green apron monkey

major exports: clown shows

Andy Mukherjee finds that the Bush administration has manage to increase exports to China in one area: policy incoherence. China has announced it will be seeking exchange rate flexibility AND convertability.

To be clear: convertability means that it will become legal and easy to exchange Yuan into dollars. Exchange rate flexibility in this case means that the Yuan/Dollar exchange rate will be allowed to fluctuate more, that it will be more determined by the market.

If China were just going to float the Yuan and let the market totally determine the exchange rate, then this would make sense. The major motive for adopting capital controls (i.e. abandoning convertability) is that you can have a fixed exchange rate and a monetary policy under the government's control.

This is because of one of the great "you can not have what you want" truths. You can not have free exchange of currencies, an independant monetary policy and a fixed exchange rate.

China, however does not want a total float. They want the currency to move up and down in a preselected band. If they make the Yuan convertable, this will be harder to do without fucking up monetary policy.

What about the Bush administration? Well, who knows why the Chinese government does what it does? I won't pretend that I know, in fact I use that question to answer an awful lot of questions about China, such as, "why is the square so shiny while the streets and sidewalks are full of rubble?"

Still even if we don't know why this decision was made we do know that this is what the U.S. Treasury wanted. Mukherjee lays it out thus:

If that looks like an attempt to link two moves that don't need to be bundled together, consider statements by those who're pushing China to change its currency regime. Even they have made confusing demands. Donald Evans, until recently the U.S. commerce secretary, said in June that for China to qualify as a market economy, the yuan ``needs to be convertible, not revalued.''

According to Evans, ``the lack of free flow of capital leads to an un-level playing field.''

That view seems to clash with what U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow has been saying all along. Last month Snow said that the Bush administration is engaged in ``tough-minded diplomacy'' with the Chinese to ``achieve the desired result which is a flexible currency.''

Pressure was applied and the decision was made. The evidence is circumstancial but significant.

the many lives of one kuai

or attack of the boozy girl

One Kuai is a fish. He’s a happy little Chinese fish of the type which is locally called shi ze tou; lion head. One Kuai is called One Kuai because that was his price. He was given as a gift from The Girl to Claire. He also apparently has a secret name which is Edmund or Eugene or some such other name that conjures up images of pale, skinny English boys in school shorts. I really don’t know why fish need secret names. To me he is One Kuai.

Normally One Kuai leads a rather boring existence, swimming around, eating pellets and making little bubbly noises. His only excitement is to jump out of the water like a trout.

Late the night before last though, the Girl came back from the pub where she was drinking with our local model UN members. She was a little deep in to her cups as is her wont on a Saturday evening. What happened when she got home was, in retrospect inevitable. Our house-shoes are stored in a little metal structure in the hallway, just around the corner from One Kuai, his lamp and a little bowl full of change that he guards. In a house which sees a fair share of boozy people trying to get to the bathroom through this hallway, that the house-shoes should be kicked and little One Kuai sent tumbling seems a fairly high probability. And so it was . . .

But One Kuai is a smart, lucky little fish. In the general tumble the aforementioned bowl was emptied of change and filled with water.Somehow, the change bowl landed upright. One Kuai, either by luck or skillful flopping ended up, not under the couch (Certain Unpleasant Death) but rather in the bowl. I found him in tight new quarters, but alive and breathing. He spent the rest of his night in a pot normally reserved for spaghetti (which I think I will clean after I’m done updating).

The Girl, in her state, felt horrible for what she had done to our beloved fish. The effects of alcohol and the process of memory encoding being what it is, she was convinced for a short time the next day that she had killed the fish. Then it was revealed that he was living a happy existence in a spaghetti bowl.

Now he has a new, nicer fish bowl, bought by the girl by way of apology.

off with your head

In economics we play a game. The name of the game changes but the rules are the same: pretend people are waaaay the fuck more rational than they actually are.

It's important to remember that this is a game. It is an assumption for building interesting and tractable models, not something economists actually believe. Everyone who's thought about it for a half a second realizes all models are idealizations and there should always be a comfortable layer of irony insulating a researcher from his model. The number of silly pop-science articles would be cut in half if this realization seeped into the minds of the literate public.

This however does not excuse us from trying to develop models that are closer to homo sapiens sapiens than homo economicus. The study of the varieties of rationality and irrationality in economics has been called bounded rationality. I have never been pleased with bounded rationality. The nice thing about the old rationality models was that there was usually an easily agreed upon most likely choice for your rational actor. It was amongst other things a way to keep researchers honest. Not so with bounded rationality. There are many actually existing types of bounded rationality and many more ways to theorize about the ways we are bounded. There are many programs with inconclusive evidence for and against.

