A very important, if largely theoretical, hobby

Friday, May 8th, 2009

Soren Johnson always considered wargames — the pre-computer, giant hex-grid map variety — a very important, if largely theoretical, hobby:

When I was growing up, access to games was limited. My family had the standard assortment of board games, your Monopoly, your Risk, your Life. However, I remember walking through our local Yard Birds one day, and sitting at the bottom of a bookshelf, hidden in a corner, was a copy of Eric Lee Smith’s Civil War. To a nine-year-old, it was like an artifact from another planet. Two huge hex-covered maps covering the southern US? Hundreds and hundreds of counters, representing everything from Supply Depots to Grant and Lee (not to mention turkeys like Halleck and Burnsides)? An immense, detailed 60-page rulebook?

Of course, I never was able to finish a game of it, but I enjoyed working my way through the game mechanics. Throughout my childhood, wargames held a place of fascination for me — a very important, if largely theoretical, hobby. Wargames shops were hard to come by, so my collection ended up fairly random. My favorites tended to be simpler games that I can barely even recall how I first found them, ones like Raphia, Blackbeard, and Belter. The latter even inspired my gaming friends to develop our own spreadsheets and macros to help us manage the economic data — it was a tycoon game before its time.

It’s hard to say what effect wargames had on me. The ratio of time spent reading rules/collecting games compared with time spent actually playing them was pretty lopsided in favor of the former. No matter how many times my friend Eric and I failed to make it through a game of Third Reich, I always considered myself a wargamer. All the time spent learning rule sets left its mark on me. Wargames were an attempt to simulate combat before computers were capable of managing these mechanics for us, so I believe that my first “gameplay programming” experience came from trying to fit all these rules into my head as a cohesive whole.

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The Ancient World’s First Superpower

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Robert Kaplan says that it’s no accident that Iran was the ancient world’s first superpower:

There was a certain geographic logic to it. Iran is the greater Middle East’s universal joint, tightly fused to all of the outer cores. Its border roughly traces and conforms to the natural contours of the landscape — plateaus to the west, mountains and seas to the north and south, and desert expanse in the east toward Afghanistan. For this reason, Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent. Unlike the geographically illogical countries of that adjacent region, there is nothing artificial about Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran is now being wooed by both India and China, whose navies will come to dominate the Eurasian sea lanes in the 21st century.

Kaplan sees Iran as another shatter zone within the greater Middle East, but with a difference:

The instability Iran will cause will not come from its implosion, but from a strong, internally coherent Iranian nation that explodes outward from a natural geographic platform to shatter the region around it. The security provided to Iran by its own natural boundaries has historically been a potent force for power projection. The present is no different. Through its uncompromising ideology and nimble intelligence services, Iran runs an unconventional, postmodern empire of substate entities in the greater Middle East: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Sadrist movement in southern Iraq. If the geographic logic of Iranian expansion sounds eerily similar to that of Russian expansion in Mackinder’s original telling, it is.

The geography of Iran today, like that of Russia before, determines the most realistic strategy to securing this shatter zone: containment. As with Russia, the goal of containing Iran must be to impose pressure on the contradictions of the unpopular, theocratic regime in Tehran, such that it eventually changes from within. The battle for Eurasia has many, increasingly interlocking fronts. But the primary one is for Iranian hearts and minds, just as it was for those of Eastern Europeans during the Cold War. Iran is home to one of the Muslim world’s most sophisticated populations, and traveling there, one encounters less anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism than in Egypt. This is where the battle of ideas meets the dictates of geography.

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan, War | No Comments »

Experts acting like experts

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Gladwell’s diagnosis of the cause of the financial crisis is simple, Felix Salmon reports — massive amounts of overconfidence, as revealed by its two most common symptoms, miscalibration and the illusion of control:

What’s going on on Wall Street isn’t the result of experts failing to act as experts: it’s the result of experts acting exactly like experts act. It’s not a result of incompetence, it’s a result of overconfidence.

