Category: One-handed!

We spent two weeks in Tokyo in October. (We had “seen the country” in 2017, so this stay was more about this mega-metropolis.)

Here are four takeaways:

First, Japan is not a country of zen-aesthetics. Marie Kondo first got famous inside Japan because they have so much clutter. This article explains how Edo-era Japan* was so “circular” (reusing and repairing everything) because they had so few resources and were not trading (more below). When Japan opened to the world, and caught up, and got rich, then the Japanese indulged themselves as much as Americans would with consumption. The only reason they don’t consume even more is — as in the Netherlands — a lack of cheap space. Read more here.

Second, I was confused about how the Americans forced Japan to open up to trade — via the Black ships of 1853 — when trade is supposed to be a voluntary, “win-win” proposition. This summary from Perplexity explains that the Americans gave itself favorable terms of trade, etc., which is why the Japanese did not benefit as much as they would have with (really) free trade. What’s a bit ironic (or karmic) is how the American navy bullied Japan in 1853 and the Japanese navy returned the favor in 1941 (but without ultimate success). Now that all of that history is “under the bridge” (in terms of political rhetoric — see Xi’s ongoing complains about “the century of humiliation” for a counterpoint), Japan and the US are best buds.

Third, the Japanese are very risk averse, perhaps due to a history of natural disasters, perhaps due to a history of getting your head cut off for making a mistake. The result, culturally, is extreme planning (more than even the Dutch!) to ensure that everything is mapped out and discussed ahead of time. So the bullet trains have never had an accident, but that’s also a sign of taking too few chances. This risk-averse culture also explains how the Japanese public get very upset when the government screws up — e.g., taking 13 years to admit to the Minamata poisoning or the badly-handled Fukushima accident (more people died from the evacuation than the radiation). I’m not saying that government’s should be happy about mistakes, but they should be a little more humble about errors.

Fourth, the Japanese are almost as enthusiastic about cars as Americans, but they also avoid over-doing it. So cars are ubiquitous, and roads are designed for cars rather than bikes. We enjoyed the freedom of biking, but (a) had to fight with Google maps, which kept directing us off calm streets and towards major roads and (b) constantly needed to go around cars and trucks double parked in bike lanes. Watch this video for the pros and cons of Tokyo’s urban design.

Bottom line: Japan’s culture and history need time to understand and appreciate.

H/T to SC

*Bonus: I was really surprised to learn that daytime hours – the actual length of an hour — in Edo-Japan were longer in summer and shorter in winter, since daylight was evenly allocated among the same number of hours. This clock face shows how the “duration” of an hour was adjusted as the season progressed. The Meiji Restoration (more like a revolution!) brought 60 minute hours… and Seiko watches!

I wanted to visit Taiwan to see it “before the Chinese invade,” and I am glad I did.

We only stayed in Taipei for 5 nights, so these reflections are limited in accuracy.

Taiwan is “tropical” in its location and climate. Our arrival was nearly “de-runwayed” by Typhoon Krathon, but we only saw rain. Then temperatures climbed back up to 25-30C.

The city is a mix of modern and run-down, like a combination of Hong Kong (or Manila) and Tokyo. The smell of the streets was sometimes of incense, sometimes of raw sewage.

Taiwan, we learned, was colonized by the Japanese from 1895 to 1945. That period has left a strong impression — mostly favorable — on the local people. Around 300,000 “Japanese” (I’m not sure the term was 100% accurate, given the facts of human relationships) were exiled by the Kuomintang when they arrived in 1949 after losing to Mao. Those 2 million Chinese didn’t just influence the culture; they took over political and economic power, for worse (soldiers killed tens of thousands of protesting Formosans) and better (democracy was allowed to develop after martial law was ended in 1987)

The island’s geography is interesting. 24 million people live in 36,000 km², but 70% of the island is mountains (>300m elevation), so the population density is more like 2,200 people/km² than 660/km² (The Netherlands — most densely populated country in Europe — has 18 million people in 33,000 km², or 545 people/km².) So, it’s crowded.

The culture is a mix of Japanese (lots of cute characters telling you what to do), SE Asian (scooters everywhere) and Chinese (food, language, and probably economy and education). The political situation is obviously affected by the bully next door, with 60x the population and 1/10 the freedom.

From what I could see and “feel,” I don’t think the Taiwanese will fight to the death against a Chinese invasion. But it seems more likely that China will try to suffocate the island, by adding a physical blockade to its ongoing political blockades in the UN, with diplomatic relations, etc. If China did attack, then it risks (a) losing too many men and machines to maintain the PLA’s (un-tested for 50+ years) reputation and (b) a US response — although we know that Trump would abandon Taiwan for a few cheeseburgers. In either case, I can see the Taiwanese leaving to settle in a free country — Japan, Malaysia, and so on…

My one-handed conclusion is that the Taiwanese deserve to be left to their own devices, to continue their progressive, decent quality of life. But life is rarely just.

