HET Forum

Although the event that took place on United where the crew had a passenger being dragged out of the plane for the simple reason of not willing to give up his seat it’s abhorring and should never happen, it could not have occurred at a better time (http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/10/travel/passenger-removed-united-flight-trnd/). The following day our topic in international business management was business ethics. Courtesy to Eddie Constantinescu which joined us in Taiwan from Chicago via video conference, he discussed with us the United Airlines incident which is nothing short of a perfect case study for business ethics. What did we all learn from this “case study” that was still taking place as we’re discussing it? If businesses can’t behave ethically, at least the fear of losing money or total collapse will prompt them to first, offer a fake apology and stop behaving unethically towards customers or the rest of the world. Moreover, quite a few businesses engage in some or all such practices: destroy the environment, pollute and abuse many of their employees legally and illegally.

It is however more difficult to get businesses to act ethically when it comes to products or resources obtained from countries where bribes and local laws do not stand in the way of child labor, gender discrimination and other demeaning employment practices and protocols. If there are no good means or ways to make such businesses suffer financially and send their stocks tumbling, they’re likely going to continue in their unethical practices. In recent years “blood” is diversifying from blood diamonds into other sorts of blood, such as “blood smartphones” as discussed in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ3BoqypGYU. The question is, how can such unethical business behavior in all the different situations mentioned here be prevented?

Financial losses from decreasing purchases and tumbling stocks have done wonders since the social media and smartphone era began. People can quickly take snapshots of anything and rapidly spread the news and surprisingly some forget the kind of era we live in. We are aware that businesses can only survive by making profits, however, we all need to realize we are watching or reading such distressing news on our phone, pc, or other e-communication device at the expense of children and many other unethical business practices. In other words, we condemn businesses which know they are using products and resources or have in their supply chain other businesses that use child labor, have unsafe working conditions, pollute the environment, etc., but we still buy their products. Are we ready to stop using our smart phones because of the reality of how they are made? Can people worldwide unite in awareness and push businesses to be more ethical by refusing to buy their products and services or making their stocks tumble if businesses can’t help themselves? Sure people can do it, United Airlines serves as a good example as it seems that nowadays it’s the only way that works! But the question is, as one of the students asked in the class “Will it always continue this way”? In other words is it nothing except the fear of losing money going to motivate businesses to do anything right?

Many authors are quite creative and may not need to read much when it comes to getting ideas and perspectives for their own writing. However, there’s always a good reason they should read more than the average individual. One reason is, speaking from my own experience as an author, I rejoice when others read my writings, thus, I’m pretty sure I make other authors happy when reading theirs. Second reason is likely more important, that of learning new things. Over the winter break I thought I would shoot two birds with one bullet; make an author happy while I learn some new things myself. I had the chance and privilege to read a great book on politics and economics written by a former colleague, friend and great economist, Dr. Peter St. Onge.

Many things in it that St. Onge wrote impressed me to say the least, however, I found the chapter on regulations superb as it is easy for all to guess, I don’t like some of the regulations in probably all countries I’ve been to, particularly in the USA. But then again, who likes them. So, if you like politics and like or hate Trump, I recommend this great book on Trump’s first 100 days in office by a great author.

Free-marketers are often ridiculed for suggesting the welfare state can be substantially replaced by free enterprise: not sure what to call those which even dare  suggest that able-bodied adults would be better off with more invigorating freedom instead of a debilitating dole.

The Case of Taiwan

Well, we have a fantastic case study in exactly this: Taiwan. With a GDP per capita about half US levels — between Spain and Portugal — Taiwan has a tiny welfare state paired with regulations that are both light and lightly enforced.

Result? An explosion in commerce, and apparently near-zero homelessness. Walk anywhere in a Taiwanese city and the streets are alive, all day and all night, with a rotating cast of pop-up businesses that employ mainly low-skill labor while making life a joy for consumers.

Hundreds of jobs, small rivers of entrepreneurial income all running off one little street.

To give a flavor, take one street near my university, Wenhua St. in Taichung. Starting around 5am, farmers drive in and spread out their produce on folding tables along the street. Shoppers are diverse: elderly who can walk instead of driving out to a megastore, mothers with kids, fathers cooking up breakfast.

Around 7am the farmers pack up and in move the breakfast joints, unloading folding tables and stacking chairs off their pickup trucks. Sandwich places, noodle shops, omelettes and full English breakfast. These go until a bit past noon, when they fold up everything on their trucks and out come the night crew: a different set of restaurants selling fried chicken or dumplings, vendors selling clothes, watches, kids’ toys. As the night wears on the beer joints open, selling hot soup and a cold beer. Families, teens, and singles throng the streets until 3am, when the street cleaners come out in preparation for the farmers coming at 5.

