Archive: 2003 December / Headspace

Archive for December, 2003

Save the world

December 29th, 2003 Uncategorized

I’m very proud that C, for his final year assignment, has wisely chosen to examine the the length of time necessary to desalinise underground water. Certainly, all research is useful and worthy, but that he’s working on something environmental makes seem even more worthy. While I’m encouraged to do my own Save The World act, I’m more daunted than ever. (Frankly, whatever that I aim to do can’t beat trying to repair the environment.) My writing is without talent: my observations is limited to a micro level, not the least literary, and what’s more frightening is that I seem to have only one story to tell: that of failed marriages.

Mysteries Famous Five did not solve

December 26th, 2003 books

Mecury retrograde isn’t a bad thing. It brings inconveniences but it makes one revisit the past. Spring cleaning brought out the old books I had as a child: Famous Five. Reading again the first book in the series, Treasure at Kirrin Island, I found myself wondering what was the gold coming back to the land for? It was 1945 when the book was published. The ship was owned by George’s great-great-great grandfather. If my grandfather was born about 100 years ago, his father would be born about twenty to thirty years before him, meaning a great-great-great grandfather would be older by about 100 years (or less, considering on the quality of healthcare and average life span of those before me) than my grandfather. The year was then probably 1745 or 1800s. Why was anyone shipping gold in the 1800s to a fishing port?

The eocnomy next year

December 25th, 2003 Uncategorized

Christmas dinner is becoming more spare over the years. I remember just a few years ago, the entire table would be covered with food and at least two bottles of tasty wine. Yesterday’s dinner looked rather forlone: an oily duck, my grandma’s hainanese mix veg, a sharp simple wine and some sticks of satay. Seeing such frugality, I fear things will not be any better at Chinese New Year. Economists do not need numbers to figure out next year’s economic outlook: paying a visit to middle class’s at dinnertime will suffice. No use for numbers, they don’t agree about it anyway.

A sobering article from Krugman

December 24th, 2003 atschool

A sobering article from Paul Krugman.
The Death of Horatio Alger
(First appeared in The Nation.)

The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago.

The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article titled “Waking Up From the American Dream.” The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society.

And guess what? Our political leaders are doing everything they can to fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone who complains–or even points out what is happening–as a practitioner of “class warfare.”

Let’s talk first about the facts on income distribution. Thirty years ago we were a relatively middle-class nation. It had not always been thus: Gilded Age America was a highly unequal society, and it stayed that way through the 1920s. During the 1930s and ’40s, however, America experienced what the economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have dubbed the Great Compression: a drastic narrowing of income gaps, probably as a result of New Deal policies. And the new economic order persisted for more than a generation: Strong unions; taxes on inherited wealth, corporate profits and high incomes; close public scrutiny of corporate management–all helped to keep income gaps relatively small. The economy was hardly egalitarian, but a generation ago the gross inequalities of the 1920s seemed very distant.

Now they’re back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez–confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office–between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they’re not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality.

Never mind, say the apologists, who churn out papers with titles like that of a 2001 Heritage Foundation piece, “Income Mobility and the Fallacy of Class-Warfare Arguments.” America, they say, isn’t a caste society–people with high incomes this year may have low incomes next year and vice versa, and the route to wealth is open to all. That’s where those commies at Business Week come in: As they point out (and as economists and sociologists have been pointing out for some time), America actually is more of a caste society than we like to think. And the caste lines have lately become a lot more rigid.

The myth of income mobility has always exceeded the reality: As a general rule, once they’ve reached their 30s, people don’t move up and down the income ladder very much. Conservatives often cite studies like a 1992 report by Glenn Hubbard, a Treasury official under the elder Bush who later became chief economic adviser to the younger Bush, that purport to show large numbers of Americans moving from low-wage to high-wage jobs during their working lives. But what these studies measure, as the economist Kevin Murphy put it, is mainly “the guy who works in the college bookstore and has a real job by his early 30s.” Serious studies that exclude this sort of pseudo-mobility show that inequality in average incomes over long periods isn’t much smaller than inequality in annual incomes.

It is true, however, that America was once a place of substantial intergenerational mobility: Sons often did much better than their fathers. A classic 1978 survey found that among adult men whose fathers were in the bottom 25 percent of the population as ranked by social and economic status, 23 percent had made it into the top 25 percent. In other words, during the first thirty years or so after World War II, the American dream of upward mobility was a real experience for many people.