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Patri Friedman Reads Atlas Shrugged and Loves It

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Bryan Caplan has repeatedly braved mockery by naming Atlas Shrugged as his favorite novel, so he’s overjoyed to see Patri son of David son of Milton finally reading and loving the book:

Now’s a good time to note that while I’ve spent most of my career as a libertarian thinking of Objectivism as a subject for mockery, I am now reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time, and loving it. It hasn’t changed my mind about any of the things I think are wrong with the philosophy, and I do get annoyed by things like her constantly equating certainty with strength/good and doubt with weakness/evil (sorry Ayn, but the world is Bayesian and posteriors are rarely 100%. Certainty may be sexy, but it is rarely correct).

But the good things about it are things that hardly appear anywhere else, and are needed now more than ever. The whole theme of how bad laws turn honest people into criminals and outlaws, into hiding from other men instead of taming nature, and what an awful reversal this is of how a good society should be, is just awesome. That’s how I’ve felt my whole life — I just want to create value, not constantly struggle with stupid artificial constraints, and to live my life openly, not constantly have to hide my consensual activities.

The commonalities between Gult’s Gulch and seasteading are actually pretty hilarious considering that I had only the vaguest idea of what GG was until a couple weeks ago. There are some key differences, of course, but some strongly overlapping themes.

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People take reality for granted

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

People take reality for granted, Teller says — offstage:

“Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn’t mean it is simple.”

Penn and Teller came to an odd epiphany early in their career:

To kill some time in a diner, Teller was practicing his version of Cups and Balls, a classic sleight-of-hand trick popularized by ancient Roman conjurers. It involves a series of “vanishes” and “transpositions” as the balls appear and disappear underneath the cups. Teller hadn’t brought any props, so he used wadded-up napkins and clear water glasses.

Somehow, this made the trick even better. Although it was now possible to follow the crumpled napkins as Teller variously palmed them, squished them, and moved them from cup to cup, the illusion persisted. “The eye could see the moves, but the mind could not comprehend them,” he says. “Giving the trick away gave nothing away, because you still couldn’t grasp it.”

(And could those ladies from The View be any more insipid?)

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The Dictator’s Handbook

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Foreign Policy has published an excerpt from Paul Collier’s Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places — The Dictator’s Handbook:

The old rulers of the Soviet Union were terrified of facing contested elections. Those of us who studied political systems presumed they must be right: Elections would empower citizens against the arrogance of government. And with the fall of the Iron Curtain, elections indeed swept the world. Yet democracy doesn’t seem to have delivered on its promise. Surprisingly often, the same old rulers are still there, ruling in much the same old way. Something has gone wrong, but what?

To answer this question, I put myself in the shoes of an old autocrat—say, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak—now having to retain power in a “democracy.” What options do I face? Hard as it is to bear, I have to be honest with myself: My people do not love me. Far from being grateful for the wonders that I have achieved, they may increasingly be aware that under my long rule our country has stagnated while similar countries have transformed themselves. There are even a few cogent voices out there explaining why this situation is my fault. I shake my head in disbelief that it has come to this, seize my gold pen, and start listing my options. I decide to be systematic, in each case evaluating the pros and cons.

Option 3 captures the feel:

Option 3: Scapegoat a minority
Pros: This one works! I can blame either unpopular minorities within my country or foreign governments for all my problems. The politics of hatred has a long and, electorally speaking, pretty successful pedigree. In the Ivory Coast it was the Burkinabe immigrants; in Zimbabwe, the whites; in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Tutsi. Failing all else, I can always blame Israel America. I can also promise favoritism for my own group.

Cons: Some of my best friends are ethnic minorities. In fact, they have been funding me for years in return for favors. I prefer doing business with ethnic minorities because, however rich they become, they cannot challenge me politically. It is the core ethnic groups I need to keep out of business. Scare the minorities too badly, and they will move their money out. So, though scapegoating works, beyond a certain point it gets rather costly.

