What do they know?

In all the excitement about China's growth and the many indisputably positive changes that have taken place in this country over the last 30 years, one interesting question is why so many of the most successful people there are the most eager to leave. The article states that around 60 percent of the rich (meaning around 1.5-2 million USD of net worth) are interested in emigrating to another country, mostly somewhere in the English speaking world.

There's a lot of very interesting back and forth on the true condition of the Chinese economy. Even living here, it's difficult to get a good feeling for what's going on. It must mean something that the richest and most successful are so interested in leaving the country. They can afford the best China has to offer and know their way around the system as well as anybody over here, but they want out. From here it looks like the China insiders selling high on the country, though I suppose you could make the more optimistic case that the rich, who largely got their wealth through corruption and connections, think that the game may be up and want to get while the gettings good.

100 Best Books

My Kindle has been a huge help in allowing me to read more books here in China. I see several on both of these lists that look excellent.

Financial Times 100 Best Books

New York Times 100 Best books

Changing the Game

Winterspeak who is very smart and JKH who is also very smart are having an excellent discussion on Winterspeak's blog (how interesting that two anonymous people, one of whom doesn't appear to even have his own site, have managed to earn such trust about such complicated things). They are basically talking about the inevitable tension that arrises when a new explanation comes along to challenge an existing interpretation. The young turks think they have the right of it, and in the case of MMT, I agree with them, but in their understandable eagerness to win over the old guard they face the question of just how much to compromises the purity of their explanation. In MMT's case this is the clear problem with talking about how things could be vs. talking about how things actually are. The government neither has nor doesn't have money is basically correct and is a huge help for laymen and even some experts, but it's not perfectly correct. Therein lies the problem.

Most people in a position of intellectual authority are extremely wary of the latest new theory that seems to explain everything. These new theories can usually be ignored and they'll simply collapse because most new theories are wrong. If on of these new theories does manage to stick for awhile and they're forced to confront it, as a shortcut they will often find a single error and happily toss it aside. This is another good and most often optimal strategy.

So MMT has a challenge- in order to gain ground and acceptance, it's important to frame arguments in a way that the vast majority can understand. However with every abstraction and metaphor, it exposes a soft underbelly for people like Krugman to poke at and dismiss the rigor of MMT. I wish I know how to reconcile these competing demands.

I see the same things with paleo or ancestral eating. The biochemistry is extremely complicated but the basics are easy to explain and a few easy fudges can help you get through to the masses, but on the other hand all these shortcuts make it very easy for the establishment to write off the movement which is a real shame. For every error in the paleo diet world (the comical carbs>insulin>fat story may be the most painful example) there are a number of big and important truths that will help a lot of people. My hope is that getting the big things right will give both of these valuable movements the momentum they need to break through to the mainstream.

The Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts is a very interesting man. He's a professor at Berkley who consistently writes about how people in positions like his have lost sight of the need to be useful. It's a provokative thesis but his own actions are a pretty powerful argument in favor of his point.

He's a relentless experimenter. When he had been sleeping poorly for years, he would track his sleep and test it against all sorts of strategies until he found ones, like standing more during the day and not eating breakfast, that consistently worked. Then he would test his theories by, for example, standing more or less and eating different things for breakfast. He also found that staring at faces in the mornings seems to have a significant positive affect on depression. His site is here and is highly recommended.

The part of his work that I'm currently interested in testing is his theory of fat mass set point that he lays out in the Shangri-la diet. Essentially he's found that a flavorless, calorie containing food or beverages, taken at least and hour before eating, causes the body to lower its fat mass set point immediately. It's an excellent example of the types of practical work that he says researchers ought to be doing. It's easy to do, cheap and (he says) highly effective, but even if it's not, there's no harm done. Compare that to the cost, risks and potential effects of a weight loss drug. How would you even know it's working and how do you compare the benefits and costs?

I'm planning to try this for the approximately 3 weeks left before we leave for the US. I don't have much fat to lose- perhaps about 5-10 pounds, so that should be a good test period. I don't plan to change by Perfect Health Diet style of eating and in line with Seth's thesis I'll be drinking a glass of sugar-sweetened water a couple of hours before eating. I'll weigh myself every morning and we'll see what's happened by the time we leave for the US on the 20th.