Tag: sociology

South Korea’s Demographics

The “picture” you see here is based off the picture in Ross Douthat’s column. I asked Dall-E to create this one, of course.

Without clicking on the link, can you guess what his column is about?

For some time now, South Korea has been a striking case study in the depopulation problem that hangs over the developed world. Almost all rich countries have seen their birthrates settle below replacement level, but usually that means somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 children per woman. For instance, in 2021 the United States stood at 1.7, France at 1.8, Italy at 1.3 and Canada at 1.4.

But South Korea is distinctive in that it slipped into below-replacement territory in the 1980s but lately has been falling even more — dropping below one child per woman in 2018 to 0.8 after the pandemic and now, in provisional data for the second and third quarters of 2023, to just 0.7 births per woman.

It’s worth unpacking what that means. A country that sustained a birthrate at that level would have, for every 200 people in one generation, 70 people in the next one, a depopulation exceeding what the Black Death delivered to Europe in the 14th century. Run the experiment through a second generational turnover, and your original 200-person population falls below 25. Run it again, and you’re nearing the kind of population crash caused by the fictional superflu in Stephen King’s “The Stand.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/opinion/south-korea-birth-dearth.html

Get used to worrying about not enough people, because that’s what the study of demographics will (has already?) come to mean in the 21st century. It’s not just South Korea, of course – Germany, Italy and Japan are also staring at the same problem, and that list is very far from being complete.

And what problem is that?

Not Enough People.

And as an Indian, sure you can ask how this can possibly be a problem. Here’s how:

There will be a choice between accepting steep economic decline as the age pyramid rapidly inverts and trying to welcome immigrants on a scale far beyond the numbers that are already destabilizing Western Europe. There will be inevitable abandonment of the elderly, vast ghost towns and ruined high rises and emigration by young people who see no future as custodians of a retirement community. And at some point there will quite possibly be an invasion from North Korea (current fertility rate: 1.8), if its southern neighbor struggles to keep a capable army in the field.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/opinion/south-korea-birth-dearth.html

I’m actually slightly uncomfortable with the assertions in this paragraph (note the repeated use of the phrase “there will be”). Not because I disagree with them, but because we simply do not know how this will pan out. Maybe the immigration story will play out better than expected, and maybe (as Ross Douthat himself says elsewhere in the column, the tide will turn in pleasant and unexpected ways). Maybe, if you want to be all weirdly sci-fi about it, the South Korean government will produce babies in artificial wombs.

Too weird, and can’t possibly happen, you say? I present to you the last fourteen years or so.

But what really gave me pause was thinking about how Ross Douthat ends his column. What, he asks, are the underlying sociological causes of and responses to this rapid fall in birthrates?

  1. Traditional social mores in South Korea, including very low out of wedlock births
  2. A feminist revolt against conservative social expectations
  3. A consequential male anti-feminist reaction
  4. Sharp polarization between the sexes
  5. A sharp reshaping of the country’s politics, and a sharp decline in marriage rates

If you are a student of economics, but only faintly interested in demographics and sociology, you’re doing it wrong, I promise you.

We live in interesting times!

NYU’s Intro to Sociology Course

What does sociology have to do with exports?

When we designed the undergraduate program for economics at the Gokhale Institute, we were unable to fit in introductory courses on philosophy and anthropology. Among other courses, I should mention – it is not as if the absence of only these courses is my sole regret. But these two pinched more than the others, I’ll admit.

But one course that was included was sociology, and the reaction to it being a part of the syllabus has been mixed. “What is the use of studying sociology?” is a refrain I’ve heard for the past three years, and I wish it weren’t so. Why? Because not all answers to problems in the field of economics lie within the domain of economics.

I’ve long been convinced that “matters of culture” are central for understanding economic growth, but I’m also painfully aware these theories tend to lack rigor and even trying to define culture can waste people’s time for hours, with no satisfactory resolution.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/12/deconstructing-cultural-codes.html

Tyler Cowen is speaking here of culture, of course, not sociology, but the two are at least related – and in my opinion are practically the same.

