David Emanuel Andersson

Entries categorized as ‘Life in Taiwan’

Taiwanese English

June 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment

This morning I had breakfast at a franchise of Taiwan’s 85C chain of coffee shops. They have now introduced bilingual signs. I had a “Vegetarian ox-tail-shaped creamy bun.” This is Taiwanese English for croissant.

Note that “vegetarian” in Taiwanese English does not equal vegetarian in standard English. While milk and eggs are considered vegetarian here, onion, garlic, and leek are strictly for carnivores. So for Taiwanese, “vegetarian garlic bread” would be a contradiction in terms (the 85C term is “garlic bread” – the only sign in the shop where Taiwanese and standard English coincided).

Categories: Life in Taiwan
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Is Paul Krugman Sixty Times More Valuable than Douglass North, Amartya Sen or Angus Maddison?

May 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Paul Krugman has just spent two days in Taiwan, at a cost to the taxpayer – including me - of US$500,000. Ten years ago, I was involved in preparing the visits to Taiwan by his obviously less distinguished colleagues North, Sen, and Maddison. Their visits lasted about a week each and cost about US$8,000 plus hotel and airline tickets. And I attended their lectures free of charge! Meanwhile, the price for attending Krugman’s show in Taipei was US$100 per person (no, I did not attend). He also spent time with the President of the Republic of China and advised students that a good preparation for economists is to read Krugman’s seminal contributions to the literature.

I have heard that Krugman thinks that the US stimulus package is too modest. Why not add $182.5 million per year on sustaining Krugman’s no doubt excellent lecture and closed-door-meeting-with-important-people services?

Categories: Economics · Life in Taiwan
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Postmaterialist Liberty Aspirations

May 1, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’m spending a lot of time reading articles related to the World Values Survey, Postmaterialism and “Postmodernization” processes at present. The reason for this is that these studies are directly related to my ongoing project on emerging values in the Oresund region. Today I read an unusually interesting article by Christian Welzel and Ronald Inglehart, entitled “Liberalism, Postmaterialism, and the Growth of Freedom” (International Review of Sociology, 15: 81-108, 2005). In that article, they use a subset of the 12-item Postmaterialism Index that only includes those postmaterialist options that signal a prioritization of liberal democracy over other social objectives. The priorities in question are “freedom of speech,” “giving people more say in important government decisions,” and “giving people more say at their jobs and in their communities.”  Using regression analyses, Welzel and Inglehart show that this index is the best possible predictor of the direction of change over time in the index of civil and political liberties as measured by Freedom House, after controlling for per capita GDP (a significant variable) and a host of other variables that turned out to be insignificant when combined with the liberty aspiration index (i.e. income inequality, ethnic diversity, religious diversity, tolerance of out-groups, share of Protestants, and the level of political and civil liberties 10 years prior to the study period).

Interestingly, Taiwan is identified as an outlier. According to the results of both the 1994 and 2006 surveys, Taiwan’s population has the second-lowest (!) liberty aspirations in the world, after Pakistan. And I can personally attest from informal surveys of Taiwanese students that very few of them select “freedom of speech” as a priority, and many of them even indicate that there is too much freedom of speech in Taiwan. This is something that I find difficult to understand, given my values. Indeed, Taiwan has greater freedom of speech than almost any other Asian country, and is perhaps the main reason why I am prepared to live here. And though I like to complain about the two main Taiwanese parties (the KMT and the DPP), I have to grant them a greater concern with maintaining freedom of speech than is typical of the general population. I would guess that the Taiwanese anomaly is the result of two reinforcing factors: the need for American moral support and the fact that a majority of government ministers – in both KMT and DPP governments – were educated at American universities.

The other interesting observation is that the liberty aspiration of the American population declined substantially between 1999 and 2006. The only fully developed Western democracy that had lower liberty aspirations (in 1999) than the United States (in 2006) was Israel. In both cases, “strong defense forces” were prioritized over “giving people more say at work and in their communities.” War, in other words, seems especially destructive of the values that are the foundation for sustainable liberal democracy. In the American case, I also think that the Patriot Act and other assaults on the freedom of expression caused many of the less-informed citizens to waver in their support for free speech. In my view, the combined effects of an open-ended and ill-defined War on Terror and ever greater powers for the federal government to snoop on private written and spoken communications were the worst consequences of the Bush presidency, and the real reason why he was the worst president in American history. The economic mismanagement of the Bush administration was regrettable, but very similar to the ill-conceived plans of countless other governments, whether Democrat, Republican or European.

