Results for “singapore best” 105 found
What I’ve been reading
1. David Der-Wei Wang, editor. A New Literary History of Modern China. Almost one thousand pages, and aren’t edited volumes so often poison? Still, these short, collated excerpts provide one of the most useful and readable entry points into modern Chinese intellectual history; this will be making my “year’s best” list. Every year you should be reading multiple books about China, all of you. Here is a sentence from the work, from Andrea Bachner: “In a brothel in Singapore at the beginning of the twentieth century, a quaint Chinese intellectual (reminiscent of Wang) immersed in the project of writing a new Dream of the Red Chamber in oracle bone script on turtle shells inspires an English visitor to dream of creating a novel superior to Ulysses, tattooed on the backs of coolie laborers.”
2. Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — And Us. The word “forgotten” is misleading in the title, but nonetheless an excellent look at how signaling theories work when the signal is distributed across a quality that is neither useful nor especially burdensome and costly. In other words, it’s not all about the peacock’s tail. The result is aesthetic beauty, and competition across that beauty for its own sake. This book offers an excellent and clearly written treatment of the particulars of avian evolution, signaling theory, and also aesthetics, bringing together some disparate areas very effectively.
3. Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation, edited and translated by Ken Liu. A strong collection, with two stories by Cixin Liu. Here is a new article on Chinese science fiction.
4. Thomas Hardy, Unexpected Elegies: “Poems of 1912-1913” and Other Poems About Emma. Some of Hardy’s best poetic work, it mixes “passion, memory, love, remorse, regret, self-awareness and self-flagellation…to serve a speech of intense emotional candor, all in celebration of his dead (and for many years estranged) wife, Emma,” by one account.
There is a new, expanded edition of Amartya Sen’s Collective Choice and Social Welfare, still the best place to go for his views on normative economics.
Robert Wright’s new book is Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. I am not sure how amenable Buddhism is to bookish treatment, and furthermore the word “true” makes me nervous in this title (“useful”?), but still this book reaches a local maximum of sorts. If you want a book from a smart Westerner defending Buddhism, this is it.
Saturday assorted links
2. The RNA editing of the octopus. Recommended.
3. Cowen’s Second Law: optimal rat tickling edition.
4. Export price elasticity > tariff elasticity > exchange rate elasticity.
5. After the Storm is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year, it is a study in Japanese “complacency,” the reviews are positive but none are insightful.
6. The museum of failed innovations.
7. “Besides, he points out, Scotland is closer to Newfoundland than Hawaii is to California.“
What to watch for in 2017
1. Iran’s presidential race in May. Iran does run real elections — sort of — but will Rouhani survive? Or will the hardliners ascend again? How much is Rouhani a hardliner anyway? Stay tuned. I’ll just note a theorem in the margins here: the greater the unpredictability of the American president, the more the identities and decisions of the other world leaders matter. According to Wikipedia, the only announced reformist candidate is a blogger (not a good sign for him or them).
2. How Nigeria copes with its recession. This is the one country in sub-Saharan Africa that has the size and talent to make a significant commercial breakthrough. Now that oil prices are back up a bit, can they dismantle their counterproductive exchange and capital controls, boost FDI, and get to four to six percent growth? Or will they wallow in the range of one to two percent, which hardly means anything in light of Nigeria’s rising population?
3. Whether the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains stable. Joseph Kabila is staying past the end of his second presidential term. Will this lead to renewed instability and conflict, beyond what is already the case? “Africa’s World War” ended in 2003, not long ago, and it is not impossible to imagine it resuming.
4. African fertility rates. They’re high. In most other parts of the world, including Latin America and the Middle East, fertility has fallen much faster than most commentators had expected. That is not yet the case for Africa, but will it be?
5. Modi’s India and where it it headed: Maybe the demonetisation was an unforced error, but it seems increasingly likely it was part of a broader strategy to push India into a semi-cashless, biometrically marked, income tax-paying society. I’ll be curious to see how that goes.
6. Economic growth in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Pakistan grew 4.7 percent last year and Bangladesh has averaged about six percent for the last decade. Is all that (relative) good news going to continue? If so, the world will be in much better shape than otherwise.
7. Will Xi Jinping overturn Chinese political conventions? His term is supposed to end in 2022, but for a while he has been sending signals he might try to stay on as leader for much longer. That could bring a new round of political instability to the Middle Kingdom. Or a new round of stability. Depending how you look at it.
