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The History and Future of Everything – Put time in perspective.
Everything is a Remix – A documentary on ideas and innovation.
Without the Doing, Dreaming is Useless – One of the many videos on the creative process from 99U.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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We are always getting ready to live but never living – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do you always wish you were somewhere else? One common source of unhappiness arises when we feel discontent with our current situation but the ideal lifestyle we long for seems to be always out of reach. I remember feeling this way almost a decade ago. As I get older, many of the dreams become either less attainable or less desirable.
Perhaps I should learn to live with presence as Alan Watts suggests. Or as Ben Casnocha put it: “For the most part, life is one damn mundane thing after another……The choice that determines higher wisdom or enlightenment is whether you can learn to appreciate the little experiences — most of them trivial, indeed — as the precious, joyous stuff.” I guess the best of both worlds is to be able to enjoy the pleasure of dreaming and looking forward to a better future as well as the everyday experience.
In her latest book, The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion, Virginia Postrel explains what glamour is, how it works, and the role it plays in our society. Highly recommended. Excerpts:
Glamour is an illusion. To glamorize is to fantasize. Glamour presents an edited version of reality. It reveals emotional truths. It shows us what we find lacking in real life and who we want to be.
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Glamour…offers “the implicit promise of a life devoid of mediocrity.” It lifts us out of everyday experience and makes our desires seem attainable.
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Glamour is not just illusory but escapist–and the escapism it offers is emotionally specific. It does not stir adrenaline, astonishment, or laughter, distracting us from current circumstances. Rather, glamour provides an emotionally compelling alternative, focusing inarticulate longings on totems that imply change and connect us with the ideal. In the image of a rising jet or a speeding convertible, a runway model or a martial-arts hero, a beachside vista or a big-city skyline, we experience the same dream: that we might soar beyond present constraints, cast off our worries, become better, freer, more accomplished, admired, respected, and desired versions of ourselves.
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Glamour fuels dissatisfaction with the here and now, even as it makes present difficulties easier to endure by suggesting the existence of better alternatives.
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Glamour entails vulnerability less because it is illusory than because it is revealing. It reminds us what we find lacking in real life and who we want to be. It stokes discontent. If the gap between reality and desire is too great, that knowledge may be painful. “People’s fantasies are what give them problems,” said Andy Warhol. “If you didn’t have fantasies you wouldn’t have problems because you’d just take whatever was there.” Warhol, who was obsessed with glamour, did not actually reject fantasy. To the contrary, he admired and encouraged it. But he himself felt the pangs of unfulfilled longing. For all his fame, wealth, and artistic accomplishment, he was always troubled by the one thing he couldn’t achieve: beauty.
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If the longing for escape and transformation is glamour’s emotional core, and grace glamour’s central illusion, then mystery is glamour’s defining perceptual quality. “Everything at a distance turns into poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events,” wrote Novalis, the eighteenth-century German Romantic poet and theorist. Every object of glamour is in some way exotic to its audience–displaced in time, space, culture, or social milieu, inhabiting a different biological, physical, or economic reality. This distance allows the other to become an ideal extension of the self. Mystery encourages projection. It makes glamour work.
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By its nature, however, displaced meaning is always out of reach.
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Whether inspiring life-altering action or momentary reverie, glamour always obscures the difficulties and distracting details of life as it is really lived. Vacation posters say nothing about jet lag; movie stars’ portraits remove blemishes. Glamour promises not only flight and transformation and escape but impossible grace.
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Translating glamour into real-world action requires editing back into one’s projections the likely costs, distractions, and anomalies.
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The moral of the story, in [Woody] Allen’s downbeat summary [of the movie Midnight in Paris], is “It’s always rotten to be where you are, and then when you get where you want to go, whether it’s back in time or to a different country, then it’s rotten too.” Familiarity breeds discontent. There’s no glamour without mystery.
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“After a time,” counseled Mr. Spock, “you might find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.” Glamour can be a powerful spur to both action and inquiry but, in the process, information and experience often destroy glamour’s essential mystery, dispelling the illusion that was once so inspiring.
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Glamour not only focuses longings. It reveals character. As the commercial metropolis grew, its plentiful glamour did more than inspire envy and frustration. It opened space for positive aspiration, and it rewarded those who could savor its pleasures without being tortured by the gap between reality and dream.
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Glamour versus realism, civilization versus directness, golden fables versus ordinary life, the pursuit of love versus contentment with less–which should we choose?
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Even in its most apparently superficial and entertaining forms, glamour reveals inner truths. It exposes our vulnerabilities, to ourselves and perhaps to the world. We feel lonely, frustrated, and unappreciated; we long for fellowship, for meaningful work, for true love. We are social and biological creatures. We want to be looked at and admired, to be rich and powerful, to be painlessly heroic and effortlessly beautiful. We long to be sexually desired and recognized as special. Glamour defies demands for humility or modesty, self-denial or patient resignation. It is ambitious and self-involved. Above all, glamour reveals that we want to be something we are not. It demonstrates that we are not wholly content with life as it is. Glamour is pleasurable, but it is also disquieting.
More excerpts from an old preview.
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Tommy Emmanuel: My Life As a One-Man Band
Portuguese artist sketches Hong Kong
Alain de Botton on Art as Therapy
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New Year resolutions usually don’t last, and most people return to life as usual by February. This is not as depressing as it sounds. End-year provides a good opportunity to reflect and New Year resolution is more a by-product of the changes we want to make. The best way to make changes is to alter our habits, and developing/changing habits can start anytime. So if things don’t work out in January, maybe try again in February in different ways. I find it easier to change thing one at a time than all at once, so it makes more sense to space out changes we want to make throughout the year.
I don’t have many ambitious goals this year (to achieve anything significant would likely require more than a year anyway). If I can form a few good habits sometime during the year, I’d be happy.
Below is a video summary of Charles Duhigg’s book on habit, and Alex Tabarrok’s review here.
More on New Year resolutions and the time it takes to form habits.
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風立ちぬ – Another beautiful anime by Hayao Miyazaki. It portrays an ideal that I like. The protagonist Jiro is talented, erudite, and dedicated to making his dreams come true. He has a good personality that attracted the heroine. Like most movies, the anime is a simplified abstraction of life. Some people might call it escapist but I see it as a beautiful illusion (like most dreams/aspirations in life). The music reminds me of 天空の城ラピュタ.
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New habits I like: blogging; Thai boxing; swimming
Travel to over 20 cities. The more memorable ones are places where I get to know new people, learn/try something new, or catch-up with existing friends.
Highlights: property tour in Chengdu, Chongqing, and Sanya; business trip in Columbo, Mumbai, and Delhi; vacation in Rome and Florence; backpacking in Kunming, Lijiang, and Dali; guy trip to macau; catching up with friends in Singapore, Shanghai, and London; attending my best friend’s wedding in Maldives.
Reflect more on books I read. My favorites (in no particular order):
- The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion (half way through)
- Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life
- Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
- Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century
- How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
- How China Became Capitalist
- The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health
- Conversations with David Foster Wallace
- Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means so Much
- How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life
- David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
- How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Other activities I enjoy: windsurfing, squid fishing, watch live soccer and rugby games (my takeaway: trying thing for the first time is often enjoyable, especially activities that involve learning new skills or something about yourself); hiking; snorkeling; basketball; coming up with names
Relationship goes well. Traveling to another city just to catch up with good friends is definitely worth it; steady and peaceful family life with plenty of home cooked food and a nice Christmas dinner.
Finance also goes well. I like Jacob’s Early Retirement Extreme philosophy. Todd’s How Much Money Do I Need to Retire? is a good short guide on retirement planning.
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