Now for the shocker: The Business Week piece cites a new survey of today’s adult men, which finds that this number has dropped to only 10 percent. That is, over the past generation upward mobility has fallen drastically. Very few children of the lower class are making their way to even moderate affluence. This goes along with other studies indicating that rags-to-riches stories have become vanishingly rare, and that the correlation between fathers’ and sons’ incomes has risen in recent decades. In modern America, it seems, you’re quite likely to stay in the social and economic class into which you were born.

Business Week attributes this to the “Wal-Martization” of the economy, the proliferation of dead-end, low-wage jobs and the disappearance of jobs that provide entry to the middle class. That’s surely part of the explanation. But public policy plays a role–and will, if present trends continue, play an even bigger role in the future.

Put it this way: Suppose that you actually liked a caste society, and you were seeking ways to use your control of the government to further entrench the advantages of the haves against the have-nots. What would you do?

One thing you would definitely do is get rid of the estate tax, so that large fortunes can be passed on to the next generation. More broadly, you would seek to reduce tax rates both on corporate profits and on unearned income such as dividends and capital gains, so that those with large accumulated or inherited wealth could more easily accumulate even more. You’d also try to create tax shelters mainly useful for the rich. And more broadly still, you’d try to reduce tax rates on people with high incomes, shifting the burden to the payroll tax and other revenue sources that bear most heavily on people with lower incomes.

Meanwhile, on the spending side, you’d cut back on healthcare for the poor, on the quality of public education and on state aid for higher education. This would make it more difficult for people with low incomes to climb out of their difficulties and acquire the education essential to upward mobility in the modern economy.

And just to close off as many routes to upward mobility as possible, you’d do everything possible to break the power of unions, and you’d privatize government functions so that well-paid civil servants could be replaced with poorly paid private employees.

It all sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it?

Where is this taking us? Thomas Piketty, whose work with Saez has transformed our understanding of income distribution, warns that current policies will eventually create “a class of rentiers in the U.S., whereby a small group of wealthy but untalented children controls vast segments of the US economy and penniless, talented children simply can’t compete.” If he’s right–and I fear that he is–we will end up suffering not only from injustice, but from a vast waste of human potential.

Goodbye, Horatio Alger. And goodbye, American Dream.

The end of interest

December 24th, 2003 books

What comes after the end of sexual life? This matter presented itself when I was trying – trying, because I’ve been lately plagued by domesticities – to work on the sickening story Cherries as well as in a discussion with C.

Love is some of the sappy stuff you see in December movies but mostly it is interest in another person. Not curiosity because curiosity has no emotions and therefore is easily perverted. Because you are intrigued, you want to stick around to see more. Interest in a person’s head usually does not lead to interest in a person’s body. But you do it anyway, sort of like going to a prostitute, instead of having to pay, you get a buzz thinking it’s love.

Sexual interest is lust or passion, which is a subset of love. So the end of sexual interest means the end of passion. But you may be interested enough to stick around, to know more about the person’s head. If there is nothing that interests you, or that someone else interests you more, then love ends.

C and I were chatting about marriage and divorce. C is conservative and thinks one must try to work at being interested in another person. Interest in anything is analogous to watching a theatre piece: if you have seen the rehearsal so many times, the jokes become tired and worn and you stop laughing at the next rehearsal. In fact, it becomes painful to watch. You want to find an escape and luckily there is – divorce. You can’t stop interest from ending: a person has only a limited number of turns in his bag of tricks. To force a person’s interest is as cruel as skinning babies for a sofa set.

This is Greene’s question from The End Of The Affair. Greene is a womaniser. For him, I think, the end of sexual life – if it is only sexual interest one refers to – shows there is nothing more. That’s why he thinks life will be barren.

Updike questions something similar in one of his books. But for Updike he refers to sexual interest in a person.

Singapore economy: growth by inputs?

December 20th, 2003 Uncategorized

Paul Krugman’s article: The Asian Myth. Krugman is a Professor of Economics at Stanford University. This article was published in Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 1994, Vol 73 No. 6.

This article is worry provoking. Krugman begins this article by outlining the growth of Soviet economy with Asian economies pre 1997 collapse. He first reminded us Soviet economy’s apparant miracle that attracted economists’ attention.

The Soviet economy grew three times as high as the average annual rate of increase in the United States, someone else reported. There seemed to be no special reason. Conclusions to the effect of a collectivist, authoritarian state was better at achieving economic growth than a free market state arose – even it was acknowledged that this system might not do a good job of providing consumer goods! (Isn’t this complete nonsense? If consumers are not buying, how can these goods be absorbed into the economy? How can there be growth?)

