How to predict the future?

There was a discussion in The Financial Times a while ago about who predicts the future better, the historians or the economists. A columnist brings up the problems economists are currently facing leading into and in the wake of the financial crisis in The Times today. The consensus of all these discussions is perhaps that it is impossible to predict the future. Still, a lot of people are paid a fortune for trying.

I can understand why, because even if I'm not paid for it, I also like to predict the future. But it is difficult. Based on the world view I managed to construct from information freely available on the net I, for example, predicted that Germany and Russia would form some kind of relationship of a more formalized variety.

However, the latest data now coming out of information I pay for have changed this to my delight and Germany is going to turn into renewable self-sufficiency by 2050. Russia is instead looking to the Chinese to supply energy for their ascent.

Another thing that changed after relying on paid information is that the conflict coverage is more subdued. Someone wanted me to read about military conflict and when I paid a 1,000SEK for a trial subscription on International Herald Tribune, the paper version, I never got any issues in the mail box. It was the first time such a thing happened to me. A vendor theft. I figured that since I had read the online paper, I had then paid something for this, at least.

Currently I tried to subscribe to The Wall Street Journal online version but my credit card did not work for this purchase for some to me unknown reason. There seems to be a political anti-American reason here in Sweden?

I don't know why, but I'm beginning to get a feeling that personal economies are breaking down. When I five years ago inherited money from my father a game was set in motion to virtually steal this money by telling other people that the money did not belong to me. The same thing just happened when I started to collect from my American pension, money I worked up myself over 9.5 years in Philadelphia as a scientist. I have realized that there are no human rights in my case but so far the right to legal money had not been infringed on. But this seems to be changing as well.

So what is going to happen in the future is unclear. I have no idea what kind of society we will get if private property is not heeded. Another tendency that I don't like is that people don't interact directly with you any more all people I'm in contact with just play charades or communicate via indirect writing. I am totally isolated from real time conversation. My telephone company does not even let me send emails? I don't like it. Things that were self evident a long time ago now seems to be forgotten.

Red Ed?

Ed Miliband, who just beat his brother David to the Labour Party chairmanship with 1.3% of the vote, has offered him the Shadow Chancellor post. Ironically, this would mean that the blairite David is now Chancellor under the brownite Ed in an age where Labour is supposed to put Blair-Brown behind them.

Bagehot, the former Charlemagne at The Economist, speculates that the now 45 year old David Miliband has in this fashion gotten few serious ways to matter in top politics. Personally, I would not count this in parliament circles and among party members very popular fellow out just yet. Maybe he will spend 5-10 years in a think-thank and come up with a new strategy? Maybe I'm old fashioned but a 55 year old Prime Minister is perfectly OK.

The question is what this means for the European left? Gunnar Hökmark, a moderate EU parlamentarian, writes in his blog that we are talking about a movement to the left within the left and that this trick did not play out well in the recent Swedish election where the center-right focused its campaign against the Left Party, the former communists in coalition with the Social Democrats.

However, the fact that Labour still moves in the same direction might mean that the British don't look much to Sweden for ideas but also that they are becoming more nationalistic, a trend seen in Sweden as well with the rise of the Sweden Democrats. The foreign secretary experienced and thereby internationally connected David Miliband did not suit the union idea of a new Britain. The world seems to matter less for the left?

The ruling coalition of Tories and Liberal Democrats are of course pleased that the more centrist cosmopolitic competitor David Miliband is neutralized for now because it does not encroach on their territory. Counting out the left in Europe is probably immature since the Red-Green coalition in Germany is doing quite well right now. The Greens a making progress in Sweden as well where they saved the Red-Green coalition from a complete embarrassment in which the once so dominating Social Democrats lost almost 5% and now have only about 30% of the vote, the same as the Moderate center-right party.

In order to create a majority government situation in Sweden, the center-right coalition Alliansen only got 173 of the 175 needed for a majority, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt tried to cajole the Greens to leave their Red-Green coalition. However, Maria Wetterstand, one of the two porte paroles of the Green party claimed that they did not have a mandate from their voters to make such a shift. This is strange because the liberal Center party has been the green wing of the Alliansen and thus afforded a backing for many of the green policies.

