qui tacet consentire videtur

I’ve uploaded all the photos I have of the APEC Korea trip here, though I’ll soon have more from the APEC hosts and the other koreans.

The Arirang TV interview is available online in streaming form here but you need to log in with the VOD site first - Arirang News 17 Nov 2005 2200h. The segment is around 26:30 to 29:00. Of course I was completely unprepared for a television interview and messed it up. The Korea Times article is available here, but they only have the picture of the first prize winners.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Or is it? Rand didn’t think so. Libertarians in general insist on consistency to principles.

Now, Chris makes an observation about Melvyn Tan, the draft-dodging pianist who comes back a national hero:

Our entire legal system is based not on mercy, but on a strict conception of justice. But, when a Singaporean judge allows a person like Mr Tan to slip through the cracks because you want to show mercy, a most un-Singaporean virtue, you break that strict conception of justice. By failing to punish this law-breaker, you will encourage many more.

Mr Tan’s case will set a legal precedent: Future draft-dodgers may return to Singapore unscathed, provided they become rich and famous. And if you happen to be able to play a musical instrument as well as Mr Tan, then you need not do NS, because you’ve already “done your duty”.

At first, I wondered if Chris had turned into one of those people I swore I would never become - someone who would defend conscription, having served through it and not wanting to devalue his legitimate-or-otherwise sacrifice (and there are quite a few around, just read some of the Young Republic posts on conscription). A fallacy of sunk costs undermining personal integrity. The same way that some officers and specialists rationalize punishing their subordinates in a perverse sense of ‘tradition’ - buying into the very system they suffered under.

After all, if you read the rest of Chris’ posts and mine, you would know that he and I generally concur that conscription in Singapore is unjust. One would expect us to celebrate the flexibility of the government in considering his service to the nation, in welcoming the market principles of specialization that let Melvyn Tan contribute where he can contribute best. One would expect us to respect a man who could stick to his principles and exercise labor mobility, paying the costs of draft dodging - exile to a foreign land. One would expect us to see this as an incremental step towards the dissolving of a system we hate. One would expect us to be happy. All these would be consistent.

Yet his response is also consistent with our position (at least my position) that conscription is just in principle, but often lacking in its practice. We accept conscription as a necessary evil, a civic responsibility that pays for our civil rights, and we look back to Athenian democracy and citizen soldiering as a model. At the same time, we look at the practice of the modern draft, and the nature of military organizations and the state, and see plenty of injustice. We want our conscription to meet the ideals of universality, minimality, transparency etc - in this perspective, it is not inconsistent for us to demand system integrity in universal conscription, that Melvyn Tan must be punished the same way any draft dodger would - that we make equal sacrifices for equal rights.

So I wonder which is more consistent as a libertarian.

My second visit to Korea must come to an end. I’m at Incheon airport waiting for my departure gate to open.

Yesterday I woke up early and left the resort for Busan station, where I got on the KTX train to Seoul. The reason why I took the KTX was to see the korean countryside, but I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before so I ended up falling asleep on the ride there. Rationalizing taking the train - cheaper, new experience, and both airports are so much further from the city centers that the time saved on a flight tends to get eaten up by commuting.

Anyway I got to Seoul station at about 10am, and made my way to Dongdaemun to drop my stuff at the hotel. It was a pretty dodgy hotel, and I would have went to the YMCA again to stay but it’s under renovation till next year. I made my way to Seoul National University station and met Gueyon, and we took a bus to the SNU campus. SNU has this really funky school gate. We had lunch at the canteen and I got an SNU collar pin from the gift shop. Gueyon took me back to the subway station, where I met Sandra/Yeonhee - who came all the way from her school which is so far away. We went for coffee at Java City, and later met Boran around Hyehwa for tea. Boran changed her hairstyle and looks prettier than before, which is to say she has transcended mortal aesthetic limits and become a goddess of beauty. Plus she got a job at Samsung HR, way to go Boran! She had to go for a homecoming party(?) where she was homecoming queen(?), so Sandra took me to City Hall where I met EJ. We went to this stream that got renovated and I pretty much froze to death walking by it. We then went to Sinchun(?) and I got to look at Ewha Woman’s University - insert ‘my sassy girl’ nostalgia here - and went for dinner.

