40 years!

In a few days more, on September the 11th, 40 years since the military coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende will have been completed. Therefore in the last days almost all communication media in Chile have exhibited all kind of programs regarding this painful topic. In Chile there are two main opinions with respect to the military coup of 1973. The socialistic perspective emphatically rejects the coup based on the belief that Allende was trying to achieve a Marxists revolution in a pacific way. On the other hand, people that belong to a political sector that we call “the Chilean right politics” have approved the coup because they contend that Allende violated the constitution of 1925 in several ways and he was trying also to impose his revolution in a very violent manner with the support of communist countries like Cuba or the Soviet Union. The younger generations which have been born after the coup have grown exposed to these two main streams of opinion.

Whatever the truth had been, this topic divides the Chileans into two groups; those who support Pinochet and those who reject him. Anger and hate have been maintained among these two sectors even between the younger ones. What can we do in order to reach reconciliation between Chileans?

I believe that reconciliation could be accomplished by three main ways. The first condition for reconciliation is that every injustice committed before and after September 1973 is repaired as much as possible according to the rule of law. This is rather a judicial process than a political issue. Secondly, the discussion around this problem should be led by historians and scientists and not by politicians. Scientists should play a major role in order to reveal the historical truth and they should have the bravery to support their vision, whatever it might be, with clear data and strong evidence. In the last place, it’s imperative that politicians don’t use this topic for electoral purposes. This third action could be only achieved if they accept the fact that everyone who was old enough for making decisions in 1973 has a little of guilt in the breakage of democracy that we suffered.  Therefore there wouldn´t be any good reasons for blaming someone for things that occurred before and after the military action.

If we led the scientists to enlighten the historical truth with data and evidence, politicians don´t use their prejudices for electoral purposes and we try to use our current laws to repair any human right violation that was committed before and after the coup, then we could expect that reconciliation among Chileans will be achieved soon. In this sense, I believe that we have reasons to be optimistic because certain actions similar to those described have been already embraced.    

Arts and Public Funding

In order to address properly this issue we should start by asking why is so common to believe that the arts differ from other private enterprises so that they require from special funding in order to exist. Why the government should provide the arts with funding and give any kind of support to other industries like for example the retail industry?

People that agree with the idea of government subsidizing the arts have the underlying assumption that this discipline is not able to make profits on its own and consequently if you leave it subject to market preferences it won´t be able to flourish. Thus is perfectly reasonable that government support this kind of human activities and not others which can sustain on their own, like the retail industry for example. This assertion is based on the common belief that few people have the willingness or the budget to pay for arts and therefore, as the prices of artistic expressions will be low, artists will make very little earnings and be discouraged from dedicating their lives to art. In other words, the market is never going to be able to provide a great part of society with artistic services or goods. One might agree with this assertion if we look at the music industry. Today is very difficult for musicians to earn good salaries because the sales of original CD´s has been completely undermined by free downloads of music through the Internet. The only way through which musicians are able to earn more money is by giving concerts and live performances. Nevertheless, musicians that are starting with this practice can´t organize concerts very often because people could get used to them and this could affect their potential popularity. Having neither the choice of selling their music nor to organize concerts with certain desired frequency it’s very difficult especially for young musicians to follow their passion and thus many of them abandon this kind of non-profitable occupation. Therefore, if we accept the fact that market isn´t able to provide goods and services regarding arts, then is reasonable to consider the arts as public goods which should be provided by governmental action.  

Despite this perspective sounds coherent, I believe that artists should try to produce, distribute and sale their forms of expression using the free-market system and without any public funding. If people don´t have the willingness to pay for arts, why should the government use money collected from taxes to force those people to be exposed to artistic expressions for which they don´t have any real preferences? I think that money from taxes can be used in other more important areas such as education, health or social security. Artists should therefore use their creativity in order to expand their expressions as much as it´s possible among individuals that are free to choose their artistic options.

On the other hand, I agree with the belief that allowing the government to take part in arts will likely affect the integrity of arts. If government will give subsidies to arts then, as resources are not infinite, it will have to discriminate some projects against others. This means that a bureaucrat with probably no deep understanding of arts will have to decide which projects to support and which projects aren´t worthy of funding. Consequently society will receive only the kind of art that is accepted by government. For example, if people in government consider that certain paintings with non-religious motives are preferable over religious painting because “the state can´t support any kind of religious expression” then the former group will impose over the latter although this might not represent the major interests or preferences of society. In this example painters with non-religious interests will be in a most advantageous position than other painters only because of the existence of a certain regulation or law written sometime by some politicians. Then, when religious painters achieve some public funding as a result of some strikes or demonstrations others groups will use the same method in order to get some money. Under this mechanism is very unlikely that arts will flourish. Instead, artists will struggle in order to get the attention of the government. It will be a battle where the most powerful or influential groups will win. I rather prefer another kind of battle, the one that occurs in free-markets where artists will compete in order to get the preferences of free individuals whose tastes and preferences aren´t subject to any law or regulation.