The main argument against Alliansen from Ms Wetterstrand was that she could not think of joining a coalition that threw out sick people from the welfare system, something the Alliansen has been blamed for doing when the halved the number of people on sick leave to the levels commensurate with other comparable countries in Europe. A necessary reform the Social Democrats had not managed to do themselves and which their policies had created. She then used an argument that had not been successful wooing voters in the election. Alliansen had offered real prosperity rather than prosperity if things went wrong via the welfare system.

Well, so how red is "Red Ed"? Some people write that his ambition is to regain the center ground and that he himself have said that his is his own man who is independent from the unions. In this case he has just out politicked his older brother for the power position and might not be particularly red at all. He has been for citizen salaries which is supposed to be leftish although I personally think they should be both left and right because we are talking about a human rights issue. We are talking of not returning to slavery. This is of course a compassionate streak in his curriculum which demonstrates concern for the ailments of this time.

The number two and the number three in the world

I have been following the row between China and Japan for a while now. Apparently a Chinese fishing boat captain rammed a Japanese coast guard vessel outside the Senkaku islands that are disputed by not only China and Japan but also by Taiwan, and got arrested according to Gideon Rachman's weekly pod cast.

The situation headed up daily and after rumors of blocked shipments of rare earth metals to Japan from China the captain was released. It is of course not clear if there was a causality between the two events. However, people in Japan took to the streets and complained over giving in to the Chinese.

Why is the situation so tense? The Financial Times runs an analysis today about the Chinese catch up game in high-speed trains that offers one possible irritation item. The Chinese are now after some years becoming a low-cost competitor to the Japanese Kawasaki Heavy Industries, the German Siemens and the French Alstom on these trains after having "digested" the technology in question for a while.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governator, is asking the Chinese to compete for the planned trains in California. They can get trains more inexpensively in this way but have not lost any technology in this case. In any case, the Chinese are building an extensive high-speed train network that according to some is a prestige project that is not going to pay off and is more and more preventing foreign competition by legal means, although it is a green project.

Fighting to get out of a recession is apparently a cut throat game where the ones with cash siphon off technological know-how. Will the Swedes follow the lead of the Governator if they are going to build high-speed trains?

Meaning, Control, and Esteem?

The last year I have worked on an argument for Religious Humanism by compiling a history of ideas, especially scientific, since the Heliocentric Theory of Copernicus 1543. It is clear from the last 500 years that it is reasonable to expect that science will continue to surprise us in revealing new knowledge from what I call the "yet unknown". The key idea of Religious Humanism is that it is possible to attribute to the "yet unknown" rather than to a supernatural personal God.

By compiling excerpts from page 1-75 in The Psychology of Religion, 4th edition, by Hood, Hill and Spilka, 2009 this is made more probable.
Religion is supposed to give meaning, control and esteem. When threatened with harm or pain, all higher organisms seek to predict and/or control the outcomes of the events that affect them. Meaning helps meet perhaps an even greater underlying need for control. Self-control can be viewed as personality’s moral muscle. Self-control is a core psychological function underlying many of the virtues addressed by religion: compassion, justice, wisdom, humility, etc. Esteem is garnered from the sociability of religious life. Church members possess larger social support networks than non-members do. Furthermore, there is more positive involvement of intra-family relationships among the religiously committed. This is attributed to enhanced feelings of social belonging and integration into a community of like-minded individuals.
Reduction of Religion
The data are not conclusive but it seems like superstition and religion are two different domains of our mental life. The term spirituality has evolved the last two decades as separate from religion as well and is now a hot topic.

Attribution in the Psychology of Religion
Attributions people make might be naturalistic or religious. In most circumstances people initially employ naturalistic attributions but shift to religious attribution when naturalistic do not satisfactorily meet the needs for meaning, control and esteem. For religious people a person’s actions and cognitions might become structured by a religious role. Research suggests that up to three quarters of religious experiences occur when individuals are engaged in religious activities or are in religious settings. Attributions to God are overwhelmingly positive. Religious persons possess a religious language which they use to describe their experience. Attributions are often made to validate and enhance self-esteem and thus perform a self-protecting function. Locus of control was initially conceptualized as a tendency to see events as either internally determined by the person or externally produced by factors beyond the control of the individual. External control is attributed to fate, luck and chance as well as control by powerful others. People who are more involved in religious activities perceive themselves as having more control over what happens to them.

