Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.

I study people, technology, and the worlds they make

Month: June 2016 (page 1 of 3)

How Chinese Students Saved America’s Colleges - Bloomberg View

June 30, 2016 / / Comments Off on How Chinese Students Saved America’s Colleges - Bloomberg View

This rapid rise in the number of Chinese students crossing the Pacific is the product partly of rising affluence in China and frustration with the relative inflexibility of the Chinese higher-education system. But it’s also been driven by U.S. colleges and universities looking to counter a decline in the number of college-age kids in the U.S. and, in the case of state universities, big cutbacks in government aid, especially since the financial crisis of 2008…. [W]hen it comes to American colleges and universities, I really don’t know how many of them could survive without foreign students in general and Chinese students in particular.

Source: How Chinese Students Saved America’s Colleges - Bloomberg View

Will Globalization Go Bankrupt? | Foreign Policy

June 30, 2016 / / Comments Off on Will Globalization Go Bankrupt? | Foreign Policy

This 2001 Foreign Policy piece by Michael Pettit asking “Will Globalization Go Bankrupt? suddenly seems rather timely.

It argues that the main drivers of globalization have been financial rather than technological or political. As he puts it,

Globalization is primarily a monetary phenomenon in which expanding liquidity induces investors to take more risks. This greater risk appetite translates into the financing of new technologies and investment in less developed markets. The combination of the two causes a “shrinking” of the globe as communications and transportation technologies improve and investment capital flows to every part of the globe. Foreign trade, made easier by the technological advances, expands to accommodate these flows. Globalization takes place, in other words, largely because investors are suddenly eager to embrace risk.

As is often forgotten during credit and investment booms, however, monetary conditions contract as well as expand. In fact, the contraction is usually the inevitable outcome of the very conditions that prompted the expansion.

But when things go bad, watch out, because that’s when people decide that the downsides of globalization outweigh the benefits:

The costs of globalization, in the form of social disruption, rising income inequality, and domination by foreign elites, became unacceptable. The political and intellectual underpinnings of globalization, which had once seemed so secure, were exposed as fragile, and the popular counterattack against the logic of globalization grew irresistible.

It’s clear to me that until we can find a way to solve the problems of inequality and permanent unemployment, we’re not going to get out of our current crisis. A lot of Trump’s appeal, and the appeal of nationalists in Europe, rests with the idea that they’ll protect Us and Our Way of Life.

Meanwhile, the arguments that cheap t-shirts and flat-screen TVs are a fair exchange for your former way of life, or that just as soon as the super-rich finish building yachts large enough to hold several smaller yachts the tide will rise and lift your little boat, or that in today’s meritocratic world if you’re poor you deserve it, mysteriously don’t seem to be so compelling.

Brexit is a disaster, but we can build on the ruins | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

June 28, 2016 / / Comments Off on Brexit is a disaster, but we can build on the ruins | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

Neoliberalism has not delivered the meritocratic nirvana its theorists promised, but a rentiers’ paradise, offering staggering returns to whoever grabs the castle first while leaving productive workers on the wrong side of the moat.

The age of enterprise has become the age of unearned income, the age of the market the age of market failure, the age of opportunity a steel cage of zero-hours contracts, precarity and surveillance….

Culture is not working. A worldview that insists both people and place are fungible is inherently hostile to the need for belonging. For years now we have been told that we do not belong, that we should shift out without complaint while others are shifted in to take our place.

When the peculiarities of community and place are swept away by the tides of capital, all that’s left is a globalised shopping culture, in which we engage with glazed passivity. Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.

Source: Brexit is a disaster, but we can build on the ruins | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

“insecurity is fantastic”

June 28, 2016 / / Comments Off on “insecurity is fantastic”

“It would be the biggest stimulus to get our butts in gear that we have ever had,” Peter Hargreaves said. “It will be like Dunkirk again,” he added, comparing Brexit to the British military’s forced evacuation from Europe after France fell to the Nazis.

“We will get out there and we will be become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic.”

Source: ‘Like Dunkirk’: Brexit donor trumpets ‘fantastic insecurity’ of leaving EU | Politics | The Guardian

Words mean different things when you’re super-rich.

So there are two different visions of what leaving the EU is going to mean for the UK economy. In one, swashbuckling privateer class will be unshackled, and free to get even richer sailing the seas of global commerce. In the other, working-class people will be protected from immigrants and cuts to NHS. I wonder which one will win?

Actually I don’t. I just wonder how violent the response will be.

“The clearest indictment of the status quo is the status quo itself”

June 28, 2016 / / Comments Off on “The clearest indictment of the status quo is the status quo itself”

You do not need a survey to ascertain the plight of American youth. You can look at their bank accounts, at the jobs they have, at the jobs their parents have lost, at the debt they hold, at the opportunities they covet but are denied. You do not need jargon or ideology to form a case against the status quo. The clearest indictment of the status quo is the status quo itself.

