paineuly

The problem with wind power is that electric utilities have to be prepared at any time for their power production to just stop on short notice.  So they must keep fossil fuel plants on hot standby, meaning they are basically burning fuel but not producing any power.  Storage technologies and the use of relatively fast-start plants like gas turbines mitigates this problem a bit but does not come close to eliminating it.  This is why wind power simply as a source contributing to the grid makes very little sense.  Here is Kent Hawkins of Master Resource going into a lot more depth:

How do electricity systems accommodate the nature of wind and solar? They do this by having redundant capacity almost equalling the renewable capacities as shown in Figures 5 and 6 for two jurisdictions that have heavily invested in wind and solar – Germany and Ontario, Canada.

Figure 5 – Duplicate capacity requirements for Germany in 2015.

Source: See note 4, sub point a.

 

Figure 6 – Duplicate capacity requirements for Ontario, Canada, in 2018

Source: Ontario Power Authority[5]

In both figures, the left-hand columns are peak demand requirements and include all the dispatchable capacity that is required to reliably meet demand and provide operating reserve. In the right-hand columns, if you look very carefully, you can see the capacity credit for wind by the slight reduction in “Peak Demand + Op Reserve.” In summary, when wind and solar are added, the other generation plants are not displaced, and, relative to requirements, wind and solar are virtually all duplicate capacity.

Wind might make more sense in niche applications where it is coupled into some kind of production process that can run intermittently and have its product stored.  I think T Boone Pickens suggested having wind produce hydrogen from water, for example, and then store the hydrogen as fuel.  This makes more sense because the total power output of a wind plant over a year can be predicted with far more certainty than the power output at any given minute of a day.  This is one reason why the #1 historic use of windpower outside of transportation has been to pump water -- because the point is to fill the tank once a week or drain the field over a month's time and not to make absolutely sure the field is draining at 10:52 am.  The intermittent power is stored in the form of water that has been moved from one place to another.

惠普宣布，它的研发机构惠普实验室的主任、首席技术官Martin Fink将在年底退休，而惠普实验室将并入到Hewlett Packard Enterprise。惠普实验室最雄心勃勃的项目是The Machine，该项目包含了忆阻器、硅光子技术和全新的操作系统。惠普实验室的研究人员在2008年证明了忆阻器的存在。忆阻器能在关闭电源后仍然记忆数据，理论上可替代传统的磁盘/内存系统。但随着Martin Fink的退休，惠普对实验室的策略很可能转向实用性的而不是The Machine/忆阻器之类需要很长时间研发的项目。The Register怀疑忆阻器是否还有真正商业化生产的可能性。

Since the end of World War II, U.S. strategy in Asia has rested upon two pillars. The first has been the need to maintain “preponderant” power, to guard against the rise of a great-power challenger who could dominate the eastern part of the Eurasian landmass and its Asian rimlands. This strategy historically required a continued military presence in locations where the United States had fought during World War II and the early Cold War: Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. The U.S. military also had to retain the ability to surge its forces into the region at any time and any place they might be needed.

The second element of U.S. strategy in Asia called for building a regional political order that would advance American interests and values. To accomplish this, first and foremost the United States helped rebuild Japan and forged an alliance with it. It also aligned itself with other non-Communist forces in North and Southeast Asia to support their development as decolonized independent countries and their growth as liberal democracies.

This two-pronged strategy was successful—both in heading off the Soviet Communist threat to the region and in providing space for Western-aligned Asian countries to develop. By the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s, experts were predicting that the 21st century would be an “Asian Century.” Lending force to this prediction was the fact that Japan’s economy was then booming, and that the so-called Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore) were likewise experiencing high levels of economic growth.

But then came the economic “explosion” of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—according to the Economist, the most rapid accumulation of wealth in human history, lifting millions out of poverty and bringing China into the family of nations. At the same time, India, too, appeared poised to unburden its economy of socialist shackles, and the rest of Southeast Asia seemed no less eager to follow northeast Asia’s path. But the big story was, and remains, China.

Starting with President’s Nixon’s “opening” to China in the 1970s, the main thrust of U.S. strategy toward the Middle Kingdom had been focused on integrating it into the liberal world order: the panoply of organizations and institutions that historically enabled the development of peaceful nation-states. But by the early 1990s, it was becoming clear that Asia’s continued peace was not preordained.

With Beijing translating its wealth into greater military and political power and making a frank bid for dominance of the region, the strategy of integration, however necessary it remained, was no longer sufficient. In the post–Cold War world, the U.S. needed an answer to China’s rise as the potential great-power challenger in Asia whose emergence Washington had long sought to prevent.

The answer—less a departure from than an amendment to the strategy of integration—was to take hedging actions against a more aggressive China. Under Bill Clinton and both Presidents Bush, Washington kept American troops forward-deployed in Japan and South Korea and shored up its extant alliances not only with Japan but also with South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. In addition, it strove to strengthen non-allied security partnerships with Taiwan and Singapore while searching for new partners in Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and Vietnam. The idea was to continue seeking the benefits of the hoped-for “Asian century” while actively protecting our forward-based security position.

Enter the Obama administration, which from early on brought to Asia policy a new assumption. Obama believed that the United States had been too distracted by the Middle East, and lately by the war on terror, to pay sufficient attention to Asia policy. Indeed, over-involvement in the Middle East, so this thinking goes, had been a strategic mistake. While his predecessors’ approach to China wasn’t altogether wrongheaded, it had been insufficient on both the hedging and the integration sides.

Obama made the case that in a time of allegedly limited resources, the U.S. needed to “rebalance its portfolio,” shifting capabilities away from the Middle East and Europe and toward Asia. From this perspective, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, coupled with Obama’s decision not to intervene in Syria, was not to be seen as (in the former instance) just an agreement on nonproliferation or (in the latter) an expression of caution—but as a way out of the Middle East morass. If that exit could be achieved, it was posited, the U.S. would be in a stronger position to hedge against China’s aggressive behavior.

This new attitude implicitly unwound the strategy of American preponderance across the critical regions of Eurasia, and also the relative weight given to the hedging and integration aspects of that strategy. When it came to order-building in particular, Obama brought a new verve and vigor to his predecessors’ efforts. The administration joined such Asian groupings as the East Asia Summit, signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and became a more frequent attendee at ASEAN+ meetings. The guiding assumption appeared to be that Asia already had, or could soon have, the kind of liberal order that defines present-day Europe.

And so the next administration will be handed an Asia strategy based on three main assumptions. First, that China will continue to grow more powerful, and the United States must continue to hedge against its aggression. Second, that there already exists a “liberal order” in Asia that simply needs to be strengthened. Third, that the U.S. can achieve success on both fronts even as it retrenches from Europe and the Middle East—regions long thought to be critical elements of a strategy of Eurasian preponderance.

Each of these assumptions is deeply flawed.

Will China Grow More Powerful?

China, it is now agreed, has entered a period of prolonged economic slowdown. Its own reported 2015 numbers showed that the economy grew only 6.9 percent, down from the breakneck double-digit rates of the first decade of the 21st century. But the true number is surely far lower. Economist Derek Scissors argues: “If Xi [Jinping] does not quickly move beyond talk to profound pro-market reform, China will not slow or struggle—it will just stop.”

China’s economic slowdown has had many causes, including an abysmal demographic situation, high levels of debt, and an inefficient and corrupt financial system. Global demand is shrinking, which means China’s export-driven growth model is approaching its end. And the regime’s response to the 2008 global financial crisis—namely, government stimulus and the accumulation of massive debt—will continue to cause more problems down the road.

A strategic reassessment is in order, and the first question to be asked is what China’s slowdown means for the regime’s internal stability and external behavior.

Tough choices clearly lie ahead for President Xi Jinping. Internally, he must find new ways to build legitimacy for a Chinese Communist Party that faced little organized resistance as long as most Chinese living standards were improving. Theoretically, of course, China could reverse direction and implement substantive market reforms. But politically those reforms do not seem to be in the offing—it is simply too risky to let capital leave Chinese banks and flow freely, as was envisioned by the 2013 Communist Party Plenum. So far, the approach of Xi Jinping has instead been a high-profile “anti-corruption” campaign that has helped to further centralize power and featured a crackdown on the media, lawyers, intellectuals, and churches.

Washington has come to expect that continued high levels of economic growth in China would sustain its double-digit increases in annual defense expenditures and impressive military-modernization program, which has produced the world’s most active missile-, ship-, and aircraft-building programs. In addition, Beijing deployed a toolkit of economic inducements to purchase the support of countries it has deemed strategically valuable—from the eastern coast of Africa, where it wants naval bases, to the Middle East, where it needs oil, to Asian countries that it wants to keep from allying fully with the United States.

Under worsening economic conditions, can China be expected to sustain its national-security policy abroad, and for how long? So far there have been no signs of abatement in Beijing’s policy of militarizing the South China Sea and challenging Japan in the East China Sea.

Nor has the PRC displayed any inclination to deviate from its historical willingness to engage in adventurism during times of trouble, earlier instances of which reach back to Deng’s post–Cultural Revolution attack on Vietnam and Mao’s pre–Great Leap Forward bombardment of Taiwan’s offshore islands.

