When we visited Laos, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was so (relatively) poor due to its status as a landlocked country.
So I put together the following graphs comparing PPP Adjusted GDP per Capita (IMF or CIA number if IMF not available) for all countries that are not islands (my hypothesis is that they develop differently than continental countries-different political/environmental pressures, etc.) and at least 1,000 sq kilometer in size. I’ve coloured the graphs based on whether the countries are landlocked or not. I’ve skipped North America as there are no landlocked countries.
The results are pretty clear; on average, you’re worse off economically if you’re from a landlocked country.
Africa
5 of the 10 poorest countries are landlocked; 11 of the poorest 20. Only 1 of the richest 10 and 2 of the richest 20 are landlocked.
Asia & Middle East
5 of the 10 poorest and none of the 10 richest.
Europe
The most even of the bunch. Only 3 of the 10 poorest and 3 of the 10 richest. However, you could argue that Austria wasn’t landlocked for most of its existence (due to the Holy Roman Empire) and than Luxembourg is a statistical outlier due to its small size.
South America
It’s left as an exercise to the reader to interpret the chart below.
It’s not on most tourists agenda, but I would highly recommend that if you go to Hong Kong you check out Kowloon Walled City Park.
It’s not the park that’s so interesting, rather it’s what used to be there.
First, some history. In 1841, the Brits took over Hong Kong Island. Understandably, the Chinese were concerned about losing more territory, so they took a small Kowloon fort (dating from 1810) and upgraded it to a walled garrison in 1847. The actual walled area was tiny; only 6.5 acres.
In 1872, the British banned gambling from Hong Kong. The enterprising gamblers simply moved across Victoria Harbour to Kowloon. It was the beginning of that city’s notoriety.
In 1889, the Brits took over the New Territories and gained the land surrounding Hong Kong Island. The Chinese troops were expelled and that was the end of the rule of law in the “Walled City”. Squatters moved in.
In World War II, the Japanese tore down the walls of the city and used the stones to extend the airport runway (the walled city is almost right next to the old airport).
In the 1950’s, heroin boomed and a lot of it was produced in the Walled City and exported throughout the world. Along with it came strip clubs, brothels, casinos, opium dens and – tastiest of all – dog meat stalls.
Since there was no rule of law, hundreds of mom and pop factories opened up in the city. Noodles and candies were made, as well as 80% of the territories fish balls. The tallest smoke stack in the entire city was in the building; 13 stories tall, but you couldn’t tell from the street.
Perhaps the oddest unregulated industry of all was dentistry. In the 1970s, the streets outside were lined with dental clinics:
From the ’60s on wards, the population of Hong Kong boomed and the Walled City followed suit by building up. The whole complex was a giant network of buildings built one on top of the other. At it’s peak, there were 40,000 people living in over 500 buildings on only 2.7 hectares. This entire warren was navigated by 20-30 alleys; there were only 3 working elevators and no running water (It was quite a business to sell water to residents). The tallest buildings were 16 stories tall.
There had been many attempts to tear the site down over the years, beginning in the 1920s by the Brits. In the late ’80s it was finally agreed that it was time to tear the damn thing down as it was becoming a threat/embarrassment to the city. Eviction started in 1992 and in 1994 the site was torn down. Here’s a shot of what it looked like before it was destroyed:
Also, a few years before demolition, a German camera crew shot a documentary about it. Fascinating:
The site is now a park and interpretive center. Where people used to shoot up, locals now do Tai Chi in the morning.
The interpretive center has a few gems in it. Before demolition, the government hired a team of Japanese anthropologists to create a cross section of the site, demonstrating what life was like inside it. Here are some shots of their drawing. Keep in mind that most of these apartments are ~200 square feet in size:
There’s also a bronze model of the site which gives you a sense of how it must have stuck out from the rest of the neighbourhood:
When they were demolishing the site, the wreckers discovered that the original fort, and the cannons (from 1802) next to it, were still there. The entire city had been built around them. They’ve preserved the building (called the Yamen) and it’s now the home to the interpretive center and the heart of the park:
One of the stereotypes of the Japanese has been that they don’t so much as ‘create’ things as take an original idea from somewhere else and then continuously improve on it until it is perfected. Exhibits A, B & C: the car industry (American and German), consumer electronics (American) and ramen noodles (originally Chinese). Perhaps the ultimate example can be found in Toto’s magical toilets – one of which graces our hotel room.
