November 27, 2005

12:14:10 am French Diary VI  

Tuesday, November 15, 2005 - Paris, France - 50, rainy.

Orsay Museum (art 1848-1914; begins where Louvre ends); World War II section of Invalids; Catacombs. Deanna continues to be sick with a sore throat and now no energy. She went back to hotel after Orsay Museum, but then ventured out later to Invalides by herself.

The Paris subway is among the best in the world. You are never much more than 500 meters from a station and the trains are frequent, the maps are plentiful, and the system is well maintained. It is similar to London in layout, but less prone to breakdown. I don't remember if it is physically uncomfortable in summer; London definitely can be, but Paris's warmer temperatures may mean they have addressed the cooling problem out of necessity. Probably Paris and Tokyo have the best systems overall, although each has a deficiency of escalators/elevators that are present in more newly built systems. Their absence is an inconvenience if you have luggage. Singapore is the sleekest system in the world, in my opinion, although it is not yet as comprehensive. Also, its stations verge on being too big, requiring you to walk long distances to get from the train to the street. Seoul's subway is excellent also, nearly as comprehensive as Paris and Tokyo, but occasionally suffering from the huge station syndrome like Singapore.

Saturday's International Herald Tribune had a great op-ed piece by Roger Cohen on the speech that French President Jacques Chirac has not given, but should, in response to the French riots. Before I discuss what Cohen said, I do have to say that Chirac's feeble response has been so invisible and lacking as to make George Bush's initial handling of Hurricane Katrina look like a model of crisis management. Also illuminating to me is that while in general the IHT has criticized Chirac, it has taken a rather mild tone, before dashing back to its comfort zone of haranguing Bush on everything he does, devoting far more column space to far less serious matters than the French riots. This unbalanced contrast, following the horribly biased Katrina coverage in Europe a few months ago, again shows me that Bush--a man who admittedly does provide much to criticize--is unlikely to get a fair evaluation by the European/US east coast media establishment for the remainder of his term. The sore loser phenomenon of 2000 has a long half-life, especially once the Iraq war re-stoked these passions.

Anyway, regarding France, Cohen providing a soaring speech that pinned the trouble assimilating immigrants to failed economic practice and a welfare state that "inhibits us, saps our creative energy, and extends a culture of dependency into suburbs of despair and vandalism." The answer Cohen says is not more government programs, but a break with past practices such as the 35-hour week and lifelong unemployment benefits that oddly have resulted in more than 60% of French citizens opposed to capitalism.

One thing I will have to commend France on is that they reject affirmative action out of hand, and have continued to do so after the riots, despite some calls to adopt this (most surprisingly by Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading conservative candidate for president in 2007). They also collect no census information on ethnic origin or religious practice, not wanting to put people in groups. Everyone is a French citizen of equal standing, with no distinctions made. Unfortunately, as the riots have revealed, in practice there has been discrimination and immigrant assimilation has not worked as well as in other countries, including the US, which falls all over itself to create ethnic and minority distinctions. I think the US success in immigrant assimilation is due to its economic model that gives hard-working people the opportunity for advancement, rather than its census taking procedures or quota systems, and I would hope if France were to adopt any of our practices it would look to the former and not the later. France's colonial past is full of historical mistakes, but this does not approach the magnitude of US slavery. Thus, I think any justification for affirmative action for France falls short. If they were to adopt any form of positive discrimination, I would hope they would base decisions on economic factors and not race or ethnicity. This might be a better method for the US to switch to as well.

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April 30, 2005

04:42:47 am Malaysia  

Country Background:
Population: 24 million
Per capita GDP: $9,000
Size: slightly larger than New Mexico
Currency: Malaysian Ringgit, fixed at 3.8 per US dollar
Independence: 1957 from United Kingdom as Malaya. Malaya expanded to become Malaysia in 1963 when Singapore and two states on the island of Borneo joined the federation. Singapore seceded by mutual agreement in 1965, but the rest of Malaysia remained in tact. Language: Bahasa Melayu is the official language (a form of Malay), but all of the languages of Singapore, plus a few others are present. English is common, not quite to the extent of Singapore, but English speakers will have no problems here. Main ethnic groups include Malay, 58%, Chinese, 24%, and Indian, 8%.