Meanwhile, won’t a slowing economy cause internal trouble that will require Beijing to make further investments to police the large Chinese empire, spanning from Tibet and Xinjiang to Hong Kong?

Washington has not even begun to think about an alternative strategy for this slowing China. There is no consensus about such basic questions as whether the lethargic growth and political decay in China might actually benefit the American interest in keeping Asia free of a hostile hegemonic power.

In that light, a wise strategy would alter the current policy of hoping for greater Chinese economic growth. While it is detrimental to global economic growth, China’s slowdown provides an opportunity to better align our economic interest with our security interest. Under such a strategy, for example, the United States could work harder to push its open-markets agenda throughout the rest of South and Southeast Asia, with particular attention granted to countries that we want to befriend. Especially in the case of a China that might be prone to lashing out, the U.S. would benefit from economically successful Asian partners able to invest in a more serious, region-wide hedging policy.

Has the ‘Liberal Order’ in Asia Been Strengthened?

The purpose of current U.S. diplomacy in Asia has been increased engagement with Asia’s multilateral organizations—hence, the Obama administration’s signing of the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in 2009, joining the East Asia Summit in 2011, sending high-level officials to the ASEAN Regional Forum, and successfully negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership that has become a major sticking point in the U.S. presidential election. But do these institutions really amount to a functioning and coherent Asian political/security order?

The answer is no. When we speak of a functioning regional liberal order, we have one model: post–World War II Europe (granting all of its manifold problems). European politics and economics have long been “ordered” around a security system based on a preponderance of American power tied into a collective alliance, NATO. American primacy within the alliance system provided the time and space for Europe to develop a political-economic system both regional and international in scope.

This is a “liberal” order in the classical sense that it encourages free trade, free markets, and a respect for liberal interpretations of international law and custom. Its institutions include the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization at the global level, and the EU, OSCE, and NATO at a regional level. And this order was not conjured up out of nothing in 1945; ultimately it was based on what Walter Russell Mead has described as centuries of an Anglo-American order.

This order was rooted in the pre–World War I British belief that “free trade would promote peace between nations based on common interests, and increasing prosperity,” according to Mead. “People-to-people contact, facilitated by international human rights and religious organizations, would remove the misunderstandings that led to war and create bonds of friendship as well.”

Before the breakdown that led to the two world wars, Europeans had gone through a “Westphalian” progression in which empires, kingdoms, and religious movements became nation-states with agreed-upon sets of customs, rules, and practices, often referred to as “classical diplomacy.” These rules included sovereign equality among nations, respect for territorial boundaries, promises to stay out of one another’s domestic politics, and attempts to resolve disputes peacefully while circumscribing the use of force. Most of Europe’s constituent countries also shared common political cultures and a common civilizational legacy.

Without those shared civilizational and cultural legacies, statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic could not possibly have been as optimistic as they were about the prospect of rebuilding a liberal system in Europe. American and European leaders spoke in urgent and almost spiritual terms about the need for a Western order. As Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett stated, the “cement” of the NATO treaty “was not the Soviet threat, but the common Western approach and that Western attachment to the worth of the individual.”

The postwar European order was animated by a positive vision for what type of order the constituent states wanted to create and a strong sense of the principles that the system would defend. Over time the European nations felt safe enough to abandon much of the Westphalian system and create “postmodern” supranational institutions that weakened the importance of national sovereignty.

This same “European world order” has now become the reference point for discussions of an “Asian order.” But that Asian order simply does not exist.

Asia does not enjoy a history of a functioning system of independent nation-states. In postwar Asia, the United States arranged its strategy around Japan, the only Asian country that had modernized and industrialized and participated in the international order before the war. The only other candidate for a great-power partner was China—and indeed, before and during the war, Western statesmen saw China as a potentially key part of the new international order. But then it fell to Mao in 1949 and joined the other side.

As for Asia’s other countries, none has ever really made the transition into a “Westphalian” nation-state. After the war, Indonesia, India, Burma, and Vietnam struggled for independence from European and American colonization. Malaysia and Singapore were created as nation-states when the British pulled out of Asia. Many Southeast Asian countries did not gain full independence until the 1960s and ’70s.

In Northeast Asia today, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan do operate within a semblance of a liberal order thanks to the U.S. alliance system and Japan’s prewar processes of modernization. Yet these countries do not have habits of mutual cooperation.

This is why all attempts to arrange Asia into a collective alliance (as in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) have fallen apart. Potential member countries simply do not share a common perception of threat, and efforts to build political and regional organizations with teeth are still limited. To be sure, Asian nations have joined such institutions as the WTO, the IMF and World Bank, and UN organizations. They have thereby benefitted from access to international markets and capital, as well as from the free use of the commons.

From time to time, Asian states have also searched for ways to make common cause regionally, as when Chinese and Soviet subversion was spreading and America was beginning to lose the Vietnam War. In 1967, the Southeast Asian nations created ASEAN as a bulwark against Communism; today, its member countries are fitfully learning to play balance-of-power politics in order to maintain their sovereign independence, increase their strategic autonomy, and block new forms of hegemony.

Still, ASEAN is no EU or NATO—and should not have been expected to be so. When it was founded, countries were still fighting for their independence and to define their territorial limits. Until 1966, Indonesia, the largest Southeast Asian nation, was still trying to undermine the formation of Malaysia as an independent country. Mutual suspicion between Indonesia and Vietnam blocked the resolution of the third Indochina war until 1991. Whenever key national-security interests were at stake, ASEAN members went outside the confines of ASEAN to resolve their problems. With little security cohesion among the Asian countries, the Asian security system still today depends on U.S. primacy and in particular on the American commitment to an open maritime order.

Given this brief history, is postwar Europe really a model for Asia and regional integration? The next administration should ask itself that question, and also what can realistically and fruitfully be expected of emergent Asian countries facing the stresses and convulsions of a declining China. The first requirement of a liberal order is constituent liberal nation-states.

Thus the first order of business for the United States is to continue encouraging the development of strategically autonomous countries developing along liberal lines. Given their short histories as independent nations, the U.S. should be satisfied with a Southeast Asia that can engage in the kind of “classical diplomacy” that resolves territorial and maritime disputes on the basis of sovereign equality and international custom, and that can defend itself against the uncertainties attendant on China’s rise and current turmoil. The region must undergo its own modern Westphalian progression before it is urged to jump into postmodern diplomacy.

Can Our Strategy in Asia Succeed While We Retrench Elsewhere?

The most important question to be asked of the new approach to Asia is not about its tactical mistakes but about its misguided strategic conception that the U.S. can “pivot” away from Eurasia’s other critical regions.

The Cold War grand strategy of containment had its roots in the view that, to preserve its security and way of life, America could not abide the dominance of a hostile power in any critical region in Eurasia. That is still the case. Put in a more positive and activist light, America has an interest in making the liberal order open to all comers, particularly in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. To do so, it still needs a global maritime strategy that can tip balances in its favor and keep trade functioning well.

Take U.S. commitments to Asian friends and allies. These depend upon security of energy supply and transit from the Middle East and therefore upon the dominant role of the United States in the Persian Gulf. It is doubtful that China or Russia will step into that role, and if they did, Asian allies would be right to be concerned.

On the issue of nonproliferation, Japan and South Korea in particular look to the U.S. global role in stemming the tide of nations anxious to acquire weapons of mass destruction. When Syria broke a longstanding taboo in 2013 by using chemical weapons, and got away with it, the event and its significance did not go unnoticed in Tokyo. America’s friends in Asia wait in nervous apprehension as Iran, allegedly in nuclear purgatory, nevertheless continues its slow march toward nuclear weapons. They have seen this happen in North Korea in the face of very similar attempts by American diplomats to prevent it. A nuclear Iran will most certainly change the calculation of Asian countries like Japan and South Korea that have the technological capabilities to acquire their weapons.

Add to these negative developments in the Middle East the festering jihadist threat in Iraq and Syria. The terrorists who have fought in these conflicts are making their way back to Muslim-majority countries in Asia such as Indonesia. And what of Russia, busy annexing Crimea, menacing Europe—and reestablishing its influence in the Middle East? Asian friends pay close attention to territories that are forcefully changed, to the rise of another revisionist power like Iran, and to the potential for unfavorable alignments between Moscow and Beijing.

The Obama administration has had some real accomplishments in Asia, from defense agreements with the Philippines and India, to the successful negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But these advances will be fleeting if the next administration gets U.S. global strategy wrong. The good news in Asia is, unlike in 1945, there are now many countries that share Washington’s liberal values. Even so, order-building in Southeast Asia should be mindful of the relatively short history these countries have as independent, strategically autonomous, Westphalian countries. They will be jealously protective of their sovereignty, will still work out their territorial boundaries, and will remain skeptical of grand institutionalist schemes. Washington can start to help build a solid foundation for 21st-century Asian states by understanding them better and learning to work with them as they are rather than as we would wish them to be—and, crucially, by helping them to hedge more effectively against a China whose rough road ahead will likely result in more aggressive behavior against them, both economically and militarily.

A couple weeks ago I discovered EconTalk and started devouring their archives. Blame them for all the econospeak that follows.

