In Beijing, sky-high housing prices have left many couples who want to get married without the traditional requirement: an apartment they own. There’s a term for those who get married anyway: naked marriage. They are literally unprotected against rent increases. More abstractly, they are less comfortable than a couple rich enough to buy housing.
Category: Beijing
Beijing Street Vendors: What Color Market?
Black market = illegal. Grey market = “the trade of a commodity through distribution channels . . . unofficial, unauthorized, or unintended.”
In the evening, near the Wudaokou subway station in Beijing (where lots of students live), dozens of street vendors sell paperbacks ($1 each), jewelry, dresses, socks, scarves, electronic accessories, fruit, toys, shoes, cooked food, stuffed animals, and many other things. No doubt it’s illegal. When a police car approaches, they pick up and leave. Once I saw a group of policemen confiscate a woman’s goods.
What’s curious is how far vendors move when police approach. Once I saw the vendors on a corner, all 12 of them, each with a cart, move to the middle of the intersection — the middle of traffic — where they clustered. At the time I thought the traffic somehow protected them. Now I think they wanted to move back fast when the police car went away. Tonight, like last night, there’s a police car at that corner, the northeast corner of the intersection. No vendors there. The vendors who’d usually be there were now at the northwest corner. In other words, if a policeman got out of his car and walked across the street, he’d encounter all the vendors that he’d displaced.
Assorted Links
- Quotation bias in reviews of the diet-heart idea. “Criticism of the diet-heart idea is often met with the argument that consensus committees have settled the issue unanimously.” Uh, where have I heard that?
- Kefir for sale in Beijing. Eating plenty of fermented food for the first time, “for whatever reason this is first trip where I didn’t have any real bout with food poisoning or tourista.”
- Cheese and tooth decay
- Tim Harford on Jane Jacobs
- Fermented grain recipes from around the world
- Triumph over HMO. “His lack of action protected his status and his organization, but put [my daughter’s] safety and well-being at risk.”
- Never bet against New Yorker writer Susan Orlean
Thanks to Steve Hansen and Gary Wolf.
Restaurant With No Menu
Today I had lunch at a Beijing restaurant with no menu. You choose dishes in discussion with your waiter. The restaurant’s theme is kung fu. Somehow having no menu is kung-fu-like. A sword hung on the wall and there were other martial-arts decorations. As we left, the wait staff said an ancient Chinese good-bye loudly in unison. It meant “the mountain and river will still be here [a metaphor for enduring friendship], let’s make a concrete date to meet again.” Only one of our two dishes was really good but I’ll go back.
Assorted Links
- Vision therapy
- Omega-3 and brain health. “Participants were 280 community volunteers between 35 and 54 y of age, free of major neuropsychiatric disorders, and not taking fish oil supplements. . . Five major dimensions of cognitive functioning were assessed . . . Among the 3 key (n-3) [poly-unsaturated fatty acids], only DHA [was] associated with major aspects of cognitive performance.”
- The rise and fall of Beijing restaurants
Thanks to Steve Hansen, Tim Lundeen, and Eric Meltzer.
How Long To Build a Subway?
From New York:
1972: Workers use cut-and-cover to break ground on the Second Avenue subway line; only a mile of tunnel is completed before the seventies financial crisis halts construction. . . .
2007: Ground breaks once again on the Second Avenue subway, to be called the T line.
Slow, yes, but not off-the-charts slow:
Between 1965, when construction of the Beijing subway began, and 2001, workers laid only 42 km of track.
Faster is possible:
By next year, Beijing aims to have another 100 km of track up and running.
As I searched for Beijing subway info, I came across this surprising blog on the Beijing City Government English website. It reminds me of something that happened to me in Alaska. I went to visit a glacier. Near the glacier was a visitor’s building, which had a small room with a slide show. The taped narration told how the glacier shrank during the summer and grew during the winter and described the animals that lived nearby. It was all very bland but you could tell the narrator really cared about the glacier. I was struck how rare that was: To see that someone really cared about something other than themselves and their family. I suppose this is why I was impressed how much Penn State students love Penn State. This blog gave me the same feeling. The writer likes (or rather liked) living in Beijing and, much more impressively, manages to convey that. I nominate it for best blog on a government website. Unfortunately it has stopped. It’s so much easier to learn when the person you are learning from really cares about the material. There’s a lot I can learn from that blog.
A nice video about building Beijing’s subway.
Assorted Links
- Fire Larry Summers Now — a blog by “Thorstein Veblen”. An especially good post. Greg Mankiw distances himself from reality when he calls Veblen “cowardly”. My view of Summers. Nassim Taleb says “ short US Treasury bonds as long as Summers is in charge.”
- Chinese museums. I fondly remember the Tap Water Museum.
- The Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results is now accepting manuscripts. Better name: Journal of Unexpected Results.
- Philip Weiss on web journalism: “You see someone’s mind in action rather than through 100 corporate filters.”
Thanks to Oskar Pearson and Dave Lull.