Itinerary

Sunday, April 24, 2005 - Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Singapore Airlines flight from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Two nights at Le Meridien.

Temperature high/low during our stay: 90/75 and humid.

Kuala Lumpur (KL) is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. It is a relatively new city, founded in the mid-19th Century by the British.
Population: between 1 and 2 million

Kuala Lumpur Activities:
- Petronas Towers
- National Museum of History
- City Tour

Our hotel in KL is a new, five-star hotel with rooms on Expedia for $60 per night, including free breakfast, a great exercise room (free also), and a free high-speed Internet connection in the room. Malaysia is an inexpensive country. Its currency ought to be higher, but the government fixes it at 3.8 per dollar, much like China fixes the yuan at 8.28 per dollar. In coming years, both countries are expected to allow their currencies to float, at least partially. We expect both to rise.

Malaysia was hit extremely hard in the 1997-1998 Asian crises, during which its then-expensive free-floating currency devalued sharply and its stock markets plunged. We don't have the numbers at hand, but the stock market went down something like 80% or more in US dollar terms (Indonesia, Thailand, and other countries suffered similarly.) Mahathir Mohamad, the country's long-standing prime minister, went berserk, blamed foreigner currency traders for trying to ruin the country, and said the crisis was a failure of capitalism. These market unfriendly words, combined with follow-on currency controls and foreign investment restrictions, caused emerging market funds to sell their Malaysian stocks and move on to other countries that understood the lessons of capitalism better. Mohamad seemed unaware that his words and actions were exacerbating the crises. In a bizarre twist, he evened jailed and tried his finance minister--for sodomy of all things. While we have no knowledge of the finance minister's inclinations, we are confident that whatever sexual peccadilloes he may have were of no concern to the government in 1995, when Malaysia was receiving more foreign direct investment than any country in East Asia.

There are many universal truths around the world and here are two relating to politicians. One, when there is a crisis, foreigners are often blamed. Two, politicians are nothing if not creative and resourceful at trumping up charges to remove opponents and scapegoats from office, or to prevent them from running in the first place. A current example is the Mexican government prosecuting the mayor of Mexico City on an administrative matter that may disqualify him from running for president in 2006. So if you hear a politician blaming foreigners, look elsewhere for the truth. And while there may be some basis in truth to the charges against domestic political opponents, usually the charges are greatly inflated and stretched. Conservatives, liberals, presidential democracies, parliamentary democracies, socialist countries, authoritarian regimes--these truths are present everywhere on this globe.

Anyway, getting back to Malaysia, Mohamad retired in 2004 after 23 years and a more open-minded successor, Abdullah Badawi, was elected prime minister. Badawi is saying all the right things and loosening the investment restrictions such that emerging markets investors are beginning to re-enter the country. Actually, Mohamad--other than going temporarily insane in 1997 and 1998--was not such a bad guy. Malaysia grew tremendously during his reign until then, averaging 8% annual growth during the 1980s. To its credit, Malaysia has learned a lot from Singapore and is not too proud to copy what works. So KL is clean, crime free, with an efficient airport and public transportation system. Malaysia is a lot like Singapore, but not quite as successful (this says more about the degree of Singapore's success than any shortcomings on Malaysia's part), and with the ethnic and religious majorities and minorities reversed. Whereas Singapore has a Chinese/Buddhist majority and a Malay/Muslim minority, KL has a Malay/Muslim majority and a Chinese/Buddhist minority. Both countries also have Indian/Hindu minorities. Singapore is more westernized, but both countries were British colonies and westerners are welcome in both places. To a westerner, though, KL feels more foreign.

We noticed several halted building projects, a legacy from the 1997-1998 crises. Overall, though, things seem vibrant enough in KL. There were no lingering signs of 1997 in Singapore or Indonesia either, although in Indonesia we were only in a tourist area, not a business center.

The reversal of majorities and minorities is one underlying reason why Singapore did not last as part of Malaysia. With Singapore included, Chinese edged slightly past Malays as the ethnic majority in Malaysia. Also, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party (PAP) began to campaign in Malaysian local politics. They were entitled to do this as they had become part of Malaysia, but let's just say the Malaysian government would have preferred the PAP to keep their focus on Singapore only. Other countries also were wary of Singapore. Indonesia and the Philippines viewed a Singapore-Malaysia combination as a regional competitive threat to the point where Indonesia may have clandestinely encouraged Malay-Chinese race riots in Singapore. So for these reasons and others, Singapore and Malaysia arranged a hasty divorce, ejecting Singapore from the country it joined only two years earlier.