I woke up late today and made Haeree wait for half an hour before meeting her at Myungdong, where we went to Coffee Bean. She got me a notebook, which is really useful since I’ve run out of notebooks and have been meaning to get one. After which, I met Jinny nearby and we went to Mr. Pizza for lunch. Jinny is going to the US in 2 weeks! She beat me there already. After lunch, I got my stuff from the hotel and found the airport bus point, and made my way to Incheon airport, where I am now. Thus ends my second visit to Seoul - but it won’t be the last.

I feel really bad that I didn’t have time to meet all my other korean friends, especially Cindy, Siyeona, Hyunjun.. Rationalizing: I’ll be back soon (hopefully) and we still have plenty of time to catch up. This was, after all, an unplanned trip, made possible by a combination of wishing, hoping, praying, and dreaming, and I am thankful for everything I got to do and see in Seoul/Busan. In the words of the governator, I’ll be back.

Can’t believe I have to go back to work tomorrow.

It’s really late so this post will be short: I attended the official dinner with all the APEC leaders - dubya et al. There were 902 guests and I was number 902… basically the most unimportant VIP, I suppose. I was seated all the way at the back, so I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself to PM Lee. Oh well, there goes my chance at the OMS.

Highlight of the evening: Seeing BoA live (OMGWTFBBQ!1!) for free. She performed ‘No.1′. A close second is sipping korean wine while listening to an aria. Third would be being in the same room with world leaders, even though they were on the other side of the ballroom.

So I got up and met my handlers Hyun-jung, Eun-hyun, and Shin-hye at the lobby of the resort, and I also met the first prize winner, Kirill from Russia, who is in the foreign service and speaks berhasa(!). We went to the BEXCO, where I got to meet the Korean prizewinners and tour the APEC media center - unfortunately I didn’t have time to swing by the Bloomberg office to say hi to Joe. Neither did I see a Channel Newsasia presence… gee go figure.

Interestingly, one of the Korean prizewinners I met is Soo-min from the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, who knows Joanne - apparently more well than I do because I had no idea she was married. I didn’t notice any ring the last time I saw her, so it must be really recent. I can’t imagine any of my older friends getting married… maybe NWT haha. Bets are on that in my batch, Chris will be the first to get hitched.

Anyway, I was interviewed by Arirang TV and the Korea Herald(?) at the media center, so I guess I might have been on Korean television for a minute or two today. Of course I was completely unprepared and messed it up, which proves that I’m probably not cut out for any leadership position. I should’ve worked harder at debate. We walked around the BEXCO IT fair, and then went for lunch which was BBQ. After which, we had coffee and parted ways.

Some observations: BEXCO security is watertight. The place is completely blocked off. So is every other place that APEC official events are taking place - around the Busan Lotte Hotel, where the APEC CEO Summit is, there are police squads all over the place with bulletproof shields. At every street corner, every subway exit. And they carry these riot weapons that look like a blunt two-handed broadsword. Not your average truncheon.

Maybe it’s just the whole APEC thing, but the people here are really hospitable and accomodating. My korean vocabulary is limited to maybe 10 phrases, and almost every time someone speaks to me my reply is something like a confused grin and ‘mian heyo’ (sorry), but they all try really hard to give me directions in english+gestures. Also, for 10k won you can eat like a full BBQ dinner. Unlimited supply of side dishes. Compare that to the meager fare KH and I got when we went to Tanjong Pagar to find a korean restaurant. I will probably need to go on a diet when I get home.