Bryan Caplan calls this political economy the way it should be done:

Realistic analysis of politicians’ actual situation, not deductions from irrelevant rational voter models.

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Call Me Steve

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

When Chinese-American Huan Hsu moved to Shanghai a year ago, he figured his name would finally seem normal:

No longer would it be the albatross of my childhood in Utah — making me stand out among the Johns, Steves, and Jordans. But when I introduced myself, I was met with blank stares, double takes, and requests for my English name. People — Chinese people — often wondered whether I were being patronizing, like the fabled Frenchman who icily responds in English to an earnest American’s attempts to get directions en français. My company almost didn’t process my paperwork because I left the box for “English name” blank. “You don’t have an English name?” the HR woman gasped. “You should really pick one.” She then waited for me to do just that, as if I could make such an important existential decision on the spot; I told her I’d get back to her. People — Chinese people — had trouble recalling my name. One guy at work, a Shanghai-born VP, called me “Steve” for almost three months. At my workplace, which is 90 percent mainland Chinese, just about everyone I interacted with had an English name, usually selected or received in school. The names ran the gamut, from the standard (Jackie, Ivy) to the unusual (Sniper, King Kong), but what really struck me was how commonly people used them when addressing one another, even when the rest of the conversation was in Chinese.

To sort out how English names became necessities in China, I recently spent an afternoon with Laurie Duthie, a UCLA doctoral candidate in anthropology who’s finishing up her dissertation in Shanghai. Duthie has studied Chinese white-collar workers since 1997 and traces the popularity of English names in China back to the influx of foreign investment following Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms. With foreign investment came foreigners, and many of Duthie’s research participants told her that they got tired of outsiders butchering their Chinese names, so they adopted English ones. “If Betty Brown’s your boss, or if your boss can’t say Du Xiao Hua, I’d want to change my name, too,” says Duthie.

Increasingly, these bosses are Chinese, yet the English names persist, in part because English tends to be the lingua franca for business technology, and even native Chinese often find it more efficient to type, write, or sign documents in English. Using English names also creates a more egalitarian atmosphere. Most forms of address in China reinforce pecking orders, such as “Third Uncle” and “Second Daughter” at home or “Old Wang” or “Little Hu” in the village square. Your given name — customarily said in full, surname first — is reserved for use by those with equal or higher social standing, and the default honorific for an elder or superior is “Teacher” — no surprise in a country that reveres education. But an English name, other than separating those with and without such names, frees users from these cultural hierarchies.

Given the nationalism I’ve witnessed in China, I was a bit surprised at how readily Chinese adopted Western names. (Even my Americanized parents were uncomfortable with the idea of me changing my name. They said I could do as I wished when I turned 18, though always in a tone that suggested such an unfilial act would cause them to die of disappointment.) But Duthie’s participants insisted that taking an English name isn’t kowtowing, nor is it simply utilitarian. Rather, it’s essential to being Chinese and achieving Chinese goals. Whereas in the past patriotism was expressed by self-sacrifice, it is now expressed through economic activity. So by working for, say, 3M, Chinese citizens are helping to build up China, and the English names they take on in the process are as patriotic as Cultural Revolution-era monikers like Ai Guo (Loves China) or Wei Dong (Mao’s Protector).

Taking English names also fits with various traditional Chinese naming practices. In the past, children were given “milk names” when they were born, and then public names once they started school. Professionals and scholars used pseudonyms, or hao, that signified membership in an educated class. Confucius, born Kong Qiu, sometimes wrote under his zi, or courtesy name, Zhongni. Even now, Chinese sometimes take new names to mark the start of a new job, entry to graduate school, or a marriage, as my coworkers Alpha and Beta did. They subsequently named their son Gamma. (For the record, Alpha is the male.)

As one of his Chinese friends said, “A name is just a dai hao.” Dai hao, or code name, can also refer to a stock’s ticker symbol.

(Hat tip to Chris.)