But it is all very well to talk of the importance of sociology when it comes to studying economics. But what exactly does it mean?

TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan wonders, in a recent column in the Business Standard, about why India just can’t crack the export problem, no matter what we try:

The latest trade data once again show that India hasn’t been able to solve its export problem. Over the last 75 years, India has succeeded in solving many problems. Food, health, education, low GDP growth rates, and much else. But there is one problem it has been unable to solve — exports.
At least a dozen committees over 60 years have tried to find solutions. The government itself has been straining hard to provide all kinds of incentives. All manner of policies have been tried. Nothing has worked.
India, despite its amazing businessmen, remains a poorly performing exporting country. Even the success of IT exports is really labour export in a disembodied form.

https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/why-does-india-continue-to-have-an-export-problem-sociology-may-answer-122120500165_1.html

And, he says, if India’s best and brightest economists cannot solve thhis problem, perhaps we should be looking to other domains. What about, he says, sociology?

For instance, is something about our business communities responsible for this failure? Is it the nature of our political and administrative structure? Or is it a combination of all these things?

https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/why-does-india-continue-to-have-an-export-problem-sociology-may-answer-122120500165_1.html

What might be the problem with our business communities? Is jugaad a good thing or a bad thing? Why are we so dependent on, and happy with, the concept of jugaad? Do we take quality as seriously as our competitors? If not, why not? Did our competitors take quality seriously in the past? If not, what made them change?

Is our administrative structure a little too overbearing? If so, why? Is it because of misaligned incentives, as an economist would say, or is there something else “there”? If so, what? What makes our bureaucracy different from those in other countries, from a sociological/cultural viewpoint? Have we always been different?

Not all of these questions have answers exclusively within the domain of economics. It makes sense to study other domains, and ask how the study of those domains enriches your understanding of economic theory. It cuts both ways, of course. While studying those other domains, your study of economics will help you too!

Now, I don’t know, alas, what sociology has to do with India’s poor export growth – if anything at all. But it certainly is a fun question to think about, and is a great example of why studying sociology as a student of economics absolitely makes sense.

One final point. I’m often asked this question by students who are just about starting to learn economics: “What should I read to understand economics better?” They think I’m being deliberately difficult when I answer by saying “absolutely everything that you can read, and not just within the field of economics”.

I’m not, of course. I couldn’t possibly be more serious!

Past posts on EFE that have mentioned sociology can be found here.

On Hierarchy and Sociology

The Browser (which, if you can, you should seriously consider subscribing to) recently linked to an excellent article by Malcolm Gladwell.

It’s a very short read, but one paragraph stood out for me.

But before we get to that, here is what I wrote a couple of months ago:

The worst kind of zero sum games are those involving status and hierarchy as end goals. Unfortunately, these also are the most prevalent, no matter where you go and what you do.

https://atomic-temporary-112243906.wpcomstaging.com/2022/04/29/so-long-farewell/

And now here’s the paragraph from Malcolm’s article:

The first is a sociological observation. One of the core concepts in cross-cultural studies is “power distance,” which refers to the degree to which a culture values hierarchy. Places such as France and Saudi Arabia and Colombia have high power-distance cultures: authority, in all its manifestations, matters a lot there. Places such as Australia and Israel are low power-distance cultures. A friend of mine, who was the Middle East correspondent for a major newspaper, once told me that he would sometimes call the Israeli Prime Minister’s residence, and the Prime Minister would pick up. That’s low power distance. I guarantee you that the President of France does not answer his own phone.

https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/what-i-found-at-a-mennonite-wedding/

What is “power distance’? As Malcolm himself points out, it is the degree to which a culture values hierarchy. This can be the number of “layers” you must get through before you are able to reach somebody with the ability and willingness to make a decision in an organization, it can the insistence on the use of honorifics, or something much more subtle (but all too noticeable if only your antennae are attuned enough to be able to see).

