Older and Older, Day by Day

It’s that time of year again when the young come a-trooping onto campus to claim their share of “The College Experience”. With uncertain gait and awestruck gaze, the new students marched into the dining hall, shining with brilliance and naivete in their awkward yet exciting transitional states of being both on the very top of one mountain (as recently graduated high schoolers) as well as at the very bottom of another (as newly admitted freshmen). They looked so young, so full of potential and possibility that their presence left me feeling out in the rain, spurring a kind of morose reflection about how poorly I spent my first year in college. Why didn’t I do this? Why didn’t I do that? Why did I squander my time as so? Blah. Blah. Blah. Nothing but sentimental, self-loathing bile choking in the neck, blocking oxygen to the head. As a rising third year, I can say with the full confidence of experience that, indeed, it’s true:  “Upperclassmenship” is overrated.

But what exactly is it about these doe-eyed freshmen that sparks this kind of existential longing? I have to say, the enchanting, magical, and mysterious flavors of college were all densely packed into my very first year. The subsequent years to college felt more like  sequels to a ‘great’ movie (like “The Matrix”): as you watch the second and third episodes, they feel less authentic and more like cop-outs of the original thing. But then again, even the bad movies brought interesting twists and turns, and every year in college brought with it different classes, different friends, and different experiences to laugh and cry about. As much as I would like to return to the Camelot years of first year college life, I know that chasing it will only cause the present slip away as well. So that’s the mantra to the game: live it now and live it large, or go home and write a sad blog about it all a few years down the line. Either way, the fresmen will always come a-trooping, the underclassmen will always become upperclassmen, and upperclassmen will always graduate. And as we all know, “graduation” is just a nicer way of saying “you’re getting old–now get the hell out of here!”.  Please excuse me as I graduate now.

Drudgery

The spacious room compresses,

collapsing steadily into the dark hole of a lonely mind

suspended in drudgery–

hung like a king on a cross.

__

The room, the well-lit, quiet, and humming room,

stifles like grease on tabletop,

smeaing one’s attention

into a slick rainbow swirl.

__

What a fine night it is,

to spend seeking the depths of solitude

while darkness stalks on,

dragging its coattail in the dust.

200, woo!

This will be my 200th blog post since my goal of reaching 100 posts. As I sit here, frazzled, yawning, and drinking coffee like a blue collar worker, I think about what these blog posts signify to me, and the good–if any–that they have served. The first thing I realized is how specific these posts are in representing my mentality at any particular time. For instance, as I was typing the beginning of this post about me being “frazzled and yawning”, I was feeling a certain writerly flair and mood that would have sent me in an exposition about the poetics of life. Incidentally, after I finished typing that first sentence, I took a break and watched a few music videos online. Upon returning to the post, I realized how detached I had become from the first sentence since I wrote it. In fact, I was surprised by how my words stacked up together to form the sentence it did. For some reason, even though I thought the sentence still sounded coherent and fairly “cool”, it no longer felt familiar to me. It was as if I had puked it out and am now watching it writhe on the ground.

So what exactly is this soft, wet, writhing blog thing that I puke out systematically every morning? I don’t have an empirical answer, but from experience, I know that it is something both connected and detached from my life. When I am in the moment of writing–like I am now–it is something familiar and warm to my touch, something unmistakably connected to me. After I finish the post and slap a big witty picture on it, however, I find that the thing I had sent out into the world no longer belonged to me. Like a clay exposed to the winds, my writing slowly begins to grow cold and harden, solidifying into a form captured in a moment of suspension. And whenever I look back on the blog to examine my old writing, I find each post distinct, not only from myself, but also from one another. It is at these moments I stand in awe and amusement at how briefly I lasted as the author of my writing.