Anyway, here is a table with “liberty aspirations” around the world. The index ranges from 0 (no-one has any postmaterialist liberty aspirations) to 5 (everyone selects the options in a way that gives priority to liberty aspirations to the maximum extent possible). Highly developed and durable liberal democracies are in bold style:

Postmaterialist liberty aspirations index, 1999-2006

Country Index    
Andorra

3.047

Cyprus

1.628

Canada

2.939

Malaysia

1.627

Britain

2.889

Singapore

1.614

Netherlands

2.795

Turkey

1.611

Switzerland

2.795

Thailand

1.592

Sweden

2.760

Moldova

1.580

Finland

2.726

Kyrgyzstan

1.577

Puerto Rico

2.656

Uganda

1.562

USA 1999

2.623

Algeria

1.551

Germany

2.591

Ghana

1.540

Slovenia

2.584

Bangladesh

1.524

Italy

2.512

Ukraine

1.490

New Zealand

2.505

Serbia

1.482

Mexico

2.500

Vietnam

1.473

Australia

2.490

Bosnia

1.430

Dominican Republic

2.441

Burkina Faso

1.420

France

        2.386

South Korea

1.395

Peru

2.350

India

1.377

Chile

2.211

Mali

1.321

Spain

2.187

Romania

1.252

Poland

2.170

Morocco

1.250

Japan

2.129

Bulgaria

1.242

Venezuela

2.127

Macedonia

1.233

Argentina

2.077

Indonesia

1.209

Brazil

2.073

Tanzania

1.186

USA 2006

2.022

Armenia

1.172

Trinidad

1.940

Georgia

1.169

Ethiopia

1.911

Russia

1.152

Rwanda

1.906

Egypt

1.128

South Africa

1.876

Jordan

1.078

Zambia

1.829

China

1.074

Israel

1.819

Albania

1.018

Philippines

1.754

Taiwan

.855

Nigeria

1.707

Pakistan

.807

Iran

1.649

 

 

Categories: Life in Taiwan · Politics · The Social Sciences
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Globalizing the Values Survey

April 17, 2009 · Leave a Comment

As I have noted earlier, I’m involved in a survey of values among 19-year-olds in the Oresund region (Copenhagen and Malmo).  An MBA student here at NSYSU, Baris Unal, has decided to arrange a similar questionnaire survey among students in the Kaohsiung region. He will use the results and Inglehart’s theory of value change as the foundation for his Master’s thesis. I’m quite excited about this, and am looking forward to comparing Taiwanese with Scandinavian values and life goals.

Some of the questions are taken from the World Values Survey, but the Oresund/Kaohsiung questionnaire looks at some values that the WVS largely avoids, for example occupational goals, housing goals, the organization of culture, and favored leisure activities. There is also the possibility of comparing the results with an earlier survey of Oresund values from 1991. Several of the questions are identical. In addition, the inclusion of key WVS questions should make it possible to look at the association – if any - between postmodern values and occupational, housing, cultural, and leisure choices.

Categories: Life in Taiwan · The Social Sciences
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High-Speed Rail Effects

April 13, 2009 · Leave a Comment

We have finally completed the estimation of hedonic price functions for five metropolitan regions in Taiwan. The purpose was to estimate the effect of high-speed rail accessibility on house prices. The two main cities of Taipei and Kaohsiung were excluded from the study due to serious spatial multicollinearity problems.  Anyway, I will be presenting the results at the conference of the European Regional Science Association in August (in Lodz, Poland). This is the abstract of my paper, co-authored with Oliver F. Shyr and Angel Lee:

 

 

“Taiwan does not only have a high population density; its population exhibits a strong preference for high-density downtown living. Rich Taiwanese thus live downtown, not in the suburbs. In addition, the expected negative relationship between centrality and the spaciousness of housing is conspicuous by its absence in Taiwan’s metropolitan areas. Taiwan should therefore be highly suited for rail transportation investments.

 

In 2007, a new high-speed railroad was inaugurated, connecting all seven metropolitan areas. Hedonic estimates show that high-speed rail accessibility has a substantial impact on house prices in three out of five studied regions. Interregional downtown-to-downtown commuting time seems to be the most important determinant of success in generating a station-centered price-distance gradient. Neighborhoods around HSR stations in suburban locations are not likely to spawn residential communities for commuters, since most Taiwanese associate inner-city neighborhoods with superior leisure activities and schools.

