Results for “the culture that is japan”
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Assorted links

1. Origins of the term “Great Stagnation”; was it Lester Thurow?

2. Deposits in Irish banks rise for the first time in a year.

3. Is there too much default correlation for EFSF leverage  to work?

4. Smith on Caplan on single mothers; “Baby lust is quite real, almost certainly genetically determined and probably explains a fair fraction of the differences in outcome among women.”

5. The Japanese electricity forecast from the culture of the Swiss in Japan.

6. Monkeys, typewriters, Shakespeare, etc.

Books about America, by foreigners, bleg

George Hawkey writes to me:

I know you’ve posted “best books” queries on the site before, so here goes. Do you have any input on the best books about American History and Culture, but written from a non-American point-of-view?

Obviously Tocqueville, and there’s a whole raft of Canadian published books on the US culture as well. What I’m looking for is more like: what would “The Best and the Brightest” be if it were written by a Japanese journalist. Or what if Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters”  trilogy was written by a Russian sociologist? “The World Is Flat” but written about the US by an Indian?

In many cases, I’m guessing these texts are not yet or will never be translated, but I’m still interested in finding greater perspective on the US than what’s provided by the traditional pundits, authors and historians.

I’ll recommend these five works of fiction, starting with Nabokov and how about Ayn Rand as well?  The comments are open for your further suggestions…

What I’ve been reading

1. John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century.  By an order of magnitude, this is the best book on the economics of contemporary publishing.  It covers the UK scene as well.

2. Adam Feinstein, A History of Autism: Conversations with the Pioneers.  A lengthy and informative treatment of how thought on autism evolved, and most of all a tale of how badly science can misfire, even "these days."  I am not sure how much the portraits of researchers are intended as positive, but overall I take away from this book the message that many of them are arrogant and also partially incompetent.  It is possible that this is a better book (and for different reasons) than the author himself realizes.

3. Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail.  An excellent book, based on a blockbuster combination of writer and topic.

4. Jean-Christopher Valtat, Aurorarama.  Think French steam punk, Inuit characters, a strange dark ship hovering over an ice-locked retro-futuristic town, and a plot which might have come from an incoherent Japanese anime movie.  So far I like it and it's also my favorite book cover in some time:

Aurora 

There were other books which I put down quickly or not quickly enough.  I'm also reading more Thomas Bernhard, never a mistake.

What I’ve been reading

1. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins.  It's derivative in its set-up, but still it has a splendid plot.  If you're looking to explore the new trend of adults reading works for "young adults," this is a good place to start.  The bottom line: I've just ordered volumes two and three, not just volume two.

2. W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction.  Pitch perfect throughout, you can add Sebald to the list of authors with first-rate contributions to both fiction and non-fiction.

3. John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11.  Combines public choice and behavioral economics approaches to foreign policy, all through the lens of the events mentioned in the subtitle.  Consistently interesting, and it shows how the intelligence failures leading up to the second Iraq War had many precedents.  Dower is the same guy who wrote the excellent books on the Pacific War and Japanese postwar recovery; I recommend his work more generally.

4. Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends.  Many books on the Holocaust tread on well-tilled ground, but this was original and compelling throughout.  Here is a useful review, although I think it considerably exaggerates how critical the book is of Wiesenthal.  I also very much like Segev's The Seventh Million.

5. Michael Whinston, Lectures on Antitrust Economics.  A very good introduction to current thinking on antitrust policy, through the lens of theory and empirics.

Are you an asker or a guesser?

Austin Frakt forwards me the following intriguing article.  Here is one excerpt:

This terminology comes from a brilliant web posting by Andrea Donderi that's achieved minor cult status online. We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid "putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept."

Neither's "wrong", but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won't think it's rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who's assuming you might decline. If you're a Guesser, you'll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it's a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they're diehard Askers.

As for myself, I am an asker when it comes to information, but a guesser when it comes to making demands.

Measuring Up

The subtitle of this excellent book, by Daniel Koretz, is What Educational Testing Really Tells Us.  Here is one excerpt:

The distressingly large achievement differences among racial/ethnic groups and socioeconomic groups in the United States lead many people to assume that American students must vary more in educational performance than others.  Some observers have even said that the horse race — simple comparisons of mean scores among countries — is misleading for this reason.  The international studies address this question, albeit with one caveat: the estimation of variability in the international surveys is much weaker than the estimation of averages.

…We are limited to more general conclusions, along the lines of "the standard deviations in the United States and Japan are quite similar."  Which they are.  In fact, the variability of student performance is fairly similar across most countries, regardless of size, culture, economic development, and average student performance.

