000, the 882 SuperZips were substantially whiter and more Asian than the rest of America.

Vivere fianco a fianco con questa élite comporta parecchi problemi – dal loro isolamento decidono anche per voi senza minimamente conoscere o avere a che fare coi vostri stili di vita – nonostante questo, diamo a Cesare quel che è di Cesare dicendo che è meglio avercela che non avervela.

… as individuals, the members of the new upper class are usually just fine— engaging, well mannered, good parents, and good neighbors… When America got serious about identifying cognitive talent, shipping the talented to colleges and the most talented to the best colleges, it also augmented the nation’s efficiency in tapping its human capital by some unknowable but large amount. The result over the long term was that cognitive talent that in an earlier era would have been employed in keeping a store or repairing broken-down engines was employed instead in running large corporations and inventing new kinds of engines…

Conclusione: l’ élite cognitiva si stacca dal resto della popolazione visto che la società contemporanea premia l’ intelligenza come non mai. E fin qui il messaggio del libro è ambivalente, qualcuno sarà a disagio, altri meno, in fondo uno sfruttamento intensivo delle intelligenze potenziali è auspicabile. C’ è però una seconda parte destinata invece ad alimentare le controversie: le armi tradizionali in mano alla working class e usate in passato per non perdere il “contatto” con la classe privilegiata sono oggi venute meno. Per “armi tradizionali” s’ intendono le virtù canoniche: culto del lavoro, culto della famiglia, culto dell’ onestà, culto religioso. Chi incolpare per questo lutto? Poiché conosciamo l’ opera pregressa di Murray, ci sono pochi dubbi: la cultura progressista e welfarista con tutto il portato di infiacchimento morale che comporta inevitabilmente la sua diffusione.