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Like many people, I studied for my undergraduate degree while living in a big dormitory with 50 friends my age. Since I’ve come to the US, I found out about some things that Americans do in their college dorms:

1. Craft a ceramic mug in the adjoining pottery studio.
2. Jump in the ball pit playroom.
3. Sell cocaine and assault rifles.

Here are some of things I was doing while living in the dorm:

1. Carry boxes of food supplies from the storehouse.
2. Clean the toilets, mop the floors and repaint the walls.
3. Grab an assault rifle and go on patrol duty at 3 AM.

Except for the rifles, it was a pretty different experience. Our class of 50 faced the problem of assigning volunteers to all the crappy chores we had to do. With unsupervised volunteering, some people would inevitably free-ride on the labor of others. We also didn’t want to force people into chores they hate. Unfortunately, even I was really motivated here’s what I saw when I steeped up to write my name on the chore table:

Carry boxes	Kind of a bummer
Clean toilets	Serious bummer
3 AM patrol	Huge bummer

This is a problem, doing chores is a bummer. In fact, so is doing any kind of work, so why do people do any work at all?

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. – Adam Smith

The very basic law upon which economics is built is that people respond to incentives, and that’s it. What if everyone in our class was paid for doing the chores? This would work if we had a budget for the chores, but unfortunately that budget was $0. There was no way we could use “real money” in the system. So what now?

This brings us to the coolest idea in the history of economics: money doesn’t need to be “real” to be real currency. Money isn’t a tangible thing, it a story. Money is a mutual promise by a group of people to do things (like butcher meat or brew beer) for each other. Currency is the way to keep track of these promises. A $10 note is a promise by every person in the United States to do 10 dollars worth of stuff for you (like making you a sandwich) in exchange for your $10 note that they can then use to get something else. That’s not different from my friends promising to clean the toilets if I carry the food boxes. The US Dollar system works because people believe that the promises to exchange stuff for dollars will be kept in the future, any group of people who trust each other can establish their own currency and it will be just as effective.

This is exactly what we did. The smartest person in our group went up to the table of chores and added a column:

Carry boxes	3 bummer points
Clean toilets	5 bummer points
3 AM patrol	8 bummer points

The bummer point economy had a few simple rules:

1. Each person’s BPs were tracked in a publicly visible table.
2. Anyone could volunteer for any chore and earn the BPs.
3. If more than one person volunteered, the volunteer with the least BPs got to do it.
4. If no one volunteered, the person with the least BPs overall was forced to do it.
5. You couldn’t opt out, because like most of my readers have figured by now, this was in the military.

The bummer economy worked stunningly well. The relative popularity of different chores allowed us to quickly establish effecting pricing: the correct number of bummer points that got exactly one or two volunteers for each task. Like with actual dollars, a few guys engaged in an altruistic penis-measuring contest to conquer the top of the bummer point table. They ended up doing about 50% more chores than anyone else and had fun doing it, to everyone’s delights. No one ever had to be forced into a task: whoever was close to the bottom of the table got their pick of the chores each week.

The biggest benefit was allowing the leveraging of comparative advantage: people volunteered for the chores they enjoyed doing the most relative to the BP price. A free-trade economy sprung up spontaneously: people traded personal errand like laundry for BPs, everyone competed to be as helpful as possible for their friends.

The simple trick of introducing currency achieved utterly miraculous results:

1. Almost every chore was done by the person who found it the easiest and enjoyed it the most, so the same amount of tasks got done with a fraction of the resulting unhappiness.
2. People invented new ways to do stuff for others, like taking up cooking or organizing fun events.
3. The publishing of the chores list at the beginning of every week turned into a fun celebration.

I’ve tried the bummer point system on several occasions at work and in school, it has works like a charm every time so far. Money is magic, and you don’t need to run a central bank to be a wizard.

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I’m flying to an exotic warm country to enjoy some mosquitoes and diarrhea, Putanumonit will be back in two weeks with a post on procrastination that I wanted to write this week but procrastinated too much on.

 

Imagine a dinner party somewhere in Italy to which, as it turns out, my dad has been invited. On the menu tonight is a sliced tomato, basil and mozzarella salad, pasta with a creamy mushroom sauce topped with parmesan cheese, and Italian gelato ice cream to finish. However, except for the sliced tomatoes and basil, my dad cannot eat anything on offer and is destined to leave the party hungry. My dad is, as I am, ethnically Chinese – and, like the majority of Chinese folk, lactose intolerant.

Although the inability to drink and eat dairy products (or more specifically the inability to digest lactose, the type of sugar found in milk) is commonly called “lactose intolerance”, this is actually a misnomer. All humans are lactose tolerant in early life because we are mammals. Most humans only switch to being lactose intolerant in the transition to adulthood.

But if so many adults struggle to digest dairy, why did we start drinking the milk of other animals in the first place? Well, with the domestication of large mammals, in particular cows, sheep and goats, people began to realise that animals could provide nutrition from more than just their meat. In fact, drinking its milk greatly increases the amount of calories available from an animal during its life-span. Couple this with the subsequent development of cheese making, which allowed for the nutrients available from milk to be preserved in compact and portable form and, voila, a new rich and renewable source of food was available to nascent herding communities.

The ability to digest dairy products as adults is likely to be adaptive owing to its increased nutritional benefits (sugars, as well as fat, protein and calcium) and milk’s role as an important drinking source in arid regions. Considering the symptoms of lactose intolerance, which include water loss from diarrhoea, individuals who had acquired the genetic adaptation of “lactase persistence” and could therefore metabolise dairy products, would have had a very strong selective advantage in areas where herding of cattle, sheep and goats occurred.

Herd mentality

So powerful was the selection pressure in herding societies to be able to consume milk and its related products, that the trait of lactase persistence actually emerged independently at least three times; in northern Europeans, emanating from what is now Denmark, and in two geographically distinct African populations.

Map of lactase persistence.
Royal Society, CC BY

The incredible thing is that although the adaptation in the three cases involved different genetic changes, they all influence the same gene, lactose dehydrogenase, required for metabolising lactose into glucose.

Chicken, pigs and tofu

A key question is how have most other peoples around the world, such as Chinese folk like my dad, continued to thrive without this ability to digest lactose as adults? Certainly the climate in much of East Asia would not have precluded the herding of cattle.

In lieu of viable milking herds, alternative sources of easily renewable protein were identified. For instance, chickens were first domesticated in China. Chickens provided a key protein source, not only from their meat – but also from their eggs, which are, like milk and cheese, a rich, portable and renewable food source. Chickens are also far smaller and have a shorter lifespan compared to large mammalian species, making production less complicated.

Crucially, one of the key crops domesticated by the Chinese – in addition to rice, of course – was the soya bean, which also has a very high protein content. Soya beans are a versatile crop and are the source ingredient for tofu and also soya milk. In much of East Asia today, chickens and pigs (also first domesticated by the Chinese) form the bulk of the meat consumed – and this is supplemented by a large number of soya-related products, including tofu, soya milk, fermented soya beans, and a dizzying array of different soy sauces.

Decaf soy latte

I spent a significant period of my childhood in Singapore, where fresh milk was almost non-existent, and although powdered milk was available, everyone drank soy milk. These days, of course, soy milk is big in the West, too – it is perceived by some to be healthier than cow’s milk as it has less fat and natural sugars and it is now widely available in all major supermarkets and in most coffee shops as a replacement for milk.

There’s a widespread belief in certain sectors of society that lactose intolerance is an indication that humans were not supposed to drink milk as adults. And certainly in some parts of the world, where this is the norm rather than the exception, this is certainly the case. But there’s no denying that the ability to digest cow (and goat and sheep and camel) milk and its products gave some humans the edge in the survival stakes and helped them thrive in early agricultural societies.

 

Giles Yeo is a Principal Research Associate, director of Genomics/Transcriptomics, MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit, at the University of Cambridge.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Historical accounts often assert that notable individuals matter for the growth of particular cities. This column uses a new database of 1.2 million people from 2,000 cities since 800CE to show that some types of ‘notable’ individuals have made a difference. Specifically, the presence of many entrepreneurs and artists is associated with faster long-term growth, but the association does not hold for notable military, political or religious figures.

Decision makers are typically assumed to be fully rational and forward looking. There is very little empirical evidence, however, on whether decision makers take account of future states of the world in strategic interactions. This column presents research on playoff matches in professional basketball to investigate whether teams are forward looking. The findings show that teams react strategically to variation in the ability of their expected future opponent when competing in earlier stages of the tournament. 

When Samuel Stouffer first wrote on political tolerance during the McCarthy era, he concluded that Americans were generally an intolerant bunch. Yet, finding that younger people were more tolerant than their parents, he also concluded that Americans would become more and more tolerant over time, due to generational replacement and increases in education.  However, Stouffer did not predict the rise of the New Left, which I argue has reframed our collective notions about free expression, resulting in a significant decline in political tolerance among America’s youth. I develop this argument in a chapter I wrote for Stanley Rothman’s last book, The End of the Experiment, (Rothman, Nagai, Maranto, and Woessner, 2015)   My findings are outlined below.