Consider this explanation:

Power distance refers to the extent to which less powerful members of organizations and institutions (including the family) accept and expect unequal power distributions. This dimension is measured not only from the perspective of the leaders, who hold power, but from the followers. In regard to power distribution, Hofstede notes, “all societies are unequal, but some are more unequal than others.”
In a large power distance society, parents teach children obedience, while in a small power distance society parents treat children as equals. Subordinates expect to be consulted in small power distance societies, versus being told what to do in large power distance societies.

https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/professional-issues/cultural-competence/examples-of-cultural-dimensions/

I debated about whether or not to include that second paragraph in the excerpt, because you might be tempted to go down a whole new discussion about parenting (god knows I’m tempted!). But I’ll park that second paragraph here, and maybe return to it in another blogpost.

But a later excerpt from the same article is even more telling: “Individuals with a low power distance cultural background may more openly express agreement and disagreement”

Particularly from the viewpoint of organizations, this ought to set off alarm bells. Any organization that is “high power distance” is likely to be an organization that doesn’t allow bad news to filter up to the highest level, and in my opinion, this is therefore an organization doomed to eventually flounder.

But this is also true in classroom settings! “Ashish, I think you’re talking crap” is far easier to say, and far more honest a comment than “Professor Kulkarni, I’m not sure I understand”. Because let’s be honest, you really want to say the former, but a high-power distance setting like a classroom will almost force you to say the latter. This is why I ask all my students to call me Ashish!

The point for me – and a point I hope you agree with – is that I like to set up for myself low-power distance environments. At home, among my friends, with my colleagues and among my students – it makes sense (to me) to have low power distance settings. Life just seems better that way.

Although I’m not sure I would have been allowed to wear an apron over my kurta pyjama on my wedding day:

The people serving the meal were the wedding party. The bride’s father gave us our picnic basket. The bride’s sister made the pulled pork sandwiches. The groom did the cole slaw. And at the end of the line, the bride—who had put an apron on over her wedding dress—served the mac and cheese. The receiving line was turned into a service line.

https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/what-i-found-at-a-mennonite-wedding/

The Difference Between a Sociological and Psychological Story

I grew up in an age where the television series “Friends” was revered.

People considerably younger than me tell me that Friends is still revered, and there is probably some truth to that hypothesis. Every time I open up Netflix on my TV, Friends is regularly in the Top 10 shows in India.

Don’t worry, this is not about to turn into a snooty ol’ discussion about how Friends could be different/better. But I will say this much: I much preferred the first two to three seasons to the rest of the show. And the reason I preferred the first two or three seasons is because in my opinion, the first two or three seasons were about life happening to those six people in New York. It was observing New York through the eyes of these six people.

It helped that these six people were attractive and young. That helped in generating the kind of appeal that Friends has had for years now. But the reason why the first two or three seasons were, in my opinion, better than the latter ones is because they were sociological observations, using these lives of these six characters as a canvas. The latter seasons? Oftentimes, it seemed as if they were an extended riff on the “We were on a break” theme. In other words, it became a psychological story about what happened to these six people, and what about their psychological make-up made them take the decisions they do.

Not my phrasing (I wish it was). It simply is me applying Zeynep Tufekci’s model to the television series Friends. Here is Zeynep talking about Game of Thrones:

COWEN: TV show Game of Thrones — why does it interest you as a sociologist?

TUFEKCI: It interested me until the last season and a half —

TUFEKCI: — because before that, it was a very, very sociological thing. Here’s the thing. Here’s the difference between a sociological story and a psychological story.

In a sociological story, you can imagine yourself being almost anyone. Instead of terrible, evil characters and good people, where you just identify with the good ones — which is the classic Hollywood narrative, which is also most of human narrative, you have the good one, the bad one — it’s more like a complicated mythology where you can imagine yourself being any one of those characters, even the ones that do the terrible things, you can see yourself doing it.

