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(12/09/09 11:57pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It used to be a lighthouse for academic careers that strayed off course, but it’s quickly becoming the case that even the law can’t save you. Not even when you’re the one who’s practicing it. This year, roughly 20 percent more people took the LSAT during the September/October test than a year previously. It’s not hard to imagine why – getting a job with a sociology major is hard enough during boom times, but during a recession, it’s practically impossible.Graduate school has always seemed like a nunnery in which to commit penance for unprofitable undergraduate choices, and law school is by far the most popular. It’s not a pyramid scheme like academia, where the only way to make money is to teach what you’ve learned, and you don’t have to bother with calculus, like in MBA programs. The only problem is that the legal field can’t expand nearly enough to take all these new students. In fact, according to a recent article by the New York Times, many law firms are not only laying off lawyers but cutting into that time-honored time-waster, “billable hours,” which threatens not only to reduce the profitability of the legal profession but to replace expensive lawyers with paralegals and others who can do the work and are willing to for less.You’d think that in a case like this, law school attendance rates would respond – but law school is getting more popular and more expensive by the year. IU’s Maurer School of Law proposed this year to raise its tuition by 24.5 percent for in-state students, which the law school dean justified as a response to lessened financial support by the state.Of course, IU’s recent jump to be the 23rd-ranked law school in the country might have raised the Maurer school’s sense of what it is entitled to. Then again, that seems to be a unifying trait among just about everyone in law school – a misperception of entitlement. It’s entirely possible that this obsession of soon-to-be and recent graduates with the legal profession is their delayed processing of a societal signal; one that’s now outdated. It’s the idea that being a lawyer is synonymous with “success.” Many current law students either grew up so far removed from the legal field that they couldn’t hear it buckling under economic and personnel pressures or decided too early to bank on law school as the validation to impractical courses of study, and even if they began to see clearly what law held in store for them, had no other options.Others just couldn’t find a job after graduation and after months of living at home, picked up an LSAT prep guide and decided that the world would surely look better after three years with their heads buried in the sand. More of my friends are in law school than are doing anything else, and I’m quite sure they’ll be excellent lawyers, but that’s like saying they’d be great at piloting the Challenger Space Shuttle. Sometimes, you just have to move on.
(11/23/09 2:18am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The onset of Thanksgiving inevitably turns our thoughts to those less fortunate, and often, though we have the will to help, it is difficult to know how. It’s both good and bad that there are so many existing programs and charities founded to help the poor, but simply giving to an established organization doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “helping” in the true sense of the word. Hunger and poverty are difficult issues that the entire world struggles with, and a dollar given here might not mean as much as a dollar given somewhere else.Just about everyone knows that simply giving money to panhandlers doesn’t solve anything. The problem is that many acts that supposedly substitute the simple giving of money are in essence the same thing. When you give someone food instead of money, for example, oftentimes you’re simply freeing up money they would have had to spend on food anyway that can now be spent on drugs or alcohol. Giving something to a person who would have bought it anyway is the same as just handing them money. And if you’re really intent on solving the problem of poverty and homelessness, giveaways are at best a band-aid – at worst, an incentive to delay solving the problem. Many of the chronically poor find themselves at the apex of a huge perversion of incentives. Two summers ago when the Indiana Daily Student did a front on local homelessness, what we found was that many of the people did better than we expected. It was possible (easy, really) to make upwards of $60 a day asking people for money. That’s an effective wage of $7.50 an hour, above minimum wage, even before taxes, and a far superior working life. Minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour, which means that getting a job for the currently unemployed is monetarily equivalent to paying 25 cents an hour to take out garbage and scrub dishes. Besides that, you lose the access to free services you had before – you can no longer hang out in the Herman B Wells Library or get meals at soup kitchens.When ordinary people get involved, they usually make it easier for panhandlers to avoid getting help. The only real help the layman can give is assistance to professionals, to organizations with established case-management programs that make participating a requirement to be given access to services. Not only do case-management programs help establish long-term solutions for the poor, it also provides an effective screening against people who can work but simply don’t want to. Such a requirement is usually unpopular, because even the homeless believe they know what’s best for themselves and will dislike outsiders meddling with their lives. But case management is simply the only way. Poverty and homelessness shouldn’t be things to be embarrassed about, but that doesn’t mean they should be provided too readily or easily to those who say they need them. If you take society’s help today, it’s your duty to learn to help yourself tomorrow.
(11/19/09 2:20am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>At 2:15 p.m., right as the bell ended, the class collectively decided they couldn’t take another minute of her lecture, and stormed out — probably planning the letters they’d write to the department chair. I admit, I spent some of that afternoon researching the various ways in which tenure can be lost, hoping that there’d be a vacant seat in the history department that would one day be filled with someone who didn’t actually proclaim that the Civil War was caused primarily by changing conceptions of manhood.It did, however, strike me that I’d have to sign the letter and explain who I was, which would probably lead to the next problem — admitting I’m an undergraduate. You can write something on expensive paper and sign it with a fountain pen, but if you have to admit that you don’t actually have any credentials on the subject, it’s a fair bet that your letter will be passed around for entertainment value at the next faculty meeting, and that the matter will be quickly dropped. But maybe that’s a good thing — after all, accusing your teachers of being wrong implies more than a little strongly that you already know best.The bias of instructors comes up as a constant problem among students. Among the negative comments people leave on Web sites like Ratemyprofessor.com, one of the most damning is “sooooo opinionated!”, assuming the professor has the gall to believe what the reviewer does not. Most students will say, if you catch them feeling off guard and particularly idealistic, that education is about challenge and growth. And then once they start actually going to classes, what they prize the most is an instructor who can find passionate ways of repeating what everyone always believed to begin with.Youth is an endless procession of declarative statements, and usually what we declare is the result of what we’ve read that week. What’s great (and forgivable) about college is how quickly one can go from being a Communist to being a Republican because they flipped through old magazines in the dentist’s office. Being so capricious is at least partly a virtue, but when people become upperclassmen, sometimes they get so caught up in protecting their fragile set of gathered assumptions that they refuse new information on the grounds that it contradicts what they believe for the moment, and cogent worldviews can sometimes be inconvenient to reconstruct.Introducing new information to an undergraduate on the cusp of escaping from college without an existential crisis is like getting between a bear and its cubs. Maybe the reason we despise particularly opinionated professors is because, sometimes, we don’t want to be challenged. My history professor may have been reaching, she may have been flat out wrong, but at least she tried to help us. As for me, if I know one thing, it is that I know nothing. Also, that false modesty is a great way to trick people into respecting what I have to say.
