Bombino – Adounia Idagh-Live musée des confluences Lyon
Size Matters
Speaking of population, there is increasingly a change from worries about overpopulation to trying to increase the size of a countries population. Japan, of course, started shrinking a couple years ago. But China has concerns too, thus the end of the one-child restriction in 2016 changing to allowing two children per family. Now some are calling for even that more lenient restriction to be abolished. China’s slowing population growth is creating a variety of challenges, including an aging population. The situation has become so dire that, according to Inkstone News, the province of Liaoning is considering paying people to have babies.” Desperate for a baby boom, the local government is exploring ways to reward couples for having a second child, which may include tax, education and housing benefits, according to a development plan released this month.” The province is desperate because the region’s fertility rate is only 0.9. We expect China’s central government to weigh in on this issue soon.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, we majored in mathematics in college. One upper division class we took in our junior year focused on complex numbers. We were in a haze all semester unable to grasp the concepts, but we dutifully crunched our equations and got an A nonetheless, making us suspicious of good grades ever since. We were reminded of this when reading the article, The Peculiar Math that Could Underlie the Laws of Nature. It features the mathematician Cohl Furey who does understand complex numbers and uses them to explain fundamental forces of the universe. But Cohl Furey, it turns out, is also a fan of New Orleans, which in an alternate, more sane universe, (one explained by complex numbers apparently) would be at its center. Like many trailblazers, Furey’s theories were disbelieved at first but “she told a colleague that if she didn’t find work in academia she planned to take her accordion to New Orleans and busk on the streets to support her physics habit.” We still don’t understand complex numbers but we do understand New Orleans. So even as we explore the Life of Xi, identify the world’s most underrated country and determine who wants self-driving cars the most, we present the video below in honor of Furey’s work to understand the laws of nature. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, the string theory of international news and data, but more understandable.
The Honeypots, Latin Girls, 9th Ward Fest
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Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
The Life of Xi
China is changing profoundly under President Xi Jinping. As we have noted in this space, Xi is more assertive on the world stage, inaugurated the ambitious One Belt One Road Initiative, has instituted a corruption crackdown (your definition of “corruption” may vary) and has introduced far more censorship into Chinese society, especially on the Internet. And, of course, President Xi has taken a more central role in governance, including eliminating the two term presidential limit. And now comes data that Xi receives more mentions in the People’s Daily (the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party) than any Chinese leader since Mao. As you see in the graph below provided by China data tweeter Air Moving Device, “Comparing Xi to previous Chinese leaders in terms of People’s Daily front-page mentions, Xi is close to being mentioned every single day, which is Mao’s record during the Cultural Revolution.” Of course, who knows if Xi will maintain this rate of mentions for as long as Mao did or if Xi will march down the dark roads Mao trod, or one hopes, instead hike up sunnier, more beneficial paths.
The World’s Most Underrated Country?
Ethiopia is bucking troubling world trends and in doing so is sneakily competing for the title of world’s most underrated country. It has been the fastest growing economy in Africa for the last ten years, is the 12th largest country by population and has young demographics (40 percent of the population is under the age of 14), which is important for continued GDP growth and innovation. And in the last two weeks not only has Ethiopia formally ended hostilities with its former combatant, Eritrea, but this week Ethiopia’s Prime Minister has called for the country to become a multi-party democracy. Reuters reports that the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff tweeted, “PM Abiy concluded: Given our current politics, there is no option except pursuing a multiparty democracy supported by strong institutions that respect human rights and rule of law.” The PM’s party, Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (always be suspicious of parties that combine the words “people, revolutionary and democratic”), has maintained power since 1991. But the winds are a changing and Ethiopia could become Africa’s first economic Lion similar to the tigers that once rose out of Asia. Our fingers are crossed.
Who Wants Self-Driving Cars the Most?
We have long asserted that because of regulatory and cultural factors, self-driving cars are likely to first take off commercially in countries other than the United States.A new survey by Ipsos buttresses our assertion. IPSOS surveyed 21,000 people across 28 countries and found that the United States came in 18th among country populations who “would own a self-driving car as their main form of use.” Malaysia came in first, followed by Peru, Colombia, Chile and Argentina. In fact, developing countries favored the use of self-driving cars far more than developed countries, perhaps reflecting their worse traffic and unfamiliarity with Uber (We joke! Kind of). Among those countries’ populations who “would not use a self-driving car,” Germany tops the list, followed by Great Britain, Canada, France and the United States. If we are to guess, we predict self-driving cars will first become ubiquitous commercially in Singapore, followed by China.
