Seth’s blog

Learning Chinese here — at least the first baby steps — has turned out be easier than expected. I’d expected to hire tutors. A Berkeley grad student I know who had lived near where I live now had done that. I found ads offering tutoring on a craigslist-like site. I started with the cheapest ($10/hour — which is a lot in Beijing). After an hour, I cut short the first lesson. It had been excruciating. “X means this. Y means that.” In my tutor’s defense, we didn’t yet have a textbook to work from but paying $10/hour for a textbook reader seemed pricey. By then, two people — a Tsinghua student I’d met in a dining hall and the girl who sold me my cell phone — had offered me free Chinese lessons.

“Why should I pay you if others will teach me for free?” I asked my tutor.

“Why did I spend four years in college learning how to teach Chinese to foreigners?” she replied. (That was her major.)

That wasn’t persuasive, I said.

She said she had a Mandarin accent but others might not.

“To speak with everyone I should learn from everyone,” I said. This is an attractive feature of Beijing: It’s much more a melting pot than other Chinese cities, such as Shanghai.

By now I’ve had several lessons from three different people who offered to teach me for free. It felt like fun, not work. They volunteered to teach me because they would learn English at the same time. Most Tsinghua students want to go graduate school in America, where they can expect to do very well — Dark Matter notwithstanding — so long as their English is adequate. I may be at the exact place on earth — the Tsinghua campus — where English-speaking ability is valued most highly. It might be a special time, too: As the Chinese educational system improves its teaching of English, I expect the value will go down. If I were in Sweden, no one would volunteer to teach me Swedish.

The difference between my paid and unpaid teachers reminds me of a famous psychology experiment on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation done by Mark Lepper and colleagues at Stanford and published in 1973. They took two groups of kids and put them in a room full of toys. One group was told they would be rewarded if they played with the toys. The other group wasn’t told this. Two weeks later, the kids were put back with the toys. Kids rewarded for playing with the toys played less with them than the other kids did. It’s such a profound effect it’s like there are two different motivational systems.

1. The scourge of Arial (the typeface)
2. The scandal of university accounting practices
3. Misleading marketing of the world’s best-selling drug. “Billions of health-care dollars may be being wasted on statin use by women but the current regulatory regime does not create incentives to prevent such behavior.”

Thanks to Justine Roberts.

“Childhood obesity is one of the biggest problems we have.” Tomorrow I’m giving a talk at Tsinghua University (Beijing) called “The Secret History of the Shangri-La Diet.” Childhood obesity is becoming a serious problem in China.

Amory Lovins
Chairman and Chief Scientist
Rocky Mountain Institute

Natural Capitalism:
The Next Industrial Revolution

Tuesday, October 28, 2008 - 4:10 p.m.
Lipman Room, Barrows Hall 8th Floor, UC Berkeley Campus

From this discussion. The speaker is Noriel Roubini, the NYU economics professor:

In U.S. the total consumption’s about $9.5 trillion. Take the entire consumption of 1 billion Chinese, it’s about $1 trillion.

The average American thinks: We’re rich, they’re poor. It’s more complicated than that. The Chinese, in hundreds of ways, do more with less. They pay less for the same quality of life. Here are some examples:

1. The lights on the stairs to my Beijing apartment are sound-activated. Works well, saves electricity. In Berkeley I pay $4/month to light the stairs to my apartment and why should my landlady install sound- or motion-activated lighting?

2. The water-heating system in my apartment is flash heating, that is, just-in-time heating. It works just as well as an American-style water heaters and there’s no heat loss when you aren’t using it.

3. My washing machine doesn’t use heated water. Incoming water is heated to room temperature by a set of baffles.

4. The doors to campus cafeterias are a set of hanging plastic strips. It gets cold in Beijing in the winter. When someone enters there is much less heat loss than when a door is opened.

5. Bicycles are everywhere (in my part of town, the university district, at least) and are easy and safe. They are also very cheap. I could have bought a used one for $15 but instead a friend gave me hers — she takes the bus to work. While bicycles are basically transportation for people who live close to work, as students do, electric bicycles — in which China leads the world — are far more powerful and could probably replace a lot of cars if downtowns were safer for them.

6. The better you cook, the cheaper ingredients you can use and achieve the same result. The Chinese, who are great cooks, use lots of vegetables, which are cheaper than meat and of course easier on the environment.