Not quite so welcome

Canada has got a lot of praise recently for its generous attitude towards admitting Syrian refugees. And rightfully so.

But Canadians are not so keen on another group: rich, mainly Chinese immigrants who have been moving into the Vancouver area for years and driving up real estate prices to a more than merely remarkable extent. That real estate boom (and a somewhat different boom in places like Toronto) has a major effect on the national economy as a whole. And it makes it easy to blame foreigners for this unbalanced, potentially perilous situation.

Of course, the word racism comes up, in part because British Columbia has a history of excluding Asian immigrants.

But it's not a simple situation. A recent article in the Globe and Mail discussed at length the fact that different groups of Chinese immigrants don't get along with each other; older immigrants and their children and grandchildren don't feel any great solidarity with new immigrants from other regions.
Here is one Globe and Mail article. There are plenty more. Like this one about the not exactly rich, not necessarily immigrant.

Brad DeLong on who subsidizes who

Brad does not even talk about defense spending.

HALLOWEEN ON THE PRAIRIE: CONGRESSMAN TIM HUELSKAMP IS THE MOST FRIGHTENING THING I WILL SEE ALL DAY

Congressman Tim Huelskamp:

“I’m from a district that pretty much ignores Washington. If you say government is going to shut down, they say, ‘OK, which part can we shut down?’”
--Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, to Associated Press

Farm subsidies! Shut down farm subsidies! Move farm subsidies from the "mandatory entitlements" to the "discretionary appropriations" side of the budget, and Congressman Huelskamp would switch his attachment to government shutdowns with the force of twenty mules!

In an average year, Congressman Huelskamp's First District collects roughly $1.5 billion in farm commodity and crop instance subsidies. There are about 20,000 farmers in the First District.
You do the math: That's $75,000/year per farmer in the district. That's $9,000/year for every family of four living in the district--a district where mean household income is $50,000/year.

I tell you, the Californias and the New Yorks and the Massachusettses... the Bostons and the San Franciscos and the Los Angeleses and the New York Cities... Those Americans who live in such places know that we work hard, and are smart. But we also know that we have been very lucky. And we know that we are Americans. And so we don't really mind having our net tax dollars flow out of our communities to pay for a Medicaid beneficiary in Salinas, KS, or a Social Security recipient in Emporia, KS. We even don't mind that much paying to keep the farms going--we can envision futures in which global warming disrupts crop production in other places and the world is very glad to have Kansas agriculture on-line and tuned-up.[1]

But we do mind Congressman Huelskamp's and his constituents pretending that it does not happen: that the First is a self-reliant rugged-individualist district, rather than one that feeds much more greedily than most via redistribution of what the rest of us produce.

Kevin Kelly says: "Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy."

Want to bet?

Despite the snark, I think this is one of the most interesting articles I've read on the web this year or maybe even last year! (smile)  Some years back I came to the conclusion that the general availability of safe clean water was the measure of civilization. I am not backing off that statement, but Kevin Kelly has made me rethink myself. You should read his article, because it is a great push back on the philistinism of our current age. Potential Picassos are being told to get a job all the time, and the cultural infrastructure built by past Picassos and their fans is being dismantled in the name of both morality and prudence, but mainly productivity.

Take a look at these farm houses which I saw under construction in remote areas of Yunnan province China. They were not unusual; farmsteads this size were everywhere in rural China. Note the scale of these massive buildings. Each support post is cut from a single huge tree. The massive earth walls are three stories high and taper toward the top. They are homes for a single extended family built in the traditional Tibetan farmhouse style. They are larger than most middle-class American homes. The extensive wood carvings inside and outside will be painted in garish colors, like this family room shown in a finished home. This area of Yunnan is consider one of the poorer areas in China, and the standard of living of the inhabitants here would be classified as "poor."
Part of the reason is that these homes have no running water, no grid electricity, and no toilets. They don't even have outhouses.
But the farmers and their children who live in these homes all have cell phones, and they have accounts on the Chinese versions of Twitter and Facebook, and recharge via solar panels.
This is important because a recent thought-provoking article by a renowned economist argues that the US economy has not been growing during the internet boom and probably will not grow any more than it has already because computers and the internet are not as productive as the last two industrial revolutions.


