The Fat Years [Book]

 

China deserves to be number one. That's an unstated premise of this book, which is all the rage among intellectuals and others interested in what the world of the near future would be like if China were back in the top spot it enjoyed for thousands of years. But revealingly, it gets there by cheating--exploiting a failure of the West, and using the powers of a dictatorship to fill a world power vacuum.

It's a wonderful read, with interesting characters from a cross-section of modern China. The book is banned in the mainland, making it all the more fun, especially to Chinese readers.  But I think it misinterprets the reasons for the rise of the West, or more precisely it relies on an incorrect reading of the reasons China fell behind.

The Chinese political leader in the book who at the end gives an explanation for China's success describes a series of well-executed moves that are possible only in a dictatorship. The novel asks if it was worth it: would you rather live in a good hell (poverty and submissive status but full knowledge of your situation) or a fake paradise (prosperity based on ignorance )

Most discussions of the book focus on how China as Number One has lost its soul, and how economic prosperity has come at the terrible price of amnesia about how it arrived. That's part of it, and clearly that's what interests the author. But that stream of thought reveals, I think, a blind spot in the way Chinese intellectuals see themselves in the world.

The West rose -- broke away from the status quo that made Chinese rulers comfortable --  from a lack of leadership, not thanks to any wisdom on the part of benevolent dictators. Prosperity requires creative destruction, including the sorts of regular takedowns of status quo that the West knows all too well, from the European wars of religion, to the American Revolution, to the regular rise and fall of Silicon Valley high tech giants:  the West is constantly throwing out the incumbents, passing power from one center to another, never giving enough power to allow any single person or group to dominate for long. The Checks and Balances of the American Constitution -- the awful brakes on power that sometimes seem so frustrating to people who want "progress" --  are the Enlightenment wisdom that forces today's leaders to show a humility that's never been necessary in China.

The chaos that Chinese people seem to fear isn't the "hell" -- good or bad -- that is the unspoken anxiety in this novel. In fact it's a necessary precondition for the paradise that many of them are seeking.

p.s. I went to a talk by the author, Chan Koonchung ((陈冠中)  last Fall.

Coming apart from my children

Americans during my lifetime are becoming unequal and divided, not by class or income, but by something much more serious: a difference in values and interests. This has been my own experience, and now Charles Murray details the problems in his latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, (well-summarized in a Wall Street Journal essay).

 

To see just how different Americans can be from one another, the book includes this quiz, which will take you about 10 minutes to answer:

Coming Apart by Charles Murray - Quiz

Here are my results:

Question	Description	My Score
1	Neighborhood	7
2	Family job	4
3	Town population	7
4	Family income	5
5	Factory	6
6	Painful job	3
7	Evangelical	2
8	Political	4
9	Dumb friend	0
10	Cigarettes	0
11	Military	0
12	Nascar	0
13	Pickup	0
14	Beer	0
15	Fishing	1
16	Restaurants	4
17	High school letter	2
18	Kiwanis	2
19	Parade	2
20	Uniform	0
21	Greyhound	1
22	Movies	1
23	TV	0
24	Oprah	0
25	Branson	0
	TOTAL	51

According to the book, my score classifies me as a “first generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents”, which anyone who knows me well could confirm.  My wife, on the other hand, would score pretty close to zero if she weren’t married to me.  Our kids are already well-removed from “the other America”, and would know almost nothing about it if not for their grandparents.

I still treasure the friends and values I learned from my small town, Midwestern upbringing. Although I’m happy with the wonderful experiences in my life now, I think it’s a tragedy that my own children don’t understand that world anymore.

Impressions of Burma

Burma (aka Myanmar) is changing quickly. Political prisoners are being released, draconian rules are being relaxed, and if this continues I expect tourism will explode from tens of thousands to tens of millions in a few years. Here are a few random observations over my week and a half visit over New Years 2012 :

Like many underdeveloped countries, the place is a garbage heap. Plastic bags and used bottles are everywhere, except in the trash can.

The domestic airlines – Air Bagan, KBZ, Mandalay, Asian Wings—are almost always late for both departure and arrival.

Here are a few books about Burma that you may want to read: George Orwell (who spent a lot of time here), and The White Umbrella.

Economic sanctions means you see relatively few foreign brands. Sure, you can find Coke here but it’s imported from Singapore. Try Star Cola or the various local coffee mixes instead of the real thing.

 

Ubiquitous sunscreen. The local women cover their faces in a yellow protective paint ground from the bark of a tree, apparently to prevent sunburn.

I didn’t find the food especially appealing: the mohinga noodles are great for breakfast, but the curries (and most everything else) are too oily, without anything special in taste.

 

You spend a lot of time barefoot if you visit temples or pagodas, where the rule is “no footwear”.

 

Let's call it Burma

The United States government (as well as the UK and most other European democracies) officially refers to it as “Burma”, a perfectly fine name for the country.  Unlike India, whose democratically-elected government deliberately renamed many of its place names in a nationalist effort to assert independence from its British-ruled past, the name “Burma” is simply an anglicized word the locals have always used to refer to the majority ethnic group and the language of the inhabitants. They still refer to their country as “Burma” in verbal conversations.

The name “Myanmar” was arbitrarily hoisted on the country in 1989 by a whim of the repressive military junta that still runs the place.  Linguistically, Burmese uses different sounds for the written versus spoken forms of some proper nouns, and “Myanmar” is the sound of the written, formal version of the country name.  So why did they change the name we foreigners are supposed to use?  Perhaps the ruling junta wanted us to treat their government with more respect.