First, I make the case that young people are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation and that this marks a clear reversal of the trends observed by social scientists for the past 60 years. Political tolerance is generally defined as the willingness to extend civil liberties and basic democratic rights to members of unpopular groups.  That is, in order to be tolerant, one must recognize the rights of one’s political enemies to fully participate in the democratic process.  Typically, this is measured by asking people whether they will allow members of unpopular groups, or groups they dislike, to exercise political rights, such as giving a public talk, teaching college, or having their books on loan in public libraries.

Americans have not, in fact, become more tolerant. Rather, they have shifted their dislike to new groups. For example, “Muslim clergymen who preach hatred against the United States” are now the least liked group included in the General Social Survey (GSS), followed by people who believe that “blacks are genetically inferior”. Most importantly, compared to those in their 40s, people in their 30s and 20s actually show lower tolerance towards these groups. According to the 2012 GSS, people in their 40s are the most tolerant of Muslim clergymen who preach anti-American hatred: 43% say a member of this group should not be allowed to give a public speech in their community.  Among people in their 30s, the number who would prohibit this group from speaking climbs to 52%, and for those in their 20s it jumps to 60%. Young people are also less tolerant than the middle aged groups toward militarists, communists, and racists. This is not true for tolerance towards homosexuals or atheists, because younger people simply like these groups more. (Political tolerance is not a measure of liking someone, but the willingness to extend political freedoms to those one dislikes).

Second, I argue that youthful intolerance is driven by different factors than old fashioned intolerance, and that this change reflects the ideology of the New Left. Herbert Marcuse, considered “The Father of the New Left,” articulates a philosophy that denies political expression to those who would oppose a progressive social agenda.  In his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse (1965) writes,

Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery. This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested… Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

The idea of “liberating tolerance” then is one in which ideas that the left deems to be intolerant are suppressed. It is an Orwellian argument for an “intolerance of intolerance” and it appears to be gaining traction in recent years, reshaping our commitments to free speech, academic freedom, and basic democratic norms.  If we look only at people under the age of 40, intolerance is correlated with a “social justice” orientation.  That is, I find that people who believe that the government has a responsibility to help poor people and blacks get ahead are also less tolerant.

Importantly, this is true even when we look at tolerance towards groups other than blacks.  For people over 40, there is no relationship between social justice attitudes and tolerance. I argue that this difference reflects a shift from values of classical liberalism to the New Left.  For older generations, support for social justice does not require a rejection of free speech. Thus, this tension between leftist social views and political tolerance is something new.

Third, I argue that intolerance itself is being reclassified as a social good. For six decades, social scientists have almost universally treated intolerance as a negative social disease.  Yet, now that liberties are surrendered for equality rather than security, the Left seems less concerned about the harmful effects of intolerance.  In fact, they have reframed the concept altogether.  For example, political scientist Allison Harell (2010) uses the term “multicultural tolerance,” which she defines as the willingness to “support speech rights for objectionable groups” but not for “groups that promote hatred.”   In other words, multicultural tolerance allows individuals to limit the rights of political opponents, so long as they frame their intolerance in terms of protecting others from hate.  This is what Marcuse refers to as “liberating tolerance.”

In fact, the idea that one should be “intolerant of intolerance” has taken hold on many college campuses, as exemplified through speech codes, civility codes, and broad, sweeping policies on harassment and discrimination.  Students now frequently lead protests and bans on campus speakers whom they believe promote hate.

While this may have the effect of creating seemingly more civil spaces, it has negative consequences.  In fact, tolerance for all groups is positively correlated.  It is not simply the fact that leftists oppose the expression of right-wing groups. Rather, those who are intolerant of one group tend to be intolerant of others and of political communication in general.

How does this all affect the “marketplace of ideas” in higher education?  On the one hand, my coauthors and I (Rothman, Kelly-Woessner and Woessner, 2011) have found little evidence of what one would call widespread indoctrination.  Rather, college students leave after four years with political values and attitudes that are quite similar to those they brought with them.  That does not mean, however, that politics doesn’t matter.  Rather, the willingness to listen to opposing viewpoints and exercise tolerance is predicted by one’s exposure to counter-attitudinal messages (Mutz, 2006) . In other words, listening to viewpoints that contradict our own makes us more tolerant.  In this way, the lack of ideological diversity in higher education contributes to intolerance, especially among leftist students.  This is a point that President Obama made forcefully in a recent speech in Des Moines, Iowa.

When colleges fail to represent the full measure of political ideas, students are less likely to learn to tolerate those unlike themselves.  This, combined with the New Left’s legacy of “liberating tolerance,” creates an environment that values anger and orthodoxy over inquiry and debate.

 

April Kelly-Woessner is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies at Elizabethtown College.

 

This article was originally published at the Heterodox Academy. Read the original article here.

Late last year, a Hong Kong book publisher and four of his associates went missing one by one, after selling books banned in mainland China. Their disappearances sparked concerns about a crackdown on freedom of speech and judicial independence in Hong Kong, and even helped fuel riots over the Lunar New Year holidays against Beijing’s creeping control.

The status of the booksellers has been in question, but yesterday state-controlled media offered an update of sorts, in the form of a report published in the online publication the Paper. The report cites an official investigation into the booksellers by the mainland police.

According to the report, four of five involved have now confessed to their crime. That included Gui Minhai, owner of the Hong Kong publisher Mighty Current and of the bookstore in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay neighborhood that sold the books.

Gui is a China-born Swedish citizen. Known for publishing books critical of the Chinese Communist Party, he appeared for the first time after his disappearance on China’s state television in mid-January, confessing to a drunk-driving accident that killed a woman 12 years ago. (Internet users noted discrepancies in shots of Gui during the confession, casting doubts on its legitimacy.) State media said at the time Gui is also under investigation for other suspected crimes.

Three of Gui’s employees have also confessed to their crimes, according to yesterday’s article in the Paper. That’s the first time they have been reported to have confessed. They had already been confirmed as being in custody of Guangdong police earlier this month (paywall).

The Paper’s report says that Gui’s publishing company, Mighty Current, has sold over 4,000 banned titles to 380 customers in 28 provinces on the mainland since October 2014. According to the report, Gui’s bookstore employees carried books through immigration using disguised covers, then mailed them to customers. The company set up a mainland bank account to do business and transferred money back to Hong Kong using cash, employees reportedly told police investigators.

Gui also confessed to a forgery, according to the Paper’s report: After he was arrested for a hit-and-run accident in late 2003, he forged a document from Swedish police to cover a driving license that had been issued under a fake identity card.

The three bookstore employees, who all testified about Gui’s crimes, will likely return to Hong Kong on bail soon, investigators told the Paper.

Another Gui associate still missing is Lee Bo, a UK citizen and co-owner of Mighty Current. The last to go missing, he reportedly sent a fax early last month to say he was assisting in an investigation on the mainland. There is so far no report of him confessing to a crime.

As for Gui, he remains in custody in Guangzhou, where the Swedish embassy has visited him. Quartz has reached out to the embassy, but has not yet received a reply.

Attitude 1 says that patients know what they want but not necessarily how to get it, and psychiatrists are there to advise them. So a patient might say “I want to stop being depressed”, and their psychiatrist might recommend them an antidepressant drug, or a therapy that works against depression. This is nice and straightforward and tends to make patients very happy.

Attitude 2 says that people are complicated. Sometimes this complexity makes them mentally ill, and sometimes it makes them come to psychiatrists and ask for help, but there’s no guarantee that the thing that they’re asking about is actually the problem. In order to solve the problem, you need to unravel the complexity, and that might involve not giving the patient what they want, or giving them things they don’t want. This is not straightforward and requires some justification, so let me give a few cases where Attitude 2 seems to me obviously correct.

1. A mother brings her 6 year old son to the doctor, complaining that he gets nauseous every morning. She wants the doctor to prescribe an anti-nausea pill. The doctor probes further and finds the kid only gets nauseous on school days. In fact, he only gets nauseous on school days when he has a particular gym class. The doctor asks the kid if there are any problems in that gym class, and the kid is reluctant to say anything. After a while, he finally admits there is a bully in that class. The mother calls the school, and the school takes care of the bully. After that the kid is no longer nauseous in the mornings.

2. A woman goes to a plastic surgeon asking him to fix her nose, which she insists is hideously deformed. The plastic surgeon thinks the nose looks perfectly normal and asks her to be cleared by a psychiatrist before surgery. The psychiatrist diagnoses the woman with body dysmorphic disorder, a delusional belief that one of their body parts is unbearably ugly. The psychiatrist advises the woman and her surgeon that plastic surgery does not work for this disease; if the woman gets her operation, she’ll inevitably either think that the new nose is just as ugly as the old one, or she’ll switch to focusing on something else like her ears or her mouth. He suggests she get psychotherapy instead. After several years of psychotherapy, the woman learns not to worry so much about her nose.

3. A woman goes to her doctor asking him how to taper off her birth control pills. The doctor is surprised at this request because he knows she is planning to break up with her boyfriend. The woman says that this is true, but she wants a child as a way to remember the relationship. The doctor probes deeper and finds the patient is very anxious and ambivalent about leaving her boyfriend and feels like if she has his child at least she will always have “a part of him” with her. The doctor refers her to therapy for her anxiety, and she is able to sort through her conflicting feelings about leaving her boyfriend. She chooses to stay on her birth control.

