Into the Depths of the DC Metro

I guess it was in late summer of 2014 that I realized Washington, DC held something very special deep below its surface. Anyone who has lived in DC or spent a decent amount of time here notices pretty quickly that some of the metro stations here tend to be buried pretty deep underground. These extra-subterranean metro stops have particularly long escalators ferrying passengers up to and from the surface. I was particularly aware of these deep escalators since we live near the Rosslyn metro stop (with the fifth longest escalator on the DC metro at 194') and I routinely commuted to DuPont circle (sixth longest escalator at 188'). Once I went to the Woodley Park metro station (which services the National Zoo and has an escalator 204' long) I was convinced that I had found the longest escalator in the WORLD. You can barely see the top of it standing down at the bottom.

But I was wrong.

My amazement at the size of these escalators finally inspired me to do some actual research on measurements. Lucky for me, there is a small community of escalator enthusiasts out there who have documented just about every technical aspect you could imagine of not just the DC metro station escalators, but weird and interesting escalators all over the world. For a nice global survey of escalators, there's this weburbanist post. For more specific info on DC's metro escalators, Greatergreaterwashington.org has a few posts on the length of escalators and an interesting discussion towards the end of this post on why the metro escalators are so deep. There's also, of course, a wikipedia page dedicated to the DC metro stop that hosts the longest escalator - Wheaton.

When I saw that neither Rosslyn, Dupont nor Woodley Park metro stations had the longest escalators in DC, I was shocked. But then, they are competing with not just any old escalator. The longest single-span escalator in DC also happens to be the longest in the entire western hemisphere! It's 230 feet long and, by my calculation, took 2 minutes and 52 seconds to ride up (without walking). When I found this out late in the summer of 2014, I determined to make the trek way out to Maryland, near the end of the red line, to experience this colossal conveyor of people. After all, how often do you get to live in a place that hosts the longest/largest/highest/etc. anything in a whole hemisphere?

I was determined to make it out to Wheaton at some point, even if it meant a 1.5 hour, $7 round trip just to ride the escalator. But fate intervened and gave me an excuse to go out there.

When I was home for the holidays, I was going through my old boyhood closet seeing what I should bring back with me. It's funny how the move-out process stretches on for so long. I think I've got it down to a bookshelf full of books now, though. Anyways, one of the items I found buried back in the closet was my old clarinet from middle school. I opened it up to find all the pieces still there and relatively in tact. It looked like it needed some maintenance but that could be arranged. I've always wanted to play an instrument and, in my adult years, I fiddled around with the piano. But those suckers are hard to move and I certainly don't want to lug one out to Vietnam. Sure, I could get a keyboard, but my level of skill probably doesn't justify the investment. Also, over the break while we were in Austin, we went to a friend's birthday part and lots of local musicians showed up for a birthday jam. Bryn and I and a few other swing-dancers took advantage of the opportunity to dance, but I think the musicians outnumbered us. There were a few clarinetists there (including David Jellema, the birthday boy) and hearing them play just inspired me to get back in-touch with my 14 year old self and start playing the clarinet again.  I packed it in my suitcase and flew back to DC with a new project on my plate.

Back in DC, I started calling music companies to get estimates on clarinet repairs and I was referred to Chuck Levin's Washington Music Center - a musical institution in the mid-Atlantic that has a long, illustrious history. Its original location was in central DC until it burned down during the 1968 riots. Its new location, coincidentally, is about 1/4 of a mile north of the Wheaton metro stop. I was now chasing two Leviathans - one in the world of escalation and the other in music. I set the date for my big adventure for Saturday, January 10, invited my college buddy Joe along for the adventure and we set out that morning to add to our list of off the beaten path Washington, DC destinations.

Of the two, I think the Wheaton escalator won out. Chuck Levin's was cool - we talked to the son of the original owner who gave us a bit of a history lesson on the place - but they wanted waaay too much money to fix my clarinet. I realized that I probably would have shopped around a little more and done some research before making the trek out there; but since I was prepared to make the trip for no other reason than to see the longest single-span escalator in the western hemisphere, it didn't take much of a pretense to get me out there.