Update: Waymo and Walmart aim to prove us wrong
Memory is a funny thing. It is remarkably unreliable. We have a memory that we once met one of the Russian interpreters for Mikhail Gorbachev but for the life of us we don’t remember the circumstances. We think it may have been on one of our business trips to Russia many years ago. We are fairly certain the interpreter worked the Reykjavik Summit for Gorbachev when he and Reagan agreed to radically reduce nuclear armaments, but we have no memory of any stories the interpreter told us of Reykjavik, or anything else for that matter. This seems odd and makes us question whether we really did meet this person. There have been many studies that show eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. But so often we take eyewitness testimony as gospel. If I ever testify in a trial, don’t believe me, or at least verify what I say. It’s like the lyric from the song, Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues: “Don’t believe anyone and most of all don’t believe me.” What you can believe, however, is how coal has been hit in the Solar Plexus in India, AI medical progress in China and the surprising news about which countries are most inclusive. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, hoping to someday meet and talk with one of the two interpreters who worked the Helsinki summit.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
Coal Hit in the India Solar Plexus
Since practically the inception of INTN, we have pointed out the Moore’s Law-like increase of solar power generation. New data from India shows this trend continuing. You’ll notice in the chart below that solar generation nearly doubled from 2016 to 2018 (there was a blip reversal from 2014 to 2015). You’ll also note that the generation of new coal plants are falling off a cliff. That’s because, as James Wimberely points out, “new solar can beat existing coal on price by 20%.” Even more important for the future, gains in storage efficiency and price continue to make remarkable progress: “With the rate of decline in battery prices, they will be competing directly with peakers [INTN: power plants for peak demand times] in a few years and beating them consistently by the mid-2020s. The energy revolution is in full swing even if not everyone is recognizing it.
Doctors and Truck Drivers?
There is much fear mongering about China. China’s closed markets are a concern, as are its continued and deepening censorship. But fears of China’s rapidly developing AI capability are misplaced. The world’s economy is a bakery not the standard metaphorical pie. When China, or any other country, develops new technology it will benefit the world, not just themselves. We are not competing over finite slices of pie–the more bakers the more treats. Case in point is the joint ventureof a Singaporean tech company, Hanalytics, and China’s prestigious Tiantan Hospital that has developed a medical AI dubbed Biomind. “After months of deep learning, the machine was ready for a competition against 25 experienced doctors at Beijing’s China National Convention Center testing their ability to analyze images of the brain.” Spoiler alert, Biomind won. Quite easily. Biomind and the doctors competed both on detecting brain tumors in brain images and on images related to strokes. “When the results came in, Biomind beat the doctors squarely in both rounds. In round one, it correctly answered 87% of the questions, versus 66% for the doctors. In round two, it won by 83% to 63%.” The machines will only get better, more adaptable and able to do more medical procedures. Humans? We’ll still be running the medical equivalent of four minute miles. This will be a challenge for human employment but that would be the case whether AI is developed in China, the U.S. or Burkina Faso.
Who is Most Inclusive?
Immigration and border disputes around the world are illustrative of our seemingly divisive age. But even in today’s climate, some countries are more inclusive than others. It won’t surprise you that according to an annual IPSOS Global Advisor survey, Canada is the most inclusive country in the world. But you may be surprised, given recent developments, to see the United States ranked second. In fact, on the question on how accepting people are for naturalized citizens, the U.S. tops the rankings. The IPSOS index scores countries on inclusiveness “reflecting social acceptance of diversity as it applies to religion, immigration, sexual orientation and gender identity, political views, and criminal background.” They surveyed 20,000 people in 27 countries. Of these 27, and we’re not sure how they picked these three cubed number of countries, Saudi Arabia came in last, just behind Malaysia and Serbia.
We traveled on business to Eastern Washington state earlier this week. Because the area is sparsely populated, when we finished our dinner meeting we drove outside the small town to gaze at the star-lit sky, something usually obscured in city-lit Seattle. But nature, ever mysterious, hid the stars with a layer of clouds. It was a windy night and we patiently waited for the sky to reveal itself. Of course, nature is full of revelations, three of which we discovered over the last week when we learned spiders can fly, ants pass the mirror test and Panamanian monkeys can use tools. Wait, spiders can fly?!!! Yes, arachnophobes out there, spiders use the positively charged atmosphere and their negatively charged webs to fling themselves into the air, often traveling miles at a time. Are you frightened? Not nearly enough. And, yes, ants are one of only nine known animal species that recognize themselves in a mirror. And Panamanian monkeys have recently been discovered to use stones to smash nut shells. No word on whether an obelisk has been discovered in that part of Panama. So while humans distract themselves with short-term, inane distractions, political, cultural and otherwise, remember there’s a whole universe out there waiting to be understood better. And in that manner, as we await a break in the clouds, we present the real reason for Mexico’s elevated violence, insights from China’s box office, and where in the world there’s the most corruption. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, closing our agape mouth whenever we are outside now that we know spiders can fly.
