Worth a look...

If you want some interesting reading, have a look at TIME Magazine's list of "10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now", drawing on trends in economics, science, religion and culture. I should note that when they say the 'world' is being changed, they mean it in the American sense - like the 'World Series' of baseball or Superbowl winners being 'World Champion's' - although a number do concern the wider world.

Of particular interest was Number 3, The New Calvinism, a movement riding on the back of "the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention". Number 7, The Rent-a-Country was also something interesting which I hadn't really heard much of.

The 10 Big Ideas they identify are

1. Jobs are the New Assets
2. Recycling the Suburbs
3. The New Calvinism
4. Reinstating the Interstate
5. Amortality
6. Africa, Business Destination
7. The Rent-a-Country
8. Biobanks
9. Survival Stores
10. Ecological Intelligence

Economic Justice

1.4 billion people, or one quarter of the population of the developing world, live on less than $1.25 a day. [1] The poorest 10% accounted for just 0.5% and the wealthiest 10% accounted for 59% of all the consumption. [2] Most of us, hopefully, are aware of the state of poverty in the world, whilst also constantly exposed to the decadence of our own cultures. This disparity must surely cause us to question the system in which we are operating which allows such injustice.

The capitalist system holds as the highest good the right of the individual to own property. Libertarian economist, Murray Rothbard, argued that, “It is wrong and criminal to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or starving, or is doing it to save one’s relatives, or is defending oneself against a third man's attack.” [3] Thus, we see property rights prioritised even over the right to life or security. It is a system such as this which permits the disproportionate distribution of wealth.

Socialist views, on the other hand, prefer state ownership in order to promote egalitarianism. Famous revolutionary Che Guevara observed that, “Socialism cannot exist without a change in consciousness resulting in a new fraternal attitude toward humanity, both at an individual level, within the societies where socialism is being built or has been built, and on a world scale, with regard to all peoples suffering from imperialist oppression.” [4] Whereas capitalism is based on an assumption that everyone is selfish – something I would say is true due to the Fall – socialism rests on the understanding that people may come to value others above themselves. I believe this kind of transformation can only come from God. As such, a socialist system is doomed to failure, unless everyone recognises Christ – an end that will only be achieved with Christ’s return.

Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas argued that private property rights are necessary to human life on the basis of pragmatics – they allow for human nature and maximise efficiency. But he also held that “man ought to possess external things, not as his own, but as common, so that, to wit, he is ready to communicate them to others in their need”. [6] Thus there is a public aspect to privately owned property so that, “In cases of need all things are common property, so that there would seem to be no sin in taking another’s property, for need has made it common.” [6] Private property, when upheld as the absolute, leads to economic injustice. Rather, it must be seen as a means to an end if it is to be of any benefit to the world’s most needy, to whom we owe both charity and justice.

However, there should be no poor among you, for in the land the LORD your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the LORD your God (Deut. 15:4-5)



[1] 2008 World Bank Research by Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen
[2] World Development Indicators 2008, World Bank, August 2008
[3] War, Peace, and the State, 1963
[4] Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria, February 24, 1965
[5] Summa Theologica, On Theft and Robbery

Originally written for the economics edition of iCU (Melbourne Uni Christian Union Newsletter)

It's just my personal opinion...

Two weeks into the semester I am being driven crazy by one of my subjects. It's an education subject called Concepts of Childhood. What we are being taught is interesting enough, it's just the way it is being taught - I have never come across a subject so dominated by postmodernism.

Constantly we are reminded there there is no single truth, and we spent the first hour of class looking at ambiguous images and interpreting them so that we could see "everyone sees things differently, and that is what is most important". All the lecturers keep insisting that they don't want to "force us to believe" anything and every time they express their views they have to qualify it saying something like, "this is just what I believe, and you may think differently, but..." or "this is what I believe as a white, middle-class Australian, but you may be have a different background and may believe differently...".

The worst example was when the lecturer was introducing us to the theories of a behaviour psychologist called B.F. Skinner. She explained to us, "I don't agree with his views, so I am trying very hard to be objective, but it isn't easy. I see his theories about raising children as...well..dangerous. But if you agree with Skinner that is fine." I was a perplexed - how can you see certain views as being both dangerous and fine? I think the only way is if you actually had no concern for those who would be endangered by the implementation of these views. The lecturer was trying to tolerate other views; trying not to presume she had an exclusive hold to what was right, but at the same time is was clear that certain all views aren't equal - some lead to joy, some to destruction.