The Escalators at Wheaton: Imagine a clarinet case in my left hand just a few inches further down. 

As far as escalator rides go, the ascent from the Wheaton metro stop was pretty cool. I guess my tolerance for long escalators has been heightened over the past 7 months of riding up and down the Rosslyn and Dupont escalators. When it comes down to it, a 230' escalator ride doesn't feel all that different from a 194' escalator ride. It's the journey that matters, though, and little adventures like this one are what make DC such a cool city to live in.

For those left wondering what the longest single-span escalator in the world is, according to the weburbanist post on the most extreme escalators in the world, Park Pobedy station in Moscow is the winner at 413'. Rest assured that if I ever make it to Moscow, riding that escalator will be on my list of things to do. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that the Park Pobedy escalator is nearly twice as long as the Wheaton escalator, it takes about the same amount of time to get up both of them (about 3 minutes). According to this Washington Post article, the DC metro authority runs its escalators at 90 feet per minute instead of the standard 120 feet per minute for safety reasons. According to my calculations, though, the Wheaton escalator was moving a little slower - about 76 feet per minute - and the Park Pobedy escalator is racing along at about 140 feet per second: twice as long and twice as fast. Man, the Russians are beating us at this, guys. 

In conclusion, as I was talking to the metro attendant at the summit of the Wheaton escalators, she confirmed my suspicion that there is no kind of plaque or acknowledgement of any kind that the escalators there are the longest in the western hemisphere. Considering that just about every other building, statue and section of pavement in this town is commemorated to some person, event or idea, I feel like the escalators at the Wheaton metro stop should be recognized for their distinction, to. I might get the chance to go back out there next month to visit the nearby Costco and maybe I'll bring some aluminum foil, tape and a sharpie to create my own little memorial to DC's longest escalator. 

Wheaton: The View Down

2015 and the end of the even year curse

My adult life, until now, has followed very closely a pattern of odd years being good and even years being bad. I've known this now for at least five years and have helplessly watched as some mysterious, oscillating force in the universe has determined the happiness of any given year based on whether or not it was divisible by two. If I were forced to, I could justify this pattern all the way to 2001 or so - but it really started getting eerily predictable in around 2005. Even my on-again off-again dedication to this blog follows the even year/odd year rule. 2011 and 2013 were great years, full of adventure and satisfaction. 2012 was a trying year of figuring out how to fit into the world.

Maybe I unconsciously stopped updating the blog in 2014 because I was anticipating the drop after a 2013 filled with living in China, traveling through SE Asia and getting into a great graduate school program that let me live in Bologna, Italy. Maybe the mysterious, oscillating force is just my own weird attempt to impose equilibrium in the world. Regardless, 2014 broke the streak. Within the past twelve months, Bryn and I got married; moved to DC;  found out we'll be moving to Vietnam in April, 2015 with the State Department; learned as much about the Civil War as one could during a summer and then I finished my masters five months ahead of schedule. Any low-points were relatively shallow and only served to provide a little contrast to the high points. Granted, one exception doesn't disprove a rule, but 2014's good outcome restored a little of my faith in the flexibility of the universe.

Luckily, 2015 is shaping up to be a good year, too. I finished my M.A. early so that I could start focusing on the transition to Vietnam and maybe even line up some job opportunities there. As of now, Bryn and I are scheduled to leave towards the end of April. That gives me about four months to do three things: 1) learn Vietnamese; 2) talk to potential employers; 3) get all of the training that I can to increase my job prospects. Luckily, the State Department provides language training to spouses, so I'll get about six weeks of all-day Vietnamese training starting in late February. Bryn has been in language training since September so I already have a head-start by helping her go over her vocabulary lists and learning how to count. By the way, two new tricks I learned in 2014: counting to 100 in Vietnamese and touching my toes. I've never been very flexible.