Spiders Spin Balloons to Fly Away | National Geographic
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Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
Mexico, Lead and Violence
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won a relatively easy election for president in Mexico a few weeks ago. Mexicans want change, including and especially because of the crime and violence in the country. In fact, in declaring victory election night, AMLO (as he is known, which is a strange acronym for a politician to adopt–“Am low”—granted that’s in English, but still), said, “We are absolutely certain that this evil [corruption] is the principle cause of social inequality and of economic inequality,” he said. “Because of corruption, violence has erupted in our country.” We take no position on whether AMLO (it is easier to type than his full name!) will be a good or bad president, but in regards to crime we again remind ourselves of the role lead plays in the rise and fall of crime. Our go-to person on this is Kevin Drum who recently wrote, “Mexico didn’t start to phase out leaded gasoline until 1990, and average blood lead levels were at or above 15 μg/dl until then, especially in rural areas… Mexico…had a generation of kids born as late as 2000 with BLLs this high. The fact that violence is endemic 18 years later is no big surprise. In another decade, things should be a lot better.” We predict a decade from now, when violent crime is way down in Mexico, there will be many claiming credit, including possibly AMLO, but not enough attention will be paid to the elimination of lead from the environment as the cause.
Boxing Office China
The cultural trends in movies used to be a good barometer for a country. That’s changed a bit with the explosion of other media, but two recent developments in China’s cinema are still worth taking note of and perhaps illustrative of its challenges as it continues to step up to the top rung of influential countries. Last week, Chinese authorities called for the capping of movie stars’ salaries: “The salaries of on-screen performers should be capped at 40% of the total production costs, according to a joint notice from five government agencies. Leading actors should receive no more than 70% of total wages for the cast, according to the announcement, published in Xinhua.” The unintended consequences of this directive will be fascinating to watch play out: Scene 1: a fancy house with an actor lying by the pool. She gets off the phone with her agent who has negotiated a contract that works around the pay restrictions. And, cut. Scene 2: Male actor in the executive lounge at the airport preparing to fly outside of China for a role that pays more than the restriction allows. And cut. This new directive takes place at the same time that one of the most popular movies in China is a black comedy based on a true story of a leukemia patient smuggling cancer drugs from India into China. Such imported drugs were previously taxed at draconian levels. We expect most people, including officials, will miss the connection between these two China movie articles. Incentives/disincentives often are ignored in policy makers efforts to shape the world to their desires.
《我不是药神》Dying to Survive || 曝国际版预告 双面徐峥异国寻药 金钱欲望戏剧性彰显
Where is the Corruption
We see corrupting influences every day, or at least they’re splashed across our screens. But what are the least and most corrupt countries? Transparency International’s recentlyreleased annual Corruptions Perception Index aims to provide the answers. The least corrupt countries last year were New Zealand, Denmark (also ranked the happiest country in the world—is there a correlation?), Finland, Norway and Switzerland. The most corrupt? You can probably guess the axis of the crooked: Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen. The best performing region is Europe, the worst are Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It turns out a free press is important to shooing corruption away. According to the report, “Further analysis of the results indicates that countries with the least protection for press and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) also tend to have the worst rates of corruption.” Support your local journalist and you will save money on bribes.
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A few years ago a friend of ours posted a video on Facebook of their then young daughter playing the drums. At one point, the delightfully cute girl does a complicated riff and then flashes a smile at her Dad holding the camera, pleased at pulling off the complicated percussion maneuver. We were reminded of this watching the viral video earlier this week of young miss Yoyoka Soma playing the drums to Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times Bad Times.” Yoyoka, who was competing in the 2018 Hit Like a Girl contest, a percussion competition designed to encourage little, old and every other type of drummer girls. Yoyoka, as you see below, is a remarkable drummer, especially for an 8-year-old, but really she bangs the drums well for anyone of any age. John Bonham, the late Led Zeppelin drummer, is her idol. Yoyoka is already able to drum like Bonham, seems to be much better emotionally, and is on her way to becoming a worldwide sensation despite the fact she did not win the contest (??!!!!–hard to imagine someone better than her). The future is in good hands, or at least the future of drumming. Meanwhile, Yoyoka’s crazy good riffs inspire us to examine how the U.S. has created a time machine to the future for China, worry over Saudi Arabia’s hate canal, and present you with our favorite story of the year. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, deciding international cases of international information and data with Solomonic-like judgment.
『Hit Like A Girl Contest 2018』Good Times Bad Times – LED ZEPPELIN / Cover by Yoyoka , 8 year old drummer
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In honor of America’s Independence Day Celebration, INTN will be off next week marinating a variety of international data to throw on the grill and shooting off fireworks of international information that will land on your laps on July 12th. Be prepared for the international BBQ of your life.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
Accelerating Into the Future
Many have forecast that as the 20th was the American Century, the 21st is likely to be the Chinese Century. Although we are nearly a fifth of the way through the 21st (yikes, how did that happen?), most felt China would not solidify its leadership until perhaps the 2040s or 2050s. But the current U.S. president’s actions to upturn the global order are accelerating us into the future Marty McFly-like (with hair eerily similar to Doc Brown’s). We have new evidence of the China Power Acceleration (CPA). According to the South China Morning Post, “China and the European Union will set up a working group to revamp the World Trade Organisation to counter US unilateralism.” Whether this working group can be successful, given the EU has the same concerns about China’s protectionism and closed markets as the U.S. does, is an open question. But the fact that the EU and China are trying is remarkable and would have been unthinkable before the U.S.’s recent trade skirmishes with both regions. Meanwhile, a retired major general in the Chinese army during a panel discussion on the South China Sea called for a rewriting of the international based order to accommodate China’s growth. The article says the Major General claimed “the shortcomings of the rules-based order was they either had limited capacity to accommodate China’s growth or China’s rapid rise meant it had outgrown the rules.” She went on to say, “We and other players have to think of a way to fix this rules-based order to update it.” And finally, in a major foreign policy speech, President Xi said China will “advance power diplomacy” on its own terms. Like continental drift or losing a sock in the laundry, China’s ascent was inevitable. But U.S. political and policy chaos is an earthquake or dropped laundry basket accelerating it.