The second sign of a sociological story, for me, is when nobody has plot armor because it’s the setting that’s carrying the story, with lots of people, but it doesn’t rely on one person dying or not dying. For six seasons, you have a very institutional sociology, very interesting. It’s like The Wire. People can die, but the story is still gripping because it’s sociological.

Here comes season — whichever the last season is — and all of a sudden, Arya can walk through fiery dragons and nothing happens. It just misses her by an inch. I’m like, “All right, you lost the plot here.” Plot armor essentially means you no longer have a solid sociological story.

I watched it with great interest until the end, and in the end, I’m like, “What just happened?” I wasn’t really very clear with the novel world. I learned that the novelist had run out of material, and the Hollywood showrunners were now writing the script. I’m like, “Ah, that’s what happened. They switched to the good-versus-evil story.”

They took a great story that was going to be how power corrupts, which clearly was the story, and in the end, they made the dragon lady snap just because she heard the church bells or something. [laughs] That’s not a good sociological story.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/zeynep-tufekci/

It’s a really good way (to me, at any rate) to think about why people say Seinfeld is better than Friends. Of course, you may not agree, and that’s obviously fine. But one reason why people say this might be is because Seinfeld is, to go back to my first example, about life happening to these people.

Roger Ebert, my favorite movie critic, often used to say that one shouldn’t ask what a movie is about. One should, instead ask how a movie is about whatever it is about. I can’t find the exact quote right now, but I think he was getting at the same point.

So ok, if you’re a student reading this, you’ve got one way to frame what everybody has felt about Game of Thrones. And you’ve got a way to think differently about Friends. But the large point is this: when you watch a movie, get lost in the plot and its intricacies, sure. But please, also ask yourself what you are learning about the society in which the plot, and the characters are based.

And here’s homework, if you are so inclined. How much of Michael Corleone’s decision making is a function of he being Michael Corleone, and how much of it is a function of he being who he is, in the family that he is from, the society in which he grew up, and his army background?

Or put another way: the really interesting question isn’t whether Michael and Sonny were different. In what ways were they similar, and why?

A fun thing to think about, if you ask me.

Final point: are you, like me, reminded of the Mahabharat when you read this paragraph?

In a sociological story, you can imagine yourself being almost anyone. Instead of terrible, evil characters and good people, where you just identify with the good ones — which is the classic Hollywood narrative, which is also most of human narrative, you have the good one, the bad one — it’s more like a complicated mythology where you can imagine yourself being any one of those characters, even the ones that do the terrible things, you can see yourself doing it.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/zeynep-tufekci/

Past EFE posts on Zeynep Tufekci here. Past EFE posts on sociology here.

Lant Pritchett on Afghanistan

As we will learn in today’s post, the principles that we will learn from this marvelous essay are applicable in so many other contexts.

First, the title of his essay:

A Quickly Made Long Tragedy

Here’s one way to understand what this means in practice: the advantage of a top-down decision making system is that decisions can be made quickly. The opportunity cost of such a system is that buy-in from every person involved with the system is not only difficult to get – it is difficult to ascertain in the first place. As Akshay Alladi puts it over here:

What does Lant Pritchett mean when he says a “quickly” made “long” tragedy? The decision making was quick, sure – implementing said decisions on the ground proved to be rather more tricky. And it took twenty years to understand that in this case, more tricky was, in fact, a euphemism for “was never gonna happen”.

Second, talk about connecting the dots as a writer!

How can one not fall in love with an essay that:

  1. is written by an economist
  2. uses basic physics
  3. uses Shakespeare (!)…
  4. uses medicine
  5. … to explain how sociological concepts
  6. … can be used to understand how political goals
  7. … were never going to be achieved…
  8. … and all this using a diagram that absolutely anybody could understand?
https://lantpritchett.org/afghanistan-2021-a-quickly-made-long-tragedy/

Third, this excerpt:

I am a very visual person so I propose this diagram as an aid to understanding the tragedy, for both the USA but much more so the people of Afghanistan, of the US engagement

https://lantpritchett.org/afghanistan-2021-a-quickly-made-long-tragedy/

If you’re a student, this is an important lesson. Figure out what type of learner you are, and that as quickly as possible. Do you prefer to understand a concept by drawing a diagram? Or by writing down an equation? Or by writing down your understanding in words? You’d be doing yourself a favor by trying to get better at all three, but any subject becomes easier when you try to figure out how you learn best. Double down on that method and get excellent at it. Try to get better at the other methods sure, but be unapologetic about the method that works best for you.

