 Motivated by his great series of lectures on economics, I bought this book. A truly great introduction to economics that is engaging and witty, making what appears to be a dry, academic subject accessible to the educated layperson.
Chang's introduction to economics advocates for a heterogeneous method of doing economics, contesting the hegemonic status of the dominant Neoclassical school. Chang identifies nine schools of economics: the Classical, Neoclassical, Marxist, Developmentalist, Austrian, Schumpeterian, Keynesian, Institutionalist, and Behaviouralist schools. As Chang explains in a concise but informative way, each school has a different way of analyzing the economy. Each school makes different assumptions about individuals, the economy, and the world, while analyzing different sections of the economy (e.g. the Neoclassical emphasizes consumption-based activities but does not focus on production, unlike the Marxist and Classical school). Chang takes Singapore as a case study for the necessity of heterogeneity: he challenges anyone to explain the development of Singapore from the perspective of just one school. Chang goes even further and recognizes the necessity of the other social sciences for a holistic understanding of human phenomena. He notes the trend of explaining all human phenomena with economics ("economic imperialism") as evidenced by books like Freakonomics. The dominant Neoclassical school defines economics by its theoretical approach (rational choice) and the ideological conditions allow manifestations like Freakonomics in popular culture--Chang wishes to reorient economics back to the study of the economy. To do this, Chang explores two areas that he claims are under-studied by economists today: history and real-life numbers, the latter of which are constructed and less objective than one might think. Ultimately, through his user's guide to economics, Chang hopes "to show the reader how to think, not what to think, about the economy." Chang are armed to form their own opinions and contest the economist's expert mystique, especially when, as Chang points out over and over throughout the book, economics today is a "political argunent often presented as a science."
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 A novel about the Korean War in two parts. The first part follows soldier Tong-Ho and his two comrades Hyun-tae and Yun-gu in the midst of the Korean War. Tong-ho tries to retain his innocence through the brutality of the war. While Hyun-tae and Yun-gu frequent prostitutes, Hyun-tae stays back and repeatedly returns to memories of Sugi, the woman he loves. He is unfit for war--nicknamed "the Poet"--he is passive and "feminine" while Hyun-tae is ruthless and in his element as a soldier. (Hwang writes in the hint of a homosexual relationship between the two.) The first and only murder of an individual--I want to distinguish this from an unfeeling massacre of a nameless crowd--occurs when Hyun-tae does away with a woman who stays behind in her village with her baby while the villagers had already fled.
The novel occurs through a series of episodes, and through their encounters with the trio, Hwang introduces a set of affecting and memorable portraits of men and women in the thick of the absurd war. Tong-ho changes as the war goes on; he becomes defiled and takes his own life, overwhelmed by the contradictions of war. "Are we the victims or the victimizers?" he asks. The war ends and part two begins. How do soldiers adjust back to civilian life? I read this part with 오발탄 (Aimless Bullet), a classic work of Korean cinema about the same period, in mind. There is a sense of misalignment between soldiers and a stagnant Korean society. Trees on a Slope ends with a pregnancy, but this is one without the hopes of a separation from the traumatic past.  "It is Nobel Prize-winner Hermann Hesse's most famous and influential work" reads the back cover of the novel; I wonder how Siddartha might have been informed and embedded in discourses of the exotic and spiritual Orient in the West--I remember reading (maybe on Wikipedia) that the novel was brought back into mainstream consciousness in the 60s by the hippies, some 40 years after the initial publication.
The story moves quickly. How to fit a whole lifetime in 150 pages? The story begins "[i]n the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddartha, the handsome Brahmin's son, grew up with his friend Govinda"--an idyllic childhood passes by in 35 words or so. Siddartha's "awakening" is probably one of the more memorable novelistic depictions of a revelation. However, what is revealed is not a deeper truth behind the veil of falsehood. Siddartha the intellectual, the Brahmin, despised the external world--he rejected transience in the search of the eternal and absolute Atman--but his contempt is transformed into an affirmation of external reality. "He looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. The world was beautiful, strange and mysterious. Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, sky and river, woods and mountains, all beautiful, all mysterious and enchanting... All this, all this yellow and blue, river and wood, passed for the first time across Siddhartha's eyes. It was no longer the magic of Mara, it was no more the veil of Maya, it was no longer meaningless and the chance diversities of the appearances of the world, despised by deep-thinking Brahmins, who scorned diversity, who sought unity. River was river... Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them." And Siddartha the artist is born. I can't help but wonder how much of Hesse's own Christian and Western cultural categories are written into this awakening, however. Did Indian Brahmin texts also write of Enlightenment as the struggle for the salvation of an eternal soul? At one point, Siddartha the enlightened becomes Siddartha the vulgar merchant who is trapped back into never-sated cycle of samsara. He reawakens thanks to the guidance of an enlightened river ferryman. I am reminded here of a book of short stories I read a decade ago by an Indian writer (I cannot remember his name). The only story I remember reading (and it is but a fragment) is of the encounter between an American hippie and an old Indian man in a nameless Indian town. The old Indian man looks curiously upon this rich white foreigner in his strange clothes. The hippie looks upon the old Indian man and wonders about the rich exotic wisdom the old Indian man contains within his depths. To repeat the initial question, how has Siddartha been informed by and embedded in discourses of the exotic and spiritual Orient in the West? |
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