As we explored the Tokyo National Museum it became evident that Japan is the ultimate remix culture. They’ve adopted ideas from other Asian nations and folded them into their own cultural identity. Buddhism came from the Korean peninsula in the sixth century or so. The Chinese gave Japan painting and calligraphy techniques. Heck, even ramen noodles are originally Chinese.
With that in mind, here are some photos of different sets of items from the museum. Have fun seeing if you can find other cultural references.
Japanese Painting & Drawing
The following are byobu folding screens that were set up temporarily as background decor, for privacy or to stop drafts. They’re a subset of what are called shoheki-ga paintings. The choice of subject was determined by the nature of the room (e.g., castle or temple), it’s function and the style of the times.
I also quite liked the detail in Ishibashi-Yama, Enoshima and Hakone by Kano Yosen-In (1753-1808):
This lovely lady is a ghost; the image is the backdrop of a Kabuki play:Kimonos
The museum has a beautiful selection of kimonos. Here are a series of close-ups:Samurai, Armour & Swords
The museum has an interesting description of how the Samurai’s traditions evolved:
The military elite held the political power in Japan for about 700 years spanning from the late 12th century until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Whilst taking the culture of the nobility, the former authority in power, as an example, they absorbed Buddhist- and common culture to create a pragmatic and powerful culture of their own.
The hitatare and kamishimo, originally commoner’s garments, evolved into the formal attire of the bafuku (military government) with time, the kosode kimono and dofuku short coat were also favored by the samurai.
The sword was the single most important equipment for a samurai, and was also appreciated as the best possible gift bestowed or presented to the shogun and the daimyos (feudal lords). Swords were usually worn in pairs of one long and one short type, such as a pair of a tachi with koshigatana, or a katana with wakizashi. Indoors, only the short sword was permitted. The style of sword mountings differed in accordance with the owner’s rank, or with the attire and fashion of the age. Sword mountings, armor, and saddlery were produced with the best available skills of the various genres of decorative arts, such as lacquerware and metalwork. In the Edo period (A.D. 1603 – 1868), military equipments were (sic) treasured and handed down over generations as symbols of social status and historical importance of the individual daimyo clan.
Wen and I are fortunate to have great friends. A few of them (randomly) ended up giving us gift certificates to Gramercy Tavern when we got married and we finally made it the other night. As we were basking in the glow of a ridiculously good meal, Wendy mentioned “how did we get here?” I couldn’t help but think of how, at least for me, a couple of decisions that – at the time – seemed irrelevant have massively shaped who I am today. (Note that this is not an original notion; complexity scientists call it path dependence). Here are a couple of those events:
When I was in high school, you applied for three different university programs in descending preference. I didn’t get into my first pick – computer engineering at the University of Waterloo. Instead, I did engineering at Queen’s. If I’d gone to Waterloo I likely wouldn’t know my current set of friends and almost certainly be married to Wen. In fact, I’d argue that not getting into Waterloo is the best thing that ever happened to me (and that’s no knock to Waterloo as a school).
When I was at Queen’s every engineer did a common first year and then had to pick a discipline to specialize in over the next three years. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but knew that I liked computers and math and physics. Each discipline made a presentation and the Engineering Physics department invited a grad named Kamal Hassan to present. He talked about how he had studied Eng Phys and learned lots of interesting math/physics/engineering but didn’t want to be an engineer and therefore became a management consultant. I had no idea what a ‘management consultant’ was, but the program sounded like something interesting so I decided to do Eng Phys. The training I received there continues to help me on a daily basis. (And, in a weird twist of fate, I ended up becoming a consultant like Kamal and, freakishly, ended up at the same business school he went to)
After my 2nd year of school, I went overseas to London on a work exchange program. There was a central organization that helped you find a job. A list of positions were posted; you applied; and if you were to be interviewed, a notice was placed for you in a book (this was pre-cellphones). This book had a very odd structure. There were tabbed pages (by students’ last names), but the tabs weren’t rigid and you could open the book but it would be collapsing under its own weight if your last name started with a “w”.