 

In two regions, HSR station accessibility generates price-distance gradients that rival or exceed CBD gradients. The Hsinchu HSR station gives rise to the single highest price-distance elasticity estimate in all five regions. This reflects the importance of the linkage between downtown Taipei and the Hsinchu Science Park to the Taiwanese economy.”

 

There are a couple of interesting results. First, there is no positive correlation between distance to the center and floor area in Taiwan, while there is a negative correlation between that distance measure and neighborhood education levels:

Region

Correlation: distance to CBD and floor area

Correlation: distance to CBD and lot size

Correlation: distance to CBD and education

Taoyuan

-.02

-.00

-.35**

Hsinchu

-.02

.00

-.77**

Taichung

-.18**

.02

-.70**

Jiayi

.02

.24**

-.73**

Tainan

-.03

.13**

-.75**

Source: Original data; *: significant at one-tailed α=.05; **: significant at α=.01.

 

Second, our estimates yield the following estimates of average price-distance elasticities:

 

Node

Region

Estimated distance elasticity of regional house prices

Hsinchu HSR station

Hsinchu

-.18**

Jiayi city center

Jiayi

-.14**

Taichung city center

Taichung

-.11**

Tainan city center

Tainan

-.11**

Taichung HSR station

Taichung

-.09**

Hsinchu Science Park

Hsinchu

-.09**

Tainan Science Park

Tainan

-.08**

Jiayi HSR station

Jiayi

-.08**

Hsinchu city center

Hsinchu

-.06**

Tainan HSR station

Tainan

-.04*

Taichung Science Park

Taichung

-.03*

Taoyuan city center

Taoyuan

-.01

Taoyuan HSR station

Taoyuan

-.01

Zhongli city center

Taoyuan

-.005

Taipei city center

Taoyuan

-.002

Categories: Economics · Life in Taiwan
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My Workplace (NSYSU)

March 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Lots of visitors remark that our campus is unusually attractive, being surrounded as it is by forested hills and the sea. We even have our own “university beach.” A picture of the beach:

untitled

Here is another picture that shows some NSYSU buildings in front:

viewnsysu

 

 

And finally, here is a view from within the campus:

nsysu

Categories: Life in Taiwan · Personal stuff
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Conspicuous Consumption

January 26, 2009 · 5 Comments

I’m in Sweden now, and – as always – it’s interesting to observe people and consider their behavior patterns and compare them with what I usually observe in Taiwan and other Asian societies. One thing that strikes me as an interesting topic for empirical economic sociology or institutional economics is the relative weight given to conspicuous consumption in different societies. It seems to me that the notion of autonomous consumer preferences – while always of questionable validity – is not equally untrue everywhere. Swedish consumers seem to at least have a substantial domain of consumption that is genuinely personal or at least confined to the individual household. For example, people here like to spend money on things such as bedroom furniture, novels, and bathroom towels. The three consumption categories that seem particularly overrepresented in Sweden as compared with Taiwan are creature comforts (comfy sofas), in-house aesthetics (paintings), and literature (novels). Compare this with my experience of observing Taiwanese consumers:

  1. Most Taiwanese spend very little on furniture, and it’s not uncommon to see a living room with a motor scooter (!) under soothing fluorescent lights.
  2. A lot of Taiwanese, on the other hand, spend a substantial part of their income on automobiles. Those who can afford it tend to prefer the largest BMW and Mercedes models.
  3. Taiwanese consumers tend to buy air conditioners, but tend not to use them if there are no visitors in the house.
  4. Taiwanese tourists tend to stay in luxury hotels, whereas Swedish tourists (even elderly ones) often consider youth hostels an attractive option.
  5. Lots of regular Taiwanese like to invite their friends to luxurious banquets, but prefer cheap night markets when they are on their own (Swedes tend to avoid expensive restaurants unless they’re on expense accounts).
  6. Interesting observation of market segmentation: Northwestern sells XO-branded cognac on Asia-bound flights, but less expensive VSOP cognac on Europe-bound ones (I had never seen a bottle of XO cognac before moving to Taiwan).
  7. Taiwanese tourists most like to vacation in expensive Japan and Hong Kong, while Swedes prefer inexpensive Thailand and Bulgaria (in spite of per capita incomes that are three times greater in Sweden).

