What Next?

July 4, 2017
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For much of the past two years Claire and I have called Champaign-Urbana, Illinois home (with a remarkable once-in-a-lifetime 7-month stint in Kenya included). This has been a remarkable time. As I worked on my M.S. degree in Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois I’ve been privileged to be a part of a study examining the economic impacts of agroforestry, while also taking courses on development and environmental economics and getting to meet some terrific researchers at the nexus of economic development, sustainable agriculture, and environmental studies.

My graduating class of MS and PhD students at Illinois. Congratulations!

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Let me just put in a brief plug for my department and field of study before I move on to what’s next. The Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE) at the University of Illinois focuses on applying economics to an array of practical problems, from understanding the causes of food waste, to predicting the effects of climate change on agriculture. The work done here is pretty concrete stuff. Applied economists take the conceptual tools provided by economic theory and use them to analyze real-world policies and problems. This is typical of agricultural and applied economics programs in land-grant institutions across the country–though I’d like to think Illinois has a lot going for its department in particular. This type of program often coexists with a “pure” economics department which focuses more on advancing the frontiers of economic theory and its ability to produce insights on human behavior. This not to say that researchers in economics departments don’t do applied work, but the land-grant mission of applied economics departments housed in agricultural institutions like the College of ACES at the University of Illinois makes applied work a natural fit. Other institutions which house similar departments include Cornell, UC Berkely, UC Davis, and Minnesota. I’m grateful to my professors here at Illinois, in particular my advisor, Kathy Baylis, whose work on on forests, agriculture, trade, poverty, and biodiversity is an inspiring example of the many applications of policy-focused economic analysis.

Now graduation is approaching! So what’s next?

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To my immense gratitude, I get to continue studying applied economics! I’ve been accepted to Duke University’s PhD Program in Environmental Policy. This turns out to be very much in line with the type of program I’ve described above. Duke is not a land-grant institution (it’s a private university, rather than a public institution founded through a federal grant of western land like the University of Illinois), but its Sanford School of Public Policy sees itself as advancing a very similar mission. So my program was formed to train economists to tackle policy questions related to humanity’s impact on the environment. The researchers I’ll work with and learn from examine a multitude of issues including the effectiveness of protected forest areas, the value of improved cookstoves in developing countries, and the trade-offs involved in hydro-electic dam construction. I can’t wait to get started this fall.

Meanwhile Claire has been accepted to the School of Government at the University of North Carolina, where she’ll be working toward a Masters degree in Public Administration. Known as an “M.B.A. for non-profits” the M.P.A. program will prepare her to work in government or the non-profit social sector. She hopes to learn more about management, fund-raising, and H.R. while connecting with the the people and organizations providing resettlement services to refugees with the hope of serving that community after graduating.

So Durham, N.C. here we come! Yes, we’re aware we stand on opposite sides of the greatest basketball rivalry of all time. But hopefully it will only make our marriage stronger :-).  To all our friends in the Southeast: see you soon! And a huge thank you and goodbye to our friends and community here in Illinois. We’ll miss you!

Where We’ve Been

October 3, 2016
Agroforestry
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For the last two and a half months Claire and I have been living and working in Kitale, a town in Trans Nzoia county, Western Kenya, home to the Kenya headquarters of  Vi Agroforestry.

Vi is an organization founded and supported by a Swedish magazine of the same name. It was founded in the 80’s when a Swedish journalist named Sten Lundgren traveled to Kenya and, struck by the specter of encroaching desertification, wrote an impassioned editorial imploring his countrymen to cease “drowning” each other in flowers and instead “give them a forest!” To no one’s surprise more than Sten’s, donations for trees started flooding in and  Vi Agroforestry (called in Swedish Vi Skogen) began.

First in the arid region of West Pokot–where a forest still grows on land at the boundary between the mutually hostile Turkana and Pokot tribes–Vi’s first employees, a Swedish volunteer and a young Kenyan named William Makokha (who still oversees seed production), began planting trees.