One morning I went to check if I had any interviews and I had one-for a 150 quid/week job at Merrill Lynch. However, due to the collapsing book, I missed one for a 250/week at some publishing company. When I found out I missed out on a job that paid 66% more I was crushed (and I spent the summer living in pernury) – but years later I was in a job interview and saw “Merrill Lynch” circled on my CV and knew that it had been worth it (if you ever meet me, ask me about that job at Merrill).
Finally, I didn’t get into any of the American grad schools I applied to. Instead, I ended up at INSEAD. Again, I met some truly unique people who I otherwise would not know. More importantly, I got a special chance to work with a serial investor and startup in Silicon Valley. This gave me the confidence to strike out on my own after school, and while that business wasn’t a success, it directly led to me getting my current job.
All of which led to us having dinner at Gramercy Tavern. I don’t pretent that the only reason I was able to have dinner there was because of the decisions made above (after all, there are an infinite number of paths that could have led to me eating there), but at least I know which points in my life have made the biggest impact.
And as for the meal. It was delicious. The appetizer was a lamb papardelle with olives, lemon confit and swiss chard.
This was followed by venison loin and sausage in a Bourbon sauce and with a potato pancake:
We quaffed it down with probably the best bottle of wine I’ve ever have – a 2001 bottle of Oddero Barolo:
Finally, they gave us a little amuse bouche for the next morning – a piece of cocount cake with pear inside:
Today I went to an exhibition at the Met called Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156-1868. It has given me a new appreciation for how absolutely insane Japanese culture is. First, let’s take a look at some of the different helmets that Samurai might wear into battle:
If you were to ask “Lindsay, isn’t one of those helmets done up to look like a swallow’s tail? And is the other one a set of crabs claws?” you’d be absolutely correct. Apparently the Samurai helmet was the early equivalent of taking your shoe off and banging it on your desk at the UN – an attempt to intimidate your enemy by convincing them that you were crazier than they were.
Their armor certainly suggests that. Granted, to a jaded 21st century dweller, it looks like the sort of costume a psychopathic midget who worships the Village People might wear (the armor dates back to the Middle Ages and the Japanese were quite short back then), but I can only imagine how exceptionally nutty it would look when combined with a very sharp sword.
If you look closely at the images below you’ll notice a few things. First, everyone’s wearing a mask to look a little crazier – although the mustaches undermine it. Second, the guy with brown hair actually does have hair coming out of his helmet-there’s some sort of animal pelt there; a different set of armor (not shown) actually had long, flow, dyed red hair attached to it. Finally, the red outfit suggests where Darth Vader comes from.
I recently finished reading Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort. It’s a “big ideas” book and something of a road map to help you understand why the world (or at least America) is what it is today. The book begins with an insight: the 1976 Presidential election was highly competitive and only 26.8% of Americans lived in a ‘landslide county’ – where the margin of victory was at least 20%. However, in 2004, that number had reached 48.3% (and steadily increased each election from ‘92-’04, despite all of them being competitive).
So why did this happen? Well, a big part is geography. Economic specialization has led geographic segregation. This should scare you as there is substantial evidence that people who are in groups will polarize (see Stanley Schacter, Muzafer Sherif, James Stoner, etc.). There are two reasons why this happens: first, when people spend all their time with a group, they only hear the same ideas and it becomes self-reinforcing. The other is that when you’re in a group, adopting a position a little to the extreme of the group can be a way to ingratiate yourself. A similar slippery slope; this is okay for your Little League, but it’s the stuff wars are fought over when it’s politicians doing so.
In politics, this lack of dialogue is reinforced by how politicians live in Washington. In 1990, Rick Santorum made an issue of the incumbent Congressman’s house – he’d bought a house in DC to keep his family together – and promised that, if elected, he would spend less time in Washington. Now Senators and Congressmen frequently live with other party members and spend so little time in Washington that they don’t socialize (and thereby talk) with their peers in opposite parties.