(11/05/09 2:16am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>College Mall has never been a place I associate with wise financial decisions, but if the last time I was there is any indication, the place has taken a turn for the worse. It isn’t necessarily anything to do with the stores inside, but rather its recent spat of “Cash for Gold” events, a setup where people bring their gold jewelry, watches and such to a merchant who will make them an offer and if it’s accepted, pay them in cash. And while it would be wrong of me to complain that such a deal is unfair (after all, no one is making these people sell their gold), it would be just plain foolish to assume that these people know much about what they’re doing.Leaving aside for a moment the obvious problems with lack of information you run into when selling precious metals to some guy in a mall, and how you’ll almost definitely get some low-ball offer that makes mention to “transaction fees” and “impurity concerns,” most people don’t understand that the reason gold is so popular now is because it will be much more popular later. That’s why so many cash-for-gold schemes are cropping up. Many gold-buying companies believe that gold will be much more valuable later, and want to buy as much as possible at what they see as today’s low prices, expecting a huge payoff in the future. That payoff will either come as a protection against a sinking dollar, which is often associated with a high deficit, or merely because people think the dollar will sink and will be willing to pay a lot to buy it at the wrong time. Of course, things could also go the other way – the dollar could get stronger and gold would decrease in value (which isn’t likely). But no matter what, someone is going to get stuck with a huge loss. It’s either that gold-buying companies are being tricked millions of separate times by individuals with an inexplicably better ability to read the market than companies full of finance experts, or these individuals are getting hosed. History may often repeat itself, but to see the return of rampant speculation on an individual basis just as the recession ends is disappointing indeed. Precious metals are prone to the same sort of fluctuations as any other asset, be it mortgage-backed securities, shares of Citigroup or Beanie Babies. It might be considered a “stable asset,” but that doesn’t mean it’s smart. In times of uncertainty, many people place a premium on feelings of safety, but are often too hasty in buying it. Most people who invest on what’s trendy are the ones who find out about the party just as the food is gone and the bill is arriving. The only guaranteed money in speculation is for the middlemen who facilitate the parting of fools and their money – or gold, as they case may be.
(09/10/09 2:50am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>If my life were ever set to music, August of my freshman year would be a solitary cello. Yes, it was that bad. Even a rough idea of what I wanted to study as I came to IU didn’t save me from the usual freshman malaise, which can settle on the shoulders of new students as the glitter wears away. For starters, I’d become marginally involved with a girl I’d met, and after everything blew up, I arbitrarily decided that she meant a great deal to me and that the breakup hurt me terribly. Meanwhile, the group I’d cobbled together out of survival friendships seemed hell-bent on scoring invites to parties that were measurably un-fun. Standing in the back of a room groaning under the weight of empty Keystone cans, asking people standing near you what they’re majoring in, encouraged by others to stay because ‘dude, there are gonna be chicks at this party – chicks, dude!’Inside the classroom, things weren’t much better. I assumed that if I just talked to my professors they’d immediately recognize my brilliance and invite me to their offices to discuss the various honors they were going to recommend me for – a high ambition for a kid who was late even to classes he enjoyed and submitted most Webwork assignments at the exact minute they were due. I began to suspect myself of narcolepsy, and I think the history department did too. I wanted to transfer almost immediately. My particular complaints about college might have been derivative to the point of ridiculousness, but then again, freshman depression is so much harder precisely because it’s so common – everyone goes through it, so no one takes it seriously after they’ve dealt with it. But to you, what’s happening is monumental, and depression never realizes its order of magnitude within the world. Three years later, I’m quite happy with how things are going for me at IU. But if there’s some magic ingredient that made all the difference, some nugget of wisdom I received along the way, it didn’t make an impression on me. Like most people, I only narrate my life when it’s particularly miserable, and like most people, it was bad, then it wasn’t any more. It’s hard to remember why. I found a department I liked. I got involved in some activities and made friends. I guess all I can say is I kept going, and eventually emerged in a better place within IU. If there’s any secret, it’s this – you just have to keep going. Now, as a resident assistant, I see students battling the same things I did and, admittedly, struggle with how to explain it. At the end of the day, all you can say is that, like most things, you need to just give it time, focus on what’s important and realize that if freshman year was the best year of your life, the rest would be all downhill. Most of us are lucky enough to be better than that.