At times, I would doubt my own role in this process. “Did I really think ‘that’? Did I really write ‘that’? Could I ever do ‘that’ again?” Like standard nametags, these questions come attached to every single post I write. Yet, as truly the author of my blog, I know for a fact that I did indeed think “that” and write “that” at the particular moments in time, even though I will never be able to replicate the same feat in quite the same way ever again. But isn’t this the case for all of life? When I smile at a squirrel, when I skip down the street, when I relax my face against the cool wind, I will always be a little different from all the other times I acted similarly. Each immediate mental experience and physical manifestation I have in the world is different. Likewise, my blog posts represent frames that capture the trajectory of my mind as it moves through time–preservations of a more fluid and dynamic human behind the computer. Because I have taken the time to blog every day, I can always flip from post to post now and then, watching my written gestures move around and about like a funny character in a crude animation flip book. It takes a lot of pages to animate this little character, but for what it is worth, that is what makes all the difference.

Political, Action!

The following is the first email I’ve written to a political figure:

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger,

I am currently a rising third year student at Berkeley, and I am writing in regards to the situation with the proposed cuts on the Cal Grants. As a recipient of the grant, I can testify to how significant such a program is to not only myself, but also to the thousands of low income students who would not be able to attend college otherwise. I am aware that the state of California is in a budget crisis. However, to cut back on education would not only exacerbate the current situation, it would squander the future investments for a more productive state, as well as undermine the most critical component to developing more informed citizens. I understand that you, like all decision makers, are faced with tough decisions for dealing with this budget crisis–after all, the cuts have the be made to one program or another. However, to cut back on the Cal Grants program at this time when higher education is needed more than ever is parochial, unwise and ultimately counterproductive. I hope you will reconsider your budgetary priorities and stand in solidarity with the students who represent the future of California. 

Sincerely yours,
Michael Lin

The World as Dots and Curves

It is often said that Economics is the study of scarcity. More aptly though, I’m beginning to feel that Economics is more about the study of profit. Sure, Economics is concerned about the limited time, limited capacities of firms and individuals, but the ultimate aim is not reconciling with scarcity. Scarcity is merely the framework through which Economics operates. As it turns out, all individuals want to maximize the utility gained from personal choices, all firms want to maximize the profit gained from corporate decisions, and all countries want to maximize the wealth gained from national policies. In other words, when making decisions about certain actions or policies, the concern for scarcity is reduced to an abstract “limit” on the economic models while the bulk of the attention is turned to how the lines intersect, interact, and respond with one another. Scarcity is included in the equation, but in a way that is beside the point–what it all comes down to is the curves.

One thing I find inadequate about this condition is how deliberately it directs your attention away from the realities of scarcity. In general, all fields create a kind of “framework” within which people are forced to think. If I am given an X-Y graph, I have to think about the relationship of the particular points in X-Y terms, and that imposes a certain kind of thinking on me. If I am in the field of philosophy, I have to focus on the arguments presented, the particular case studies that illustrate the point, and argue the link between the larger argument and the case study; if I am in Ethnic Studies, I have to focus on culture, ethnicity, and history in relation to how they affect contemporary politics; if I am in Rhetoric, I have to focus on the terms upon which I am arguing and question the assumptions made behind particular statements. In other words, in any particular field, there are ways in which I am required to think: I am not only constrained to the structural “form” , but also to the tools of analysis and variables available in a particular field. This isn’t to say that one field is necessarily better than another, but that every field illuminates certain concerns at the expense of diminishing others.

For Economics in particular, I feel that the models provided for maximizing utility are very narrowly focused and micro-based, and the obsession for profit often trumps many other considerations. Environmental Science, for instance, studies how natural resources and other environmental factors regulate and interact with the species in the world. To extract minerals from the ground, to cut down trees, to build factories in particular locations is to affect the ecosystem and everything that lives within it. However, when a business comes into the picture and considers whether or not to establish factories in a particular location, the focus is less on the consequences of its actions and more on its time line for breaking even and making profit. China’s Three-Gorges Dam is a great example. In order to generate hydroelectricity for the country, China flooded the historically significant Three-Gorges by turning it into the biggest Dam in the world. The environmental factors aside (such as the flooding of 1,300 archaeological sites and the loss of rare plants and animals), China had to “re-locate” 1.24 million people–almost twice the population of Alaska–in order to conduct this project.

