Like so many other walks of life, Olympic sport is becoming dominated by people who attended private school

 Or possibly a comma.

“Selfishness needs no moral justification, it’s perfectly natural and how most of us are built to function.”

Hence the economic mess we find ourselves in and the riots in London a year ago. Shouldn’t human societies be trying to do better than that in the 21st century?

Is there such a thing as unselfish greed? WTF?

Puzzling.

Here’s a definition of selfishness from an online dictionary:

self·ish   [sel-fish]  
adjective 1. 
devoted to or caring only for oneself; concerned primarily with one’s own interests, benefits, welfare, etc., regardless of others. 2. 
characterized by or manifesting concern or care only for oneself: selfish motives. 
Which to me seems like a very bad thing. What kind of world will we end up living in if everybody in it is out for themselves and doesn’t give a sh*t about anybody else?

Possibly a world in which a coterie of financiers, traders and bankers precipitate a global crash, motivated by ever increasing bonuses and personal rewards to the exclusion of morality or conscience. Or a world in which mobs loot shops and businesses and burn down building without caring a damn for the people affected. 

The cult of selfishness can only ever lead to chaos and disaster. 

As we have seen.

No. Caring about your own children is a good thing, it’s when you do that while not giving a sh*t about anybody else’s children that’s selfish.

Didn’t you read the dictionary definition I quoted?

Mike,

I think you mischaracterise.  I don’t believe I’m a tory, I’m more enthused by the ideas of Gladstone’s liberals.  In modern terms, of course these involve balanced budgets, but more importantly they look to achieve two things:  let those with talent succeed through the exercise of free choice and not getting in their way, but more importantly concentrate on supporting those without, by diverting extra resources to them.

This is a very long way from “equality of output”, which is the mark of a heavy statist approach, and of constant measuring of interim results, intervention and of meddling – that is the approach adopted by some of the harder left governments of the world through history.

It is if you like an approach of “concentration on giving people a chance” – an inelegant phrase.  Government should not worry about those who have advantages of birth or of talent – let them blossom.  Do not get in their way.  Instead, concentrate Government resources to help those who do not have those advantages to help them to achieve the very best they can.

I do not believe such a position is tory, but also I do not care if some believe it is.

As for winners and losers, well I am by training inclined to the mathematical approach and to observation of reality, not the approach of trying to change reality.  There was an exchange elsewhere in this thread about whether my approach is inane.  I do not care of other’s perceptions.  No political philosophy can or should try to change the laws of mathematics.  It is more caring to try to stop the losers from losing too badly.

More than likely something basic about how IQs are normally distributed and such like although I don’t actually really know what the guy is going on about. There are no mathematical or statistical laws that state there will always be a certain proportion of “winners” and a certain percentage of “losers” as if the relative proportions of these two groups were unalterable cosmic constants or similar. 

Life expectancy without adequate shelter, clean drinking water, proper nourishment and medical care is something like 35 years or so – as it is in some countries in the Third World and was in this country in the 18th century – whereas these days after intervention by society via the welfare state and NHS etc.,  in the UK life expectancy has increased to something like 88 years these days as far as I can remember.

Same thing with “winners” and “losers”.

People are not born pre-destined to fall into either camp provided society intervenes appropriately: an enlightened society can swell the ranks of the former and almost eliminate the latter entirely if it has the will and chooses to do so.

Do you want me to start with the degree-level explanation, or the Key Stage One level explanation?

Have you heard of a man called Pareto?  Lorenz curves, Gini coefficients, hypergeometric distributions, zeta distributions?  For those with the capacity to lift up their eyes from learning the very complicated chant of “It’s not fair!  The rich should pay!”, these sorts of distributions among populations explain quite a lot as to why there are winners and losers, rich and poor, rainfall distribution over time, agricultural yields,  the sizes of villages, why a small proportion being vaccinated protects a whole population, and (in the case of hypergeometric distribution), why levelling “up” is a more likely consequence of targeting funds at the lower curves and abstracting upper outliers (i.e. “the stars and the talent”) to special training. The latter is the direct cause of Halhouse’s adoption of engineering apprentices in 1882, and later taking gifted children from their Yorkshire schools and putting them into Oxford or Cambridge, and then reappointing them District Engineers after they graduated, with a requirement to themselves identify local talent and promote it..

Peter, 

if those examples are nothing to do with mathematics, and everything to do with human socio-economic constructs, then how do you explain that natural phenomena are also not just explained but in other cases first predicted and then confirmed by them?  The distribution of sand grains by size on any beach, the distance between galaxies, the number of freckles on a human’s back, the pattern of spots on a leopard?  Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals?

You do appear to not understand the universality of these laws.

Some might say that, but they would be wrong, empirically.  And it makes no sense to try to define a spectrum – by definition the totality – as narrowing down.  Beyond any spectrum, there is nothing, not time or dimension.  So you cannot narrow down a spectrum.

Because natural phenomena are exactly that – entirely natural and without human interference.

Socio-economic “phenomena” are subject to a huge degree of human interference.

You are moving the goal posts, Jaime, not for the first time …

Grains of sand on a beach have no say on how they are distributed. Human beings can decide how wealth and other advantages are allocated and shared. We make the world we live in the world does not make us.

The thing you mention are not mathematical laws but more like commentary about things which may or may not occur in societies at particular point in time. The commutative, associative and distributive laws of mathematics ARE inviolable laws inside a closed axiom system but what you’re talking about are hypotheses, couched in simple mathematical language, about how certain things might happen in certain kinds of societies given very specific conditions. None of these things are universally true and are dependent upon how particular economies and societies are organised and the things they predict are not inevitable and most of the things you mention only give “rough” estimates anyway – rules of thumb you might say – like Pareto who developed the “Pareto Principle” by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas and extended that observation to land ownership in Italy, as the country was at the time. Not very scientific and certainly not a mathematical law. Other stuff you mention is probabilistic and can hardly be regarded as law-like; coincidence can play all sorts of trick on the human mind.    

Still I have to give you points for not mentioning the Laffer curve or Parkinson’s Law or similar.

For which I am grateful.

You are wrong.  Both are only adequately explained by reference to the authoritarian / liberal axis, not the economic axis which to adherents of liberalism (if not tories) is fairly unimportant.  In any argument you make, you consistently do not acknowledge the existence of this axis, which makes your arguments by definition mono-dimensional.

Perhaps it is easier for you to only try to differentiate in one dimension.

Peter,

Borrowing of money is not associated with either right or left – both may do it, both have, both have also chosen not to.  And in Gladstone’s case there was hardly a public / private sector divide – it was virtually all private, so you can’t really in fairness accuse him of favouring one over the other.

Equality of outcome is an absurd abstraction, espoused by people who fail to notice that there is such a thing as human nature, and that human nature varies from person to person.