However, it’s not as simple as that. As the same time as this economic specialization has occurred, there has been a corresponding decrease in the role of traditional American institutions: Elks, marriage, the Presbyterian Church, the daily newspaper, arguably the federal government and the Democratic party (think the New Deal).
In fact, 1965 turns out to be the Annus Horribilus for trust in America. The year started with the creation of Medicare and Medicaid plus many of Johnson’s Great Society programs (the War on Poverty) and the Justice Department ordering desegregation. It saw Bloody Sunday in Selma. The year ended with the escalation of the Vietnam War, the first stirrings of anti-war protests and then the Watts riots. One hell of a year and a massive shock to the system resulting in a massive drop in people’s faith in old institutions.
This shock in 1965 is partially explained by Inglehart’s theory of social change. In the early 1970’s, he proposed that when people grow up in abundance, their social values changed. The 1950’s and ’60’s represented the first time that the mass of Americans grew up middle class-and it had a profound effect on their values. Inglehart predicted that society would transition from being “elite-directed” to being “elite-challenging” and that we would live in a “post-materialist” society where people would lose interesting in traditional religion, become more interested in personal spirituality and people would be more interested in personal freedom, abortion rights, gay right and the environment. He also predicted that folks would vote less but sign more petitions. It’s largely played out that way.
And this is where my beef with The Big Sort begins. After this aggressive hypothesis, the rest of the book falls into a set of stylized facts explaining how we got to today and how it’s represented in society, rather than a discussion of how to live in today’s reality. We learn that geography, more than class or gender, is a better indicator of how you will vote. Labour leaders were pro-Iraq was in Republican counties but against it in Democratic counties. Same for women. We hear that in 2004, 73% of Americans lived in counties where the same political party had been elected since 1992 (not much dialogue there). And there’s a long description of the rise of the Evangelical Right (the origin of Public vs. Private Protestantism, the preacher McGavan [Bridges of God] recognizing that Christianity spreads as a mass movement and this leads to the Saddleback Churches of the world) plus a quaint description of how Applebee’s uses community to fill tables (each Applebee’s has a ‘community wall’ celebrating the history and people of the area; they then eat in groups).
There’s a lot of commentary on how dangerous a situation this is and a thorough description of how it’s emerged, but there’s no guide to the future. There’s not even a whiff of how we might manage our way out of this. A great book, but I’m hoping there’ll be a sequel about what we might do next.
And now for some interesting factoids:
Democrats may be a little more flexible than Republicans. Between 1995 and 2000, 79% of people who left Republican counties moved to counties that would vote Republican in 2004. However, people who left Democratic counties moved to both Republican and Democratic-voting counties (but not to Republican landslide counties).
In Ohio in the 1960’s, Michigan’s working class voted solidly Democrat. However, in Ohio they voted Republican (which was arguably against their interests). The explanation is that in Michigan all the workers lived near one another and acted as a block whereas in Ohio they were interspersed with the middle class, who frequently voted Republican. There was no cohesive Ohio working class and no cohesive Democrat machine to get out the vote. This is a prelude to today, where Bishop would argue that economic specialization has led to geographic segregation, which is reflected by more similar people living together (hence the landslide votes).
The Founding Fathers envisioned the House and Senate as a place for a constant clashing of opinions. In the early years of the Republic, there was talk about whether legislators should be “instructed” by their constituents or if they should represent the local opinions of their constituency but be focused more on what was best for the nation. The national perspective was the winner, but Bishop would argue that the “instructors” are taking back the legislative branch.
Contact hypothesis: when groups have contact with others, they can learn how to integrate and find middle ground. However, in order to work, the groups must see themselves as equals, the meetings must take place as a pursuit of a shared goal and the meetings must not be artificial.
People always visit New York and ask me what they should see. I can usually come up with some ideas for everyone, but I’m not really able to provide a comprehensive set of suggestions. However, this weekend at Brooklyn Flea I bought a tour pamphlet, so now people can refer to this blog post.
