Provenance

The result of some feelings, some ideas, a sunny weekend and a handphone camera.

The Mean of the East and the West

Lin Yu Tang 林语堂

The second Chinese philosopher who has influenced me fundamentally got to be Lin Yu Tang (林语堂). The first is Zhuangzi (莊子) like I stated before when I talked about the book The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott. Lin Yu Tang was educated both in China and in the West. He was arguably the first who made a significant effort in drawing closer Chinese and English literature. Lin Yu Tang used to describe himself as having the brain of the West and the soul and heart of the East.

After spending years in France, I find myself in a similar position as him. Like Hulk and Smeagol, I am split inside me, not in the sense of personality but mentality. Religion is complicated and widely variable in China. It is the same for Chinese descendants in Malaysia. But if you really want to reduce it down into a single word, Lin Yu Tang would argue that it has to be the doctrine of the Mean (中庸). I myself am no exception. It defines my soul and my heart. The funny thing is, my field of speciality involves a lot statistics and statistics always revolve around finding the mean. 

The way of the Mean is deeply Eastern. I think it is originated from the Buddha's concept of the Middle Way. The Middle Way is something I find rarely in the West or at least in France, since I can only speak with my personal experience. When I started to learn French, I learnt the phrase comme ci comme ça which means it's not good and not bad either, it's ok, it's so so in English. It's ok is a phrase I like to use a lot but I have never heard any French using it.

They always have strong opinions, to even the minutiae of daily life. Take the example of weather. The weather is never ok for them, it is either too hot or too cold for them. They are the same about the food, it is never just comme ci comme ça. Perhaps I am afraid to give my opinion. While I agree to the importance to have your own point of view and stand for it, but what I also think it is sometimes better off if we just go with the flow and be content for what we already have.

Zhuangzi once said : 進不敢為前，退不敢為後, which means when one is in a group, never stay at the front of the pack while never stay too far behind. He further argued that only the middle of the pack was the perfect position to be in. At first glance, the doctrine of the Mean seems to be against progress. But for me, I would interpret it as the following : find the group where you are the mean, and that way, you can learn from the front pack for improvement and also learn the way to help those who are lagging behind. Once you find yourself too far away from the mean, it is time to find another group. Just like Michael Dell said : never be the smartest person in the room.

Because of this, I don't feel comfortable to be a leader but I am happy to be the assistant leader. Because of this, I don't like to be the head but the one who helps the man in charge. Because of this, even I have some ideas, I won't fully speak out my opinions without rethinking them a few times over. I refuse to speak out whatever pops into my head. That's why brainstorming is a disaster for me. Often I would build a series of arguments and conter-arguments for my idea before I judge whether it is worth presenting to others or not. But as an engineer, whether I like to be a leader or not, there is a good chance that I will hold such a position somewhere down the road.

Tagore once criticized the Western culture as inherently destructive and needed to be tempered by the spiritual wisdom of the East. In my case, it is the other way. I think I have quite enough the Mean of Eastern culture. Through my years in France and using Lin Yu Tang as a role model, now I have to find the mean between the East and the West. 

  

Bibliography

• 林语堂, 人生的盛宴
• 莊子, 莊子‧外篇‧山木第二十 
• 于丹, 企望华文文学出现林语堂式旗帜 (http://culture.ifeng.com, 23 November 2011)
• Pankaj Mishra, Sentimental Education in Shanghai (http://www.nybooks.com, 12 June 2008) 
• Michael Dell's speech at the University of Texas, 2003 

 

 

Serendipity : Vermeer on my rice pudding

After a tiring walk in the Louvre, we came back to our hostel kitchen and we were having dinner. After seeing the Mona Lisa and the Renaissance gallery, I convinced my mom, my little brother and my little sister to go and have a look at Vermeer's work, the Lacemaker. Sitting at the kitchen, I was explaining why I had dragged them to see it and told them I had seen another Vermeer's work, the Milkmaid in Amsterdam. Speak of the devil, my sister asked me if the milkmaid looked like the one on the cover of her rice pudding pot, and guess what! Holy shit! It is exactly the same!

Vermeer's "Milkmaid" on a rice pudding pot

I had always been buying rice pudding of this brand for such a long time and I had never noticed it until then. Oh my god! Vermeer on my rice pudding! I wondered how many people knew about this. That feeling could only be understood by the first person who opened the Tutankhamun Tomb. I have to steal this phrase from Amelie Poulain because there is just no better way to describe the thrill. 

