As the Mainichi Daily News reports, following its six-hour furlough, the monkey that escaped from Tokyo's Ueno Zoo was finally caught in the basement of a Taito-Ward restaurant.
"The Japanese macaque was one of 23 released into the zoo's monley enclosure on Jan. 24 at around 9:30am. As soon as it was release, it scaled the enclosure's 4.5-meter concrete wall and esacped outside the zoo."
For those familiar with the children's book Curious George Finds a Job, the only deviation from that plot and this episode is that the Japanese monkey didn't first hide in the straw of his friend the elephant before escaping. Also, perhaps had the monkey had more time to settle into the restaurant environment before capture, it too would have impressed the chef with its plate-washing dexterity and landed a job as a window washer.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Government Leadership on Climate Change: The Japanese Solar Power Solution
There is good news out of Japan this week where the Environment Minister Tetsuo Saito tabled a plan before the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy that would see significant public investments in solar power. A few hours ago the Council released a document entitled “Growth Strategy through Low Carbon Revolution” (my translation), that lays out an aggressive plan to halve the cost of solar power in Japan over the next three to five years. Here how it works: the government would purchase massive numbers of solar panels from industry in order to furnish schools, municipal offices and other public institutions on a scale that would allow them to generate solar power for their own needs while also producing surplus electricity that they would sell back to the utilities ( a feed-in tariff system). The power companies in turn would be obliged to purchase this green energy at twice the rate of conventional power. If all goes according to plan, then the government projects the cost of solar power can be reduced from 49 ¥/kWh to 24¥/kWh. The Japanese MSN news site is already heralding this as a “green school plan”.
Most climate change policy experts now agree that individual voluntary actions (switching lightbulbs, etc.) to conserve energy are necessary but not sufficient measures for tackling the problem. Indeed, as economists such as Mark Jaccard assert, without an overarching shift in government policy – to price carbon, and thereby lower the relative cost of alternative energy sources, we are basically spinning our wheels. That is why this government initiative in Japan is so encouraging. It offers to stimulate economic growth in a sector in which Japanese firms are competitive, while simultaneously providing a viable strategy to scale up the use of renewable energy sources. Most importantly it provides a heartening example of top-down government leadership to arrest climate change.
Most climate change policy experts now agree that individual voluntary actions (switching lightbulbs, etc.) to conserve energy are necessary but not sufficient measures for tackling the problem. Indeed, as economists such as Mark Jaccard assert, without an overarching shift in government policy – to price carbon, and thereby lower the relative cost of alternative energy sources, we are basically spinning our wheels. That is why this government initiative in Japan is so encouraging. It offers to stimulate economic growth in a sector in which Japanese firms are competitive, while simultaneously providing a viable strategy to scale up the use of renewable energy sources. Most importantly it provides a heartening example of top-down government leadership to arrest climate change.
Friday, March 6, 2009
The gentrification of ‘toxic waste’
Paul Krugman’s “The Big Dither” column in yesterday’s New York Times expressed his concern for the Obama administration’s inability to offer a credible (read politically sellable) solution to the mountains of bad debt still concealed within the US financial system. If one agrees with the premise that the financial system, despite its now well-documented culture of greed, blind faith and incompetence, is the beating heart and circulatory system of the economy, then no broader economic recovery can take place without the equivalence of a quadruple bypass that would purge the system of these bad debts that are now routinely referred to as toxic waste. On a side note, this crisis has generated an entirely new lexicon: from John McCain’s (via David Letterman) ‘the economy is cratering’ (now ubiquitous in contemporary commentary), to the ‘bad bank’ British solution, and last but not least ‘zombie banks’. The dithering of the Fed and the Obama administration, Krugman suspects, results from a conviction that these distressed assets are “really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them.” This is where I see comparisons to both gentrification and Japan’s ‘lost decade’.
