Another objection, albeit anecdotal: every ten years China conducts a national census. At first this struck me as an efficient process, given that local bureaus can rely on Neighborhood Committees (another holdover from the communist period, sort of the state-sanctioned equivalent of a community organization) to send people around to all of the homes within the neighborhood to gather detailed demographic information.

So alone I sit one Sunday afternoon minding my own business. A loud knock comes at the door – and behold, it is a demographer, one of the older neighbor ladies who has been tasked with surveying residents. I open the door, “Oh” – she says “You’re not from around here. So you’re renting?” We go through her list – she wants to know I.D. number (“Oh that’s right you people don’t have those”), marital status, education, employment, name, age, home address (“Are you sure Pie-uh-nee-ar (Pioneer) Road doesn’t have Chinese characters? I need to write Chinese characters.”) After collecting what she wants, she heads off, and I return to my previous engagement.

About an hour later she comes back – I open the door and she says “Oh. Oh yeah wait. I was here already. SORRY!” No worries – there are lots of buildings, and many Unit 202s here in sunny Bamboo-Park-New-Village.

Another hour passes, and she returns a third time. This time it’s “OHHH darn I’m wrong again. I’ve already talked to you. I’m sorry.”

If we assume that grandma-citizen-demographer was average, then it stands to reason that even something as basic as the census might have considerable upward bias, purely from being oversampled by a factor of three. And hereafter, Shanghai’s population suddenly triples. National planners develop ulcers. The world again is astounded by China’s rapid growth.

Other real estate: on a crappy NYT story note, this fine piece of journalism chronicles the very authentic experience of Mrs. Bradford, an American who moves to sleepy exotic Shanghai and lives in an ~Rmb13,200 flat (well above the monthly income of an average Shanghainese resident) which she furnished for USD15,000 (roughly the equivalent to two years’ worth of income for, again, your average Shanghainese family). It sounds like a nice place, though calling it ‘authentic’ is nauseating, even if it is in the real estate section. They should know that going native in Shanghai means living in a 1980s Communist cement edifice for USD200 a month and slaying cockroaches with one’s bare hands.

Rather than shed light on human behavior, popular press reports on these topics seem to draw a lot of their appeal from the fact that mainstream evo psych arguments allow perfectly respectable publications/people, like the NYT Magazine, to publish articles about vanilla rape fantasies, which they might not otherwise be so inclined to do. The fact that there needs to be intellectual cover to discuss otherwise taboo practices is itself a more interesting comment on human behavior.

That’s not to say that some of these arguments aren’t valid: I don’t know, I’m neither an evolutionary biologist nor an anthropologist. Neither are 90% of the other peddlers of this material, however. These arguments are instead used to provide cover for, say, vain metrosexual dieting fads that allow modern interpretations of vestigial lifestyles to take on very modern conceptions of machismo. Sure our distant ancestors might have hunted mastadons and ate lots of berries. They also had very short life expectancies.

Many of the objections seem blindingly simple: why are some gay men be enamored with rape fantasies, if the appeal stems from female survivability in an era of common violence? It seems more likely that people find agency-free boning very appealing. Or, if us v. them tribal mentalities really are to blame for an inherent fear of foreigners, why does the modern definition of national and ethnic identification often expand to millions (or, a billion over here) of people. Deeply ingrained tribal loyalty would extend to, at maximum, 100-200 people, suggesting that modern political systems could only function among competing groups of angry-Michigander militia. Obviously the interaction of cultural and biological factors are at work in any type of social organization, though the popular sci evo psych arguments are much more absolute, and their authors rarely attempt to navigate any tension between the two.

So, dear readers, here’s the challenge: use absolute evo psych arguments to answer as many questions asked of you as possible. For example, respond to “what are you having for dinner” with “given thousands of years of my ancestors living in a tribal context my ancestors needed to rely on the women of the group to provide daily sustenance in the form of fruits and figs. So get in the kitchen, woman, and forage me some fruits and figs.”

Your logic will be irrefutable. The NYT might even come and quote you.