William Makokha in the forest he helped to plant in West Pokot, Kenya.

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It didn’t take long for Vi’s operation to shift from outright reforestation–with its attendant challenge of land availability–to agroforestry i.e. trees on farms. It was also clear that opportunity lay more in well-watered Trans Nzoia than in West Pokot. Trans Nzoia had been one of the areas designated as “white highlands” during the colonial period, meaning the land was designated for settlement by white British colonists. When independence came, much of the land was redistributed to Kenyans, drawing in farmers eager for land from all over the country. These new settlers found themselves in a landscape denuded by the large-scale agriculture practiced by the colonists.

When Vi was beginning, Trans Nzoia was still relatively deforested, so as the young organization expanded its operations it built tree nurseries around the county and began distributing trees to farmers eager to grow timber and firewood on plots reclaimed from the colonialists’ mono-crop plantations.

As Vi moved toward empowering farmers instead of planting trees on its own, they came in contact with the World Agroforestry Centre (also known as the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry, or ICRAF–an acronym which sticks even to the new name). The impact evaluation I’m working on is an ICRAF project, and Claire’s work is to trace  Vi’s technical knowledge back to its source in scientific research–including ICRAF’s work. So the narrative above comes from oral histories she has collected over the past few months.

Since its early days, Vi has done some remarkable things: they contributed significantly to reforestation in Trans Nzoia, participated in the field-testing of a number of innovative agroforestry practices, developed Kenya’s first carbon credit trading program, and expanded their operations into Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda.

In addition to providing agricultural advisory services to farmer groups throughout their focal areas, Vi’s headquarters serves as a demonstration area for agroforestry techniques, a tree nursery, and an arboretum dedicated to species indigenous to East Africa.

Tree seedling in the Vi nursery, shaded by trees dedicated to past directors and funders of the organization.

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As if that weren’t enough they also maintain a garden called the Grove of Peace dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Estonia disaster–a 1994 shipwreck which claimed the lives of 900 people in the Baltic Sea. This garden is the most striking parts of the Vi campus. It is open to the public, and people stroll in throughout the day to walk, eat lunch, pray, and even sing hymns.

Benches in the Grove of Peace, often occupied by Kitale residents on their lunch break.

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A cow wanders through a trellis in the Grove of Peace. Her milk goes into the morning chai for Vi staff.

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Claire and I spent the better part of the summer on the back porch of the Vi office, looking down over the peace garden and the arboretum, guarding our lunch from the De Brazza’s monkeys and trying to catch a glimpse of the more reclusive Colobus. It was a wonderful time.

A De Brazza’s monkey scaling the office gutter. These guys  bang on the porch roof in frustration if we get between them and the scraps in the trash can.

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The Colobus monkeys are harder to spot. They can leap incredible distances, white fringe flying behind them. Just once they came close enough for Claire to get photos.

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So that’s where we’ve been for the last little while! Claire and I have now moved to Nairobi to be close to the ICRAF office as we write our reports. But we’ll make it back to Vi in Kitale several times before we leave Kenya. We are so grateful to our colleagues there for being so welcoming, and we are glad to get to continue working together as we finish our respective projects.

Econ Life Hack: Using Notepad++ and texdoc to write reproducible LaTex documents with Stata.

October 1, 2016
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Fair warning: this post is off the nerd deep end.I’m going to describe how to use the Notepad++ text editor and the Stata package texdoc to edit Stata and LaTex code from within the same document. So this post will assume a basic level of interest in and knowledge of Stata and LaTex. Here goes!

During my coursework at UIUC I got acquainted with R and was particularly taken with the Knitr package for writing reproducible reports.

Brief discursus on why this matters: reproducible research is a growing preoccupation in the social sciences, especially with recent high-profile spats about p-hacking and reproducibility in the psychology literature. Reproducibility actually encompasses a number of questions, the most obvious being, “if I did the same experiment over again, would I get the same result?” But even before you get to attempting to re-run an experiment (which in economics is tricky, since we don’t exactly work in labs…) there is a lower bar to pass: “if I ran the same code on the same data would I get the same result?” That might seem like an obvious and easy test, but there are a number of documented cases where papers submitted to peer-review journals have failed it. So there is a push within economics to publish the code used in the statistical analysis along with the data and the analysis itself.