I first knew about Vermeer from a Youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kfeWpLry3U). The School of Life channel always produce interesting contents and this video is the first focusing on an artist. For short, Vermeer's works all focus on painting the mundane. I don't think I am able to explain Vermeer better than the narrator of the video, Hannah Roxburgh. She narrated multiple videos on this channel. By the way, she is charming with her brainy talk. With her soothing voice, I always forget what she has discussed about at the end of the video.

Milkmaid

My first glimpse at the Milkmaid was a coincidence too. I visited Amsterdam at the beginning of August 2015. The main purpose was to visit a friend of mine there and the second plan was to smoke weed and eat some mushrooms. Rijks museum was essentially a side trip. I didn't even know that it was in there. Not until that I picked up the brochure map after I had entered the Rijks that I realized the Milkmaid was so damn popular. You didn't even have to get a map or any direction to get to Vermeer. Simply follow the crowd and you would be there. For the lack of better word, the Milkmaid was the Mona Lisa of the Rijks. I went into Rijks blind but it turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

Lacemaker

After seeing the Lacemaker, it instantly became my favorite. What I like the most about it isn't the colour nor the style, none of those artistic mumbo jumbo. Where it is placed is what I like about it. It is situated at the third floor of the Louvre, almost at the end of an alleyway. It actually takes effort just to get there. Talking about the Louvre, people always go for Mona Lisa and the Venus of Milo first. Honestly, Louvre is huge and squeezing through the crowd in Renaissance gallery is exhausting enough. Most of the people just won't bother to check out a tiny painting so far away. Plus the relatively smaller size, the Lacemaker is so easily ignored under the shadow of Mona Lisa. But for me, it sits where it should always be. The analogy is strong, just like a hardworking blue collar is always ignored by our media nowadays. The blue collar in question is the lacemaker. She doesn't seem to give a shit about fame. She just continues to perfect her craft, quietly into eternity. I find that idea kinda poetic. It kinda reminds me of Camus' Sisyphus.

Come to think about it, Dutch Lady being called Dutch Lady makes so much sense now. Rarely you see things come in full circle in unexpected ways. I am delighted :)

Keynes vs Hayek : The Return of Authoritarianism

How much intervention in the market economy should the state have? This has to be one the big questions in economic science. Another way to look at the question is asking whether the market is able to auto-regulate. This question had sparked the academic battle in between two economic giants : John Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. Their battle is so well-known that there are even videos on Yoututbe of them doing rap battle. To put it simply : Keynes wants to steer the market while Hayek leans more to laisser-faire. 

Keynes thinks that the simple law of supply and demand is insufficient to explain the price fluctuation of merchandises in the market. He demonstrates his point of view in his famous concept of a beauty constest. In this contest, each participant is asked to choose the six most atractive faces among one hundred photographs. The winner is awarded to the one who picks the list the closest to the most popular of the combined lists of all participants. The natural strategy is to actually choose the most beautiful faces. But a better strategy would be choosing the list by taking into account of the choices other participants make, assuming that the others choose the most beautiful faces. We can take the reasoning further by assuming that the other participants know and apply the better strategy, and make the list accordingly. 

As we can see, the strategy can be extended to the next level and the next, at each level we assume that the others apply the strategy the level before. This concept explains exceptionally well the fluctuations in the stock market. The price of shares don't always reflect their real value but the value people think they are. All Keynes wants to prove through this concept is that the market is unable to self-regulate. Thus more intervention is needed. 

On the hand, Hayek argues that the market is an auto-regulated system. He believes the market is a complex system. He says that it is a system so complex that not even a powerful super computer is able to manage all the information in the system. It can only be governed by so called spontaneous order. The spontaneous order is comparable with the idea of the "invisible hand" proposed by Adam Smith. Using the price as the information in the economic system, Hayek further argues that any intervention such as a simple act of fixing an upper price limit on a merchandise, would just falsify the information thus create an inaccurate image of the reality of the market.  

In recent years, we can observe that more and more right-wing authoritarians are on the rise in Europe. Figures such as Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage are gaining popularity. The same can also be said in USA as a recent poll favoring Donald Trump. Their policies are not exactly Keysian but very closely linked. The basic idea is the same : more government's control, less liberalism capitalism. Nouriel Roubini explains all of these very well in an article he wrote for Project Syndicate, entitled "Europe's Politics of Dystopia". The rise of authoritarian governement is what Hayek fears the most. He says that the idea of assuming one can understand the market system in its entirety and is able to reconstruct the world with a program, can lead to totalitarism.  

