Tag: Adam Smith

Impending Incident

The North-East is once again bracing for a gathering storm.

Climate change and the prolonged cold front.

Satellite tracking has improved weather forecast substantially.

Other things in life seem less certain e.g. financial market and food/fuel prices.

The Queen of England was reported as saying “how come no one saw this coming?” (in the context of this past Recession).

Our 21st-century narrative should have bluntly shown the Elephant in the room.

And that was with all the predictions of Nobel-prize-winning economists.

After averting an avalanche, we now face a cliff.

All impending incidents. Everyone was aware of the Sequester. The budget cuts and the cancelled contracts.

700,000 jobs are to be eliminated, to bring the unemployed population to just about 13 million. Adam Smith got hand (invisible) but not heart.

To survive, one needs to be tough . This is a test of not manhood but nationhood.

There is a piece about Finding Love in Walmart (18 States). What about Walgreens?

Too convenient and high-priced?

Let’s face it. The Elephant has stood there in the room.

Much has been written about it, but it refuses to budge.

Still high unemployment, still high fuel prices.

The best brains simply surrender, while the top 1 percenter simp;y accumulate. That is an impending event (as of this edit, the DOW has just reached its all-time high since 2007, much of it came from institutional investors).

So we join a new spectator’s sports: space traveling (of course you have to be very rich to ride). Aristocracy in the age of Austerity. Our version of the dream has just been upgraded and most impossible to realize. Well, we can always rely on the weather man for better odds. With space stations, weather forecast, once a hard uncertainty, has now become a soft one at that.

P.S. The area did experience end-of-season snow blizzards, just as predicted.

Unseen hands

that manipulate interest rates, oil price, appropriate and earmark budgets for the commons.

Adam Smith must be talking about the abstract “invisible hand” of a free market, while in reality, we all feel there are levers behind the scene with successive hands, tinkling and adjusting. Some are automated, by self-improving algorithms.

One example of the devastating works of this unseen hand was seven or eight years ago, when people in Southern California driving to Arizona and Las Vegas to buy houses. People who were NINJ (No job, no income).

The unseen hand that was supposed to regulate, didn’t.

Now, they uncover a bunch of Ponzi schemes. Quickly, these poster boys are put away, or at least, taken out of their nice homes in Colorado.

I do buy things to sustain. Hence, I am a consumer, but refuse to be called consumerist. I don’t follow the cult of purchase for purchase’s sakes.

I don’t buy to stimulate anything. If the economy can’t get cranked by itself (with 7 Billion of us buying things day in and out), then all the unseen hands in the world can’t help it.

At least, there is some good news from the Michigan Consumer Confidence Index. And Wall Street chart starts looks like a slanted V-shaped recovery. Let’s hope so. Rally, rally, rally. Oil price goes up. Confidence is up. So is the temperature.

If you don’t hit the store by 10AM, forget it. The USA weather maps shows red-hot regions in the South. It’s global warming. And we need those unseen hands to regulate the thermostat as well. I am not against hands. Just encourage them to tinkle with the right buttons, while letting the market regulate itself, in the noble Adam Smith tradition.

Start thinking

This is the last of the Trilogy: Start seeing, start hearing and start thinking.

It’s the hardest, because the end product of thinking is acting.

Acting means change. Change brings dissonance and discomfort.

Our faculty is quite limited: we are conditioned to respond in Pavlovian way.

Group think. Similar to   Adam Smith’s unseen hand that regulates the market, there are underpinnings that regulate our thinking e.g. sub-conscious, upbringing, gene pool and the times we live in.

We find ourselves respond instinctively to rising gas price, to the latest poll and pulse.

Independent and critical thinking require courage of conviction.

Men are social animals.

The thinking man is boxed in and labeled as “philosopher”.

The image is quiet nerdy.

Reclusive and esoteric.

Who wants to hang out with all-hair guy whose response seems to have a built-in three-second delay.

Not fast enough.

We want automatic and reflexive feedback (like an vacation auto reponse email).

Preferably measurable one.

From A to B, we draw a shortest line.

Philosophers and physicists don’t necessary agree with this.

To them, there are various shades of grey.

We rather live as common people and seek comfort in numbers.

To think different is to be isolated, if not ostracized.

Yet we need thinking men and women.

They question how we should then live.

Is this the best way to look at things.

Is this THE way or just one of the many ways.

What are some other ways to skin a cat.

Unless we learn to think for ourselves, others will do for us.

Conformity by default (same with no-show during an election).

Being self-disruptive is an antidote to social decline.

Start thinking. It hurts at times.

It is lonely as well.

But it’s healthy and in the long-term, that’s the only way to survive in an age of intelligent machine.

Software will eat our lunch. But we can still use software to prepare our tomorrow’s lunch.