I could go on. My point is that Taiwanese consumption is much more expressive toward other people than Swedish consumers. Most Taiwanese can simply not see the point of a good meal in aesthetically pleasing surroundings, unless they have someone to observe them. By contrast,  many of my Swedish friends and acquaintances like nothing better than shield themselves from the world and enjoy their favorite things without being disturbed by the outside world. The Swedish ideal could be something like spending time alone or with their nuclear family in a lakeside cottage, while the Taiwanese ideal could be something like arranging a lavish banquet for the 500 closest relatives, friends, and colleagues.

Could this be related to differences in the score for individualism (see the preceding post)? Does this make standard economic theory (independent consumer preferences) more applicable to Sweden than to Taiwan, and Veblenian theories of interactive demand (even) more applicable to societies with more collectivist individual values? Is there a tendency for societies to become more individualist in their consumption patterns as an effect of economic development (assuming that Sweden is more postindustrial than Taiwan)? There are lots of interesting hypotheses dealing with consumption and cultural differences, but it seems to be an underresearched field, at least among empirical economists.

Categories: Economics · Life in Taiwan · The Social Sciences
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Railroads and Accessibility (THSR Edition)

January 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Over the past year, I’ve been cooperating with Oliver Shyr of National Cheng-kung University on a study of the effects of Taiwan’s high-speed rail (HSR) on urban property prices. Our goal is to compare the effects of HSR accessibility in all seven affected metropolitan regions. So far, the effects have been contradictory: substantial impacts in the north, no or negligible impacts in the south.

 

I’ve become quite skeptical about the HSR - the world’s most expensive build-operate-transfer project. The investment cost was US$15 billion, or about 5 percent of Taiwan’s GDP. In relative terms, this would correspond to spending the entire US bailout package (US$700 billion) on railroads. True,  it’s better than bailing out bankrupt firms, but still.

 

What follows is a summary of a future paper of ours. It concerns two regions: Hsinchu in the north and Tainan in the south. The empirical observations for the other regions are still being collected, but preliminary estimations indicate that Hsinchu is as representative of the north as Tainan is of the south. Central Taiwan (Taichung) so far seems to be in an intermediate position.

 

 

High-Speed Rail Accessibility and House Prices: Different Cities, Different Effects

David Emanuel Andersson

Oliver F. Shyr

 

Summary

 

A high-speed railway line (HSR) that was opened in early 2007 connects seven metropolitan areas on the west coast of Taiwan. We estimate and compare implicit prices of HSR station accessibility using hedonic price functions for the residential property markets in the Hsinchu and Tainan metropolitan areas. Control variables include three additional accessibility attributes as well as structural and neighborhood attributes. Both analyses use  the same initial specifications and the same functional forms:  four pre-specified and two Box-Cox-transformed hedonic price functions.

 

The estimated functions show that HSR accessibility is regionally differentiated. HSR accessibility has a substantial impact in the Hsinchu region. The estimated effect testifies to the economic importance of the Taipei-Hsinchu link for the Hsinchu Science Park. It has a greater impact on house prices than either the distance to Hsinchu’s traditional downtown area or the distance to the science park itself. All three distance effects are however statistically significant and economically non-negligible. The empirical results lend support to the notion that Hsinchu’s downtown and high-tech nodes have been transformed into outlying sub-centers in an enlarged metropolitan region. HSR accessibility can then be seen as a proxy for accessibility to Taipei’s central business district. Since the new high-speed rail link has resulted in a substantial reduction of the time distance between Taipei and Hsinchu, it seems that high-speed rail investments may contribute to urban enlargement processes.

 

In the southern region of Tainan, HSR accessibility has at most a minor effect on residential property prices. Estimated HSR accessibility effects in the Tainan region imply low or negligible distance elasticities. The effects are also less robust then in Hsinchu, and not statistically significant for all functional specifications.

 

The difference between Hsinchu and Tainan regarding HSR accessibility reflects two mutually reinforcing factors in the Tainan region: low intra-regional accessibility of its HSR station and an economic structure where knowledge-intensive services carry much less total and relative weight than in Hsinchu. In Taiwan, only the northern corridor from Taipei to Hsinchu exhibits consistently high land prices and positive population growth. Given the high investment cost of Taiwan’s high-speed rail line, a policy implication is that the investment may have been too costly from a southern Taiwanese perspective. The limited impact probably reflects the absence of a complementary restructuring of the southern economy. So far, the southern economy has shown no signs of the spontaneous innovative processes that are necessary for a self-generated economic transformation, nor is the region important as a center of scientific research or for the production of other knowledge services.