One thing KL has that Singapore does not is a former world's tallest building. The Petronas Towers held that title from 1997-2004, taking it from the Sears Tower and passing it along to Taipei 101 in Taiwan. The subject of a recent e-mail no*prize trivia question, we note here for the record that Nick's father, Larry Padgett, was the first to answer the question correctly. Honorable mention goes out to Don Furman and Jan Johnson who had the correct answer, but were a bit late. Dangerous Don hails from Garner, Iowa, a small but prosperous little town where the tallest building, the grain elevator, is nearly five stories tall. In his youth, he was a corrupting influence on Nick, and was always the source of Nick's youthful indiscretions. But like George W. Bush, Don has cleaned up his hard-partying ways, and settled down to a life of respectability in Garner, where he has a monopoly as the only optometrist in two towns. The FTC is investigating.

Many spoilsports in Chicago took issue with losing the world's tallest title that they had for 23 years, and pointed out correctly that the Sears Tower is actually taller than the Petronas Towers in many ways. It's a bit of moot point now that Petronas is no longer number one and several other even taller buildings are planned. But how can it be that some claim Sears is taller than Petronas? Given two buildings, isn't it obvious which is bigger? Actually no. If you got a group of people together to decide how to measure building height, you would soon realize that there are many different ways to measure. All start from street level, but where do you stop? At the absolute highest point, counting all antennas? At the roof, ignoring all antennas and spires? At the highest inhabited floor, ignoring any floors devoted to mechanics? By all of these measures, the Sears Tower is taller than Petronas Towers. But none of these measures is the correct measure. The correct measure as determined by the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat at Lehigh University is "from sidewalk level of main entrance to structural top of the building. Television and radio antennas and flag poles are not included." Thus, the spires on top of Petronas Towers, which are considered structural, are including in its height, but the television antennas on the top of Sears Tower are not counted.

We point this out not to further the claims of argumentative Chicagoans, but as background for a future discussion on future world's tallest buildings. We received several replies to this follow-on trivia question that we asked via e-mail. The two buildings we had in mind were mentioned first by Cheryl Hays, Deanna's mom, but several other buildings we were not aware of were also cited. So we need to do some more research on this topic before we hand out the priceless no*prize. More on this later.

In a postscript to our first contest on the current world's tallest building, we received an e-mail from our Asia advance man, John Krotzer, Nick's B-school roommate, and our provider of lodging in Shanghai, China. When John heard of our world tour last year, he voluntarily agreed to move his wife and three children to Asia and then arrange business trips to various destinations prior to our arrival to provide us with restaurant reviews, attractions to see, and the location of English-language bookstores. In a past log, you may remember that we detailed the notorious Kidman-Krotzer Dinner in Sydney. John writes, " I should get a bonus. I was IN this tower [Taipei 101] when you wrote this! I am in Taipei as we speak. This building also has the world's fastest elevator--38 seconds up and 46 down. It goes down [slower] so your stomach doesn't feel queasy."

Not to be outdone, while John is gallivanting around the Pacific, his wife Tania reports in from Shanghai of her recent shopping exploits, "Success!!! Now in addition to seeing the Krotzer-Romanoff family, you can look forward to drinking Snapple Raspberry Iced Tea. The good news for me was that the store FINALLY had Kraft Macaroni & Cheese today too (the first time I've been able to find it!)" Well, this is quite a treat and most unexpected. We may just cancel the remainder of our Vietnam tour and head right to Shanghai.

While Deanna can look forward to her trusty Coca-Cola every day in any country in the world, Nick has had no Snapple since Tampa, where Deanna's mom stocks a second refrigerator with no less than five cases of sugary beverages at all times. There was raspberry iced tea on occasion in New Zealand and Australia, but it was always the artificially too sweet Lipton or Nestea versions. Snapple was common in Singapore, but apparently the local distributor has an anti-raspberry tea bias, for nowhere on the island did we see this flavor. Cranberry/raspberry juice yes, but raspberry iced tea no.

