The shape of the curve

Setting up the top and bottom ends of the value scale is necessary and can involve some fun and speculation. However, the important thing now is the shape of the value curve. It is important because it will be the tool that lets us consider whether we are being realistic about our scale of value.

Part of setting up this curve is simple; it involves things that everybody would agree about. We will consider the simple question "is this more important than that" and we are going to use the answers to rank stuff. More important stuff goes to the left, less important to the right. As a starting exercise we will consider the world rice crop for 2009 versus the number of visitors to Graceland in the same year. Even the greatest Elvis devotee would admit that the world rice crop is of more importance, so we can say that on our scale, rice is to the left of Graceland. How far apart they are does not matter yet. Now lets look at another crop. Peaches. And let's stay at the highest level of things for a minute. In terms of he concerns of the whole human race, rice is more important than peaches and peaches beat Elvis, so they go somewhere between rice and Graceland. So far, so good. But what if you are a peach farmer? For you, for this year, maybe peaches beat rice? Our personal ranking of things can differ from society's ranking. This is a simple fact, neither good nor bad. However, the extent to which personal rankings distort the global ranking or the local ranking may involve good and bad.

The ranking, some averaged-out ranking, will be the horizontal axis of our graph. The vertical axis will be value - with life itself having some very high value over on the left side and our nail advice having very low value over on the right. Today's food, medical care, sanitation will all be high and over to the left. Silly stuff will be low and on the right. But what of things in between? Where is the divide between important and unimportant things? is the curve gentle or does it plummet at some point? This is where my crazy ideas start to become useful.

Imagine for a moment that we had a wonderful society where everything necessary to sustain life was just there. Housing, food, medical care, transport - imagine that good old workers' paradise that never came into being. How might its inhabitants view the relative value of say today's dinner against the singing of a song? Might they not think that one dinner and one song have about the same value? Perhaps that one good piece of art was worth many dinners? That a fingernail technician should eat no matter how many or how few nails she or he had worked on that day? In that society then, the curve would be quite flat, regarding most things, most pursuits as having fairly similar value and a quite high value. That's the red curve on the diagram below.

Now the opposite. A world where everyone is close to starvation. Think of the situation in those desperate camps where dictators put their imagined enemies. It's another flat curve, but in this one just about everything has almost no value - the blue curve in my graph.

In the 20th century people tried to build societies that followed both of those curves. They all failed because they are inhuman and inhumane. The more stable societies, those that worked well enough the continue had curves like the green line. There was and is a sense of relative value of things and efforts in such a society, so that the engines of both greed and benevolence get a chance to operate.