Neil Smith’s Marxist reading of gentrification, suggests that it marks the return of capital to the distressed (and hence undervalued) inner city. Smith uses the concept of the rent gap, the difference between the actual value of ungentrified land under its present use, and the potential price that could be achieved if the parcel of land was transformed into a higher and better use. At some threshold, the rent gap becomes the irresistible motive for speculators to buy-in, upgrade and reap the profits of a gentrified inner city. (In contrast to Smith’s production-side explanation, David Ley’s work has drawn attention to consumption-side factors, namely the social, cultural and political characteristics of the gentrifiers themselves, a group that in the Canadian case at least Ley refers to as the New Middle Class. NB: It is now generally acknowledge that gentrification is driven by both production-side and consumption-side factors.)
It would seem that what the Bernanke-Geithner plan – which aims to rehabilitate the bad debt swashing about the bilge of the financial system - amounts to is the gentrification of toxic waste. But are there any brave souls willing to colonize and fix-up this hard-knock stretch of Wall Street? ‘Nothing shaking on Shakedown Street’, as the Grateful Dead once sang ‘used to be the heart of town.’ The crux of the matter is that there is still not a viable plan to create the right incentive environment to coax shell-shocked investors to ante up and gamble on these great unknowns. Krugman is rightly concerned about any plan in which investors who would purchase bad debts pass on any future losses to the taxpayer but appropriate any gains privately. That, of course, is one of the dynamics that generated this whole problem in the first place. But how else might a solution work? There are limits, after all, to the extent to which the financial system can be nationalized – although nobody much knows what these might be, yet.
This is why it is still worthwhile to return to the great deleveraging that accompanied Japan’s lost decade, a parallel that is credited to Nomura Securities’ Richard Koo, who catalogued the long run impacts and government responses to the ‘balance sheet recession’ experienced by Japan through and beyond the 1990s. The Japanese case proved the impotence of monetary policy – they effectively had a zero interest rate for the better part of a decade – in the face of structural (as opposed to cyclical) crisis. And to some degree the Japanese case might give us room for guarded optimism in noting the success of fiscal policy as manifested, for example, in massive government expenditures in construction. Japan, through this period became known as a ‘kensetsu kokka’, or ‘construction state’ for its paved-over riverbeds and bridges to nowhere (for a reading of this policy impact on the landscape, see Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons). Make fun of it if you will, but Japan’s fiscal policy seemed to stave off a much harsher scenario. So instead of merely flat-lining for fifteen years, Japan might have experienced a more prolonged and biting contraction had it not primed the pump to the degree that it did. After witnessing the serial over-employment on most Japanese construction sites when I lived there between 2001 and 2003, I grew to somehow appreciate the version of Japanese Keynsianism.
What did the Japanese do with their own financial toxic waste? Well they didn’t try to gentrify it. For a very long time, everyone knew of the huge stock of troubled assets concealed within the Japanese economy, but perhaps for reasons of social dignity, the banks were very slow to call in their bad loans. As a result, though there was a significant and prolonged slump in real estate, there was nothing similar to the massive foreclosure problem we see in the US. Why was this the case? Well for starters, housing in Japan has a much higher rate of rental accommodation. Indeed, in many Japanese cities there are often cases of twin rents where the land is owned by one person, the structure on it another. The point is that though both the Japanese bubble and the current global crisis were triggered by real estate, the economic geographies of housing in both cases were quite different, with nowhere near the degree of (sometimes irresponsible) encouragement to become a homeowner that we saw in the Anglo-American world.
If there was ever an excuse for dithering, the opaqueness and intractability of the current mess looks like one to me. Which is maybe why it is a good, if distracting, thing that Phish is back to lighten the mood.
Neil Smith’s Marxist reading of gentrification, suggests that it marks the return of capital to the distressed (and hence undervalued) inner city. Smith uses the concept of the rent gap, the difference between the actual value of ungentrified land under its present use, and the potential price that could be achieved if the parcel of land was transformed into a higher and better use. At some threshold, the rent gap becomes the irresistible motive for speculators to buy-in, upgrade and reap the profits of a gentrified inner city. (In contrast to Smith’s production-side explanation, David Ley’s work has drawn attention to consumption-side factors, namely the social, cultural and political characteristics of the gentrifiers themselves, a group that in the Canadian case at least Ley refers to as the New Middle Class. NB: It is now generally acknowledge that gentrification is driven by both production-side and consumption-side factors.)