More economists, looking at Soviet growth were gradually coming to a different conclusion. The conclusion was that simply, resources were mobilised; with greater input, there will be greater output.

Krugman compares this with the Asian Miracle – the sudden and large economic leaps made by the ‘five tigers’, Japan and China. Of Singapore’s remarkable growth – that is three times as fast as US – he has this to say: “…this achievement seems to be a kind of economic miracle. But the miracle turns out to have been based on perspiration rather than inspiration: Singapore grew through a mobilization of resources that would have made Stalin proud.”

He continues, that the percentage of employed doubled and cannot double again. The half educated work force was replaced with highly skilled highly educated work force – another change in behaviour that cannot be replicated. Then he sets out a bomb: “all of Singapore’s growth can be explained by increases in measured inputs. There is no sign at all of increased efficiency.” He furthur adds, later in the article, that when a Harvard grad student, Yuan Tsao, presented a paper finding little evidence of efficiency growth in Singapore the work was ignored or dismissed as unbelievable.

I was at class when the professor was discussing this article. I sat up and at once poo-poo-ed Krugman in my head. From the quiet derisive snorts around the room, I sensed everyone else’s agreement.

Throughout the past 30 years, Singapore has been following the Japan growth model which is heavy handed. Like Japan we have a MITA that directs resources to industries Singapore chooses to develope. Japan’s economists, studying the economic growth in the west, uncovered that growth of industries look a little like migrating birds flying pattern. As a developing economy becomes developed, its industries move from simple manufacturing to more difficult manufacturing or servicing.

Singapore moved the same way, from electronics manufacturing to wafer production. Singapore first began from a low base of growth, therefore could have a greater growth greater than a developed country because the economy is playing catch up.

Furthermore, EDB has always invited foreign MNCs to build their base in Singapore with very attractive tax packages. They came with their technologies, and thus, helped to reduce the technological gap with the first world.

Singapore is also quick to capitalise on geographical position by creating a financial center or to lure foreign operations to build headquarters in Singapore. Singapore’s high competitiveness is well known in the business markets and her ports are noted as highly efficient are definite examples that Singaporeans are not inefficient sods.

But thinking seriously about this, I am starting to worry: Krugman is right. Looking at examples Soviet, China and Japan, they were very very fast growers, almost miraculous, then all of a sudden, they became mired in inexplicable recession for a long time.

Look at Singapore: she is now struggling through a “structural” recession, a fancy term to show we are moving forwards, from simple manufacturing to more complex manufacturing, rather than face the truth that we are stuck in a nothing more than ordinary recession.

The economy has shown greater volatility in recent years, more susceptible to tiny knocks and harder to bounce back.

Technology shifts your production frontier – the true growth. Singapore has been borrowing straight from the foriegners without a lot of modification. (Alert: increased inputs!) There isn’t any local development for the so-called hot industries, which is at the moment Chemical and Bio-technology. (Five years ago, it was financial services.) You can’t decide for the market what it wants. That’s baloney. And without some integration, that is, true innovation, technology borrowing will not help to increase efficiency of the people because it is getting in more inputs to increase outputs. Let’s not talk about financial sector: it’s not so hot.

Unless the government does away with its heavy handedness the arts and economy will not turn for the better. It helps too, if there is a strong voice to critique its work.

Fur Heaven’s Sake – from Style Magazine

December 20th, 2003 Uncategorized

I found a magazine called Style lying about the house. It had the following about its cover page, which was a woman in a pink furry coat.

“This is my stand on fur: I love it. I can already hear the shrill voices of professional animal lovers start to caw and sob at that statement. If you would pipe down for just a second, you’d notice that fur is all overt he catwalks this season; appearing on coats, bags, gloves, sleeves, collars, capes, hats, and even shoes. I simply can’t stand the two faced illogic of meat-eaters protesting against fur clothes. I respect your opinion if, indeed, you have thought it through and are a strict vegetarian, don’t wear leather, don’t pollute the environment with detergents and other domestic chemicals and don’t use drugs and cosmetics test on animals. Otherwise, you have simply no right to jump on the anti-fur bandwagon – just because you own a cat or two, and think puppies are cute. No-one in a developed economy in this day and age eats meat out of neccessity, just like no-one needs to wear fur. What you have to ask yourself is this: Does an animal suffer less ignoble death when it dies for its meat, than its fur? How is it more ethical to kill ducks than beavers? Why draw the line with foxes and minks? Isn’t this standard totally arbitrary? Why not chickens? Or white bait? Tell me why it seems all right to step on ants, or swat at bugs, but not spot a chinchilla collar? Why not start a campaign for the ethical treatment of bivalves and throw blood at chefs French and Chinese? Fur is now farmed commecially, like chicken or cows or pigs, or indeed, clams. We wear fur because it’s beautiful, and nothing feels quite like it, however authentic a fake fur may be made to look. We eat meat because it tastes good and makes us deliciously sated, they way tofu can’t. Both are luxuries we can do without, but why should we? You can. But the logical conclusion to that line of thought, you know, would be to give up the life you know and head for the forest and nibbles on nuts.”