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Designing for Free

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

I’m not surprised that a game publisher would try this; I am surprised that such a brazen tactic has worked:

In China, a new MMORPG with a very aggressive business model, entitled ZT Online, has gained significant popularity. With an ARPU of $40/quarter spread over one million paying users, the game has made its publisher, Giant Interactive, one of the most profitable online entertainment companies in China. Like many Asian games, ZT is free-to-play (F2P) and focuses primarily on player-vs-player gameplay. Not only can players steal from their defeated foes, but weaker characters can even be kidnapped and held for ransom, locking their owners out of the game.

Access to equipment in ZT is very limited. First of all, there are no loot drops from killing monsters or completing quests. Further, all items in the game are completely bound to the owner, so there is no way to trade for better weapons with other players. Instead, the primary way to gain equipment to empower one’s character is by paying real money directly to the publisher to open “treasure chests.” Essentially in-game slot machines, these chest have only a small chance of producing something useful, and finding the best equipment often requires opening thousands of chests. In fact, each day, the game confers a special bonus to the player who has opened the most chests, meaning the player who has spent the most real-world money to obtain better items.

This innovation came about in Asia for a reason:

ZT Online’s complete embrace, at every level of the game, of real-money transactions (RMT) may be appalling to some in the West, but the game is in many ways at the vanguard of a trend to develop games that take advantage of the players’ appetites for spending money to gain in-game advantages. Ironically, the F2P-with-RMT model traces its origins to the challenge of getting Asian gamers to buy boxed, retail games, most of whom preferred the free ride of easy and widespread piracy. In response, Korean companies like Nexon and NCsoft built server-based online games which could not be pirated and would require alternate business models.

Designing free-to-play game is more complicated than designing traditional games:

In a fixed-cost world, the designer can focus on just one thing: making the player’s experience as engaging and interesting and fun as possible.

For a F2P game, however, designers have to balance making free content fun enough to engage first-time players but not so much fun that they would not yearn for something more, something that could be turned into a transaction sometime in the future. Every design decision must be made with a mind towards how it affects the balance between free and paid content.

Thus, Soren Johnson points out, the true cost of piracy is that the line between game business and game design has become very blurry.

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Fertile Shock Zone

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Robert Kaplan’s list of shock zones includes the Fertile Crescent:

The countries of this region — Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq — are vague geographic expressions that had little meaning before the 20th century. When the official lines on the map are removed, we find a crude finger-painting of Sunni and Shiite clusters that contradict national borders. Inside these borders, the governing authorities of Lebanon and Iraq barely exist. The one in Syria is tyrannical and fundamentally unstable; the one in Jordan is rational but under quiet siege. (Jordan’s main reason for being at all is to act as a buffer for other Arab regimes that fear having a land border with Israel.) Indeed, the Levant is characterized by tired authoritarian regimes and ineffective democracies.

Of all the geographically illogical states in the Fertile Crescent, none is more so than Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, by far the worst in the Arab world, was itself geographically determined: Every Iraqi dictator going back to the first military coup in 1958 had to be more repressive than the previous one just to hold together a country with no natural borders that seethes with ethnic and sectarian consciousness. The mountains that separate Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq, and the division of the Mesopotamian plain between Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south, may prove more pivotal to Iraq’s stability than the yearning after the ideal of democracy. If democracy doesn’t in fairly short order establish sturdy institutional roots, Iraq’s geography will likely lead it back to tyranny or anarchy again.

But for all the recent focus on Iraq, geography and history tell us that Syria might be at the real heart of future turbulence in the Arab world. Aleppo in northern Syria is a bazaar city with greater historical links to Mosul, Baghdad, and Anatolia than to Damascus. Whenever Damascus’s fortunes declined with the rise of Baghdad to the east, Aleppo recovered its greatness. Wandering through the souks of Aleppo, it is striking how distant and irrelevant Damascus seems: The bazaars are dominated by Kurds, Turks, Circassians, Arab Christians, Armenians, and others, unlike the Damascus souk, which is more a world of Sunni Arabs. As in Pakistan and the former Yugoslavia, each sect and religion in Syria has a specific location. Between Aleppo and Damascus is the increasingly Islamist Sunni heartland. Between Damascus and the Jordanian border are the Druse, and in the mountain stronghold contiguous with Lebanon are the Alawites — both remnants of a wave of Shiism from Persia and Mesopotamia that swept over Syria a thousand years ago.