Worryingly everyone else in the classroom seems untroubled by this. Actually the class seems just as eager to promote postmodernism, with one girl reminded me that "everything is relative" when a comment of mine suggested absolute truth.

I thought I had seen the worst of it when I was studying Anthropology and we were told, "you can't judge culture because that is presuming your own truth is exclusively true" - but even in Anthropology relativism was seen to be problematic and quite aggressively critiqued. In Concepts of Childhood it is an unquestioned assumption. Should be an interesting semester...

Intellectual Property

I realise my blog has received very little use for some time, not sure whether I think less during holidays or just am less motivated to write my thoughts. In either case, uni is back, so also is the blogging.

Just a warning, this one is rather long because I didn't have the motivation or ability to condense it.

I recently took part in a very interesting conversation on the topic of music piracy. A friend was adamant that illegally sharing music is immoral as it is a form of stealing. However another friend raised the validity of ideas of intellectual property on which copyright laws are based and which had been an assumption for the first friend.

The conversation got me thinking about what value I place on intellectual rights.

I am no economist, but I can see the rationality in intellectual property laws. If there are high monetary incentives for creativity in a society then people will continue to strive for new ideas, inventions, marketing methods etc. which leads to more efficient methods of production. If everyone was permitted to download music, books, research papers for free, then the musicians, authors, and researchers would have lower incentives to produce.[1]

So I may concede that it is rational for intellectual property to be defended by law. But is there any moral basis for it? I struggle to see knowledge as property, largely because it is a public good, not a private good. A public good is something that is both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Knowledge is former because the use of knowledge does not preclude its use by others. For example, if I discover that lemon juice is the cure to cancer (which, incidentally, it is not) and you used this knowledge to cure yourself of cancer, then your neighbour would be no less capable of using this knowledge as a cure because it has been used once. However, the neighbour would be less capable of accessing lemon juice because there is a limited supply of lemons in the world and you had just used some of them up in curing yourself from cancer. The more lemons you used, the less access others would have to lemons, however the you can use the information all you like and it is no less abundant because of your use.

Knowledge is also non-excludable.[2] Once I tell you the cure for cancer is lemon juice there is no possible way I can take that information back from you; I can't prevent you from accessing it. However, I could steal your lemon juice to prevent you from accessing it. Ergo, knowledge is a public good, lemons are a private good. It makes no sense to claim ownership of a public good because this ownership is not naturally exclusive. It follows that you also can't steal knowledge, because no-one owns it.

Whilst someone can not own a public good, they can be credited with making it a public good. Knowledge can be discovered, air can be made clean by not polluting, safety can be maximised by punishing crime - but no-one can own knowledge, clean air or safety. You can't steal any of these public goods, but you can steal credit for them. The government could claim that increasing air quality is due to the new wind farm when instead it may be the result of favourable winds, or the judges can claim their 'zero tolerance' policy caused a reduction in crime which actually resulted from decreasing poverty, or I can claim that I, and not Pascal, discovered at a2 + b2 = c2. However, I would see this act of taking credit more as lying than stealing. But I would say it is immoral to wilfully take credit for another person's idea, not because the idea belongs to them, but because of dishonesty in such a claim.

In The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke uses an analogy of a fountain of water, which is abundant to the degree that we can call it a public good - you can take a pitcher of water from the fountain and it will not be noticeably affected, so that by taking out a pitcher of water your neighbour is no less capable of taking out a pitcher of water for themselves. So you can't claim ownership of the water in the fountain. However, you can claim ownership of the water in the pitcher because your "labour hath taken it out of the hands of Nature where it was common, and belonged equally to all her children, and hath appropriated it to [yourself]". For a while I was tempted to think the same of knowledge: a person who laboured to discover the fact that lemon juice cures cancer had taken what was common and made a claim to own it by their labour. If your pitcher of water was stolen, you could no longer take it to the market to sell it to me. If my knowledge that lemon juice cures cancer was stolen, I could no longer take it to the market to sell it. But they are not the same. In one case you have lost your pitcher of water, in the other you have only lost your ability to sell the knowledge, not the knowledge itself. Rather than having a private good stolen, this situation is analogous to the market closing down, or the price for pitchers of water falling to zero, so they could no longer be sold for profit. So it is with music/video piracy. The musician has not actually had anything taken from them when their song is illegally downloaded, rather they have lost the opportunity to sell that song to the offender.