As for potential employers, I already started talking to people in the fall and so I at least have some resources to use in my search. One cool project I found was the Provincial Competitiveness Index, a USAID funded outfit that measures Vietnamese provinces' ability to economically develop. I'll figure out a way to at least talk to them before I land in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). There are also the multitude of foreign companies that are either just opening or expanding their operations in Vietnam. I'm not exactly sure what I could do for them or why they would need me, but I hope to figure that out over the coming weeks. Teaching is also an option in HCMC - either at local schools or leading online classes.

The State Department also hires qualified spouses to work in the consulate and I'm doing everything I can to open those doors, as well. I just took a test on Friday that, if I pass, will qualify me to take another exam in the coming months which, if I pass, could potentially qualify me to apply for certain positions at the HCMC consulate - but in no way guarantees me any job. I'm not too optimistic about finding work down that avenue, but at the very least I'm getting a good lesson in navigating the State Department bureaucracy. I have a feeling that will be a valuable skill to have over the coming years. Regardless of those exams, though, I'll be able to get training in consular affairs. I'll start the class in just a few weeks and, assuming I pass, I'll be a much more competitive candidate for consular jobs that open up in HCMC. It'll also be a great introduction to how a consulate works, so at the very least, I'll understand Bryn's job much better.

I think that most of my fate will remain undetermined until I land in HCMC, start meeting people and see what's going on there. Of course, the more prepared I am, the better, but I don't think it is realistic to expect to have a job when I land there in late April or early May. Of course, there's always my back-up plan. If absolutely nothing pans out, I'll learn as much as I can about the Ho Chi Minh trail that supplied the Viet Cong in South Vietnam and then try to re-trace its path forty years after it facilitated Hanoi's victory against the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. Regardless of what happens professionally, expect more blog posts on that topic in 2015.

I think that what I'm most excited about coming into 2015 is that the slate is pretty clean. When I started grad school, I did so with the intent of going on to work for the Department of the Treasury on countering illicit finance. That's still in my long-term professional interest, but it won't be quite so linear as I imagined. The opportunity to go live in Vietnam for two years is just too good to pass up and I am unbelievably proud of Bryn for making this opportunity for us. Now, I get to go over there and create a life for myself. That will be challenging, in a lot of ways, but challenging in a way that makes for great experiences and great life-lessons later on. I'm also pretty confident that it will provide plenty of good excuses to write, so stay tuned. 

Turning Thirty

As of today, I am officially thirty years old. Even though I've been practicing for the past few months, it still feels weird to say and write. The best part about turning thirty is that I got one of the most thoughtful gifts from all of you - a collection of stories and pictures from family and friends. Bryn did a great job putting it all together and I look forward to showing it off to everyone when I'm back in Austin over the holidays. By the way, I'll be back in Austin over the holidays and I'd like to see as many of you as possible for the 2-3 weeks that I'm there!

Many of the stories I knew and laughed or cried as I anticipated what came next. Some of the stories I had forgotten about, or was too young to remember and this was the first time I heard about them. Some of the stories weren't totally historically accurate, but you guys did a good job skewing the facts in my favor, so I'm willing to overlook the errors. I read over the book for about an hour this morning but will undoubtedly read over it many more times today and in the coming weeks. Thank you all for contributing and making today special. I hope you all know how much you mean to me and it's great to have friends and family as loving as the ones I've got. I'm a lucky guy, for sure.

The book is quite a good complement to a "life book" that my Aunt Suzy made for me when I graduated from high school. I like that there is now a "Volume II". I remember as a kid, my parents had a shelf of photo albums that documented the people and events that made up our family. Over the past few years, I've reminisced about those albums and suffered some nostalgic regret that now all photos are stored digitally and actual, physical albums are rare. But now I've got two albums of my own that I intend to keep on my shelf forever as physical memories of everyone who's made my life great. I couldn't imagine a better birthday present.

