Everything Else Not Being Equal

The Jeet Kune Do of Food

2011-07-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

I have started blogging about my travel and dining experience again, in a blog called The Jeet Kune Do of Food. Please take a look.

Hong Kong is not a libertarian utopia

2011-07-10T01:48:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong has long been said as the role model of free market after the praises of Milton Friedman and Frederic Hayek. I have yet to find their quotes. But if my memory serves me well, I remember a paper arguing, at least in the case of Friedman, that his praise is an after-thought after Hong Kong showed tremendous economic growth in the 1970s. In other words, the economic miracle is not predicted; rather, it is used to justify an ideology.
Regardless, there are enough people who know Hong Kong well enough can tell you that Hong Kong is not a free market. Sure, tax rates are low and there is much less red tape when it comes to setting up businesses. However, the Archilles' heel of the economy is land, and land is very much controlled by the government and a few real estate moguls. I was recently recommended to read this best seller (the Chinese edition)--Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong by Alice Poon. Poon used to work for one of the moguls as an assistant. She outlined how these economic elists first earned their money from real estates, and then gradually acquire larger and larger shares in the telecomunication, utilities and transportation markets. Their influence in politics has no equal in Hong Kong. I blogged about the protest of July 1, 2011 and one of the targets was these moguls.

Today, I walked around the city to take some pictures for a project. These are two pictures I took in the last few days. The one on the left is about theft, but the words are "stealing the properties of the citizens" which seem to refer to houses/apartments. The one on the right is from a building in Wing Lee Street (永利街) which was made famous by the film Echoes of the Rainbow. It is a written complaint of the government urban redevelopment project. This is another story I will tell later...

Colonialism Nostagia

2011-07-04T18:48:00.000-07:00

Whenever someone uses a word ending with "ism," there is a sense of universality and essentiality. "Capitalism is good/bad," "communism is inferior/superior," etc. Once we buy into such a binary coding, then it sounds right to think that if X is Y, ~X must be ~Y.

It is not that all things were great in Hong Kong during the British rule. But if my memory serves me well, there was a sense of progress in different fronts: the economy, our longevity, our film industry, and even our voices in terms of its effects on government policies.

Let's examine the binary logic again: X is Y --> ~X is ~Y.

This is a logical fallacy in a classical sense. Let X be "Strawberry" and Y be "red". It is quite reasonable to say that strawberry is red and "X is Y" is a true statement. Does this mean that other fruits that is not strawberry (~X) must be non-red (~Y)? At least some apples are red, so are a few other fruits. OK, I am not very precise here since ~X in principle includes non-fruit such as dishwashers and fat cats, but this imprecision is trivial and the point is legit.

Now consider, X: British colonial rule in Hong Kong, Y: bad, ~X: Hong Kong people rule Hong Kong. Again, ~X is not essentially ~Y.

Furthermore, X is Y is just a simplistic statement. A more thorough examination will tell you that X is actually A, B, C and D. A and B could be really lousy but C and D may actually be quite desirable after all.

This is why when the current affairs are depressing as it is in Hong Kong 14 years after the handover (or "hangover," which is an ironically fitting description), people would bring out the colonial flags again in the recent protest. In another piece, the protester interviewed made it clear, that some core values (the C's and the D's) left by the British have been lost.

Simplificiation is a tool to distract us from certain observations or information. It is used to differentiate (us versus foreigners/colonists) and dedifferentiate ("we the Hong Kong people"). If we change the coding, one would realize that there were, are and will always be several millions people in Hong Kong and a minority of them in charge of the government, whether in the pre- or the post-colonist era. The government minority is privileged, in power, and thus different. The key issue is whether their policies achieve goals that are aligned with the interest of the citizens. Anything else, such as the ethnicity, may be relevant but of secondary importance.

In a different part of the world where I reside, a similar discussion of logic, albeit of a different context, is also relevant. Well, let's leave it for another day.

International Network for Economic Method 2010

2010-12-28T12:07:00.000-08:00

The conference of the International Network for Economic Method (INEM) was held in Birmingham, Alabama last year. This is a very cool conference and I met many interesting scholars and saw many wonderful presentation there. I also learned this new thing presentation tool known as Prezi.

Black Swan

2010-12-26T19:29:00.000-08:00

Just went to see Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan. I was surprsied that uptown Lagoon theatre have two screens showing the film. Good for Aronofsky. Many years ago I saw a Diane Sawyer's clip about Sundance, and he was one of the featured contender, making his debut Pi. Now he is going to make The Wolverine with Hugh Jackman. I could understand the transformation of Christopher Nolan and Peter Jackson from indies to major studio production, but Aronofsky's move is puzzling.

The story of Black Swan is simple, it is about a ballerina, on her way to achieve stardom, goes mad. What the film contributes are Aronofsky's superb visual demonstration of the madness of the dancer, and the breakout performance of Natalie Portman. This is actually a scary movie, and what I like is that it is scary movie not of a typical horror genre. This arthouse film also makes use of CGI effects, which are done right.

A Newly Discovered Blog

2010-12-22T22:29:00.000-08:00

My colleagues King Banaian and David Switzer have been blogging for a while. Recently, Kristof has found a blog by a former student of mine, Benjamin Seghers. His blog is thoughtful and he is an articulate writer. Most interestingly, his blog can be seen as a response to King's and David's libertarian blogs and it is not easy--and it should not be to start with-- to be pigeonholed either left or right.

http://scsuintellectuals.wordpress.com/

Ceteris paribus

2010-12-13T17:26:00.000-08:00

The Ceteris Paribus clause, assuming everything else being equal, is intended to clarify thought, allowing a scientific statement to be held true, under a set of specific conditions. However, it is too often used informally to defend a paradigm, when it is under the challenges by facts, making it infallible.

Why did I choose the title "Everything Else Not Being Equal"? There is always a need to counter conventional wisdom.