This disturbing pluralism removes the guards against an economist gerrymandering his theory to get the result he wants.

While I welcome the introduction of cognitive psychology into the domain of economics, trying to solve the problems of economics by importing the problems of cognitive psychology was, well, depressing. It's like trying to solve traditional sociology problems by using anthropology, i.e. trading in one set of problematic institutions for another. No disrespect to either of those fields, which are wonderful storehouses for knowledge of the varieties of human belief and behavior. But I doubt one would describe the theories of one as more accurate than the theories of the other. The same goes for economics and psychology.

But now I am heartened. As reported in The Economist, neuroeconomics is starting to poke its beak through the shell. If this all works out it is quite a deal. Not only do we possibly get a more accurate reading of human behavior, we get some nifty underlying principles AND some very sound seeming empirical methodologies that may keep researchers honest.

For any one who has ever looked at a game theory puzzle and just despaired at the gap between what's on the paper and what a human would actually do, this is an exciting time.

english mike's page

New link up to a good friend, who by my tyrannical decree shall live under the webname "English Mike." Mike apparently has some wicked flash skills. He has a lot of pictures of the lao wei here in dongying and a little slice of what we like to call the "French Guy Incident."

yup, food

The four main ingredients of culture are food, work, sex and entertainment. The one that fascinates me the most, I must admit, is food. Food is the easiest to appreciate without language and language takes a lot of work. Work is unpleasant.

Barbequed baby birds on a stick. Grosser than barbequed silkworms? I would argue no.

Seller of said birds.

Girl making dumplings. It's tough to get the dough to filling ratio right, tought to make shapely dumplings. They let The Girl try her hand at a few after she took this picture.

Street vendors rock. They warm the cockles of my little capitalist heart and provide tasty stuffed pancakes (pronounced bee-ung) for 1 quay (about 13 cents).

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Noodle maker outside a Dongying Mall.

rubble! an odyssey

People want to know, what's Dongying like? How does a foriegner get along in it? What's the feel of the city? For the answers to these questions it's best to go to the Expat's Guide to Dongying.

As useful as The Expat's Guide is, there is, alas, something missing from its pages. The feel is just a little off. This is a lack that I can very definitely put my finger on, not some mysterious je ne sais quois. What the Expat's Guide lacks that Dongying has in spades is simply this: piles, rubble and hookers.

One of the more impressive piles near my kindergarten.

There is a brisk pile derived economy in Dongying.

Certain parts of the city have a "recently shelled" look to them.

This is where the sidewalk ends.

One of the many piles of kittens to be found around town. Other popular piles include puppies, meat and shiny.

Jeez, this place has a lot of hookers. According to the locals, only foreigners ever visit hookers. By our estimate there are about 46 foreigners living in Dongying. About half of those are (more or less) heterosexual females. The number of hookers would be impossible to estimate but 500 would be a good basement estimate. Either the locals are totally full of it or these figures speak volumes about the expat sex drive.

Taking pictures of hookers is hard. If they see you they will start bellowing at you to come get your hair washed.

[Note: good photos by The Girl; crappy, oddly composed photos by otis]

there's a lot of pressure at the center of the universe

I was lent an old issue of Fortune magazine with an article on little emperors. The article was an excellant piece of culture reporting and I think it fairly nailed the odd universe of the new middle class Chinese children, whose every want is gratified and who are expected to pull an atlas's weight.

Unfortunately the article requires a subscription, registration and form fields. This companion photo essay is free, though and I believe it tells a lot of story on its own.

afternoon children's tv and some children

Never one to waste an afternoon spent in a chair with needles in my arm, I watched TV.

Afternoon Educational English
I watched two programs intended to teach English to Chinese students, "GoGo" and "Lanmao, The Happy Blue Cat". GoGo is perfectly bland dinosaur with magical powers and some instructional ability. I can't imagine a child watching GoGo. Here's a dinosaur with magic powers and all he does is go to the store and have picnics. He does cause carrots to float into a cart. He likes carrots. Lanmao on the other hand is pure charlatan. What he is so happy about is awful pronunciation and awkward sentence formations. I see Lanmao and know why Chinese people are constantly telling me to have a rest when they really want to know if I have the day off. Lanmao is a popular merchandiser and I can see why. His show was more entertaining than the not-horribly-wrong GoGo. Lanmao worked in a chase scene with a dog and then he fell off a cliff. I don't really remember if they wrapped that up or not.