4. A man goes to his doctor asking for the strongest antipsychotics that exist, saying that he’s crazy and he’s going to hurt someone. The man converses very logically, and tells the doctor he’s felt like this for a year now and never hurt anybody. The doctor suggests that he’s not actually psychotic or violent, but might have an obsessive-compulsive disorder where he worries about becoming that way. The doctor recommends therapy for OCD.

5. A man comes to the psychiatric hospital saying that he’s suicidal and needs admission. The doctor knows him well, and remembers that he has been admitted five times in the past six months, each time after a life crisis, and that the patient has never actually attempted suicide and never even planned how he might do it. The doctor suggests that the man is using the psych hospital as an emotional crutch, and that instead of threatening suicide and going to the hospital whenever he is upset, he needs to learn more adaptive coping mechanisms.

Attitude 1 would have been the wrong choice in these five situations. If the doctor had just given the mother the anti-nausea pill she’d been asking for, the son’s stress about being bullied probably would have just caused some other symptoms. If the surgeon had just given the woman the nose job she wanted, she would have been dissatisfied with the surgery and wanted it changed again. If the third doctor had just told the woman how to get off birth control like she wanted, she might have had a baby for the wrong reasons and regretted it later, leading to heartache all around. If the fourth doctor had just given the man an antipsychotic, he would have unnecessarily exposed him to a potentially life-long course of very strong medication. If the fifth doctor had admitted the man to the hospital, he would be using up scarce resources and discouraging the man from learning better coping strategies.

Any halfway decent psychiatrist uses both attitudes at different times, but most people I know tend to lean to one side or the other. The 2-leaning doctors stereotype the 1-leaning doctors as simple-minded and gullible. The 1-leaning doctors stereotype the 2-leaning doctors as antirational paranoiacs with sledgehammers.

I remember a textbook talking about a case study by a famous psychiatrist. The patient had come in talking about how her husband was being borderline-emotionally-abusive to her. The psychiatrist interrupted her and said that she was perpetuating this dynamic to feed her own narcissism. The patient said this was absolutely not true and she wasn’t narcissistic. The psychiatrist said she would never be able to get over her provoking-her-husband problem until she admitted the depth of her narcissism. The patient refused to keep seeing the psychiatrist after that, and the psychiatrist commented that it had been a hopeless case from the beginning – the extent of her narcissism was so great that she would never acknowledge that somebody else might know more than she did.

And the textbook was very wishy-washy about this – it acknowledged that the famous psychiatrist was brilliant and was doing the right thing in trying to confront the woman with evidence for her narcissism, but then it said that maybe he should have taken a more compassionate tone. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help thinking that the famous psychiatrist was a jerk, that his only evidence the woman was narcissistic at all was a snap judgment from one or two easily misinterpretable things she said, and that call me narcissistic if you want but I wouldn’t have kept attending therapy with this guy either.

That right there is the failure mode of Attitude 2; when we get out of the perfectly safe cases I mentioned above and into the more extreme versions, it starts looking a lot like making snap judgments about how all of a patient’s problems reduce to a single personality flaw, and then interpreting everything about the patient in that light. Narcissism is probably the most popular, but other such flaws include “patient is regressing and wants to act like a child and have other people take care of her”, “patient is just looking for attention”, and “patient is obsessive and demands complete control over everything”. The problem is, once you make one of these judgments every possible piece of data becomes further confirmation.

For example, suppose that a patient says he is having side effects on his new medication.

If you already believe the patient is a narcissist, you can dismiss the patient by saying that he wants to be special, he’s not happy on the same medication as everyone else, he’s trying to control the interaction by making you feel bad because you gave him an inferior medication. The solution is to teach the patient that he can’t always have his way by continuing the medication.

If you already believe the patient is regressing, you can dismiss the patient by saying that he’s throwing a temper tantrum, that instead of dealing with the side effects like a mature adult he wants someone else to step in and make everything magically better. The solution is to teach the patient to deal with his own problems by continuing the medication.

If you already believe that the patient is looking for attention, you can dismiss the patient by saying that they’re just trying to get the doctor’s attention by complaining. You can teach them that this is a maladptive social strategy by continuing the medication.

If you already believe that the patient is obsessive, you can dismiss the patient by saying that he’s getting all neurotic over minor side effects and has worked himself into a frenzy over perfectly ordinary minor hiccups because he can’t tolerate anxiety. The solution is to reassure the patient that everything is fine and continue the medication.

If you already believe that the patient is a witch, you can dismiss the patient by saying that they’re trying to confuse and upset you so that you will be easy prey when they try to kidnap you and sacrifice you to their lord and master, the Devil.

So it’s pretty easy to dislike 2-leaning doctors. Also, fun. Also, quite often justified. So sometimes I give in to the urge and dislike them.

The problem is, sometimes they’re right. I remember one time I had a patient who complained that Geodon was making her hallucinate. Geodon is an anti-hallucination medicine, so the chance that it makes someone hallucinate is pretty slim – but I’ve read all the usual social media posts where people complain about their evil psychiatrist who just dismisses their deeply felt pain as fakery because they had a problem that wasn’t listed in the textbook, and I didn’t want to be that guy, so I went along with it. I asked her to take some Geodon right there in my office. She swallowed the Geodon pill, and sure enough, about two minutes later she said she was starting to have all of these terrible hallucinations.

So I explained to her that oral Geodon takes at least an hour or two before a reasonable amount gets into the bloodstream, and there was no biological way that it could cause hallucinations two minutes after she took it. Then we talked about why she might be scared of the Geodon, and whether she felt any ambivalence about really wanting to get better. Eventually she agreed to try the Geodon again and didn’t hallucinate any more.

Here I felt okay because I had biological impossibility on my side. But I always wonder how many cases I’m letting slip just because my patients’ stories are merely possible-but-unlikely.

Everything’s a tradeoff between Type I and Type II errors. If I err too far on the side of Attitude 1, then my patients will like me and I’ll never inspire a “my doctor said I was just making up my side effects for attention, and later on I got neuroleptic malignant syndrome and died!” horror story. But I will occasionally be doing the equivalent of doing plastic surgery on a body dysmorphic disorder patient, giving unnecessary and harmful medical care while ignoring the true problem.

If I err too far on the side of Attitude 2, then I always get to feel like a hard-headed non-gullible investigator digging down to the root of the problem – but occasionally I’ll end up like that famous psychiatrist in the textbook and tell people that the reason their foot hurts is because they’re narcissistic, and it has nothing to do with the fact that they stepped on a nail and the only reason they’re even bringing up the nail is their deep-seated narcissism.

I tend to lean way toward Attitude 1. I’m not sure I can justify it. Part of it is my personality: conflict scares me and I want to be liked. Part of it is that I read too many horror stories on social media about how much patients hate their Attitude 2 psychiatrists. Part of it is that Attitude 2 has a lot of its philosophical grounding in Freud, and I really don’t trust Freud.

This is a lucrative attitude nowadays. We are all supposed to be biological psychiatrists, all the old psycho-babble is no longer covered by insurance, and The Customer Is Always Right. I am lucky insofar as my natural tendency is also the socially more acceptable one.

(I suppose an Attitude 2 psychiatrist would say I’m not lucky at all, and that my unconscious desire for social approval and success has led me to adopt Attitude 1, and also I am a narcissist)

I may or may not be a narcissist, but I am definitely neurotic. And when my neurosis gets to “maybe I’m a terrible psychiatrist”, this is what it usually settles upon to worry about. Attitude 2 and the various arts associated with it are opaque to me. I can pass tests on them when I have to, but I don’t feel them in my bones. When I’m with a whole conference of doctors nodding their head and going “Yup, that guy’s a narcissist”, I’m always panicking, thinking “Wait, I’m not even close to convinced he’s a narcissist, and also nobody really knows how to treat narcissism, and I would feel a lot more comfortable if this conversation would shift to comparing and contrasting the various subtypes of dopamine receptors.” I am bad at it, and what’s worse I don’t even know if I should be better at it, and I don’t know how to solve the bad-at-it part without worrying that I’m sending myself and my patients down a blind alley.

The OECD Family Database (available here) has some fascinating statistics on average commute times by gender, and a summary of some of those data are displayed in the two tables above (click to enlarge). I was first made aware of these OECD commute times data from a blog post by Jim Rose (“The reverse gender gap in commuting times across the OECD”) where Jim suggests that “Commuting times need to be incorporated into calculations of the gender wage gap because they represent a serious fixed cost of working that is higher for men than for women.” Good point.

The graph that Jim displays on his blog is based on data from this OECD Excel file that contains the average commute times (minutes per day) for all adult men and women, including “self-employed who work at home and working age survey-respondents who do not participate in the labor market.” The OECD goes on to say that “Obviously, estimates on average commuting times for all respondents are lower than when such estimates are based on responses by workers only.”