(09/03/09 3:05am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It’s called a “Hunger Banquet.” Oxfam explains it like this: guests to a meal are given a ticket at random. Fifty percent of those are designated as “poor” and will help themselves to only small portions of rice and water. Another 35 percent is seen as middle class and is served rice and beans. The next 15 percent are the upper class and will be served a “sumptuous buffet.” I saw one in Wright Place food court the other day, and the looks being thrown between participants would have made Marx proud. There, on the floor, were the poor, who cast vicious glances at those being served the buffet, who could hardly eat for their guilt. The implied lesson, that in America, our entire lives are these so-called “sumptuous buffets” (and we should carry an approximately generous portion of guilt), will apparently teach the apparently novel idea that there exists in the world a disparity of income, and sometimes people go hungry. But that’s where the Hunger Banquet’s lesson takes a strange left turn. The implied dynamic that one’s social status is determined by pure chance, that there exists no means to change one’s position and that wealth is a zero-sum game (only 15 percent can be rich, and the poor are poor because the rich are rich), are the sort of defeated ideas that lead to poverty in the first place. I don’t think you’d find anyone who would argue that poverty is somehow deserved, or a conscious choice, but equally rare are logical people who would assert that poverty just happens. The world is full of examples of people who, within a couple generations of eating rice at society’s proverbial floor, worked their way up. Also numerous are people whose unwise decisions squandered their wealth and ended their “sumptuous buffet.”Most of the countries who tried to alleviate poverty by taking from the rich, instead of helping the poor earn more, wound up poorer than before. However, cathartic it may have been to lash out at the wealthy in China during Mao’s reforms, under Castro, or in the USSR, after a day of screaming yourself hoarse you went back to a house with no more food than before. To describe the world’s food supply as a fixed-shape pie, over which social classes all fight for their share, is also untrue. Society has made huge leaps in food production throughout the years, but for many of the poor, these improvements have been outpaced by population increases, war and disease. But no one is poor because someone else is rich. Wealth isn’t a zero-sum game. Oxfam might inspire guilt and put money in its coffers with its Hunger Banquets, but its oddly Marxian message smacks of a world view that has lead to more hunger, not less. And until people change their mindset about wealth from “Why does he get that?” to “How do I get that, too?”, poverty will never change.
(08/09/09 9:56pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It’s not often that C-SPAN can inspire envy in a person, but that’s precisely what I felt a few weeks ago when I paused long enough while channel surfing to catch a glimpse of the British Parliament.This was during the worst of Gordon Brown’s popularity woes, and I expected to see him burned at a stake of droll British sarcasm. Instead, I found civility. It felt like that scene when the Grinch realizes that even after Christmas is stolen, the Whos are still doing OK. The figures on television kept referring to other legislators as “my right honorable friend,” and indeed, my heart grew three sizes that day. It was a trend I wished I saw in America – disagreement with at least the grudging acknowledgement that those we disagree with are necessary. Britain might have its own partisan mess, but those four words provide a valuable reminder. Take, for instance, a recent column in the New York Times. The arc of this piece was essentially this: The health-care debate is being fouled up by Republicans, who are too involved, but they’re all ignorant and believe in creationism, and that’s sad. “This is no party of Einsteins,” the author wrote. That’s the health-care debate for you.Forget basic concerns about whether it’s fair to make all citizens pay for health care despite how much they value it, the potential impositions of having government potentially dictate what is and what isn’t elective surgery (sex change, anyone?), or whether universal health care is working out elsewhere in the world.No, it’s “Republicans are uneducated; they should shut up.” Granted, most Republicans aren’t now, nor have they been recently, particularly appreciative of what bipartisanship can do, but that’s why everyone needs to change, not just the ruling half of the current term. Sometimes I wonder if they have any of those bumper stickers left from when opposition to the war in Iraq first got mainstream – the ones about how “dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” or about how when political opposition dies, “the soul of America dies with it.” They should hand them out at the next Republican convention. No, Republicans aren’t being accused of being unpatriotic – just dumb and ignorant. Either way, it’s a diversionary, ad-hominem policy parlor trick, not a real contribution toward political solutions. That might be today’s biggest threat to democracy: our perpetual wish that the other party would stop fouling up our initiatives. And yet it’s precisely the countries that get this perverse wish and wind up as one-party states that are the least free. Sure, legislation can be hard to pass in America, and the discourse on both sides of the aisle is sometimes downright immature, but it’s better than unanimous accord. And while I think the optimal solution is to do as George Washington once prescribed and forget political parties entirely, that’s a goal better whispered to a magic lamp than asked of today’s American citizens. If partisanship is what we have to deal with, we should at least appreciate what it does for us. It preserves, even if through paralysis, this wonderful thing we have.