The experiment was only partially successful. A great deal of random information consumption was just moved to work (though the bulk of what I read is finance/economics related anyway, so guilt levels remain at a minimum). With the newfound free time in the evenings, I found myself not reading/studying more but rather going out and socializing, a lot. More bluntly: the primary substitutable activities for time-spent-looking-at-twitter appear to be humping and drinking.

Ignoring online social networks was therefore very good for my actual social life. As for big deep thoughts: no dice. More sleep though, without the constant nag of “something interesting might be happening somewhere.”

It was annoying to try to do non-work related organization activities or find maps for bars/restaurants (Shanghai being not quite so conveniently organized as your average American city). It was also a pain to upload photographs, and blog (lots of trips to cafes).

Conclusion: though not entirely surprising, moderation is key. OCD-prone users like myself should therefore seek methods to limit what technology can do, potentially using applications like Temptation Blocker to improve short-term productivity. If lifestyle permits, periodic stints of completely ignoring information technology seem very relaxing. Learning how to avoid readreadread compulsions while still having access to email and lifestyle information seems the optimal scenario for type-A obssessicons. Intentionally limiting what a home device can do might achieve some of these same ends (a la iPad). The ability to customize everything is anathema to a more focused and (imho) more comfortable lifestyle.

And one with a more lenient filter:

The second situation is more threatening from a freedom-of-information perspective, in that individuals interested in accessing only certain sensitive information will find ways to evade the firewall but never make the leap to having complete online freedom (certain proxies work at certain times for certain sites. A full VPN, on the other hand, typically requires actually paying for overseas bandwidth but also provides total access). Whether full access is worthwhile will depend on whether someone can satisfy enough of their preferences within the limited regime. Total information access might simply not be worth it.

To be fair, this discussion is already focusing on a minority of Chinese internet users. Most are completely happy to chat on QQ and pick digital crops with their Happy Farmer Friends, and could really care less about spending much time gathering news and information online. This minority is non-trivial, however, in the sense that they are more likely to be educated, and will be (if not already are) in decision making roles.

My prior assumption is that (even among the liberal educated minority) Zhou-everyman is much more interested in the seemingly banal (finding images of scantily clad women, say) than in fact checking recent news stories or looking up details of Tian@nmen.* If s/he is able to satisfy the first preference, then s/he will not spend much more effort to gain total access. Those who gain total access (for the purpose of the seemingly banal) also have the ancillary capacity to access other information; presumably the ultimate goal of freedom of information proponents.

Stark contrasts within the Chinese intranet vis-a-vis the global world wide web, then, might motivate a larger number of Chinese internet users to seek out total access to information. Providing stepping stones along the way could potentially harm long-term information exposure.

* Confirmation bias: after gaining access to a VPN, the first thing I did was look at lolcats and failblog, both of which are blocked. I have yet to access anything that would be considered extremely sensitive in the eyes of Chinese authorities. Frankly, F@lunG0ng is kind of boring.

Moments later, the whole bottle goes into a big cup; I of course drink the it all to avoid being rude (seriously when was the last time a 60 year old poured you a bottle full of liquor?) Dinner is good, and the interaction not as awkward as it could have been. I learn how they came to own several flats in Pudong, and how the mother and two grandparents subsist entirely off of the daughter’s very modest income.

Having previously explained at length to the pair that foreign men are generally very bad dating prospects (pump-and-dump versus pumping out babies) it’s sort of amazing that they are so persistent. This time the mother assured me that she simply wanted a starter boyfriend of sorts, despite continued protestations. “You can start from friends!” she assured me.

Many young Chinese women behave as though they are strapped with an explosive that will detonate if they reach 30 and are unmarried. At least their parents often seem to think so. Though this behavior seems out of place among persistently aloof Westerners, Robin Hanson points out that egg count decreases to approximately 12% by age 30, with steep declines each year thereafter. He ponders a different equilibrium, where women have kids much younger and delay career/grad school until age 28+, in order to produce healthier children (or simply, more children among certain demographics, which is something the developed world badly needs). This is not to say that planned birth policy is the answer (as China has in fact done), merely to question why the status quo appears to be sub-optimal from the perspective of long-term survivability.

