Monthly Archives: April 2011

Book Log – Un Lun Dun

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Un Lun Dun by China Mieville

Curt Holman loaned me this book, a favorite of his daughter’s.

My only experience with China Mieville thus far has been Perdido Street Station, which is a quirky but engrossing book. Mieville seems like the writer that the term “speculative fiction” was coined for, as one hesitates to call it fantasy or science fiction.

Un Lun Dun is a surprising and creative book intended for kids, but entertaining for adults.

Jumping between what I’ll call an Un-World and this world, it has a down the rabbit hole feel, but more grounded than the Alice surrealism. The world of unLondon thrives on the cast-offs of the real London, where animated garbage and eccentric creatures abound. A crisis that threatens unLondon and London alike can seemingly only be thwarted by a prophesied young girl, but Mieville is not so pedestrian to allow that to play out as you would expect.

The vivid description of the action and oddball characters is crying out for a movie adaptation.

Dreams of My President

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I dreamed last night that I participated in two unrelated press conferences with President Obama.

The majority of the dream was me trying to figure out how to compress the description of the experience into 140 characters.

This is my brain trying to tell me something.

On Money

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Sometimes, I think it would have been fun to be an economist. Then I blink my eyes, shake my head a bit, and the feeling passes.

But my interest in the mathematics behind sustainable incomes and considering the big picture economy doesn’t fade.

So, there have been two articles in the past few weeks that caught my eye. One on IKEA’s U.S. plant woes, and the other on a “realistic wage“, i.e. the minimum salary to live in a sustainable way and be able to plan for retirement, etc.

IKEA’s $8/hour starting wage would be sufficient for a part time job for the second earner in a two income household with no kids and renting (31.5 hours a week, 50 weeks a year). To sustain a single person on their own, the worker would need to work 75 hours a week, 50 weeks a year (less if they get higher pay for the overtime). In Sweden, the minimum wage is $19/hour, with 5 weeks paid vacation.

New York Times

Essentially, anyone making less than $15/hour1 is going to be dependent on someone else in order to make a sustainable living, get healthcare, plan for retirement. Add a kid into the mix, and the number goes up to $23/hour.

These numbers are based on the New York Times table, developed from the report by the Wider Opportunities for Women and Department of Health and Human Services.

So what happens in America if we take these numbers as real, and seek to improve the minimum wage? As labor costs go up, so do the cost of goods and services. As the cost of goods and services rise, the “reality wage” goes up. If the minimum wage is increased to counter that… is there a unstable feedback loop happening, or does the system stabilize?

If we purchase fewer goods and services to counter the rise in costs, does the economy take a nose dive? Or is the cost of goods and services kept in check by the lowering of the “wages” of the upper classes, thereby closing the income gap that has reportedly been growing over the last twenty years? (Is there enough money being earned at the top such that “re-distributing” some of it could make a meaningful difference at the bottom?)

It is easy to see why one might want to leave it to the Invisible Hand to set minimum wages… messing about with a complex system can have very undesirable results.

On the other hand… $8/hour just ain’t enough. The Invisible Hand is not necessarily wise, or correct.

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1This is using my 50 weeks/40 hours, no paid vacation model.

Book Log – The Known World

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The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Stacey gave me this one Christmas or birthday; It was an NPR recommendation. It is one of those books that sit on the To Be Read shelf, looking somewhat appealing, but always overshadowed by a flashier title next to it.

But I made a decision to attack those piles of attractive-but-somehow-second-choice books on my shelf, and this was the second one from that list (The Time Traveler being the first).

It’s a very good book, if a book about the institution of slavery can be said to be “good”. It delves into the lesser known quirks of the time, such as free blacks living amongst slaves, and, in fact, owning slaves. If a paper is all that stands between a black man and slavery, what happens when the paper is eaten?

As interesting (and unsettling) as the topic was, the real shining point was the storytelling technique. There was a smooth jumping back and forth in time, often pausing in the middle of a paragraph in the “present” and telling the full fate of a character in a sentence or two. It reminded me of “Run, Lola, Run”, when we would often see a series of snapshots showing the fate of someone Lola bumped into.

The characters are complex and nuanced, and there are a lot of them, all deftly painted.

It’s not my typical sort of book, but I’m glad I read it, possibly because of that.