Religion and Biology
People are today merging the psychology of religion with evolutionary psychology. Some hypothesize that religion is derived from having a genetic advantage. The capacity for belief might be inherited. Some, d’Aquili and Newberg, 1999, say that “God or pure consciousness is generated by the brain”. Hamer, the author of the book The God Gene, 2004, feels that more than one gene is likely to be part of the religion-spirituality complex and he is convinced that the tendency to be spiritual is genetic in origin. Relevant mutations must have occurred in Africa in the fairly distant human past for spirituality to be genetically mediated. Contemporary popular language suggests that we are “hardwired” for these expressions. The temporal lobe is known to give rise to spiritual thoughts and has been related to epilepsy since Hippocrates. Limbic structures (specifically the amygdala involved in fear) were not activated during a religious state, such as reading the 23rd psalm, but were involved during a non-religious emotional state. Religious experience is likely to be a cognitive process utilizing established neural connections between the frontal and parietal lobes. The neurobiology of spirituality has otherwise mostly been studied in meditative states.

There is general agreement that the basic purpose of a religious ritual is communication. The discomfort, distress, and threat of uncertainty are lessened when one possesses ritualistic means of coping with troublesome situations. Psychoanalysts have added that it provides a connection to one’s inner desires and feelings. More broadly, rituals are viewed as means of encouraging and controlling emotion. People want them, volunteer to participate in them, and probably gain pleasure from having ritual roles to play. The neurological network proposed to be involved in ritual is considered part of the autonomic nervous system and termed the “ergotropic-tropotropic system”. Though prayer may be aimed at reducing tension, its goal could actually be an altered state of consciousness, either contemplative or mystical. Prayer appears to be helpful, but the reasons are not so clear. Forgiveness has been conceptualized as an “emotion-focused coping strategy” that counters stress and reduces adverse physiological responses.

The philosophical question of whether God is created in our minds or whether he exists in reality is essentially solved in Religious Humanism because of its pantheistic nature. The existence of something we call God is a reflection of Nature in our minds and of course “God” exists because everything is God and has always existed. Our minds are part of God. So, we are attuned to Nature and wish for knowledge of the “yet unknown”. Attributions to the “yet unknown” should work equally well as those to a personal supernatural God.

The “yet unknown” offers an individualist perspective on the God concept. People can make it into what they feel is most important. I also found a statement in the book cited above that religiously committed scholars can consider science an avenue to God. It is apparently something people do even if they operate with a supernatural God concept. This might in principle mean that others also have thought about the “yet unknown” as part of the God concept since otherwise the materialistic prerequisite is not followed.

Education, does it matter?

"Alison Wolf of King's College London and author of a provocative book called Does Education Matter? has argued elsewhere, that maths and science education are something fun and desirable that countries spend more on as they get richer, rather than being the engine of economic growth."

This citation is from an ongoing debate on The Economist web site concerning innovation. If you argue that the pursuit of science is searching for God in a materialistic pantheism and that this is the goal of mankind, it is of great interest to know how to optimize it. Is it driving the economy at the same time or is it a byproduct of the economy?

What is rather clear from history is that the scientific revolution starting during the 17th century stimulated the development of philosophy most of the time. It also leads to a secularization that freed the minds of people. However, would this have happened without the development of trade and business and a middle class? Francis Bacon became the "trumpeter of a new era" by extrapolating from the invention of the compass, gun powder and the movable type, all pre-17th century events, all tools for subduing Nature.

73% of the people voting on the motion in the Economist debate think math and science are important for innovation but the remainder believes that management skills are limiting as well as venture capital. Looking at the AngloAmerican history there is a correlation of a wave of inventions after the introduction of public schools, with the light bulb and the areoplane as examples. Then there is a new wave after the creation of armies of PhDs in the mid 20th century with the transistor and DNA helix as prime examples. America has, though, always been very good at making products out of ideas which would also speak for managerial skills.

It is not easy to determine which is the hen or the egg between science and management but it would be very good to know. Truly brilliant scientists might make stimulating breakthroughs even if society is not well to do around them but to get a scientific revolution probably requires prosperity in the environment.

What is it parties like the Sweden Democrats, National front in France and the British National Party in the UK want to return to?