You can read the article here: Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? (PDF) by Robert Gordon.
Gordon answers his own question with: Yes, US economic growth is over for a while. I think Robert Gordon is wrong about his conclusion, but I wanted to start with one of the bits of evidence he offers for his view. He is trying to argue that the consequences of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, which bought to common people electricity and plumbing, was far more important than the computers and internet which the 3rd Industrial Revolution has brought us. (Gordon's 1st Industrial revolution was steam and railroads.) As evidence of this claim he offers this hypothetical choice between option A and option B.

With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002. Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?

Gordon then goes on to say:

I have posed this imaginary choice to several audiences in speeches, and the usual reaction is a guffaw, a chuckle, because the preference for Option A is so obvious.

But as I just recounted, Option A is not obvious at all.
The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. To them, this is not a hypothetical choice at all, but a real one. and they have made their decision in massive numbers. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, if not billions of people in the rest of Asia, Africa and South America have chosen Option B. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers' homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. (I know they don't have a toilet because I've stayed in many of their homes.) But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water.
Most of the poor of the world don't have such access to resources as these Yunnan farmers, but even in their poorer environment they still choose to use their meager cash to purchase the benefits of the 3rd revolution over the benefits of the 2nd revolution. Connection before plumbing. It is an almost universal choice.
This choice may seem difficult for someone who has little experience in the developing world, but in the places were most of the world lives we can plainly see that the fruits of the 3rd generation of automation are at least as, and perhaps more, valuable than some fruits of the 2nd wave of industrialization.
So if people value the benefits of computers and internet so much why don't we see this value reflected in the growth of the US economy? According to Gordon growth has stalled in the internet age. This question was first asked by Robert Solow in 1987 and Gordon's answer is that there are 6 "headwinds," six negative, or contrary forces which deduct growth from the growth due to technology in the US (Gordon reiterates he is only speaking of he US). The six "headwinds" slowing down growth are the aging of the US population, stagnant levels of education, rising inequality, outsourcing and globalization, environmental constraints, and household and government debt. I agree with Gordon about these headwinds, particularly the first one, which he also sees as the most important.
Where Gordon is wrong is his misunderstanding and underestimating of the power of technological growth before it meets these headwinds.
... the 3rd Industrial Revolution is not really computers and the internet, it is the networking of everything.
And in that regime we are just at the beginning of the beginning. We have only begun to connect everything to everything and to make little network minds everywhere. It may take another 80 years for the full affect of this revolution to be revealed.
In the year 2095 when economic grad students are asked to review this paper of Robert Gordon and write about why he was wrong back in 2012, they will say things like "Gordon missed the impact from the real inventions of this revolution: big data, ubiquitous mobile, quantified self, cheap AI, and personal work robots. All of these were far more consequential than stand alone computation, and yet all of them were embryonic and visible when he wrote his paper. He was looking backwards instead of forward."
Finally, Gordon is focused, as most economists, on GDP which measures the amount of "labor saving" that has been accomplished. The more labor you save while making or serving something, the more productive you are. In the calculus of traditional economics productivity equals wealth. Gordon rightly points out that so far the internet has not saved a lot of labor. As I argue in my robot piece in Wired, Better Than Human (not my title), I think the real wealth in the future does not come from saving labor but in creating new kinds of things to do. In this sense long-term wealth depends on making new labor.
Civilization is not just about saving labor but also about "wasting" labor to make art, to make beautiful things, to "waste" time playing, like sports. Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy. The value he added to the economy could not be optimized for productivity. It's hard to shoehorn some of the most important things we do in life into the category of "being productive." Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity -- output per hour -- is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity. That is why science and art are so hard to fund. But they are also the foundation of long-term growth. Yet our notions of jobs, of work, of the economy don't include a lot of space for wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.

 Thanks to Brad DeLong for the heads-up. And Will McLean for this comment.

A stunning pair of images

Over at TomDispatch.com:

How Not to Reconstruct Iraq, Afghanistan -- or America A Guide to Disaster at Home and Abroad By Peter Van Buren

Some images remain like scars on my memory. One of the last things I saw in Iraq, where I spent a year with the Department of State helping squander some of the $44 billion American taxpayers put up to “reconstruct” that country, were horses living semi-wild among the muck and garbage of Baghdad. Those horses had once raced for Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and seven years after their “liberation” by the American invasion of 2003, they were still wandering that unraveling, unreconstructed urban landscape looking, like many other Iraqis, for food.