The Future

Technology has played a significant role in human evolution and has become one of the most important agents of change regarding human behavior. Technology has promoted certain forms of social and personal behavior encouraging individuals to leave behind some ways of acting, making them to become old-fashioned, and enabling new forms of interaction among persons. Although some people might have a negative perspective of technological advancements, on the other side many agree that technology has really improved our thinking skills and life quality of ordinary people by solving problems that have plagued us for many years and therefore allowing us to defy new and more complex challenges.  I believe that the present shape of the world is explained by all the technological devices that are available for us today.  Consequently if you want to guess how the world would look like in the future, you should try first to foresee the upcoming technological changes.

Of course we are experiencing tech advancements in many different fields. For example, with regard to transportation between cities separated by long distances or among countries, it´s likely that we will have, in a relative short period of time, the chance to travel using supersonic planes that will fly at higher speeds than sound and will hence reduce substantively the amount of time we invest today in moving from one place to another.  If we consider another area of development like exploration of the universe, we can also see some amazing progress. NASA is currently working on new technological devices that will ease the sending of humans to explore the solar system and collect valuable information. Thus we could expect that landing of humans on Mars will be accomplished soon.  On the other hand, the problem of energy and its relationship with environment is currently one of the most urgent issues in which scientist from all over the world have been engaged. The challenge of producing efficient power through a sustainable mechanism has been continuously addressed by governments, universities and research centers which have devoted important amounts of their budgets in order to move forward on this issue. As you can see there are many areas which will surprise us soon with astonishing advancements.

Despite of the overwhelming amount of technology improvements that we could imagine, I believe that there are two main areas which will lead the stream of upcoming technological developments.  One is related with the understanding of human body operation. Tissue and organ biosynthetic generation will enable the possibility of replacing an old organ or one severally damaged by a particular disease by a new organ fully designed and cultivated in a lab. The more comprehensive understanding of the process of cancer formation will allow us to prevent this widespread disease in a much effective way.  These advancements in biology in addition with upcoming discoveries in brain science that will reveal the present mysteries of brain operation will literally integrate the human body with computers. Blindness, deafness or even complete muscular paralysis would be solved with the help of microcomputers inserted somewhere in our bodies that will send electrical signals to the brain or allow muscular locomotion using advanced electromechanical methods.  In order to achieve these great triumphs over human nature new materials will be required and therefore the advances in nanotechnology will play a crucial role.  These new materials provided with amazing properties regarding electromagnetic conductivity and structural capabilities will have a broader range of application that will go beyond biology. They will be incorporated in industrial process which will become efficient and therefore in the long term a set of new products and services will be available for consumers at lower prices.

At the same time technology regarding integrated circuits will continue following Moore’s Law which states that the amount of transistors placed in a certain volume gets doubled every year. This means that both speed and process capacity of circuits will maintain its present growth at exponential rates and consequently integrated circuits will become more powerful, smaller and cheaper. They will be in some sense omnipresent and almost every object will have a card attached to it with a message such as: “Intel Inside”.  In order to continue with Moore’s Law quantum computing will be essential because it will allow the processing of much higher volumes of information. This constitutes the second key area around which technology will develop at very fast rates.

The capability of processing gigantic amounts of data through quantum computing and the ability to connect computers to our brains and bodies will have an enormous impact on our lives that will reach almost any human action. Communications will be dramatically transformed from holographic projections and learning processes will evolve in such way that memory as we understand it today will be useless. The availability of information as we are currently seeing it will continue its growth but we won´t need to be carrying any notebook, Ipad or smartphone with us because a microcomputer connected to the cloud will be attached to our bodies.  Working routines will be very different and remote work will increase. Therefore the whole structure of corporations will also change and smaller companies will appear. In the long term we will have to accept that each individual itself will be considered as a corporation. Even more, governments will progressively lose their capacity of taxation and thereby governmental action will begin to decrease.  As the entire world will be connected some native customs will completely disappear, languages will unify and free-market economies will be developed everywhere. The present notion of countries will probably be affected and will evolve towards a concept of universal governments. In such a world, how are we going to resolve our problems? Who will administer justice? There will be wars although any country will have the power of destroying the entire world? In some strange sense the future entails a contradiction regarding concentration of power. Technology will help to distribute it among individuals by giving them a sort of infinite power. It seems that as more technological advancements help us to solve our problems and improve our skills, higher ethical standards will be demanded in order to manage these amazing but potentially dangerous technological tools.   