8. Chinese capital flight and the currency peg. This one seems to be heating to a boil. Capital flight continues to rise, using every technique known to mankind including Bitcoin and e-purchases of Singaporean gambling tokens. The government says that the sporadic reports of USD trades at 7-1 are nonsense, so they must be right. When will it snap? And when it does, will it be a non-event or a big deal?
9. American institutions: Will the United States Congress and courts continue to secure some version of rule of law in this country? And will we agree on what that means?
10. What is the Latin American middle class good for? Many Latin economies now have built a reasonably-sized middle class, but commodity prices are not in general favoring those economies. Will those middle classes push their countries into better policies and educational systems? Slowly but surely, I believe the answer is yes.
There is a chance the French or German elections make this list, but right now the best forecasts are for “business as usual” in both cases. Brexit will continue to torture us with its drawn-out agony. And remember — your emotional guide as to what is an important issue often reflects your own selfish concerns about the status of you and your preferred groups. Do keep that in mind throughout this year.
If you’re looking for a few sleeper issues, I’ll cite Russia-Israel tensions over control of Middle Eastern airspace, economic and institutional recovery in Ukraine combined with sabotage potential from you-know-where, the political economy and geopolitics of aging in Japan, the rise of a Trump-like populist in Mexico, and the potential failure of the Saudi reform process as a few more to keep your eye on. Climate change and the destroyed parts of the Middle East bear watching too, along with ongoing collapse in Yemen, for water supplies too.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Do real interest rates encourage higher savings?
2. Are you Howard Roark? The libertarian architect.
3. A problem for industrial policy: export specialization is not as stable as you think.
4. Ted Gioia’s 100 best albums of 2016, always an event. All kinds of music.
5. An international coastal city right next to Singapore. And how pangolins drink.
6. Japan’s original industrialization was actually quite resource-intensive.
Monday assorted links
Saturday assorted links
4. Is the House really on the line?
5. Wallonia blocks EU-Canada trade deal.
6. Sky Ladder is a splendid documentary, Netflix. It’s the story of Cai Guo-qiang, probably the world’s greatest active artist, and his quest to produce a truly amazing artistic display for his 100-year-old grandmother before she passes away. it is also one of the best movies about contemporary China, or for that matter art and politics.
Nations can be start-ups, too
That is my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The virtues of business startups have led to many a success story. These enterprises start with clean slates. They embody the focused and often idiosyncratic visions of their founders. The successful ones grow faster than their competitors. Even after they become larger and more bureaucratic, these companies often retain some of the creative spirit of their startup origins.
It is less commonly recognized that some nations, including many of the post-World War II economic miracles, had features of startups. For instance, Singapore started as an independent country in 1965, after it was essentially kicked out of Malaysia and suddenly had to fend for itself. Lee Kuan Yew was the country’s first leader, and he embodied many features of the founder-chief executive: setting the vision and ethos, assuming responsibility for other personnel, influencing the early product lines in manufacturing and serving as a chairman-of-the-board figure in his later years.
Other start-ups nations have been UAE, Israel, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Cayman Islands, Estonia, South Korea, and of course way back when the United States. You will note that many of these examples are imperfectly democratic in their early years, and they do not in every case grow out of it. And this:
The world today seems to have lower potential for startup nations. This is in part because international relations are more peaceful and also because most colonial relationships have receded into the more distant past. Those are both positive developments, but the corresponding downside is not always recognized, namely fewer chances for reshuffling the pieces.
This is the close:
To paraphrase John Cleese from Monty Python, the startup nation concept isn’t dead, it’s just resting. Whether in business or in politics, the compelling logic of the startup just isn’t going away.
The best chances for future start-ups may be in Africa, around the borders of Russia, and perhaps someday (not now) Kurdistan. Do read the whole thing.
How to Bring Prosperity to Iran
I was pleased to be one of a group of economists asked to publish a letter to Iran in the New Year’s issue of Tejarat-e Farda, an Iranian business weekly. The issue features messages from economists around the word.
Here is my letter:
Happy Nowruz! I celebrate today not only a New Year but what I hope will be a new beginning. Political differences have cut Iran, long a center of world trade and commerce, from the world economy. As a result, the Iranian economy has performed for a generation or more well below its potential. But Iran has great national resources and could experience an explosion of prosperity if it adopts the right institutions.