Reproducible documents make that task a lot easier. Using a tool like Knitr, you can write a report or paper, including snippets of R so that the code can be edited along with the analysis rather than copying and pasting tables back and forth. This eliminates some possibilities for errors and keeps you from including old tables when the model or the data changes. It also simplifies and organizes the task of providing code and data, because everything is all in one place. Most importantly for the lazy grad student in all of us: it saves a lot of time. Moving to RStudio with Knitr saved me considerable time, because each table was automatically regenerated inside my document any time the code changed.

Which brings me to my major beef with Stata: where’s the equivalent of Knitr? Enter texdoc. This is a Stata package that allows you to write LaTex (the markdown language used to format papers for publication) and Stata code within the same document. This means you can write a report, format it, and run the Stata analysis all in one place, no copying and pasting needed. So…

What You Need:

  1. texdoc and sjlatex Stata packages
  2. Notepad++ text editor
  3. A distribution of LaTex (I used MikTex v. 2.9)

Step 1: Install texdoc and sjlatex

First, to get Stata to allow LaTex code inside your .do files, install texdoc by typing ssc install texdoc into the Stata command line. Then consult the texdoc help file and this paper by Ben Jann for how to include LaTex code inside your .do files.

Next, in order to get LaTex to properly read your Stata output, install sjlatex. Instructions are available here for installing sjlatex and getting your installation of MikTex to find it.

Note: the file “stata.sty” included in the sjlatex package is essential for telling MikTex how to format Stata output. I’m sure there is a more elegant way to do this, but I had to put that file into my LaTex project’s working directory, i.e. the folder where the LaTex pdf files are generated, in order to get MikTex to recognize it.

Now play around with writing LaTex and Stata code, placing LaTex code inside /*tex and tex*/ tags. This will allow you to write a document complete with a LaTex header, sections of text, and a bibliography, while spitting out your Stata output from within the same file.

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As you can see above, my LaTex header is treated as a comment (shout-out to Mani at UIUC for his primer on LaTex). So Stata ignores the LaTex, then produces a separate .tex file which you can run MikTex on to produce the final formatted document.

End of story?

Unfortunately no. If you try this out for yourself, you’ll find a few flaws in the workflow, mainly stemming from the limitations of Stata’s native .do file editor. It is just not set up for writing an entire document. It doesn’t have spell-check, it doesn’t wrap text (so a paragraph is one long line), and it will definitely not help you with your LaTex syntax.

So it’s time to ante up and use a real text editor to work with the .texdoc files you’ll be writing with this package. There are two very good options for this task: SublimeText and Notepad++. You can check out how to use SublimeText with Stata here, but I’ll be focusing on Notepad++ because I have a bias for open-source tools, and I already had it installed when I was working this out.

Step 2: Configure Notepad++ to work with Stata

Install Notepad++, then follow the instructions here to install Freidrich Huebler’s extension rundolines. This will allow you to write Stata code in Notepad++ then execute it in Stata.

Note: This requires some fussing with the code in the programs Huebler provides. Make sure you get the file path to Stata entered correctly, and edit the code so it refers to your version of Stata. I futzed with this for a while before realizing the code pointed to Stata 14.0 and my version is 14.1.

Next, to get Notepad++ to recognize Stata commands and provide syntax highlighting, follow these instructions from Konstantin Golyaev to set Stata code as a user-defined language.

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Now you can choose Stata as one of the languages. Note that Tex comes pre-installed under “T” in the menu pictured above, so you can toggle between the two languages as you write.

Step 3: Configure Notepad++ to work with LaTex

John Bruer has thorough instructions here for setting up Notepad++ so that you can run LaTex to generate documents and even search back and forth between the final document and the code that produced it.