No Man is an Island, but a Country?
You may remember that Saudi Arabia has been in a simmering conflict with its neighbor Qatar the past year over a number of issues. That has been covered in the news numerous times. But you may not know that Saudi Arabia is so upset it has plans, in fact is taking bids from private companies, to build a canal on its 38-mile border with Qater and turn the isthmus into an island. According to Business Insider, “reports indicate five international companies have been invited to bid for the project, called the “Salwa Channel,” with a deadline set for Monday. Sources told Makkah, a Saudi Arabian newspaper, that Saudi authorities will announce the winner of the contract deal within 90 days, and hope to complete the canal by the end of the year.” That’s definitely upping, or rather uprooting, the stakes of the Saudi cold war with Qatar. Perhaps more alarming, the Makkah newspaper further reports that “part of the canal would also be converted into a military base and a nuclear waste burial site.” Saudi Arabia is literally trying to turn Qatar into an island with a moat of nuclear waste. Stay tuned.
Our favorite Story Yet: Angry Tea Table Flipping Contest
In an age of anger and outrage, at a time when it is easy to feel helpless and alone, leave it to Japan—the most unique culture in the world—to provide the perfect anecdote. Last week, you see, was the 12th Annual Angry Tea Table Flipping Contest. And yes we are ashamed it took us a dozen years to discover this contest in which “participants must shout a phrase of anger, frustration, passion, or hope, while upending a small table and sending it flying.” How does it work specifically, you ask? According to Sora News 24, “An elderly woman in cooking garb is seated next to the contestant and when she touches their shoulder and gently asks them to ‘stop,’ that’s their cue to flip out both figuratively and literally.” That is, they flip the small tea table which holds various items, including a plastic fish. Winners are determined both on style points and the distance the plastic fish travels in the air. And what are the participants to shout before flipping the table? “Participants can shout about whatever their hearts desire. Rages this year included a man addressing all women with a ‘What’s wrong with me?!’ On the other hand, affirmations such as ‘I want a job offer’ or ‘I deserve a raise’ could also be heard.” We feel that if this contest was made mandatory worldwide, 73 percent of the problems plaguing this orbiting globe would be solved.
心の叫びで「サンマ」飛ばす 岩手でちゃぶ台返し大会
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We realize we live in an age where people, including presidents, assert up is down, down is up and cages are chain-linked fences, but nonetheless we rage, rage against the dying of the light of truth, as Dylan Thomas’ ne’er-do-well cousin might write. While stuck in Seattle’s increasingly bad traffic (this is a fact), we listened to someone on the radio discussing Seattle’s expanding homeless problem (also a fact though what to do about homelessness is more complicated) note that the homelessness problem is leading to an increase in crime (not a fact). The news media continues to cover crime like it’s a crisis. But as Kevin Drum points out, it’snot. Crime rates in Seattle, and just about everywhere, are down. Murder, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, thefts, auto thefts and arson are all down from past years. Way down from ten years ago and way, way down (excuse the technical statistics term) from twenty and thirty years ago. Seattle, the United States, much of the world, is far more safe than in the past. And yet we act and talk as if it’s the opposite. Certainly the U.S. president does so for political reasons, it’s advantageous to him if we are scared. What’s the rest of our excuse? As we walk in the park late at night, fearless and confident, we examine all the beer in India, worry about the great separation in China and consider TV versus the Internet. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, avoiding baseball mascots so we can safely bring you news of the world.
*Note we have late breaking news that we could not fit into this week’s edition, but look for our favorite story of the year next week.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
All the Beer in India
We are not as worried about climate change as some people. Not because we don’t think it is happening or because we are unconcerned about its effects but because we observe increasing evidence we are going to solve this large problem. Case in point, Anheuser-Busch is starting to brew its beer in India using solar power. According to Quartz, “Anheuser-Busch’s Mysuru plant that brews Budweiser beer will soon be powered up to 80% by solar energy, making it the company’s third facility globally to run on renewable power.” In fact, the world’s largest brewer said late last year that by 2025 it plans to produce all of its beer using solar power. Now if they could only brew beer that’s worth drinking. The point is, of course, that no matter how the U.S. government or other government’s change policy, in the mid-term technology is making renewable energy more affordable than polluting energies. Industry will gravitate to these sources. Now the mid-term may be too long to prevent some of the effects of climate change gas emissions. Ice is already melting rapidly in Antarctica, for example, which will lead to seas rising sooner than anticipated. People are right to be alarmed at the specter of climate change. And we’re worried too but heartened that Canadian scientists have developed a technology that allows them to capture carbon at a cost of $94 per ton (time to impose tariffs on Canadian scientists). At that price they use the captured carbon to produce fuel at $1 per liter, according to the research published in the scientific journal Joule. Climate change is real, its effect possibly devastating, but there are solutions on the way. We don’t advocate complacency but we keep at least one eye on other worries for which there are not yet solutions coming down the pike.
