Christmas and New Year
We’re at the end of 2005, and it’s been full of events and stories. Let me offer a swift update on what my year has been like, in the hope that we’ve not been out of touch for too long so that you don’t know what I’m doing writing all this to you.
To start with, it’s slightly inappropriate to say ‘my year’ since all along I’ve been surrounded by people who are important to me. Anyway, here’s what’s been going on: Flo and I decided to get married—but to wait until next year to actually do it. This year we saw, for the first time, what it’s like to live together in one place for a significant amount of time. (She took one year in Romania as part of an exchange programme between the two universities of Antwerp and Timisoara.)
That meant closer and more intensive interaction with my parents as well, which naturally led to conflict and misunderstanding. A long-drawn process, inherent to many families that are ‘growing up’ (albeit a little late, in our case) but which has resulted in a healthier, better relationship between generations—something I am quite proud of.
Professionally, I think the best way of describing the situation would be to say that I’m ‘professionalizing’ my activity, because it’s become so intense that without rigour and order it’s actually hard to even keep track of what I’m doing! Together with others, I am working hard on building a good academic record and on leveraging that and other attributes in applied research and consulting.
In other news, a major highlight of the year was our trip to America’s east coast, but there were others too. About many of these things you can read more on my website, www.ciprianman.net.
Of course, I should add countless other facts and stories in order to be complete, but I’ll only mention one more, apparently insignificant, piece of data.
I am sitting in an armchair, looking outside at the Christmas-tree-like myriad colourful lights of Budapest Airport, having for the past hour listened to a chapter of Freakonomics, a current favourite book and having had my self-made sandwich that included a piece of ham, illegally transported over the Hungarian-Romanian border. (No, it’s not allowed to bring any meat products into the EU!) I’m looking forward to meeting Flo in Brussels and to a few days’ rest. I’ll be sending this to you using my 3G/UMTS phone, which is the same device I used to listen to the book.
What does this mean? Obviously, that I have a cool phone.
Well, that and the fact that I thought of many of the people who have mattered to me over time, during a short break in a foreign airport, at a time when my heart is set to ‘welcoming’ mode because I’m going to see my sweetheart in just a few hours’ time.
All the very best to you for the New Year!
Ciprian.
I watched a movie this afternoon,
Der Untergang; it's about the last few days of Hitler's reign. Then I cooked myself a Chinese meal and ate it while watching TV (unusually enough for me). TVR 1 (Romanian National TV's main channel) was showing a German documentary of
Ceausescu's final days. Indeed, it is the 17th of December, the day when 16 years ago people in the town I'm in right now, were demonstrating against that regime, and dying in the process. Some call those days in
Timisoara the beginning of the
Romanian Revolution, though truly the "absolutely drastic change" the word
revolution presumes to have taken place "over a relatively short period" actually took rather a lot of time...
The way three-term, old-school president
Iliescu and his regime managed to slow down change and to turn around the positive effects of that revolution continue to haunt the country and cause frustration among observers. One might be forgiven for saying, to paraphrase Hitler, that Romanians got what they deserved: for not being aware enough of the world around them, for not being politically mature enough to understand what was going on, for being easily manipulable and for not having the cultural values that would have ensured continued rallying around constructive, democratic aims. "It's not their fault" is the natural response to such a statement, and it's true. History has merely allowed this nation's elite to evolve for a brief inter-war period. All other independent Romanian thinking and culture was stifled throughout history, one way or another--at least this is my current understanding. Most great individuals have always needed to go abroad in order to realise their full potential.
Instead of attributing guilt however (and feeling, perhaps, guilty for not doing anything or not doing more), my drive is towards the future. One where there is no such thing as "us and them" but where everyone plays globally by the same rules, and we all understand that belonging to a group (or a nation) is merely a small part of the picture. A future where awareness, knowledge and reasoning represent no less than the new religion. But let's not let the pretty words fool us, this is (still) no picnic for most, and it ain't about to get much better very soon.
Steven D. Levitt posts about having babies on
Freakonomics this morning. Here's an excerpt from his
original source (Slate , Fri 9 Dec 2005):
"On average, [...] a woman in her 20s will increase her lifetime earnings by 10 percent if she delays the birth of her first child by a year. Part of that is because she'll earn higher wages—about 3 percent higher—for the rest of her life; the rest is because she'll work longer hours.
For college-educated women, the effects are even bigger. For professional women, the effects are bigger yet—for these women, the wage hike is not 3 percent, but 4.7 percent.
So, if you have your first child at 24 instead of 25, you're giving up 10 percent of your lifetime earnings. The wage hit comes in two pieces. There's an immediate drop, followed by a slower rate of growth—right up to the day you retire. So, a 34-year-old woman with a 10-year-old child will (again on average) get smaller percentage raises on a smaller base salary than an otherwise identical woman with a 9-year-old. Each year of delayed childbirth compounds these benefits, at least for women in their 20s.
Once you're in your 30s, there's far less reward for continued delay. Surprisingly, it appears that none of these effects are mitigated by the passage of family-leave laws." [my italics]
This has a lot to do with average life-cycles and the age at which the woman begins work. I would expect that the later she starts her career, the more the effect is pushed forward in time. Amazing though what a huge difference this makes. A US college graduate earns, on average,
$2.1 million over his/her lifespan (yes, there might be differences due to gender or related variables). Still 10% of about 2 million bucks is a lot of money to give up just because you want a child one year early.
Once you've started off on your career track, you're all set and according to this latest research the cost of having a child is insignificant. That would be in line with what grandma might have told you: wait until you're ready (materially and psychologically), then have your child(ren). We could build a whole theory about being psychologically as well as economically ready to have children, but the two might be highly correlated anyway.
Hail to family planning, to birth control and hail to doing more research on the possibility of introducing intelligent incentives for people to build families at the appropriate time! (Not too early so as not to be ready in the sense outlined above, not too late so as to contribute negatively to birth rates and future growth.)
Have you thought about needing a licence to have children? You need one to drive, and raising children requires
way more responsibility and knowledge.
It's true what they say at
www.pandora.com: when talking to friends, one way of starting to really know someone is by asking what their favourite music is. If similarities in taste are found, a kinship is established and suddenly you're looking at the other person as though they were somehow closer.
OK, this may have been more obvious during my teens (because yes, I am talking about myself here actually) but I still enjoy learning that others (few others, I might add) share in my fairly eclectic musical tastes. And they're getting more eclectic by the day, as I get in touch with more (digitally-distributed) music that makes up "
the long tail" of niche preferences.
Talking to my newly-found digital DJ/friend,
Pandora, for the first time ever today, I have already found several new directions to look into. If only there was time. Still, it's so wonderful to listen to new music that sounds perfectly chosen according to my tastes that I can't but agree with Seth Godin's commendation.
He adds: "Check out Pandora. Web 2.0 plus music plus affiliate plus free plus cool." For the e-marketer it's mana from heaven:
the perfect case study of tomorrow's non-aggressive, listening-to-the-customer, helpful but only with permission, intelligent, useful, way of selling things. Or not selling so much as making them so perfect for each individual user/customer/partner that they simply sell themselves. Just you wait, mass customization is has barely shown its shadow and even that is not the end of the road.
