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TLDR: If the United States of America hadn’t sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, we could have comfortably fed every single US child, or fed / clothed / housed / cared for every US child living in poverty.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have come at a staggering cost to the United States taxpayer.  The National Priorities Project estimates that the combined cost tops $1.249 trillion over the past 10 years.  There might have been a concomitant cost of not going to war, in terms of possible future damage to our country, but because that cost is arguable and probabilistic, I won’t cover it.  What we know for certain is the amount of money we did spend.

We spent this money in the hopes of making the United States safer from terrorism.  There is a real threat of terrorism, although there are only a few attempts in the US on record from the past 10 years.  It’s hard for a layperson to say how effective the many billions of dollars we’ve spent have been in thwarting terrorism; but it is easy to say how effective they could have been otherwise.

In the United States today, 23% of children live in households classified by the USDA as “food insecure”.  A household is considered “food insecure” when its occupants live in hunger or fear of starvation.  Children in this situation are more common in the southern states, but are found in every state in the union.  This is truly a national issue.

Given a rough estimate of $124 billion expenditure on war per year, and a total of about 75 million children in the US, we could have allotted ~$1650 per US child per year, enough to comfortably feed every single child in the United States.  Or, we could have allotted ~$7200 per child per year to each of the 17.2 million children living in “food insecure” households, enough to pay for food, clothing, housing, and medical care.

As Talib Kweli says,

In order to receive, then we need to give

We gotta feed the kids, they gotta eat to live

What good is a country safe from terrorism when its children are starving?

I’ve been thinking about principles a lot lately.  As I approach most things, I’ve been approaching my pondering metacognitively.  I’ve been trying to figure out what my principles are or should be, but as part of that examination, I’ve come to a frustrating question: should one even have principles?

In my opinion, any contemplation of “should” implies a hypothetical imperative: something that is done in order to reach a certain goal.  Assuming that this implication is valid (that we are not operating from some universal categorical imperative), the question that I’m asking myself is: Why?  Why have principles?  The best answer I can find for myself is that setting principles by which to live is a strategy to maximize happiness.

But then I get to another difficult question: what is happiness?  From my experience (or I guess I should say, in my definition), happiness results from the fulfillment of needs.  Drawing from Maslow’s hierarchy, we find a laundry list of needs.  But, again: why?  Why do we have needs?  My philosophy of existence is that of self-reinforcement – that is, things that exist in a certain form are often that way because they tend to maintain their own existence.  From this rationale, organisms (humans included) that exist and persist do so because they are able to maintain their own existence, both as individuals and as species.  As we look at the needs on Maslow’s hierarchy, we see increasingly complex levels of behavioral imperatives, the satisfaction of which tends (again, in my experience) to lead toward an individual’s self-perpetuation, both physiologically and genetically.  Then, if happiness results from the fulfillment of needs, it is perhaps highly correlated to self-perpetuation.

So given my assumption that principles are designed to maximize happiness, how do I go about choosing them?  Or more importantly, choosing whether I want to have them?  If I could be happier without principles, should I forgo them?  Or, if I choose to follow principles, should I design them as Kant does, such that I would wish (and could conceive of a world where it’s possible) that all others should follow them as well?  Or should I construct my own principles in the style of Hume’s sensible knave: following most rules, but taking advantage of personally beneficial exceptions, even at the cost of others?  And why should I even care about the costs of others, unless there are ways that they affect my happiness (revenge, community destruction, empathy)?

Sometimes I wish I could just lay it all down with the certainty of my favorite sensible knave: Calvin (of the same and Hobbes).  Here’s one of my favorite strips from November 27, 1990 that states the easy way out of this conundrum nonchalantly and eloquently:

Is Calvin’s simple philosophy a perversion of the concept of principles?  Or is it the pinnacle, a categorical imperative from which all other principles should be derived?  Are the principles that most of us hold dear – justice, equality, kindness, empathy, fairness – actually emergent strategies that increase the chances of our individual and collective self-perpetuation?

Or is there some kind of other universal virtue, not derived from this brand of intelligent self-interest?

So many questions, and so few answers.  But then again, maybe I’ve found a core principle of mine: don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions!

The great scientist Richard Feynman famously said, “Physics is like sex.  Sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”  We see this fascinating phenomenon again and again: a joyful or compulsive activity for one leading to useful development for others.  Discussing the history of technological innovation today with my father, we came up with a few interesting examples of what I would call “our means to your end”.