I flew home that same day, a too-rapid change of worlds, to a country in which the schools of my hometown in Ohio could not afford to pay teachers a decent wage. Once great cities were rotting away as certainly as if they were in Iraq, where those horses were scrabbling to get by. To this day I’m left pondering these questions: Why has the United States spent so much money and time so disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations abroad, while allowing its own infrastructure to crumble untended? Why do we even think of that as “policy”?

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen!

In the midst of what looks like an investment scandal involving a Canadian forestry company active in China, various business writers and commenters are arguing about whether China is now a good place to invest.  There are plenty of China-boosters saying that its economy will go up, up, up, presumably forever; and then there is this writer, who thinks there are good reasons to steer clear, for instance:

Lack of transparency: China is a dictatorship where analysts find it difficult to perform due diligence on prospective investments – just ask any analyst who has tried to research a Chinese company. What’s more, official Chinese statistics are notoriously unreliable, leading some observers, such as Stratfor, a private intelligence consultant, to label the country’s economy an unsustainable Ponzi scheme.

Few China fans address this charge, which should have a lot of force.  Think of all the countries that are not dictatorships and which do have traditions of transparency that had crashes in 2008-9 because large parts of the economy were, despite the advantages of past good governance, Ponzi schemes.

Do you really think that the most powerful people in China, many of whom were raised under Maoism, play fairer than the Icelanders?

Really?

Image:  The great teacher.

Saudi Arabia

Thanks to Feed for Arabist.Net for this excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

Karen Elliott House: From Tunis to Cairo to Riyadh? - WSJ.com:

Thirty years of visiting Saudi Arabia, including intensive reporting over the past four years, convinces me that unless the regime rapidly and radically reforms itself—or is pushed to do so by the U.S.—it will remain vulnerable to upheaval. Despite the conventional wisdom that Saudi Arabia is unique, and that billions in oil revenue and an omnipresent intelligence system allow the regime to maintain power by buying loyalty or intimidating its passive populace, it can happen here.

The many risks to the al Saud family's rule can be summed up in one sentence: The gap between aged rulers and youthful subjects grows dramatically as the information gap between rulers and ruled shrinks. The average age of the kingdom's trio of ruling princes is 83, yet 60% of Saudis are under 18 years of age. Thanks to satellite television, the Internet and social media, the young now are well aware of government corruption—and that 40% of Saudis live in poverty and nearly 70% can't afford a home. These Saudis are living Third World lives, suffering from poor education and unable to find jobs in a private sector where 90% of all employees are imported non-Saudis. Through new media the young compare their circumstances unfavorably with those in nearby Gulf sheikhdoms and the West.

It strikes me that the world as a whole is suffering from a case of a surprisingly small number of really old guys hogging the vast wealth of the modern world, while the young scramble for scraps.   Search for "United States economic inequality" and see what pops up.

Are you smarter than Thomas Jefferson? (My 2000th blog post)

TomDispatch.com is devoted to "resisting empire" by describing aspects of our world that no one else wants to talk about.  It can get pretty depressing in there:  you have to feel strong to immerse yourself in a TomDispatch essay.  (Are you strong enough for this one?)

But a recent piece by actor and dramatist Wallace Shaun goes far beyond the norm.  Key excerpts from Why I Call Myself a Socialist: Is the World Really a Stage? follow.

We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there’s a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he’s playing himself in his daily life, he’s playing a part, he’s performing, just as he’s performing when he plays a part on stage. He knows that when he’s on stage performing, he’s in a sense deceiving his friends in the audience less than he does in daily life, not more, because on stage he’s disclosing the parts of himself that in daily life he struggles to hide. He knows, in fact, that the role of himself is actually a rather small part, and that when he plays that part he must make an enormous effort to conceal the whole universe of possibilities that exists inside him.

Actors are treated as uncanny beings by non-actors because of the strange voyage into themselves that actors habitually make, traveling outside the small territory of traits that are seen by their daily acquaintances as “them.” Actors, in contrast, look at non-actors with a certain bewilderment, and secretly think: What an odd life those people lead! Doesn’t it get a bit—claustrophobic?...

