Just in case any of you know where I can find my ideal city, this is how the perfect synthesis between Oslo, Paris and London would work (I haven’t included Boston, because I haven’t lived there as an adult):

The city would essentially look like central Paris: a mix of wide boulevards and charming cobble-stoned pedestrian streets, with sidewalk cafés and well-dressed people. Some of the parks would be designed by Englishmen in the late 1800s. There would be at least one dramatic modern building in the style of the Oslo opera house. The city would be surrounded by Norwegian nature.

Buildings would all be built by Norwegians, as they are the only culture out of the three who prepare for winter rather than deny its existence. Single-glazed windows, insufficient ventilation and inadequate heating would be illegal. All apartments would have nice kitchens.

The British would be in charge of public transportation, as well as providing information about this service. All other forms of communication and information technology (including online banking) would be run by Norwegians. There would be telephone service everywhere, from the tops of the surrounding ski slopes to the deepest tunnels of the underground system – and free WiFi in parks, thanks to a suggestion from the French.

The French would have the overall responsibility for food, but they would be forced to import international wine. Norwegian salmon and Norwegian bread would be available even in the smallest corner shops. Most restaurants would work like in Paris: with affordable three-course standard menus served by waiters who took their jobs seriously and didn’t expect tips. Influences from the Brits would ensure some international flavor varieties like Indian, Mexican and Chinese food, but the English would be discouraged from trying to sell their own pies and mashed things to people. The cafés would be French, but with coffee from Norway.

The pubs would of course be English, but with a wide selection of draught beer from around the world. Everyone would cooperate on other forms of nightlife, but the Norwegians would be completely barred from any attempts to control alcohol policy, including prices and closing time for pubs and bars. This would instead generally be governed by the French.

People would buy their French clothes, French lingerie and French shoes from British sales assistants. These sales people would take lessons in customer service from Americans, but tone it down to a less insistent European level. Thanks to the Norwegians, winter boots and other shoes with good sensible soles would always be available. Norwegians would teach people how to dress in winter; the French in every other season.

In public places, the people would somehow combine the passion of the French with the manners of the English. They would queue and make reserved small talk, but still kiss each other in public. The English would be in charge of television and humor and entertainment in general, so there would be a lot of trilingual wordplay.

If anyone should ever wish to leave, the airport runway would be de-iced by the Norwegians.

Related posts:

• Hunting for coffee in the land of tea – Why coffee wouldn’t be English
• Coffee in Paris – Why coffee wouldn’t be French
• First impressions of living in London

Image sources: Paris Guinness Nature

Let’s start with the view from the top floor of the Pompidou Art Museum in the fourth arrondissement:

I prefer to see the Eiffel Tower either like this, or from Champ de Mars or Trocadero. If you insist on going up to the top of Eiffel Tower, take the stairs as far up as possible. There is a line specifically for people who want to walk (shorter than the line for the elevator) and it’s cheaper. To get up the very top, you have to buy an additional ticket.

Museums are often free in the evenings on specific days if you are under 26 (student or not). I’ve added the days of the week when they were free back in 2008 to these brief museum descriptions:

• Pompidou, the world’s largest collection of modern art. The building is interesting in itself, and it’s in my favorite part of town. Go up to the top floor and enjoy the view. (Free on Wednesday nights)
• Musée d’Orsay, the art museum you should see if you only see one. All the great impressionists, in an old train station. (Free on Thursday nights)
• Louvre, actually really stressful. I think the paintings are too close together, and it’s just too big. Go in with a plan, know what you want to see, and then get out. (Free on Friday nights)

My favorite of the 20 arrondissements is the fourth. In addition to the Pompidou, this is where you find Notre Dame, the world’s best ice cream from Berthillon on the island behind the Notre Dame and Le Marais, an area with cobble-stone streets, fantastic fallafel and Jewish bakeries. There are plenty of bars and restaurants here too, as well as my favorite place for coffee in Paris, Soluna Caféotheque (52, rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, Pont Marie metro stop). (Read my guide to coffee in Paris for more coffee info) This is also where you’ll find the stalls that sell used books on both sides of the Seine, and on the left bank, Shakespeare and Company, the English language book store where “Before Sunset” starts.

Once you’ve crossed over to the left bank, you’re in the Latin Quarter in the 6th arrondissement. This is the traditional student area, so there are affordable restaurants and lots of bars. You can eat a traditional three course meal here for less than 20 euros. Afterwards, I recommend sharing pitchers of sangria at Le Dix (10, rue Odeon, Odeon metro stop).