(07/26/09 9:48pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>On July 23, the Indiana Daily Student ran a story about Ohio State professor Russell Fazio and his study on interracial housing assignments, which produced a disturbing statistic. At IU, students who are randomly assigned a roommate of a different race are three times more likely to request a change than students who were given a same-race roommate. What’s perhaps more shocking than the statistic itself was the reaction it elicited from IU administrators who were quoted in response. “It really surprises me, because I think it would be contrary to the case,” Pamela Freeman, who is associate dean of students and director of the office of student ethics and anti-harassment programs, told the IDS in the July 23 article. Of all the people this report shouldn’t surprise, you’d think Freeman would be at the top of the list. Sadly, that wasn’t where the lunacy stopped. Two other people quoted in the article, Sara Ivey Lucas, IU’s assistant director for housing assignments, and Eric Love, IU’s director of diversity education, said IU is “diverse.” They’re wrong. By its own statistics, available through the University Web site, IU’s fall 2007 black enrollment was at 4.3 percent, about half of the size of the black percentage of Indiana, according to the U.S. Census and about a third of the nation at large. Hispanic enrollment was 2.5 percent - again, half of the state of Indiana and about one-sixth of the national percentage. The response illustrates clearly the disconnect between IU’s very real diversity woes and what the administration thinks it’s doing to solve them. But even its best attempts to cater to minority students seem only to further the school’s rampant de-facto segregation. None of IU’s eight black fraternities or sororities are members of the Interfraternity Council of IU or the IU Panhellenic Association, nor the “multicultural” Greek Council, but rather the National Pan-Hellenic Council, made up entirely of black fraternities. Black IU freshmen seem to be secluded to the Southeast neighborhood. And, as Fazio’s report stated, IU students who get a roommate of a different race are three times more likely to request a transfer.It all culminates to prove what most IU students already know: We aren’t diverse, and we don’t feel integrated, and we don’t seem to be making progress. And if IU stopped its grandiose speeches on how “diverse we already are” long enough to actually look down from its ivory podium, it would see its audience and know the truth. Instead, students have become cynical. They’re subjected to relentless depictions of IU’s racial climate ludicrously incongruous with the present situation. They hear officials fumble through declarations of false current achievements and feel like they’re listening to Kim Jong Il expound on about how the North Korean economy is robust and the people well-fed, actual observations be damned. IU squanders its credibility selling a bogus reality to students who know better, and it winds up unable to enact the change it insists it wants. But until it sees solutions in terms other than committees and rhetoric, it will never have any leadership. It will, however, have plenty of dorm transfer requests.
(07/12/09 10:54pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>By now, the situation in China’s Xinjiang region seems to be cooling down.After Hu Jintao’s hasty (and no doubt embarrassing) departure from the G-8 summit in Italy, troops surged into Xinjiang to further stem the violence. But even after order is restored, it’s hard to imagine the tension will go away. This clash, between the Han and Uyghur ethnic groups, wasn’t just a random flare of violence, but a partial release of tension that has been building for some time. Ethnic minorities in China seem to have a peculiar existence. It can’t be easy being in a country where there are 55 recognized ethnic groups, of which more than 90 percent are the Han ethnic majority. In particular, because Chinese culture draws such a sharp distinction between outsiders and insiders, it can feel cold on the outside.I had a professor who once said that the best way to identify Chinese civilization is look for the walls – the Great Wall is a perfect example, differentiating “them” from “us.” If you ask anyone in China how ethnic minorities fare, you are invariably reminded of China’s own affirmative action policies, which give exemption to China’s one-child policy to all non-Han ethnic groups, as well as extra points on the “gao kao,” the college entrance examination. Ethnic minorities, most Chinese will tell you, live a rather blessed life. But sometimes the focus on what ethnic minorities are awarded in compensation seems to gloss over the problems they still face. When they complain, they are seen as ungrateful. There’s a word in Chinese, “jianwai,” that aptly describes the situation – when someone is too polite to you, is too obliging, and it creates social distance. It literally means “to see as foreign.”It was a perfect description for the beginning of my time in China in which, because I was different, I was treated with an unfailing politeness. But, as comfortable as it is, that politeness shown to foreigners also creates an unbridgeable gap and ensures that those who were once different will always be different. Perhaps in recognition of this fact, the Chinese government has embarked on several policies meant to integrate marginalized groups. The encouragement of mass migration of the ethnic majority Han group to minority regions, for example, or a stronger emphasis on mainstream Chinese education and less focus on native culture. Critics, however, allege these only serve to dilute already threatened identities. It’s a classic case of how the Chinese government can’t seem to win in the public eye. Give minorities special privileges and you make them different; encourage integration and you’re destroying their identity. And while there’s a firestorm of criticism no matter what the Chinese government does, the real issue at hand is a lack of understanding at just how tricky ethnic integration can be. People who like to allege that China is being ham-fisted in the way it treats minorities seem to miss that in situations like this, there isn’t any easy solution. Sometimes it just takes time.
(06/28/09 9:52pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>At the very least, fair trade is an encouraging symbol of our generation’s philanthropic bent. But however comforting it might be to see that such goodwill hasn’t disappeared from the world, one can’t help but notice that goodwill seems to have replaced good ideas. And it’s the latter, and only the latter, that will alleviate dire poverty. In August, a fair-trade store will open in Bloomington as yet another advancement of what is a very well-intentioned idea. Fair trade works to give producers (most often those who produce coffee) more money for their produce, thereby bettering their lives. You pay a little more at the register with the understanding that the people who grew the beans that made your coffee will be suitably compensated. Giving aid, however, can be very, very tricky.Promising an above-market price for a pound of produce has distorting effects. It attracts people to grow more than is necessary and to stop growing other crops. And when a surplus exists, fair-trade standards still mandate a certain price, which puts retailers in the sticky position of having to pay the same price for coffee that simply isn’t wanted or to tell farmers that what they were influenced to grow will not be bought this season. The better the price given for coffee, the less of the other crops farmers will want to grow. If the price of coffee was high enough, the comparative rarity of other sources of food might make them more expensive. This means people in developing countries – whose cheapest source of food is perhaps the farm down the street – might find themselves suddenly faced with a price they can’t afford to pay. Even if fair trade were to apply to every crop, the effect would be the same: a sort of domestic inflation that, even for those lucky enough to sell products bought by fair-trade companies, erodes any gains the farmers might have made by making them pay a higher price for everything they used to buy cheaply. For those whose products are not bought by fair-trade companies, there will be only misery. This is all assuming that fair trade gives a significant portion of its profits back to producers. Some estimates, however, put the increase in money that farmers receive at only 10 percent or so, meaning that fair trade is, for some unscrupulous merchants, not so much a business charity as a way to identify and take advantage of consumers willing to pay more. In its worst form, fair trade can begin to resemble a sort of economic imperialism, which encourages farmers in developing countries not to create interconnected economies that buy and sell among themselves, but become export dependent even at the peril of domestic consumers. Worse still, it erodes their self-reliance in favor of sucking at the teat of a social trend that, were it to disappear or become unfashionable, could be crippling. Export dependency can have disastrous consequences – witness the problem in China’s economy. Then, imagine it being all your fault.