But perhaps you think they have lost the fruits of their labour, to which they are entitled? I would also dispute an argument such as this. I don't feel as though people have a right to be paid for their ideas or their labour. Say there are two people, Bill and Ben. Bill is a very hard working farmer. With his work his produces wheat, which people like to buy, so Bill's labour earns him money. Ben is also very hard working. He spend all day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year looking for and collecting rocks that are spherical. Through his work he has amassed an impressive collection of spherical rocks. However, no-one likes to pay money for his rocks, so his labour doesn't earn him money. My point is that labour can be used to gain wages, but there is nothing fundamental about it which established that all who labour should be paid for labour. If a person desires money it is rational to look for work which society is willing to pay for. Now, if a person professionally comes up with bright ideas or writes songs and is able to get money from that, all good and well. But just because they did the labour to come up with that idea or song doesn't entitle them to wages for it.

I am still debating with myself the extent to which artists/thinkers/inventors are responsible for what they produce. As a researcher, for example, I can't make lemon juice the cure for cancer, it is simply an apparent fact (or in this case a fiction). Inventions, songs and novels, on the other hand, are not apparent facts, but the degree to which they are original creations is debatable. If I write a song (those who know me will know just how farfetched this hypothetical scenario is), I am taking things from the world around me - singular musical notes and singular words, as well as series of notes and series of words which, through language, can be deciphered to form ideas - and arranged them using my creativity and knowledge of what combinations of notes sound good and what words invoke thought and feeling. It would be a part-whole fallacy to say that just because each of the components of a song (words and notes) are unoriginal, the song itself is too, but still the extent of originality is vague. In examining this question let us take the example of Yesterday by The Beatles. The song was by The Beatles, credited to "Lennon /McCartney" but written and performed solely by Paul McCartney (with string quartet accompaniment). I had a read of Wikipedia and it appears that the song purportedly shows similarities in lyrics to a Nat 'King' Cole song, Answer Me and musical similarities to Georgia on My Mind. However, the rather lengthy description of how it came to be written shows that it was original, although McCartney himself suspected he had subconsciously plagiarised saying, "For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no-one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it."

How much has to be plagiarised before a song would be considered unoriginal? Only two lines bear any resemblance to the lyrics of Answer Me and that caused an accusation. Ian Hammond has written a quite detailed piece on the similarities with Georgia on My Mind yet considers these purely innocent, saying "Every Beatles' song is constructed largely out of style components, and thus borrows from other songs, as all songs must". This isn't simply a matter of part-whole, because obviously much less than whole - just a 5 or 10 second snippet - would be considered the artist's creation. I wonder how the copyright laws deal with the vagueness of all this.

Even seeing the extent to which songs are creations, I would say that the issue of plagiarism in music is one of dishonesty rather than stealing. But what of the question of illegally sharing music? I am not all that cluey on copyright laws, but I have been informed that you are permitted to make a singly hard copy and unlimited soft copies of a piece of music that you buy [3]. It is also legal to share these copies. However it becomes illegal when the same product is being used multiple times simultaneously. For example, I can put my Beatles album onto iTunes, and I can also lend that CD to a friend. But it would be illegal for me to listen to the album on iTunes whilst my friend is playing in the CD in their house.

Personally, I have always thought of sharing as a good thing, and I think the sole reason the law opposes this is because it destroys the economic incentives for artists because they will sell less if their music is freely shared. Thus, the law is perhaps rational, but not just. I believe the role of the law is to enforce what is just, and not to determine what is just, so I think it is fair to disagree with the law.


[1] Result specific to the music industry would include a greater emphasis on live performances (an experience that can't be downloaded), albums being promoted for bonus material rather than songs, and poorer musicians. A positive effect would be that, with the easier access to a wide range of music, there should be a greater appreciation for music in society as a whole, and so less people would be listening to bad pop. Thus, pop artists would be earning far less, be getting less attention and the media would finally be free from reporting the riveting Britney Spears saga.
[2] Perhaps the existence of copyright laws suggests that knowledge can be made excludable, but it is not naturally so, and laws that make public good excludable are notoriously difficult to enforce (as it exemplified by the prevalence of music/video piracy).
[3] When you purchase a CD you are buying both the physical CD and the material on it. You don't buy ownership of the material but only the use of it, if that makes sense.


NB: It was not my intention from this argument to gain a license to ignore the law, because I acknowledge that following the law is of value in itself.