The entire essay is worth reading, and multiple times. But when you consume anything (a video, a movie, a podcast, a textbook – anything) always ask what else you can learn from it, apart from the intended lesson itself.

It is A Very Underrated Skill indeed!

Demystifying Sociology

Economics can be baffling, especially to students who learn it in only the theoretical sense. If, for example, your worldview is formed by going through micro/macro classes alone, reality can often be confusing.

Does identity—one’s concept of self—influence economic behavior in the labor market? I investigate this question in rural India, focusing on the effect of caste identity on labor supply. In a field experiment, casual laborers belonging to different castes choose whether to take up various real job offers. All offers involve working on a default manufacturing task and an additional task. The additional task changes across offers, is performed in private, and differs in its association with specific castes. Workers’ average take-up rate of offers is 23 percentage points lower if offers involve working on tasks that are associated with castes that rank higher than their own. This gap increases to 47 pp if the castes associated with the relevant offers rank lower than workers’ own in the caste hierarchy. Responses to job offers are invariant to whether or not workers’ choices are publicized, suggesting that the role of identity itself—rather than social image—is paramount. Using a supplementary experiment, I show that 43% of workers refuse to spend ten minutes working on tasks associated with other castes, even when offered ten times their daily wage. This paper’s findings indicate that identity may be an important constraint on labor supply, contributing to misallocation of talent in the economy.

Oh, S. (2019). Does Identity Affect Labor Supply?. Job Marker Paper, Columbia University.

To make the point clearer: microeconomics teaches you that if you are offered ten times your daily wage to do a task for ten minutes, well, duh, you should take it. Reality (well, ok, this paper) teaches you you’d be wrong 43% of the time. At which point, you should begin to ask why.

Sociology gets a bad rap for being an ultra boring field, and there is, one has to admit, some truth to the charge. There are many Dave Barry columns that deserve multiple readings, but this particular one is particularly funny (and relevant):

For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you’ll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: “Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or ‘crying,’ behavior forms.” If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant.

http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/summer96/0342.html

The column is particularly funny because it is particularly true – not just about sociology, but about college in general. Please read the whole thing.

Anyways, back to sociology: yes, boring af, but also helps us economists get a better grip on reality, by pointing out that the world often doesn’t work the way our models would like it to. Thaler* puts this maddening behavior on part of the world down to what he calls Supposedly Irrelevant Factors (SIF’s) (slide 6, if you can’t be bothered to go through the whole thing, although you really should.)

So what is sociology? Here’s the English definition:

Sociology is the study of human behavior. Sociology refers to social behavior, society, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture that surrounds everyday life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology

… and click here if you want the definition of sociology by a sociologist (consider yourself warned). It is, in essence, a field of enquiry that asks what explains the behavior of people in a society, and also if living in society itself influences how people will behave.

Economic sociology, a subset of sociology, is “the sociological perspective applied to economic phenomena”**. And the reason it is a field of study worth exploring in its own right is because it helps us make sense of potentially baffling results such as the one Suanna Oh came up with.

Read the paper, please (section 6.3 for those of you who are curious about whether the author has really thought things through) – and while you’re at it, learn more about economic sociology. I’m trying to learn more myself, and will keep you guys updated as we go along.

*Yes, that’s from behavioral economics, but the point holds over here too, and is more than mildly relted.

** Smelser, N. J., & Swedberg, R. (Eds.). (2010). The handbook of economic sociology. Princeton university press.

Large classes, small groups

You might want to read my previous posts about online education and learning before reading this. See this essay about the state of higher education in India, this about signaling and bundling in higher education, this about unbundling college and this about measuring efficiency in education.