Perhaps aggressive landlady, with her old-lady ways, is on to something.

The level of umbrage stemming from non-phone-call answering is approximately equivalent to what we gringos might feel if someone ignores our voice message for several days. Of course, gringos here are given more of a free pass to not pick up their cell phone. Personally I expect that someone will text if they have something important to say. Instead, they will just keep calling – seven, eight, nine times in a row – for a perfectly normal, unimportant message. This sort of tyrany is why people answer their cell phones in the movie theater, during a large dinner banquet, or while speeding through traffic on an electric motor-trike. Mass data analysis corroborates this phenomenon:

Typing in “girlfriend” reveals several interesting results, including, “what should I do if my girlfriend doesn’t answer her cell phone?” [answer: call again later; or better yet text her saying git in the kitchen and boil me some noodles]. A woman’s failure to answer the phone in this instance denies the simpering mainland lad the opportunity to profess his undying love for the fourth time that day; and obviously means that the girl in question 1) no longer loves the young Chinese man and won’t let him carry her handbag anymore or 2) she’s cheating on him at that very moment and 1 will logically follow.

So, when in China, always answer your phone.

The US is in the midst of a structural shift, and it won’t be “green jobs” that save us (and foible the Chinese simultaneously). The article illustrates some of the difficulty with actually getting there, however.

Since most training occurs on the job, why not just give the Pell Grants to Microsoft for hiring a new engineer? The simple answer is probably that 1) people being considered for such a position aren’t those who need it and 2) changing the status of the subsidized institution (to a company) would probably lead to similar system-gaming behavior.

She is of course correct: it is easier to find scantily clad people on Google than on Baidu, though this is due to the efficiency of Google’s search algorithms vis-a-vis Baidu, not simply because it’s foreign, and all foreigners are smutty (though that’s a fairly prevalent meme as well).

I often struggle with making interesting, lasting friendships with ‘locals,’ who I (intolerantly) define as Chinese nationals who don’t speak English and and have no strong interest to learn about global affairs. Were I able to do so effectively, it would be possible to gather more information on a broader range of perspectives.

As a result, expats living here often suffer from a ‘foreign-friendly-exposure’ bias, even if the interactions are conducted in Mandarin, for the simple reason that people are interested in talking to us are much more likely to be politically liberal. The only instances of lasting relationships with a ‘genuine local’ I know of are where people are able to substitute very specific interests (like making out) in place of the cultural gap. Sort of depressing that there seems to be no middle ground.

Americans are a rather unhealthy people, which might be one of the reasons why we spend 17% of income on healthcare. Yet here I am, an unhealthy American, outside of the US, and actuarial giants such as AXA, AIG, and Ping’an are telling me (through a price mechanism) that I’m going to pay much less purely by the fact that I’m not in the US.

This is probably some part of a wider argument on healthcare policy in general. It does seem that if moratoriums on pre-existing conditions were illegal, insurers would need to raise prices significantly across the board. Effectively they would need to assume everyone is slightly less healthy than previous actuarial models suggested. This is because healthy people will generally know their health condition (or the converse, marginally unhealthy people will probably have better access to that information than a potential insurer), the optimal course of action would be to have a very inexpensive, emergency only plan to begin with. If something that is considered a pre-existing condition emerges, immediately switch to a higher priced, more inclusive plan. If insurers are prevented from price discriminating on the basis of (already limited) actuarial information, they will inevitably be forced to raise prices on all participants in the scheme to make the system solvent. Whether there is some efficiency loss between the two regimes is an empirical question, one which I’m not remotely qualified to address. If no efficiency loss: nationalize everyone. Even better, cover everyone in the world, since the best rates would be possible by covering as large a population as possible (and you get better data). If there is an efficiency loss, then the (socially equitable) course would be to have healthy people pay a tax to subsidize the difference in cost to provide coverage for the unhealthy people. Doing so would, it seems, maintain actuarial standards and provide better pricing across the board.

All theory anyway, and entirely unfeasible given path dependence. If one is young and healthy and American: leave North America and get health care elsewhere. Chances are you won’t need bypass surgery. Foreigners do most other health procedures rather well. In the meantime ancillary factors (walking everywhere) will probably make one happier and healthier. Return home *after* smog induced lung cancer develops.