There isn’t a by line so I have no idea if the person was serious or not. But I’m so glad this person said it. Now I have to qualms admitting that I love,

Babies’ Skin.

This is my stand on baby’s skin: I love it on lampshades, as a glove, on shoes, on sofas (why stop at leather)? I can already hear the shrill voices start to caw and sob at that statement. If you would pipe down for just a second, you’d notice that baby skin, like fur, will easily catch on next season. Why stop at animal’s skin? Look, don’t throw at me stupid arguments for humanity. I simply can’t stand the two faced illogic of meat eaters who use animal skin on their sofa, bags, shoes, gloves, yet protest when Hilter skinned jews for lampshades. I respect your opinion if, indeed, you have thought it through and are a strict vegetarian, don’t wear leather, don’t pollute the environment with detergents and other domestic chemicals and don’t use drugs and cosmetics test on animals or people. Otherwise, you have simply no right – just because you have a child or two, and think they are rather charming. In this day and age, you see images everywhere of children starving. Why not put them out of their misery and make some use out of them? No one needs to suffer unneccessarily. What you have to ask yourself is this: Does a human child suffer a less ignoble death starving than if it is skinned for a pair of gloves? How is it more ethical to kill ducks than humans? Isn’t this standard totally arbitrary? Tell me why it seems all right to step on ants, or swat at bugs, but not to own a human skin sofa set? Why not start a campaign for the ethical treatment of bivalves and throw blood at chefs French and Chinese? There are too many children and they are starving. Think of all the dangerous abortions we’d be preventing! I wear human skin because it’s beautiful, and nothing feels quite like it. We eat meat because it tastes good and makes us deliciously sated, the way tofu can’t. Both are luxuries we can do without, but why should we? You can. But the logical conclusion to that line of thought, you know, would be to give up the life you know and head for the forest and nibbles on nuts.

In all seriousness, I do not believe anyone could put on a straight face and say all these things. That some of us are trying to do something right is commendable, and those who prefer not to, ought not to stand at the side lines, screaming hypocrisy. In fashion parlance, Yuck.

Frank Dubiel

December 7th, 2003 ObituariesTags: Pens

Frank Dubiel died, 7th Dec. Sadly missed by all at alt.collecting.pen-pencils.

(Frank helping out a newbie alt.collecting.pens-pencils)
From: fdubiel@aol.com (fdubiel@aol.com)
Subject: Re: Your thoughts about Pentrace
Original Format
Newsgroups: alt.collecting.pens-pencils
Date: 2003-11-07 00:41:22 PST

TigerMoon wrote:
>
> I’m new to pen collecting. I’ve visited Penlovers, but wasn’t too
> impressed. I’ve also been to Pentrace a couple times. No opinion yet.
> What do you guys think of this group? Just curious.

Ask on other boards some technical question such as, “My new Blobmaster fountain pen skips occasionally and also doesn’t seem to hold much ink. What should I do?”

While its possible you might get some sound advise its perhaps as likely, or even more likely you will get one or both of the following:

1. “Hi! I’m so very sad to hear your Blobmaster is not performing as you feel it should. I know the feeling because just last week my Scratch-o-Matic suddenly started skipping for no reason. I was devistated as I know you must be. I haven’t been able to sleep well
since then. These pens don’t seem to understand how much mental anguish they cause us when they misbehave. I feel you pain. I hope you get
the problems resolved so you and your Blobmaster can write many happy letters over the years.

2. Send your pen to Mr G. Nibwacker. He will fix your pen for a price.

Ask the same question here on acpp and you may get sound technical advise, or be told–

1. Read Da Book you dummy. You don’t have Da Book? Then don’t be so damn cheap and buy yourself a copy.

2. Who gives a damn about you and your crummy pen? Get a good pen like a 51 or a Snorkel.

… Guess its time for me to run and hide… …in transit to Columbus, see many of you there. Frank