Reading Japan, understanding China

中原よ。

地球は冬で寒くて暗い。

ぢゃ。

さやうなら。

  

Nakahara, friend!

The earth is wintry, cold and dark.

Well then, good-bye.

I am reading Reischauer's history of Japan. Surprising that the Japanese use a supremely difficult writing system, worse than the Chinese. Europeans also used difficult systems in the past, like writing in Latin. But it was abandoned, the Japanese stuck with it. I also understood that the Chinese Communist Party is following the Japanese model of modernization, only that the Japanese were lucky to have the Americans to impose on them what they longed to do. For example, democracy and agrarian reform. The Chinese know that the dictatorship of the proletariat does not fit them, but they cannot find the way to wiggle out of the format and dissolve the Communist Party and reform in two or three competing parties. The West should not fear China. It is fated to become wealthy as Japan and South Korea, and then, stagnate. BTW, Nakahara was a poet, died at age thirty. 

Paris Unfit for Human Habitation

460 tons of lead tiles of the Notre Dame Cathedral vaporized last month and Parisians are breathing it in the poisoned air. This is a long term quite untreatable problem. The metal fallout formed a dust that has settled on the city and contaminated the soil and is stuck in air conditioning ducts. Measured lead concentrations  in areas close to the cathedral were between 10 and 20 grams per kilogram.

10 to 20 grams lead per kilogram equals 20,000 milligram/kg that is 20,000 ppm. About 10 to 50 ppm (parts per million) lead occurs naturally in soils, and more in urban areas. Universally, soil lead levels are associated with elevated blood levels in humans. Studies show high blood Pb levels are linked to  environmental conditions;  dry weather results in more suspended soil dust, which is breathed in by the population.

The Environmental Protection Agency allows concentrations of 400 ppm Pb in soils where children play and 1200 ppm in other areas of bare soil. The EPA doesn't have specific standards for a safe level of soil lead, but various organizations and researchers have attempted to come up with a number - somewhere between 300 and 600 ppm.  No doubt, the soil around the Cathedral is toxic and the place should be closed to tourists, or maybe, tourists allowed for short visits while protected by face-masks with anti-dust filter. Maybe Parisians should start to wear industrial dust-masks in the street, like the inhabitants of Beijing.  Left: Graph showing the concentration of lead particles in the air and the weather, in Detroit. Dry weather allows dust to contaminate the air and children's blood. All the soil in Paris and its buildings are contaminated and until decontaminated, unfit for human habitation.

One more reason for young Jews with children to move to Ashdod on the Mediterranean.

I think I'll buy TEVA

There is a worldwide shortage of cheap remedies, and the main producers are Mylan and Teva. They have been suffering from low prices dictated by the regulators, who never think about what are doing. Teva is very cheap, I bet it will survive the oxycontin issue and repay its debts, and become profitable again.

PS next day: TEVA continues to drop on TASE. In politics I am "oficialista" (always vote for the party in power) and in the bourse, contrarian. 

Mango Harvest

This summer we had a good yield in the mango plantation of Ramat HaShavim. Some mangoes were so low on the trees that even Arbel harvested a big one. 

Why there is no progress? Inelastically Supplied Jews

An academic paper confirms what I had long suspected: the factor impeding progress is the scarcity of what they call "genius" and "inelastically supplied superstar labor" and I call, with due modesty, "Jews". I mean real flesh-and-bone Jews, and also a close group of non-Jewish smart people. 

Digital versions of labor and capital can be reproduced much more cheaply than their traditional forms. This increases the supply and reduces the marginal cost of both labor and capital. What then, if anything, is becoming scarcer? We posit a third factor, ‘genius’, that cannot be duplicated by digital technologies. Our approach resolves several macroeconomic puzzles. Over the last several decades, both real median wages and the real interest rate have been stagnant or falling in the United States and the World. Furthermore, shares of income paid to labor and capital (properly measured) have also decreased. And despite dramatic advances in digital technologies, the growth rate of measured output has not increased. No competitive neoclassical two-factor model can reconcile these trends. We show that when increasingly digitized capital and labor are sufficiently complementary to inelastically supplied genius, innovation augmenting either of the first two factors can decrease wages and interest rates in the short and long run. Growth is increasingly constrained by the scarce input, not labor or capital. We discuss microfoundations for genius, with a focus on the increasing importance of superstar labor.

Imagining my fate in Venezuela

It was 1976 or so when they knocked on the door of the apartment my parents were renting out to a young couple. The neighbors said people without uniforms came and kidnapped the terrorists. That was a time when it was enough that one's phone number was in the phonebook of a suspected person to be sentenced to death. May be they were in fact looking for me? The same day I burned all my books and went to the Venezuelan consulate in Buenos Aires to get a visa. Venezuela was then a most prosperous democratic country, with fantastic oil income, many young professionals were leaving Argentina and moving to Caracas. Others went to Spain, Mexico, Italy, Brazil. The consulate was crowded and I could not even get inside. I talked to the people in the corridor and got the impression that the situation was much more urgent than I had thought. People were crying of fear and desperate to escape. I had a valid visa to the USA and an open Lufthansa ticket, so next day I was in New York.

The point is that Venezuela has self destroyed and seven or ten million have escaped and found refuge in Colombia and other hellholes. Almost all the Jews have left for Miami, certainly those who arrived from Argentina to share Venezuela's (temporary) oil bonanza and safety. Venezuela has been thoroughly ruined by Chavez and Maduro, the currency is worth nothing (pic) and its prospects are infernal as its oil production is falling and the price of the oil - collapsing. I did not like New York, and spent time drinking in the YMCA, then took the drunk decision to move on to Israel. Israel just had emerged from a big war and I was not sure it could survive. I was always Zionist, but my Aliyah - like everybody's - was not a clear-cut rational decision. In my drunken way, I had taken the best decision. I am at home. 

Vaca Muerta: The Cow is Dead

Vaca Muerta (Neuquén, Argentina) fracking project went in three years from discovery to full development (13,000 workers) and now to decay. With the current price of Brent at 56 dollar a barrel, Vaca Muerta cannot compete and is  sacking 1000 workers. Just as in the times of Rockefeller, the oil industry is suffering from cyclical chaos.