Danny Crichton

Last week, I displayed photos from my trip to Songdo, the new Free Economic Zone city built on the outskirts of Seoul near the Incheon International Airport. As I noted before, the city is something of a ghost town, an amalgamation of glass-and-steel skyscrapers but very little in the way of the human factor.

Here is a model of the future of the city presented at the Compact Smart City museum located in the middle of the development.

However, it was not the museum of the future city that was as strange as the institutions (if you can call them that?) that have taken up residence in the new city. The first is the Hello Kitty Studio and Play Land (or some marketing name like that). To get a sense of this place, you have to keep in mind that the entire city is a ghost town, except for this spot. I was able to walk up three-lane roads without passing cars, except right here at the Hello Kitty World, where there was actually traffic police directing cars to parking spots.

The strangest thing in Songdo was the artwork. I am not really an expert on public art in Korea, but this display of the entirety of the biblical story of Jesus (complete with a life-size Noah's Arc) is something that is just unreal. I don't know whether this existed before the city was built, or whether it was sponsored, but either way, it was truly

I was thinking yesterday about finding polling data about people's faith in the basic tenets of democracy and human rights - questions like whether people felt that governments were responsive to their needs, do they think that special interests dominate political decision-making, etc. In short, I wanted to get a sense, especially in Europe and in North America, about the health of the democratic process.

While it didn't provide numbers, this New York Times story basically follows that question. The detractors of democracy are starting to become more numerous and more vociferous in their complaints. The article is worth a full read (I'll quote a few bits below):

Increasingly, citizens of all ages, but particularly the young, are rejecting conventional structures like parties and trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web.

...

In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, a consensus emerged that liberal economics combined with democratic institutions represented the only path forward. That consensus, championed by scholars like Francis Fukuyama in his book "The End of History and the Last Man," has been shaken if not broken by a seemingly endless succession of crises - the Asian financial collapse of 1997, the Internet bubble that burst in 2000, the subprime crisis of 2007-8 and the continuing European and American debt crisis - and the seeming inability of policy makers to deal with them or cushion their people from the shocks.

...

Responding to shifts in voter needs is supposed to be democracy's strength. These emerging movements, like many in the past, could end up being absorbed by traditional political parties, just as the Republican Party in the United States is seeking to benefit from the anti-establishment

A few years back, I read an interesting and at times provocative book called The World Without Us. In it, the author describes what would happen if humans suddenly vanished from the world, how the world would slowly encroach and transform the world back to its natural state.

That feeling was very much evident in my trip to Songdo Business Area, a part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone outside Seoul. Billed as the future innovation hub of South Korea, the city seemed if anything a ghost town despite the gleaming glass and concrete towers that abounded. To be fair, I traveled on a weekend to what is essentially an office village, but there is still something eery about walking up a 6-lane road and barely seeing any cars in any direction.

While the city really is a paragon of progressive ideas in urban design and development, I am concerned about the almost utopian vision of its creators. Cities develop organically from the demands of their inhabitants, and cities like Songdo have a tough time adapting to those demands due to their insistence on uniformity and precision. The city is also almost 50 subway stops from downtown Seoul, making it difficult to connect the suburb to the urban core.

This week's photos show the development of the city; next week I will show the two most bizarre landmarks the area has to offer.

Students practice and perform Taekwondo maneuvers in downtown Seoul. You can read more about Korean martial arts on that highly peer reviewed source, Wikipedia.

Korea is a crowded place, an urban environment often more geared to pedestrians than motorists (although you would never know that trying to cross an intersection). Engineers at KAIST are searching for the next major revolution in personal transportation, and one example of this is an ultra-compact electric car that seems perfect for the hipster road warrior. I caught the car in action a few days ago, and ran after it to its home on campus.

And it's home outside of mechanical engineering.

Yesterday, I discussed my lack of sympathy for students who majored in the humanities without any particular direction - and who then end up waiting tables as described in a recent New York Times article. In that post, I also commented that the liberal arts are an important component of university education. This blog post will attempt to answer how to major in the humanities while avoiding the unsavory service jobs that some graduates have faced upon graduation.

