The Conversation
- Holy Jesus, Jeremy (7)
- Eurasian Sensation: @ Colin: I’m pretty sure Jeremy Lin and his supporters are not the same person.
- colin: I was pretty impressed with Lin, until some digging around leads me to believe he’s more interested in...
- Eurasian Sensation: Why does anyone give a shit? The US is the global capital of people loudly claiming their love...
- What Cultures Value (21)
- “But he hit me back first!” (37)
- colin: It’s taboo to speak this truth in America, but here it is: Blacks are as racist as, if not more than,...
- Eurasian Sensation: @ Raguel: It’s interesting that you raise the Indonesian Chinese, as there are indeed some...
- Raguel: As heated as the debate has become I think that it has been productive. The perspectives raised, unpopular or...
- Seeking Asian Female (7)
- King: “If I ever get a mail order bride I will get her addicted to sex first.” I assume you mean with you...
- bigWOWO: Linda, Haha! Maybe that dude is on to something with the foreign language nagging. But to be honest, maybe...
- raguel: LOL @ Chen and traumatic comedy XD The more I discover about mail-order marriages the more horrible the...
- About A Boy by Nick Hornby (6)
- bigWOWO: That’s a really good point, Raguel. Like it or not, TV executives control everything (including what...
- Raguel: I could be wrong but the distribution windows for media and especially film seems very hierarchical. If you...
- bigWOWO: Illegal streaming? I had no idea anyone did that! Well, I really should check out some movies one of these...
- Superbowl Recipe and Xenophobic Superbowl Ad (22)
- Raguel: Time to get your concealed carry licences, folks!
- Eurasian Sensation: Jeff Yang has a good article about this ad: http://inamerica.blogs.cnn....
- Raguel: I haven’t even gotten to why the ad really is so offensive to us, ROFL
- Jeremy Lin shines (20)
- N: @danny You should youtube his college games. The two against Boston college and the one against UConn. Lol, he can...
- Lingyai: @Ben Efsaneyim Why would it be surprising a non Asian crowd cheering for Lin? Most of the NBA fans going to...
- bigWOWO: Danny and Mojo, Holy crap! That’s amazing! I didn’t know he could dunk either! I think...
- Stop SOPA and PIPA (9)
- Raguel: ^ Nice one Byron! I’m reading through the NYT picks, they’re good!
- bigWOWO: The Times had an Op-Ed by the President of the RIAA, and I commented. My comment was picked as a...
- Raguel: Found a great website, take a look at this: https://www.cdt.org/ Why should privacy be important, in an age...
- The Perversity of Human Biodiversity, a.k.a. “Scientific” Racism (402)
- bigWOWO: Here’s an interesting suggestion coming out of MIT: Connectome by Sebastian Seung...
- Battle Hymn of the Kitten Daughter (36)
- Raguel: You know Andre, you and me, I think we and a lot of other folks may have gone through some pretty harrowing...
- Andre M. Smith: Russians call me German, Germans call me Russian, Jews call me a Christian, Christians a Jew....
- Two podcasts that address racism in the military, and Danny Chen the person (9)
- Raguel: The origins of racism in the American military as described by loudestfuckingazns is accurate. Very recently,...
- bigWOWO: Sorry, Larry, just noticed that the spam robot junked your comment. Approved!
- bigWOWO: Agreed. It just has more weight if you include your name. Not that the ideas are any less valid, but it just...
- Facebook IPO (5)
- King: Actually WOWO, I bump into plenty of Asians up at the Art Center College of Design http://www.artcenter.edu/a...
- bigWOWO: Agree with King. This might not be a bad thing for Asian Americans to hear about. We can jump off the STEM...
- Raguel: People are too accustomed to thinking about value only in terms of money. Even artists are guilty of it. Some...
- Activism is as activism does (10)
- trolldetector: Brooks also goes onto say ‘You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of...
- bigWOWO: By the way, speaking of activism, there was a great David Brooks column recently. He talks about how people...
- Raguel: I have no experience whatsoever with activism. I simply do not feel safe participating in it. There is always...
- How to Win a Streetfight (18)
- bigWOWO: No worries. I feel the same way. Nothing against her, but just doubtful.
- Raguel: Hi Byron! I’ve been occupied doing a lot of reading and thinking recently. I suppose its just another...
- bigWOWO: Hey Raguel, What about your comments on ASSK?
I agree with everything you said. About #1…I think...
- UFC 117 Sonnen vs. Silva Recap (1)
- bigWOWO: I think Michael Bisping solved the Chael Sonnen puzzle today, even though he lost a controversial decision....
- 6 on 1 Beatdown of Asian Man (36)
- King: “I mean I look around me and 99% of the time there are no women that look like or dress like Adriana Lima...
- SWR: Apparently the girl in the second video was not the girl who filmed the fight. It was probably unwise of her to...
- Raguel: I mean I look around me and 99% of the time there are no women that look like or dress like Adriana Lima in...
- Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids by Bryan Caplan (Review) (6)
- bigWOWO: Jeff, You called it! They were (if I recall correctly) 7 (twins) and 2. He’s still in the honeymoon...
- jeffat8asians: “Overpaying?” With the possible exception of college tuition (and even that is arguable),...
- Hitler: Kids suck lol.
- The Asian Rock Thread (16)
- ben: I’ve been getting into Asian rock music recently so thank you all very much for uploading all these videos.