Yesterday, I was at the library checking out some books. A friend came up and joked with me about spending the last day of my twenties reading and working on papers. For a few moments immediately afterwards, I was overtaken by grief and felt this anxious guilt that I wasn't do something more spectacular. But then I remembered the last YEAR of my twenties and all that anxiety and guilt vanished. I spent the last year living in China, gallivanting around south east Asia and getting a masters degree in International Relations in Italy. The last day of my twenties isn't nearly as important as the last year of my twenties, and the last year of my twenties was full to the brim. I welcome the next decade with as much excitement as I celebrate the last.

And finally, just to add some historic significance to this day, Iran, the US and other negotiators reached a deal this morning in Geneva that will see an easing of tensions between Iran and the west: a historic event that indicates an improvement in relations between Iran and the US that has been sour for the duration of my lifetime. As I prepare for a career in international relations, I can't help but wonder what impact today's agreement will have on my future. Maybe we can all celebrate my 40th in Tehran? Who knows.

Have a good week and thank you all again! Bryn has posted pictures so check them out on her facebook page. I'll post pictures from today on flickr once I've done some things worth taking pictures of.

Vietnam War Parable

We're covering the Vietnam War this week in my course on "American Foreign Policy since 1945" - which is essentially a survey of the Cold War. Tonight, I was reading Daniel Ellsberg's "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers". Ellsberg is the one who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and has recently resurfaced in the news for supporting Bradley Manning. Reading his book has been illuminating. Most of it is actually about his experience as an adviser in Vietnam and his observations there during the US build-up of forces.

Past and recent political controversies aside, it's a good book and I thought this passage that I copied below was a nice parable of the American experience in Vietnam. I'm not sure if it's 100% accurate - the punchline seems too clean for real life - but that doesn't matter as much as the underlying point of putting US involvement in Vietnam within the greater historical context. It was good enough to get me to read it twice. I couldn't help but share it with everyone else.

"Later in the spring of 1966, during the Buddhist uprising, I was driving along a road between Da Nang and Hoi An in I Corps. The road had been blocked or cut every half mile or so - there were trenches across the road that we had to drive around on the shoulder or barbed-wire fences we had to cut through - not by the VC but by the Buddhist ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] troop units who were opposed to General Ky's regime in Saigon. In effect, both sides in this civil war within the war were being paid out of the US budget.

Along the road was an unusual succession of abandoned fortifications, of varying constructions, that dated from different periods successively further back in time. There were recent Popular Force outposts. We had supplied the wages for the local militia that had built them and the cement, if there was any. But basically, these were mud forts, very primitive little outposts along the road supposedly to protect local hamlets. They had been recently abandoned because of the regional nonviolent uprising against the Saigon regime, which had been paying the troops out of US aid. Posts like these I'd seen all over Vietnam.

But next to one of them was a pillbox of another kind, better constructed and made out of concrete, a cylindrical box with narrow portholes. The interpreter driving with me, a young Vietnamese lieutenant, explained that this had been built by the French. I recognized that it looked like one of the smaller pillboxes I had seen in pictures of the French Maginot Line at the outset of the German invasion of France. We drove by several of these. Most were from the 1946-54 war by France to regain its colony, during which it had run a pacification program very similar to ours. But some of them, the lieutenant pointed out, went back much earlier, to the twenties and thirties (when the Maginot Line had been built) and even much earlier in the French pacification of Vietnam.

In the midst of these, along the road, were some pillboxes of a distinctly different sort, also concrete but rounded, like ovens. I recognized those from pictures of the Pacific island fighting by the marines in World War II. They were Japanese, built when the Japanese had pacified the area of what was now I Corps in their occupation of Vietnam during the war. Finally, we came to a massive knoll, overgrown with grass and studded with very old stones. I was told it was an ancient Chinese fort, constructed when the Chinese had pacified Vietnam, starting with what was now I Corps, over a period of a thousand years. When the interpreter told me that, I was reminded of what Tran Hgoc Chau had once said to me: "You must understand that we are a people who think of ourselves as having defeated the Chinese, though it took us a thousand years."