Ultimately, in a demanding market with many competitors, there is little room to consider the extraneous consequences involved in the process of making profit. Yet, just as the world is not populated by dots on moving lines and curves, the world is not simply a market with competitors. Unfortunately, with the dominant paradigm constructed through the model of Economics, it becomes all too easy to overlook the many social implications that fall outside the bottom line–even if such implications involve the livelihoods of 1.34 million people.

iPhone App for life?

Yesterday was the Annual Apple Developers’ Conference, and for the past few years, Apple would bring t0 this exciting event its new hipster product that it would flounce around on stage to the delight of ogling fans around the world. I can’t say I’m a convert to the Apple enterprise, but being the curious individual I am, I went online to entertain my eyes and ears with the spiffy ads about Apple’s new development. However, rather than be met with some new brain-busting, seductive new line of products, I came face to face with the iPhone–a little gadget I’ve seen plenty of times before already. Rather than innovate something worth buzzing about, Apple has chosen to dwell in the comforts of its past success by streamlining its current products. I guess that’s what you get when the iconic apple CEO, Steve Jobs, goes on medical leave. Slightly dishearten, I decided to listen to the new developments made to the phone. That was the first time I seriously looked at the capacities of the iPhone, and after the video, I find myself quite awed by the functionality packed into such a little gadget.

Any future-gazing gypsy can see that, within the near future, the iPhone will come to dominate all other lines of smart-phones. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit because I haven’t yet given the other smart-phones a good look (Blackberries, I’m coming for you next). But from what I did see, I saw in the iPhone a dynamic, creative, and engaging architecture made possible by the iPhone Apps. Not only are there TONS of apps to choose from (all of which seemed to be developed relatively easily by small business start-ups), the variety of products create competition, affordability, choice, personalizability, and most importantly, loyalty–not only for customers addicted to their customized set of iPhone apps, but also for the developers who created the Apps. My point is, because the iPhone apps are so easy to develop (I have a friend at Stanford right now who is currently selling his own app online), there are apps developed to satisfy almost any need that exists in the market. With time, it seems there will be enough iPhone apps out there to fill the demands for almost anything in life.

Which brings me to the question, “how much humanity will we trade for technology”? I phrase this question in this way because it is indeed a trade: with technology, we get an unprecedented amount of precision, speed, and productivity in many things in life. With an app for GPS navigation, an app for reminding us of our daily “to-dos”, an app for calculating how to split the bill for a dinner amongst 5 people, we become more efficient in whatever it is that we do and manage our time better. However, with such technology also comes a deep reliance in the capabilities it offers. Cognitive Science has shown that our brain develops connections only with usage: human memory is built when we try to remember what we forgot to do for the day; spatial navigation is developed when we get lost and try and find our destination; math skills are reinforced when we take out a pen and paper and try to calculate how we should split our bill for tonight’s dinner, etc. Because technology can do all of these things more quickly and reliably than we can, we increase productivity when we outsource these skills to technology.

Theoretically, outsourcing our inefficient human skills to the convenience of an iPhone is better in terms of absolute economic productivity–we don’t stand around trying to remember what we forgot, waste time being lost on the road, or mess up numbers when calculating our share of dinner. However, an opportunity cost is also involved: in not utilizing our human capacities for these chores, these skills diminish with time. One of the laws of neural plasticity is that whatever we do repeatedly is strengthened, and whatever we don’t do deteriorate over time–just as we remember some things better when we try to recall often and forget other things when we don’t review them at all. In other words, with any activity we do (recall, navigation, math), we can work more efficiently with technology, or we can actually use and strengthen our existing human capacity.

Ultimately, technology exists to increase productivity. In Economics, countries trade to maximize the overall consumption capacity, and each country gains by producing a good that it is relatively more efficient at while trading for a good it is less efficient at producing. Yet trade, by definition, signals that there are trade-offs. If I trade you oranges for bananas, the trade-off is the oranages I had to sacrifice for your bananas. Likewise, when I trade the use of my inherent human skills for the efficiency of technology, my trade-off is my development as a human being. My reliance on technology can make me more productive, and as a result, I can do more with the time I now have. But are the terms of trade worth it? Could we, or should we, be trading the activities in our lives for a series of iPhone apps?