The Financial Times compare the Sweden Democrats that just won 5.7% of the popular vote in the Swedish election with the British National Party in the UK and the National Front Party in France. The BNP won 1.9% in the 2010 election but got 5.2% in the London Mayoral election 2008. They got 0.7% in the 2005 election. In the 2007 presidential election Jean-Marie LePen of the NF got 11% of the vote.

If it is like it seems in Sweden right now, that no one wants to talk to the SD in the Riksdag, perhaps we should change the election system to that of Britain and the US, the first past-the-post system that effectively selects against a third party with a battle between the Moderates and the Social Democrats. After all, Adolf Hitler came to power in a proportional election system.

The proportional election systems of Continental Europe has given rise to the participation of nationalist parties in many countries most notably the Netherlands, The Party for Freedom, and Hungary, Jobbik. The Liberal Democrats in Britain, that just participate in a ruling coalition, however, wants to change the election system to a proportional one in order to get more influence with their 22% of the popular vote.

The Danish People's Party, Dansk Folkeparti, with 14% of the vote, however, was treated as the Sweden Democrats initially due to their alienation towards foreigners, but have since become incorporated as a support party although they do not yet participate on the ministerial level according to the Swedish radio program Studio Ett.

Today's editorial on DN.se believes that 15% of the vote might be a maximum of how large the parties alienated against foreigners could grow. Perhaps, but in this respect it might be reasonable to ask how many people of a population that for some reason think it was better earlier on. These people are displeased with the current situation and do not want to experiment not realizing that things have changed so much that the road backwards is closed. Like lemmings they march towards and unknown that will cause the pension systems of Europe to crumble if immigration is resisted.

The welfare model is dear to Europeans. One would hope that it is dear enough to allow for immigration that will change Europe to a more multicultural environment. Some people think that the reason for the success of Europe in driving the scientific and industrial revolutions depended on this multiculturality which then was imitated in the US, although with a single language. A multifocal environment that lacked a centralized dogma ruling it. A non-federal EU might just be the best stabilizer available. The remaining discussion is then at which speed the immigration is going to take place.

What in reality should be discussed is the low birth rates in Europe. In Japan the birth rates are low and immigration almost non-existent. Germany seems to head for a lowering of their population as well. Can our societies be sustained with shrinking populations? The US plan to increase their population but they are not so densely populated. Britain is increasing as well and will by 2050 have passed Germany as the most populous country in Europe. Sweden is increasing by immigration. This is a wise choice.

An election ushering in a new era

I am for a multicultural society and I did not vote for the Sweden Democrats but I must say it was very annoying how the Social Democrats and the Left Party representatives in a clearly totalitarian manner harassed the new comers to the Riksdag in the National Television broadcast yesterday. The Alliance members had a more balanced tone to the event. The Social Democrats seem at loss as to the reason for their defeat but maybe people don't want to be told of what to think?

A liberal society is supposed to be tolerant to minorities and not showing tolerance at the same time as you say that the Sweden Democrats are not tolerant is somewhat childish. Also annoying is how these party representatives call Denmark a racist society because of the Dansk Folkeparti who like Sweden Democrats are for a "responsible policy for immigration". Apparently the Danish are relieved of not having to be harassed by the Swedes on this matter any longer.

Reading international papers it is clear that there is a certain surprise in that Sweden has gotten a "right wing extremist party" as many write. Some mention their neo-nazi background. It is in some way as the Swedish innocence or virginity has been fouled. In this sense it is a political history event as Jimmy Åkesson, the party leader of the Sweden Democrats said in his speech before his crowd yesterday night after the announcement of their 5.7% share of the popular vote, a count actually larger than that of the Christian Democrats and the Left Party. No one mentioned during the television coverage yesterday about the fact that there are problems on the Continent regarding immigration issues. It is like the Swedes are not mature enough to deal with this information.

More important as the sign of a new era is that the Alliance went forward and the Social Democrats lost ground. It is also historic that a center-right government is getting a second mandate although they did not get a full majority. This has, however, been the norm rather than the exception in Swedish politics and special rules for handling budget issues have been introduced to alleviate this problem although the particular issues might cause problems. It is not surprising that the Swedish people are more stimulated by talk about getting jobs than securing the welfare state. First things first!