It would seem that what the Bernanke-Geithner plan – which aims to rehabilitate the bad debt swashing about the bilge of the financial system - amounts to is the gentrification of toxic waste. But are there any brave souls willing to colonize and fix-up this hard-knock stretch of Wall Street? ‘Nothing shaking on Shakedown Street’, as the Grateful Dead once sang ‘used to be the heart of town.’ The crux of the matter is that there is still not a viable plan to create the right incentive environment to coax shell-shocked investors to ante up and gamble on these great unknowns. Krugman is rightly concerned about any plan in which investors who would purchase bad debts pass on any future losses to the taxpayer but appropriate any gains privately. That, of course, is one of the dynamics that generated this whole problem in the first place. But how else might a solution work? There are limits, after all, to the extent to which the financial system can be nationalized – although nobody much knows what these might be, yet.
This is why it is still worthwhile to return to the great deleveraging that accompanied Japan’s lost decade, a parallel that is credited to Nomura Securities’ Richard Koo, who catalogued the long run impacts and government responses to the ‘balance sheet recession’ experienced by Japan through and beyond the 1990s. The Japanese case proved the impotence of monetary policy – they effectively had a zero interest rate for the better part of a decade – in the face of structural (as opposed to cyclical) crisis. And to some degree the Japanese case might give us room for guarded optimism in noting the success of fiscal policy as manifested, for example, in massive government expenditures in construction. Japan, through this period became known as a ‘kensetsu kokka’, or ‘construction state’ for its paved-over riverbeds and bridges to nowhere (for a reading of this policy impact on the landscape, see Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons). Make fun of it if you will, but Japan’s fiscal policy seemed to stave off a much harsher scenario. So instead of merely flat-lining for fifteen years, Japan might have experienced a more prolonged and biting contraction had it not primed the pump to the degree that it did. After witnessing the serial over-employment on most Japanese construction sites when I lived there between 2001 and 2003, I grew to somehow appreciate the version of Japanese Keynsianism.
What did the Japanese do with their own financial toxic waste? Well they didn’t try to gentrify it. For a very long time, everyone knew of the huge stock of troubled assets concealed within the Japanese economy, but perhaps for reasons of social dignity, the banks were very slow to call in their bad loans. As a result, though there was a significant and prolonged slump in real estate, there was nothing similar to the massive foreclosure problem we see in the US. Why was this the case? Well for starters, housing in Japan has a much higher rate of rental accommodation. Indeed, in many Japanese cities there are often cases of twin rents where the land is owned by one person, the structure on it another. The point is that though both the Japanese bubble and the current global crisis were triggered by real estate, the economic geographies of housing in both cases were quite different, with nowhere near the degree of (sometimes irresponsible) encouragement to become a homeowner that we saw in the Anglo-American world.
If there was ever an excuse for dithering, the opaqueness and intractability of the current mess looks like one to me. Which is maybe why it is a good, if distracting, thing that Phish is back to lighten the mood.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Top Five Dickens' Characters
(in no particular order, except for the last and best):
Mr. Alfred Jingle (Pickwick Papers) - “an indescribable air of jaunty impudence and perfect self- possession pervaded the whole man.”
'Is anything the matter with Mr. Snodgrass, Sir?' inquired Emily, with great anxiety.
'Nothing the matter, ma'am,' replied the stranger. 'Cricket dinner--glorious party--capital songs--old port--claret--good --very good--wine, ma'am--wine.'
The Old Mr. Turveydrop (Bleak House) - A model of deportment
Wemmick (Great Expectations) - Selected for the pride he has in his, erm, home, his collection of curiosities, his relationship with his father (The Aged P), and for his attitude:
Mrs. Jellyby (Bleak House) – for her telescopic philanthropy
Mr. Wilkins Micawber (David Copperfield) – Where to begin… How about these excerpts from Copperfield’s surprising encounter with Micawber at Tommy Traddles’ place in Camden Town (Chapter 27).