You can take the “uptown residential tour” which will take you to Grant’s Tomb where you can see “the New George Washington Bridge, with its longest span in the world.” For those keeping track, the bridge hasn’t been “new” since it was dedicated in 1931 and Grant’s Tomb (shown below) is surrounded by a canopy of fully grown trees:
But perhaps you want something a little more prurient. Why not take the De Luxe After Dark Tour? You’ll go to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the Bower and the Lower East Side. The Bowery “is a characteristic and historic spot with its endless procession of human wrecks of all ages and from all walks of life.” “The Ghetto” a.k.a. the Lower East Side is “the melting pot where foreigners from all over the world first come into touch with American life.”
If you’re really crazy, you could take the De Luxe Combination Tour: it throws in Harlem. You’ll visit its “conglomeration of night clubs, cabarets, spiritual meetings, jazz and superstition.” Bonus points: on the way back, you’ll “return through the Upper East Side German and Bavarian sections, with its sidewalk cafes, beer gardens and waiters in native Bavarian costumes.”
I went to the Conflux Festival on Saturday morning and attended a talk by Matt Knutzen entitled Rebuilding the Historical City. Matt’s a cartographer working at the NYPL and he was explaining a new tool they’ve built – and the Very Big Idea behind the tool.
The NYPL has over 60,000 maps of NYC in their Digital Gallery, but they’re simply digitized images. They lack any actual mapping points: latlongs, etc. that can actually be use to project the map onto other maps. As a result, they’ve decided to build a tool – the Map Rectifier – that allows anyone to convert an image of a historical map into an actual working map and share the results with the world.
The process is simple: you find an old map you want to convert into a working map. You put it side by side with an OpenStreetMap map of New York. You then click on a point in the old map and click on a corresponding point in OpenStreetMap. Once you’ve done at least four points, you click “rectify” and the system warps the image of the old map to fit it onto the real map. At this point, the old map is converted into a set of latitude and longitudes and can be used elsewhere (the system is also smart enough to tell you if you did a bad job). I’d show you screen shots, but I can’t get a login to the system; it’s still in invite only mode
There’s some other cool functionality in the tool: it’s got the ability to crop maps (so you can skip parts of the map) and you can also trace out buildings and add data about them (e.g., it’s a public house, etc.).
This gets better and better because once you’ve converted the map into a set of KML coordinates and you can view it in Google Earth. For example, here’s a projection of a 1924 aerial set of photos vs. what’s there today (a lot more farmland back then):
Here’s another example, from the 20th Ward’s fire insurance map. You can see what Madison Square looked like before the Garden and the Farley post office were built:
This technology is impressive as you can start to tell and visualize the history of the city. Moreover, once the system launches, it’s going to be open to the public and anyone can rectify a map (that’s a sea change in how libraries work). Also, kudos to the NYPL for making the entire system open source: you’ll be able to install the software on your own server and start rectifying your own maps.
I was walking around the neighbourhood the other day when a historic plaque caught my eye:
…the workingmen’s cottages on Warren Place were among the first planned low-income housing in the nation when they were built in the late 1870’s. At that time, rent for a four-room apartment was $1.93 per week.
Wow! $1.93 a week rent sounds great. But what is that after inflation? According to the inflation calculator, that’s about $37.41 in 2008 (assuming 1875 as a base year). Given that a 1Br goes for about $500 a week around here (and has roughly 4 rooms), if you were a very old person with rent control, you’d be laughing.
Also, if you were a landlord, the difference between $500 and $37 ain’t much of a return. That’s a compound return of only 1.90% over the 130-odd years, meaning you’re doing much better than inflation, but not a whole heckuva lot. You still would have done better in the stock market.
If you know me, you might know that I spent my last year of college in Germany. I’ve always had a curious fascination with the place: it’s a nation that didn’t exist until the late 19th century and then spent the first half of the 20th century trying to take over the world-and committing moral suicide along the way. It was then torn in two and rebounded to become (at least the Western part) one of the most successful countries in the world.
