Selfishness

Ever since I started writing here, I have focused only on the negative traits of human behaviour. So, I thought, today, let me write about something positive. How can "Selfishness" be positive, you ask? Read on.


Every once in a while I notice a gaping hole in my knowledge. A few years ago I started wondering what exactly the economy was. What did it mean when people said the economy was growing? Who was Adam Smith, and what was so revolutionary about his book, "The Wealth of Nations"? In order to fill that hole, I bought the book.

Aside from getting my questions answered and learning a little about the world, I learned a lot about life. Adam Smith, while a bit loquacious, was also a genius. His economic theory was so simple, yet so misunderstood, even 231 years later. In a nutshell, what Adam Smith said was this:

1. Wealth is not gold and silver. Wealth is living a comfortable life.

2. People should concentrate on doing what they are good at.

3. People should delegate what they are not good at to others.

  

By doing what you do most efficiently, you have the most power to trade the produce of your labour with others who are, in turn, doing what they do most efficiently. Thus, the most overall good is produced with the least amount of effort, and we will all become rich, which is to say, we all live a comfortable life. The keyword here is all. In the old way of thinking, there was a limited amount of happiness in the world, so nobody could be happy, except at the expense of others. Adam Smith realized that, actually, we can all be happy.

I am an analyst. Analyzing situations and coming up with novel solutions to problems is what I do for a living. Ideas are cheap, though; you have to design and build a system to implement your idea. A system to make sure everyone in the world manages to produce and receive such that everyone achieves the greatest possible happiness seems extremely complicated.

No, said Adam Smith. It’s actually extremely simple. All you have to do is follow three simple rules.

1. Act selfishly to fulfill your own desires

2. ...within reason

3. ...and with an eye toward the greater good.

Selfishness is the basis of good design.

What’s magical about this system is that it’s realistic. A system based on people being unselfish is a system that is designed to fail. This not only applies to people; this applies to all systems. A selfish system is an automated system. A selfish system is an object-oriented system. It’s a system where individual actors pursue their own best interests and all that’s good comes as a side effect of those actions.

Consider the problem of hard drive fragmentation. Microsoft addresses this problem by providing a utility that people can remember to run from time to time that will take all of their files and move them around on disk to make the most efficient use of the filesystem given the available space. This is a system that’s designed to fail. Why would I run some pain-in-the-neck utility? How does that make my day better or more productive?

On the other hand, Apple’s filesystem automatically defragments itself as a side effect of normal filesystem operations. When I selfishly move, copy, and delete files, I’m defragmenting my drive as a side effect. This is a system that takes advantage of what I’m going to do anyway. Microsoft’s system is a stationary bike that relies on my being willing to exercise, while Apple’s system is a 12-speed street bike that takes advantage of the fact that I want to go to the store.

Apple is not blameless in this regard. Consider Disk Utility, which requires people to know about and remember to run some application to repair permissions on their drive so that everything works properly. This is a system that is designed to fail, and which does fail. Nearly every person who has lost their Delicious Library data has done so because of a permissions error. The root cause of this loss? Some engineer shortsightedly  expecting a user to altruistically repair some esoteric aspect of their filesystem.

Selfishness is the way of nature.

People who have read Adam Smith’s book, must have heard of invisible hand, and they might even be aware that the invisible hand is the apparent force that automatically balances the market when people act in their own best interests. However, what most people fail to realize is that the whole “be selfish” message has two extremely large caveats. First, you have to be reasonable. There’s nothing wrong with having a beer or smoking a cigarette, nor is there anything wrong with making money. However, if you let the pursuit of  balance of your bank account become the only thing you do, you are being unreasonable. Having a million and having ten million is the exact same thing. At a certain point, you have to step back and say, OK, I have enough. Time to do something else.

The other catch follows from the idea that I should be free to act in my own self-interest. If I do things that are unnecessarily detrimental to society, I am preventing other people from acting in their own self-interest. You have the right to do what’s best for you, but not if it infringes on my right to do what’s best for me. That doesn’t mean there can’t be competition. Competition for limited resources is inevitable. It’s the basis of nature, and the driving force behind another brilliant theory, natural selection. If there are two people and one job, let the one most qualified get the job. If there are two products that do the same thing, let the better one be the one you buy. Luckily, there’s a lot of people and a lot of needs, so chances are, even second place walks away with a nice prize.What that means is you have to take care that your life doesn’t spill over into other people’s lives. Antisocial behavior is a crime against society.

The one thing that makes me red-faced, cross-eyed angry is when people do things that are antisocial. I don’t mean not wanting to go out or talk to people. No, by antisocial I’m talking about things that are actively incompatible with being around other people. I’m talking about cutting in line, stealing, and driving like a moron. I’m talking about breaking car windows, graffiti, and bumping other cars when you parallel park. I’m talking about littering, throwing cigarette butts all over the place and throwing rubbish out car windows on the highways.

To me, these crimes of selfishness are the worst crimes in the world. If you and your friend get into a fight and you kill him, that’s unfortunate, but isn’t it worse to completely destroy the world’s ability to communicate because you insist on sending out millions of messages advertising some pills which I don't need, some sites which I do not want to vist, and whatever else it is that’s clogging my inbox? Murder is a crime against another person and their friends and family. Spam is a crime against society itself. Society is more than just a person. Society is all people. Sometimes we, as society, have to move to rectify abuses that threaten our right to be selfish. Ultimately, the selfishness of the many must outweigh the selfishness of the few.

This is why, despite thinking Adam Smith is a genius, I think we need to realize that some things are just too important to leave to individuals so we, as a society, have to make a decision. We all want to be healthy, and I don’t think anyone can honestly believe that one person is more entitled to being healthy than another. Breathe all the air you want, but if someone decides to pollute the air, we need to shut them down. The air belongs to all of us. The environment belongs to all of us. Selfishness must regulate selfishness.

Selfishness defines the value of everything.

Another thing to come out of all this invisible hand business is the idea of supply and demand. The idea is that the cost of something and the availability of something must balance out. If you’re selling something faster than you can make it, you have to raise the price. If you’re making something faster than you’re selling it, you have to lower the price. The reason this works is the law of marginal utility, which states that something is worth exactly what I am willing to pay for it. If I’m starving to death I’d probably pay you a thousand for a meal. But if you hope to open a business selling meals at a thousand a pop, then you are an idiot.

Adam Smith didn’t understand this. He talked around it, but he never quite figured out price. He assumed it had to do with the amount of labour that goes into something, but we’ve since figured out that this is untrue. If I spend a year producing an ugly sweater with my poor knitting skills, and you make a lakh a year, logic dictates you should pay me a lakh for my sweater.

Common sense says this is untrue. Even if we took out all the labour and I charged you 100 for the yarn, that doesn’t make the sweater worth 100, if you’re unwilling to pay it. You, and only you, decide how much you’re willing to pay. If I’m lucky, someone who is going to an ugly sweater party will offer me 200, and I’ll take it. If you decide that you want the sweater after all, that’s too bad. I’m not willing to spend another year making a sweater for hundred bucks and the cost of yarn. 

So, I am now starting to believe that Ayn Rand is after all right in saying "Selfishness is a Virtue"

Signing off....

Rajan