It’s not an entirely bad name change. Unlike names like “Stalingrad” or “Soviet Union”, which were brand new terms specifically intended to force a new political agenda, there is some logic in asking English speakers to use the pronounced form of the written names. The change is applied consistently to all place names including the (long-time) capitol city Rangoon (Yangon) and the main river, Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady).

But that is a decision that should be up to the people, not the military.  Perhaps someday the citizens of a newly-free Burma will elect representatives who will themselves choose to call their country “Myanmar”, at which point I’m sure the United States and other countries will recognize the change. Until then, I’m going to call it by the name the people used the last time they were free.

Gregory Slayton on Innovation

Dartmouth Tuck School of Business Adjunct Professor Gregory W. Slayton was in Beijing this month to give some talks about innovation.  Although creativity and innovation are of course important to me, I haven’t focused on this, partly because I think of it as an art (that you learn by doing) rather than a science (that you learn by studying). Obviously it's a little of both, and as a professor he’s studied it academically, so it was nice to get an overview of the state of the science.

He divides professional creativity into four components:

• Product: what you make
• Process: how you make it
• Interpersonal: who you partner with
• Strategic: future directions

Companies as well as people can be analyzed on these dimensions, and he asks us to rate ourselves (our “Creative Profile”) on each of the four components and assess where we want to be in five years.

He recommends three classic books on creativity:

• Creativity: Mihaly Csikszenthmihaly
• The Medici Effect: Frans Johansson
• When Sparks Fly: Harnessing the Power of Group Creativity: Leonard-Barton and Swap

as well as some readings I thought were useful about Pixar,  Alessis, and a highly-quoted HBR article by Teresa Ambile.

Other suggestions:

• Keep a creative journal to write down new thoughts or ideas as they come to you
• Appoint a “Creative Board of Directors”, mentors who will give you feedback on how to be more creatively successful

Gregory has an interesting background: Harvard MBA, McKinsey consultant, Silicon Valley businessman, and Consul General to the Bahamas. He's also had a longtime interest in Asia, and I enjoyed the short conversations we had during the breaks, talking about his thoughts on China and more.

Zeo vs. the motion sensors

I don't have a Jawbone UP. I tried to buy one earlier this month but Best Buy wasn't stocking them until the kinks have been worked out. Several of my friends rave about it, though:  it's just a bracelet that you wear and it automatically measures your activity, including your sleep.

The UP is one of a number of devices that try to measure sleep based on your movement in bed. It has a tiny accelerometer that picks up the slightest little twitches of your hand while sleeping. Since sleep phases are often accompanied by such movement,  (the theory is) software can later stitch it together to guess how much time you were in REM sleep or deep sleep. But these twitches are just a proxy for the actual sleep phase,  so I'm skeptical that it can measure it as accurately as the Zeo, which uses special sensors to directly detect the electromagnetic activity in your brain. Still, maybe it's "close enough", especially if (like me) you don't have any particular sleep issues that need analysis to the nth degree.

Movement detection is pretty easy, and there are plenty of ways to do it.  There's even an App for that! Smart Alarm, by Arawella Corporation, cleverly uses the built-in accelerometer, plus the microphone, to measure your movement at night and guess the amount of various sleep phases.

How does it compare to my Zeo Sleep Manager?  Last night I tried both at the same time and here are the results:

 

 

Answer: Zeo is way better. It’s not even clear that the motion-detection app gave useful information, and might even be outright wrong.

The motion detection method was wrong. It says I:

• Slept one hour longer than I did. (9 hrs vs 8)
• Had more phases of REM sleep (6 vs. 4)
• Had less deep sleep (5 vs. 8+)

Look at the charts and you’ll see the difference.

I don’t know how well this compares to an UP, but I bet the motion-detection systems just aren’t very useful.  If you really want to measure sleep, I say get the Zeo.

By the way, my recommendations:  Zeo comes in two forms: an alarm clock version that doesn’t require anything extra; and a more portable, cheaper version that plugs into your smart phone. If you have an iPhone or an Android, the Mobile Sleep Manager is a little cheaper and smaller.  The Alarm Clock version is nicer if you don’t already have a nice bedside alarm clock, or if you don’t like sleeping near your phone.

I'm sleeping better, but why?

I love my Zeo Sleep Manager, a cool device that measures my brain activity in order to help understand the quality of my sleep: the amount of refreshing REM versus Deep sleep, versus plain-old-ordinary light sleep, and of course the all-up total sleep each night. I started using it in mid-2010, and have used it to track my sleep most nights since then.

I don't have any particular sleep issues, though I was intrigued by the idea that I may be used to a particular quality of sleep, and maybe I just think I'm doing okay. Well, after using Zeo for this long I can't say that I feel all that different -- I feel fine, and always have -- but feelings are hard to measure objectively. Is there a way to measure my sleep quality more scientifically?

Zeo uses a measure they call "ZQ", which tries to combine a bunch of aspects of sleep into a single number you can compare across nights. After analyzing my data for the past eighteen months, I've noticed that my ZQ number seems to be going up over time, for no apparent reason.  At least, I don't think I've been changing anything about myself: I just go to bed when I'm tired, and wake up when it's morning. I haven't deliberately tried to change anything about myself.

But even without trying, my ZQ seems to have improved over the past year.  Since the amount of daylight varies throughout the year, I analyzed my numbers date by date.  (I don't have data for every single night, so my analysis skips the nights when I don't have a datapoint for both years).

Here's a chart that shows the difference in my ZQ compared between given dates in 2010 and 2011.

As you can see, there seems to be a clear trend of my ZQ improving, and for the past few months it's improved significantly – on the order of 20 or more points per night. I wonder why?