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Archive for the ‘Economics and Culture’ Category

Competition and Standards

Posted in Economics and Culture, Health and wellness, Hobbies, Links, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 28, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Eleanor wrote an article about her gym membership experience in China. Regardless of the field, I also prefer coaches who are skilled practitioners themselves, maintain high standards, and remain passionate about their craft. External standards, such as those set by employers, may ensure competence, but intrinsic motivation is what sustains excellence.

Competition governs almost every aspect of Chinese life. From the notoriously gruelling university entrance exams to industrial price wars, success depends on standing out from a vast pool of hardworking rivals…

Oxygym’s standards for staff are exacting. They are assessed according to nine criteria, each stricter than the last…Male and female trainers are expected to maintain body fat below 15 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively, while passing physical tests befitting Navy Seals. Male trainers must deadlift twice their body weight, run 2.7km in 12 minutes and complete 15 unassisted pull-ups. For women trainers, the requirements include deadlifting one and a half times their body weight and 24 consecutive push-ups. While trainers are permitted to exercise on the gym floor, they are discouraged from visibly sweating while doing so.

When I ask Will what a trainer’s personal fitness level has to do with their teaching ability, he appears surprised by the question. “Even if a trainer is very experienced, if they are fat and don’t take care of their appearance, clients won’t want lessons with them,” he says. “The coach should represent an aspiration. They should embody what the student hopes to become.” If a trainer fails to meet those standards, there is a long queue of applicants waiting to take their place.

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Adam Smith on What We Should Strive For

Posted in Economics and Culture, Happiness, tagged , , , , on May 18, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Ross Levine wrote a series of imagined letters from Adam Smith’s perspective.

Why do we work so hard even after many of us have met our survival needs? Often it’s because we believe wealth brings admiration and approval from others. But admiration from others is fickle and not a source of lasting happiness.

What we really crave is to be worthy of admiration: “The love of praise seeks the opinions of others. The love of praiseworthiness seeks inner integrity.”

We should direct our ambition toward becoming worthy of our inner judge: “True satisfaction comes not from wealth, titles, accolades, or applause, but from acting in harmony with the impartial spectator’s standards.”

Back in university, I read several biographies of Adam Smith, along with his books and lectures, and came to admire his broad range of intellectual interests and his insights into human psychology. He and David Hume would be among my top choices for dinner companions.

PS: There’s a musical based on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Here’s a Freakonomics podcast interview with its composer, David Lang.

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Time, Money, and Living a Good Life

Posted in Books, Economics and Culture, Hobbies, Philosophy, Reflection, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 3, 2026| Leave a Comment »

“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.” — Henry David Thoreau

There comes a point in everyone’s life when time matters more than money. Ever since I read Jacob’s Early Retirement Extreme nearly two decades ago, I’ve set a goal to save enough to reach financial freedom. I think the mid-40s is about the sweet spot to begin a new chapter. At this age, I still have the energy and health, along with the resources, to do the things I want. And I might discover other mountains that I’d like to climb.

Facing the unknown requires courage. And giving up a decent-paying job, along with the perks and status that come with it, isn’t easy. But once one had a taste of those things, they start to feel less special. While I enjoy meeting smart people, having intellectual conversations, and learning new things, I’m less interested in the lifestyle many people in my industry pursue. People in high-paying jobs often network, socialize, and spend on expensive status markers—high-end watches, alcohol, cars, houses, luxury travel, and fine dining. I’m more drawn to a simple, minimalist life. I don’t have the courage to live like the toilet cleaner in the film Perfect Days, but I do believe I have enough to live meaningfully.

Most of the things I enjoy in life are free (running, drawing, playing basketball) or relatively inexpensive for the amount of enjoyment they provide (video games, streaming services, books). Things can be costly, but diminishing returns kick in quickly. I think it’s better to own a small number of high-quality things that truly bring joy than to accumulate too much to keep track of. Often, expensive purchases are positional goods, signals for showing off, rather than sources of intrinsic value. Experiences like travel are one area where money can help. But to maximize enjoyment, it’s best to do them occasionally, so we don’t get used to them and take them for granted.

