So, true, true, it’s been a while since I’ve updated the site. So let me hit you with what I’ve been thinking about the last few months.
1) This artist, Jessica Nagy, does modern art better than the splash of color guys. Her pieces are index cards with fake Powerpoint-style sentiments. I enjoyed the graph of “how many people know the band” and “how cool it is” about a dozen down the page.
2) I’ve been playing football out here in Richmond for a local team called the VA Ravens. We’re playing for the league championship (our league goes from deep in the Carolinas up to Baltimore) two weekends from now after going 11-1 for the season, with the only loss coming by one point to a team we beat later in the season. I’d been kicking for them, but I broke my ankle playing basketball a few weeks back and have been out since then. I did manage to make a 51 yard drop kick field goal in practice, though - take that, Doug Flutie!
3) Eyal and I took our Southern Road Tour. I’d never really been down to the land of grits and NASCAR. Lemme tell you, it’s a different place. Brief summary: Savannah is very nice, southern food is good, the rural areas are often incredibly poor, and a bluegrass festival is a good time.
4) With the election coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about politics. I like Richardson, but he has no chance of winning, so I’ll no doubt elect Clinton, who is decent, but has a completely different conception of the role of government than I do. I see the government as a necessary evil, a means for coordinating the few things that we cannot coordinate voluntarily (through markets, or associations, or whatever). Hillary surely doesn’t see government that way. On the other hand, repairing the damage done to America’s good name is the number one cause of the next president, and unlike Guiliani, Hillary is not batshit crazy. I’m completely serious about this - a Guiliani presidency will do incredible harm to this country. If anything, his speeches indicate that he thinks the problem with Bush is that Bush has listened too much to foreigners, that we haven’t used enough violence in the MidEast, and that the President has too many checks and balances on his ability to act.
5) I’m working on some papers before I apply for grad school next year. The first couple are just ones that I’ve done with the economists at work - one on urban density in the US, and another on income inequality. The second is (in theory) my math M.S. thesis. Essentially, I’m using some fancy math tricks to solve for the optimal auction for selling things like online advertisements; I call this class “Multi-slot Continuous Auctions.” This problem is what economists call a mechanism design problem, so I was glad to see three mechanism designers won the Economics Nobel this year.
6) Finally, I’m thinking more about immigration. In general, I’m a big fan of immigration - the more, the merrier, at least in the US. The only real problem I see is so-called ethnic ghettos. That is, I think that unassimilated immigrants are problematic. In general, Muslim North Africans in Europe fit this scenario. The US is special, though, in that our culture is not really tied to history or ethnicity. A place like Ireland is different, though. Even after two or three generations, could a Chinese in Ireland get razzed for county honor in a national Gaelic Football final? It strikes me as somehow different.
That said, I think we should think of immigration in two ways. First, there are “non-permanent immigrants”. If a finance analyst for some i-bank takes a post in Shanghai, he almost certainly is not planning to move his family and descendants to China permanently. I don’t really have any problem with this class of immigrants avoiding assimilation altogether, and I think that since their numbers will always be fairly low, we ought not be concerned about them.
Second are the class of permanent immigrants. Most immigrants to the US fit this criteria: they and their children will live in the US long-term. It is this class where assimilation is critical. In general, I don’t think this is much of a problem. I have friends with ancestry in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America whose “Americanness” is undeniable. The only potential pitfall to natural assimilation, it seems, is clothing/habits that continuously identify others of the bearer’s non-American identity. Something like headscarves (and certainly a full burqa) or the dress of Orthodox Jews fit this criteria. I don’t know if this is enough reason to restrict immigration, but I think I would prefer an America where permanent immigrants are heavily pressured, at the very least, to assimilate into the mainstream. What do you think?