For slightly more than 20 euros, you can get a slightly better version of the traditional snails+baguette+duck+vegetables+crème brûlée at Au Pied du Sacré Coeur (85, rue Lamarck). It’s in Montmartre, right by the Sacré Coeur (hence the name). There are MANY good restaurants in Paris, but if you’re in Montmartre, this is a nice one. Then go up to the cathedral, enjoy the view and watch people drinking beer and playing music on the church steps.

If you get off the metro at Opera, you’ll be surrounded by shopping opportunities, including all the chain stores and the big department stores Galleries Lafayette and Printemps. I did most of my non-grocery shopping at Lafayette when I lived in Paris (both the shoe department and the lingerie floor are excellent). The Marais also has some good stores, and vintage shopping in Rue de la Pompe in the 16th arrondissement is good. Les Halles and rue Rivoli also have all the standard brands for clothing and shoes. My favorite French brands are Comptoirs des Cotonniers (clothes, including good trench coats), Aubade (lingerie) and Parcours (shoes).

Related articles:

• Coffee in Paris
• May in Paris
• Rant of the day: Parisian weather
• Passing strangers

This simple question is written on a magnet on my fridge. Beside this fridge, I can get a normal coffee (black, freshly ground beans, French press). But although I sleep in a two-bedroom flat in Camberwell, I live on the LSE campus in central London, surrounded by coffee shops that don’t sell coffee and sandwich shops that don’t sell bread.

Café chains that (claim to) serve coffee and sandwiches dominate central London. There’s Starbuck’s of course, but also British chains in more or less the same format: Caffé Nero, Costa Coffee, Prêt a Manger. Just like in the US, I was initially baffled by the size of their drinks. Forget the Tall = Small confusion Starbuck’s offers; I couldn’t even get a barista to explain what the difference between a small and a medium cappuccino was. An extra shot? More of everything? No, just more milk, apparently. But to me, that means it’s no longer a cappuccino (one part espresso, one part milk, one part foam); it’s caffeinated hot milk.

The Daily Mail did a cappuccino test last October, and found that foam accounts for more than a third of the contents of most high street cappuccinos.

“Order anything larger than a 12oz cup and you are getting a watered-down coffee,”  Marco Arrigo told the Daily Mail. Marco trains baristas at Illycaffe’s Universita del Caffe in London. If only he got through to more of the hot milk purveyors around Holborn station and along Fleet Street.

Just like I wouldn’t order cocktails at a bar where they don’t know what a gin&tonic is, I usually default to americano when I’m unsure about a new coffee shop. Espresso with extra water won’t taste sour like drip coffee that’s been sitting around in a thermos for hours, and you neatly avoid the problem of too much milk or milk at the wrong temperature. And even if the espresso isn’t great, adding water will usually smooth that out a bit. It’s pretty hard to mess up an americano.

Or so I thought. English baristas add milk to it.

Specifying that I want “an americano without milk”, is like ordering “salad without marshmallows”. Yes, I know that it is possible to add sponges made of glycerin and sugar to salad, but surely that stops it being salad. (Yes, I know Americans add marshmallow to salad. That stops it being salad. Nothing can convince me otherwise.)

About half of the time, even if I manage to specify that I want my americano black (oh, it feels so wrong to have to specify that), my single-shot americano arrives in a cup so big and filled with water that I can see to the bottom.

Even if I make a conscious effort to leave the high-maintenance, over-caffeinated side of my personality on the opposite side of the Thames, this is just wrong. I may be in tea country, but I expect more from a cosmopolitan city like London.

So I have started to order like, to quote the PostSecret postcard above, a douche: “Could you make me an americano and use about half of the water you would normally use? Please!” (Must remember to say please. I am not in Norway anymore). So far only one barista has told me this was “impossible” (at the Tea and Coffee Festival at the South Bank Centre, of all places), but most of them give me funny looks. Even so, they don’t get anywhere near as grouchy as the woman behind one the LSE coffee counters did when I asked her – as a curious economics student – why the americano was cheaper than the espresso.

At the Pret A Manger next to Holborn tube station, the guy who sold me a customized americano and a BLT on bread that tasted much like marshmallows, was quite good-natured about my fussiness: “My Italian friend hates coffee in London,” he told me, “He says we add too much of everything but coffee.” I agreed and asked him why the English did this, and he shrugged and said: “It’s different in Italy. Here in England, you can get a white americano.”

I have had decent coffee here. TimeOut wrote a feature on coffee shops a while back, and if you hunt for coffee, it can be found. But even at good places, the quality is inconsistent, and it all depends on who’s shift it is and whether they have time to care (or you have time to wait). I guess I have gotten spoiled, forgetting that Oslo, despite being a terrifyingly expensive miniature city, has an amazing coffee scene.

On the other hand, walk into any London pub and enjoy at least four different draught beers, served with a smile and an offer of samples. Maybe I’ll just drink less espresso shots and more pints.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 18 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

You can buy it for me here.