So hundreds of jobs, small rivers of entrepreneurial income all running off one little street. Each patch of street is recycled 3 or more times a day according to what customers want. And none of it would be legal in most US cities.

The Beauty of Laissez-faire

Three interesting results come out of this laissez-faire approach to small commerce. First, streets in Taiwan are full of shoppers all day and all night. There are none of those dangerous urban deserts that abound in American cities like DC and New York. You can safely roam around at 3am any day of the week, and find tons of pop-up bars or restaurants, packed with laughing people enjoying the night.

His friends’ first question was: what kind of shop will you open during your job-hunt?

Second, because laissez-faire allows a robust market to develop, street food in Taiwan is safe, delicious, and ridiculously cheap. We pay between $1.50 and $2 for a full meal, in a country where overall costs are half the US level. So, adjusting for price levels, we pay $3 to $4 for what would cost us easily 3-5 times that in the US. As a result, my family doesn’t eat out once a week like back in the States; we eat out 2 or 3 times a day.

Why so cheap? Because the market is substantially left to self-regulate: if a vendor sells bad or dirty food, word spreads and they’re out of business. Other vendors, indeed, enforce this since the reputation of the whole street is at risk. The result is that vendors scrupulously clean their equipment every day; indeed there are services that go around cleaning your food-stall on hire. It’s like nested deregulation: an unregulated service provided to an unregulated service that is, ultimately, “policed” by customers themselves.

Freedom and opportunity: that is what underpins true welfare and security.

From my perspective as a customer, the end result is fantastic: clean, delicious food that we can afford to eat every single day of the month. By the way, that is apparently what most Taiwanese now do: it’s standard for people to never cook in, but rather to just pick up $2 meals every night for the family, only cooking for special occasions or for a midnight snack.

Third, and possibly most important, is the impact on jobs and self-sufficiency. A Taiwanese friend announced he’d lost his job, and his friends’ first question was: what kind of shop will you open during your job-hunt? Since it’s so easy to start a pocket-business, there’s an entire industry that caters to them. You can lose your job, take the bus, rent a food stand for a month, pay $50 to slap on some signage, have it delivered to some high-traffic spot and get cranking that night on fried twinkies, sausage-buns, whatever you think people want to eat. So sling sausages by night, keep looking for work in the daytime, and when you find a job just take the stand back for your deposit.

Freedom and opportunity: that is what underpins true welfare and security. The results are striking: in 3 years here, in a city bigger and poorer than St. Louis, I have never once seen a homeless person. The closest I’ve seen is an elderly lady who grows orchids and sells them out of a bag.

So choose one: job-killing regulations and a welfare state, or reduce burdens on small business and set the people free.

by Peter St. Onge

http://profitsofchaos.com/

Foundation for Economic Education.

As students are always looking for the best opportunities to earn a living after completing their studies, one of the discussion topics that always comes up in all the courses I teach is, of course, where are  the places with the best opportunities. Incidentally, as I lived most of my life in USA, people have wondered why I choose to live and work in Asia when according to “most people” the opportunities are greater in the USA. Let’s then, redefine what is an opportunity as many fail to recognize what is the true or entire meaning of the word “opportunity”.

To many individuals, the word opportunity is mostly the paycheck, not accounting for anything else that should be part of it (e.g. the cost of living, safety, crimes and homicide in that location, healthcare coverage, the ease of doing work – not only the ease of finding work, the culture and people you are dealing with, and most of all the quality of life in a certain place or location).

It is why for some people and businesses, working or operating in various places and countries, dealing with certain laws, cultures, people and/or environments it could make all the difference when it comes to any given opportunities. Although in many cases individuals have to live in a certain location physically to take advantage of certain opportunities, the internet has created more and more opportunities for individuals and companies to operate globally without them having to move or migrate to other places or countries. Moreover, opportunities today are highlighted by the fact that an increasing number of smart individuals in 3^rd world countries are better off than below average intelligent people in developed countries in picking up opportunities. Take the internet scams for example; most come from 3rd world countries. The idea here is that the “smart” guy has figured out an opportunity to scam gullible individuals in developed countries, even though he’s using it the wrong way. But how is this any different than a country or system which takes advantage of laws, systems, and or the local environment to scam you legally? Of course this is another can of worms, so let’s just stick to opportunities that are moral and ethical for now!