Source: Why Young Americans Are Giving Up on Capitalism | Foreign Policy

“nobody knows what is going to happen but everyone can explain it afterwards”

June 24, 2016 / / Comments Off on “nobody knows what is going to happen but everyone can explain it afterwards”

Britain cannot leave Europe any more than Piccadilly Circus can leave London. Europe is where we are, and where we will remain. Britain has always been a European country, its fate inextricably intertwined with that of the continent, and it always will be. But it is leaving the European Union. Why?

A universal truth: nobody knows what is going to happen but everyone can explain it afterwards. If just 3% of the more than 33 million Brits who voted in this referendum had gone the other way, you would now be reading endless articles explaining how it was, after all, “the economy, stupid”, how British pragmatism finally won through, etc. So beware the illusions of retrospective determinism.

Source: As a lifelong English European, this is the biggest defeat of my political life | Timothy Garton Ash | Politics | The Guardian

“The police, army and refugees could agree” that they “all dreaded a day without internet”

June 20, 2016 / / Comments Off on “The police, army and refugees could agree” that they “all dreaded a day without internet”

This is a heck of a story:

Kevin MacRitchie surveyed the inferno spreading across Diavata refugee camp. From his vantage point on the roof, where he had been fixing a satellite dish, he could see a column of thick black smoke twisting toward the sky above two rows of incinerated tents. While Greek army and police helped battle the fire, a protest had erupted at the front gate, by Syrian refugees frustrated with conditions in the camp and the asylum backlog that was keeping them there.

That meant MacRitchie was now alone. His teammate, David Tagliani, had run out to drive their equipment van into the camp, and in the meantime, the angry mass had blocked the entrance. Yet when they recognized Tagliani behind the wheel, the protestors stopped. “Wifi,” they called to each other, “wifi.” And they cleared a path to let the van pass.

The police, army and refugees could agree on at least one thing, it seemed. They all dreaded a day without internet.

On Stephen Curry and racial assumptions

June 16, 2016 / / Comments Off on On Stephen Curry and racial assumptions

When I root for [Stephen] Curry’s success, I am not interested in affirming the supposed superiority of the light complexioned. I reject the notion that identifying with Steph more than LeBron constitutes aligning one’s self with whiteness. Instead, I relish Curry’s rise because of its potential to illustrate that blackness contains multitudes. He has fallen into a strange place in the American racial cosmos. Too easily accepted by white people to be fully embraced by black people, Curry also represents a rare case of white folks being wrong about a black guy in ways that exalt rather than diminish him.

That LeBron James was able to overcome the odds and become the best basketball player of his generation is an objectively tremendous feat, but his story is also a familiar one. In many ways, he’s a composite of black stereotypes: born to a teenage mother, raised without a father in the inner city, surpassingly strong and fast with surreal hops. The reality is that his success is as much a consequence of his legendary work ethic and shrewd decision-making as his unprecedented mix of skill, size, and agility. Nevertheless, he’s seen as a passive beneficiary of a genetic lottery, a once-in-a-generation physical specimen who merely had to lace up shoes to actualize his predestined dominance….

[T]he durable misconception that Steph’s all-world handle and historic shooting ability come solely from tireless toil in the gym is refreshing, as tall tales go. It’s a rare instance of black athletic excellence being appreciated as a reward for diligence, sacrifice, and commitment rather than the abundance of fast-twitch muscles. It’s a step in the right direction for American culture that a black superstar can be celebrated as a super striver and not just a happy accident.

Source: Stephen Curry is challenging the worst, most durable stereotypes about black athletes.

“We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority”

June 16, 2016 / / Comments Off on “We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority”

We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity. The government could, for example, provide incentives to companies that resist automation, thereby preserving jobs for the less brainy. It could also discourage hiring practices that arbitrarily and counterproductively weed out the less-well-IQ’ed. This might even redound to employers’ benefit: Whatever advantages high intelligence confers on employees, it doesn’t necessarily make for more effective, better employees. Among other things, the less brainy are, according to studies and some business experts, less likely to be oblivious of their own biases and flaws, to mistakenly assume that recent trends will continue into the future, to be anxiety-ridden, and to be arrogant.

When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched. Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous. That can’t be right. Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not be permitted to reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.

Source: The Disadvantages of Being Stupid - The Atlantic

“Disagreements over which Americans should enjoy respect and defense and opportunity… have perhaps never been starker”

June 15, 2016 / / Comments Off on “Disagreements over which Americans should enjoy respect and defense and opportunity… have perhaps never been starker”

Trump and Stone are so brazen and grotesque in their bigotry and dishonesty that they might take your breath away were they not so in keeping with the tone and substance of the larger electoral war being waged around us as we turn a perilous corner toward the fall.

As Hillary Clinton noted last Friday in a speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, this election is not like previous presidential contests. It “isn’t about the same old fights between Democrats and Republicans. … This election,” Clinton said, “is profoundly different.”

She isn’t kidding…. Disagreements over which Americans should enjoy respect and defense and opportunity — let alone life and liberty — have perhaps never been starker. In part, that is because Donald Trump is exposing the blatant prejudice behind Republican obstructionism, and in part because, in an uncharacteristic show of strategic and messaging coherence, Democratic party leaders showed up last week to make the case for the other side.

Source: This Election Is a Civil War — The Cut

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