A Perfect World

Suppose we lived in an imaginary world where resources were in some sense infinite. Only by desiring something we would obtain it immediately. If you wish a house with a swimming pool and a big garden it will magically and instantly appear in from of you only by simple thinking on it. If you wish to have your preferred meals served on your table you only have to wish it. But suppose also that there were only two restrains to which you were subject: you can´t magically create or destroy other humans and you can´t automatically improve your own sets of skills and talents. What would happen in this kind of ideal world? Would everybody live on their own planets with all kind of amenities but isolated from the rest?

In order to address such a complicated question it’s necessary to distinguish two types of actions in which the habitants of such a universe will be engaged. The first type could be called personal actions and the second are collective actions.  Personal actions will only require the participation of the individual interested in that particular action. For example if you wish to have an incredible car and drive it across an empty street at very high speed you will be engaged in a personal action. In the opposite sense, if you would like to teach something and someone else would like to learn it from you, both will commit a collective action. Which will be the role of collective actions in this rare universe?

It´s a clear fact that we need each others. We like to talk to someone else, have the need to love, to teach students, to learn from teachers or to have fun with friends.  In all these cases we should note that we will have to compete with other people´s skills in a similar way it occurs in our present world. The winners of such competition will be the most social-skilled persons and they will have the chance to accomplish their collective needs with the persons they want. The losers will face three main choices; they can turn into another kind of collective actions, accept to fulfill their social needs with fewer persons or initiate violence against the winners. Although there will be people more skilled than others it´s not clear who will win the eventual wars or conflicts that may occur because nobody will more skilled than the whole rest. This brings us to ask whether power could be concentrated in a few persons or whether concentration of power is indeed a consequence of limited resources.   

Therefore, in order to avoid the terrible consequences of the conflicts that might occur, it´s possible that a market around collective actions will appear. Every market needs a mean of payment and thereby currency will also exist in this imaginary world. People with money will be able to pay for collective actions and those who receive the payment will be richer in order to acquire other collective actions. By this way rich and poor will also have to coexist. Their form is going to be very different because they will have everything they wish except collective actions.

Following the entangled logic of all this reasoning we can observe that this imaginary world won´t be too different from the present because competition, hate and poverty will exist in both worlds. Here one might argue that by eliminating the two imposed restrictions it would be possible to achieve a perfect world where everybody will be happy and fulfilled. In such a world everybody will be similar to a god and, at the same time, there will be no good because everybody will be equal. Is there any way we can imagine the Utopia from Thomas More? 

The Pursuit of Happiness

This brief and informal essay was motivated from the reading of two well-known sentences. The first is the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which affirms: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. The second sentence was stated by a Russian philosopher and writer who developed a philosophical system called objectivism. Regarding happiness Ayn Rand once said: “Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values”.  

Both phrases illustrate that one of the main purposes of life is the search of happiness according to your own interests and values. Almost for everybody this statement sounds very reasonable because we all want to achieve happiness or, at least, that is what we normally hear from people’s wishes. This leads us to ask immediately what happiness is or whether there’s any way by which we can explain the meaning of this term. Have we ever met somebody that we could consider a happy person? Which are the main characteristics of happy people?

Before we analyze this complex issue it´s worth to say that we will start from a premise that for many may appeared very questionable. This whole informal analysis of happiness will be based on the consideration that happiness is a personal decision. Taking this into account we won’t make any formal definition of happiness but to describe those necessary conditions for making such an important decision. It’s important to recall that they are only necessary conditions and therefore having achieved them doesn’t mean the attainment of happiness. Instead, the lack of them is useful to describe what happiness is NOT about.

We will also use another controversial premise for this analysis which indicates that happiness is a long-duration condition. This means that happiness is not affected from everyday situations like receiving an awful new, having an accident, winning the lottery or being fired. Of course happiness is a condition that can be lost but this occurs typically over a long period of time. By this way, having pointed out two important assumptions for our analysis we will indicate two conditions that I consider necessary for happiness.