The top table above displays average commute times for 17 OECD countries from this OECD source (see Table LMF2.6.A) that considers only “paid workers.” Some observations:

1. For all 17 OECD countries in the top table, men spend more time on average commuting to and from work each day, and the “gender commute time gap” ranges from as little as one extra minute of commuting time each day in Norway to as high as 18 minutes each day in the U.S. Interestingly, the difference in average commute times in the US by gender – 61 minutes for women vs. 79 minutes for men – represents a 23% “gender commute time gap” in favor of women that is exactly equal to the 23% “gender pay gap” that we hear about from President Obama:

Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns…in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.

Let me re-phrase Obama’s statement to highlight the “gender commute time gap”:

Today, the average full-time working woman commutes only 77 minutes for every 100 minutes a man commutes to work…in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.

2. Following my introduction in 2010 of the “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” to highlight the “gender occupational fatality gap” in favor of women, let me now introduce the “Equal Commute Day” to highlight the significant “gender commute time gap” in favor of women. As displayed in the top table above, “Equal Commute Day” in the U.S. will fall on April 14 this year and represents how far into the current year women will be able to commute to work before they have spent as much time commuting to work as men did in 2015. Interestingly, that will be a few days after the next “Equal Pay Day” on April 12. “Equal Commute Days” for other OECD countries are also displayed in the top table above.

The bottom chart above displays some really interesting data on the average amount of time spent commuting by paid workers by gender and by the presence (and ages) of children in the household (also from Table LMF2.6.A). Note that:

3. Having children is actually associated with a slight increase in commuting times on average for men in the 16 OECD countries in the bottom table (U.S. data weren’t available for this part of the OECD study). In the UK, the average commute time increases by 2 minutes per day for men with young children (under 7 years old) and by 6 minutes per day for men with school aged children (7 to 17 years old).

4. In contrast to men with children, the average commute times in the OECD countries for women with children does change significantly – there is an average reduction of 4.6 minutes commuting time per day (1,150 minutes per year, or more than 19 hours) for women with young children (from 55.6 minutes to 51 minutes) and an average reduction of 3.9 minutes per day (975 minutes per year, or 16.25 hours) for women with school aged children (from 55.6 to 51.7 minutes).

5. In summary, the average “gender commute time gaps” for paid workers are as follows: a) 10.2% less commuting time per day for women vs. men in households without children (55.6 minutes for women vs. 61.9 minutes for men), b) 18% less commuting time per day for women vs. men in households with young children (51 vs. 62.1 minutes) and c) 17% less commuting time per day for women vs. men in households with children between 7 and 17 years of age.

Bottom Line: Behind the drive for closing the “gender pay gap” – presumably to zero – is often the mistaken assumption that men and women are, or should be, completely interchangeable in their roles in the labor market and in the family. Those assumptions defy innate biological differences and the forces of Mother Nature. It’s an empirically supported fact that men have a much greater tolerance for (and attraction to) risk than women. For example, 91% of motorcycle deaths in 2013 were male, 92% of workplace fatalities in 2014 were men, 93.4% of the current federal prison population is male, and almost 90% of climbers attempting to reach the peak of Mount Everest between 1990 and 2005 were men. That higher male tolerance for risk helps explain some of the gender differences in pay – dangerous, higher risk jobs that are more physically demanding in harsh outdoor work conditions pay more on average than safer, lower risk jobs that are less physically demanding and are in pleasant, air-conditioned indoor offices. It’s also a biological reality that men can’t get pregnant and can’t breast feed, which means that men and women will always play different family roles in childbirth and breastfeeding, and other nurturing child care responsibilities.

We learn about other gender differences for workplace preferences and for family roles from the OECD “gender commute time gaps.” In 17 OECD countries, and especially in the U.S., men are disproportionately more tolerant of longer commute times than women, who on average prefer to work closer to home at job locations with a shorter commute. To the extent that longer commute times are associated with a greater selection of higher-paying jobs, longer average commute times for men would be another factor that would explain some of the aggregate gender differences in pay favoring men. Further, while having children has no effect on men’s average commute times (and in fact increases their commute times slightly), having children does seems to affect women’s preferences for even shorter commute times compared to when they were childless. This might suggest that women want more flexibility and shorter commute times after they have children so that they can more effectively provide family and child care services. In conclusion, the OECD data suggest that women on average place a premium on shorter commute times to work, and therefore may be willing to voluntarily accept fewer job options and lower pay for being able to work close to home, especially after they have children.

Q: To close the “gender pay gap” women might have to be willing to spend a lot more time commuting to higher paying jobs and close the 23% “gender commute time gap,” which is currently 4,500 minutes annually in the U.S., or 75 hours per year and more than nine 8-hour work days per year in additional commute time for men. Would that increased commute time really be worth it to most women? Based on their current “revealed preferences” for shorter commute times than men according to the OECD survey, I think the answer is obviously “No.”

The question has often been asked, what lessons can India learn from the Chinese success story? Can they be applied to India—or is the national genius, or DNA, so different that copycat strategies won’t work?

It is when one confronts these questions that the similarities assumed on the basis of size, scale and (once upon a time) income level are seen to be superficial. The historical and cultural differences between the two entities, and, therefore, their political and economic choices, are more substantive factors.

China’s geographical core has been a centrally administered empire for a couple of millennia, whereas India’s history mostly comprises multiple feuding monarchies. China is overwhelmingly Han, while India is a polyglot nation with every kind of diversity: ethnic, linguistic, religious, caste. China has a long experience of being run by a merit-based bureaucracy, India does not. China has a sense of destiny (the Middle Kingdom with a mandate from heaven), history and continuity, while India’s history is the cause of current political contestations. Chinese nationalism is unifying, while some kinds of Indian nationalism are divisive.

Differences in the modern era are equally substantial. China became a one-party dictatorship while India imitated Westminster democracy. China’s rulers emerged hardened from a civil war and could take the tough decisions about breaking down old ways of doing things in order to create a new reality, whereas India won its freedom through non-violence, so its leaders were inclined to make the softer choices.  China mobilised its masses to bring about revolutionary change, whereas India sought change through laws passed in Parliament. 

China mobilised its masses to bring about revolutionary change, whereas India sought change through laws passed in Parliament and implemented by a bureaucratic set-up inherited from colonial rulers. China began under Mao by emphasising change in the countryside while India under Nehru sought industrialisation. China achieved rapid progress on the key human indicators while India did not.

China began reforming its economy in 1978 with a sense of national purpose; India’s reforms since 1991 have been half-hearted at best and without much political conviction. The end results have thus been very different for the two economies; China has become a global power that casts a shadow over India’s regional status.

The two countries’ paths to development have been almost polar opposites. For a long time, China was seen to have a better macro story than its micro-story: that is, its state performed better than individual companies. India, in contrast, had an underperforming state that failed to deliver the basics, while its entrepreneurs (usually from the traditional trading castes) ran a better-performing private corporate sector. China, therefore, attracted more foreign direct investment in job-creating new factories, while India attracted portfolio investment in existing companies. In recent years, following sweeping reform of its public sector, China’s micro story has improved as well, though in general corporate governance norms remain superior in India.

China achieved what it did by throwing resources on an unprecedented scale into the development of infrastructure, by offering factory owners swarms of workers with no real rights to industrial action or collective bargaining, and by keeping its currency artificially low in order to capture export markets while suppressing local demand. It operated an opaque banking, financial and pricing system in which outside observers found it hard to understand cost structures; also by stealing or copying technology from foreign firms that invested in China; and by achieving exceptionally high productivity norms on factory floors.

India is not about to do any of these; it couldn’t even if it wanted to. While the Indian state has never been able to deliver adequate physical infrastructure (electricity, roads, ports), the existence of a capital market meant that the relationship between capital investment and increased output (the incremental capital-output ratio) has always been better in India than in China—that is, it can achieve similar rates of economic growth with the use of less capital. At the same time, the attempt to apply private-sector efficiency to building infrastructure (through public-private partnerships) has resulted in bad investments, stalled projects and debt-laden balance sheets.

 Chinese workers are better educated and better fed, and seem to take willingly to the monotony of repetitive shop-floor work. 

Taking away the collective bargaining rights of industrial labour, as China has done for all practical purposes, would be unthinkable in a multi-party parliamentary democracy with a long-term left-of- centre bias. A mercantilist currency policy to keep the rupee cheap is ideologically taboo among Indian policymakers who buy into mainstream orthodoxy about not manipulating the exchange rate, and in any case, is not without its costs if pursued for any length of time. India’s politicians, in turn, have often confused a strong currency with national strength—as some Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politicians did during the 2014 election campaign. Meanwhile, the wholesale theft of industrial technology is impossible in a country with an independent judiciary.

Importantly, the combination of large-scale production and very high productivity, which seems to have an East Asian patent, appears to be a leap too far for India. Chinese workers are better educated and better fed, and seem to take willingly to the monotony of repetitive shop-floor work. Those in charge of India’s National Skill Development Corporation report, in contrast, that young Indian men show a marked preference for training that will help them get white- collar jobs, even if manufacturing work pays more. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they are willing to take up to a 50% cut in pay, to switch from blue- or brown-collar to white-collar work (such a preference could be linked to caste and status; among other things, it improves prospects in the marriage market). Similarly, whereas young, single women in China are willing to move far away from home and stay in dormitories located next to factories, their Indian counterparts prefer to stay at home and get bussed to work. This is slower, costlier, less efficient, and results in higher absenteeism.