 

Table 1 presents the results for the Hsinchu and Tainan region of the best-performing functional forms; the log-linear and simple both-hand side Box-Cox models, after exclusion of one (Hsinchu) or two (Tainan) insignificant variables. The symbol λ refers to the Box-Cox transformation parameter, implying that it is very close to a log-linear function in the case of Hsinchu. The other estimated functions do not perform as well in terms of log likelihood or R squared as the ones shown in the table. However, almost all of the effects are quite robust across specifications, with the exceptions of HSR accessibility in Tainan, building height, and freeway accessibility (the latter is excluded from both the Hsinchu and Tainan equations that correspond to Table 1).

 

Table 1: Hedonic price functions for the Hsinchu and Tainan metropolitan areas (t-values in parentheses)

Variable

Hsinchu:

log-linear

Hsinchu:

BS Box-Cox

Tainan:

log-linear

Tainan:

BS Box-Cox

Constant

.76

.76

1.56

2.13

Floor area

.53**

(19.6)

.53**

(14.3)

.55**

(26.9)

.65**

(21.5)

Lot size

.44**

(21.2)

.45**

(13.5)

.47**

(19.4)

.63**

(14.3)

Age

-.04**

(-5.7)

-.04**

(-5.4)

-.12**

(-19.7)

-.18**

(-12.9)

Height

.59

(1.4)

.12**

(3.5)

 

 

Shop/dwelling use

.13**

(2.9)

.14**

(2.9)

.14**

(6.5)

.20**

(6.6)

Street frontage

.11**

(6.7)

.11**

(6.3)

.19**

(11.7)

.25**

(10.6)

Road width

.05**

(3.0)

.05**

(3.0)

.10**

(6.3)

.12**

(6.5)

Commercial zone

.61**

(13.5)

.61**

(9.4)

.33**

(6.5)

.40**

(6.1)

Residential zone

.28**

(16.3)

.28**

(11.7)

.23**

(5.9)

.25**

(4.9)

Education

.16**

(3.9)

.16**

(3.9)

.45**

(10.4)

.739**

(7.7)

Distance to CBD

-.06**

(-4.1)

-.06**

(-4.0)

-.11**

(-7.0)

-.17**

(-6.7)

Distance to HSR

-.18**

(-9.0)

-.18**

(-6.9)

-.04*

(-2.0)

-.05*

(-1.9)

Distance to science park

-.09**

(-5.5)

-.09**

(-5.2)

-.08**

(-3.6)

-.06**

(-3.0)

λ

 

.001

 

.168

Adjusted R2 

.85

 

.80

 

 

Log likelihood

 

-1375.7

 

-2453.7

 

N

846

846

1550

1550

 

 

Categories: Economics · Life in Taiwan
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Nationalism

January 14, 2009 · 2 Comments

If there is one aspect of politics that serves as a motivating force of all political parties and movements in Taiwan it is nationalism, or rather competing nationalisms. The current governing party, the KMT (Guomindang in Hanyu Pinyin), is usually translated as the Nationalist Party, although the National People’s Party would be closer to its meaning in Chinese. The KMT is historically based on the ideology of Sun Yat-sen, the “Three Principles of the People” which are nationalism, democracy, and social welfare. The nationalism of Sun Yat-sen was a form of  ”civic nationalism;” a territorial and political rather than ethnic nationalism. Its original domain comprises the present de facto jurisdictions of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan (the “Republic of China”), and Mongolia.

The main opposition party and the governing party from 2000 to 2008 is the DPP, or Democratic Progressive Party. In spite of its name, this is also a nationalist party, but the nationalism of the DPP is Taiwanese rather than Chinese nationalism. While it is officially committed to civic rather than ethnic nationalism, its opponents claim that it in fact represents the values of one of Taiwan’s ethnic groups (or sub-ethnic groups, depending on your point of view). The ethnic group in question is called Minnan in Mandarin, Hoklo in Taiwan, and Hokkien in Singapore and Malaysia. Minnan make up about 70 percent of Taiwan’s population, are the descendants of pre-1949 migrants from the southern part of China’s Fujian province, and speak a distinctly Taiwanese version of Minnanhua, which is also spoken around Xiamen in the PRC and on the Malay peninsula. The main distinguishing feature of the Taiwanese variant is that it  incorporates a fair number of borrowed words from Japanese. Although the KMT draws support from all four major ethnic groups, the DPP is almost exclusively supported by members of the Minnan majority.