Excerpt 2:
'You find us, Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, with one eye on Traddles, 'at present established, on what may be designated as a small and unassuming scale; but, you are aware that I have, in the course of my career, surmounted difficulties, and conquered obstacles. You are no stranger to the fact, that there have been periods of my life, when it has been requisite that I should pause, until certain expected events should turn up; when it has been necessary that I should fall back, before making what I trust I shall not be accused of presumption in terming - a spring. The present is one of those momentous stages in the life of man. You find me, fallen back, FOR a spring; and I have every reason to believe that a vigorous leap will shortly be the result.'
Mr. Alfred Jingle (Pickwick Papers) - “an indescribable air of jaunty impudence and perfect self- possession pervaded the whole man.”
Then there is his singular form speech:
'Is anything the matter with Mr. Snodgrass, Sir?' inquired Emily, with great anxiety.
'Nothing the matter, ma'am,' replied the stranger. 'Cricket dinner--glorious party--capital songs--old port--claret--good --very good--wine, ma'am--wine.'
The Old Mr. Turveydrop (Bleak House) - A model of deportment
Wemmick (Great Expectations) - Selected for the pride he has in his, erm, home, his collection of curiosities, his relationship with his father (The Aged P), and for his attitude:
“When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me.”
Mrs. Jellyby (Bleak House) – for her telescopic philanthropy
Mr. Wilkins Micawber (David Copperfield) – Where to begin… How about these excerpts from Copperfield’s surprising encounter with Micawber at Tommy Traddles’ place in Camden Town (Chapter 27).
Excerpt 1:
I found that the street was not as desirable a one as I could have wished it to be, for the sake of Traddles. The inhabitants appeared to have a propensity to throw any little trifles they were not in want of, into the road: which not only made it rank and sloppy, but untidy too, on account of the cabbage-leaves. The refuse was not wholly vegetable either, for I myself saw a shoe, a doubled-up saucepan, a black bonnet, and an umbrella, in various stages of decomposition, as I was looking out for the number I wanted.
The general air of the place reminded me forcibly of the days when I lived with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. An indescribable character of faded gentility that attached to the house I sought, and made it unlike all the other houses in the street - though they were all built on one monotonous pattern, and looked like the early copies of a blundering boy who was learning to make houses, and had not yet got out of his cramped brick-and-mortar pothooks - reminded me still more of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. Happening to arrive at the door as it was opened to the afternoon milkman, I was reminded of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber more forcibly yet.
'Now,' said the milkman to a very youthful servant girl. 'Has that there little bill of mine been heerd on?'
Excerpt 2:
'You find us, Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, with one eye on Traddles, 'at present established, on what may be designated as a small and unassuming scale; but, you are aware that I have, in the course of my career, surmounted difficulties, and conquered obstacles. You are no stranger to the fact, that there have been periods of my life, when it has been requisite that I should pause, until certain expected events should turn up; when it has been necessary that I should fall back, before making what I trust I shall not be accused of presumption in terming - a spring. The present is one of those momentous stages in the life of man. You find me, fallen back, FOR a spring; and I have every reason to believe that a vigorous leap will shortly be the result.'
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Lithium, the new mobility and Japan
For the last 60 years or so, oil has been the key limiting factor governing human mobility. Yet the growing recognition that a fossil-fueled economy is unsustainable has spurred investment in alternative energy sources. While the contours of the new energy economy are still unclear, bridging technologies such as rechargeable batteries whether in hybrid or electric vehicles, cell phones or laptop computers, are likely to figure heavily in the medium term. The new mobility afforded by portable electronic devices such as Blackberries relies on compact sources of power, and in particular lithium ion batteries. In scaled-up versions rechargeable lithium ion batteries are also imagined to propel the automotive fleet into the future. Two interesting economic geographies and sets of actors are emerging in the face of this anticipated demand.