In the first place it´s important to underscore that happiness needs another human person. This requirement may be complicated to digest because it can be likely misunderstand as the need for somebody to love in a traditional or romantic sense. Far from this interpretation this condition suggests an internal and very deep bonding between the individual who searches happiness and another person or group of persons. Take for example a castaway living isolated from the world in a very remote island. Could he achieve happiness in those terrible conditions? Based in our argument our answer is an outright yes only if the actions of the character in our example are connected with an internal concept of another person distinct from me. In this sense he should think in god, his family and friends or even in the entire world and incorporate these ideas in his actions or intentions. The word thinking is not the proper one because it entails having a rational or conscious concept of other persons when our argument actually contends that you have to include the world, an entity different from yourself, in your thoughts, aims, actions and intentions.

Someone can argue for example that he is authentically happy by learning mathematics completely alone and therefore he doesn’t need the world for achieving happiness or maybe he could need it only for instrumental o practical reasons. Following our argument we would say that if he is learning only for himself it’s impossible for him to reach a long-duration state of happiness. Nonetheless, if he includes the world in his lonely studying he might achieve happiness. The expression “including the world” means that his search for knowledge will also consider, not as a declared intention, to share them with others by teaching, writing a book, explaining them to a fried, making predictions or designing a novel device. If he is looking for knowledge only to be accumulated in his mind or brain without the conception of something different than himself the most likely result is not happiness but sorrow. The same is truth if he is studying only for experiencing the ecstasy of understanding the world or contemplating the nature. Why scientists who have discovered a great issue are so elated when they are writing down their conclusions?

The second condition for happiness is to have dreams, aims or things you want to accomplish but recalling that happiness can´t neither depend on the particular goals of an individual nor in the achievement of them.  Our goals change over time (when you accomplish something you set another new objective) and they depend strongly on the environment (if you are a prisoner you might want to escape) and therefore happiness can´t be subject to these variable conditions. The only important thing is to have objectives and trying to achieve them, no matter if they´re grandiloquent or subtle ones.

The question about happiness is a very complex topic which has been addressed by different religions and philosophical doctrines. Some of them assert that defeating death and transcending time is a central concept to achieve happiness and others recall that pursuing pleasure and having a more hedonistic behavior would bring us closer to happiness. Whatever the truth is it´s a fact that in our lives we have met some people that we consider to be authentically happy. Which are their characteristics? Do they have dreams and have knocked down their interior walls? From where do they draw strength to surpass pain and adversity?

9 colors and flavors!

A few days ago, on Monday, finished the registration period for presidential, senatorial, deputies and local authorities elections that will take place at the end of this year in Chile. Regarding presidential elections, 9 persons fulfilled all the requirements needed to register their candidacy. By this way, in November all Chilean citizens that are also living in this country will have the voluntary option of choosing the next president among 9 different alternatives!

Despite all these options come in different colors and flavors, in my humble opinion they can be classified into four big groups. It´s worth to indicate that all these groups don’t’ constitute current political conglomerates and this categorization is only a reductionist approach for describing many diverse political realities

The first group could be called the liberal and conservative option because it encourages economic freedom and is rather conservative on a political and social level. It rejects, for example, same-sex marriage, drugs legalization or substantial changes on the processes for electing authorities. The second group is a bit more liberal on “value” issues and although believes in the power of free-markets to create opportunities it considers that higher taxes on firms would help to reduce social inequalities. The third group, on the other side, embraces a big tax reform in order to assure social rights for the people. For example, this group thinks that applying more taxes will allow the state to provide free secondary and undergraduate education for almost everybody. It has been said that this tax reform will collect almost 3% of domestic product. On a constitutional level, the candidates from this group believe that the current constitution is not representative of the will of the people because it was written during the military and non-democratic government in 1980. They suggest important changes on the constitution being the most important the elimination of the subsidiary role of state. Instead, the state ought to have a more active social participation, more closed to a welfare state. The last group agrees with this constitutional amendment but it goes much further. It also proposes nationalization of many important industries like mining. They argue that big corporations operating with Chilean resources own very large profits but don’t really help to improve living conditions of ordinary citizens.  Some of the candidates from this group have said that they wouldn’t have any problems in calling to national strikes or demonstrations if their proposals were rejected by the congress.  