Note on references: The code in Bruer’s instructions above uses Bibtex to generate references. If you prefer Biber (which is more recent and has more options) you’ll need to substitute biber.exe for bibtex.exe in the pdf_latex.bat file. And again, pay close attention to the paths to the various programs that are being called.

Step 4: Put it all together

Now that Notepad++, Stata and LaTex can all talk to each other, it’s just a matter of settling on a workflow that works for you. I tend to keep three files going in Notepad++ at a time: the .texdoc file, the .tex file, and a master .do file that gets everything started. The master do file just has a few lines of code like this:

clear
cd “example working directory”
set more off
texdoc do example.texdoc
texdoc strip example.texdoc example.do, replace

This sets the working directory, initiates the .texdoc file, and creates a separate .do file with just the Stata code, in case I want to look at or share the code without all the LaTex stuff.

So to run the whole thing, I execute the master .do file, which runs all the code in the .texdoc file, generating both my stripped .do file and a .tex file in the process.

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Then I click over to the .tex file’s tab and run MikTex using the pdflatex_build command (which I’ve set as keyboard shortcut F8), and there it is: a nicely formatted pdf with paragraphs of text and Stata-generated tables all included.

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So that’s that! Using texdoc with Notepad++ you can write reproducible papers and reports and look like a boss doing it. If anyone reading this has any additional improvements or modifications they’ve made, please share them.

 

 

Another Hemisphere’s Stars

January 8, 2015
Writing
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Growing up my heroes were martial. Flying aces, squadron commanders, generals, fighter pilots. Sergeant York, General Patton, Ulysses S. Grant, Hannibal of Carthage, Sun Tzu. The ones I dreamed about most flew planes, steely-eyed men wedded to sleek flying machines dealing death from the air. I had a profusion of inner effigies, models of me at war, reflected back by the pictures in books about dog-fights and bombing runs.

I was in the woods when we declared war on Iraq.

Click here to continue reading at Curator Magazine

The Barbershop

November 4, 2014
Writing
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They killed the dogs last night. Gunshots and panicked yelps then—for the first time in two months—silence. Now I’m walking two blocks toward the river on the way to the barbershop and there are corpses piled in heaps on the curb awaiting removal.

Calo is unconcerned. He is singing the praises of the neighborhood barber. My hair is thick and shaggy, while Calo’s is buzzed tight; his dense Dominican curls smooth against his head.

“He will make you…zzzt,” he runs his fingers across his scalp, “so good, so cool.”

Dog tongues loll out of dog mouths. The flies, used to the meager pickings on discarded mango pits, are feasting.

“Que…” I search for the right question, “Que es esto?” “What is this?” As if some thing has been here, some single beast, slouching toward the river to die.

Click here to continue reading at Curator Magazine

19 Notes on 6 Languages

March 31, 2014
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  • In Thai, one word (tam), suffices for both “make” and “do.” The same is true for the Tajik kardan and the Spanish hacer. English is the only language I’ve yet learned that separates the idea of action from that of creation.
  • When Thais say they are eating, they say they are eating rice. When they say they are hungry, they say they are hungry for rice, whether they plan to eat rice or not. Rice is food. The real food. This linguistic association of the staple with the very concept of food is common. Congolese will often say they have not eaten today if they have not yet eaten manioc.

continue reading at Curator Magazine.

Day In, Day Out: A Review of Hannah Arendt

January 9, 2014
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If there is an Oscar for the category, “best glorification of the life of the mind” then Hannah Arendt deserves it. Rarely have the classroom and the writing desk glowed with more fervor on-screen than in Margarethe Von Trotta’s biopic of the acclaimed Jewish political theorist.

It’s a winning presentation. Barbara Sukowa’s Arendt is a lantern-jawed hero of independent thought, steely-eyed in the face of criticism.