To get to my hotel from the airport I got on an airport shuttle bus, which was supposed to take one hour. Halfway through the journey I saw fireworks in the sky - there were so many they lit up the horizon a pale green and the reflections in the clouds made them shimmer. It was pretty nice until I realized that traffic had come to a complete standstill - I think the police must have blocked off the roads or something for the VIPs to leave - and it seemed like the whole of Busan started streaming out of the area.

Fortunately in the delay I got to meet Nam-soon, the restaurant manager of Pizza Hut here, and Joe Sobcyzk from Bloomberg, who were on the same bus. After about an hour of waiting at that spot, we decided to get off the bus and take the subway. So we got off the bus with our luggage (Nam-soon had a lot of luggage) and made our way through the crowd of people only to find that the queue for the subway extended all the way up onto the street.

Eventually, with Nam-soon’s help, we managed to get onto the subway and went to a station closer to our hotels. They don’t have escalators, which made carrying the luggage up really difficult. However, so did everyone else, so we couldn’t get a taxi. Nam-soon had to call her sister to come and pick us up. She really saved us, so Nam-soon, if you’re reading this, you deserve an award.

To all my friends: A quick update from Gimpo International Airport, which is about 30 minutes from Incheon International Airport. It’s pretty cold here at night and it gets dark quickly too. I would write more but my domestic connection flight is boarding in five minutes.

First point of interest - The Innocent Steps girl is in all these cell phone adverts and they’re all over the place. Everywhere I look there is some sort of ‘rotating widescreen’ cell phone ad with her on it. It’s even more ubiquitous than all the APEC 2005 posters.

As ever-blunt Chris notes:

Personally, I think that the Dove campaign is both right and wrong. If they’re trying to suggest that one does not need to look perfect to be attractive, then they’re absolutely correct. But if they’re trying to suggest that the flaws actually increase one’s attractiveness, then I disagree.

Of course, women don’t need all 10 features in order to look attractive (remember, you only need 70 percent in order to get an A!). But that doesn’t mean that the way to look attractive is to explicitly reject these norms. Unfortunately, the Dove ads sometimes sounded like that.

Sure, the girl with single eyelids is quite pretty. But she’s pretty in spite of, not because of, the single eyelids. The best we can say is that having double eyelids is a less important determinant of beauty than say, having a small nose or high cheekbones. But no, single eyelids are not twice as nice.

First - some of the aims of the campaign are laudable, and I would agree with them on public-choice grounds. That said, Chris is correct in his analysis that the visual aspect of the advertising operates on the substitutability of beauty. We are inclined to accept the models as ‘beautiful’ despite their flaws because they make up for it with other components of beauty - in short, beauty is multicausal and modular. Perfectly acceptable. However, this is intended to reinforce the unrelated claim of Dove’s campaign for real beauty: that the flaws of the models are actually assets and constitute ‘true’ beauty.

This is more than mere egalitarian-fetishist celebration of mediocrity. They seek to invert (not merely subvert) the dominant aesthetic paradigm and institute a new concept of what is beautiful, what is feminine, what is desirable. The disparity between the intended message of the campaign and the advertising that it operates on strikes me as intellectually dishonest. This is unsurprising, the prime mover is commercial.

Perhaps the campaign for real beauty should focus more on substitutability and equivalence, the way Bridget Jones and Kim Sam-soon work: that unattractive women can be desirable for other reasons, which might be more important.

I attended the LKY public lecture by Dr. Charles Vest this evening with KH, ‘GLOBALIZATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE EMERGING META UNIVERSITY‘. Vest posits that the future of higher education is that of the ‘meta university’, which he didn’t really pin down but vaguely described as an open model, perhaps similar to MIT’s own OpenCourseWare. Now, I am a big fan of MIT OCW, but it is hardly an open source model the way wikipedia or linux are. The information flow is unidirectional. Anyway. Vest explained that in justifying OCW to the clients, he said that an MIT education was more than just the curriculum. No doubt.