The Chinese system has fewer checks and balances, so the alignment of objectives is easier, with coordinated action to follow. In India, the two major political parties can agree on the need for a new law, yet each will try to stop the other from getting it passed in Parliament. Much of Narendra Modi’s initial legislative thrust and policy stance were on issues that his party had opposed when in opposition (higher foreign investment in the insurance sector, a border settlement with Bangladesh, the goods and services tax, majority foreign investment in organised retail trade, and so on). Even more ironically, its principal political battle after it formed the government was to try and undo something it had voted in favour of when in opposition (the 2013 land acquisition law).

The separation of powers between legislature, executive, and judiciary makes getting project clearances a complicated hurdle race. This is especially so when populism comes easily to politicians seeking votes and legislatures pass unrealistic laws. The executive is rule-bound rather than result-oriented, and the judiciary given to overreach, issuing sweeping judgments that sometimes show a divorce from economic logic. The result, as Singapore’s Lee KuanYew declared tersely a few years ago, is that “Indians talk while Chinese do”—a remark that drew raucous laughter in the Singapore business forum where Lee was speaking.

Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books India from the book The Turn of the Tortoise: The Challenge and Promise of India’s Future authored by T. N. Ninan. Available in all major bookstores. We welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.

Today is President Ronald Reagan’s birthday, he was born on February 6 in 1911 and would have been 105 years old today. Here are a few items to honor and celebrate the birthday of President Reagan.

1. Amazingly, in the entire history of the United States, there have only been two sitting US presidents who have visited the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) while in office: Ronald Reagan in 1985 and George W. Bush in 2007. After his presidency, Reagan visited the NYSE again in 1992 with Mikhail Gorbachev to mark the exchange’s bicentennial.

Shortly after his death on June 5, 2004, the New York Stock Exchange put this tribute to the 40th president of the United States on its website (emphasis added):

On March 28, 1985, President Ronald Reagan made his first of two visits to the NYSE to salute the robust American expansion, as well as the central role of the New York Stock Exchange as the nerve center of entrepreneurial capitalism (see photo above). President Reagan was the first sitting U.S. president to visit the NYSE.

At 9:53 a.m. that morning, President Reagan—amid a roaring ovation—addressed the Exchange community from the bell podium. Flanked by his chief of staff, Donald T. Regan and NYSE chairman and CEO John J. Phelan, President Reagan proclaimed: “We’re bullish on the American Economy. The American economy is like a race horse that’s begun to gallop in front of the field.” Aiming to drive “the bears back into hibernation,” he said, “that’s our economic program for the next four years—we’re going to turn the bull loose.”

Throughout his presidency, the President continued to champion the principles and power of free people competing in free markets. During the first year of his Administration, in September 1981, Reagan communicated his core beliefs to members of the IMF and the World Bank when he stated:

“We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and, ultimately, human fulfillment are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success – only then can societies remain alive, dynamic, prosperous, progressive and free.

“Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire post-war period, contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development. The societies that have achieved the most spectacular, broad-based progress are neither the most tightly controlled, nor the biggest in size, nor the wealthiest in natural resources. No, what unites them all is their willingness to believe in the magic of the marketplace.

“Everyday life confirms the fundamentally human and democratic ideal that individual effort deserves economic reward. Nothing is more crushing to the spirit of working people and to the vision of development itself than the absence of reward for honest toil and legitimate risk. So let me speak plainly: We cannot have prosperity and successful development without economic freedom; nor can we preserve our personal and political freedoms without economic freedom. Governments that set out to regiment their people with the stated objective of providing security and liberty have ended up losing both. Those which put freedom as the first priority find they have also provided security and economic progress.”

Comment: In contrast to Reagan, I think it’s safe to say that our current president does not trust the people nor does he believe in economic freedom or the magic of the marketplace. Rather, he believes firmly that rigid government controls, regulations, executive orders, and higher taxes are essential to his economic vision. Probably also pretty safe to predict that President Obama will not be making any visits to the NYSE before he leaves office. No, he’ll avoid the “nerve center of entrepreneurial capitalism,” just like he’s avoided visiting the areas that are home today to the most remarkable energy and economic success stories in US history – the Great American Energy Boom. Those extraordinary examples of the “magic of the marketplace” from revolutionary “Made in the USA” technologies emerged starting at the very beginning of Obama’s presidency in 2009 in the “petropreneurial nerve centers” located in places like the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota and the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford Shale oil fields of Texas. And it was the perfectly timed energy-driven economic stimulus from America’s shale oil and gas fields that helped to support the US economy during the Great Recession and prevented that economic downturn from being even more severe and lasting much longer – and in the process may have helped Obama get re-elected!

2. Maybe more than any US president, Ronald Reagan had a wonderful sense of humor and he demonstrated his keen wit in many of his public speeches. You can see many great examples of Reagan’s humor in the video below titled “The Best of Reagan.”

3. Perhaps one of President’s Reagan’s most famous and influential speeches was his “Berlin Wall speech” at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany on June 12, 1987. It was in this speech  (at about 12:00 in the video below) that Reagan made his famous and history-changing demand “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” That statement and speech helped changed the course of history, and there’s even an entire Wikipedia entry for “Tear Down This Wall.” According to the Wikipedia entry, “The speech was also a source of considerable controversy within the Reagan administration itself, with several senior staffers and aides advising against the phrase, saying anything that might cause further East-West tensions or potential embarrassment to Gorbachev, with whom President Reagan had built a good relationship, should be omitted. American officials in West Germany and presidential speechwriters, including Peter Robinson, thought otherwise.” Here’s the full passage of what preceded Reagan’s famous line:

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!

4. Less than two years after Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech, the Berlin wall did fall unexpectedly on November 9, 1989, in what Peter Jennings in the news report below describes as “perhaps the most important announcement made in Central Europe since the end of World War II, certainly since the wall went up in 1961.”

Bottom Line: Happy 105th Birthday, President Ronald Reagan!

With the current barrage of political grandstanding in the US, it can be refreshing to see politicians looking unguarded, once in a while. It’s not by accident that US Republican presidential contender Donald Trump opened his gilded Manhattan triplex and lavish upstate New York estate for the current US Weekly (Feb. 8) issue. The Clintons have hosted Oprah in their Chappaqua residence, while George W. Bush and John Kerry have graced the covers of Ladies Home Journal.

Being seen relaxing at home can warm up anyone’s public image. Opening their doors to the press was a tactic that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma famously deployed in 2011, when they allowed themselves to be photographed playing with their children on their kitchen floor. After the Assad regime was accused of human rights atrocities months later, Vogue magazine tried in vain to scrub the Internet of its glowing family profile.

Readers and writers alike are easily enchanted by the idea of meeting a powerful leader in their private residence. But the origin of this PR tactic is sobering, as architecture historian Despina Stratigakos explains in her provocative new book, Hitler at Home.

“Today it’s almost normal for politicians to trot out their personal lives but it wasn’t [the case] when Hitler was doing it,” she tells Quartz. Just before the outbreak of World War II, the New York Times Magazine published a long, favorable article about Hitler’s “unobtrusively elegant” Berghof mountain retreat, Stratigakos reminds us. The dreamy title of that 1939 piece: Herr Hitler: At Home in the Clouds.

Although daunting, totalitarian architecture is typically associated with the Nazi aesthetic, Stratigakos posits that images of Hitler’s domestic life, framed by tasteful interiors, had an equally indelible effect on the public imagination. And in this realm, there was perhaps no one more influential than a woman named Gerdy Troost.

Hitler’s favorite interior designer

The creative partner and wife of one of Hitler’s most cherished architects, Gerdy Troost defined and defended the Nazi propaganda aesthetic until she died in 1996. Troost worked on the renovation of Hitler’s homes and transformed the Prince Carl Palace in Munich to an urbane apartment for state visitors, (notably for its first guest, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini). Later, she even handcrafted jewel-encrusted medal boxes for the regime.

 The feared Führer allowed cameras into his three impeccably designed private residences in Germany. Troost was Hitler’s favorite tastemaker, and his trusted counsel in matters of design and architecture. But despite her 15-year collaboration with the German dictator, Troost’s name has been relegated to a footnote in history books, observes Stratigakos.

While many scholars tend to disassociate Hitler’s private domain from his politics, Stratigakos believes that there was no separation in the Nazi’s relentless propaganda machine. In fact, Hitler’s tranquil, designer homes provided the backdrop to his most effective portraits—these, says Stratigakos, helped him move on from the “screaming reactionary” reputation he once cultivated in the 1930s.

Drawing on sealed personal papers at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, Stratigakos’s remarkable volume (released on Sept 2015) is the first to limn the extent of Troost’s influence on the Nazi head of state.

Troost and Hitler’s design teamwork

Raised as a pacifist and with a curiosity for modern art that Hitler rejected, Troost was initially skeptical of the politician who came to see her husband so frequently. But a few weeks after their first meeting in Sept 1930, Troost was head-over-heels for Hitler’s charisma. “Contrary to the unappealing hue and cry of his public persona, Hitler in person…behaves like a truly splendid, serious, cultivated chap,” she wrote to her mother.