The only ideological difference in Western terms between Taiwan’s political parties is between the Chinese nationalism of the KMT (and other “blue” parties) and the Taiwanese (or Taiwanese Minnan) nationalism of the DPP (and other “green” parties). In all other ideological respects they are indistinguishable: they are both culturally conservative parties that favor a mixed economy of small private and large government-subsidized firms. They like to exhort people to come together in the pursuit of economic growth as expressed in the national GDP figure. The government, whether KMT or DPP, formulates national development plans that focuses on the role of high-tech export-oriented businesses in three science parks (Hsinchu, Taichung, and Tainan/Luzhu). As part of these plans, the firms in the three science parks benefit from subsidized land rents, targeted infrastructure investments and tax exemptions. Both parties also like to express national achievement in supposedly impressive national monuments from the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial to Taipei 101.

While the official ideologies of the two main parties are non-ethnic, an ethnic bias has always been present. Until the 1990s, naturalization was limited to “overseas Chinese” and immigrant wives of citizens (traditional Chinese society is patrilineal). According to the “civic nationalism” of the KMT, ethnic diversity is limited to Han Chinese and “recognized” national minorities such as Tibetans, Mongols, Taiwanese aboriginal tribes and so forth (it is noteworthy that the PRC adopted the same approach when bestowing Chinese citizenship on Hong Kong residents in 1997). In the late 1990s, the policy was liberalized somewhat to also allow the naturalization of male spouses, although the naturalization of PRC spouses was becoming gradually more difficult. This was perhaps a result of the rise in Taiwanese nationalism during that period.

Now I have an admission to make: I’m a lifelong opponent of nationalism in all its forms – civic or territorial, ethnic or linguistic, religious or cultural. A caveat is that given the existence of nationalism, I prefer the civic nationalism of the United States over the ethnic nationalisms of, say, Germany, Ireland or Japan. Why should one attach any moral or ideological significance to something (location of birth, ethnicity etc.) that is not an object of individual choice? Open-minded people sometimes concur, but add that interjurisdictional migrants do indeed choose an institutionally laden location. Supposedly, this implies that they can be viewed as voluntary citizens, should they be naturalized by the government of their destination. But this overlooks the hostility to new entrants among earlier established nation states: the United Nations is in effect an oligopolistic club that raises the costs of potential entrepreneurs in the nation-building business. It sorts of reminds me of OPEC in its attitute to competing suppliers.

The DPP may protest and state that it does indeed want to add to the number of offerings (although only in a legalistic sense, not in an economic de facto sense). But would the DPP allow spatial agglomerations of non-supporters to secede and establish new independent nations within Taiwan?  I think everyone already knows the answer to that question.

I believe nationalism  is incompatible with both the laissez faire and egalitarian versions of  liberalism. The free-market liberal question is this: does nationalism contribute to individual autonomy? The corresponding egalitarian (or Rawlsian) question would be whether we should care more about the worst-off “compatriots” rather than the worst-off human beings? (Do individuals behind the veil of ignorance know nothing except for their nationality?)

For the run-of-the-mill utilitarian economist the attractions of nationalism should also be non-existent. It would imply that a governmentally imposed addition to the spatial friction of transportation and communication networks would be a desirable additional constraint on individual utility maximization (perhaps it would be desirable if the cost of border-crossings were more than offset by reductions in spatial frictions that are only possible with nation states – but surely infrastructural investments do not depend on nationalist sentiments).

For me, however, the decisive question is this: Is an overrepresentation of  ”compatriots” within the interpersonal networks of individuals conducive to their personal growth of knowledge? If knowledge is understood in its widest sense – ranging from theories of natural and social processes to more elusive aspects such as moral intuition, aesthetic appreciation, and personal skills -  nationalism would seem to be the enemy of such growth. My hope is that we (as fellow inhabitants of the earth) will reject all the trappings of nationalism: flag-waving as well as national languages, national development plans and national curricula, and - most important – any special treatment of individuals on the basis of their citizenship or – even worse – ethnicity.

Categories: Life in Taiwan · Politics
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New Header

December 13, 2008 · Leave a Comment

The new image header shows a typical Taiwanese cityscape from above.  The photo is from Kaohsiung, and was not taken by me.

Categories: Life in Taiwan
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