Now this will come as a great shock to many, and one of us may even deny this fact, but truthful reporting must come ahead of martial bliss, so we will relate that on this trip Nick has been very flexible and adaptable with his food and beverage consumption, much more so than finicky Deanna with her ever-insistent two-legged vegetarian requirements. How she worries so about getting violently ill and throwing up her meal. Why Nick even ate lettuce at one meal in Singapore, as documented in our Image Gallery!

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04:41:01 am Singapore  

Country Background:
Population: 4.4 million
Per capita GDP: $24,000
Size: slightly more than 3.5 times the size of Washington D.C.
Currency: Singapore dollar, 1.65 per US dollar
Independence: Modern Singapore was founded in 1819 by Sir Stamford Raffles as a British colony. In 1959, it became self-governing within the British Commonwealth; in 1963, it joined the Federation of Malaysia; in 1965, it seceded from Malaysia to become an independent country.
Language: National language is Malay, but English, Chinese (Mandarin), Tamil (an Indian dialect), and Malay are all official languages. Everyone speaks English. Chinese is also spoken by most people, as Singapore's ethnicity is 77% Chinese, compared to 14% Malay, 8% Indian, and 1% other.

Itinerary

Tuesday, April 19, 2005 - Sunday, April 24, 2005
Singapore Airlines flight from Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia to Singapore
Five nights at Hotel 1929 in Chinatown

Temperature high/low during our stay: 95/75 and humid. Singapore is 2 degrees north of the Equator. It's hot and muggy year-round, except indoors where it is often freezing cold from the air conditioning.
Singapore is a city, an island, and a nation.

Singapore Activities:
- Spending hours at Borders researching future travel in Asia
- Spending hours booking future Asia travel over the internet
- Singapore Art Museum
- Singapore History Museum (Nick)
- Shopping (Deanna)
- Night Safari
- City Gallery, with exhibits devoted to city planning (Nick)
- Shopping (Deanna)
- Singapore International Film Festival
- Laundry
- Finding and utilizing a health club (Nick) and a yoga studio (Deanna)
- Dinner with Navinder and Hsiao Ming Singh (see Image Gallery), who Deanna stayed with previously in Singapore in 2000. Deanna's maid-of-honor Stacy Carlson and her husband Bill lived in Singapore for several years and are good friends with the Singhs.
- River boat cruise
- Asian Civilizations Museum (both of them)
- Changi Prison Museum (Nick)
- Shopping (Deanna)

While in Brazil, we wrote a post discussing what an accomplishment of human imagination and willpower the building of Brasilia, the country's capital, was. Brasilia, remember, was created from scratch out of the jungle in roughly 1000 days. We saluted Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek for pulling this off within one term because he knew if the project stretched beyond his tenure, a successor would not be likely to complete the work. Singapore was not built in 1000 days, but to us, it is even more impressive of an accomplishment of human willpower. And we could easily live in Singapore, where frankly we would not be that keen on residing in Brasilia, its remarkable origin notwithstanding. Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister of Singapore country during its first 25 years deserves the credit for creating this masterpiece of cleanliness and efficiency through a recipe that is one-part George Washington, one-part Mayor Daley, and one part Mao Zedong. Lee is one of the best political leaders of the second half of the 20th Century, in our opinion, albeit not well known by the Western public because the stage he operated on--running a city-state of a few million people--was small.

In 1965, Singapore became an independent nation after a hasty divorce from Malaysia, the country it joined two years earlier. It was a third-world city--dirty, with too many people, too few jobs, and too little prospects. It had no natural resources for industry and no natural sites to draw tourists. Within 20 years, by the mid-80s, it was an international city, vying with Hong Kong to be the economic capital of Southeast Asia. It had compiled a long list of world bests: it had become the world's cleanest city; its airport and national airline were repeatedly voted best in the world by frequent flyers; arguably, the world's nicest subway system had just opened; its port was the busiest in the world; and it had the world's highest level of home ownership (over 90%). All of these attributes remain in place in 2005.

Desired social goods were created through administrative fiat. If you want people to own their own homes, force them to save money to do so. Currently 20% of every paycheck goes into a Central Provident Fund for housing, healthcare, and retirement (companies pay in an additional percentage, 12% of each employee's salary, if we remember correctly). If you don't want litter on the streets, don't allow the sale of chewing gum in the country as it is one of the hardest forms of litter to remove. Want traffic safety? Then arrest people for jaywalking, require taxis to have sensors that beep annoyingly when the speed limit is exceeded, and install red light and speed cameras that photograph your license plate and send you a fine in the mail. Want to eliminate congested traffic in the city center? Then collect an electronic toll from all cars entering a designated area, with the fee adjusting automatically based on time of day and traffic conditions. Don't want opposition to your ideas? Then have one party rule and censor the press. Then there is Nick's personal favorite: hate graffiti? Then cane the bastard graffiti criminals (including famously an American teenager)! Result: no graffiti.

Over time, some of these ideas have been abandoned (you can now purchase chewing gum and jaywalking is common); some have been reduced (press and movie censorship is less but not completely gone, one-party rule remains, but the opposition has strengthened); while others have expanded and are being copied around the world (speed and red light cameras are present throughout Australia and other countries and electronic road pricing is being trialed in central London). We think as more time passes, many of the rules most objectionable to civil libertarians will be further eased, while Singapore retains its overall sense of order and efficiency.

Now here's a question that we think most Americans would answer differently than us. If you had to choose between full-fledged capitalism and full-fledged democracy, which would you choose if you had to live in a place with one or the other but not both? Most Americans would say democracy. We would choose capitalism. We see it as a more basic ingredient to a successful society that will ultimately facilitate other positive attributes. In other words, capitalism creates prosperity and that prosperity leads--over time--to democracy. There are plenty of places in the world which have democracy, but that also have many constraints to free enterprise (e.g. currency controls, restrictions on foreign investment, heavy regulation, many businesses government owned), to the point where prosperity never occurs. In general, we think these places are worse off than those with the reverse--fairly unrestricted capitalism but not full-fledged democracy.

Nick's view on this was formed when he lived in Asia in 1990 and saw firsthand that countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Taiwan, the territory of Hong Kong, and others were all prospering economically even though they had fairly authoritarian governments over the most recent decades. In contrast, the country he lived in, the Philippines was struggling economically even though it had been a democracy, excepting parts of the Marcos years, since World War II. Since 1990, all of the prospering countries have moved further toward democracy (the territory of Hong Kong is a special case as it has reverted back to China, although Hong Kong had a limited degree of democracy then and now) as their economic strength has led to greater political freedom. Meanwhile, the Philippines continues to lag economically, its democracy notwithstanding. Of course, China is the best example of this, its unlikely combination of political communism and economic capitalism producing 9% annualized economic growth over the past 27 years. This is the highest rate of growth recorded by any country in modern times.

We should stop at this point and state that we are talking about a matter of degrees. Singapore is a democracy as it has had elections dating back to when the British still ruled it. And the Philippines is capitalist. But on a spectrum, you would classify the Philippines as more of a democracy than Singapore (because one party dominates Singapore politics) and you would classify Singapore as more conducive to free enterprise than the Philippines (because the Philippines have more restrictions on foreign investment, less transparency, and more government corruption).

So we think civil libertarians miss the point when they criticize Singapore. Singapore's single-minded focus on raising living standards and improving quality of life has been hugely successful. The People's Action Party deserves to remain in power if they have transformed the country from a poor backwater to one where everyone has a job, owns their own home, and enjoys a high standard of education and health care. It's a great place to live. It's clean, efficient, and crime free. The shopping is world class and you can eat any kind of food from all over the world. Westerners from dozens of nations live there. Some say it's boring, and maybe if we were in our early 20s we would agree, although our friends who did live there report there is plenty of debauchery if you know where to look for it. (As an aside, when we went out for dinner with the Singhs, Navinder was delighted to point out to us several brothels within a block or two of our hotel! And let's point out that Singapore has just approved two casino integrated resorts to try to ensure it remains a top tourist destination.)

Another overlooked accomplishment of Singapore is that it is a multi-ethnic, multilingual, multi-religion society that lives in harmony. We did not appreciate this when we had each visited Singapore previously, but spending more time here, we came to recognize this. It is the melting pot of Asia.

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