Frenzied Rant

A brain on caffeine, sodium, and a diet of high fructose is seriously not conducive to thinking straight.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I would like to tackle head on, the great existential, epistemological, and ontological question that all humans at one point or another have probably pondered: what does it mean that we will all die within 100 years? I just read a very interesting commencement address from the Classics department here at Berkeley discussing the utility of studying the Classics (found here: http://classics.berkeley.edu/news/mendelsohnAddress.php). The speaker, award winning author and critic Daniel Mendelsohn, notes how when he told his grandmother that he was going to major in the Classics as an undergrad, he was told that everything in the Classics died thousands of years ago. From this anecdote, Mendelsohn takes the audience up into the stratosphere and leaps from millennium to millennium, through and across time, dancing with and within the great question of civilization and culture. After the expansive view of history from up top, we find ourselves gazing down into year 3009,  a period in which we will all surely be dead. It is at this moment of suspension that Mendelsohn drops us all back down to the hard question of existence. After all, if only great names like Virgil, Homer, and Plato were retained out of the millions of names possible, and if only great works like the Aeneid, the Odyssey, and Metamorphoses survived through misfortune and bad luck, how much of a chance do we stand in the rapids of time?

My asking this question will not change my fate of death. Even the words I type here will probably be lost; after all, the internet was only invented less than 20 years ago. Technology has sure done us miracles, but who knows how long we will all last? How long do we want to last? The reason why I am bringing up this endlessly complicated, eternally problematic question, is because I currently stand at a crossroads in my life called the University–a critical position in which I am to pull myself up from the clay in the ground and begin to create a temporary existence that is “me”. What profession do I want to take on? What impact do I want to have in the world? What kind of people do I want to engage? Why? I could live a decent life, full of love, fun, joy, pleasure, engagement, affluence, blah, blah, blah. I could live a elitist life, full of challenges, adventures, life-threatening situations, chronic stress, blah, blah, blah. I could simply live life, and let the events take their turns, directing my time left and right with no particular direction like a raft at sea. I could do an endless amount of things, but because I am here at the University with the opportunity to choose, I must. My choice here can be idealistic, can be pragmatic. Either way, I must choose, knowing that whatever choice I make will determine whether any trace of me will be left in 1000 years.

Ultimately, I don’t think I’ve answered any questions. For the most part, I kind of just pulled apart a yarn of perennial questions lying dormant in the back of my head. I sit here now, tired from the attempt to unravel life and find clarity, huffing and puffing, surrounded by fluff and tangled stuff all around me. Plato and Socrates must be laughing at me somewhere. History must be laughing at me too. But I’m okay with that. I’m okay with that because I’m still alive, because I still have time to find the answer and live its essence. I still have the chance to make the choice that will make all the difference. While I still can, I will let history laugh at me, and I laugh back at it, and we will laugh together–if only for 100 years.

The Economic Mindset

This post is a synthesis of some of my thoughts on material from the book “Economics for Dummies”, by Sean Flynn.

Economics identifies itself as the science of scarity: an inquiry into why and how people make decisions about the allocation of resources for maximizing overall utility. In essence, it centralizes the unfortunate fact that all matter in this world are limited and attempts to find the most efficient and productive means for dealing with what limited resources we have. This single ideological strand that ties together every principle and theoretical thinking underlying the dismal science of economics.

Economics permeates all realms of life. In particular, the field is split into two basic components of macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macroeconomics deals with the consequences of large scale movements  of capital, labor, and finances, and it understands the transactions amongst different nations from a birds-eye, top-down manner. The emphasis is usually placed on the global scale, and the mechanisms involved includes monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policies. Microeconomics, on the other hand, deals with the behavior and implications of certain individuals or particular firms as situated within different nations. The emphasis here is in the relational statuses of firms and individuals with one another, along with how and why certain decisions are made. Both macro and microeconomics operate within the realm of markets and competition, and mathematical models are developed for the sake of maximizing production or for predicting behavior.