I'll discuss three plans: 1) Humanities Plus, 2) Practical Humanities, and 3) Pure Humanities.

Plan #1: Humanities Plus

This plan complements a major in a humanities discipline with a skill-based discipline like statistics, computer science, economics, engineering, business, etc. (one could arguably add a critical language like Chinese or Arabic as well if at a high proficiency). This particular approach allows for a tremendous amount of choice, and can also provide considerable depth in the humanities field. A minor in a skills-based discipline at Stanford is 32 units, and if these are spread over 12 quarters, one could take as few as 3 units a quarter to attain the minor at graduation.

While some are surprised to hear this, many careers only require basic knowledge of a few skills - the rest are provided on the job through training and are customized for the particular your particular job function. For instance, technical writing does not require a tremendous amount of knowledge of engineering, but strong communications abilities are crucial for success. Stated without further comment, consulting and finance work in much the same way too. A minor can thus open important new career fields that were not previously available.

In some ways, this is the plan that I chose in my undergraduate education. While I majored in Mathematical and Computational Sciences,

The New York Times has a piece on our generation's acceptance of low employment prospects - a cultural shift they call "Generation Limbo"

Meet the members of what might be called Generation Limbo: highly educated 20-somethings, whose careers are stuck in neutral, coping with dead-end jobs and listless prospects.

And so they wait: for the economy to turn, for good jobs to materialize, for their lucky break. Some do so bitterly, frustrated that their well-mapped careers have gone astray. Others do so anxiously, wondering how they are going to pay their rent, their school loans, their living expenses - sometimes resorting to once-unthinkable government handouts.

The views of this group are summarized by one student in particular:

"We did everything we were supposed to," said Stephanie Morales, 23, who graduated from Dartmouth College in 2009 with hopes of working in the arts. Instead she ended up waiting tables at a Chart House restaurant in Weehawken, N.J., earning $2.17 an hour plus tips, to pay off her student loans. "What was the point of working so hard for 22 years if there was nothing out there?" said Ms. Morales, who is now a paralegal and plans on attending law school.

How much sympathy should we have for these students? More specifically, how much sympathy should we have for others in our generation who have been caught up in a bad economic situation?

Despite being empathetic and sympathetic for anyone caught in this economic morass, I can't help but feel that these people made seriously bad decisions - majoring in areas like English and the arts that have poor job prospects no matter what the outlook of the economy. While I am a strident defender of the classic liberal arts, these

This NYTimes article, "Does America Need Manufacturing?," perfectly encapsulates why industrial policy must become a major component of the government's efforts to renew and rebuild the American economy. There are strong echoes in this article of Clyde Prestowitz' "The Betrayal of American Propserity," a book that convinced me to move away from software programming and toward economics.

Important Quotes:

For decades, the federal government has generally resisted throwing its weight - and its money - behind particular industries. If the market was killing manufacturing jobs, it was pointless to fight it. The government wasn't in the business of picking winners.

Repatriating a high-tech manufacturing plant to the United States is not simply a matter of hiring the local talent. It requires good-old foreign know-how. "We call it 'copy exact,' " Forcier said. "We bought a company in Korea that had the technology around this type of battery and had developed the manufacturing process there. We basically brought that here, copied it exactly and scaled it up." A123 also brought a team of six Korean engineers to help transfer the technology to the U.S. and sent a team of Americans to Korea to learn.

And most importantly to what I study:

Federal agencies like the Department of Energy have long financed scientific research - through university grants, for instance - on technologies like lithium-ion batteries. But a basic feature of government policy is to allow corporations and entrepreneurs to pick through the results of that research, commercialize the promising ideas and let the market sort things out. In other countries, it often works differently. Governments are more willing to help companies pool information about a new industry or technology and (especially in Korea and China) assist with the early-stagecommercialization of