In addition, Aadisht had a great comment about optionality and higher education, which really deserves a post in its own right – but you can click on the link in this paragraph and scroll to the bottom to read it for now.

All that being said, today’s post ties together the thoughts and deeds of three people whose thinking I try to follow very carefully when it comes to online education.

The role of community in education

Let’s begin with this tweet from one of them, David Perell.

Both the thread of which 4. is a part, and the Twitter thread referenced in 4. are worth reading.

But today, I wanted to focus on the community bit.

A quick reminder: my thesis is that college sells you three things. The education itself, the access to peer networks and the credentialing. If there is to be an online model that will work for colleges, it must successfully provide all three (and more) at the same price (or less) as college does today.

When it comes to peer networks, can they ever be as successful online as they have been offline?

That begs the question: have they been successful offline? And that is really two separate questions.

About Peer Groups

  1. Are peer groups worth the effort in the first place?
  2. Is there something special about peer groups you form in college?

With regard to the first, I’m going to take a pass on answering it in depth for at least two reasons. First, I know nowhere near enough sociology to be able to speak about this sensibly for any length of time. And second, isn’t the answer obvious?

About the second question, you might want to read this essay – a part of which is excerpted below:

As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-making-friends-as-an-adult.html

The entire essay is worth your time, but the crux of it is those three points above: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and college life.

Anecdote Time

Two of the best years of my life were spent while studying for my Masters degree at the Gokhale Institute in Pune. There was a fair bit of reading/learning involved, but most of those two years were spent in just hanging out with a group of people I am still close friends with.

And of the three things that Gokhale Institute gave me when I purchased a Masters degree from it, it is this group of friends that I value the most. Then comes the degree, and the least important – as it turns out – was the learning itself.

Don’t misunderstand me – learning was and is important! It’s just that for me, sitting in a class and listening to professors talk wasn’t the best way to learn. I have learnt much more by speaking one-on-one with some professors, arguing heatedly and passionately about random topics with friends, and by reading/listening/viewing to stuff on my own time.

But therein lies a dilemma.

How to reconcile online education with forming your college gang?

Random bike rides, conversations at three in the morning sitting on a ledge on the hostel terrace, giggling at a joke while sitting towards the back of a classroom is not just an important part of college. In my personal experience, this pretty much was college.

And not just during the pandemic, but even beyond, the key challenge is to figure out ways and means to achieve something approaching the same experience in this brave new online world of ours.

What might be an answer to this conundrum? That brings me to the second person whose thoughts about online education matter to me, Tyler Cowen

Small Group Theory, via Tyler Cowen

If you are seeking to foment change, take care to bring together people who have a relatively good chance of forming a small group together. Perhaps small groups of this kind are the fundamental units of social change, noting that often the small groups will be found within larger organizations. The returns to “person A meeting person B” arguably are underrated, and perhaps more philanthropy should be aimed toward this end.

Small groups (potentially) have the speed and power to learn from members and to iterate quickly and improve their ideas and base all of those processes upon trust. These groups also have low overhead and low communications overhead. Small groups also insulate their members sufficiently from a possibly stifling mainstream consensus, while the multiplicity of group members simultaneously boosts the chances of drawing in potential ideas and corrections from the broader social milieu.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/best-analyses-small-innovative-productive-groups.html

If you are going to run an online course, or are going to be a student enrolled in an online course, the most important thing you can do is think long and hard about forming groups.

If you are the person running the course, you need to make the process of forming a group as friction-less as you possibly can. Without these groups, not only are drop-outs more likely, but the groups themselves are perhaps the bigger point!

Here’s Tyler Cowen again, in a separate post:

Remember Lancastrian methods of education from 19th century England? Part of the idea was to keep small group size, and economize on labor, by having the students teach each other, typically with the older students instructing the younger.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/05/my-weird-lancastrian-method-for-reopening-higher-education.html

The post I quoted from is about how college might reinvent itself in the era of the pandemic, but the larger point he is making – or at any rate, the point I choose to take away – is about how learning in small groups is better than classrooms.

