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.

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

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!

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.

I want to keep this post short but do want to say that I find domain name squatting to be a HUGE and unnecessary barrier to operating on the Internet – there is already enough competition between people with legitimate claims to the same domain, and domain name squatters only make things worse and don’t help anyone. Yearly domain name fees were set low to make them affordable for almost anyone (generally around $10) but as a result they were also cheap enough for squatters to buy them by the hundreds or even thousands. The current domain name system favors those who entered very early, bought as much as they could grab at the beginning and could then forced everyone else to buy from them. Since they are the only seller of the product they can get extremely high prices if they find buyers who want a particular domain enough. Markets don’t work very well when there is little substitutability between products and the supply of each product is constant at 1.

To the person who sold me this domain, I hope you enjoy your money, and I hope you find someway to contribute to society in a more useful way instead of creating obstacles to the rest of us. I would have much rather donated that money to charity to see it go to waste on you.

Much as I love reading I have always felt like getting the big picture of history is extremely difficult through books and even most history classes and I think that interactive media is extremely well suited to this. But who are all these people, you ask, the Hittites, the Seljuks? When it comes to digging deeper the map isn’t enough, wouldn’t it be great to have Apture in an interactive map like this? What do you think?

Victor Harbison has a very thought provoking (and certain to be controversial) guest post about Magnet schools at Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times blog. Harbison, a teacher, talks about how he sees average students excel when surrounded by smart peers and stagnate when they are surrounded by other average or less motivated students. Since magnet schools pull out top students from a large number of schools they rid many students of their smartest peers:

When educational leaders decided to create magnet schools, they didn’t just get it wrong, they got it backwards. They pulled out the best and brightest from our communities and sent them away. The students who are part of the “great middle” now find themselves in an environment where the peers who have the greatest influence in their school are the least positive role models.

So far so good, most people who have been through a Magnet school will tell you about how much they enjoyed the experience and the idea that taking the top performing students out of average schools might hurt their environment is relatively intuitive. Now for the controversial alternative:

What should have been done was to pull out the bottom ten percent.Educational leaders could have greatly expanded the alternative school model and sent struggling students to a place that had been designed to meet their educational needs. [...] Imagine if pulling out the “bottom ten” had been the policy for the past 30 years. Neighborhood schools could have purred along like the go-go 90’s under Clinton and the students with the greatest needs, facing the greatest challenges, would have had millions of dollars in resources devoted to their education in brand new state-of-the-art buildings (with Ivy League-educated, amazing teachers, no doubt). Just imagine.

Would this work? I think that tailoring curriculum to help get underachievers up to speed and to provide them with additional and specialized resources would definitely be a good idea. Furthermore, taking the worst performers out of most schools might free up additional teacher time for the remaining students and also stop distractions from such students.

On the other hand, would lots of underperforming students make these schools exceptionally hard to manage? Would it be difficult to get teachers to work in these more difficult schools (Teach for America is a good indicator that some teachers would like the challenge if given the support)?

Furthermore, what about the top performers – aren’t they a big part of creating the kind of innovative research and companies that help move a country forward? Would they be worse off if they have to continue to study with more average peers? Or would interaction with more average students give them a better understanding of the wider populace and allow them to create things more targeted and useful to more people? Harbison ends with the following:

I look forward to the arguments defending magnet schools. They are legion and many are spot on. That is, if you can live with the idea of condemning the vast majority of students in your community to sub-standard schools. No one can rationally argue that they are a good long term solution to what ails schools in this country.

The comments on the article are also very worth reading.

“Being right across from the train station, we have long lines before trains leave and pennies make it worse,” said Fersch. “Further, there is a lot of lugging them from the bank, dropping them, not being able to reconcile register receipts and so on. Plus, mining zinc is an environmental nightmare, and it costs the government more to make pennies than they are worth. Finally, they have minted thousands for every man, woman and child. Where do they all go? If they were truly worth anything they wouldn’t end up in coffee cans, vacuum cleaners or sofas. It is simply a tax, which raises no revenue.”

Finland (a country generally very open to innovative ideas) followed by the Netherlands have already abolished both the 1 and 2 Euro cent coins with great success:

A survey in 2004 found a majority of citizens wanting the one and two cent coins to be withdrawn across the eurozone, support being highest for the withdrawal of the one cent coin. However, citizens in Germany were most vocal in the support of keeping the coin. At present, the three copper coins together represent 80% of all new coins minted in the eurozone.

Having visited Finland twice I have to agree that this was extremely convenient, except when trying to get 1 and 2 Euro cents for a collector friend and having to spend 10 Euro on a set of coins worth less than 4 Euro because the 2 coins are now so hard to find.

I recently finished George Soros’ The New Paradigm for Financial Markets which was interesting as an insight into Soros’ thinking (more about that in a later post) but did not really give me any new insight into the economic troubles. After that I decided it was time to make my way through all the China books that have been sitting on my shelf, starting with the Chinese Economy, both The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth and Rural China Takes Off were excellent reads that I recommend highly, Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China, a collection of research studies on reform was less interesting.

After enjoying A Passage to India this much I am now reading A Room with a View, after reading about it in a wonderful travel article on Florence in the NYTimes that references it heavily.

Finally, I want to say how much I’ve come to love Audiobooks – yes, they are slower than just reading the book myself but they allow me to ‘read’ while I’m driving to work or working out at the gym and therefore save a lot of time. I don’t think I would have as much time to read fiction without them.