Cargo cult?

[flatlandr]

Is Taiwan suffering from an odd type of Cargo Cult ideology?

[Dawud]

Do go on…

[SuperS54]

Costco did seem to have an unusually large selection of cargo shorts the last time I visited.

[flatlandr]

This is what I missed about this forum. Honest to goodness laughs.

[flatlandr]

Well I’ve found that I have only been having conversations with Taiwanese people of late. Small business owners, factory owners, housewives, uni grads, educators and so on. And the common theme that arises is an opaque “Field of Dreams” outlook for the future. If you buy it, you’ll get a job to pay for it. If someone else is making fistfuls of dollars making something, copy it and you will too. I had a class discussion yesterday where I was asked what I thought Taiwan could do to make it. I’d suggested a war footing and re-tool dying industries such as bike manufacturing, solar panel factories, energy storage like batteries and the like to innovate a low cost, low tech vehicle industry. It’d be a homegrown, home tested thing like the Gogoro that could be streamlined. It’s an undeveloped idea but all I got in return was crickets. A former bolt and nut manufacturer guffawed because he couldn’t see where the the money was. Thus the Cargo Cult idea. It’s like nobody believes Gates or Jobs didn’t start out as billionaires.

[Dawud]

Well it’s true that Taiwan’s economy is looking precarious, but I don’t think anybody has the answer. Your idea might work, or it might not. The government is not always very good at anticipating what will be competitive.

[endy]

I don’t care what anyone says. Cargo shorts are fucking awesome. “Oh but they aren’t fashionable”. So what? Cargo shorts are the most comfie shorts that aren’t just straight up basketball shorts. They are good enough (barely) for the office so you can lounge away in your chair, happily knowing you have 10 pockets in case you need to hide away some pens or something. Anyway I’m all for the new cargo cult! Who will join me??

[flatlandr]

If you need that many pockets, get a purse, Nancy.

[Charlie_Jack]

About 30 or so years ago, when I was in one of my various “nominally-in-school” episodes, the VA notified me that if I wished my monthly check to continue between semesters, I was going to have to declare a major. I went to the VA office at the school to verify this, which they did. Then I asked them how that could quickly and easily be done, and they directed me down the hall to the office of the College of Arts and Sciences. The people in that office said I would have to declare a major in a specific subject, which would involve going to a department office. I asked them where the closest department office was, and they directed me to the English Department office, which was just a few doors down. How I wound up in Taiwan is a mere extravagant concatenation of similarly random-esque incidents. I say all this by way of just trying to add a little perspective to what I’m about to say. What I mean to say is, I’m especially well qualified for this type of discussion, because my life seems to resemble an extended cargo-cult ritual.

Well, anyway, I had nothing to do on this hot afternoon but to settle down and write you a line. Wait, those aren’t my words, those are Rod Stewart’s and Martin Quittenton’s.

But neither do I have any original words about the situation you’ve introduced, only remnants from a book I started reading about 40 years ago but never finished, viz.:

Our remote ancestors did not expand their economies much by simply doing more of what they had already been doing: piling up more wild seeds and nuts, slaughtering more wild cattle and geese, making more spearheads, necklaces, burins and fires. They expanded their economies by adding new kinds of work. So do we. Innovating economies expand and develop. Economies that do not add new kinds of goods and services, but continue only to repeat old work, do not expand much nor do they, by definition, develop.

Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, p. 49

Ms. Jacobs provides examples of “adding new kinds of work”; here’s one:

Near the flour mills were shacks where mill machinery was repaired and new parts and machinery were made to equip the growing numbers of mills. Along the waterfront were small shipyards where passenger ships and ships for the flour trade were built to cross the Lakes. By the 1840s, some of the Detroit yards had found customers for their ships in other Lake ports and even along the coast. Soon the Detroit yards were building ocean-going cargo vessels. These were not sailboats, but steamships. Detroit shipyards were among the first in the world to build steamships. Just how the work of making marine engines began is obscure, but it is believed to have been added, by machinists, to the older work which they had been doing for the mills.

Ibid., p. 123

I’m not sure that everyone even subscribes to the “adding new kinds of work” idea, but even if they do, the big question, I guess, would be how to induce such a thing–that is, how to get people to start adding new kinds of work. I notice that in Ms. Jacobs’s Detroit example, she says that how the new work began to be added “is obscure.” To me, that doesn’t sound very encouraging.

I guess sometimes part of the “how” can be seen:

“Why Can’t I See The Picture Now?” – Jennifer Land

@flatlandr

A former bolt and nut manufacturer guffawed because he couldn’t see where the the money was.

I think Ms. Jacobs touches on that problem as well:

A candy manufacturer, reminiscing to a New Yorker reporter about the first candy bar he developed as a shipping clerk in a candy factory, recalls, “I showed it to my boss and he was very happy. ‘How many of these can you make in a minute?’ he asked me. ‘In a minute?’ I said. ‘It took me four months to make this one!’"

Jacobs, p. 90 (I’m not sure this link will work.)

I think her thesis in the above quote was that adding new work is often inefficient, at least initially. In fact, she says as much:

I do not mean that cities are economically valuable in spite of their inefficiency and impracticality but rather because they are inefficient and impractical.

Ibid., p. 86 (I’m not sure this link will work, either.)

[flatlandr]

Thanks for that. You almost lost me at concatenation there but I hung in to the end. I think I’ve followed a similar path. I’ve been around entrepreneurs most of my life who’ve researched and executed their own thing in niche industries but counter-intuitive to that, watching what many people do here is like nails on chalkboard to me. To the discussion I mentioned, when I suggested a 3 or 4 wheeled electric vehicle my students were thinking Tesla because of its retail pricetag not something more practical and affordable because of our energy dependence. I’ll keep swinging at windmills, though.

[Charlie_Jack]

I hope you’re successful in helping this new country to improve its prospects.

[flatlandr]

Yeah, instead of encouraging exciting discussions about “why do all atogas drink milk” or “why don’t Canadians take showers”, I steer things to my own interests. I’m not oblivious to the nodding heads outside but shaking the head inside look I see in most people’s eyes. If my students are deluding themselves I might as well do as the Romans do.

[Charlie_Jack]

Maybe some ideas are best incubated by oneself, but I think they’re probably going to be presented to some kind of group (1, 2, 3, 4) in order to move them eventually forward to fruition. I guess the trick is to find a good group to share those ideas with.

I majored in English, so finding a group that’s interested in your kinds of ideas is 'way out of my league, but I can’t help but think there might be groups of people here–whether local or foreign-born–who think and talk about the same kinds of things you’re thinking and talking about–you know, people with whom you can exchange ideas instead of just getting internal head shakes and/or outright guffaws.

[politbureau]

You can’t turn a bottom feeder into a marlin no matter what you do.

[Charlie_Jack]

I lack the skills to tell the fortune of a twenty-two-year-old country.

[flatlandr]

Thanks for the advice. I think I’ll show this video and see if it shines through.
https://youtu.be/V9AbeALNVkk
or this one if I want them to cry.
https://youtu.be/2-DhlrMqKNk

[the_bear]

Mini golf. It’s time mini golf took Taiwan by storm.

[flatlandr]

That’s an elitist gateway drug.

https://youtu.be/Zd9JqkXUbVs

[Dr_Milker]

@the_bear

Mini golf. It’s time mini golf took Taiwan by storm.

That would definitely help with traffic congestion.

[the_bear]

Droll, very droll.