- Simple Pickup on ABC News (132)
- “Lazy” Americans and the Decline of the American Middle Class (6)
- bigWOWO: But kobu, how can we have literature and art without money to support artists and writers? About...
- kobukson: I don’t know why everyone seems to think the notion of the decline of the middle class is such a bad...
- bigWOWO: There are a lot of veterans (supposedly) on that site. I can kind of understand it–military guys are...
- Aung Sung Suu Kyi Movie with Michelle Yeoh (45)
- bigWOWO: Eurasian, Lee Kuan Yew has always been upfront about Singapore’s hybrid system. To the best of my...
- Eurasian Sensation: @ BigWowo: New governments following independence or a major power struggle often have the sort...
- N: @bww And ironically, one of the rare democratic successes in the region that is Singapore behaves much closer to a...
- Holy Jesus, Jeremy (7)
Tag Archives: Economics
What Cultures Value
Thanks to Eurasian Sensation, who posted this article: The One-Shot Society. The article is about the educational system in Korea, where students cram like mad for one college entrance test, a test which determines the career that they will have for the rest of their lives. In Korea, as the article mentions, people rarely change jobs, so it’s imperative that students get into the best university and then into the best company. We’ve spoken about this trend in Korea and how it limits their opportunities to make decisions later in life, which is why many Koreans try to become doctors.
Education IS Oversold, But We Also Need More Education
Ha-Joon Chang’s book helped me to reconcile some differing but not mutually exclusive viewpoints that I’ve held in the past, namely that:
a) Education is oversold (also see here)
and
b) We need more education in the humanities (also see here)
In “Thing 17,” Chang compares the literacy of different countries and shows how increased literacy doesn’t necessarily mean that a country will do better. In 1960′s, for example, the literacy rate of the Philippines was 72% compared with a rate of 54% in Taiwan, and the per capita income of the Philippines was almost twice that of Taiwan, but Taiwan’s per capita income today is nearly ten times that of the Philippines (180). The main reason a nation’s economy grows, as Chang shows, is because of its government and institutions, not because of it’s education.
Too Many People Trying to Become Doctors in Korea
I just finished 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. It’s a fascinating book about the perils of free market capitalism. Chang is pro-capitalism but anti-free-market. He makes a compelling case for government intervention in markets.
He writes about his country, South Korea, where the government put a damper on government economic intervention in 1997 and left their workers to the dictates of the market. Like the U.S., Korea has a weak welfare state, so if a Korean company goes under or sends a Korean employee packing while the economy is bad, that employee’s life will change in a big, big way.
Jeff Yang’s SF Column to End; the Politics of Demand
Jeff Yang
I meant to announce this a few days ago, but Jeff Yang’s Asian Pop column has come to an end. Eight years of writing the biggest Asian American pop culture column, and it’s all over. The “Gatekeepers” decided that the finances didn’t make sense, so they canned the column. It’s a huge loss for them and a huge loss for Asian America. But I know that Jeff is going to move on to bigger and better things. I have faith, brother!
Ha-Joon Chang book review coming up
Ha-Joon Chang
I know this is short notice, but I’m going to be reviewing Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism next week. If anyone wants to read it to discuss later, go buy it now. It’s a phenomenal book by a Cambridge economist who is against free markets. I’m usually not a big fan of simplified pop-econ books written by professors (didn’t care too much for Freakonomics), but this book is excellent. I will caution you: it’s actually not easy reading and takes a bit of extra effort to understand the points he makes. But it’s well worth reading, given the fact that we all need to be thinking about economics during these hard times. If you’re interested in reading it, post below. Learn more about Mr. Chang here.
Old People and Economics
Here are three Times articles that together make some very interesting statements about age and economics.
The first is an opinion piece by David Brooks, where he talks about how government is paralyzed because of the enormous pensions that government jobs offer. He writes:
New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.
Communitarian vs. Libertarian
This Op-Ed by David Brooks is the #1 most popular on the Times site today. In the Op-Ed, Brooks talks about the upsurge in American libertarianism with the Tea Party, and he presents an alternative, more communitarian approach that was posed by British writer Phillip Blond. (See the original Blond article here.)
Blond, according to Brooks, poses the problem:
Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.
The Return of Depression Economics
I just finished reading Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. It’s a great little book that takes novices on a quick walk through the history of economics since the Great Depression. Krugman argues that depressions and recessions come from runs (bank runs, shadow banking runs, house sell-offs), and that the remedy is to bring back confidence in spending.
Wikipedia Seeks $6M
I just saw this Washington Post article about how Wikipedia is trying to raise $6 million dollars this year to cover operating costs for its nonprofit website.
I’m reading a book called Wikinomics right now about how there’s a new economy coming out because of massive cross collaboration, but if Wikipedia, the poster child of the book, needs to beg people for money, I don’t see how this new economic model is going to survive.
The RiceDaddies Empowerment in Diversity Challenge
Rice Daddies Challenge
SoulSnax from Rice Daddies sent me this awesome activist initiative that the Rice Daddies have been working on: the RiceDaddies Empowerment in Diversity challenge. They raise money for educational purposes in order to teach our kids culture and leadership and to instill our kids with self-love. I think they’re the only Asian American internet site which has such an initiative. From their site:
With that in mind, The RiceDaddies Empowerment in Diversity Challenge aims to mitigate the marginalizing effects of diversity-negligent pop culture and media by funding innovative educational programs that do the following:
- Promote positive images of ourselves for our children