With all said, the battle of Keynes vs Hayek or authoritarianism vs liberalism reminds me of the Strauss-Howe generational theory. The theory states that the Western history follows a four-stage cycle of social or mood eras which William Strauss and Neil Howe call turnings. The four turnings are High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis. During the High turning, collectivism in the society is strong and governement tends to be very authoritarian. The prime example of the High era is the 30 years after WW2 or the Trente Glorieuses in France when Keynesian model was very popular. On the contrary, during the opposite turning, the Unraveling, the individualism is high and a more liberal model is preferred. A good example of Unraveling era would have to be ten-year period before the the Great Depression of 1929. 

Although being often criticized as unscientific and unfalsifiable. this theory remains influential. On paper, it does seem like authoritarianism and liberalism alternate throughout the Western history. According to the theory, we are living in the era of Crisis that will peak in the year 2020. Martin Armstrong even predict a major crisis in the year 2017. If the theory is correct, that would probably explains the rise of the authoritarians.



Bibliography

• Nouriel Roubini, Europe's Politics of Dystopia (www.project-syndicate.org, 29 Oct 2015)
• Martin Armstrong, The Coming European Revolution (www.armstrongeconomics.com, 12 Jan 2016)
• Martin Armstrong, French Politics are Turning Ahead of 2017 (www.armstrongeconomics.com, 13 Jan 2016)
• Patrick O'Connor and Janet Hook, Poll : Donald Trump Widens His Lead in Republican Presdentiel Race (www.wsj.com, 14 Jan 2016)
• Vsauce, Juvenoia (www.youtube.com, 01 Nov 2015)
• Strauss-Howe Generational Theory (en.wikipedia.org)

Innovate or die?

Innovation here, innovation there, innovation everywhere. Nowadays, everyone seems to embrace it as the ultimate gospel in our capitalist world. The word innovation is so trendy, most of us get the impression that innovation is a necessity for a company to survive. In fact, during an interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook, he even told Bloomberg that "to not innovate is to die." If the king of innovation himself said so, it must be true, right? 

The apparent answer is yes. I mean it is not difficult to find an example from recent history to prove it true. Blockbuster, Polaroid, Borders, Alta Vista, just to name a few. But the most famous example has to be Kodak. For anyone who does not know the story of Kodak, here is a little crash course. Kodak is an American company best known for its photographic film product and it dominated the market during the 80's. However, it then started to decline in the 1990 due to the fatal marketing decision to stay in the film industry rather than moving immediately into digital photography. The decline was drastic, to the point that Kodak filed for bankruptcy in January 2012.     

At first sight, it does seem like the Kodak story fits the "innovate or die" statement perfectly. But at a closer look, it is more revealing than that. It is interesting to note that it was Kodak who first developped the digital camera in 1975. So what happened? In fact, Kodak fell into the "low-risk trap". Instead of investing in a disruptive technology like digital camera, Kodak chose to put the money into improving the quality of photographic film, a low-risk innovation. Adi Alon, a managing director of the Operations Innovation and Product Development Consulting Group for technology consultancy firm Accenture, stated : "Low-risk approach to innovation ... helps maintain the brand, maintain the core offering, but it doesn't result in a significant value creation. And over time, it's going to erode your market position."

"Low-risk innovation is a trap that many companies fall into," he explains. Unfortunately, the king of innovation Tim Cook and Apple itself might have just fallen victim to this trap. With its 37 versions of iPod, 23 iPhones and 16 iPads, Apple is basically making different iterations of the same technology. Adding more and more visually stunning features cannot hide the fact that Apple's growth seems to have plateaued. 

Besides choosing the right innovation, to survive in the fast-paced market is also about what you do with your innovation. "More often, it's an inability to do things that have to follow innovation. It's really about getting stuff done," states Cliff Oxford, the CEO at Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. "Getting stuff done means packaging, selling, delivering and collecting money to increase revenue and profits," he further explains. One can even argue that with an impeccable marketing strategy, one can sell anything to anyone, regardless the quality of the product. 

Beats by Dre is the prime example in this case. While the quality of their products is not bad per say, Beats' headphones are often regarded as overpriced in the audio-lover community. The reason Beats electronics is able to sell their products with such high price tags is perceived value. "You've heard of Beats by Dre, and your mom and dad probably have too. But if you ask them to name another audio company, they might have some trouble unless they're audiohead ... Perceived value is really the name of the game that Beats electronics is winning," says Marques Brownlee, a Youtuber and technology reviewer. 

To conclude, the statement "innovate or die" is only part of the truth. The correct statement should have been : "innovate while avoiding the low-risk approach and increase the perceived value of your innovation, or die." But who wants to put that as the title of their article. Undeniably, "innovate or die" is a powerful statement. It is simple and captivating but lacking foresight. Don't be fool by it, it is just another advertising trick to get more readers, just like I use it as the title of this article.