Some of the hymns that they sing have nice chords
Though the lyrics are dodgy
And yes I have all of the usual objections to miseducation
Of children forced into a cult institution and taught to externalise blame
And to feel ashamed and to judge things as plain right or wrong
But I quite like the songs

Just like Minchin, and just like my dad, I’m not religious, but I still love Christmas. I prefer the Christmas songs about parties in the winter to the ones about Jesus, because I like to relate to lyrics. But I think Norway would have a big feast centered around lighting candles with family members even if there wasn’t a single Christian Norwegian, if only to have something to look forward to when it starts to get cold and dark. Just like Minchin, I will be travelling to another continent to meet up with family this year, and that’s what I’m looking forward to, not the presents, and certainly not the church service – which I’ve skipped for the past few years to watch over the turkey and hang out with my dad.

For two years in a row, I attempted a Christmas-music-themed advent calendar (here’s the original, with links to the old blog), meaning I blogged about Christmas music every day in December. Both years, real life got in the way. This year, I am a busy grad student, and there is no way I am going through that blogging schedule again. But as I sit here in my living room, next to blinking colorful lights and a (plastic) Christmas tree, listening to a playlist of Christmas pop/rock music, that Christmassy feeling is pulling my focus away from my Economic History essay (this week’s topic: the role of technology and policy in global trade integration in the 19th century) and towards walking around in a winter wonderland while listening to jingle bell jazz songs.

So here’s a selection of blog posts about Christmas:

• Have yourself a lonely, depressing little Christmas – Why my favorite Christmas music is sad
• Wonderlaaaand – Christmas in Brooklynese
• What are you doing New Year’s Eve – survival guide to a potentially disastrous night
• Happy bilingual holidays – Why my favorite Christmas music is in English
• Have yourself a traumatizing Christmas – Carol of the Bells freaks me out
• You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile – Why the original Grinch cartoon is the best Christmas movie ever.
• Am I really dreaming of a white Christmas? – What that song is really about
• Why I probably won’t be buying you a Christmas present
• Christmas music economics – The price of French hens, milkmaids and a partridge in a pear tree

This is the explanation for any problem my Danish flatmate and I encounter. While she’s lived here for years and I just arrived, we both get frustrated over the way things work – or don’t – in the UK. Yesterday I tried to explain at least some of these problems to my flatmate using economic history: the two of us are living in a developing country. Or, since I don’t really like that term, let’s say we are living in a medieval economy.

In an essay I handed in recently, I argued that the process of economic development is the process of solving fundamental problems of exchange (FPOE), thereby moving towards a situation of optimal levels of exchange. FPOE is the technical term for what happens when trade does not take place due to a lack of trust.

For those of you who appreciate game theory:
In a Prisoner’s Dilemma or “game of trust”, A can choose to initiate exchange or not, and B can choose to cooperate (by fulfilling his side of the contract) or not cooperate. If there is no exchange, the payoff for both players is 0. If there is a successful exchange (B cooperates), both players will be better off. However, if B thinks not cooperating will get him a higher reward than cooperating, he has an incentive to cheat A, leaving A worse off than if there is no exchange. And if A thinks he is likely to be cheated, there will be no trade, leaving the game at a sub-Pareto-optimal equilibrium without an exchange.

In medieval times, in the absence of state institutions like courts, traders attempted to solve their trust issues among themselves. For example, according to the historian Greif, Maghribi traders of the eleventh-century Mediterranean developed an informal contract-enforcement mechanism based on multilateral relationships within a close-knit “coalition”. They could spread information about cheating agents and make sure they were not traded with again. Basically “If you cheat one of us, we will all boycott you.” 

Institutions like the Maghribi coalition are relation-based. They are largely implicit, personal and formed outside of courtrooms. In contrast, most of our modern state institutions are rule-based: most transactions are based on impersonal and explicit agreements, and the state can impartially enforce contracts.

The point I would like to stress in this distinction is not the existence of a state to regulate a market. It is the possibility of enforcing contracts impersonally and impartially, rather than through reputation. A rule-based system allows for large-scale anonymous trade – so it favors economic development.

Yet even a state-controlled rule-based system has certain relational elements. Citizenship gives you access to a coalition that is certainly larger than the one organized by the medieval Maghribis – but it is a coalition none the less. When a British library asks for proof of a UK address before they let me in to their reading room, when setting up a UK bank account turns into a bureaucratic nightmare for foreign students, and when I have to pay six months rent in advance unless someone who owns property in the UK can vouch for me, it is because the UK is a coalition. There is an implicit agreement that the Prisoner’s Dilemma has been resolved in advance for permanent members of the UK club, while foreigners must negotiate on their own. When you leave your home coalition, you are plunged back into the market conditions of the Middle Ages.