Turkey and Iran once had similar standards of living but GDP per capita today is more than twice as high in Turkey as in Iran. On the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index, Turkey is not a world leader, it ranks just 55th in the world (Singapore ranks 1st), but Iran ranks only 118th out of 189 countries.
Iran, however, is moving in the right direction. Privatization of state enterprises, when combined with competitive and open markets, will improve efficiency and innovation. Greater experience with private markets and commercial law also hold the promise of building a more secure foundation for property rights, especially for foreign investors. With the right business climate, billions of dollars could flow to Iran including many billions from successful Iranians who live in the United States and around the world.
The United Arab Emirates provides an interesting model. The UAE has the best business climate in the region and its reputation for security of property has allowed the UAE to attract investment from all over the world including at least $200 billion from investors of Iranian heritage. The government of the UAE takes pride in its business climate and they have used international benchmarks to attract investment and measure their own achievements. It’s remarkable that in their vision document the UAE explicitly aims to be the number one ranked country on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index by 2021. Iran could similarly set goals and mark achievements using international benchmarks such as the Ease of Doing Business Index, the Global Competitiveness Index and the Transparency Index.
The size of the Iranian market makes it attractive to foreign investors as does the sophistication of the Iranian consumer. Iran has a great history of investment in education and its population is among the best educated in the region. Iran is well poised to succeed in information technology and internet startups especially if it offers guarantees and protections for free movement of information.
Iranians have a long history of entrepreneurship and trade, they are among the best educated people in the region, and there is a large Iranian community in the world who would like to invest in their homeland. Iran has strong foundations and with the right institutions it could achieve a prosperity takeoff that would be welcomed by Iranians as well as by the many people around the world who wish the best for the Iranian people in the community of nations.
What I’ve been reading
1. C.E. Cubitt, A Life of Friedrich August von Hayek. How come you don’t hear of this book more often? It is an extensive, rambling meditation on Hayek’s last years, full of anecdotes about Hayek’s medical ailments, arguments with his wife, and which groups he did not like. It is also short on any kind of formal documentation. But what could be more of a document than this book itself? Self-published by Hayek’s last private secretary, it seems too detailed and too strange to be entirely made up. You can pull out a random sentence and get something like “He [Hayek] liked women, he told me, providing they were not hirsute and did not offend his sensitive nose, and on one occasion even told me that he was “a little in love” with one of the waitresses in the Colombi Hotel.” Or we read that Hayek was obsessed with euthanasia, and in his last years carried around a razor blade in case it might be needed on short notice. It’s like absorbing a Thomas Bernhardt novel without the literary skill but with real stakes in the history of ideas. Ultimately I found this one unreadable, though it is consistent with my view that intellectual history is first and foremost a matter of biography. And what about the biography of Charlotte Cubitt herself? That is the real mystery here.
2. Jim Baker, Crossroads: A Popular History of Malaysia and Singapore. I loved this book and found every page gripping, it is hard to see how it could be better than it is. One of the best books of last year, it turns out.
The new novels by Orhan Pamuk and David Mitchell appear to be serious efforts, but so far neither one is grabbing me.
Saturday assorted links
1. Liz Lutgendorff is offended by fantasy and science fiction novels.
2. There is no great stagnation, drug delivery edition. And the value of certain and immediate rewards.
3. What do we infer from disclosure?
4. “Superfluids aren’t usually purely super…”
5. More on why fair trade doesn’t work.
6. Greece just got fifty-five billion euros in debt relief.
7. The LKY Musical: Singapore’s history set to song.
8. Oliver Sacks on his cousin Robert Aumann. And other things.
If you could know only one thing about a city’s food scene…
No, it is not knowledge of the city’s best dish, nor is it access to all the Yelp reviews, or even an understanding of how the spices in that cuisine work together.
I have a simple nomination. If you could only know one thing about a city, you would like to know what time the best and most popular restaurants fill up.
If you know that time, you can walk around a restaurant-rich area. Wait for the best places to start filling up, and then make your move and muscle your way through the door. Voila, the wisdom of crowds!
If you come too early, you cannot glean information from watching the customer flow because there isn’t any. If you come too late, the best places are already full, or they have lines which are too long. But if you are there at just the right time, and attentive to the movement of the crowds, what really can go wrong?