Here are some photos:

I wasn’t too surprised that Trump was re-elected, as he appeals to a number of people:

• He’s a man. Lots of people don’t want a female president, even if that means electing a felon, rapist, deadbeat, lying narcissist. A woman!

• “An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.” Sadly (for them), Trump will toss them under the bus while pursuing his own goals.
• He promises everything to everyone. When he’s talking, he’s just throwing shit on the wall to see what sticks. He doesn’t care if his promises contradict each other, are impossible, etc., since he’s not going to keep any of them.

As an aside, I do think it’s important to mention Trump’s major strength: Identifying voters’ angers and hopes. This skill would be useful if he actually DID something about it, but he only uses it to advance himself. 

What kind of president will he be? Terrible, as last time, since his only goals are (1) self-enrichment and (2) hanging out with dictators who can actually wield power.

(1) He will also burn $trillions of value to make $millions for himself. He doesn’t care how much American treasure goes away. His concern is his bank account. (His crypto-grifts and Truth Social stock manipulations would be entertaining if not for the many suckers he’s ripping off…)

(2) He will give Ukraine to Putin and let Bibi kill more Palestinians.  The good news is that he’s a coward, so he’s unlikely to start another war. OTOH, Trump (the coward) will not stop China from taking Taiwan or other bullies to ruin lives formerly protected by America’s umbrella.

I don’t think there will be a land war in Europe, as NATO is still far stronger than Russia and the French/UK have enough nuclear weapons to deter Putin.

What about America’s culture wars, abortion, inequality and all that? On the one hand, the Democrats really lost on this one, focussing on gender rights (etc.) instead of the working classes who skipped university. That’s a sad own goal. On the other hand, the Republicans are so corrupt and incompetent that they will do little to help the average person. A duopoly of disgrace.

What’s going on in the Average American’s mind? The Onion has a view, but  I’ve come to the conclusion that the country is no longer a place I want to associate with. Thus, I am going to give up my US citizenship ASAP. I’m “hitching my horse” to a future in Europe, with the Dutch.

Europe and the rest of the world cannot escape the baleful impacts of Trump’s brutal incompetence (David McWilliams has some good insights), but we have more protection. For Americans, I can only recommend the advice of a good friend: “I’m like that turtle crossing the road. I don’t care who’s president. I need to avoid the speeding cars.”

My one-handed conclusion is that a lot of angry people just put a gun to their head and pulled the trigger. Blood and brains everywhere except where they’re supposed to be.

Addendum (12 Nov): David McWilliams makes a good point, i.e., that Trump represents a “new [old] era” of isolationism, and thus opposition to globalism. Such a view can get expensive (Smoot-Hawley tariffs and loss of the gains from international trade) and dangerous (“isolated” US was forced to enter WWI and WWII by “outsiders”), but it has a logic. As a multi-cultural globalist, I think I prefer to stick with Europe — especially since the threat this time is Russia, not Germany.

14 Nov: Another excellent perspective from Fareed Zakaria, exploring isolationist America vs the globalist elites. Trump is bad news for small countries, but (maybe?) good news for big business, which is NOT the same as good for the economy.

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For more opinions that became facts, read these posts on Trump 1.0

9 Nov 2016: Bottom Line Trump’s presidency adds momentum to an racist, nationalist, fascist trend towards a Dark Age that will make 99 percent of us poorer in heart, mind and home.

15 Nov 2016: Looking outside the US, don’t forget that Putin is just charmed to his socks to have Trump as President, as now he can dominate the “near abroad” without the pesky Americans blabbing about NATO or human rights. He will probably be even happier when Trump leaves Syria to him and removes sanctions related to Ukraine, so he can get rich while killing even more civilians.

24 Jan 2017: 14 points of Fascism

 

People (well, men mostly) constantly seek to dominate of each other.

What’s interesting is that they do not all chose the same means of dealing with the weak.