For me, the ultimate freedom is being able to thrive under any circumstances. As Thoreau discovered in Walden, it doesn’t take much to live a good life. Time, attention, and freedom may be the most valuable luxuries. Or in Thoreau’s words, “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”

After my kids were born, I started revisiting my childhood hobbies. With more resources and a more mature mindset, I’ve been able to improve and surpass my younger self in many areas. Focusing on my hobbies may not be a good way to contribute to society. But as long as I continue to learn and grow, maybe I would discover new possibilities I can’t yet imagine.

Perfect Days and having enough:

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Comic Strip: Work From Home (with kids)

Posted in Art, cartoon, Economics and Culture, tagged on November 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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Melbourne Impressions

Posted in Economics and Culture, Travel, tagged on November 29, 2023| Leave a Comment »

It’s highly walkable with lots of greenery and clean air, so no wonder it’s often ranked as one of the most livable cities. The free tram zone in the CBD is a nice concept.

Known as the cultural capital of Australia, it tends to attract people interested in the creative industries. There are plenty of museums, galleries, live music, sports, and other events in the city.

Food is generally good and reasonably priced, thanks to the abundance of fresh locally grown ingredients (meat, dairy, wine, fruits, etc.). It’s cheap to cook at home, and even dining out doesn’t feel expensive relative to Singapore. It also has a strong coffee culture.

With a population of 6.6 million, it’s somewhere between Singapore and Hong Kong. That seems enough to sustain cultural events and shops without feeling too crowded.

If there are complaints, it’d be the tenacious flies that seem to stick with you, especially near parks during the summer. And it’s a bit far from other countries for international travel.

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Paul Graham on Superlinear Returns

Posted in Economics and Culture, Links, tagged , , on October 27, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Paul Graham thinks exponential growth and thresholds are the two sources of superlinear returns. Good advice. Excerpts:

The most important case combining both sources of superlinear returns may be learning. Knowledge grows exponentially, but there are also thresholds in it…

Which yields another heuristic: always be learning…

The most obvious way to take advantage of superlinear returns for performance is by doing exceptionally good work. At the far end of the curve, incremental effort is a bargain. All the more so because there’s less competition at the far end — and not just for the obvious reason that it’s hard to do something exceptionally well, but also because people find the prospect so intimidating that few even try. Which means it’s not just a bargain to do exceptional work, but a bargain even to try to…

Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn’t matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious. Work as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth from a distance, but up close they’re full of gaps. Notice and explore such gaps, and if you’re lucky one will expand into a whole new field. Take as much risk as you can afford; if you’re not failing occasionally you’re probably being too conservative. Seek out the best colleagues. Develop good taste and learn from the best examples. Be honest, especially with yourself. Exercise and eat and sleep well and avoid the more dangerous drugs. When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to…

What are fields where a few big winners outperform everyone else? Here are some obvious ones: sports, politics, art, music, acting, directing, writing, math, science, starting companies, and investing….: the remaining list is exactly the same as the list of fields where you have to be independent-minded to succeed — where your ideas have to be not just correct, but novel as well…

Learning, for example. When you first start learning something, you feel lost. But it’s worth making the initial effort to get a toehold, because the more you learn, the easier it will get.

There’s another more subtle lesson in the list of fields with superlinear returns: not to equate work with a job. For most of the 20th century the two were identical for nearly everyone, and as a result we’ve inherited a custom that equates productivity with having a job. Even now to most people the phrase “your work” means their job. But to a writer or artist or scientist it means whatever they’re currently studying or creating. For someone like that, their work is something they carry with them from job to job, if they have jobs at all. It may be done for an employer, but it’s part of their portfolio.