The Separation
China is an amazing place and it deserves praise and notice for its economic development that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty the last thirty years. But China also has faults and challenges and one that is not receiving enough attention is its treatment of Muslims. A scary and sobering post in The Interpreter, a publication of the Australian Lowry Institute, details the apparent building of concentration camps for Muslim minorities throughout the far west of China. The article claims “recent research by a handful of academics and journalists has meticulously documented the construction of a vast network of “collective re-education centres” across Xinjiang.” The article cites a variety of other research documenting the camps and the abuse of Muslims. We now have a handful of accounts about life inside Xinjiang’s secretive gulag, where detainees are subjected to around-the-clock political indoctrination and forced to denounce their culture and religion. Omir Bekali was detained without a legal warrant and held for eight months in a squalid, overcrowded camp in Karamay. After his release, he told AP News that he was placed in solitary confinement, physically tortured, and deprived food.” This is not something we have tracked very closely–there is limited attention spans for outrages and more than enough outrageous behavior to go around, but this one deserves more of our attention.
Internet vs. TV: The Media Medium Cage Match
We end on a slightly lighter note. Or do we? It depends on your view of TV and the Internet, I suppose. According to the media agency, Zenith, which tracks these things, next year for the first time the world will spend more time on the Internet than watching TV. Personally, we’ve been doing that for years, though sometimes we do both at the same time, especially when watching sporting events. So the world is catching up with us. “People will spend an average of 170.6 minutes a day, or nearly three hours, using the internet for things like shopping, browsing social media, chatting with friends, and streaming music and video in 2019, a recent report by media agency Zenith estimated. That’s a tad more than the 170.3 minutes they’re expected to spend watching TV.” The Internet already rules over what once was derided as the Idiot Box (and yet the reverse Flynn Effect–IQ scores going down–didn’t occur in the age of television but only now in the Internet age) in Asia and the Middle East but still lags far behind in Latin America and Western Europe. Europeans and Latinos clearly need to watch more cat videos.
One of the amusements of watching the recently ended NBA basketball playoffs was the theatrical denials by players when they are called for a foul. They roared in disbelief, stomped around the court, screamed at the officials as if they had been betrayed by their very kin. But when replays are showed, nine times out of ten, not only did the player indeed commit the foul, they hit the opponent so hard it would not have been surprising to see them charged with a crime, much less a foul. It appears this NBA grandstanding with referees migrated from soccer, or football as it’s known outside of America. The World Cup begins next week and we will similarly see players emote like a community theater actor hamming it up on stage in Duluth. Unfortunately, politics has also adopted such tactics. No matter how hard we may have struck some entity across the arm, our politicians will deny it. In fact, they are likely to say not only did they not foul, they actually were massaging the arm to make it feel better (or maybe they were accused of an unwanted massage of the arm, in which case they deny the arm ever existed in the first place). For the moment, we ignore the politicians and athlete actors and instead describe our North Korean Three, further investigate where wealth is traveling to and point out the most expensive places for a beer. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, refereeing a world of information and data and preparing for your instant replay reviews.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
Our North Korean Three
We try to tackle important issues, events and data that are not covered in the news so we’ll leave it to others to pontificate on the significance, if any, of the Trump-Kim meeting. But there are a few things that continue to go unnoticed or are under appreciated in this whole wacky game theory geopolitical derby on the Korean Peninsula. 1) There is still not enough attention paid to the real economic reforms Kim Jong-Un is instituting in North Korea. Since taking power, Kim has allowed far more private enterprise than any of his predecessors. It’s mostly an underground economy but Kim has not tried to dig it out; in fact, he appears to be fertilizing and tilling it. 2) Yes, China borders North Korea, but so too does Russia, albeit a much shorter border than China’s, but still one with strategic resonance. There has been lots of focus on what China wants with regards to North Korea, but given the current U.S. President’s Madam Bovary-like relationship with Russia, there should also be a focus on what Russia wants to happen in Korea. 3) In the absence of humans, strange things happen. The DMZ is a mostly No Human Zone (NHZ?) which has led to a flourishing of flora and fauna. According to the Smithsonian, “5097 animal and plant species have been identified in the area, including 106 that are labeled as endangered or protected.” In fact, there have been unconfirmed reports of sightings of the endangered Siberian Tiger (crossing over that Russian border?) and the Amur leopard. Nature, like economies and politics, is chaotic (mathematically speaking). A strip of uninhabited land led to unexpected results. What will nascent, delicate economic reforms and Russian interests lead to?