And that criticism is stiff, for Hannah Arendt chooses to center its drama around Arendt’s coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial and the writing of the subsequent book, Eichmann in Jerusalem — a period in Arendt’s life when she was embroiled in controversy. The film makes much of this drama, reminding the viewers that what is now familiar in the history of ideas was once too hot to handle.

Click here to continue reading at Curator Magazine.

The Atlas of Economic Complexity

August 27, 2013
Book Reviews
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Graphic from infosthetics.com

As a follow-up to Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth, I recently downloaded and read The Atlas of Economic Complexity by Ricardo Hausmann, Cesar Hidalgo et al. It was a good chaser after Beinhocker’s massive introduction to complexity economics. Hausmann and Hidalgo are influenced by the idea that the economy is a complex adaptive system. Therefore they reject the idea that you can easily sum up an economy in a single number like GDP. Instead, they try to analyze all the different products produced in the economy in an attempt to get a grasp on how complex it is rather than just how big it is in dollar terms. Their results are interesting.

Hausmann and Hidalgo assume that the economy is based on productive knowledge–bits of knowledge necessary to make the products that we consume. These units of productive knowledge they call capabilities. They also assume that many products have overlaps in the capabilities needed to make them. So if you make shirts, there is a high probability you can make blouses too. These relationships should show up in a visualization of the product space. Countries that makes shirts will show a tendency to produce products with overlapping capabilities: blouses, pants, etc.

Hausmann and Hidalgo calculate a country’s economic complexity by measuring the diversity of products a country is capable of producing, and by also calculating the ubiquity of the products they do produce. So if a country produces only a few products and those products are ubiquitous throughout the world it is pretty certain the country has a fairly non-complex economy. The amount of capabilities present in that economy must be pretty few. For example, here’s an infographic of the economy of Tajikistan:

Taj exportsAluminum, raw cotton and dried fruit dominate the Tajik economy. And each of these items are ubiquitous enough in the world that it does not take a high degree of scarce knowledge to produce them. On the other hand, here’s Thailand’s exports:

tree_map_export_tha_all_show_2010Notice the increase in the number of products, but also of the kinds of products produced. It takes many more capabilities to produce electronics than it does to produce raw cotton. Here the difference between an emerging economy like Thailand and an underdeveloped economy like Tajikistan is pretty stark.

The interesting thing about the measure of economic complexity is that Hausmann and Hidalgo have found it to be a strong indicator of future economic growth. The economies which are highly complex but with a lower-than-expected current GDP can be expected to grow quickly, while countries that have a high GDP relative to their complexity can be expected to grow slowly, if at all. This gives a new dimension to the “resource curse” hypothesis in that it displays growth based on natural resource exploitation is unsustainable, unless it is invested in expanding other productive capacities.

According to the Atlas of Economic Complexity, the economies whose level of complexity  most predict growth in GDP per capita are China, India and Thailand. Next in the rankings come Belarus, Muldova and Zimbabwe. All of these countries have economies which currently lag behind their potential.

Using GDP instead of GDP per capita, the top slots all go to Sub-Saharan Africa: Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania take the top slots, with Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Senegal following. Though their high levels of population growth keep income per capita down, these will all likely be fast-growing economies over the next decade.

The Atlas of Economic Complexity brings to life the incredible diversity within the world economy. It offers a new metric of development: the Economic Complexity Index, or ECI, which may prove to be a more important indicator than more simplistic metrics like GDP per capita. Time will tell how Hausmann and Ricardo’s predictions turn out. But their approach seems bound to be imitated as development theorists absorb and make use of the insights of complexity science.

For a brief introduction to economic complexity from Cesar Hidalgo himself, check out his talk at TEDx Boston:

And for more cool data visualizations visit the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

The Origin of Wealth

August 22, 2013
Book Reviews
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Every once in a while I read a book that totally revolutionizes my conceptual categories. Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics did that form me in the field of economics.

Some background: economists have known for some time that there are some pretty big caveats to the models we’ve been using to understand the economy. These models are hugely contingent on some key assumptions including:

-the rational decision-making of (perfectly) informed economic agents.

