Burning memories

I had a whole bunch of classmates from South Korea when I was in graduate school.  My dissertation guide referred to them as the Korean mafia, for the manner in which they operated as a tight group.

Thanks to the military service, I think, they were typically two to five years older than me.  A couple of them were married, and at least one had a kid, as I recall now decades later.  One guy went to Vegas one weekend and came back about 3,000 dollars richer!!!   He took me to a Korean BBQ restaurant, which was quite an experience.  Another guy always had a nice car, in which we went to Santa Barbara for a conference.  He took me to the Chart House in Malibu, which was a huge deal for the starving graduate student that I was. 

One of the mafia guys emailed me a few years ago.  Some how he tracked me down.  "Do you remember me?" he asked.  Like I could have forgotten them all!  In the warm email recalling old classmates, he wrote that the mafia was doing well, with a majority of them in academia.  He himself was a university provost.  "If you have a chance to visit Korea, these Mafia will really welcome you," he added.

With two of them, I recall having had discussions about culture and art and movies.  Boy would it be a pleasure to find out what they thought about Burning.

The movie has plenty of intellectual stuff to talk about.  The urban-rural divide that was so much a part of the graduate school discussions.  Income and wealth inequality.  The role of women in society.  North Korea, which is only a stone's throw away from Seoul.

And personal matters too.  Did one of my old classmates ever find out whatever happened to the grandparents and his eldest sibling who were left behind in North Korea, and whom his parents never saw again?  What are the mafia's kids up to, and what do they think about Burning?  Do they smoke cigarettes even now like how they used to in grad school?

In the journey of life, we are fellow passengers for a while.  We exit at different places and continue on with our separate travels.  Rarely do we travel together again.  

I am glad that I traveled for a while with the Korean mafia.

An organic way of life

We didn't have a refrigerator at home when we were kids.  In the near-equatorial conditions, and in a vegetarian household, that meant buying vegetables practically every other day.  Because potatoes are more tolerant than most other vegetables, they were stored in a dark corner and were often the option if a guest showed up un-announced--after all, those were also the days before emails and telephones, and relatives did knock on the door without a heads-up.

For whatever reason, I liked involving myself in the kitchen affairs.  Not that I cooked back then.  But, I think I had far more interest than the typical boy did in how the food preparation happened. Perhaps my mother has forgotten me asking her questions like why we needed half-a-kilo of the vegetable and not more.  Like my grandmother, I too was always impressed with how my mother seemed to cook the exact quantity for a meal; rare was a day when we ended up with more food.

In that kind of an old lifestyle, only the needed fruits and vegetables and milk were purchased, and they were all consumed.  Food was never wasted.  Never.

I wonder if my interested involvement with those household affairs is also why I continue with some of those old practices.  Even in my life on the other side of the planet from the old country, I seem to do grocery shopping every other day.  But, hey, I rarely ever have to throw food into the trash can!

But, of course, I have the organic waste to deal with.  Everything from banana and orange peels to coffee grinds and more.  A few months ago, our garbage collection service introduced collecting food waste for recycling.  M bought me a stainless steel compost bin for the kitchen.  Into that bin goes the banana and orange peels and coffee grinds.  Thanks to all that, the regular trash bag rarely gets filled anymore even for the biweekly service!

So, of course, I was immediately drawn to this essay in The New Yorker.  It is all about recycling organics.  You know, like the food stuff and more that affluent societies casually throw out.  "South Korea recycles ninety-five per cent of its food waste."  That.Is.Amazing!!!  At the other end is New York City, for instance:

recycling of organics—food waste, yard waste, pretty much anything that rots—remains voluntary, even though such material makes up about a third of New York’s trash. All but five per cent of the city’s organic waste goes to landfills.

There is a reason that we worry about the organics that go to landfills:

Organic waste doesn’t just stink when it’s sent to landfills; it becomes a climate poison. Yes, we’ve been schooled again and again in the importance of recycling—by friends, by pious enemies, even by “Wall-E.” But the recycling of organics is arguably more important than that of plastics, metal, or paper. Composting transforms raw organic waste into a humus-like substance that enriches soil and enhances carbon capture. In landfills, starved of oxygen, decomposing organics release methane, a greenhouse gas whose warming effects, in the long run, are fifty-six times those of CO₂. The United States has greater landfill emissions than any other country, the equivalent of thirty-seven million cars on the road each year.

USA! USA! USA!

The thirteen thousand tons of food waste produced daily in South Korea now become one of three things: compost (thirty per cent), animal feed (sixty per cent), or biofuel (ten per cent). “People from other countries ask me very often, ‘How did South Korea achieve this success?’ ”

Read the essay to find out how South Korea managed to do this.  And what every one of us can do about this important issue, irrespective of where we live on this pale blue dot.

PS: The essay ends with a wonderful note on the globalized lives that we lead.  The South Korean interpreter, Lucia Lee, laments about her boyfriend's problem that there's not much that he can eat in South Korea because ...  He is a Jain.  Yes, a Jain. From India.  Isn't life beautiful!

(Mis)Reading history: North Korea v. South Korea, and India v. China

As a graduate student in the late 1980s, which feels like a lifetime ago, I came across quite a few studies that contrasted two pairs of countries for their development trajectories: India and China, and the two Koreas.