In Singapore the best time to start stalking the hawker centres is about 10:30 a.m., certainly no later than 11. Otherwise the lines at the best stalls are simply too long. Just show up at the right time, and assume the Singaporeans know what they are doing. It works. In Paris you must be looking for a good lunch restaurant before 12:30.
It is a common theme in food economics that knowledge of people, or knowledge of social mechanisms, is often more valuable than knowledge of food. Knowing whom to ask and also how to ask is also often more valuable than a detailed knowledge of a cuisine per se.
Jaan, in Sinagpore
Why should you seek out French food in Singapore? Yet I did. I would describe my meal as at the San Sebastian level for quality and presentation, and one of the best I’ve had in the last five years. I also enjoyed the best view of any meal of comparable quality, looking out onto Marina Bay Sands and the Straits.
In fact, Singapore rarely disappoints. There is an all-vegetarian menu as well.
Genetically Engineering Humans Isn’t So Scary (Don’t Fear the CRISPR, Part 2)
Yesterday I outlined why genetically engineered children are not imminent. The Chinese CRISPR gene editing of embryos experiment was lethal to around 20% of embryos, inserted off-target errors into roughly 10% of embryos (with some debate there), and only produced the desired genetic change in around 5% of embryos, and even then only in a subset of cells in those embryos.
Over time, the technology will become more efficient and the combined error and lethality rates will drop, though likely never to zero.
Human genome editing should be regulated. But it should be regulated primarily to assure safety and informed consent, rather than being banned as it is most developed countries (see figure 3). It’s implausible that human genome editing will lead to a Gattaca scenario, as I’ll show below. And bans only make the societal outcomes worse.
1. Enhancing Human Traits is Hard (And Gattaca is Science Fiction)
The primary fear of human germline engineering, beyond safety, appears to be a Gattaca-like scenario, where the rich are able to enhance the intelligence, looks, and other traits of their children, and the poor aren’t.
But boosting desirable traits such as intelligence and height to any significant degree is implausible, even with a very low error rate.
The largest ever survey of genes associated with IQ found 69 separate genes, which together accounted for less than 8% of the variance in IQ scores, implying that at least hundreds of genes, if not thousands, involved in IQ. (See paper, here.) As Nature reported, even the three genes with the largest individual impact added up to less than two points of IQ:
The three variants the researchers identified were each responsible for an average of 0.3 points on an IQ test. … That means that a person with two copies of each variant would score 1.8 points higher on an intelligence test than a person with none of them.
Height is similarly controlled by hundreds of gene. 697 genes together account for just one fifth of the heritability of adult height. (Paper at Nature Genetics here).
For major personality traits, identified genes account for less than 2% of variation, and it’s likely that hundreds or thousands of genes are involved.
Manipulating IQ, height, or personality is thus likely to involve making a very large number of genetic changes. Even then, genetic changes are likely to produce a moderate rather than overwhelming impact.
Conversely, for those unlucky enough to be conceived with the wrong genes, a single genetic change could prevent Cystic Fibrosis, or dramatically reduce the odds of Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer or ovarian cancer, or cut the risk of heart disease by 30-40%.
Reducing disease is orders of magnitude easier and safer than augmenting abilities.
2. Parents are risk averse
We already trust parents to make hundreds of impactful decisions on behalf of their children: Schooling, diet and nutrition, neighborhood, screen time, media exposure, and religious upbringing are just a few. Each of these has a larger impact on the average child – positive or negative – than one is likely to see from a realistic gene editing scenario any time in the next few decades.
And in general, parents are risk averse when their children are involved. Using gene editing to reduce the risk of disease is quite different than taking on new risks in an effort to boost a trait like height or IQ. That’s even more true when it takes dozens or hundreds of genetic tweaks to make even a relatively small change in those traits – and when every genetic tweak adds to the risk of an error.
(Parents could go for a more radical approach: Inserting extra copies of human genes, or transgenic variants not found in humans at all. It seems likely that parents will be even more averse to venturing into such uncharted waters with their children.)
If a trait like IQ could be safely increased to a marked degree, that would constitute a benefit to both the child and society. And while it would pose issues for inequality, the best solution might be to try to rectify inequality of access, rather than ban the technique. (Consider that IVF is subsidized in places as different as Singapore and Sweden.) But significant enhancements don’t appear to be likely any time on the horizon.