After her husband’s death in 1934, the two remained such good friends that Hitler’s German Shepherd Blondi and Troost’s German Shepherd Herras were even paired to mate.

In the impeccable homes that Troost created for him, Hitler readily welcomed cameras. Carefully orchestrated photo shoots showed him laughing with friends, stopping to greet children, cavorting with dogs, and he’s even shown feeding baby deer.

For the perfect backdrop to these staged vignettes, Troost paired traditional, neoclassical architecture with quiet, subtle color harmonies—a counterpoint to the bombastic, swastika-branded venues Hitler was usually photographed in. Through these warm and fuzzy “domestic performances,” as Stratigakos puts it, the world was shown a softer side of the Third Reich.

Stratigakos connects Hitler’s strange and strategic obsession with home makeovers with his rise to power. After his niece committed suicide at their shared apartment in 1931, Hitler, then a budget-conscious bachelor and the leader of the nation’s second-most powerful party, became concerned that the scandal would thrust his modest abode into the spotlight.

Throughout the rest of his reign, he worked with closely with architects and designers to change his image from rabble-rouser to a refined intellectual.

A cautionary tale

The woman who designed Hitler’s personal makeover was not an easy subject for Stratigakos, a self-described feminist historian—and the daughter of a survivor of the Nazi regime. Among the many achievements in Stratigakos’ groundbreaking research about Troost is that she’s able to paint a full picture of such a divisive character.

“It was very, very tough, writing about her and ‘living with her,’ as you do with your subject,” she tells Quartz. “But what I hoped to show was her complexity.”

Stratigakos suggests that unmasking the design aspect of Hitler’s onetime appeal offers a cautionary tale, today.

“It was important for me to make readers reflect about their own consumption,” she explains referring to our lust for tabloid stories about the inner lives of famous people. “As a historian, my primary responsibility is to show how things work ideologically but I also wanted to show how we can be seduced by our own desires.

Immigration is an important election issue that often benefits right-wing political parties. Contemporary European politics is an example par excellence. Immigration in the US has been intermittently at the fringes and centre-stage in recent years, and this column looks at the extent to which US voters care about immigration. The political effect of immigration turns out to crucially depend on the extent to which immigrants participate in the political process. One thing from the research is clear: Republicans are generally opposed to immigration reforms, especially if they include a path to citizenship for currently undocumented immigrants. Naturalised immigrants are a liability for conservative politicians, as they tend to vote for progressive parties.

The Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index has dropped substantially in the past few months. China’s growth rate has also slowed. This column argues that the slowdown of the Chinese economy has little to do with the stock exchange, and is mostly due to economic forces. The author recommends a package of policies that need to be implemented to smooth the transition to a sustainable growth rate. 

The Swedish government is preparing to reject large numbers of immigrants. Upwards of 80,000 immigrants should, according to the interior minister, be forced to leave the country. The news, which is widely reported by international media, is part of a major shift in immigration policy.

In 2010 the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats gained enough votes to enter the parliament.  Sweden’s then center-right Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt chose to react with a somewhat unusual strategy: Reinfeldt signed a deal with the opposition Environmental Party, transitioning towards nearly free immigration. He has later explained that the ambition was to isolate the Sweden Democrats from power and influence.

Four years later Reinfeldt’s government was voted out of power. The opposition parties on the left merely increased their voter support by 0.02 per cent. The anti-immigration party however doubled its share of votes, something the party – which historically has neo-Nazi roots – has done in seven consecutive elections. Swedish policies was turned into something of a mess, with the introduction of a third block whom nobody wanted to collaborate with. After some parliamentary turmoil, where a new election was announced but later cancelled, the four center-right parties agreed to not challenge the minority government formed by the Social Democrats and the Environmental Party.

The new government continued it´s pro-immigration policies. Sweden, with its generous welfare systems, proved to be quite a magnet for migrants. At the end of 2015, Sweden was receiving 10,000 immigrants per week. As my brother Tino Sanandaji, an economist critical of the current policies, has pointed out, this can be compared to an annual rate of 25,000 immigrants a year during the period 1990-2010. Reinfeldt’s policy shift, coupled with the breakdown of the European border and the Syrian crises, had moved an already generous immigration policy to almost free immigration.

The cost of receiving new immigrants proved quite high. A significant share are youths without adult companionship who come from Afghanistan. It seems that many are Afghanis who have migrated to Iran and, not satisfied with the life there, turn to Sweden. Under the current policies, the cost of giving support to a single youth who comes without adult companionship, is annually upwards to € 100 000. In the last part of 2014 the system came under considerable stress.

Finally, the Social Democratic prime minister Stefan Löfven reversed policies. Or as The Guardian has phrased it, in the end of November 2015 “Sweden slam[med] shut its open-door policy towards refugees”. When announcing this policy, Åsa Romson – the Environment and ceremonial Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, who is one of the two leaders of the environmental party – had tears in her eyes.

The Environmentalist Party, which strongly supports the idea of a world without borders, cannot be happy about the recent announcement of mass-deportations. However, it is no surprise that the Social Democrats are pushing for the reform. Firstly, Swedish media is unfortunately flooded on a daily basis with accounts of fighting, crime and sexual assaults related to newly arrived migrants. To give just one example, this week a 22 year old asylum worker, herself of immigrant origin, was stabbed to death in her place of work by a recently arrived migrant.

Also, the Swedish welfare state is far from successful when it comes to integrating immigrants on its labour market. The median refugee granted asylum in Sweden during 2004 merely earned £880 a month ten years later. Amongst family immigrants of refugees the level was as low as £360. This of course points to many living of various forms of public support. This is not a sustainable situation in a generous welfare state, where the public system expends much on various social programs, health care etc. are high for all residents.

Lastly, the support for the Social Democrats has been falling significantly. A leading survey published on the 23^rd of January found that the Social Democrats are only supported by 23.2 per cent of the Swedish electorate. This is a record low number, and quite a shock for a party that for long has dominated Swedish policies with support of around 40 to 50 per cent of voters in many elections. A poll-of-polls shows that the Social Democrats on average have 23.9 per cent of the support, closely followed by the conservative Moderates (the party previously lead by Reinfeldt) who have 23.2 per cent and the Sweden Democrats who have 21.0 per cent of the support. Since the latter party systematically has a higher actual share of support in elections than in poles, one can say that the vote is evenly split between the three parties.

The Moderates have already moved from the idea of free-immigration to quite strict policies. Adapting to the challenges ahead, the Social Democrats have followed suit. It remains to be seen how Swedish policies can cope with the situation. The famously egalitarian welfare system in the North is unfortunately singularly unfit for integrating those with foreign origin in its society. Besides the obvious problems with social upheaval and crime, the economic policy must adapt. The high taxes, generous welfare provisions and rigid labour regulation that are trapping many immigrants in welfare dependency simply need changing. The question is if Swedish policies will do a U-turn also in these regards.

The post Sweden closes the door to migrants appeared first on CapX.

Linus Torvalds的母校赫尔辛基大学将削减980名雇员，有570个职位将在2017年底裁掉，其中教师和研究员75人。此外，大学还将重组和合并部分部门。教授、教师和研究人员批评了裁员计划。校长Jukka Kola在一份声明中称，裁员是因为政府削减了教育开支。截至2014年，赫尔辛基大学雇佣了8000多人，有超过3.6万名学生。芬兰大学教授、研究员和教师工会认为大学的裁员计划过于激进。在2015年，尽管经济困难，芬兰接收了1.5万名难民，每年难民的安置费用1.5万欧元，芬兰在难民身上花了2.25亿欧元。

The leaders of tomorrow will be well versed in dead philosophers, according to a new database of college syllabi.

The Open Syllabus Project, a collection of over 1 million curricula from English-language colleges and universities over the past 15 years, released its data on Friday (Jan. 22). Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Aristotle overwhelmingly dominate lists in the US, particularly at the top schools.

The required readings skew toward the humanities—science and engineering classes tend to assign fewer titles—and not surprisingly, toward the Western canon.

In the US, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein is the most taught work of fiction, with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales a close second. In history titles, George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi’s textbook, America: A Narrative History, is No. 1, with Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, a memoir about life as an African-American woman in Jim Crow America, at No. 2. The Communist Manifesto is the third most taught in history, and is the top title in sociology.

“It’s still a dirty dataset,” project director Joe Karaganis tells Quartz, referring to the potential for errors from misspelled or non-uniform titles. In addition, the team behind the project, based at Columbia’s American Assembly public policy institute, has had to rely on what’s publicly available on college sites.

But with the database now open, Karaganis hopes this will change: As more institutions and academics get involved, the team can start to fill in the gaps and correct mistakes. He looks to triple the number of syllabi by the end of 2016.

See the texts taught at 10 of the top US colleges and how often they appeared over the last 15 years.

10 top US colleges*

Princeton

Harvard

Yale

Columbia

Stanford

University of Chicago

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Duke

University of Pennsylvania

Brown

* This list is compiled from the US News’ current national universities rankings cross-referenced with available syllabi on the Open Syllabus Project.

Image by Marissa Smith on Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0.