More on the Wealth of Nations
Follow the money they say, which is one reason we are so obsessed with AfrAsia Bank’s annual Global Wealth Migration Review. Last week we examined the haves and have nots. This week we look at where the money’s moving. Which countries are seeing the largest outflows of wealth? China, India, Turkey and the UK top the list of countries from which the wealthy are fleeing. Perhaps Brexit is having an impact on where rich Brits want to live? There’s certainly been lots of reasons to exit Turkey the last year. China and India, which lead the list of countries from which wealth is fleeing, are a little more complicated. The report argues that outflow from these countries is not a big deal because “they are still producing far more new wealthy people than they are losing.” Perhaps, but we raise our poor eyebrows a bit when seeing such outflows. The U.S., Canada and Australia are the top destinations for wealthy Chinese and Indians. These are all 2017 numbers. It will be interesting to see how developments this year affect 2018 outflows and destinations, if at all.
Buy Me a Beer
When we came across a list of the most expensive cities in the world to buy a beer, we were a bit chagrined to note that we had knocked down an ale, lager or stout in most of these places. Our pocketbook is a bit lighter because of it. Dubai leads the list, partly because you can only drink in Western style hotels and other designated areas. We’re a bit surprised to see Boston as the third-most expensive U.S. city for beer. But if you’re looking for inexpensive good beer, travel to Manila (just don’t get involved with the drug trade there), Prague, Johannesburg or Mexico City. The sights are good and the beer is cheap.
It’s the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. I’m neither an aficionado of Robert Kennedy (or any other Kennedy for that matter) nor a hater. But I did read this week a remembrance of Kennedy by Conor Friedersdorf, and like most articles about Kennedy this week, it was full of what ifs, as in what if someone had not shot and killed Kennedy in a hotel in Los Angeles the night of the California Primary. But that was not what struck me in reading the article. No, what was remarkable was how the many excerpts of Kennedy’s speeches sprinkled throughout Friederdorf’s long piece, show how much political discourse has degraded over the last fifty years. We are far dumber speakers than we were half a century ago. And I don’t merely refer to our current dumb discourser in chief. In a speech to a black audience the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated (tough year that 1968), Kennedy quotes an ancient Greek poet: “My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’” Can you imagine any politician quoting an ancient Greek poet today? Or using the elegant, literate language found in the other speech excerpts quoted in the article? Never mind what side of the aisle you are on or what you believe about any particular issue. We have dumbed down our public discourse and we wonder whether that has led to many of our other problems. We talk dumb and so we act dumb. Or, is it the other way around? As we study up on poetry, ancient and modern, we present a wealth of information on wealth, contemplate who takes the most drugs, and write up the most distressing topic we have ever presented in this space. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, dreaming of Aeschylus as we serve up the international equivalent of limericks.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
A Wealth of Information
The world continues to become more wealthy though perhaps it is not as evenly distributed as some would like. The annual AfrAsia Bank Global Wealth Migration Report shows that in the last year wealth grew 12 percent worldwide to US$215 trillion. India saw the fastest growth in wealth at 25 percent followed by Malta, China and Mauritius, of all places. According to the report, “Growth rates in Malta, Mauritius, New Zealand, Israel, Australia, USA, Luxembourg and Switzerland were all assisted by the ongoing migration of wealthy people to these countries.” Who did the worst? Pakistan, Nigeria, Venezuela and Turkey lead that dubious list. The reasons for the poor performances differ with Venezuela due to the continuing meltdown of the economy and in Turkey due to a lack of investment over concerns about their political and media crackdown. Over the last decade, the top country for accumulating wealth is Vietnam. We visited there a number of times the last ten years and are not surprised by this young, dynamic country’s performance. The report is chock full of interesting and in some cases surprising information. So much so, that we’ll delve further into the report next week.
The World is a Drug
As we rode our bike for the first time since our multiple knee surgeries, we had to navigate around the shoals of drug dealers and users populating the Interurban Trail. They eyed us and others on the trail suspiciously as if we were trespassing on their land. It was a bit disconcerting since in our current physical state neither flight or fight is a particularly good option. Of course, drug abuse is not just a problem in Seattle, or even in the United States. In fact, the population with the highest rate of abuse is in Russia. Ukraine and Belarus also have relatively high percentages of their populations abusing drugs and alcohol. So too does the rough and tumble Greenland (Clearly Trainspotting 3 should take place there). In Russia, alcohol is the predominant drug problem which we witnessed first-hand ten years ago while spending time in the Russian Far East seeing young men drinking from bottles of vodka at ten in the morning. Of course, as with many challenges in our world, it is men who rear their glazed-eye heads. As Our World in Data notes, “Substance use disorders are more common among men than women. This is true across all countries, as shown in the (second) chart below which plots the share of males with a substance use disorder versus the share of females.” What ails the men of the world, and is there a drug for it?