America's Funniest Home Videosesque Clip Program
China seems to love clip shows in much the way we did in the early nineties. They even have some little Bob Sagaty voice making what I assume are wacky comments over the footage. The two I watched were probably called "Anthropomorphism is Funny/Adorable" (standard dog chasing ceiling fan stuff) and "Holy Shit! People Drive Some Fucked-Up Looking Cars!" (it's a car, but it's also a roller skate).

The Fish Show
Fish swimming around doing fishy stuff works in any language. This show caused me to recall the feeling of disappointment I got when I learned that the largest sea creatures were not, in fact, dangerous man-eaters. It seemed so wrong for something to be so big and not menace surfers and occasionally put mankind in his place. In retrospect, my theological and Darwinian reasoning were both flawed but I think my grasp of scriptwriting was pretty tight. My reverie was interrupted by the little emperor next to me who did not wish to be edutained any longer. His father complied.

Commercial
The kid's dad looked for something suitably brainless for about five minutes before settling on a commercial featuring gelatin bears attacking fruit. I like watching TV in another language. In English I would probably know some boring reason why the little gelatin bears were battling with fruit (they need to drain its sweet juices?). When the same commercial is in mandarin the semantic part of my brain is allowed to throw up its imaginary little arms and yell, "Fuck! Little gelatin bears fighting with fruit! Fuck!"

Taiwanese Afternoon Teen Drama
People responsible for the set and lighting on Saved by the Bell, I know where you've fled to. I hear that occasionally the dudes on these shows throw a slap down to the ladies to show them who’s boss. That would have made Saved by the Bell a lot more interesting, in a monstrously perverse way. Slater always seemed like a real woman hater.

Children's Exercise Program/Talk Show
Also known as a grown man plays hacky sack in front of a sea of unimpressed and mysteriously bescarved children. The hostess was thoroughly impressed though. Her peals of delighted laughter would have been more appropriate were the man teaching the children chainsaw juggling or a heretofore taboo form of female sexual pleasing.

My attention on the last one waned because at this point they wheeled in a baby and started shaving it. I was pretty dismayed for a couple minutes, and the baby was distressed for the rest of the afternoon. This turned out to be one of those things you can figure out if put your mind to it, though. They were going to stick a needle in the baby's head. Now, I know the answer to the question, "why the hell would you shave a baby?"

all that's going in my arm?

No experience of China would be complete without a trip to the hospital. China really knows how to do hospitals. I was befelled by a disease which a like to call "the unpleasantness". Its course left me a shell of a man and also left me on the business end of an IV needle. But not before I got the whole gamut of hospital fun going from floor to floor collecting forms and witnessing slightly astonishing practices.

I can tell you about Chinese hospitals, they are confusing. My Chinese speaking guides were frequently perplexed and spent a good time leading me towards rooms which were obviously not our real destination in vain hope of finding someone who would tell us what to do or where to go. One such guide arrived in the hospital and froze up, forcing me to take over, pushing what I thought were the right receipts into her hands and guiding her towards what looked like useful windows. "Is this the right one?" she asked, holding up what looked to me like a pharmaceutical order.

"Lady, I'm the illiterate here," I said. The force of the comment was lost but I think the message was received.

There's more to China hospital fun than the endless demands of bureaucracy. There are the angry-faced, gloveless nurses who occasionally tell you that they have accidentally sold your medicine to another patient and that you, therefore, will have to go downstairs to buy more. My translator's face lost a lot of color when I told her what I thought of that. Rather than translate what I said back to the nurse, she went into the nurse's office to look for it herself. She found my medicine, unsold (or rather still only sold once) right with all the other medicine.

Sanitation was about what you'd expect, unclean bathrooms, floors mopped with the ever popular "spreading the urine around" technique and the odd person who hands you a dixie cup and says, "we need you to shit in this." I must add that crapping in a cup is now on my skill list.

Using IVs to medicate babies is more popular than I would expect, more popular than anyone who thinks about screaming, squirming and tiny, tiny veins would. Most of the patients in the IV room were children. Indeed, I began suspect that they were holding tryouts for the World's Unhappiest Baby Pageant oh five (Sri Lanka not included).

The worst part is I’m not done yet. My unnamed internal organ is still inflamed (with bacteria). I feel better, but the babies always seem to be just as unhappy.