Seth's Blog

Someday, if I am lucky, I would like to write a book called The Four Abundances. It would be about how four incredibly important things that were once impossibly scarce, became or will become, to everyone’s surprise, abundant:

1. Water. Free and everywhere. So cheap my Berkeley landlady pays my water bill. This has been true for a long time.
2. Knowledge. I mean general knowledge. Via the Web, reference book knowledge and news is instantly accessible for free. A recent development, although books and newspapers were a big step in this direction.
3. Health. A future abundance. Health is far from abundant right now. On the other hand, health has improved dramatically during the last 200 years, as Robert Kugel has documented. It is clearly approaching abundance.
4. Happiness. Another future abundance. I suppose it seems impossibly far off — but abundant water once seemed impossibly far off. Here it’s hard to find signs of improvement, much less approaching abundance. Depression has become more common, not less, during my lifetime.

My self-experimentation has convinced me that health and happiness depend on things that were common in Stone-Age life, just as there was enough water and knowledge during that time. (Now we have more than enough water and knowledge, which is fine.) We need to figure out what those elements are. Self-experimentation provides a way of doing so.

In my little corner of Beijing, transportation is becoming a fifth (or third) abundance. Mostly I ride a bike — my bike was free, costs pennies to maintain, doesn’t pollute, provides exercise, easy to park. For longer trips I take the subway (30 cents/ride) or a cab (a few dollars a ride). Many people take the bus (a few cents/ride). I might get an electric bike for a few hundred dollars. Doesn’t pollute, very cheap per mile, easy to park, little congestion.

I’ve thought about this for months; what made me finally decide to post this was noticing that two little tools I use every day — a penlight and a brush to clean my keyboard — were free, giveaways at trade shows.

My cell phone has a service number that you call to get your account balance or to recharge your account. You press 1 for in Mandarin, 2 for English. Today for the first time I pressed 1. It reminded me of being 9 and going into the adult section of the library for the first time. I looked at a few books. They were full of words I didn’t know. Likewise, I didn’t understand a word of the Mandarin I heard. But I can listen to it again and again.

Last night on Chinese TV I watched the first day of an English-speaking contest. Contestants gave a short prepared speech, then gave an impromptu speech based on a randomly-chosen debate topic (e.g., should TV advertising aimed at children be banned?). After the impromptu speech they defended their position for a few minutes. It was a test of both English and public speaking. The contestants were college students.

I really liked it. It’s a statement of, and promotion of, certain values; it says that society — at least the owners of the TV station and viewers — value something outside of themselves (English) and intellectual (learning a foreign language). China has been called a “nation of bookworms” (by James McGregor in One Billion Customers) so a show glorifying learning isn’t entirely surprising but it is a big improvement over American TV game shows, which glorify office politics (Survivor), strange tasks in foreign countries (The Amazing Race), and singing (American Idol). I supposed the closest thing in America is the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which glorifies a useless skill (spelling obscure words).
What might American TV do like this? I can’t think of a contest revolving around learning from other cultures but I can think of some contests that would promote useful intellectual pursuits:

• Green engineering contest. Give teams of high school students home-engineering tasks involving energy use: Insulate a window, boil water, light a room.
• Joke-telling contest. Tests the ability to use jokes in everyday life — for example to defuse difficult situations. Americans have lost this ability so completely I suspect some of them don’t even realize it exists. I’m an example — I’m terrible at joke-telling.
• Editing contest. Contestants take an everyday piece of writing and improve it.
• Literature appreciation contest. Shown a passage from a famous novel, short story, or poem, contestants explain what is good about it. Bonus points for identifying the source.

Today I visited the flagship store of the Lohao City chain here in Beijing. (Lohao stands for Lifestyle Of Healthy And Organic.) I needed more flaxseed oil. It was a straight line from the subway stop but I needed to call the store twice to convey this to the taxi driver. The store was a lot smaller than I expected for a chain with six locations. It was a little bigger than a 7-11. It had a baking area, a wine area, a produce area, and a wheatgrass growing area where you could get wheatgrass juice and other healthy juices. They were sampling some delicious organic wine made from a fruit the English-speaking clerk didn’t know the word for. I was a little surprised it only cost $6/bottle.

The chain is just a few years old. It specializes in organic food. The chain owns its own 22,000-acre farm where they grow the food they sell — a new type of farmer’s market. By growing the food they sell they can guarantee how it is grown. This really is an innovation in food selling. I hope the six stores (one in Shanghai) mean the concept is successful rather than they started with a lot of money.

I wanted to buy six bottles of flaxseed oil but the store only had one. The clerk went to another store to get five more but came back with only one more. One bottle (250 ml) might last me a week so I need to search for other sources.

I told the clerk the flaxseed oil was for my research. “Can you really tell the flaxseed oil improves your brain?” he asked. Yes, I said. He was studying English at a private school in Beijing. He’s in his second year of college, majoring in “commercial diplomacy” which means business diplomacy (e.g., negotiations). He predicted that even though Obama quit smoking for the campaign, he will start smoking again now that he’s President.
The chain puts out a biannual magazine now on its third issue. The magazine said something very true:”As people earn more money, they start caring whether they are healthy enough to enjoy their fortune.”

More about healthy food in China.

Suppose I want to improve performance of my washing machine. Ways I might do this fall into three categories:

1. Supply missing inputs. It needs water, soap, and electricity. If any one of them is missing, I can greatly improve performance by adding it — by plugging the machine in, for example. These changes are easy because water, soap, and electricity are easy to get.

2. Replace broken parts. This will also greatly improve performance. These changes are very difficult unless I am a washing machine repairman.

3. Everything else. To improve performance any other way will be difficult and any improvements will be small. These other methods of improvement — such as putting special disks into the wash — are also likely to be dangerous.

All complex machines are like this. What I call the Washing Machine Principle says that humans are also like this. This means that non-transplant attempts to improve human well-being fall into two clusters: 1. Easy, safe, and highly effective. 2. Difficult, dangerous, and only slightly effective.

Some simple examples:

• Vitamins. If you have a deficiency disease, getting more of the right vitamin will cure you easily, safely, and rapidly. They supply a missing input.
• Antidepressants. They are dangerous, difficult to make and obtain, and don’t work very well. In controlled studies, they do only slightly better than placebos. Patients typically must try several to find one that works. They don’t supply a missing input.
• The mirror treatment for certain neurological conditions that Atul Gawande recently described:

[The patient's] left hand felt cartoonishly large—at least twice its actual size. He developed a constant burning pain along an inch-wide ribbon extending from the left side of his neck all the way down his arm. And an itch crept up and down along the same band, which no amount of scratching would relieve. . . . [These symptoms had lasted 11 years. Gawande suggested trying the mirror treatment.] After a couple of weeks, his hand returned to feeling normal in size all day long. The mirror also provided the first effective treatment he has had for the flares of itch and pain.

The mirror treatment is cheap, safe, and, in this case, highly effective. Clearly it supplies a missing input.

To be continued.