Beijing Hot Pot
Beijing has far more hot pot restaurants than you’d ever guess from Chinese restaurants in America. There are about ten restaurants on the Tsinghua campus; one of them is a hot pot restaurant. Judging from this passage in an article about Beijing hot pot restaurants, some aspects of restaurant reviews (“don’t forget”, semi-humorous derogatory comparisons) are universal:
And don’t forget the wan or spheres of hashed protein, often how fish and seafood find their way to the table.Wise up in cheaper establishments and be warned that some meatballs [i.e., fishballs] can have a texture as if they bounced off the courts of Wimbledon, so avoid them unless you’re in a reputable safe house.
My Theory of Human Evolution (Beijing furniture shopping)
I am moving to an unfurnished apartment in Beijing so I went furniture shopping at a huge “furnishings plaza” with hundreds of furniture showrooms. (Not to mention showrooms for mattresses, doors, stairs, security systems, curtains, light fixtures, and interior decorators.) It was more like a trade show than anything I’ve seen in America or Europe. I think it had more furniture choices than the whole Bay Area. I loved wandering around it, partly because it kept reminding me of my theory of human evolution:
1. The huge choice included a big range of styles, including European, Chinese Traditional, modern, and “flat-plate” (meaning flat pieces of wood). At least 90% of the stuff struck me as ugly. Garish, too ornate, too simple, clunky, chunky, bad colors, bad patterns, and so on. Of course there were buyers for all of it. That there is such diversity of taste (“no accounting for taste”) supports a diversity of technological development. Exactly what a healthy economy needs.
2. Almost all the furniture was decorated. (If you don’t want decoration, you shop at Ikea.) Decoration is unnecessary from a functional point of view — you can sleep on a bed whether it is decorated or not — but is obviously pleasant. (Which is why I wasn’t at Ikea.) Decoration is difficult, so the demand for it supports technological innovation.
3. I write a lot sitting up in bed. After I saw a bed with a cushioned headboard, I realized I wanted a bed with a built-in cushion for sitting up. I found something better than I knew existed — the headboard cushion is detachable and cleanable. Having chosen the bed, there was pressure to buy matching furniture — the side table, the wardrobe, and so on. The furniture that matched my chosen bed was not especially attractive by itself but would become more attractive when near my bed. Because we like seeing things match. Our preference for matching stuff at first glance is paradoxical since it seems to push for less diversity rather than more. Why do we like seeing things match? The evolutionary reason, I believe, is so we will put similar things side by side to get that effect. Notice how clothing stores and many other stores are decorated. Why is that good? Because when we put things side by side it is much easier to see little differences and thus little ways one of them can be improved. When you start to notice these little differences, you become a connoisseur. Connoisseurs pay more for hard-to-make stuff than the rest of us and thus support technology that produces hard-to-see improvements.
4. Few Chinese bedrooms have closets. Clothes are hung in wardrobes. The wardrobe that matched my chosen bed wasn’t the loveliest wardrobe I saw. But the loveliest wardrobe I saw didn’t match the bed I wanted. The loveliest wardrobe I saw had something unusual: decoration of several sizes. We like a combination of large-, medium-, and small-scale decorative detail more than one size alone. This creates further challenges for artisans: There is pressure to be skilled at a wide range of sizes. So you don’t just develop technology for making small decorative details, you also develop technology for making larger details. Again, human nature promoting diversity of technological development.
5. The more expensive stuff looked better than the cheaper stuff, yes. But a lot of the expensive stuff wasn’t so much beautiful as expensive-looking. You might or might not like it — but no one would disagree it was expensive. Presumably people buy such stuff to show off, the way we do so many things to show our status. That we use difficult-to-make possessions to display status (thus creating demand for such things) is yet another way that human nature promotes technological innovation.
Back to the (Recent) Past
My work is all about how the past was better for us. People stood more; so they slept better. They ate more animal fat; so they slept better. They saw more faces in the morning and fewer faces late at night, so their mood was better. Their food had more bacteria growing on it, so their immune and digestive systems worked beter. And so on.
Past meaning 100,000 years ago. In Beijing, I am moving from one apartment (A) to another apartment (B). Apartment A is in a modern building, Apartment B is in a building maybe 40 years older. To my surprise, Apartment B is clearly better than Apartment A. The biggest improvement is that Apartment B has all-incandescent lighting. Apartment A was all-fluorescent. Exposure to fluorescent light in the evening can interfere with the faces-mood effect because it can resemble sunlight. Incandescent lamps are so much cooler than the sun that the light they emit is very different. Another improvement is that Apartment B, unlike Apartment A, has a sun deck. So it’s easy to get lots of sunlight in the morning — important for sleep and for the faces-mood effect. The third improvement is that Apartment B, like Apartment A, is on the sixth floor — but Apartment B is a walk-up. Walking up six flights of stairs will tire out my legs so that when I do one-legged standing (to sleep better) I won’t have to stand as long before getting exhausted. When I lived in Apartment A I could have taken the stairs, but I never did.