 Chinese Cockroach Sushi*
There’s no doubt the world is in a foul mood these days with people plenty worried about the future. For some their visage is darkened by fears of climate change. Others worry about the possible arrival of our robotic overlords. Still others remain deeply concerned by the world’s apparent turn from liberal democracy to authoritarianism. But for us, nothing is more dystopian than cockroach sushi–which we’ve recently learned is a real thing in China. We vowed to start fasting when we read in the South China Morning Post of the rapid increase of cockroach farms and factories in China. “The number of cockroach farmers in Shandong alone has tripled to about 400 in the past three years, according to Liu Yusheng, president of Shandong Insect Industry Association and an entomology professor at Shandong Agricultural University.” Good God, there were already 133.3 cockroach farmers in China in 2015?!!! The article then goes on to describe a new facility where literally billions of cockroaches are born and bred, and it’s not a 1970s walk-up apartment on the lower eastside of Manhattan. In addition to eating the cockroaches, China is also using the insects to eat up the enormous amounts of food waste in the country. “Cockroaches devour virtually everything, and can consume food weighing up to 5 per cent of their own weight each day…There is no better way of processing kitchen waste than feeding it to cockroaches,” says cockroach researcher Li Yanrong. As we type, a new facility is being built that can breed 2 billion cockroaches each year, “powered by artificial intelligence and big data.” What could go wrong? This my friends, is dystopia.
*This is the most horrifying headline we’ve ever written
Our thumb is not green, it is not even chartreuse. But we are an admirer of dahlias and a friend of ours, who is a master dahlia grower, kindly provided us some plant shoots of our own this week. They have distinguished lineages, sort of like a race horse, making us nervous that if we mistreat them we will commit the equivalent of killing one of Secretariat’s foals. But plant them we did. Tenderly. Carefully. Following all directions. We were tempted to speak a few encouraging words to the plants but what little dignity we have reared its decorous head. So imagine our horror when the next morning the INTN spouse came in from our front yard and reported, “The dahlias look dead.” We quickly went to inspect them ourselves and they were indeed quite wilted, the dahlia equivalent of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. We emailed our friend, the Dahlia Master, and she assured us they will be okay. So as we weed out a Charles Dickens story in China, water North Korea’s future with comparisons to East Germany, and fertilize global warming with air conditioning, we hope you will send nurturing thoughts for our three dahlias. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, a blooming garden of international information and data in a less than concrete world.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
Charles Dickens in China
Whether you are a racist lawyer, violent cop or unruly sports fan, in our new recorded age, it is increasingly difficult to get away with bad behavior. China, of course, is taking it to a new level with their Social Credit System. You remember reading about it last year, right? How’s it coming? The state-run Global Times reports that since April, Chinese citizens have been blocked from taking 11 million flights and 4.25 million high speed rail trips due to miscreant behavior of one type or another. The nascent system is currently built on a series of black lists where unfortunate (or deserving) citizens find themselves punished for misbehavior such as acting badly on a train or flight (we have long advocated for replacing TSA security lines with clothing monitoring lines—you are not allowed to sit on an airplane seat if you are wearing pajamas, short shorts or a stained sweat suit, for example). Much of the Chinese focus is on debt. Debtors names are published on websites and not allowed to fly or stay at fancy hotels. One province goes one step further. They “play a recorded message when someone tries to call a blacklisted debtor, informing the caller that the person they want to speak with has outstanding debts. And in May, a short cartoon with the photographs of debtors’ faces began playing at movie theatres, on buses, and on public noticeboards with a voiceover that said: ‘Come, come, look at these [debtors]. It’s a person who borrows money and doesn’t pay it back.’” No word on what happens to provinces themselves that are in debt. In the meantime, we await China’s Dickens to chronicle their experiment.
Korea’s Future Via East Germany
In the fanciful game of diplomatic beer pong being played on and with the Korean Peninsula, it is anyone’s guess what happens. But should the two Koreas ever reunify, it is safe to say that many decades will pass before there is a true equilibrium. Germany has spent upwards of 1.7 trillion Euros on its reunification and yet economic, social and cultural differences remain between Western and Eastern parts of the ole Deutschland even 30 years later. Stubborn cultural differences are revealed in a new paper which shows East Germans are much less likely to invest in the stock market than West Germans, even when controlling for income and other factors. And when they do invest, they are more likely to hold stocks in companies in communist or former communist countries such as Russia, China and Vietnam. The paper’s authors note that this inclination is stronger in parts of East Germany that did not have access to Western media. The authors conjecture this is a result of ubiquitous and effective propaganda (see Soviet ad below) up through 1989. We are all hostage to our biases influenced by whatever environment we grew up in. It is a sobering thought which causes us to reach for our Weisen beer.
