Joshua Go

The trouble with a government (or any big organization) running a budget surplus and sitting on a big pile of cash is that people start asking questions like, "Why don't we do something with that money, especially since there's so much to fix?" At that scale, having some cash ready for a rainy day is not an excuse that people are able to handle, especially when the quoted figure is in the billions of dollars. Surpluses may seem like a lot of money, although when divided on a per-person basis, they seldom amount to much at all. In this deficit-infested time, it's easy to rail against profligacy in our budgets. I'm not trying to engage in what-ifs here. I'm suggesting a way we can avoid this same problem in the future. We've been told that it's wise to save up for the future, to have some cash on hand just in case — folk wisdom that was reinforced by the big collapses this year. We also know that it's hard for most people to hear about a surplus ...

I have lived and worked in Greater Los Angeles for over a year now. Since the area is one of the world's major population centers, it only makes sense that I'd come across plenty of opportunities to observe the interplay between two forces: lots of people and limited resources. It's a common problem, but always a multifaceted one. Coming up with a solution means that planners (who could be church volunteers, business managers, or software engineers) must consider various factors. Having to stop and think about this can slow down decision making, and even when there's time to ponder and plan, thinking of a solution from scratch is more error-prone than referring to a proven set of guidelines and rules. Pricing Consider the situation when lots of people are elbowing each other to buy concert tickets. There's no increasing the supply of these tickets since a concert hall or stadium can only hold a set amount of people without the Los Angeles Fire Department throwing a...

News sources everywhere seem to lament the collapse of the Doha round of trade talks because countries would then have to resort to bilateral or regional trade agreements. For any supporter of free trade this would be understandable, but if we acknowledge the short term havoc wreaked by rapid changes to trade flows that do not give workers and business owners time to adjust, a gradual and stepwise approach to the opening up of markets seems to be a more prudent way to go. One of the major problems cited by those who favor a broad trade policy is the inconvenience of having to keep track of different rules for different countries. I would go about solving this by building a hash table of trade rules. Basically it would mean that given a country and a product as input, we would get the policies regarding that product as output. This would be a large table, but we would ask and receive only what we are interested in. There's also the advantage of isolated policies having limited effec...

Under our current Constitution, an American citizen is an American citizen — except when it comes to the presidency. There are American citizens who will never be able to attain the highest office in the land, even with distinguished military service, community involvement, or a track record of political achievements. The one differentiating factor that isolates these citizens from the rest is that they happened to be born in another country, to parents who were not American citizens. This means that foreign-born American citizens — whether they were born in Mexico, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, China, or India — can never be President. Nevertheless, the United States is one of the most accepting countries in the world when it comes to citizenship. Acquiring United States citizenship is a long and arduous process, but in theory it is open to all. And as many of us know, there's so much to be done and so much that could be done aside from coveting the presidency....

People who cannot handle small, easy duties should not be entrusted with more power and responsibility. Basically, be faithful with the small things, and you will be entrusted with bigger and better things. I particularly like this lesson because I love the process of building and focusing on smaller tasks, but at the same time I've always been a big dreamer. As one would expect, though, I also experience that impatience to move on to the next step, even if I'm nowhere near ready. But that's the way the world works. I've been thinking too, that the ability to wield power and responsibility is not entirely intrinsic. True, you can be put in charge of small things as a test of your potential, which is a property that never changes, and it does serve as a way to winnow out the good from the bad. But I realized that the process and experience of handling the little issues and tiny problems is itself critical to bringing out any latent potential or untapped talent in peo...

As much as we value liberty and tout the virtues of living in a free society, I humbly submit that eternal vigilance is not the only price we pay for our freedom. Anywhere there's freedom, you will find disorder, inconvenience, and shabbiness. We allow our freedoms to be restricted because we want some sort of orderliness, convenience, or good aesthetics. These are good things, but conceding to rigidity often means losing substance or meaning. Take homeowners' associations, for example. With pretty much any HOA, you cannot get away with painting your house bright pink, letting the weeds grow to four feet in your front yard, and then parking your car among the weeds. It may be how you prefer to live your life and run your household, but by joining the HOA you are giving up freedoms that you would otherwise have, in exchange for the assurance that your neighbor across the street will not paint his house a loud pastel purple, because pink is okay but purple is not. You may be fine...

For as long as I can remember, I've been excited about environmentally-friendly solutions. For energy, my dream for clean energy centered around solar and wind power. For barren soil, it was composting. For everyday fuel, I thought of renewable sources such as ethanol or hydrogen. Now I'm glad it's becoming more widely adopted; I thought I'd never see the day when such things would actually become economically feasible. There's an ethanol craze sweeping America at the moment, and I hadn't bothered to read much about it until this week's Economist leader, "Castro was right," pointed out that there are two main ways of producing ethanol on an industrial scale: corn and sugar. Ethanol advocates often point to Brazil as a shining example of a large country that uses ethanol on a large scale. Knowing that Brazil is doing fine with massive ethanol deployment made me more excited about having it in the United States, until I found out that their ethanol i...

As an Asian-American, it might be alarming to read Bush's details on a foiled terror plot in Los Angeles. The article states that Southeast Asians were recruited to carry out the planned attack. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm figuring that Asians will be profiled from now on. I'm okay with that and I understand the concern for security, but I'm guessing that the whiny Asian-American activist types will not be happy to hear this. They'll make a stink about it. Eventually, the smart thing to do would be just to profile young people everywhere. Once Middle Easterners and Asians are profiled, al-Qaeda may turn to other ethnic groups to carry out their plans.

I was reading Eric Hobsbawm's Industry and Empire this weekend. One interesting argument in the book is that Britain suffered decline because it got complacent about its dominant position. If it was being out-produced or out-innovated, it could retreat back into the comfort of its world empire. Having a power base is useful to buffer against shock or sudden change, but the factors causing the shock or change shouldn't be ignored. Even though it's reassuring to have something to fall back on, this comfort is a temporary solution and something must be done about the root cause of the problem. Another book I read this weekend was Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America . Its thesis is that the man who shot McKinley was only one part of the "murder." The McKinley legacy was also wiped out by his successor, Theodore Roosevelt. (The author of the book, Eric Rauchway, is a professor at UC Davis. I took his course on the Gilded Age and Progress...

Americans typically look at China's military buildup and become alarmed. This should not be the case. Looking at the numbers and looking at history will help us understand why it's sensible for China to have a strong military. Let's take a look at the numbers. With 1.3 billion people and a million-man army, that's less than one-tenth of one percent of the population in the armed forces. China recently stated her intentions for peaceful development . Why do we have trouble believing this? If you want stability and peace, you will need a deterrent against external forces which threaten that stability. There are also historical reasons behind the Chinese government's desire for a strong military--reasons which Americans may not understand. America has never suffered an invasion on the scale China has suffered time and again. China's long history, punctuated by foreign invasions from the likes of the Mongols, Manchurians, and most recently the Japanese, has taught t...