-the tendency of markets to reach equilibrium, unless shocked from some exogenous source

Unfortunately, in the real world, these assumptions are largely wrong. And recent events, including the Great Recession and euro-zone crisis–both of which were not foreseen by most mainstream economists–have significantly increased the skepticism with which many view the models that come from these assumptions.

But what is the next step for economics? Behavioral economics has long been punching holes in the vision of the rational, perfectly informed agent. But the mainstream view is still of an equilibrium economy, with caveats for market failures. There has been little in the way of a new synthesis.

But Eric Beinhocker thinks it’s coming. His book advocates a bundle of related insights he  calls collectively “Complexity Economics.” I would venture to bet these insights will be the source of economics’ new mainstream.

Complexity Economics, as Beinhocker frames it, arises out of the mathematical revolution that brought us chaos theory. This is the mathematics of unpredictable, turbulent, emergent behavior, sensitively dependent on initial conditions and subject to amplifying feedback loops that defy strictly Newtonian attempts at analysis. This is the world of turbulence, fractals, emergent intelligence, population dynamics and a whole host of other phenomena which math had no tools to understand until the 1980s. If you want a readable introduction to this stuff, I recommend James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science.

These mathematical innovations are finally coming home to roost in economics, the study of the most massively complex emergent system humankind has ever created. And Beinhocker’s book is a manifesto of sorts for this new approach.

So what is Complexity Economics? Beinhocker distinguishes it from what he calls “Traditional Economics,” (his term for pre-complexity equilibrium economics) using the following categories:

Dynamics: Traditional Economics tends to depict “closed, static, linear systems in equilibrium.” Complexity economics favors “open, dynamic, nonlinear systems, far from equilibrium.”

Agents: Traditional Economic agents are “modeled collectively” and tend to “make no errors and have no biases; have no need for learning or adaptation.” On the other hand agents in Complexity Economics are “modeled individually” (this matters because their behavior gives rise to macroeconomic phenomena in an emergent manner, rather than according to immutable laws of supply and demand as in Traditional Economic theories) and “are subject to errors and biases; learn and adapt over time.”

Networks: Traditional Economic models “assume agents only interact indirectly through market mechanisms (e.g., auctions),” while Complexity Economics “explicitly models interactions between individual agents; networks of relationships change over time.”

Emergence: In Traditional Economics, “Micro and macroeconomics remain separate disciplines,” while in Complexity Economics “macro patters are the emergent result of micro-level behaviors and interactions.”

Evolution: Traditional Economics offers “no mechanism for endogenously creating novelty, or growth in order and complexity.” Complexity Economics proposes an “eveolutionary process of differentiation, selection, and amplification” as an explanation for the process of economic development.

Taken together, these distinctions create a whole new way of looking at economics. Economists tending toward this school of thought tend to create models of individual agents, and then watch what structure emerges–like a whirl in a turbulent stream–from their interaction. This is in contrast with typical models that assume everyone is totally self-interested and perfectly rational, then create laws that bring the model to an equilibrium where utility is maximized in the system–more like a marble coming to rest in a bowl.

For those on the edge of the field, this change has a few important implications:

1. The market is neither rational nor predictable. This has been well-demonstrated by the past 100 years of economic history, but until now we haven’t had the math to describe a non-equilibrium, non-linear, complex adaptive market. Now we do.

2. The market is adaptive, as are the agents in it. Previous thinkers have compared the market to the survival-of-the-fittest world of nature. But now economists are actually modeling firms and business plans as if each is subject to the same selection pressure as a bacteria in a competitive ecosystem. In other words, each firm is competing for energy. Literally. Every firm demands energy in some form, and uses it to create useful order. How useful the orderly stuff is determines whether the firm gets more energy to keep creating useful, orderly stuff. This is not a metaphor. The complexity models are literally placing economics within the constraints of the second law of thermodynamics. Either a firm adapts, or it is collapses into high entropy.