Just my thoughts: if we are to consider education as having two outputs, ‘productivity’ and ’signalling’, we can also further differentiate them into formal and informal spheres - formal being the structured, designed form. Firstly, productivity in terms of knowledge and skill gains can be formally structured in terms of curriculum, syllabi, lectures and such - and these are by and large transferable. Signalling can be formalized in terms of oversight, quality control, etc over the brand usage, and this is to some extent also transferable ie extended beyond the campus, though I am usually skeptical of this.

The informal aspects of productivity gains come from the interaction between faculty and students, between students themselves, and the network effects that come from the immediate F2F contact of a critical mass. The so-called learning beyond the classroom. This is not readily transferable with the present level of technology. Signalling too is also informal, in the way that personal networks and recognition form with shared/community experiences, extended conversation - again about critical mass. This does not seem transferable either. Rather, signalling as a mechanism seeks to limit rather than to expand.

So how relevant is distance education, however high quality and branded, when it is of limited value in terms of productivity and signalling gains? Perhaps the challenge is for communications technology to evolve enough to substitute for extended, large-scale F2F - a virtual cyberversity with the critical mass. Of course, it would not have the same signalling value, but by then it might not matter anymore when informational asymmetries are reduced. And that’s the thing about thinking about the future - by the time technology evolves enough to solve the problem, you probably don’t have the same problem anymore.

Economic theory posits that education is more than simply increasing productivity (through knowledge/skill gains) - it is also about signalling and screening. A highly selective admission/graduation process, or the act of self-selection in opting for a competitive school, sends signals to others with asymmetric information (ie employers) about the candidate’s value. This helps them screen candidates and reduce the decision space. The perennial question about elite schools is how much of the candidate’s value is through the education or innate (ie selected) - an NBER paper ‘Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables’ finds:

We find that students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges. However, the average tuition charged by the school is significantly related to the students’ subsequent earnings. Indeed, we find a substantial internal rate of return from attending a more costly college. Lastly, the payoff to attending an elite college appears to be greater for students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds.

Swarthmore Associate Professor of History Tim Burke writes:

For another, the more highly selective a college or university is in its admission policies, the more useful it is for an employer as a device for identifying potentially valuable employees, even if the employer doesn’t know or care what happened to the potential employee while he or she was a student. If so, this has bad implications for expensive noncompetitive lower-tier private colleges, possibly, but since they’ve long since been the most economically tenuous part of the higher education sector, that’s not news.

What does this mean for ACS, which has recently set up its ‘international’ school, Anglo-Chinese School (International)? As a new institution, the quality of the education is yet to be determined, though we will soon be able to make projections on this. However, where screening and signalling is concerned.. Anecdotal evidence (from friends who have been involved with the school recently) suggests that admissions is not academically rigorous. The primary screening mechanism is the tuition fee, which is high relative to heavily subsidized public school fees, but more or less comparable with the private schools. This means that the primary signal about their students is one of privilege. That might be important for clients who want their children to associate with the ‘right sort of people’ (whatever that means) but it seems like the wrong brand strategy to me, if clients are interested in say, increasing productivity or getting into a competitive university.

What worries me more is that, in this niche of the education industry, price is being taken as an indicator of value - a giffen good - which tends to create a vicious cycle of increasing prices and perceived value, which is almost always artificial. Perhaps the heavy subsidies on public school tuition have distorted the market and my perceptions of what a fair price is for a privately run, highly efficient education provider (ACS Independent, maybe?), but I can’t help but see the price tags as some sort of educational arms race in a prisoner’s dilemma for schools.

The answer for ACS (International) is to adjust its entrance signal from mere privilege to include academic rigor and potential - but that is what ACS (Independent) already does and would be redundant/inefficient. If we believe that privilege is precisely what the ‘international’ school seeks to signal, then I wonder how this fits in the overall strategy for ACS as a whole.