(06/14/09 10:47pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It seems like every year, when the graduation fanfare has subsided and the confetti has reached the floor, graduates turn their eyes to the piece of paper standing in for four years of trial and tuition and ask the rather pressing question, “What did I just put myself through?” It’s inevitable even in good times, much less a recession. Did we just make a bunch of people waste their money and time?Granted, some skills you learn in college are directly applicable to specific fields. If you want to be an accountant, studying accounting is really the only way. The criticism usually focuses on people who choose more esoteric, liberal-arts majors. In place of finance expertise, the job market tends to see the choice of personal fulfillment as a handicap.When liberal-arts graduates enter the job market, they give their college degree as more of a symbol than a qualification. Graduating college means you are trainable, capable of seeing something through to the end and presumably smarter than you were before. But none of that can necessarily be traced back to college, especially by potential employers. Maybe you were already smart enough for the job in question before you went to school; maybe you were always committed; and maybe studying art history won’t actually help you sell real estate or insurance. Meanwhile, universities, responding to a greater desire from high school graduates who wanted to stay competitive for the best jobs, opened up more campuses and created more paths to a college degree. The problem is the best students took to going to graduate school in greater numbers. The momentary advantage given by a more equal disbursement of college diplomas was simply nullified by those who were always more academic or intelligent (or wealthy). College is still, as it was 50 years ago, extremely expensive and extremely time-consuming. The difference is that it’s also now necessary for jobs that, fifty years ago, could have been taken by high school graduates. But for those who couldn’t attend college, because the money wasn’t there or because they weren’t academic enough to attend a university, they are now excluded from an opportunity they were not unsuitable for. All this has a very polarizing effect. The uppermost get the jobs they were always going to get; the middle get the jobs they had before; but the least fortunate suddenly find that they cannot afford to pursue opportunities they used to have. And, yes, the general population is left better educated. It is also poorer and has less choice. Especially in these times, is that a burden we want to impose on our citizens?
(05/31/09 10:32pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>BEIJING – Back at IU, there are a number of people I greatly respect who, on any given day, have the latest copy of The Economist in their backpacks. It’s all they read, and for what seems like a good reason – it’s comforting to have solved the policy woes of a dozen or so world leaders before one’s breakfast is finished. But as universal a currency of thought as The Economist is in the West, it is mostly reviled in China. I once tried to discuss it here with a government university professor who dismissed me with a wave of the hand and told me that it simply wasn’t “a reputable publication.” The first reaction is the easiest, to dismiss the opinions of people who live in authoritarian countries as wholly inspired by authoritarianism. But I met too many people I also greatly respected in the halls of Beijing University to see them as outright wrong. At least they read The Economist. When my government professor suggested I start reading the Chinese economic newspaper Workers’ Daily, I gave up, not because of the difficulty but because of its penchants for nasty little asides about the follies of the West, and sweeping generalizations, which frustrated me to no end.It might seem surprising to find a country where one of the West’s most prestigious newsmagazines is seen as garbage, but then, you have to realize how many Americans might see the news sources you trust the most with a similar level of suspicion, even if these Americans are spread out across the country. People don’t get their news based on where they live, nor do they find an appreciable difference in the level of credibility between papers such as the Washington Post or the New York Times. The basis they choose upon is, essentially, the story arc that the paper presents. The Economist presents policy solutions much like recent graduates of “Introduction to Economics” – privatize, deregulate and watch perfection unfold.The New York Times, meanwhile, seems to have struck a compromise: If it walks, it is being actively oppressed by rich white men. If it doesn’t walk, the government should set up a bureau to regulate it (or give it universal health care until it is healthy enough to walk again). We speak about how people’s thoughts are controlled by the government in places like China, but rarely about how people voluntarily limit their thinking through consciously choosing which version of the truth to believe, and which to immediately distrust. These days, if people get their news from only one source, they eat what F. Scott Fitzgerald described as “predigested food.” He complained that, for two cents, voters bought “their politics, prejudices and philosophy.”At least my Chinese classmates knew their domestic media was controlled by the government and tried to read things like CNN and the BBC to balance their opinions. We, on the other side of the ocean, have a nasty habit of assuming that once you have the ability to read whatever you want, there’s nothing left to be done.