In particular, there is a focus area in microeconomics that I am most interested in: behavioral economics. The study of behavioral economics deals with the social, psychological, cognitive, and rational factors involved with decision making. My personal preference is a more philosophical and theoretical take on the economics of how behavior results from implicit economic calculations. I am much less interested in the attempts to model such theories, for not only are they inadequate in so many regards, they are also just plain boring to learn about. In economic terms, I would say the opportunity costs to developing a model-based understanding of economics are too great, and the marginal utility I gain from such an attempt too little to justify the endeavor. I would rather maximize the utility of my time and education elsewhere.

To dive briefly into behavioral economics, there are three essential components: first there is identifying an option that produces the most utility (AKA whatever makes you happiest); second, there is clarifying the stakes and limitations to the decisions that can be made; third, there is making the decision after taking into consideration the pro and con factors involved.

The first step of identifying an option that produces the most utility seems to involve less of economics than it does philosophy. For instance, the “utility” in this case refers to what makes you happiest. This happiness can translate into what is most pleasurable on a material level; it can represent what is most engaging on a psychological level; or it can refer to what is most purposeful on a personal or spiritual level. Economics disregards all of those nuance differences and simply puts them all under the sterile caption of “utility”. The reason Economics categorizes such qualitatively different motivations in such a poorly descriptive term is because Economics doesn’t care for intent–it cares only for outcome. This view stems from the core notion that humans all have self-interests and attempt to satisfy these interests in different ways. It sounds almost immoral to view the complexities of life in such a crude measure Either way, because economics is born out of the paradigm of scarcity, it is of no surprise that it decides to settle with its pragmatically amoral stance.

The second step of the quest for maximal utility is identifying the limits and restrictions to making decisions. Because this step is all about dealing with and navigating around limitations, this component seems to be where the bulk of economic models tend to be concentrated. For one thing, there is the idea of the opportunity cost, which is the value of the next greatest alternative that one must give up in order to make a certain decision. If I am typing this blog, my opportunity cost is the time I could have spent working on my economics problem set I have due tomorrow. The biggest concern I have about the idea of opportunity costs is that it seems to entertain the view that humans are omnipotent and can always know that what they choose is the best of all options available. Setting this contentious problem aside, there is also the law of diminishing returns, which states that the return reaped from a particular product or action tends to decline with each successive use or action. For instance, when I first started typing this blog, I was very absorbed about what I was typing and meticulous about my style. With each word I type, however, I find the law of diminishing demand kicking in, and feel the “pleasure” I gain from blogging slowly declining. I have to put in more and more, and I am getting less and less out of it. It’s quite an interesting phenomenon.

To jump the gun, the last component to the quest for maximal utility is making a decision. Although this step seems to involve the most economics of balancing costs and benefits, psychology plays a big role as well. In this three-step model for behavioral economics, the basic assumption is that all humans are rational in deciding the options that best maximize their limited resources. However, as research has shown, consumer behavior is very much tied to a lot of irrational factors as well. After all, why do people buy lottery tickets when economically speaking, the chances of winning are like being struck by lightning 7 times? There is a multitude of factors involved in human decision making, some conscious and others not. The role of the mind in making a decision is where the rubber hits the road, and although economic models are helpful for predicting behavior, they would benefit very much from the support of research done in the field of psychology.

Ultimately, I would like to conclude with a final observation about the significance of technology within all this talk about economics. Because resources in life are limited, technology has been and always will be the single most crucial element to maximizing productivity. When I say technology in this case, I am not simply referring to the technologies that have brought about the industrial revolution and ushered in a new era of prosperity. I am not only talking about the computers, the airplanes, the cars, and Blackberries that help us live our lives with greater productivity. I am also talking about the technology of the mind. The mentalities we adopt–our psyche–is our most precious technology. After all, our mindsets determines the habits we develop, the skills we hone, the environments we immerse ourselves in, the people we choose to meet, etc. Ultimately, if we can understand and utilize the technology that is our mind, than we can maximize the utility to everything we do, regardless of the economic factors that try to subject us to certain decisions. The X-factor is in the mind.