I was shocked to read this but the book is highly reputable and persuasive.

Collier on the Food Crisis

Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion was my pick for best economics book last year (not written by a dear friend), it was smart, hard-hitting and unconventional.  Collier hasn’t lost his touch as a great comment, more like an op-ed, on the food crisis over at Martin Wolf’s Economic Forum illustrates.

The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something
that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global
supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically
sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market…. There are still many areas of the world that
have good land which could be used far more productively if it was
properly managed by large companies…

Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We
laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable
and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew
out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to
contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources
have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said
for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot
afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on
agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result,
Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty
years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited
to innovation and investment: the result has been that African
agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing
productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model.

Read the whole thing.  Many more oxen are gored.

The $10 billion Saudi university

A picture is here and yes they claim the finished version will have both male and female students and Western faculty.  A question we’ve been asking over lunch lately is the following: how much would it really cost to set up a first-rate university — and not just a technical school — in Asia?  Let’s say an Asian businessman were willing to put up $10 billion in endowment: how good would the school be?  I see three major problems:

1. Many Asian governments cannot precommit to respecting academic free speech; nor for that matter can the Saudis.

2. An excellent university must be part of an intellectual network near other excellent universities.  Arguably with the internet this effect is weakening over time.  Still, if they tripled my salary I wouldn’t move to Saudi Arabia or for that matter Japan and that is for reasons related to network effects.

3. Such universities could not precommit to the governance systems (please don’t laugh) that have been so effective in bringing American schools to dominate the world rankings.  In fact the more money that one person or government gave, the greater the commitment problem might be.  By these governance systems I mean faculty control of appointments, with academic-based monitoring by the Dean and Provost, independent boards, and Presidents willing and able to raise enough money to maintain financial independence for the future.  That’s a pretty tall order but you’ll find all those qualities in the successful American colleges and universities.  Long-run financial independence also requires a more general culture of philanthropy which is found only in the United States.

Technical schools aside, I do not expect American colleges and universities to lose their leadership role in the immediate future.  And if they do, the real competitors will prove to be Europe, the UK, and Canada, not Asia.

My favorite things German, Richard Wagner edition

1. Music: Riches galore, most of all gamelan music.  My favorite CD of the soft, dreamy Javanese gamelan is Javanese Court Gamelan, on Nonesuch.  Most gamelan music is from Bali.  Golden Rain is one good pick of many, but virtually any gamelan CD without a half-naked woman on the cover will be excellent.  Look for the French and Japanese labels in this area.  For other areas of Indonesian music, there is a very good Smithsonian set of 20 CDs; the acoustic guitar music is especially interesting.  Here is a one-CD sampler from that set.

2. Novel: Pramoedya Toer’s Buru Quartet (four volumes, but quite readable) is perhaps the least read great novel of the 20th century.  On the surface it concerns imperialism but it is actually about what a life really consists of and how that life is defined.  Reading each volume redefines the one that came before it.  Like gamelan music, very highly recommended.  The author "wrote" most of it during his 14-year stint in Buru prison, but most of the time without the benefit of pen or paper.

3. Food dish: This is a no brainer, Beef Rendang.  In general the food from Sumatra is spicier.  Get Sumatran Rijstafel when you can, it is better than Javanese though both are wonderful.

4. Textiles: A rich area, but the subtle colors and textures of Sumatra are tops.  The early twentieth century is an especially strong time but the quality continues to be high.  Textiles from Timor are not to be overlooked, although of course now they are independent.  Here is one Sumatran image.  Here is another nice piece.  Try this one too.

5. Film: I have never seen an Indonesian movie, though in my defense I have never turned down an opportunity to see one either.  Nia Dinata is currently a renowned Indonesian filmmaker.  The reasonably good Year of Living Dangerously is the only movie I know set in Indonesia.  Can you all help out here?

6. Painter: I like the Naive Art of Bali, so how about Nyoman Lesug?  Sadly he is not well represented on the web.  Dewa Putu Bedi is perhaps better known.  Anak Agung Gede Sobrat is another option.  Here are some other names to start with.  But it is increasingly difficult to run across the better stuff.

The bottom line: Most people underexplore tthe culture of this region, relative to the quality of their best offerings.  I am not yet sure, however, whether we should call it a "country."

New ideas in business

The list is from Harvard Business Review, worth a quick read, try this:

An entrepreneurial Japan–which once would have seemed oxymoronic–may ultimately overshadow the much touted start-up cultures in China and India.

A good bet.  Scrolling down to the bottom you will find Clay Shirky and also David Weinberger’s interesting "The Folly of Accountabilism."