I’ve always wondered how the nation spun into the moral decay that led to World War II and the Holocaust. The world was in a bad time in the 1930s (sound familiar?) but the Germans responded in their own uniquely offensive (both militarily and morally) way. Recently I’ve been reading Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, which gives a sense of what the atmosphere was like in the early 1930s before the Nazis came to power. He chronicles the time and it offers a bit of insight into what life was like in a nation humbled and bankrupted by the Versailles Treaty, wracked by hyperinflation and desperately searching for strong leadership – be it from the Right or the Left.
Here’s a striking passage:
Berlin was in a state of civil war [Isherwood is returning to it in late 1932]. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon. Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer-mugs, chair-legs or leaded clubs; bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster-columns, rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines. In the middle of a crowded street a young man would be attacked, stripped, thrashed and left bleeding on the pavement; in fifteen seconds it was all over and the assilants had disappeared. Otto got a gash over the eye with a razor in a battle on a fair-ground near the Copernickerstrasse. The doctor put in three stitches and he was in hospital for a week. The newspapers were full of death-bed photographs of rival martyrs, Nazi, Reichsbanner and Communist. My pupils [he was a teacher] looked at them and shook their heads, apologizing for the state of Germany. “Dear, dear!” they said, “it’s terrible. It can’t go on.”
The murder reporters and the jazz-writers had inflated the German language beyond recall. The vocabulary of newspaper invective (traitor, Versailles-lackey, murder-swine, Marx-crook, Hitler-swamp, Red-pest) had come to resemble, through excessive use, the formal phraseology of politeness employed by the Chinese. The word Liebe, soaring from the Goethe standard, was no longer worth a whore’s kiss. Spring, moonlight, youth, rose, girl, darling, heart, May: such was the miserably devaluated currency dealt in by authors of all those tangoes, waltzes and fox-trots which advocated the private escape. Find a dear little sweetheart, they advised, and forget the slump, ignore the unemployed. Fly, they urged us, to Hawaii, to Naples, to the Never-Never-Vienna. Hugenberg, behind the Ufa [a film production company], was serving up nationalism to suit all tastes. He produced battlefield epics, farces of barrack-room life, operattas in whch the jinks of a pre-war military aristocracy were reclothed in the fashions of 1932. his brilliant directors and camera-men had to concentrate their talents on cyncially beautiful shots of the bubbles in champagne and the sheen of lamplight on silk.
And morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day to be spent as they could best contrive; selling bootlaces, begging, playing draughts in the hall of the Labour Exchange, hanging about urinals, opening the doors of cars, helping with crates in the marekts, gossiping, lounging, stealing, overhearing racing tips, sharing stumps of cigarette-ends picked up in the gutter, singing folk-songs for groschen in courtyards and between stations in the carriages of the Undergorund Railway. After the New Year, the snow fell, but did not lie; there was no money to be earned by sweeping it away. The shopkeepers rang all coins on the counter for fear of the counterfeiters. Frl. Schroeder’s astrologer foretold the end of the world. “Listen,” said Fritz Wendel, between sips of a cocktail in the bar of the Eden Hotel, “I give a damn if this country goes communist. What I mean, we’d have to alter our ideas a bit. Hell, who cares?”
As an aside, this is almost certainly what life was like in Sarajevo in 1992. When I was in Germany I knew a girl who had been to Croatia for a holiday in 1990. She remembered that every night there were fistfights between men in the street; the next year, the war began.
It was a similar situation in Rwanda in the years leading up to the genocide in 1994. The UN was reporting that there was violence in the streets attributable to many parties – the military, politicized youth mobs and various ethnic groups.
Someone is going to write a fascinating paper one day talking about how nations respond to crises: the U.S. in the 1930’s peacefully overcame the displacement brought on by economic disaster and became strong; the Germans projected their issues outward onto the rest of the world whereas Yugoslavia/Rwanda collapsed into horrific civil wars. I’d love to know why each responded in its own way.
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This lovely lady is a ghost; the image is the backdrop of a Kabuki play:
We quaffed it down with probably the best bottle of wine I’ve ever have – a 2001 bottle of Oddero Barolo:
Finally, they gave us a little amuse bouche for the next morning – a piece of cocount cake with pear inside:
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