Buttons

Our entering economics graduate class has 38 people. Roughly 1/3 of them are from the Asia, 1/3 of them are from South America, 1/4 of them are from the U.S and the rest are from Europe and other places. There's a common trend among econ programs, and most graduate programs in general, to have a lot of foreign students, and very few domestic students. Many people have speculated on the reasons, but nevertheless, this situation leads to very interesting results, for instance recently some chinese students were protesting at the U.S embassy because they weren't being granted visas to come here. On one hand, the world thinks the U.S is a bully of other nations, but at the same time, they all want to come over here to study... then go back and teach what they've learned here. There are two ways this could be interpreted: 1) it could be very very bad for us or 2) it could be very very good for us. It depends on whether or not you believe the American message is subversive (freedoms and such, ya know), or not. I'm not too concerned about South America or Europe, because they don't have this nationalistic-world-domination-superiority complex, but China, in particular, used to be very powerful, and would very much like to see that again. So now what? Well, I don't know. I just trust that George Bush keeps us on top of the food chain.

Another thing that I find disturbing about China is this disjoint between the government and the people. Obviously we realize it, and the Chinese realize it to -academically. The way that they look on our system of government is through their own experience; sure they can say that their government is corrupt and inefficient and smushes some freedoms, but at the same time, they're accustomed to it. The government distracts them by raising their patriotic fervor through censored news items about things like Taiwan (it used to belong to us, so it still belongs to us. A simple argument for simple people) and airplanes (it crashed our fighter! never mind that it was over international waters and besides, imagine a turtle swerving into a hare... ) and they're fine with things that wouldn't be fine in this country AND they don't really understand the way that power is derived from the people here. We can argue all day about whether or not the politicians in Washington represent us adequately, but the truth of the matter is, we can sure pull them out of Washington if we didn't like them. It's very true, our government is of the people, for the people and by the people.

When the U.S government acts, it's with the support of the people. When the Chinese government acts, they can also claim it's with the support of the people. The difference is, our citizenry is much better informed than their citizenry (back to the censorship issue again.)

What I like to think is that these aspects of our country are inherently required in order to run a first class economy. The free exchange of ideas without fear of government intervention promotes cussedness and disrespect for authority.

There was one international person in our homework study group who had been a lecturer for Beijing University for quite some time before coming here to study. He's very very intelligent, and funny! but that's besides the point. The rest of us are domestic students, with all of them being much more intelligent than me, but during that particular time we had this problem that couldn't be solved using the method that they taught us in the book (A difference equation problem.. them again). So we're ripping our hair out when all of a sudden, somebody comes up with a brilliant idea that solves it, using a method that gives an answer but was still kind of iffy... and all of us examined it quickly and decided that that was the solution. And our international friend said, "I have to ask the professor."

"What's the matter, is it wrong?"

"No, it's right, but I have to ask the professor before I put it down."

I was floored. He may not be representative of people from China, but as an academic, he had to be willing to stand on his own two feet - his attitude should have been to the professor: screw your opinion! prove me wrong! especially since he had looked at it and thought it was right.

As a side note, in my naivety I had said difference equations weren't cool. Eh. We learned you could do markov chains with them which are very important in finance. (What I would like to see are differential markov chains but i'm sure some math guy has already done that.)