Continue to be amazed with how direct certain aspects of Chinese social taboos are. Ex-landlady (the one who’s been trying to find a man for her daughter) calls and says, “say Tongli, you forgot some stuff at your old place. When can you come over and get it?” I arrive, grab stuff, and ex-landlady says, “why don’t you stay for dinner with us?” Inner monologue: well this will probably be awkward but I do like free food and it would be solid language practice. So I stay, and the daughter notes that she saw wine bottles in my old flat, concluding that I enjoy the occasional spirit, and offers some Korean sake. “Sure I’ll have a little bit,” I declare.

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.

One aspect of China that I’ve had some difficulty adjusting to are the prevailing taboos around cell phone use. The most significant difference is that one must always answer their phone. This seems to be the result of having no voice mail (not sure why, since it doesn’t seem difficult to implement from a technical perspective.) I have, for example, seen mile long riot acts read to a friend [in text message form] after they fail to answer their local lady friend’s cell phone call while eating dinner with me [note - the proper, culturally sensitive response in this instance is: 'woman git in the kitchen and boil me some noodles']. The only time that someone is allowed not to answer their phone is if they ‘are in an important meeting with their boss’ (direct from earlier riot act).

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.

Those of us who are vehemently pro-globalization often gloss over transitional effects from job losses: Pareto optimality isn’t much of a consolation if you’re the one losing the job. This NYT article provides an overview of problems associated with career schools in the US, the likes of ITT Tech. Vocational education should allow people whose job prospects have been creatively destroyed to find new, higher-on-the-value chain jobs.

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.

Dinner conversation with some young women from Chongqing, censorship comes up. Recently the government has been cracking down on all sorts of licentiousness. One of the ladies mentioned that she strongly supported these efforts (especially online cens0rship), since “yellow material can damage the development of young people, especially men.” This would, in turn, make it harder for her to find husband material later on. She continued, “especially foreign sites like Google have lots of yellow material.”

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.

Oh how it tickles to shop for private health insurance. Nationalize me, will you?! What I’m finding is that: comprehensive health coverage is very affordable for young expats. Most of the plans I’ve examined feature no co-pay at all for outpatient or emergency procedures, and even cover acupuncture and moxibustion at elite Chinese medicine clinics. These are available through most major multinational insurers and allow one to go to international-level hospitals anywhere in the world (outside of the US), and run about USD1,300-1,800 per year, which is certainly less than 17% of income. If the plan includes US coverage, it goes up by about 60%. These plans do not provide coverage for procedures relating to pre-existing conditions for a 24-month moratorium.

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.

Though I’ve never watched it, the premise behind Frontier House is that families try to survive using only technologies and methods available in the 1800s. Similarly, I’ve often wondered what life was like before the internet, I’ve decided to conduct a similar experiment and spend a few weeks without high speed internet access at the new home. This is in response to personal concerns that I spend far too much time absorbing as much information as possible, without time to adequately reflect on what I’m reading (is also a function of being cheap). This phenomenon has only grown worse with new technologies that allow time between publication to approach zero. Utilities like Temptation Blocker, and the success of news aggregation sites seem premised on this situation as well.

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 have been lots of articles recently about the changing role of the American male motivated by an increase in long-term unemployment among young men. This hits close to home as I am a young male, with (apparently) increasingly dubious prospects for future income security. I am also (apparently) increasingly less likely to get married or sire stable offspring. In the increasingly unlikely event I do marry, it will (apparently) be to a higher educated woman with higher earning capacity than myself, which (apparently) will make me less appealing to her in the long term.

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.