Ja-Ja-Ja..Jammin

Missed a good day’s worth of blogging, but that’s okay–I more than made that up with a year’s worth of mopping, wiping, sweeping, and cleaning. Prior to moving out of our humble little studio room, my roommate and I have pretty much neglected the maintenance of the room until the sinks piled with dishes, the tables coated with dust, and the trashcans foamed at the mouth, leaking nonsense out around the top, onto the ground. If it weren’t for moving into a new apartment, I would imagine my roommate and I continuing to live in that room until the room became a biohazard–then, we would simply live symbiotically with the mold and tough it out Darwinian style in a battle for the survival of the fittest. Either that, or we would invite the local elementary school and middle school students to come to our place to collect specimen for the next upcoming science fair. They could mix the black mold from the refrigerator with the brown bacteria collecting around our sink and have those colonies fight it out with the red stuff starting to climb up our shower curtains. It would be epic. First prize for the brave team that dares to accept such a challenge–guaranteed. We could potentially even offer our mold to the highest bidder and make a buck or two off of that; after all, we certainly have enough to go around for quite a while. Maybe we could use that to pay our rent! I digress.

Besides all the icky cleaning work, I also laid aside all of my homework and just took it mentally easy yesterday: I didn’t think about my Philosopher paper, I left all the International Trade materials in a box somewhere (even though I have a gigantic problem set due in three days), I didn’t think about the worldly affairs (even though it was the anniversary of the Tiananmen incident), I didn’t check my email for the entire day, and I didn’t blog. It was one of the most mentally unproductive days of my life. But, for some reason, it was unusually satisfying–satisfying on a deeply visceral level. For one thing, my roommate and I took down a gigantic bed-frame, moved it across the hall in bits and pieces, and put it all back together in an impressive feat of balance, strength, and dexterity. Doesn’t sound too impressive, I know–I would have also thought that if I just read about it on some guy’s blog.  But try it next time. Take it down for real, removing the screws, finding the allen wrench, holding onto metal frames as the perpendicular joints are collapsing on top of your feet, maneuvering it around the halls while not running holes into walls. See if you don’t walk away from the experience feeling reborn in a kind of handyman-esque epiphany. It’s quite exciting.

But in addition to all of that, I would say the most memorable experience of the day was the final jamming session at night. After the scrubbing, after the moving of boxes, after the classes, after the propping up of the bed, after the laundry–after the full-day’s worth of physical, muscle demanding work–my companions and I had a nice, sumptuous Thai dinner. As we slowly walked back to our apartment with our bellies laden with rice and curry, we breathed in the cool night and lived completely in the moment, soaking in the joy of “being” like sponges walking into the ocean. We got home and took our seats on and around the lush, blue sofa. Then with scripted coincidence, the three of us boys took up our guitars as if we were taking up female companions for a dance and came together spontaneously for a song: one man took the mike, the other took up the instrumental, and I, I took the base chords. Just like that, we three Muskateers did our parts and played a coherent and pleasant song. It was my first ever jamming session, as well as my first recording. My creative inspiration has been all but exhausted in that one night–all of my organic, serendipitous energy were focused on that one brief session and manifested as sound waves reverberating around the room, out through the windows, and into the night. We were jammin’.

For Posterity’s Sake

The gate through which Heaven brings calm and peace

has been blocked and barred,

by the chains of machine-gun bullets

strung across the chests of soldiers

with red stars on their caps.

__

In the dark night lit by flashing flares,

the flight of the stampeding mass

sends swirls of dust flying to the air,

sends fathers, mothers, sons and daughters running for air

in the fog of smoke and gunpowder.

__

The rough clay of the Goddess of Democracy,

dashed to bits and pounded to powder,

finds solace in the blood on the ground

where it is no longer white,

but brown with the struggle of the people.

__

20 years past and 7,000 miles away,

a young student of Asian descent,

types trepidly from a land of Democracy:

The man did not stand in way of the tanks–

the tanks stood in the way of the man.