(04/07/09 11:58pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>BEIJING – It was under the awning of a Beijing gas station that the grand, immaterial theories of international relations both began to make sense and sound ludicrous to me. The previous few weeks had been a steady stream of bad news for any American who hopes to return to Beijing in peace: the discovery of a hidden Chinese computer surveillance network, GhostNet, a scuffle between reconnaissance ships in the South China Sea, the unguarded remarks of a senior party official about “well-fed foreigners” with nothing better to do than cast blame on others, etc.Your political science textbook could tell you all about the potential conflicts between rising and established powers, but if you have any power of observation, the writing is on the wall. On my bedside table is “Unhappy China,” which gives a rather succinct explanation of the prevailing mood. The book was recently published over here and is selling wildly in bookstores everywhere, despite criticism from the Chinese Communist Party as being too nationalistic.Its premise is that the West could never accept Chinese power, which is unfortunate (for the West), because China is best able to lead the world. After all, they’ve been doing it for several thousand years, minus the last 200, according to the book.But sitting in a car along with some other classmates, I realized precisely who I was looking at: friends who once made me macaroni and cheese because they knew how much I missed it. Friends who like French and Spanish music, some of whom have a dance class in 30 minutes (but will probably be late). These friends are also supposed members of America’s horde of adversaries. When we talk about the inevitability of conflict over the world’s scarce resources, it’s easy to sound glib about the usage of broad, national power. What’s less easy is to imagine the people on the receiving end who, when given names and attributes, cease to be recognizable as “them.” To many of my classmates at Beijing University, I was also part of “them” when I first arrived. People I’d met had been exposed to just enough American culture to hit that perfect compromise between a wholly skewed view of what the United States is actually like and a sureness that their opinions were correct. It was a fitting complement, given that many student visitors to China exit the plane with a list of the Chinese Communist Party’s crimes already written out, unsure how the society functions but certain it needs to change. Once you spend a little time getting to know people, not just slogans, “them” begins to dissolve into names. Then the insatiable Chinese desire for resources (soon to be as insatiable as our own) isn’t 1.3 billion people with a thirst for oil, but people you’ve met on the way to work or to class, who stop to put some gas in the tank. Funny how your rivals often turn out to be just like you.
(02/18/09 3:22am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>By noon on Tuesday, a story about China’s collapsing exports industry was the fifth-most commented story on Economist.com, down slightly from its ranking as No. 3 just days earlier. It had beaten out stories on the financial crisis and was runner-up to a story on the Arab-Israeli conflict. And it was only the explanation of a graph. Better yet, the graph wasn’t even referenced in any of the comments I read. Instead, people who left comments merely did what goes on in most China-related English language discussion boards – expend vitriol, get frustrated and eventually give up. Part of the reason for all the political animosity in these internet discussions comes from the simple fact that it’s the Internet, and most people who comment are by nature contentious and unreasonable. But part of the reason is also cultural, and might be the reason that in all this debating, we aren’t coming to any shared understanding. Instead, China and America are getting further apart. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao can certainly sympathize with the cyber-nationalists frothing through their fingertips at The Economist’s Web site. Last week while giving a speech at Cambridge a student threw a shoe at him in an apparent critique of his so-called tyranny, while outside, protestors clamored for Tibetan independence and the reform of human rights. In some way or another, China has been fending off errant shoes since the Olympics began. We always believed that by criticizing the Communist Party, we’d be shining light into a country that does its best to make itself opaque, and democratic reforms would result. In retrospect, it was an easy mistake to make. We thought we’d be greeted as liberators. At this juncture in our relations with China, however, it makes sense to take a step back and wonder what went wrong in our discourse. And the answer, in my experience, is that we went about it in the entirely wrong way. Trying to fix something in China by bluntly pointing it out is about the worst way possible; whether a broken light bulb or a broken executive branch, subtlety is the best way to go. That means economic incentives, private pressure and leadership. That isn’t how we’re used to functioning, but we can see that our current methods haven’t helped. And at the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves: Is our role in the world to try and lead or to simply call it like we see it and let people react? The American preference for openness and directness might, in this situation, be precisely what’s poisoning our discourse with China. Some might say that toning down our outward criticism of China would be simple acquiescence to a regime that many Americans frankly don’t like.But communication is about more than just translating sentences, and by changing the format in which we influence, we’ll be able to take the same message to an audience that will be much more receptive, a far more important goal. If our diplomats are just speaking to hear themselves talk, they might as well type.
(01/22/09 3:21am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>You don’t have to clean up your hotel room. You don’t have to drive nicely with a rental car. If you don’t have to pay to maintain it, chances are you won’t expend much energy making sure it’s in good shape. That’s someone else’s responsibility.And if many people get their way, the same rules will apply to your body.In with Obama’s presidency is the enduring hope within many circles that he will “fix” the American health care system by making it a universal system, or something similar. “Pay for everybody” sounds like a great, magnanimous solution in virtually every scenario. It takes a real attention to policy to realize why, especially for America, universal health care isn’t a practical solution.Americans don’t usually die of diseases like malaria or dysentery – afflictions that strike at random and on blameless victims. A great deal of deaths in America stem directly from unhealthy choices we make. Fortunately for the people who live these lifestyles, we have a government which prizes the ability of the individual to choose what he or she wants. But we never said the government would pay for the damage these choices can create. People are more likely to make bad lifestyle choices if they know that the consequences of their actions will be subsidized by the government. And even if America were to institute a system of universal health care and somehow care for all the smokers and junk-food eaters, it would only be able to cure the symptoms of their affliction. To treat the root cause – a lack of exercise or a pack of Camels a day – would infringe on their rights. Making someone spend an hour on the treadmill so that they can claim what the government gives out universally would be a direct contradiction of individual liberty. Of course, there are many in America who struggle with illness but are unable to pay, whose afflictions are not their own fault. The trick is to set up some kind of system whereby the government can help individuals but not open the door for moral hazard – to create an incentive for people to take care of themselves, but help them if they need it.The solution, I believe, is to let them keep more of their own money, or to offer them aid in cash. This way, they would have the options to pay for doctor’s visits, but if at the end of the year they were able to avoid repeat procedures, they would be able to spend their money as they choose. This isn’t the end-all, be-all argument regarding universal health care; there are of course factors on both sides of the argument kept out because of space. But it would be a lean option. It would keep costs lean by preserving competition between medical providers; it would keep people lean by giving them more reasons to live healthy lifestyles, and it would keep the government lean by avoiding more complex bureaucracy. However, it seems many people don’t want what’s lean; instead, they want to have cake. And then they want to eat it too.