Elections in Syria in 1947, 1949, and 1954 exacerbated these divisions by polarizing the vote along sectarian lines. The late Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 after 21 changes of government in 24 years. For three decades, he was the Leonid Brezhnev of the Arab world, staving off the future by failing to build a civil society at home. His son Bashar will have to open the political system eventually, if only to keep pace with a dynamically changing society armed with satellite dishes and the Internet. But no one knows how stable a post-authoritarian Syria would be. Policymakers must fear the worst. Yet a post-Assad Syria may well do better than post-Saddam Iraq, precisely because its tyranny has been much less severe. Indeed, traveling from Saddam’s Iraq to Assad’s Syria was like coming up for air.

In addition to its inability to solve the problem of political legitimacy, the Arab world is unable to secure its own environment. The plateau peoples of Turkey will dominate the Arabs in the 21st century because the Turks have water and the Arabs don’t. Indeed, to develop its own desperately poor southeast and thereby suppress Kurdish separatism, Turkey will need to divert increasingly large amounts of the Euphrates River from Syria and Iraq. As the Middle East becomes a realm of parched urban areas, water will grow in value relative to oil. The countries with it will retain the ability — and thus the power — to blackmail those without it. Water will be like nuclear energy, thereby making desalinization and dual-use power facilities primary targets of missile strikes in future wars. Not just in the West Bank, but everywhere there is less room to maneuver.

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan, War | No Comments »

1,000 True Fans

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people, Kevin Kelly says — a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers — but it’s a mixed blessing for creators, who face massive competition.

Rather than aim for a blockbuster hit, an alternative strategy is to find 1,000 True Fans willing to spend $100 per year — buying anything and everything, the t-shirt, the mug, and the hat.

So far, it doesn’t look like too many creators are successfully following this strategy, but Arizona-based game developer Flashbang Studios is giving it a try:

For the last year, Arizona-based game developer Flashbang Studios has released a game every eight weeks free of charge to play online on its Web site Blurst. The games have often been bizarre and cartoonish. “Jetpack Brontosaurus” and “Off-Road Velociraptor Safari” play exactly as they sound while “Blush” allows players to control a jellyfish-like creature through a glowing undersea world. On Friday, the company release its newest game, “Paper Moon,” a monochromatic jaunt through a dreary landscape as players control the scenery to advance through the stages. “It’s based on a pop-up book and the song by Ella Fitzgerald,” says Steve Swink, Flashbang’s game designer.

Later this year, Blurst games will conduct an experiment. In addition to giving away its games for free, it’ll charge $20 for a six month subscription for additional features such as a downloadable version. Blurst will also be taking requests from fans to add features over time. Mr. Swink and his team calculated how many people they’d need to keep a staff of six and cover a $20,000 per month budget. They arrived at what they considered to be a reasonable goal: only 5,000 people every half-year.

Posted in Business, Games, Media | No Comments »

Kindle versions represent 35 percent of sales

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

While unveiling the new, larger Kindle DX, Jeff Bezos also revealed that sales of the Kindle versions of titles represent 35 percent of sales for those titles with a Kindle version.

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Kindle DX

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Amazon’s new Kindle DX — with 9.7″ screen and 4GB of storage — has been announced. The price? $489 — vs. $359 for the 6″ Kindle 2.