• Some go for genocide, i.e., erasing a culture and absorbing its people into the “superior” culture. Actual (and cultural) genocide occurred when homo sapiens killed homo neanderthalensis, religious purists carried out pogroms against infidels, when the Turks genocided the Armenians in 1915 (and Kurds now), and most recently with Putin in Ukraine and Xi in Xinjiang (Uyghurs), Tibet (since 1959) and Taiwan (in planning).
• Colonial powers sometimes carried out genocides, but they more often settled for extractive relationships that undermined local people and cultures in favor of the Metropole. In India, for example.
• Then there were empires (Roman, Ottoman) that were more tolerant, i.e., allowing locals to keep their languages, religions and even local rulers as long as they paid taxes.
• And finally, we get to the most benign version of “domination” — cultural imperialism in which the stronger, richer society adopts elements of a poorer, weaker or distant culture. I am not sure that Japan suffered when the Europeans lost their minds to Japanisme, since “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

What we see here, in order from most to least damaging, are a series of decisions by the strong that affect the weak. Given that the weak will resist more, the more they are threatened, you can see how more harmful policies result in stronger backlash and resistance, to the point of shortening the reign of those with “power.” Hitler’s “thousand year Reich” lasted just over a decade. Soviet Man didn’t make it to his 70th birthday. The Roman and Ottoman empires lasted at least 500 years, each.

Be nice.

Watch this. It’s maybe the best talk I’ve seen this year.

We humans are not too effective in reducing the emissions of CO2 and other GHGs. Thus, the atmosphere is retaining more heat and climate has shifted into a chaotic mess.

But what if we could invent a bacteria that would digest CO2 into O2 and “carbon poop” as a means of reducing climate risks?

(Here’s an article that I read after writing this that discusses various geo-engineering efforts — all of which need capital or other inputs to expand, so they are not subject — I hope! — to the runaway dynamic I describe here.)

I’m not sure that we can (or will), but I am pretty sure that “we” (the inventors? a nation? a business? the UN?) would release it in the hope that we could save ourselves from run away heating and climate chaos.

But I’m pretty sure that would be a bad idea — like what would stop those bacteria from digesting too much? Indeed, I can easily see that the bacteria would multiply in our CO2-rich environment, thereby digesting so much CO2 that plants would start to suffocate and producing so much O2 that we humans (and other animals) would be poisoned by excess O2.

The Earth would cool, of course — potentially losing so much “insulation” that we started burning more fossil fuels just to stay warm.

I could go on with impacts (what good/bad impact can you think of?), but let’s just stop here and admit that we humans have no idea of how to “control” the Earth in the Anthropocene.

Nice try.

I am a pessimist. I see the glass as half empty, which means that I am (a) often right about things going wrong and (b) slightly less-often surprised when things go right. It’s a defensive mechanism I have, based on many bad experiences and disappointments.

But I could be a “glass-half-full” guy, if I was more like my dad. He is, indeed, more of a glass 120% full kinda guy — a bit delusional but always cheerful. (He’s also had some interesting luck.) I’m not sure I can convince myself to skip onto a more optimistic path, but it’s something I need to think about.

Benefit-cost accounting (BCA) began with a simple comparison of monetary benefits and costs, e.g., should I invest $100 in exchange for a return of $10 per year.

Then people wanted to compare more abstract values, such as the benefit of a vacation or sandwich or education against the costs of those goods. In those cases, the benefits are somewhat subjective — depending on the person, timing, etc. — but economists have used various techniques to try to quantify the benefits. The most obvious is “revealed preference,” which looks at decisions as an indicator of value. Thus, we assume that anyone who buys the sandwich is receiving adequate benefits (happiness, calories) compared to the the cost. This method is not very precise for individual decisions, but it is more accurate with a lot of data on frequent purchases in competitive markets. So it’s better for sandwiches or houses, but not so much for antiques, a cooking course or even an education (we rarely do two university bachelor’s degrees).

So there are issues of subjectivity. And they get worse, the more abstract the benefits and costs — the value of a whale for example.

But we need to know the value of whales, or a human life, or a cure for HIV/AIDS, so economists have gotten more and more creative.

(Can we just ignore exact values and say “it’s worth infinite”? Not when it comes to making choices, i.e., how many whales are we willing to kill if that means saving a human life… or how many humans are we willing to let die to save a whale. More on this in a moment.)

The “science” of calculating the value of a statistical [human] life (VSL) is theoretically elegant, but controversial — most obviously because it’s based on wages, which implies, for example, that one American life (gdp/capita) is “worth” ten Peruvian lives.*

But, back to whales. There are two main methods of assessing value, both based on asking people questions:

• Willingness to pay (WTP): “How much will you pay to save a whale from death?”

  

• Willingness to accept (WTA): “How much can I pay you to kill a whale?”

  

Although these $$ figures should be the same, they are vastly different in practice, due to budgetary limits (money in your pocket), endowment effects (is the whale mine), abstraction (this whale or a “representative” whale?), etc.

Which brings me to ducks…

So there’s an old joke among economists:

Land developer: “Can you give me the value of this wetland, so I can decide if I should build a shopping mall here?”
Economic consultant: “Sure.”
LD: “Great, how much will you charge?”
EC: “Depends on what answer you want.”