It’s an intimidating prospect to enter a field where a few big winners outperform everyone else. Some people do this deliberately, but you don’t need to. If you have sufficient natural ability and you follow your curiosity sufficiently far, you’ll end up in one. Your curiosity won’t let you be interested in boring questions, and interesting questions tend to create fields with superlinear returns if they’re not already part of one.

The territory of superlinear returns is by no means static. Indeed, the most extreme returns come from expanding it. So while both ambition and curiosity can get you into this territory, curiosity may be the more powerful of the two. Ambition tends to make you climb existing peaks, but if you stick close enough to an interesting enough question, it may grow into a mountain beneath you.

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Ask an Economist Anything: Bryan Caplan edition

Posted in cartoon, Economics and Culture, tagged , on January 5, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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As an Economist Anything II

Posted in cartoon, Economics and Culture, tagged , on January 2, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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Asiaphoria?

Posted in Economics and Culture, Links, tagged , , , , on February 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Pritchett and Summers wrote that “regression to the mean is the single most robust finding of the growth literature and the typical degrees of regression to the mean imply substantial slow-downs in China and India relative even to the currently more cautious and less bullish forecasts.”

Some thoughts/takeaways:

  • Our understanding on economic growth & development remains poor: “super-rapid growth is due in part to a large residual or unexplained component.”
  • Japan, Korea, and Taiwan fit the regression to the mean story, but that doesn’t mean they fail to transit to higher income economies.
  • Economists are bad at forecasting growth (near or long term) and often miss major turning points. Most forecasts are based to a large extent on recent growth figures.
  • The regression to the mean is a long-term argument so we shouldn’t use it to forecast growth in the near or even medium term (it would probably draw the same conclusion every year over the past decade). Similarly, perhaps we shouldn’t be too bearish on countries that seem to be making lots of poor decisions (e.g. Brazil, Russia, Argentina) if our horizon is long enough.
  • In the country specific section, the authors resort to “institutional quality” to argue why emerging market growth tends to be less persistent than developed market growth (which tends to grow at mean rate). So the bottom line seems to be whether China succeeds in its reform plans (reduce corruption, improve the rule of law, etc.). Given predicting politics is difficult even in the short term, let alone decades, today’s growth tells us little about future growth in places where institutional reforms are needed. 
  • My guess is that Singapore’s political system is the model China wants to move towards. Whether it can manage the transition well is an open question, and I think prolonged political instability is the biggest risk to its long-term growth outlook. On the positive side, China is taking reforms more seriously than most other emerging markets, so on net I’m optimistic that China will become a high-income country someday. 

 

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Misc. articles

Posted in Economics and Culture, Health and wellness, Links, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »

The Cult of Overwork – “Overwork has become a credential of prosperity” even though we know “long hours diminish both productivity and quality”. The puzzle is why we (at least for those living in relatively high income places) still work so much, and don’t enjoy more leisure as Keynes wrote back in the 1930, or as Bertrand Russell recommended in In Praise of Idleness (excerpts below).

What Chinese officials learn from the Party training school – Some officials are impressive indeed, though not sure how much can be attributed to the training. 

How I made sure all 12 of my kids  could pay for college themselves – Sensible parenting principles that seem to strive a balance between the extreme generalizations of the free-range Western style and the Asian tiger parenting style. Remind me of the highly recommended book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. 

Memoirs of a Would-be Macroeconomist by Arnold Kling- Good coverage of the recent debates and development in macroeconomics from various schools of thought. I especially enjoy the description of his experience working at CBO and the Fed.

Excerpts from Russell’s In Praise of Idleness:

I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.

……

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

……

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered ‘highbrow’. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

Excerpts from Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren:

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age  of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.

……

Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth-unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them. For we shall inquire more curiously than is safe to-day into the true character of this “purposiveness” with which in varying degrees Nature has endowed almost all of us. For purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our own environment. The “purposive” man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time.

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