I’ve sometimes noted that many people in my generation, born during World War II, are obsessed, as I am, by the image of the trains arriving at the railroad station at Auschwitz and the way that the S.S. officers who greeted the trains would perform on the spot what was called a “selection,” choosing a few of those getting off of each train to be slave laborers, who would get to live for as long as they were needed, while everyone else would be sent to the gas chambers almost immediately. And just as inexorable as were these “selections” are the determinations made by the global market when babies are born. The global market selects out a tiny group of privileged babies who are born in certain parts of certain towns in certain countries, and these babies are allowed to lead privileged lives. Some will be scientists, some will be bankers. Some will command, rule, and grow fantastically rich, and others will become more modestly paid intellectuals or teachers or artists. But all the members of this tiny group will have the chance to develop their minds and realize their talents.

As for all the other babies, the market sorts them and stamps labels onto them and hurls them violently into various pits, where an appropriate upbringing and preparation are waiting for them. If the market thinks that workers will be needed in electronics factories, a hundred thousand babies will be stamped with the label “factory worker” and thrown down into a certain particular pit. And when the moment comes when one of the babies is fully prepared and old enough to work, she’ll crawl out of the pit, and she’ll find herself standing at the gate of a factory in India or in China or in Mexico, and she’ll stand at her workstation for 16 hours a day... And it’s not that anyone sadly concluded when she was born that she lacked the talent to become, let’s say, a violinist, a conductor, or perhaps another Beethoven. The reason she was sent to the factory and not to the concert hall was not that she lacked ability but that the market wanted workers, and so she was assigned to be one.

 And during the period when all the babies who are born have been sorted into their different categories and labeled, during the period when you could say that they’re being nourished in their pens until they’re ready to go to work, they’re all assigned appropriate costumes. And once they know what costume they’ll wear, each individual is given an accent, a way of speaking, some characteristic personality traits, and a matching body type, and each person’s face starts slowly to specialize in certain expressions which coordinate well with their personality, body type, and costume. And so each person comes to understand what role he will play, and so each can consistently select and reproduce, through all the decades and changes of fashion, the appropriate style and wardrobe, for the rest of his life...

Image:  Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (dramatized).

A new era?

Brazil and China strike a huge energy deal and...Doug Saunders in the Globe and Mail comments:

Brazil saw the swearing-in of a new president, Dilma Rousseff, who is best known for being a former guerrilla rebel against Brazil’s military dictatorship. That was all in the past – a time when the politics and economics of Brazil, and most non-wealthy countries, were entirely defined by relations with the great former colonial powers to the north and west.

In those days, countries like Brazil had a choice: They either sold raw materials and cheap goods at low cost to the Yankees and Europeans and played by their rules, or resisted them with closed borders, Kalashnikovs and command economies.


This was 2011, though, not 1981, so Ms. Rousseff had no need for such a choice. After her inauguration, she immediately set to work boosting export investments in value-added industries and cutting government spending to keep the Brazilian currency from inflating.

She also, tellingly, authorized a deal in which the huge Chinese company State Grid purchased seven of Brazil’s electrical-transmission utilities for $1-billion, essentially putting the country’s electrical-distribution grid under Chinese ownership, even though her government had weeks earlier placed import tariffs on Chinese toys during the Christmas season in order to avoid hurting her country’s trade surplus. In the poor half of the world, trade relations are not a matter of simple tit-for-tat retaliations.

...

I believe we are witnessing the end of the post-colonial era in politics and economics. In China, Brazil and a dozen other countries, the type of thinking known as “post-colonial” – defined as a stark choice between angry resistance or humiliating subservience – has simply ceased to matter in political and business relations.

The post-colonial era began in earnest in the years after the Second World War, when Britain, France and the United States ceased to be formal colonizers, allowing southern and eastern countries to have their own governments (in places like Brazil, it had begun decades earlier). The end of the Cold War and the Soviet empire kicked it into high gear.

Post-colonial governments had responded to the external, commercial and globalized nature of their erstwhile colonial rulers very often by becoming nationalist, closed to trade and investment. Sometimes they were opposed to capitalism itself – witness the waves of Marxist and Maoist regimes that swept across Africa and South America, without Soviet prodding, during the postwar decades. Or they were dictatorial and violent and co-operative with the industries of their former empires.