The pointer is from Ben Casnocha.

What does voice pitch indicate?

Women in almost every culture speak in deeper voices than Japanese women.  American women’s voices are lower than Japanese women’s, Swedish women’s are lower than American’s, and Dutch women’s are lower than Swedish women’s.  Vocal difference is one way of expressing social difference, so that in Dutch society, which doesn’t differentiate much between its image of the ideal male and the ideal female, there are few differences between male and female voice.  The Dutch also find medium and low pitch more attractive than high pitch.

That is from the new and interesting The Human Voice: How this Extraordinary Instrument Reveals Essential Clues About Who We Are, by Anne Karpf.  Here is an interesting dissertation abstract on voice pitch, some of which relates to economic ideas on signaling.

Democide

Rudy Rummel writes that due to new evidence he has significantly updated his figures for 20th century democide,  i.e. murder by government.

Many scholars and
commentators have referenced my total of 174,000,000 for the democide
(genocide and mass murder) of the last century. I’m now trying to get
word out that I’ve had to make a major revision in my total due to two
books. One is Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, and the
other is Mao: the Unknown Story that she wrote with her husband, Jon
Halliday. I’m now convinced that that Stalin exceeded Hitler in
monstrous evil, and Mao beat out Stalin.

From the time I wrote my book on China’s Bloody Century, I have held to these democide totals for Mao:

Civil War-Sino-Japanese War 1923-1949 = 3,466,000 murdered
Rule over China (PRC) 1949-1987 = 35,236,000 murdered

However,
some other scholars and researchers had put the PRC total as from
60,000,000 to a high 70,000,000. Asked why my total is so low by
comparison, I’ve responded that I did not include the China’s Great
Famine 1958-1961. From my study of what was written on this in English,
I believed that:

(1) the famine was due to the Great Leap Forward when Mao tried to catch up with the West in producing iron and steel;
(2)
the factorization of agriculture, forcing virtually all peasants to
give up their land, livestock, tools, and homes to live in regimented
communes;

(3) the exuberant over reporting of agricultural
production by commune and district managers for fear of the
consequences of not meeting their quotas;

(4) the consequent belief
of high communist officials that excess food was being produced and
could be exported without starving the peasants;

(5) but, reports from traveling high officials indicated that peasants might be starving in certain localities;
(6) an investigative team was sent out from Beijing, and reported back that there was mass starvation;
(7) and then the CCP stopped exporting food and began to import what was needed to stop the famine.

Thus,
I believed that Mao’s policies were responsible for the famine, but he
was mislead about it, and finally when he found out, he stopped it and
changed his policies. Therefore, I argued, this was not a democide.
Others, however, have so counted it, but I thought this was a sloppy
application of the concepts of mass murder, genocide, or politicide
(virtually no one used the concept of democide). They were right and I
was wrong.

From the biography of Mao, which I trust (for those
who might question it, look at the hundreds of interviews Chang and
Halliday conducted with communist cadre and former high officials, and
the extensive bibliography) I can now say that yes, Mao’s policies
caused the famine. He knew about it from the beginning. He didn’t care!
Literally. And he tried to take more food from the people to pay for
his lust for international power, but was overruled by a meeting of
7,000 top Communist Party members.

So, the famine was
intentional. What was its human cost? I had estimated that 27,000,000
Chinese starved to death or died from associated diseases. Others
estimated the toll to be as high as 40,000,000. Chang and Halliday put
it at 38,000,000, and given their sources, I will accept that.

Now,
I have to change all the world democide totals that populate my
websites, blogs, and publications. The total for the communist democide
before and after Mao took over the mainland is thus 3,446,000 +
35,226,000 + 38,000,000 = 76,692,000, or to round off, 77,000,000
murdered. This is now in line with the 65 million toll estimated for
China in the Black Book of Communism, and Chang and Halliday’s estimate
of "well over 70 million."

This exceeds the 61,911,000 murdered by the Soviet Union 1917-1987, with Hitler far behind at 20,946,000 wiped out 1933-1945.

For
perspective on Mao’s most bloody rule, all wars 1900-1987 cost in
combat dead 34,021,000 — including WWI and II, Vietnam, Korea, and the
Mexican and Russian Revolutions. Mao alone murdered over twice as many
as were killed in combat in all these wars.

Now, my overall
totals for world democide 1900-1999 must also be changed. I have
estimated it to be 174,000,000 murdered, of which communist regimes
murdered about 148,000,000. Also, compare this to combat dead.
Communists overall have murdered four times those killed in combat,
while globally the democide toll was over six times that number.