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Sid’s Rules

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Game-designer Sid Meier is famous for his dictum that “a good game is a series of interesting choices.” Soren Johnson shares some of Sid’s other rules:

  • Double it or Cut it by Half
    Good games can rarely be created in a vacuum, which is why many designers advocate an iterative design process, during which a simple prototype of the game is built very early and then iterated on repeatedly until the game becomes a shippable product. Sid called this process “finding the fun,” and the probability of success is often directly related to the number of times a team can turn the crank on the loop of developing an idea, play-testing the results, and then adjusting based on feedback. As the number of times a team can go through this cycle is finite, developers should not waste time with small changes. Instead, when making gameplay adjustments, developers should aim for significant changes that will provoke a tangible response.

  • One Good Game is Better than Two Great Ones
    Sid liked to call this one the “Covert Action Rule,” a reference to a not-altogether-successful spy game he made in the early ’90s:
    The mistake I made was actually having two games competing with each other. There was an action game where you break into a building and do all sorts of picking up clues and things like that, and then there was the story which involved a plot where you had to figure out who the mastermind was and what cities they were in, and it was an involved mystery-type plot. Individually, each part could have been a good game. Together, they fought with each other. You would have this mystery that you were trying to solve, then you would be facing this action sequence, and you’d do this cool action thing, and you’d get out of the building, and you’d say, “What was the mystery I was trying to solve?” Covert Action integrated a story and action poorly because the action was actually too intense – you’d spend ten minutes or so of real time in a mission, and by the time you got out, you had no idea of what was going on in the world.

  • Do your Research after the Game is Done
    Creating a game about a real topic can lead to a natural but dangerous tendency to cram the product full of bits of trivia and obscure knowledge to show off the amount of research the designer has done. This tendency spoils the very reason why real-world themes are so valuable – that players come to the game with all the knowledge they already need. While designers should still be careful not to include anything factually incorrect, the value of an interactive experience is the interplay of simple concepts, not the inclusion of numerous facts and figures.

  • The Player Should Have the Fun, not the Designer or the Computer
    Creating story-based games can be an intoxicating experience for designers, many of whom go overboard with turgid back stories full of proper nouns, rarely-used consonants, and apostrophes. Furthermore, games based on complex, detailed simulations can be especially opaque if the mysterious inner workings of the algorithmic model remain hidden from view. As Sid liked to say, with these games, either the designer or the computer was the one having the fun, not the player.

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Moderate-Speed Rail

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Train-enthusiast Robert Poole laments that any planned high-speed rail should be called moderate-speed rail:

Let’s begin by getting clear on what is meant by “high-speed rail.” In the United States, this term means anything in excess of 110 mph. The only U.S. train that goes (briefly) faster than that is Amtrak’s Acela service on the Northeast Corridor route; all other current Amtrak lines have a top speed of 79 mph. Nearly all of the 10 corridor proposals in contention for a piece of the federal $13 billion are planning upgrades of existing passenger service to get to 110 mph.

As unambitious as those projects may sound, they are more than capable of absorbing most or all of the $13 billion. These corridors serve a mix of freight and passenger trains, with the former tending to be very long and operating at speeds that seldom exceed 60 mph. To enable 110 mph passenger trains to operate on these tracks will require major upgrades to signaling systems and the addition of passing sidings. And if priority is given to an expanded number of passenger trains, that means the freight trains will spend even more time than they do now stopped on mile-long (or longer) sidings.

And that conflict between freight and passenger service is one of the little-noticed problems with what really should be called “moderate-speed rail.” You can optimize a rail network for freight or for passenger service, but not for both. The current US rail network is optimized for freight, and as a result, rail’s share of US freight ton-miles is about 40 percent. By contrast, Europe’s network is optimized for passenger trains, and as a result, rail’s share of freight ton-miles is only 10-15 percent. Wendell Cox has crunched the numbers and estimated that the carbon-intensity of goods movement is about 25 percent higher in Europe than in the USA.