And on a related note, the third person whose thoughts on online education I choose to take very seriously, Seth Godin:

Great guy. Chip and I went to business school together. He was the third youngest person in the class and I was the second youngest person in the class. He got five of us together and every Tuesday night, we met in the Anthropology Department for four hours. We brainstormed more than 5,000 business ideas over the course of the first year of business school. It was magnificent. It wasn’t official, it wasn’t sanctioned. It was just Chip said let’s do this, and we did. And he picked the Anthropology Department because he knew someone there and could get the conference room.

https://tim.blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/138-seth-godin.pdf

That is from an episode from Tim Ferriss’ podcast, in which he interviewed Seth (the whole episode is well worth your time), but the point that I remembered was about small groups.

Anybody who is going to try and do education online is going to have to get small groups going. Without it – in my opinion – it simply will not work.

But how do you form these groups?

I’m still thinking about the how, and the more I think about it, the more it seems as if there is never going to be a perfect answer. Forming groups is hard, and I think we need to make peace with the fact that groups may not always work out.

People won’t get along, people will drop out, quarrels will take place even among groups that develop close bonds – there are many, many things that can go wrong. But it doesn’t matter how long it takes and how many times groups have to be formed and re-formed – it is unlikely that you’ll get an education worth the name without the formation of a group, or community.

And what do these groups do?

… will be the topic of tomorrow’s essay, for I was part of an experiment that tried to answer this question – and I really liked the answer!

Tech: Links for 6th August, 2019

Smart Cities is a phrase that has been bandied about in India for a while now, but nobody who actually lives in any city in India can claim in good conscience to actually live in one.

What exactly is a smart city? What does it entail? What are the minimum qualifications to be thought of as one, what are the costs involved? Are all costs economic – as in, might it be rather lonely to be a part of a smart city? Rather than spend time defining each of these things, today’s links are about a city in South Korea that very few of you have likely heard of: Songdo.

  1. “Built on 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea off Incheon, about 56 kilometres (35 mi) from the South’s capital Seoul, Songdo district is the largest private real estate development in history. By its completion date in 2015, the district was planned to contain 80,000 apartments, 5,000,000 square metres (50,000,000 sq ft) of office space and 900,000 square metres (10,000,000 sq ft) of retail space. The 65-floor Northeast Asia Trade Tower became South Korea’s tallest building. Computers have been built into the houses, streets, and offices as part of a wide area network.”
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    From Wikipedia. Reading this article also informs us that while a lot of us may not have heard of Songdo, we certainly have seen it.
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  2. A link (Business Insider) that has lots of pcitures, and information about Songdo’s urban density, transport, remoteness, trash collection and much more.
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  3. “This was all pretty slick, but where were the levitating buildings and flying cars we had envisioned? The city’s futurism was incremental, as it turned out, coexisting with the familiar and mundane. We had expected a city 25 or even 50 years ahead of the rest of the world; instead, Songdo felt like 2017—still the future, perhaps, but not the promised land of science fiction. There were mostly just subtle, somewhat odd differences from the cities of the present—for example, in Central Park, a small island filled with rabbits, a cordoned-off section with captive deer, and the occasional hidden speaker playing relaxing classical music.”
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    From a while ago… an article from the Atlantic talking about how Songdo was in 2014, and how it might turn out.
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  4. “The streets, footpaths and cycle lanes and racks are strangely empty for such a large city, there’s no presence of culture – no museums, theatres and just one cinema. On weekends, the cycle racks are empty and the area is desolate. One critic said it had a “Chernobyl-like emptiness” to it.
    Now it’s trying to entice US citizens to save the US$40 billion project from failure with the construction of a colossal “American Town”.”
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    People, it would seem, make cities what they are. Doing it the other way around seems to have not worked. Exercise: would you say this is good news for India?
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  5. And another article from CityLab that says more or less the same thing.