(11/20/08 3:36am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>BEIJING – Every time I go to the convenience store on campus, I pass a treasure trove of bootleg DVDs. They sit in stacks on a cart, in irregular packaging with poorly translated titles, but the price you can’t beat – about $1.10 per disc.For the longest time, I made a habit of refusing to buy these movies, simply because I knew the DVDs were illegitimate copies that, although functional, were technically illegal. But it didn’t help that virtually every other international student I saw passing the cart would, upon realization, turn around and gaze, lost in opportunity, like marooned sailors looking at a coconut tree.I boycotted it at first, but when I saw people I knew saving more money than me on purchases that were more or less identical, I had a revelation. Since then I haven’t lost a wink of sleep over the issue: Society works better if I buy pirated goods as well.Boycotting seemed like a good idea until I thought of the situation in larger terms. I suppose I was hoping that if enough people joined, bootlegging would disappear. But then I thought about all the money buyers save on bootleg goods – not just DVDs – and realized that if I were to continue following this philosophy, eventually all I’d have to show for it was relative poverty compared to those who have no qualms about copyright infringement.Money is power, a basic form of influence. And considering that a dollar you save is a dollar you can spend on something else, people who indulge in pirated goods will have many more dollars than people who refuse. With that money comes more say in how things operate.It’s like renouncing violence – if everyone did it, the first guy willing to throw punches would rule the world. And if people who buy pirated goods had more influence in the world, what sort of reforms would they lobby for? What would be their stances on other criminal issues?There’s another problem: Hoping everyone else will boycott pirated goods with me is an unreliable strategy. Ultimately boycotters have to trust each other to deny what’s in their immediate best interest because of faith in a moral philosophy. Considering that we live in a country where many people blame oil companies for the high price of gas or think of the corporate tax as a just punishment, defending the profits of multinational companies isn’t likely to be this year’s trendy charity.But what if everyone bought pirated goods? Out of self-interest, companies would lobby governments to more strictly enforce property rights. When pirated goods would eventually go away, it would happen without any one group getting richer than the other.The beauty of the latter solution is that it relies only on people pursuing what’s in their immediate best interest. When was the last time that assumption failed you?Sometimes the best way to show society its weak points is to give it a little jab between the armor. I’m sure Tony Soprano would agree.
(11/06/08 3:45am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>BEIJING – There are many products for sale in China, but most of them can be summed up by this: It’s almost as good and a whole lot cheaper. In fact, for a pittance, a person can adorn themselves with near-perfect copies of any status symbol they can imagine. And for that reason, some status symbols in China don’t mean much any more.There are six-story malls, districts even, dedicated to providing wide-eyed tourists the chance to gorge themselves on everything from Ralph Lauren to Yves Saint Laurent. And it isn’t just clothes that you can buy forgeries of; even some cars can be faked. But here’s the problem: If it isn’t expensive, it isn’t elite. If it isn’t elite, it isn’t cool. And if it isn’t cool, it’s not worth buying.Sure, piracy is technically illegal in China. But it’s illegal the same way that oral sex is illegal in Indiana. Moreover, the sale of forged items puts money into the hands of Chinese salespeople at the cost of companies based outside China, and it contributes to tourism. But China gains something entirely different – a slight revocation of what luxury items truly signify and a sort of belated, unintended field goal for egalitarianism.On the streets of Beijing, no one wearing a Gucci sweater or checking a Rolex is perceived to be any better than the person next to him. While there certainly exist vast differences between levels of wealth in China, the aged comrades of a generation whose ideology is almost forgotten can at least take solace in the fact that outright class differentiation is getting harder and harder.The default assumption following the end of the communist scare seemed to be that communism was defeated by merely the presence of capitalism, like darkness in a room obliterated by a candle. Of course there’s no battle left to be fought (emigration to Venezuela and North Korea isn’t exactly booming), but it’s at least an interesting idea. Capitalism’s basic foundation is property rights, and forgery erodes this.If one wanted to rid the world of status symbols, flooding the market with cheap status symbols would do two things: rob the good of any significance by making it easy to attain by even the poor and divert any profit that might have gone to the company that designed the good. As long as carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag is seen as fashionable, people will try to get it for the cheapest price, until it’s seen as too common. Then, no one wants it at all. Governments protect against this through enforcing property rights, something China has had trouble with in recent years.Of course, no reasonable person would believe there’s any government plot to undermine the fashion industry. Indeed, no reasonable person would believe that the Chinese still want pure communism. But you have to admire how it all worked out – all the while, Marxists thought they could discourage materialism by shunning high-fashion items. Who knew all the answers lay in giving Prada to the proletariat?
