Is the State Obsolete?

I had a very interesting discussion yesterday about whether the concept of the state (i.e., country) is now obsolete. The basic premise is that the world is flat, and that national boundaries are irrelevant in the current global economy. The arguments were roughly along the following lines:

1. Corporations act in ways that benefit people of all countries. The basic unit of society should be the corporation, not the nation. An American country that lays off people in America frees them up to do better, more imaginative, more creative, more cerebral work. The same company, which hires replacements in India, improves the lives of those Indians, who would otherwise have been unable to find work that paid them so well.
2. The argument was be taken further: brain-drain is not really a drain at all, because national boundaries don't matter. Thus top brains and talent moving from India to the US is not a concern. It is better to use your brains in the US than to underuse them in India. And India benefits from this: foreign remittances to India are higher than to any other country in the world.
   
3. There is only one country in the world, the USA, which has an inherent culture of innovation and discovery. (Or perhaps two or three others at most, Germany being a possibility.) This is why no innovation happens in India, and cannot happen in India -- because the people, by nature, lack innovativeness.
4. India, more than any other place, doesn't deserve nationhood because of the diversity of its people. An Indian feels like a stranger in a different part of his own country. The US feels more like home than India.
   

I didn't agree with these points. My answer yesterday to the question: "What is the point of nations?" was "Bargaining power". Here's a Q & A:

Q01: What is the point of nations?
Ans: Bargaining power. A nation is nothing more than a collective that bargains in order to increase the standard of living (SoL) for its citizens. It is the same concept as that of a workers' union.

Q02: What is the point of nationalism?
Ans: The reason a citizen should support his nation (and the concept of nationhood) is that it increases his chances of a better SoL. Nationalism increases a nation's ability to bargain, by increasing the nation's unity.

Q03: Then why shouldn't everyone in the world pledge their loyalty to those nations that have the highest chances of improving their citizens' SoL? Specifically, the USA?
Ans: If an individual's goal is to increase his SoL, he should indeed attempt to become a citizen of the country most likely to increase its citizens' SoL. The reason this doesn't happen in practice is countries like the USA realize it is not in their best interest, and have laws in place to prevent easy access to citizenship.

Q04: Which laws?
Ans: To become a citizen, one has to demonstrate both competence (through employability) and American nationalism (through a test and residence). America realizes that notions of the world being flat (in the sense of nonexistent national boundaries) are not in its best interests.

Q05: Why is "no boundaries" not in America's best interest?
Ans: For Americans to remain prosperous, there needs to be a vastly larger population of non-Americans. There needs to be someone to bargain with, someone to exploit.

Q06: Huh?? Why? What do you mean by "exploit"?
Ans: American power has many immediate reasons, but it can be traced back to a form of imperialism. America's prosperity relies on the exploitation of non-Americans, just as the prosperity of every other major power throughout history relied on exploitation of other populations. Unless a vast population of non-Americans exists, it will be impossible to use America's bargaining power to acquire various raw materials from them at prices much lower than the cost it takes to extract them. This is not a bad thing; it is what every major country in the world is trying to do, and is what every trader in a market attempts to do on a daily basis. It's just that America is better at it than other nations.

Q07: Even if nations are not irrelevant, why don't we stop at Indian states? Why shouldn't Rajasthan, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu be separate countries? Why do we need the whole of India to be one country?
Ans: Because larger countries have more bargaining power than smaller ones.

Q08: Then why shouldn't India annex more land and become an even bigger country?
Ans: If we can, we should. China knows this; that's why China seized Tibet. But we need to make sure the negative consequences of such an action don't outweigh the gains.

Q09: Well, the USA can certainly annex more land. Why doesn't it do so?
Ans: The fallout from such an action would have an unjustifiable cost for the USA. It is so stable and has such a high SoL that managing a population of unwilling conquerees would lower the overall American SoL. Increasing the American SoL at this point is much more easily accomplished by projection of soft power.

Van Gogh

Van Gogh's paintings Starry Night and Cafe Terrace at Night stir something deep. My interpretation (which van Gogh probably never intended) is that they are a contrast between the warm, familiar fold of civilization and the wild unkown mystery of the celestial sky. In Starry Night, it is as if the monumental forces lying in the hearts of suns and galaxies have descended onto the hamlet of Saint-Rémy, which is getting ready to tuck in for the night, unaware and unconcerned about the fantastic forces at work in deep space.
The same sentiment is stirred by Cafe Terrace at Night: the warmth of familiar surroundings and human company contrasted to the unknowns in the surrounding dark streets, and even more, the unknowns up in the sky. I can't decide what I want to be: a diner at the cafe or a predator lurking in the dark alleys, looking at the diners and waiting for one of them to leave that safe haven.

Religion as a Computational Simplification

What is religion, why do we need to have faith, why do we need gods?

Life includes a series of decisions. Decisions help us optimize our condition, find a route to another condition that is better, more stable, easier or happier. But the number of minute decisions that need to be made is so large that our built-in computer, the brain, is overwhelmed by the computational requirements.

So it takes shortcuts. It categorizes the decisions, pushing some, such as picking up the next spoonful of food or stepping aside to avoid a pothole, into a subconscious decision making queue. Others are not so subconscious but are still routine jobs, like signing your name on a credit card bill or going to work in the morning. Even with these reductions on its computational requirements, the brain would be left with too many significant mid- and long-term decisions.

Religion is the knowledge applicable to another subcategory of these remaining decisions. In many cases, it quickly allows us to use the past experience of wise people to determine a course of action when faced with certain decisions. Trying to figure every one of these out for oneself would put too much of a computational burden on the brain. Religion gives quick answers, without always requiring us to think hard.

Of course there are still a lot of decisions that can't be addressed by religious knowledge, and which might require individual thinking. But religion helps quite a bit; a lot of right-and-wrong type decisions can be solved quickly by referring to religious knowledge.

The Nonconservation of Causality

Vaguely, this is what the title means: Suppose John is a bad influence on Bob, and Bob robs Dave. Should we say that John is responsible or Bob is? I think it is possible to say that both are.

I'm sure legal systems have thought about this sort of thing a lot...