I began with one close to my vocation and avocation: gaming.  The video game industry sells over $20 billion worth of products per year to a crowd of enthusiastic technophiles who crave the latest in performance and functionality.  But why do they (we) crave these qualities?  Competitive advantage in gaming, sure… but I would propose that a big part of the desire stems from an interest in increasingly realistic and stimulating fantasy worlds.  In order to achieve the latest in virtual reality, gaming hardware companies like Nvidia and ATI have found themselves in a consumer-driven arms race – one that has lead them to develop some of the most advanced processor technology available today.  And, fascinatingly, the non-gaming world has benefited indirectly from this race nearly as much as the gaming world itself.  The same advanced, performance-enhanced computing technology that the average gamer has in his PS3, Wii, Xbox, or desktop rig has been harnessed by another hyper-competitive industry: professional electronic trading.  The graphics-processing chips inside today’s machines are incredibly powerful; Nvidia’s Quadro FX 5800, a high-end consumer graphics card, has a mind-blowing 240 parallel cores, which were designed to perform complex in-game physics simulations like smoke, fire, and fluids.  The trading industry has taken these powerhouse machines, which allow for 50 times more calculations than standard four-core desktop processors, and has adapted them for their own purposes: value-at-risk calculations, option pricing, market data analysis, and high-speed arbitrage.  But the trading professionals aren’t the only “derivative beneficiar[ies],” as Irene E. Aldridge, managing partner of Able Alpha Trading, called them; there are thousands of other computer enthusiasts who benefit from the technological innovation born of the imaginative consumer’s demand.  The creative passion of one group of individuals (gamers/hardward companies) has enabled the development of myriad others.

What other imaginative industries have created technology that changed the world?  My father, after thinking for a few minutes, came up with a great one: Bible-printing!  Johannes Gutenberg, an early-fifteenth century printer, wanted to find a way to more quickly perform a duty close to his heart: spreading the word of Christianity through metal-working.  In 1440, Gutenberg wrote a text called Kunst und Aventur (art and enterprise), which laid out his ingenious invention: movable type.  By 1455, Gutenberg had completed a working printing press, and had already printed 180 42-line Bibles.  His innovation in typesetting technology revolutionized the printing industry, drastically increasing the speed with which a book or article could be printed.  The leap in printing throughput “fed the growing Renaissance [in Europe], and was a major catalyst for the later scientific revolution.”  While Johannes Gutenberg had built his masterpiece to extend the growth of both Christianity and his personal finances, he inadvertently invented a technology that enabled an explosion of intellectual development.  Again – the creative passion of one group of individuals (Gutenberg and his associates) has enabled the development of myriad others.

I’ve specifically covered here a pair of technologies invented for the purposes of imaginative activities, but there must be hundreds (if not thousands) of other instances where a technology invented for a given purpose was adapted for another.  I would even venture to say that there will be hundreds or thousands of new instances in the coming years.  This assumption brings about an important question: What will be the next great appropriation?  And, more importantly, how can the world foster the original innovation and subsequent adaptation that powers human advancement?  In the two examples I presented, the drive for invention and improvement was a combination of intrinsic motivation – emotional in nature – and extrinsic motivation – financial.  If we use these examples as a prototype, the implication is clear: we must encourage individuals to follow their passion, to build those things that catch their attention and harness their imagination; and we must perpetuate a system that enables others to readily adapt these technologies for the betterment of themselves and their respective fields.  Such an arrangement will fluidly facilitate the transformation of “our means” to “your end”.

Note: this post refers to metaphysical objectivism, not Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

What pure science is to objectivism, engineering is to existentialism.  Pure science seeks to build a universal theory of the material world, as objective philosophy seeks to build a universal theory of the social and spiritual world.  In contrast: engineering seeks to develop a practical understanding of the material world, and to apply that understanding to bring its masters closer to a given goal; existentialism seeks to develop a practical understanding of the social and spiritual world, and to apply that understanding to bring its master (the individual) closer to his or her personal goals.

The difference between pure science and engineering (and between objectivism and existentialism) is the goal.  In the former, the goal is to build a beautiful, unifying theory, internally consistent, but without any stated purpose besides understanding.  In the latter, the goal is to build a similarly internally consistent theory, as beautiful and unifying as possible; but that internal consistency, beauty, and unity are only useful in their tendency to bring the theory’s owner closer to his or her goals.

In concision: pure science and objectivism seek understanding for its own sake, while engineering and existentialism seek understanding for its utility.