Initial results: much removed from the pressure of feeling like something-sort-of-interesting-somewhere is being missed, one is free to pursue slower activities, such as cooking and sleeping. Health benefits are probably balanced: time spent exercising will probably increase though alcohol intake also appears to increase commensurately with boredom. Overall diet will probably improve.

My hope is that the results of this experiment will: 1) shed light on what daily life was like for my parent’s generation, 2) better help manage content filtering and aggregation in the future. I have the luxury of not being tied to a Blackberry at this stage in my career. Learning how to limit information consumption would seem critical for future mental health, if these trends continue.

There’s no direct link to Chinese gender issues aside from anecdotes; in general I consider China to still be a very patriarchal society, though men don’t seem to fit the modern definition of masculinity at all. Despite popular narratives of manly aboriginal hunters, extreme gender identities are a modern product of wealth and higher income levels. China’s gender imbalance, unique in the world in terms of its scale, will be felt most acutely amongst the very poor, the results decidedly uncomfortable for men and women at the bottom of the social ladder. Still, a visit to an internet cafe or university dormitory filled with better-off urbanites reveals the zeal with which a large swath of young mainland men have for the most exquisite forms of escapism. Something is certainly not right. Surely talking to girls is more interesting than getting to level 70.

Back to the US: it would be nice to figure out exactly what is going on. If decreased income prospects for men make marriage a more insecure institution by increasing the probability of divorce, and if single-parent households have deleterious effects on children, finding a way out of the cycle seems extremely important. Having been a stupid-mistake-prone adolescent male, it would seem very useful to adopt a different set of strategies when raising adolescent males, such that they do not make similar stupid mistakes, especially if alternate child raising tactics are relatively cheap to implement. Bearing the above in mind, I’m personally not convinced the problem is as simple as a “generation of men raised by women,” though existing social problems that gave rise to that idea are certainly going to be exacerbated by these economics trends if gender norms don’t radically change (evolution being terribly slow in reprogramming our desires.)

Marriage as an institution for child rearing seems more personally relevant as of late, having hit the age where biological clocks start ticking. Numerous 20-something female Western and progressive Shanghainese friends lament the dearth of actual interested date requests they receive, presumably to placate some sort of nagging evolutionary desire to feel pursued. The expectation, it seems, is for males to take the socially aggressive role while simultaneously being emotionally sensitive enough to… Not quite sure to what end. Learning to walk this kind of tightrope perhaps requires further maturation. Until then, numerous males my age will probably continue to be intentionally aloof. Gender equality in that sense may end up meaning universally equivalent odds when playing the see who we wake up next to today roulette. No idea what this might mean for the long-term efficacy of social taboos for child rearing. Perhaps it has always been this way, and we’ve only now the luxury of noticing it.

As usual I question whether the effort spent on in-kind aid wouldn’t have been more efficiently allocated by simply giving money to charity; contra argument is that it’s harder to motivate people to simply give money and, more importantly, it’s a lot easier to embezzle money than heavy sack-o’-rice, so China-dwellers might be much less trusting. There’s also probably a multiplier effect among your volunteer group also, since money is crass and food is necessary to live. There were two other groups at different Carrefour stores, between the three I believe 1700kg of foodstuff was collected.

People seemed very positive, overall it didn’t seem very different from an average food drive in the U.S. Some people ignored us completely; others donated a lot. Observations: Old couples tended to be very curious, and asked at length what we were doing/why we were doing it. Several people pointed out that they were “members of disadvantaged group, why aren’t you helping us?” People responded better when we indicated that we were affiliated with an international charity rather than a Shanghai charity. Likelihood of donation increased if subject was part of a couple, especially if they had a child.

One long conversation I had with an older Shanghainese man went something like this: “So where you all from?” – “I’m from the U.S. and she’s from Venezuela.” – “Oh. So why are helping Chinese people?” – “Global development is important.” – “Oh. Okay. What do I do?”

Generous and wonderful people everywhere.