While post-colonialism clings on in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Zimbabwe and a handful of other places, it has vanished from most of the world with amazing speed.

The rich get richer

One observer's explanation of how it has worked.

Bush's errors, from Foreign Policy -- two worth noting

Foreign Policy  is currently featuring a response by Stephen M. Walt to George W. Bush's self-justifying book on his presidency. 

The FP piece is appropriately subtitled "Don't fall for the nostalgia -- George W. Bush's foreign policy really was that bad." (John Ibbitson, that means you!) Even if you read the news closely from 2000-8, it's worth a look at this list of appalling and criminal actions; all the more so if you avoided the news in that period.

Two items on this list really stick out -- they remind us that domestic policies and inaction by Bush and his gang have undermined American strength in the foreign policy sphere, maybe permanently. This point cannot be repeated too often, though American "leaders" show little awareness and interest. Here are those items, with my emphasis:

11. Hurricane Katrina. It takes a truly spectacular domestic-policy blunder to register as a foreign-policy screw-up, too. Yet Bush's bungled response to Hurricane Katrina was exactly that. Observers around the world saw this debacle as both a demonstration of waning U.S. competence and a revealing indicator of continued racial inequality, if not outright injustice. (You know you've screwed up when you get offers of relief aid from Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.) Because America's "soft power" depends on other states believing that we know what we are doing and that we stand for laudable ideals, the disaster in New Orleans was yet another self-inflicted blow to America's global image. If the United States cannot take good care of its own citizens, why should anyone think we can "nation-build" in some distant foreign land?


14. The Crash Heard 'Round the World. By lowering taxes while waging costly wars, Bush produced near-record fiscal deficits and a mountain of foreign debt. At the same time, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's easy money policy encouraged a vast real estate bubble that eventually collapsed in 2008. Bush's economic team also paid little attention to regulating Wall Street, thereby facilitating the reckless behavior that produced a major financial collapse in 2008. The resulting meltdown cost Americans trillions of dollars and millions of jobs, and the aftermath will affect U.S. economic prospects for many years to come.

Although Bush does not deserve all the blame for causing the greatest recession since the 1930s, he was in charge when it happened and his actions contributed significantly to the debacle. And because international influence ultimately rests upon a state's economic strength, the damage wrought by this economic crisis may be Bush's most enduring foreign-policy legacy.

Brazil!

Saith the BBC:

Number-crunchers say rising incomes have catapulted more than 29 million Brazilians into the middle class during the eight-year presidency of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former trade unionist elected in 2002.

Hope?

For a story about hope in America, this is extraordinarily discouraging:

Mr. Fetterman’s solace is that Braddock has likely fallen as far as it can: the town’s only remaining large employer, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, closed its hospital here earlier this year, taking more than 600 jobs with it. (One woman noted sourly that UPMC even yanked its shrubbery out of the landscaping.)

This recent article takes the most optomistic view it  can (after years of well-based pessimism at  the same site):

So take some pleasure in this: our troops are coming home and you’re going to see it happen.  And in the not so very distant future it won’t be our job to “police” the world or be the “global sheriff.” And won’t that be a relief?  We can form actual coalitions of equals to do things worth doing globally and never have to organize another “coalition of the billing,” twisting arms and bribing others to do our military bidding.

Since by the time we get anywhere near such a world, our leaders will have run this country into the ground, it’s hard to offer the traditional three cheers for such a future.  But how about at least one-and-a-half prospective cheers for the possible return of perspective to our American world, for a significant lessening, even if not the decisive ending, of an American imperial role and of the massive military “footprint” that goes with it.

It’s going to happen.  Put your money on it.

And thank you, George W. Bush (though I never thought I’d say that), you’ve given an old guy a shot at seeing the fruits of American decline myself.  I’m looking forward.

If you are Irish...

..is one good generation all you get?

Image: Canada's gain.

A nod to China

I generally don't say much about China, since I don't teach China save occasionally in World History. Shame on me.