Not long ago, this wasn’t the case. No matter how smart you were, if you happened to be in a certain place or country, you would not be able to accomplish or amount to anything unless you left that place for the ones with more available opportunities (unfortunately many were unable to leave the place or lost their life doing so). Many people that I know have immigrated to USA or other countries before the internet era and for most it’s unquestionable that it made the greatest difference in terms of opportunities, especially in the blue collar jobs area. Many others wanted to immigrate to various places around the world from their native place but could not, and they could only wonder “what if”. Some of them not too much later found out that they were able to “get out” by using even better means, the internet, and are now happy they didn’t go or migrate anywhere, as the internet now brings an opportunity directly to your desk in many instances instead of you having to go chase it physically in some place or country. There are still places in the world where you are doomed if you live there, but for the most part, if you can “get out” using your computer or smart phone, you are likely to run into an opportunity of some kind.

I still wish I could live in California, not because it offers any “opportunity” in particular when compared to other places worldwide but for one simple reason, the weather. However, for many more reasons, especially safety (man induced disasters which I don’t want to detail for the sake of political correctness; natural disasters are a different story and are a big issue in some places) I prefer quite a few other places. Should weather be considered an important aspect/part of an opportunity? If we include some of the Middle East countries that are loaded with opportunities, the weather would make a good case against a good opportunity among other things, especially if there are a number of similar opportunities to choose from worldwide.

3. Postmodern Architecture. In the 70s architects were already starting to look beyond the principles of modernism; Kenneth Frampton published his book, ‘ Towards a Critical Regionalism ‘, in which he sought to provide a modern architecture tied to a place’s geographical and cultural context. Other architects like Mario Botta, Aldo Rossi, James Stirling, revisited the principles of pre-modern architecture and aimed to reinterpret them in order to find new means of expression. Others like Charles Jencks, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Juhani Pallasmaa, derived their architecture from theoretical fields like Complexity Science, Deconstructivism or Phenomenology. All these became identified with the so-called Postmodern Architecture. Their works still owed a great deal to the Modernist principles and aesthetics, while often displaying a specific flamboyance, whimsicality and self-irony. Modernism had disintegrated into multiple factions which only kept its structural and functional norms as their only unifying factor.

For lack of better inspiration many architects continued to produce bland, predictable functional buildings; in most cases financial and structural constraints tend to limit the architects’ vision and creativity. Many high end architects, sometimes referred to as ‘starchitects’, developed a signature visual style by designing complex, twisted forms (Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid), either derived from a theoretical background or simply gratuitous, while a third category of architects continued to engage in theoretical fields, aiming not so much to create a visual style, as to root their design in a characteristic paradigm. Some focused on philosophical currents such as Deconstructivism, Phenomenology, Structuralism, others focused on Complexity Science, Sociology, Anthropology, participative design, while others focused on the emerging technologies – generative algorithms, fractals, parametric design software, non-Euclidean geometry.

At present we’re probably witnessing a new crisis within the profession; architects find it hard to keep pace with the rapid evolution of technology; older professionals who managed to become successful depend on tech savvy fresh graduates, who in turn lack practical experience and familiarity with building yards. More and more tangent fields are drawn into the picture, requiring further specialisations, forcing individual architectural masterminds to give way to entire teams of professionals.  Those students who are more attracted to the theoretical side of the profession will often find little use for their knowledge in a common architectural practice, and in many cases decide to pursue an academic path and abandon the design field.

The overcrowding and the intense urbanisation that happened in the last decades is contributing to the crisis within the profession; universities are producing an excess of professionals, while design opportunities become more rare. Young architects are thus forced to seek alternatives to design, focusing on rehabilitation, conversion of old buildings, conducting analyses of the urban environments in order to propose improvements, specialising in architectural visualisation, CGI etc.

The rapid evolution of CGI, 3D environments, video games and virtual reality allowed for the development of virtual worlds created exclusively for entertainment purposes. A series of SciFi genres emerged, each accompanied by its own architectural aesthetics. These might be seen as tools of progress, contributing to a glorious future, or, on the contrary, as useful tools for investigating the past in creative ways and bringing it to life. The ‘alternate history’ approach produced genres such as Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Gothicpunk, Post-apocalyptic dystopia. Most of these genres deliberately mix the culture of a past age with the present culture; some speculate on futuristic developments of our world, some are based on ancient myths, while others imagine completely parallel worlds. ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Game of Thrones’ fans can not only watch their favourite series, but also immerse themselves in Tolkien’s world by becoming characters in Multiplayer online role-playing games like ‘The Elder Scrolls’.

Those passionate about architectural design now have the opportunity to contribute to the creation of virtual worlds by using 3D modeling and realistic visualisation tools. In the same time, virtual reality glasses are currently becoming more and more widespread, along with the development of augmented reality devices. It seems we’re witnessing a new liberation of architecture, a total detachment from functional, structural and financial constraints. The newly emerging virtual architectural environments are becoming pure materialisations of our fantasies, fever dreams that seek to explore all possible worlds, all possible alternatives and outcomes of our collective and individual existence.