If we start thinking. Hard. Now. Before it’s too late. The greatest tragedy in life is wasted talent (implied THINKING).

Chicago’s former self

I finished the epilogue to “the Devil in the White City” longing for more.

That’s how good the read was.

The architects and builders reached out to the sky, and in Ferris’ case, taking the people up with him for an amusement ride in 1893.

The Fair (DreamLand) later inspired DisneyLand.

But not all was quiet on the lake front.

We had a Jack-the-Rippper type abducting and mutilating women orginally drawn to bright light and big city.

Near the closing of the Fair, the mayor got shot, turning the Closing ceremony into a burial and burning of man’s monumental greatness

(White City turned Black City).

White City as it turned out cast dark shadows.

America in the Gilded Age.

Full of ambition and aspiration.

World leader in manufacturing and masonry.

Builders and dreamers.

The sky was the limit (not credit limit as of late).

Later, we had the Wright brothers and Frank-Lloyd Wright.

But during that period, just Westinghouse and Edison (GE), birthers of electricity.

Just Buffalo Bill and Fair builders trying to “outEiffel” Eiffel.

They had a race of a thousand miles, preferably to arrive at the Fair on the same horse.

One fair attendee from Poland who had used kerosene lamp all her life, upon seeing the city of lights, uttered “It’s Heaven”.

Unfortunately, only the train track remains (with dark fiber routes lay dormant). The rest was burned to the ground, with no regret. It was not  the first time the city was in flame. (Mrs O Leary’s cow would kick the lantern later to cause the Chicago Great Fire).

America’s second largest city has its current mayor who left the White House for the White City.

Chicago who hosted the Democratic Convention and its bloody confrontation during the Vietnam War.

Chicago with its boderos and board rooms.

Chicago, a school of economics, which favors “Adam Smith‘s invisible hand”.

Chicago South Side, in contrast to the White city.

Chicago, the band, with “Doesn’t anybody know what time it is”.

Chicago Chicago, the musical and Chicago World Fair, a memorial of America’s Imperial Past.

Its future and America’s are so inter-twined that its leaders had once been a community worker before entering the White House.

Chicago, my first great city outside of the insulated Happy Valley. To have finished “the Devil in the White City” to me was like to have my first taste of that Polish sausage and sauerkraut, or like that Polish girl who first saw electricity: it embodies human greatness and its possibilities (and its need for redemption as well). If only we launched another mandate to complete a World Fair with ensuing deadline, or “ask not…what your country can do for you”. In both instances,  Michigan Lake or Moon Landing, America rose to the challenge and out-shined its own complacency and comfort zone.

deja vu

Yesterday I reposted “Invisible Man“.  Today, it’s about “invisible hand“. There is an invisible hand that definitely plays with events in history, and this Adam-Smith-like hand seems to run out of tricks every 40 years or so, so it seems.

In Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley Press), we learn that history seems to recycle itself every 40 years also

(29-69-09).  First the French romantic/liberty movement, then the generation gap movement, and now the consumer movement.

This time, with the confluence of technological shift, policy shift and evolutionary shift, we  see Vietnam emerge

and leap-frog (it now exports more handsets than garment) into the world scene. After all, it has

survived quarrels with three of the UN Security Council members and emerged unscathed (France, US and China).

Saigon Tourist (a Vietnamese consortium in VN) once acquired a SF hotel in Fisherman Wharf  for $44 million (as of this edit, a Chinese consortium has just acquired a development around the Staples Center in the Southland).

It’s like a bi-coastal mirror image of another Vietnamese hotel owner from New York (who by the way donated a lot of money to the victims of disasters in New York).

It’s about time Vietnamese philanthropy plays catch up. The Viet Kieu (Viet expats) community has another 2 years to  face its American version of 40-year cycle. At that point, there will be a hand-over of the torch to the second generation, whom , as studies often confirm, wants nothing to do with their first-generation immigrant parents.

Many FDI projects have been abandoned here in VN. Banks are stuck with bad debts. And companies pick up the tab to retrain their workforce, whose education ill-prepares them for the work world. The only sure thing here are young people getting married in drove over the holidays.

I have seen it before: the rush to spend, then withdraw syndrome to survive, then spend again as if there is no tomorrow, much less next year.

If any indication at all, the young demographics will take up on Western counterparts, from online gaming to online music, from lifestyle consumption to hopefully, a respect for the fragile environment. It’s deja vu all over again here Vietnam: eat, drink and be merry. They did that in war time, now they do it in peace time. 40 years is a long time, but then, 40 years seems like just a blink of an eye. Just try to hear the prelude to some songs you once loved, and tell me you don’t react on reflex as if you had done not so long ago, when you first heard it and felt it resonated.

I hope you love the “invisible hand” better than being the “invisible man”. At least, that hand might give you a chance, another dance.