Back then, the divergence between India and China--at least on the economic scene--was just about emerging.  The Korean situation, however, was very clear: North Korea was rapidly falling behind South Korea's success.

That divergence between the two Koreas is clear in the chart below, which I picked up from Daniel Drezner's blog:

The divergence was obvious to us grad students only because we were looking at it after the roads had forked.  Drezner quotes Nicholas Eberstadt,

Around the time of Mao Zedong's death (1976), North Korea was more educated, more productive and (by the measure of international trade per capita) much more open than China. Around that same time, in fact, per capita output in North Korea and South Korea may have been quite similar. Today, North Korea has the awful distinction of being the only literate and urbanized society in human history to suffer mass famine in peacetime. 

and then wisely suggests that we keep such charts in mind:

whenever anyone confidently asserts the obvious superiority of a particular model of political economy.  Because, I assure you, there was a point in time when such superiority was far from obvious.

One of my professors from grad school, Peter Gordon, notes in his blog post, which is also on very much a similar point:

It is a cliche that you can never know enough history.  Picking up on Smith, North, Acemoglu, Lal and others, we see that economists can never know enough history. 

Yep. In many posts, like in this one, I have explored the contrasts between India and China.  Yes, there is enormous divergence now.  But, imagine if there is one heck of an unraveling of the Chinese social contract, and the Communist Party loses control, leading to economic declines similar to what happened to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union ... Looking back in time after such a situation, will the divergence be that obvious?

US falls behind Mexico. And that is the good news!

The Economist, which was the source for this graph, also notes:

Asian OECD countries Japan and South Korea are the leanest. Governments will count the eventual cost: health-care spending on an obese person is 25% more than for someone of average weight. And the problem is not confined to the rich world. In rapidly developing countries such as China, Brazil and India obesity rates, though still low, are growing fast as the dietary habits of the ever-increasing middle classes change.

Market down. Korea tense. Euro burns. So ...?

More here
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Take the dog for a wok?

"The right to eat cats and dogs is under threat" in China, reports the Economist.
My question for the magazine: whatever happened to coming up with punny headlines?  Missed an opportunity for linking dog and "wok" :)

The proposed law would make the “illegal consumption or sale” of dog- or cat-meat punishable by a fine of up to 5,000 yuan ($730) or imprisonment for up to 15 days. But opponents are still many and vociferous both in the press and online. Dog-eating, they argue, is a time-honoured tradition and China is not yet ready for Western-style prissiness about consuming such animals. Perhaps, they suggest hopefully, the word “illegal” could be taken to mean that there might still be a legal way of killing cats and dogs for the table.

A couple of years ago, students in one of my classes asked me about the "holy cow" and, therefore, not much of a beef market in India.  I then engaged them in a discussion, and followed up with a comment that what we eat is culturally determined.

I then asked them how we might draw the line--what is it that prevented them from eating dogs?  The students seemed to be appalled that I would even ask such a question.

I  sensed that I had detected a chink in their armor, and went for the next step.  I asked them if they would be ok with having immigrant neighbors--immigrants from, say, South Korea, whose dog one day disappeared because, well, it became food.  If we banned eating dogs here, then couldn't we use that same law to ban eating chicken and beef as well?  Boy, I could see in their eyes that they wished they had never brought up the holy cow question :)

Let me refer you back to an old posting on eating dog meat ...

The "real" Asian Tiger ...

Consider this excerpt:

An economy that in the 1960s had a per capita income on a par with sub-Saharan Africa is now snapping at the heels of Britain and France.

Forty-plus years, and a poor country is now, for all purposes, a rich one.  And that country is ....
South Korea.

Its economy is practically as big as India’s even with a population less than one-twentieth the size. It exports more goods than the UK, a statistic admittedly more surprising to those who are aware that Britain still makes things. Samsung, not long ago considered a poor-man’s Sony, overhauled Hewlett-Packard last year to become the world’s biggest technology company by sales.

I had a whole bunch of classmates from South Korea when I was in grad school.  My dissertation guide, Harry, refers to them as the Korean mafia--no, they are not into illegal activities.  All those guys are doing really well as academics and policy wonks, and remain well networked.  Good for them, I say.  One guy took me to a Korean BBQ restaurant, which was quite an experience.  With another guy I remember going to the Chart House--this one was by Malibu.  One guy went to Vegas one weekend and came back about 3,000 dollars richer!!!  All those guys seemed to have quite some loose change in their pockets, while I was always scrambling for money :)

Growth of Broadband, versus growth of Railroads

Came across this table in Brad DeLong's blog.

What a fantastic growth rate in merely 30 years!

I wish our broadband speeds had gone up at such growth rates! I think we got DSL connections in Bakersfield about nine, maybe even ten years, ago. Yet, the connection to the internet today does not seem to be that much faster than what it was a decade ago.

How much have we fallen behind in broadband speeds? Too far :-(

USA Today reports that "The median U.S. download speed now is 1.97 megabits per second — a fraction of the 61 megabits per second enjoyed by consumers in Japan, says the report released Monday. Other speedy countries include South Korea (median 45 megabits), France (17 megabits) and Canada (7 megabits).
"We have pathetic speeds compared to the rest of the world," CWA President Larry Cohen says. "People don't pay attention to the fact that the country that started the commercial Internet is falling woefully behind."