True high-speed rail is very, very expensive — and not profitable:

True high-speed rail (HSR) is represented by the bullet trains in Japan, France, Spain, and Germany, with speeds of 150-200 mph. Those relatively few routes are built, out of necessity, on exclusive rights of way — with wider curves, shallower grades, and full grade separation. That makes their cost much higher than the moderate-speed rail featured in (most of) the Obama plan. A table in a recent Government Accountability Office report on the subject (GAO-09-317) shows the construction cost of recent overseas HSR lines, in 2008 dollars. Except for an outlier in Japan that cost $143 million/mile, they averaged $51 million per mile to construct (i.e., these figures do not include the vehicles). Thus, a 300-mile system would cost $15.3 billion.

Despite various claims to the contrary, the Government Accountability Office found: “In each of the countries we visited, the central government paid the up-front construction costs of their country’s high-speed rail lines, and did so with no expectation that its investment would be recouped through ticket revenues.”

Thus, claims about “profits” that appear in the media refer only to operating profits—and even those appear to occur on only some of these lines. In the U.K., for instance, The Economist reports that in 2007 the British government subsidized the operating costs of UK rail operators to the tune of $6.6 billion. The new HSR line that opened in Taiwan in 2007 lost $1.5 billion in its first year of operation. University of Paris transport economist Remy Prud’Homme estimates that overall, passenger rail service in the European Union 15 receive about $100 billion in subsidies each year.

Posted in Business, Policy, Technology, Urbanism | No Comments »

We’re all Jews now

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Yuri Slezkine argues that modernity, means everyone becoming Jewish. Adam Cadre explains:

People spend way too much time talking about the distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of humanity, when the Dionysian is simply an Apollonian on a holiday. Instead, we should talk about the distinction between the Apollonian and the Mercurian. Apollo was god of both livestock and agriculture, so herding and farming both fall into the Apollonian sphere — and historically, the overwhelming majority of civilized people have been herders or farmers. When Thomas Jefferson envisioned America as a country made up almost entirely of small farms, it didn’t really take a lot of imagination because that had been pretty much the entire world up to that point. And there were basically only three other occupations that society considered respectable: aristocrat, priest, and soldier. These Slezkine considers Apollonian as well.

All other occupations — doctor, lawyer, scholar, and especially merchant — were considered unfit for respectable people and were largely left to outsiders. In Southeast Asia these outsiders were the Chinese; in East Africa, the Indians; in Latin America, the Lebanese. In Europe, there were three main groups who filled this niche. One of these specialized in “pariah entrepreneurship” — jewelry-making, fortune-telling, street theater, begging, theft — and consequently became Europe’s untouchables, the lowest of the low: these were the Gypsies. The other two were highly educated (indeed, almost universally literate) and became the richest people in Europe even as they were forced to accept second-class social status. These were the Armenians and, more visibly, the Jews.

Having established the idea of “Mercurian” groups living on the edges of “Apollonian” societies, Slezkine moves on to the next phase of his argument, contending that the modern “service economy” is almost entirely Mercurian in nature. To put my own spin on it: my day job is teaching standardized test prep, and on the grad side, the four big tests are the MCAT, the LSAT, the GRE, and the GMAT. These tests open the door to a career in medicine, law, academia, and business, respectively. And people sign up for these classes because these Mercurian fields are the elite occupations of the modern industrialized world. Even if you’re not elite, you’re part of a Mercurian system. Three hundred years ago, being part of the “working class” meant you were a peasant: you scrabbled around in the dirt trying to make stuff grow, like hundreds of generations of Apollonians before you. A hundred years ago, peasants had become proles, and you worked in a factory or a mill, the industrial age equivalent of Apollonian work. But now? Now you work in a store. You poke at a cash register at Wal-Mart, or pass meat and bread products through a window at Burger King. If you’re upper working class — what the Bolsheviks would have called a kulak — maybe you get to work in an office as a receptionist or something. In any case, you’re doing work that until relatively recently would have been done by Jews. Modernity, Slezkine contends, means everyone becoming Jewish.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

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