Heating the Planet by Cooling Off
We recently, when having our furnace replaced, had central air conditioning installed. It’s fantastic although our cat Willow who loved sitting on a vent when hot air blew out, was very confused, upset and startled to have cool air disturbing her ample and yet cute stomach. Areas of the world that most need air conditioning, however, are least likely to have access to it, as you can see in the chart below. India, Africa and parts of Asia usually do not have air conditioning. In fact, as Quartz notes, “328 million people living in the US consume more energy for cooling than the 4.4 billion people living in all of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia (excluding China) combined, according to the IEA report.” But as wealth grows, that will undoubtedly be one of the first things added to commercial and residential buildings, freaking out felines the world over. But that means electricity use will go up with corresponding increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Air conditioning needs to be installed in the developing world for health and productivity reasons. But so too do clean energy sources. Fortunately, those are coming along rapidly.
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admin2018-05-31 11:00:472018-07-13 03:48:25Charles Dickens in China, Korea’s Future Via East Germany and Heating the PlanetOne semester at Willamette University–Harvard, Stanford and Yale alums feel foolish in the presence of Bearcats–we lived in the Canterbury Apartments. It was coincidentally the same semester we were taking Chaucer from one of our favorite professors, Kim Stafford. Kim had a way of pronouncing Middle English so that it was understandable. His voice was almost Jack Nicholson-like, as were the sharp bend of his eyebrows when reading one of Chaucer’s ribald tales. He made Chaucer as fun for us as it was for someone in 1455. When Stafford learned I lived in the Canterbury Apartments, he said we needed to hold class there while we read through the Canterbury Tales. I readily agreed and one afternoon the whole class squeezed into our apartment and drank Mead wine that Stafford brought (in today’s cuckoo, politically correct world a professor would probably be arrested for such transgressions but we figure the statute of limitations is up) and read through the MIller’s Prologue or some such tale. It was a great afternoon and a class full of learning and fun. So we learned with delight last week that Kim Stafford has just been named the Poet Laureate of Oregon. As we toast a glass of mead to Professor Stafford we speak in rhyme about studying in China, keep a steady meter about what worries the world and make funny Chaucer-like puns about Chinese nicknames. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, making a pilgrimage through the Pardoners, Summoners, Reeves and Cooks who make our world so amusing, complicated and fascinating.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
Coming to China
In our continuing effort to understand a world and future increasingly influenced by China, we educate ourselves on education. China now has more African students studying at its higher education institutions than any other country, including the former leader, France. The U.S., of course, has traditionally had more international students, whether from Africa or elsewhere, than any other country (the U.K. is second). That has helped project American culture and values into the world, as well as provided top international talent for the country. The U.S. still has the most international students though the numbers have flattened in the Trump era. China, not surprisingly for an emerging world power with grand ambitions, is hosting an increasing number of international students, from 291,000 in 2011 to nearly 500,000 today. China aims to increase that number even more for a variety of reasons, including growing future world leaders with ties to China. Says Wang Huiyao, director of an influential Chinese think tank, “There are more than 300 world leaders including presidents, prime ministers and ministers around the globe that graduated from US universities, but only a few foreign leaders that graduated from Chinese universities, so we still need to exercise effort to boost academic exchange and educate more political elites from other countries.” The coming decades will see a very different world under very different influences than today’s.
What Are You Worried About?
Are we on the right track or are we, as Dr. John rasped, in the right place at the wrong time? In a survey by IPSOS, which tracks views of people around the world monthly, only a few countries’ populations feel they are on the right track. China stands out as an outlier with 90 percent feeling things are headed in the right direction. Nearly 73 percent of Indians also have a good vibe of where things are heading. But almost all other countries are like Han Solo—they’ve got a bad feeling about this. In fact, only 40 percent of the world’s population thinks things are on the right track. The IPSOS survey also asks what are people’s top worries. This varies quite a bit from country to country. In Japan it’s inequality, in Turkey it’s terrorism and in Brazil it’s corruption. By the way, a PEW Global poll finds that nine of ten international scholars rate climate change as their top worry. That threat does not rate high among the average Joes, Wangs, Kims and Singhs of the world. Of course, this is why action confronting climate change proves elusive.
Pancake Emperor and Chinese Nicknames
We are a keen observer of the NBA playoffs which are pivoting to the Championship round as we write. Chinese are also great fans of the NBA (we were once stalked by hotel workers in Beijing bugging us for info after having lunch in the hotel restaurant with a former NBA player). So with delight we were pointed to a Deadspin article on the fantastic nicknames the Chinese have created for NBA players: “At their best, Chinese nicknames always seem to combine both affection and shade, producing monikers that both fans and haters can get behind.” Thus Charles Barkley is called a fat pig, but he’s a flying fat pig (飞猪)—high praise, since the character for “flying” normally is reserved for players who take their game above the rim.” The article points out the visual nature of Chinese characters provides for clever puns and multiple meanings. For example, Lebron James, who travels a lot without being called for it, “is dubbed ‘Six-Step Bron’ (六步郎), using three characters that also sound like ‘LeBron.’ But our favorite is Stephen Curry, which unfortunately is not safe for work. You must click on the link for that glorious nickname and explanation when you get home tonight.
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