Welcome to the East.
Is It Dead or Is It Dinner?
Welcome to the East.
Bye Bye Shanghai
My five nights in Shanghai was the longest I stayed in one city.
I’m glad I did. I met some tremendous people and had a lunch and/or dinner every day during my stay. I will summarize all that I learned from these A+ people in a later post.
Outside of meetings, I walked along the Bund, the #1 tourist spot. The Bund is a walking area along the main river which separates the Pudong part of the city from the Puxi part. Most tourism is in Puxi and that’s where my apartment was too. I did go to Pudong for one meeting in the Citigroup building but there’s not much to see there other than amazing skyscrappers, which are better seen from across the shore.
The Bund was good but not great. I don’t think it’s worth the hype. It’s certainly a beautiful skyline though.
I also wandered through Old Town and a couple gardens. People’s Square is a nice bamboo enclave from the traffic. I finally checked out the Shanghai Museum, highly recommended by my Lonely Planet guide. Good stuff. Lots of good Chinese landscape paintings, which I like, and some jade and bronze sculpture. The English audio guide is worth the investment.
Not once in Shanghai did i use public transit — taxi everywhere. It’s so cheap. To flag a cab costs about a $1.50 and it stays at that rate for the first several minutes. Plus, they’re omnipresent.
The food scene in Shanghai is solid and cosmopolitan. With locals I ate authentic Shanghai dumplings and noodles and tried as hard as I could to stay away from spicy stuff, which I don’t like. On my own I patronized Pizza Hut, which was fantastic, and the place across from my apartment at least three times. "Steak King" serves Western food and Chinese food. I often got both: some dim sum plus a steak, for example. And who knew kiwi juice could taste so good? One night I ate with Eisen’s family in their apartment, sans Eisen since he was traveling. The Mom is so nice and so Taiwanese. I love how every Chinese family has a massive rice cooker which seems bottomless.
Two of my days were punctuated by lengthy workouts at Fitness First in Plaza 66. It’s a huge facility and one time I got lucky and watched "Meet the Parents" while on the elliptical. So many great lines in that movie.
The one frustration with my apartment was the lack of breakfast. Each morning I trekked out and tried to find breakfast. (I also searched in grocery stores for cereal to stock the fridge but with no success). Until I found a hole in the wall buffet style Chinese breakfast, this caused daily morning stress. I also had to eat a LOT of food because I now know my malaria medicine only works on a really full stomach and lots of water (I take my pills in morning).
All in all, Shanghai is the business and financial center of China boasts tons of tourist infrastructure, and is relatively easy to navigate. This doesn’t mean it’s exempt from all the troubles which plague China (more on that later), but I can see why many expats choose to live and work in Shanghai. As i’ve said before, some cities are good to visit, some good to live, some both. Beijing has more slam dunk tourist attractions, Shanghai may be a better living destination.
Economics-Speak: Should Polygamy Be Legal?
You’ve gotta love the Becker-Posner Blog. Each week Gary Becker and Richard Posner, two of the most prominent and prolific public intellectuals in America, take on a random topic in life (literally, any topic) and present their analysis. Then they respond to the 50-100 comments left on each post.
This week they pondered whether polygamy should be legal. I couldn’t help chuckle at some of the following phrases, which is so full of economics-speak that it generated a new business idea: create a reality TV show where economists and lawyers come together and chit-chat in their own languages. Ratings would skyrocket once the college market devises a new drinking game: one drink for each Latin phrase said by the lawyers and one drink each time “price” is uttered by the economists.
Household goverance under polygamy is bound to be more hierarchical than in monogamous marriage, because the household is larger and the ties of affection weaker; as a result, “agency costs” are higher and so the principal (the husband, as head of the household) has to devise and implement means of supervision that would be unnecessary in a monogamous household. (An additional factor is that women in a polygamous household have a greater incentive to commit adultery since they have less frequent sex with, and affection for, their husband, so the husband has to watch them more carefully to prevent their straying.) This managerial responsibility deflects the husband from more socially productive activities….
Especially given the large disparities in wealth in the United States, legalizing polygamy would enable wealthy men to have multiple wives, even harems, which would reduce the supply of women to men of lower incomes and thus aggravate inequality. The resulting shortage of women would lead to queuing, and thus to a high age of marriage for men, which in turn would increase the demand for prostitution. Moreover, intense competition for women would lower the age of marriage for women, which would be likely to result in less investment by them in education (because household production is a substitute for market production) and therefore reduce women’s market output.
KFC and Pizza Hut as Premium Brands – And Glories of McDonald's
KFC and Pizza Hut are kicking McDonald’s ass in China.
They’re everywhere. And locals tell me the food is excellent and they’re positioned as premium brands.
I’m a big fan of Western fast food chains in China and other Eastern countries. The whole line about McDonald’s ruining local cuisine or culture is such horseshit.
McDonald’s and its ilk give the locals choice. If the locals didn’t like the food, they wouldn’t eat there and McDonald’s wouldn’t be there. So a Chinese person wants a break from noodles? Big deal — give him a burger! It doesn’t make the noodles any less real. So a Parisan doesn’t want to sit in a cafe for two hours for lunch? Big deal — give her something fast! (McDonald’s in Paris, btw, is one of their biggest success stories.)
People who sit at home in the States and say McDonald’s in all these countries takes something away from the local feel haven’t traveled. I never eat McDonald’s at home — I think it’s vile. But abroad I eat there all the time. It’s a nice break from the local fare. And I’m damn glad I have that choice.
Quotes from "Man's Search for Meaning"
I just read Viktor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning and loved it. I strongly recommend this inspiring book of which there are more than 12 million copies in print worldwide.
For those who haven’t yet read it, it is Frankl’s account of surviving a Nazi concentration camp. His survival experience — which is gripping and shocking — provides the jumping off point for his life philosophy of “finding meaning”. He argues that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit of what we find meaningful. Here are two of my favorite excerpts from the book, emphases mine:
Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his wall to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostatis,” i.e. a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call “non-dynamics,” i.e. the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it.
And then to the question, What is the meaning of my life?
The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment…As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. in a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible….
This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” It seems that there is nothing which would stimulate a man’s sense of responsiblness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended. Such a precept confronts him with life’s finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself.