see things differently

Landsat Image of the Sundarbans mangrove forest in India.

More from @vruba: In which I politicize a natural disaster:

Here’s Bangladesh, home of 160,000,000 people:

This picture is about 750 km (450 mi) on a side. Bangladesh is the area of New York State. It has the highest population density of any country except micronations like Singapore and the Vatican.

Notice there is no patchwork logging texture like most of the developed world has from space. Bangladesh’s only remaning lowland forests of any size are the Sundarbans, a dark green mangrove swamp on the coast. Except some foothills around the edges, the country is almost entirely a dense network of villages between fields and ponds. More than two thirds of its people – roughly the equivalent of the entire population of Japan or Mexico – live outside cities. If you pull it up on Google Maps, you’ll see many ponds have been squared off as surrounding farm plots crowded at their edges over centuries.

Notice the braided rivers. These are the members of the Ganges river system. Rivers can only flow in that kind of pattern on flat land. The land is flat because it is mostly the delta of the Ganges. Soil from the mountain range at the top of the frame, the Himalaya, washes down the rivers and has slowly built a bay into a huge bench along the Indian Ocean. About a third of Bangladesh is below 10 meters. The Sundarbans are legally protected partly because they buffer storm surges: when a cyclone makes landfall, the seawater it pushes is slowed by the manifold roots. This was learned the hard way.

Notice two cities – lichen-like gray patches. The one in the lower center of the frame is Dhaka (Dacca); 15 million people live there, or a little less than twice as many as in the five boroughs of New York City. To its southwest, not far from the water, is Kolkata (Calcutta), just over the border in India, with a population of about 14.5 million. Both of them are roughly half below 10 meters.

The border with India is winding and sometimes contentious. One of the main disagreements is sharing the water of the Ganges. The Ganges depends on the monsoons and snowfall in the Himalaya. The area is politically complex. To the west, India, a nuclear-armed democracy, plays a difficult set of roles in the world and is not always friendly. To the north, past the tiny Himalayan countries, is China, a nuclear-armed single-party state and rival of India. To the east is Myanmar, a terribly oppressive dictatorship. Bangladesh would soon find itself in trouble if many of its people, even a small proportion like ten million, spilled across any of its borders. As I write this, I see that the UN High Commission on Refugees has in fact just asked Bangladesh to open its borders to people leaving Myanmar.

Bangladesh’s Human Development Index is comparable to that of Cambodia or Angola, two countries that suffered generation-long episodes of violence near the end of the last century, but Bangladesh has been basically at peace since the year-long war of independence in 1971. It is simply very poor. It’s getting richer, but it’s very poor. The nation cannot afford to, say, take the approach of the Netherlands and wall out the ocean, even if that were possible in a country of rivers. Now, for all its challenges, Bangladesh has well-chosen strategies to deal with them. It is not powerless and it is not a lost cause. But it is 160,000,000 people living under a threat that, so far, only increases.

Persuasion, Initiative, Freedom, Desire

@isomorphisms: Econ 101 leaves out persuasion. What fraction of business (/politics) is persuasion?

@isomorphisms: Of course that's only part of the problem with lacking a theory of where utility surfaces come from.

@isomorphisms: People choose careers, (spouses?), and clothes based on narratives someone else wrote. Whether it's the YC type "entrepreneur" narrative or Puma's "sleek" narrative, or sci-fi narratives of technological progress.

Where did economists themselves get the idea to become professors? Could it have been from 17 years of schooling???

@isomorphisms: It's rare for people to initiate their own dreams or be 100% originators of their goals or preferences.

@isomorphisms: Which presents a problem for the Edgeworth-box story of lonely individuals trading with each other.

@isomorphisms: But the story Don Draper told about Lucky Strikes is, I think, the same one as the fMRI Pepsi/Coke experiment. #neuromarketing

@isomorphisms: It's that ∄ difference between "lies" and "truth": perception is reality. It's that pleasure and preference themselves are malleable and being moulded by others all the time. (Or at least they're trying to mould it.) Even besides "marketing types" or essayists trying to influence your unconscious or conscious thoughts as their job, plenty of people reflexively enforce social norms and expectations without a strong desire or benefit

@isomorphisms: The story of Don Draper and the Lucky Strikes makes us individuals out not as free-willed inventors of ourselves, util-seekers and comandantes of our own pocketbooks--but as dull voids with no idea what to do with the incomprehensible freedom we enjoy in a society where incomes so far exceed subsistence.

@isomorphisms: It puts us as templates onto which meme-smiths paint their work, searching for 1 that will stick and replicate itself.

@isomorphisnms: It's somewhere in that spirit, I think, that persuasion in the workplace, in the store, on the TV, can be modelled. And without an effective theory of persuasion I don't see how economic theory can take an honest accounting of choice, preference, or "optimum".

Bike ride through streets named Brookside (nowhere near a brook), Ridgeview (not on a ridge), Westminster (none of their corpses will be entombed there). A tennis court on Buckminster Drive.

Ironically, this sign: "NO SOLICATIONS ON THE PREMISES". The real estate developers and bankers involved have already done all the selling, thank you. Now we need these people to obediently and consistently rise for work every day and pay OUR due, without YOU fingering their pockets as well.

Even "Alan Rickman Reads Proust", the suggestions of what to do with freedom--trips to India, faling madly in love, "On The Road" type life--aren't original ideas, those come from stories which we have no better idea than to live out.

But why point out the unoriginality of others when I have so much to draw on myself?

My first business was, literally, a copy of one I'd worked at in another locality. My dreams to become a quant? 100% seeded in the insinuations of my professors.

Or even my unclever insults above aimed at the ownership society. Did I invent those myself? No. Umpteen movies and stories and poems railing against suburban culture. Any surprise that Millennials want to walk to small shops whereas their parents preferred driving to the mall? Was it that something about cars and roads and shops changed? Or that a generation worth of artists told a nasty story that changed the demand functions.

This is depressing. I need a cigarette.

Persuasion, Initiative, Freedom, Desire

BROWSE