(This is of course only made worse by the fact that there may be institutions to help you, but you are less likely to know about them than you are to know about institutions in your home country – which may explain why I find London increasingly practical and less ridiculous the longer I stay here.)

Medieval traders went from a situation where trade didn’t take place because it was literally impossible to move goods between people, to a situation where trade was possible, but didn’t happen because of a lack of trust. Today we can initiate trade with complete strangers – not just impartially and impersonally, but instantly  – with one click on a touch screen. But «can» and «do» are not the same. We have resolved so many of the practical problems that limit trade, from transportation costs to language barriers to timing, that when we refrain from exchange now, it is almost always because of some lack of trust.

Despite our supposedly rule-based national and international institutions, we still act relationally. Recent research using simple web-based games shows how cooperation can remain stable in a large group if participants have some choice over who they interact with. When grouped together completely randomly, the participants cheated each other more and more, even though this left them worse off in total.

According to The Economist, international migrants use diaspora networks as modern day coalitions. They trust people on the other side of the globe, because they originally emigrated from the same home countries. These networks make cross-border trade easier, and they are not government-enforced.

The paradox for economic historians who study medieval times is that exchange took place without the assistance of a state regulating the market. A paradox for both scholars and policy-makers today is how exchange should take place in a globalized economy where one state can no longer regulate the entire market.

Related posts:

• Living locally, working globally My BA dissertation about, among other things, diaspora networks and how the preference for our home coalition makes the global labor market less global
• Illegal = global FPOE means there is no global market for music

We all assumed it was tendinitis in the wrists, a typical repetitive strain injury. I was a journalist and front page editor spending most of my free time swing dancing and tweeting – of course my wrists were strained!

I was told to stop writing for two weeks. Then for two more weeks. Then for two more. And eventually it had been three months.

Read the rest of this blog post at Nascent Novelist, where I was a guest blogger this week.

Photo by Åsmund Solberg Nilsen
(Nails done to celebrate 4th of July, in case you were wondering. This hand was the the stripes; the other one was the stars.)

I wrote about high-skilled labor migration and offshoring between the US and India, mainly within the IT industry, and discussed the importance of this international labor market both historically for India, and theoretically for International Relations theory. My main argument was that offshoring is a form of labor migration without physical migration, and that this duality makes offshoring both a globalizing and a localizing force.

Living locally, working globally

If you are not as geeky about population-related matters like high-skilled labor migration and location-insensitive work as I am, why not do the busy grad-student trick of reading just the conclusion, which I have pasted below…

…

I started this paper by quoting Churchill: “The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.”

This sentence can be interpreted the way it was understood in the article where I found it: “The battles of the future will be battles for talent (The Economist 2007)”, meaning that brain power is a sought-after commodity and that in an increasingly integrated and meritocratic world, having the right skills may become more important than being born in the right country. While states, companies and universities may compete for talented individuals, this does not mean that the battle for brainpower is a zero-sum game. Talented emigrants did not prove to be a loss to India, and offshoring is economically rational and beneficial for both the offshore worker and the offshoring corporation. Nor is it a game played only by states. An MNC with workers all over the world who collaborate without actually meeting each other can also be called an empire of the mind. Some of the more creative predictions of the future even foresee a world where MNCs are empires, having replaced the state entirely.

Another way to interpret the quote is to think that empires, nation-states and other cultural communities are still of the mind, even if they do become less influential as physical or legal entities. If all states liberalize and allow free flows of information, migration, investment and borderless knowledge work, people still care about where they come from. British people prefer to speak to someone who sounds British, Indian workers prefer working for an Indian company and books are written reminding American businessmen that Indian businessmen do not attend meetings in shorts (Davies 2004:89). Emigrants maintain contact with their country of birth, and some are willing to accept lower wages if that means working in their own country (Chanda&Sreenivasan 2006:231). The  Indian diaspora network is a way of maintaining national connections in the mind, regardless of where one lives physically. These localizing forces may in some cases constrain offshoring, but in other cases offshoring allows for economic integration with only a minimum of cultural integration, reinforcing the  importance of geography and identity. Perhaps technology, skill and liberalization policies can give us “(…) a world with a rich smorgasbord of cultures but without the frictions that cultural differences usually engender. Not one flat common culture (Leamer 2006:7).”

The extraordinary thing about being able to live locally and work globally is that it opens up a possibility for dramatic change – for a new “labor market reality.” Technology and to a certain extent government policies enable mobility and interaction regardless of state borders. However, as Friedman (2005:375) writes in The World is Flat: “I know that the world is not flat”, meaning that possibility does not equal action, because people are still people.