A Journey Through Asia

Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam in particular. Absolutely beautiful. Via Andrew Sullivan.

Is culture always key?

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita – The Predictionieer’s Game:

Diplomats are convinced that a country’s name is an important variable that helps explain behavior. That’s why the State Department continues to be organized around country desks, just as the intelligence community is organized around geographic regions. Leaders of multinational corporations take much the same view. When they have a problem in Kazakhstan, they call their guys in Kazakhstan to find out what to do. That seems eminently reasonable. Yet it is terribly inadequate for solving most problems.

Certainly knowing about places and how different they might be is important, but not as important as knowing about people and how similar they are, wherever they are. I have not arrived at this view lightly nor, I hope, in ignorance. After all, the training that led to my Ph.D. molded me into a South Asia specialist. I even studied Urdu for five years and did field research in India, so I certainly respect and value area expertise. But area studies alone are a poor substitute for the marriage of knowledge about places and the deep understanding of applied game theorists about how people decide. Surely we would think it ridiculous if chemists believed that oxygen and hydrogen combine differently in China than they do in the United States, but for some reason we think it entirely sensible to believe that people make choices based on different principles in Timbuktu than in Tipperary.

Why I love the Economist 2

Anyone who knows me will also know that I love the Economist and listen to its Audio Edition on my way to work every week as my general news overview. The beginning of its special report on the economic downtown a few weeks ago is a perfect example of its combination of high (though not always perfect) quality reporting and biting wit:

Five years ago Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske wrote a book, “Trading Up: The New American Luxury”. They argued that Americans, even those of modest means, were abandoning merely adequate products for luxurious ones. Jake the construction worker, for example, splurged $3,000 on Callaway golf clubs, though he could have bought a set nearly as good for a third as much. (“They make me feel rich,” he said.) A shipping clerk on $25,000 a year bought silk pyjamas from Victoria’s Secret. A couple making $125,000 ordered a $4,000 brand-name cooking range, even though their kitchen came with a free generic one.

If you read the book backwards, it describes what is going on today.

- Trading down: From decadence to discounts, The Economist, May 30th, 2009

The coolest invention ever?

This is completely unrelated to Entrepreneurship or Economic Development but it is related to incredibly cool products, though definitely in the very very early adoption stage (product/market fit?!?). I’ve been missing the ocean (having spent a lot of my childhood on an island) and been going swimming every evening (no matter how cold) but this little gadget just transforms what swimming means:

Useful? I’m not sure, but it’s definitely amazing (thanks to Mike Krieger for finding it). By the way, did you notice the little icons beneath the photo? The photo above is an Apture Super Embed and you can learn more about the Lunocet Monofin by clicking the icons on the bottom. Try it out!

Why I use Twitter

I find the following excerpt from texasinafrica to be the perfect summary of why I find Twitter incredibly valuable. Except that in my case it’s Startups + Africa and all the other things she mentions:

I’ve railed against Twitter in the past, mostly because I think it contributes to the culture of oversharing [...] But. Here’s the thing. The community of people who blog and think and write (hopefully not in that order) about African states, foreign policy, humanitarian issues, state failure, and a lot of other stuff I care about are mostly on Twitter. And it’s impossible to keep up with everything without signing up.So there you have it. I’m on Twitter in order to save time. And so far, it’s not bad.

Twitter has helped me learn more quickly – and that’s made a huge difference.