So, the point here is that there’s a lot of subjectivity in calculating the non-market values of benefits or costs. That’s why you often see economists on both sides of a dispute, each with a “scientific” estimate of value that is vastly higher or lower than the others. That’s not because values are so different from the same process; it’s because there are different processes of arriving at values — none of which is more legitimate than the other!**

Now to ducks.

If the EC wants to stop the LD from building the shopping mall, then they need merely to identify some ducks (say 100), assign a WTA value of  $50,000 per duck, and say “whelp, the costs of destroying that habitat and thus those ducks is so high that your project fails the CBA.”

OTOH, the EC can say “ducks are like chickens, and chickens cost around $2 each, so you need to send $200 to Ducks Unlimited so they can save some ducks elsewhere. Bring on the machines.”

Bottom line: Economists with two hands can make or break your project by ignoring or counting VSDs. Is that fair? No. But it is “scientific” so plan accordingly.

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* Back in the times of paper airline tickets, this tradeoff was spelled out, in terms of compensation for death on flights in/to/from the US, which was a multiple of compensation for flights that did not have a US-leg. That may have also reflected the influence of lawyers. I can’t find a good link, but here’s a start.

**This is no trivial point. The “social cost of carbon” is one of the most relevant, yet debated (often for nefarious reasons) values out there. I’d say that the future of our civilization depends on getting it right. Sadly, we are getting it wrong because a lot of people want to pretend that emissions do not matter… while they are living large.

Humans are not doing enough mitigation to slow — let alone reverse — climate change chaos. Average global temperature is now +1.2C, far above which is on track to exceed the 2015 Paris Agreement’s target of “holding the increase in the global average temperature… increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels…” by 2034.*

In this 2011 post (“We’re screwed, now what?”), I wrote:

Mitigation-focused investments (solar, biofuels, zero-emissions stuff) are wasted if there’s no “carbon reduction payback” — this means that a lot of projects are going to turn instantly unprofitable.

Thus, it’s time to adapt: lift your skirts for floods and prepare for droughts.

So which countries will do better with adapting — and which will not?

Here are four factors**

1. Climate chaos will arrive in all places in different ways. No physical geography will consistently be “better” or “safer.” Winners and losers will change places. Chance and planning will battle. Nature always bats last!***
2. Wealth is a double-edged sword. It correlates with more resources (useful but not necessary), but it is not sufficient to overcome social divisions and political opportunism.
3. Poverty can be a blessing in communities that have practiced mutual aid while having to adjust to various shocks and injustices. The poor will abandon a cardboard shack before it floods. Will the wealthy abandon Miami as the waters rise?
4. Corruption — the abuse of public office for private gain — will get worse before it gets better, for the same reasons as always: stealing is easier than working. The temptation to steal in a “shrinking pie” world — a world that humans have not faced for centuries — will rise as we tell ourselves “I deserve. You don’t.”

Look around you — is your community ready? Do you even have a community?

* Global average temperatures were +1.58C in April 2024, but that’s not the long-term average? Small consolation.

** What factors have I missed?

*** IMO, homo sapiens will not go extinct, as we are more tenacious than mosquitoes. I see three steps “down” from our current status as the world’s dominant organism. I think each step will take a few hundred years.

1. We fight over a shrinking pie, but maintain a semblance of today’s nation-states, technological advances, and so on.
2. We start to forget key elements of knowledge (e.g., nuclear power or silicon chips) and civility (e.g., more slavery).
3. We are reduced to tribes of social primates who cooperate to survive, but we are too few, and the Anthropocene slowly starts to end.

Simon Kuznets (1901-1985) was a brilliant economist, making both important theoretical and empirical contributions to the discipline.

One that I’ve known about for years, without delving into details, was Kuznets’s invention (definition?) of GDP under the original name of “National Income.”

Well, I just read his 1934 paper on that topic [pdf], and there were two surprises:

(1) “If all the commodities produced and all the direct services rendered during the year are added at their market value, and from the resulting total we subtract the value of that part of the nation’s stock of goods that was expended (both as raw materials and as capital equipment) in producing this total, then the remainder constitutes the net product of the national economy during the year.”

This passage clearly indicates that net income must be reduced by the amount of capital lost or used to produce that income (e.g., depreciation), but that subtraction is left out of the modern definition of GDP (“the market value of all the final goods and services produced and rendered in a specific time period by a country“), which can encourage (or disguise) excess conversion of capital into income, e.g., running down machines or converting forests into toothpicks.

(2) The depression hit wage earners harder (see Table 5) than salaried workers, worsening economic (and social) inequality.

What about Kuznets saying “Don’t use GDP as a measure of progress?” Well, he said this in 1937: “Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.”

Bottom line: GDP is a shit measure that helps no citizens while encouraging politicians waste resources competing over whose GDP is bigger.