In the first group we have only a female candidate, Evelyn Matthei, who was the labor secretary during the present government of Sebastián Piñera.  The second group has three members: Franco Parisi, Tomás Jocelyn-Holt and Ricardo Israel. The first two are running without the support of any party and the last is representing the PRI (meaning Independent Regionalist Party). In the third group we have Michelle Bachelet and Marco Enríquez-Ominami. The former was the president of Chile before Piñera and the last is a young politician that created his own political force, a party called PRO (from the word progressive). His nickname is MEO. Finally, in the last group there are three candidates more. All of them are supported by different and rather small parties. They’re Marcel Claude, Roxana Miranda and Alfredo Sfeir.

There are two big issues in relation with upcoming elections. In the first place, many political analysts agree that an authentic liberal option, defending both personal and economic freedom, is missing between the present 9 options. The apparition of various liberal think tanks and similar groups in recent years could be a signal that these ideas are growing between the Chileans. The second issue is the present difficulty to predict the results with more or less accuracy. During the current administration the congress approved automatic registration for elections and voluntary vote. This change makes it very difficult to forecast how many people are going to vote in the next elections. Historically nearly 8 million people have voted in previous elections but because of the recently approved law this amount could go up to more than 11 million. Of course, there’s also the possibility that nothing significant occurs.

Here is my bet: Matthei 36%, Bachelet 34%, MEO 12%, Parisi 8%, Israel 7%, Claude 1%, Sfeir 1%, Jocelyn-Holt 0.5% and Miranda 0.5%. The total votes will be very high, close to 10 million! If final results are similar to these projections we will have a second round between Bachelet and Matthei where everything could happen. As you can see this will be a very interesting semester for those who have fun with political circus. 

Somebody to Admire

Similar to Queen’s song “Somebody to Love” I believe that we all should have “somebody to admire” and, if we don´t, we should look for it. Don’t misunderstand me: you don’t need to know this person (or these persons); you have only to follow its opinions or public appearances with a truly emotional commitment.  

Most of us admire some persons that, in a special way, are like a kind of reference for us. Commonly we are interested in their opinions, have a strong tendency to defend their positions (which is more emotional than rational in most cases) and to incorporate them in our daily behavior. They may be considered as “idols” or “heroes”, even though such denominations may be possible too grandiloquent.  

In my personal case I have two persons that fall into this vague definition. They are the musician Charly Garcia and the economist Milton Friedman. Both had a powerful and similar effect on my ideas and behavior despite of the fact that they seem to be very different and for many persons even opposed characters. I had always heard about them, but I was almost 20 years old when I began actually exploring the world of Charly García and a bit more than 30 years old when I started with Milton Friedman’s ideas. The channel through which I have the opportunity to dive into the depth of their thoughts was the same: the great YouTube. This marvelous web tool deserves a special recognition. It has allowed me to hear full albums, attend to various courses, listen to different speeches and interviews and a lot more. It’s really a great tool for learning and having fun at the same time!  Therefore, my most sincerely respects regarding YouTube.

As I mentioned later, I met Charly García, of course not in a physical way, in my 20’s and listening to his music for the first time was simply astonish. It was a very subtle and elegant mix of classical music with elements from the popular world, specially, from rock, tango and folk.  The lyrics were mysterious and dark but charged with a strange feeling of hope. Without using sumptuous words and rather simple sentences very powerful concepts were illustrated in his songs. All these combined elements made the whole esthetical concept of “Say No More” very engaging. It represented chaos, critical thinking and beauty at the same time. It encouraged me to ask where the limits were and what would happen if we move them a little. These limits imposed by social behavior were arbitrary? The main and most important lesson of Charly was this sense of critical thinking and not giving any answers for granted.

The same effect was produced by Friedman’s ideas regarding free markets and concentration of power. I knew very little about economy and therefore was concerned with the general economic and political concepts explained by Milton Friedman rather than his contributions to economic science.  It was the challenging and simple questions proposed by Milton what draw my attention. It was not obvious that distributing wealth from rich to poor trough taxation was an efficient solution to poverty. On the contrary, that mechanism could provide more segregation and worsen the problem. The alternative of using free markets in which voluntary cooperation is promoted seemed very powerful in order to avoid the apparition of monopolies.  Besides the interesting content of his ideas it was really the way Milton presented them what struck me most. Everything was logically analyzed and, most important, supported with evidence and data. Thereby, the whole concept represented rationality and logical soundness. This perception moved me, on an emotional level, to pose questions and try to find simple answers from them.

As you can see, having somebody to admire can really affect the way you see the world.  You need to put aside your ego and let your emotions find a place where your own thoughts can develop in the most prolific way.