3. We might not be able to predict the economy, but we may be able to give it boundaries. Though the economy is a shape-shifting emergent phenomena involving billions of agents and trillions of goods, like an eco-system, it has its boundaries. There is a “fitness function” to which all firms conform: the demand of consumers. And if we, as flawed but self-conscious actors in this complex system, demand (either through uncoordinated action, or political will), an economy whose effects on the environment and the poor are less deleterious, we may get it. But it will be difficult, and our actions will be plagued by unintended consequences.

The Origin of Wealth gave me a lot to think about. And its titular proposition: that wealth is the result of low-entropy order emerging from social conditions favorable to the fostering of complex, dynamic systems, is an interesting one.

It dovetails with Why Nations Fail, which I wrote about some time ago. But while Acemoglu and Robinson could be frustratingly mono-causal in their discussion of political institutions, Beinhocker is frustratingly vague on the actual mechanisms for creating the conditions required for complex, dynamic, wealth-creating systems to get working for humanity. But, as Beinhocker readily admits, this is a new turn for economics.

Perhaps more insights will be forthcoming as the field progresses. A number of development thinkers I follow, including Oxfam’s Duncan Green and Owen Barder of the Center for Global Development, have begun writing about the implications of complexity theory for development, and Ben Ramalingam has a fascinating blog compiling research from the intersection of aid and complexity.  I’ll likely write more as I learn about it.

Meandering Home

June 13, 2013
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Sad as it is, the time has come for me to return to the United States. The folks at the seed bank and Chiang Mai treated me to farewell dinners, and I said my farewells. I will miss Thailand, and all the people I met there. I learned a lot about seeds, food, agriculture, development, and Southeast Asian culture while I was there. It was a remarkable, interesting place to live and work.

But there is an end to everything. Fortunately, I didn’t have to fly straight back. Instead, I took the train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok and had a whirlwind two-day tour of Thai art and culture. Here are some photos of the adventure:

Some wilted lotus buds at a shrine in the Temple of the Emerald Buddha.

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A child looks at some lotus flowers in front of a lovely example of Ficus religiosa, the Bhodi tree, under which the Buddha is said to have received enlightenment.

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Some students taking a tour of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha.

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A lock in the Grand Palace, bedecked with a small garland of flowers, for reasons mysterious to me.

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A crucifix in the Silpakorn University gallery of sculpture. Behind it, Buddha’s head.

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A profile of Florentine sculptor Silpa Bhirisri (born Corrado Feroci), the namesake of Silpakorn university, and the man most responsible for introducing modern art to Thailand. He was made the King’s official sculptor in 1924, and went on to train most of the prominent artists of Thailand. His motto, “Vita brevis, ars longa” (“Life is short, art is long”–or perhaps, “life is brief, art endures”) adorns the entrance to the university.

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Chinatown at dusk.

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Looking over Salvador Dali’s shoulder at an installation at the Bangkok Museum of Contemporary Art.

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The most striking piece I saw at the MOCA: like many examples of Buddhist art, it contemplates mortality in vivid, if not grotesque, detail. But something about the attention paid to the old man in this painting strikes me as loving. An example, perhaps, of the ethic of compassion in Buddhist thought which, to an outsider like me seems to run counter to the idea of detachment. The artist seems to say that detachment from the self allows compassion for the other–even if all things are as insubstantial as the old man’s grasp on life. But you’re free to draw your own conclusions.

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A silk-weaving loom at the late Jim Thompson’s house. Thompson, like Corrado Feroci, entered Thailand at a pivotal point in its transition to cultural and economic openness. He visited during the Vietnam war (in which he may have participated as a CIA operative), and stayed when the war ended. Thompson played an important part in marketing Thai silk abroad, and assembled a remarkable collection of Thai art and architecture in his home. This brought him a peculiar mixture of respect, gratitude and resentment in Thai society, as described in this article in the Paris Review. He disappeared in 1967 under mysterious circumstances while hiking in Malaysia.

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Artists preparing an installation outside the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre.

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A closer look at an artist at work.

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