On the one hand, the uneven distribution of global lithium reserves raises the strategic stakes surrounding access to this heretofore taken-for-granted resource. This recent piece from The New York Times illuminates the shifting sands of lithium mining, especially in key source nations such as Bolivia. The article also points to the second emergent player associated with the new mobility, Japanese firms such as Mitsubishi that are currently inking deals to secure supplies of lithium for their battery manufacturing divisions.
In a related development, Panasonic’s bid for Sanyo, the largest recent merger deal within Japanese industry, has been driven by the former’s desire to access the rechargeable battery and renewable energy (solar) expertise of the latter. Japanese firms, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization, currently lead the world in obtaining patents for ‘green’ technologies. Despite the massive job losses in corporate Japan, the evidence suggests its leading firms, from Toyota to Panasonic, are well positioned for the future, given their pivotal role in facilitating the new mobility. This development is good news for the Kansai region of Japan where Panasonic plans to base its lithium business.
On the one hand, the uneven distribution of global lithium reserves raises the strategic stakes surrounding access to this heretofore taken-for-granted resource. This recent piece from The New York Times illuminates the shifting sands of lithium mining, especially in key source nations such as Bolivia. The article also points to the second emergent player associated with the new mobility, Japanese firms such as Mitsubishi that are currently inking deals to secure supplies of lithium for their battery manufacturing divisions.
In a related development, Panasonic’s bid for Sanyo, the largest recent merger deal within Japanese industry, has been driven by the former’s desire to access the rechargeable battery and renewable energy (solar) expertise of the latter. Japanese firms, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization, currently lead the world in obtaining patents for ‘green’ technologies. Despite the massive job losses in corporate Japan, the evidence suggests its leading firms, from Toyota to Panasonic, are well positioned for the future, given their pivotal role in facilitating the new mobility. This development is good news for the Kansai region of Japan where Panasonic plans to base its lithium business.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Save our schools?
It is not often I get to comment on issues to which I am so personally connected. My parents’ high schools, Brantford Collegiate Institute (Mom) and Moncton High School (Dad), my own elementary school, and finally my Godmother figure prominently in this post.
I don’t usually read the Moncton Times & Transcript, but it was lucky that I caught a glimpse of this item from last Saturday: ‘Community urged: keep up MHS fight’.
Moncton High School, which was built in 1936 and which my father attended during and just after the Second World War, is an imposing fortress of a building. Located at the base of Mountain Road, the thoroughfare that bisects Moncton, its sandstone walls and turrets can easily fool first time viewers into imagining it serves some function other than its educational role. While not quite Hogwarts, Moncton High’s architectural flourishes evoke a more innocent era when the education of North American youth maintained some grounding in the classics. Jarvis Collegiate in Toronto, Kitsilano High School in Vancouver, as well as (the original) Oakville Trafalgar High School in my hometown, though all distinctive, nevertheless evince a style that has long since yielded to the utilitarian hodge-podge of interchangeable boxes that characterize the late 20th century high school. Times have very much changed since these relic structures were built with separate boys and girls entrances. Time wears.
It turns out MHS requires $48 million in infrastructure improvements, which has prompted calls for the New Brunswick government to save money by closing the school. Now I confess to have not followed this specific issue closely, so my reading of the local situation is based largely on hearsay and perspectives derived from other places.
This is where my Godmother, my mom’s best friend Mary Welsh comes in. One of the busiest, yet most selfless people I know, she epitomizes the spirit of community service and has just recently been awarded the Order of Ontario. The most recent cause to consume Mary’s energies has been the fight to save Brantford Collegiate Institute (est. 1910), the place where she met my mom on the school’s badminton team in the mid-1950s.
In the last few years BCI has also faced the tradeoff between its expensive upkeep and closure. As the head of BCI’s alumni association, Mary worked tirelessly, between dog walks and a million other pursuits, to save the school. By arguing that the cost to bus the displaced students to a new school on the edge of town cancelled any cost savings derived from closing BCI, Mary was able to get the Ontario government to dig into an unused infrastructure fund for renovations that kept BCI in place. Given this success, proponents who hope Moncton High can be similarly saved have sought Mary’s advice on the matter – and this advice constituted the basis for the Times & Transcript piece.