(10/23/08 1:59am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>BEIJING – No one knew where he came from.One minute my classmates were sitting alone in their private sleeper compartment on a train bound for Nanjing, the next, they were visited by a middle-aged Chinese businessman who barged in, intent on grilling them about their political beliefs.An hour passed.Even after they all left to explore the rest of the train, the man stayed put, ambushing passersby with challenges to the Electoral College.As I passed by what unofficially became his cabin, he poked his head out the door and asked me about America’s financial crisis. It’s a popular topic in China, but for a very different reason. People always ask me about America’s banks with a barely reserved glee, the way a bitter guy might inquire as to an ex-girlfriend’s current boyfriend who was recently arrested.I always resign myself to discussing the American financial crisis, knowing it’s going to be a slaughter. I can barely express everything I know about economics while the other combatant (and it is always combat) smugly tells me how only socialism can solve the world’s ills.This particular lecture came complete with props. He used a pillow and a bottle of empty beer to illustrate how America had (purposefully) distorted Chinese purchasing power.Whenever conversations like this occur, I usually try to keep them civil by ending with a friendly thanks to the other person for sharing his viewpoints. After leaving the cabin to tear my hair out, frustrated he just wouldn’t listen, I looked behind me to imagine that he was probably doing the exact same thing.Unfortunately, there’s no correlation between how sure of yourself you are and how valid your opinion is. Both of us, utterly convinced of the superiority of our argument, had been mostly wasting our time.Debates, whether between presidents or passengers, are rarely marked by concessions. And while we might believe in our more idealistic moments that we talk politics with people who believe differently in order to expand our worldview, usually what we really mean is that we debate so the other person will expand his worldview. Namely, by agreeing that they are wrong.I realized in that cabin that I am particularly vulnerable to such blindness. I used to think that being from a country marked by an exquisite freedom to question whatever I wanted would provide me with the most evolved opinion I could possess.But somewhere along the way that didn’t happen. Instead, floating in a sea of free information, I glimpsed what was convenient and became complacent. But after I talked with this man, I began to wonder if I still had the capacity to challenge what I thought.He didn’t manage to convince me of what he believed, but in a roundabout way, managed to make me question what I believed.For a train-ride debate, I suppose you have to take what you can get.
(10/09/08 2:17am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>BEIJING – Around the age when we begin to ask where babies and presidents come from, we begin on a track of knowledge that eventually stalls in the realization that politicians are sometimes less than straightforward.Curiously enough, no one seems to ask why this is. Of course this observation is correct, but if the national commentary on the election is at all representative of what people really think, a politician who would only answer our prayers and give definite answers would surely be elected. The fact that no one chooses to do so indicates a problem with us, not them. But then again, consider how we use the information we already have.Any newspaper can supply you with plenty of evidence. You know the article you read about the legislation a candidate voted for eight years ago, in a different time with a myriad of different contributing factors, done when the candidate (God help him) might have held different viewpoints? Chances are the writer turned it into a contrived, poorly thought out treatise on why the candidate in question (and everyone in his party) are roundly unfit for office, and perhaps even for life on earth. After all, what passes for solid logic in an election year undergoes far less scrutiny than in other times. Writers go so far as to write short columns on why certain political philosophies are simply wrong. In a more sensible year, people might remember that one’s approach to taxation or prison reform depends on the circumstance and value of equity versus efficiency, but for a few months every election year, the gates at Delphi open and partisan oracles give definite rulings on unanswerable questions. I can only hope that next, they’ll settle a bet and decide once and for all which came first: the chicken or the egg.To answer a question directly is to tie oneself inextricably to an imperfect real world and to suddenly be held responsible for the simple truth that there are sometimes hard choices and unfortunate circumstances. If commentators can’t or won’t digest the truth reasonably, it’s better the candidates become ethereal, unbound by the impossible criteria set before them. Of course, politicians will have to make actual decisions eventually, but better those decisions not be misunderstood and held against them until the job is irrevocably theirs. The average voter isn’t stupid – far from it. He’s just biased and is terrible at putting things into perspective. He reads articles written by people who only cater to partisanship, who do a terrible job examining policy and are worse still at putting things in perspective. If a president were to try and feed these people the truth, they’d just bite off his hand. If we truly were voters who cared more about policy and experience, that’s what we’d be pitched. So when we see pandering where honesty should be, we should ask ourselves why dishonesty works so well. We should wonder if maybe the only path towards accountable candidates is responsible citizens. Now that would be some straight talk.
(09/25/08 3:37am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>BEIJING – Most people I talk to in the states are curious to know what China’s like. How’s the food, have you seen the Great Wall and, oh yes, has the government abducted anyone you know recently?My answer never changes. China isn’t what you think it is – at least it isn’t what I thought it would be. Everyone has visions of roving vans distributing propaganda, military police goose-stepping down the sidewalk and a population afraid to stop smiling, lest they spend the next few years in a re-education camp. And if what I used to think now strikes me as ridiculous, it strikes most Chinese even more so. To them, it’s downright offensive. After I’d been here for a week, I made it a point to ask professors and other Chinese citizens I had the chance to speak with about what it was like dealing with the government. I sugar-coated the question, but it essentially boiled down to asking about the ins and outs of dealing with an oppressive regime. Their reply was also always the same: The government might have been a problem 20 years ago, but not anymore. The party has mostly left its citizens to the task of making money. This isn’t a democracy by any means, but it also isn’t what it’s usually portrayed as. You can buy copies of Western newsmagazines on street corners and log on to CNN.com from public computers. At an everyday level, you don’t see much difference between here and the West. The Chinese realize this, too, and their response to Western criticism has been mostly a wave of nationalism that offers some fairly good points. The first of which is that China has, until recently, always been an authoritarian state. We take it as a boon to democracy that the splendors of Rome happened under the senate, but China had no trouble making largely parallel advances under emperors who could conscript manual labor and execute potential rivals whenever they so chose.The second is that democratic tradition doesn’t look so good right now. The approval rate for both Congress and the president is appallingly low, and the general election has brought out immature, foot-dragging partisanship in virtually every participant. If these are the yields of self-determination, they ask, who wouldn’t choose the alternative? And that’s a shame, because there are certainly things China would gain from a more open system with a greater respect for human rights. But what to liberalize and how to do so are complex questions, especially across cultural boundaries. The proposal from unwanted Western contributors seems to be that once China has an electoral college, Beijing’s smoggy skies will part and everything will be OK. Democracy might be a good idea here (or it might not), but as of right now it’s a diamond hawked by a used-car salesman. It’s a prescription blindly offered, even if it would turn out to be a good idea. And while we ask the Chinese to question their government, it seems we’ve been unable thus far to question what we think about China.