I felt I could not overlook this Daily Kos diary about the reaction to a wave of suicides in Foxconn's very, very large electronics factory in Shenzhen (see image showing a Foxconn produced motherboard from a couple of years back). The diary cites this New York Times article, which I excerpt:

The Foxconn Technology Group, a giant contract electronics manufacturer that experienced a series of worker suicides, said it would raise salaries by at least 30 percent, more than previously indicated.

...

“It’s been a while since we increased wages, hence the decision,” Mr. Ding said on Wednesday. The company supplies Apple, Hewlett-Packard and other large technology companies.

At least 10 people have died this year at Hon Hai’s manufacturing complex in Shenzhen, and the police are treating the deaths as suicides.

Foxconn’s chairman has rejected accusations from labor rights groups that the firm is a sweatshop and last week opened the Shenzhen plant to the media.

According to the DK diary, there has been a wave of strikes in China. See the diary for more information.

Huge export-oriented factories controlled by the communist elite of China have been a key factor in the world economy for quite some time now. If these strikes are being met by concessions, this could have a big impact on us all. It does make me wonder what is behind them.

It's hard being an oligarch, out on the street.

Magical thinking -- a scary survey of the present crisis

Allan Gregg talks to Chris Hedges on his book Empire of Illusion. Thanks to Arabist.net for drawing my attention to this TVOntario interview.

"The crisis we are in"

I thought I did not have an hour to listen to Stephen S. Cohen talk about his recent book with Brad DeLong, The End of Influence: What happens when other countries have the money. But I was wrong.

A creaky old country

That's what I sometimes think when I read the news out of the USA. The most recent exhibit is a column by Bob Herbert in the New York Times:

Two weeks ago, as I was getting ready to take off for Palo Alto, Calif., to cover a conference on the importance of energy and infrastructure for the next American economy, The Times’s Keith Bradsher was writing from Tianjin, China, about how the Chinese were sprinting past everybody else in the world, including the United States, in the race to develop clean energy.

That we are allowing this to happen is beyond stupid. China is a poor country with nothing comparable to the tremendous research, industrial and economic resources that the U.S. has been blessed with. Yet they’re blowing us away — at least for the moment — in the race to the future.

Our esteemed leaders in Washington can’t figure out how to do anything more difficult than line up for a group photo. Put Americans back to work? You must be kidding. Health care? We’ve been working on it for three-quarters of a century. Infrastructure? Don’t ask.

It really is a disgrace that China with all its resource problems and under the leadership of the Communist Party seems to have a much more forward-thinking attitude about some really basic stuff. It's like Americans have given up on practicality in favor of theological conflict -- about evolution, marriage equality, and "don't ask, don't tell."

Thanks to Brad DeLong for the heads-up.

Dictionary of Traded Goods and Commodities, 1550-1820

British History Online has webbed a searchable version of this reference work, for serious research or serious fun.

Image: Market Hill in St. Edmundsbury, 1700.

Nine nations: A China primer

I will be away from blogging till at least the weekend, so I came to the computer today feeling some obligation to leave you with something good. I was completely uninspired until Brad DeLong -- again -- came to the rescue by providing me with a link to Patrick Chovanec's Atlantic article on the Nine Nations of China. Like Mr. Chovanec, I was influenced by the 1981 book by Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America, in which he redivided Canada and the United States into economic and cultural areas that more reflected reality than the international and state/provincial divisions on most maps. It was a fresh approach that has since gone stale, as lazy people keep referring to it like nothing important has changed since the 1970s. But once again it renders yeoman service by inspiring this new article. I do not endorse the authority of the Nine Nations of China, since I'm about two or three steps above simple ignorance, but I found it interesting. Here's an excerpt:

This week, President Obama makes his first state visit to China. What kind of country will he find there? We tend to imagine China as a monolith: 1.3 billion people sharing the same language, history, and culture. The truth is far more interesting. China is a mosaic of several distinct regions, each with its own resources, dynamics, and historical character.

As a traveler, teacher, and professional investor who has been exploring China since 1986, I’ve come to think of these regions as the Nine Nations of China (inspired, in part, by Joel Garreau’s Nine Nations of North America). Taken individually, these “nations” would account for eight of the 20 most populous countries in the world.

As China’s economy becomes more integrated, these regional differences are taking on greater importance than ever before.

This is your planet -- Pushkar Fair, Rajasthan, India

Pictures of the great annual camel and livestock fair from The Big Picture.