Razib Khan points out one other thing we trust parents to do, which has a larger impact on the genes of a child than any plausible technology of the next few decades:
“the best bet for having a smart child is picking a spouse with a deviated phenotype. Look for smart people to marry.”
3. Bans make safety and inequality worse
A ban on human germline gene editing would cut off medical applications that could reduce the risk of disease in an effort to control the far less likely and far less impactful enhancement and parental control scenarios.
A ban is also unlikely to be global. Attitudes towards genetic engineering vary substantially by country. In the US, surveys find 4% to 14% of the population supports genetic engineering for enhancement purposes. Only around 40% support its use to prevent disease. Yet, As David Macer pointed out, as early as 1994:
in India and Thailand, more than 50% of the 900+ respondents in each country supported enhancement of physical characters, intelligence, or making people more ethical.
While most of Europe has banned genetic engineering, and the US looks likely to follow suit, it’s likely to go forward in at least some parts of Asia. (That is, indeed, one of the premises of Nexus and its sequels.)
If the US and Europe do ban the technology, while other countries don’t, then genetic engineering will be accessible to a smaller set of people: Those who can afford to travel overseas and pay for it out-of-pocket. Access will become more unequal. And, in all likelihood, genetic engineering in Thailand, India, or China is likely to be less well regulated for safety than it would be in the US or Europe, increasing the risk of mishap.
The fear of genetic engineering is based on unrealistic views of the genome, the technology, and how parents would use it. If we let that fear drive us towards a ban on genetic engineering – rather than legalization and regulation – we’ll reduce safety and create more inequality of access.
I’ll give the penultimate word to Jennifer Doudna, the inventor of the technique (this is taken from a truly interesting set of responses to Nature Biotechnology’s questions, which they posed to a large number of leaders in the field):
Doudna, Carroll, Martin & Botchan: We don’t think an international ban would be effective by itself; it is likely some people would ignore it. Regulation is essential to ensure that dangerous, trivial or cosmetic uses are not pursued.
Legalize and regulate genetic engineering. That’s the way to boost safety and equality, and to guide the science and ethics.
To where should you vote with your feet?
If voting with your feet was your preferred method, what would be the best country to immigrate to from the United States for: A) Progressives B) Social Conservatives C) Libertarians
As a follow up, a common expression in the US among adults as I was growing up was “its a free country”. That expressed both disdain of the expressed course of action and a willingness to let the fool do what he wanted. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are literary representatives of that, what should I call it, frontier freedom? Are there countries that even if the official line is restrictive, the feeling of liberty might be much greater? Am I nuts to feel that in many ways the US is less free than it was a couple of generations ago?
For Progressives I’ll pick Denmark. They have high taxes and ultimately they are not too friendly toward immigration, instead preferring to keep their social policy comprehensive and expensive. Sweden may not quite manage the same, although they are still a fairly high pick on this list. Another direction to look would be Australia, where government spending is most likely to actually be redistributive.
For Social Conservatives, I say Singapore. They are tough on drugs and the citizens are expected to work and required to save. Parents are treated with respect, at least relative to the West, and when it comes to births at the very least they are trying hard with subsidies and ads on buses. An underrated pick here would be France, by the way.
For Libertarians, I say the United States. For all of the statist intervention in this country, it remains the place where markets are capable of exercising the most power for the better. And it is no accident that such a huge chunk of the world’s libertarians are also Americans, or at least heavily American-influenced. Singapore is in the running for this designation, with its government at eighteen percent of gdp, but so many things there are planned so comprehensively and the attitude of the country is more technocratic than free market per se. Hong Kong is no longer such a free economy, having come under increasing Chinese influence not to mention law-enforced cartelization, and that is on top of their government-supplied housing stock and single payer health care system.
As for the last part of this question, the relatively peaceful parts of Mexico, in my view, very often feel freer than the United States. But I am never sure how much that is worth.
Assorted links
1. An impressive display of, um…Big Data (pdf), addressing how suppliers discriminate against customers in Singapore. There is also an NBER version, but I don’t see it on their site at this moment.
2. The religion that is Iceland.
3. “…the greatest work of journalism from the nineteenth century.”
4. The Hospital is no Place for a Heart Attack. And few from the EU side like the Greek debt swap idea.
5. Best films of the decade? Winter Sleep should be added to the list immediately, it is Ceylan’s masterpiece. That, along with Uncle Boonmee, should be very close to the top.
7. Timothy Taylor on the new corporate income tax proposals.