Featured Thought Merchant: Hernando de Soto

". . . Hernando de Soto is a Peruvian economist known for his work on the informal economy, or economic activity that is neither taxed nor monitored by a government. De Soto argues that an important characteristic of capitalism is the functioning state protection of property rights in a formal property system where ownership and transactions are clearly recorded. . . "

Interview with Hernando de Soto:

“. . . Capitalism is essentially the economic system of poor people. That's what allowed the people that came from humble origins of the world to have economic rights the way only nobility and the high bourgeoisie had it before. So capitalism is essentially a tool for poor people to prosper. . . The constituency of capitalism has always been poor people that are outside the system. That's the way it worked in the United States. That was the basis of the libertarian or liberal democratic revolution that occurred in Western Europe. I don't know why it is that everybody expects that when you go and you talk to rich people throughout Latin America or Asia or the Middle East you are in touch with people who have the same libertarian principles that you do. You don't. The real constituency is below, and until the people who consider themselves real capitalists realize that they're not real capitalists, they're talking about the systems of privilege that existed way before popular capitalism was in place. . . .”

Featured Thought Merchant: David Pearce

". . . David Pearce promotes the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. He argues that the abolition of suffering can be accomplished through paradise engineering (The Hedonistic Imperative )

From Utopian Neuroscience:

I predict that superintelligent posthumans will be animated by gradients of bliss that are literally billions of times richer than anything biologically accessible today; but whether or not such civilisations exist beyond extremely low density branches of the universal wave function is pure conjecture. Instead, I want to raise ten objections to the indefinite amplification of well-being - and sketch out ten possible replies.

From Why Does Anything Exist?:

The quantum-mechanical wave-function of the Universe, the allegedly exhaustive formal description of the world, encodes how everything that physically can occur/exist does occur/exist with some density or other. Taken literally, this increasingly popular and deceptively "anything-goes"-sounding interpretation of the quantum formalism actually rules out all of the world's traditional cosmologies. This is because of their varying degrees of disguised internal inconsistency. At least to my negative utilitarian mind, [Universal Quantum Mechanics’s] entailment of googolplexes of hell-branches means it is horrifically more prolific in others.

Engineering a Paradise with Featured Thought Merchant David Pearce

". . . David Pearce promotes the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. He argues that the abolition of suffering can be accomplished through paradise engineering. In The Hedonistic Imperative, Pearce outlines how technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, pharmacology, and neurosurgery could potentially converge to eliminate all forms of unpleasant experience in human life and produce a post-human civilization. . . ."
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". . . The term “abolitioinism,” used to describe the use of biotechnology to eliminate suffering, was first proposed by Lews Mancini in 1986. Abolitionism is the use of science to maximize happiness and minimize suffering—not just in humans but in all sentient life. It is a philosophy inspired by utilitarian ethics: if happiness equals value, then the elimination of suffering or 'maximization of value' should be the prime objective of the human race. . . ."
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". . . It is hard for me [i.e., Barry Schwartz] to see much reason for concern over a society that dedicates itself to promoting happiness by cultivating virtuous character and human excellence. It strikes me that this is a vast improvement on the pursuit of increased per capita GDP. Making this point, I think, is Richard Layard’s main objective in his book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, which is cited by McMahon as a prime example of the current interest in identifying happiness-promoting policies. Layard’s argument, in essence, is that one of the things nations do is pursue policies. Given that nations pursue policies, they ought to be pursuing policies that promote the welfare of their citizens. All nations have pretty much taken it for granted that the way to promote the welfare of citizens is by increasing national wealth. It has seemed reasonable to take wealth as a proxy for welfare, because the more wealth citizens have, the better each citizen will be able to pursue welfare as he or she sees it. If wealth is not an end in itself, but rather a means of promoting welfare, then it would certainly be good to know whether it is achieving this end. . . ." From Why Societies Should Pursue Happiness.
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". . . Four of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies are proposing to launch a television station to tell the public about their drugs, amid strenuous lobbying across Europe by the industry for an end to restrictions aimed at protecting patients. Pharma TV would be a dedicated interactive digital channel funded by the industry with health news and features but, at its heart, would be detailed information from drug companies about their medicines. . . ." From Coming soon: the shopping channel run by drug firms.

Featured Thought Merchant: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson - Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University

Wild Idea #14:If we allowed complete freedom of contract, law could be privatized, to our common benefit.

Limits on freedom of contract are today said to fix problems of monopoly, externalities, asymmetric information, and local irrationality. But if limits are good fixes, then people should voluntarily choose such limits in early contracting over contract law itself. If competing private laws offered law and enforcement packages, contracting early with each other on inter-law disputes, we could each better tune our laws to our individual circumstances and preferences.

Wild Idea #1: Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds.

The startling prediction of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics is that when systems like your mind interact with small quantum systems, every possible quantum outcome actually happens in a different "world." Quantum mechanics is our most basic theory of physics, and surveys of prominent physicists reportedly find majorities favoring this interpretation.