So what meaning, one generation removed, do these buildings or even old schools in general, hold for me? Though my father, a child of the Great Depression, was only a Maritimer for the war years, he and his twin sister maintain fond memories of their time in Moncton, when they lived in a unit at the back of 182 Highfield Street. So they must have only been at MHS for only a few years before the family moved back to Oakville where there attended Oakville Trafalgar, the high school down the road from where I later grew up. OT was unfortunately closed and relocated in the early 1990s. The structure has since served as a film set, an outpatient clinic for the adjacent hospital (itself slated for closure), but mostly looks sadly boarded up to me these days. A block away, Brantwood Elementary where my brother and I went from K-5, and which also must be at least 75 years old, is also on the verge of discontinuation. No wonder every third house in the neighborhood has a ‘Save Our Schools’ banner on the lawn.
In my lifetime the overall growth of the GTA has consumed Oakville, more than doubling its population. Due to its location and charm this demographic change has enhanced the embourgeoisement of Oakville, particularly its older neighborhoods. So Oakville has gone latte and there are now Porsches on my parents’ street. With fewer young families able to afford these postal codes, the population of primary school aged kids apparently does not justify continual public investment in an aging institution like Brantwood, so the remaining kids will now have to bus halfway across town, although one suspects school buses will not be the primary mode of transit used. I used to remember running a block and a half home from Brantwood for lunch. (My commute in Sackville, by the way, is about twice that distance.)
As for BCI in Brantford, its location in the city centre bears similarity to the other cases discussed thus far. Mary is quoted as saying that a key constituency that would have been affected by a BCI closure would have been the “many affluent young professionals…buying homes in the older part of town and renovating them as a place to raise their children.” The heritage crowd was also enthused – BCI was designed by Alfred Chapman who also did the R.O.M.
Interestingly, the T&T article described Brantford as “a city of about 60,000 people just outside Toronto’. Maybe my perception of distance has changed, but Brantford is a good hour-and-a half outside Toronto. To me it was both literally and figuratively far removed from the metropolis. Yet like the nearby Kitchener-Waterloo area, 30 km upstream along the Grand River from Brantford, these places have been largely absorbed by the growth of the mega-city region that Richard Florida calls Tor-Buff-Chester. This integration is good and bad.
My four aunts and uncles on my mom’s side all went through BCI. It sure has meaning for them. (For a clue as to how my maternal line channeled through Brantford, read Robertson Davies’ Murther and Walking Spirits). My other Godmother, my mom’s and Mary’s badminton coach also taught there so the connection runs pretty deep. I remember playing BCI in rugby in Grade 11, but that is my only point of contact. I am glad that BCI has been saved, though I recognized the bitterness that Mary notes characterized the fight to save it.
As for Moncton High, I am not as sure. This morning one of my hockey team-mates put it to me this way. Do you think the government can justify spending $40-odd million to renovate Moncton High when there are schools in Sackville that are so strapped for cash that parents have to fund-raise for a new coat of paint? I think parents also supplied the labour to paint the school. So the MHS case could also be a bitter fight.
Are our older schools worth saving? Is their symbolic and heritage value still relevant? Do places large and small think schools in the centre of town should serve as the heart of their community? How do we decide? All I know is that without champions like my Godmother, Mary Welsh, these issues would all be lost causes. Good for her!
Friday, January 16, 2009
Nikkeijin, auto-parts and migration
According to the Asahi Shimbun, the declining fortunes of autoparts makers in the Mikawa region of eastern Aichi Prefecture and western Shizuoka, has precipitated an outmigration of Brazillian Nikkeijin who worked in these factories. Meanwhile, Toyota, which reported its first annual loss in more than 70 years, has urged its managers to buy Toyotas in a bid to stimulate demand. So both ends of the supply chain hierachy are feeling the pinch.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)