Driving this road was like time travel or visiting an archaeological dig that had brought strata from many historical epochs to the surface. It was a kind of open-air museum of successive efforts by foreigners to establish their authority and control over Vietnamese or at least to protect their own troops and collaborators from resisting locals. At this moment it was not secure for us, since the militia and ARVN paid by the GVN [Government of South Vietnam] had left the countryside tot he VC to demonstrate against the Saigon regime in Da Nang and other local towns. We drove fast, between the obstacles on the road, with our weapons at the ready. Even so, the children we passed, as always, were friendly to us. They waved and called out the only American words they knew: "Hallo! Number one! OK!," the same words that had so touched my heart when I heard them for the first time after my arrival in Vietnam.

The lieutenant driving with me remarked, when we heard some of these shouts, "When I was a little boy, their age, I used to shout hello at foreign soldiers too."

I said, "How did you say it? Bonjour?"
He said, "Ohayo gozainmasu." Good morning in Japanese.

I knew we were following the French in Vietnam, who for all their colonialism were our allies in two world wars. But as someone who had grown up on movies of the war in the Pacific, and then on war stories in the Marines, I found it eerie to hear I was walking in the footsteps of Japanese invaders."

Leap years And The Even More Curious Phenomenon Of Non-Leap Years

Autumn has come to Bologna and the past few weeks have been dreary and cold. Today, however, the clouds broke and it was a beautiful, clear, warm-enough day. I took an afternoon break from studying and ran up to my favorite spot in Bologna: Villa Ghigi. My own attempts to capture the view and the ambiance up there have so far been unsuccessful. However, this contributor to wikimedia seemed to do a pretty good job of it. 

View of Bologna from Villa Ghigi

Because of the weather and my battle with a persistent cold over the past couple of weeks, I haven't been running much. Getting out and stretching my legs this afternoon did me a lot of good. Well, maybe. The intellectual result of my run is outlined below. I'll leave it up to the reader to determine the normative value of the outcome which is detailed below.

I've mentioned before that one of my favorite by-products of running is the unpredictable stream of thoughts that go through my head as I settle into an almost meditative state. Today, a particularly lucid stream of thoughts brought me to the question of leap years and how we deal with them. The progression of thoughts that got me to that point are another story entirely, but as I plodded back down the hill, I realized that leap years present a problem. 

The whole idea of celebrating a February 29th every four years comes from our attempt to match the earth's revolutions around the sun to it's axial rotation - i.e. match earth years to earth days. There's no good reason why the earth should rotate on its axis a particular number of times as it revolves around the sun. To make life easy, we typically refer to a year as having 365 days. In fact, it revolves on its axis more like 365.2425 times for every trip around the sun. (I didn't know this as I was running, I just assumed there was a margin of error. Wikipedia told me the exact number when I got back.) Now, if the earth were kind to us, it'd pick a nice even number of days to go around the sun; for example, 365 or, if it were particularly kind, 360 days would make celestial time-keeping very neat and easy. Failing that, it'd be nice if the earth picked an easy fraction of a day to add on or subtract from each year. Granted, 365.2425 rounds up to 365.25 easily enough and so every four years, we add an extra day to even things out. None of us would ever notice a difference over the course of our lifetimes between measuring a year as 365.25 days and the ACTUAL length of 365.2425. But apparently, the Pope Gregory was wise enough to transcend living memory. He wanted a calendar for the ages, and to do that, you need more foresight than a measly lifetime.

Rounding up to .25, adding an extra day every four years and leaving it at that could have DISASTROUS consequences; specifically, the addition of 3/100ths of a day each time we celebrate February 29. The additional .2425 days per year only adds up to .97 days over four years, not a full day. Over the course of many years celebrating February 29, the summer solstice gradually creep up and, instead of happening on June 21, it slips back to June 20. Extrapolate that error over a few thousand years and eventually the summer solstice would be in May. That's just unacceptable. 

So, I came back home and started tooling around on wikipedia. Thank goodness Pope Greg had considered this 3/100ths of a day we were adding every four years and formulated a strategy for correcting it. It turns out that at the turn of each century, the centennial year (e.g. 1700, 1800, 1900, etc.) is NOT counted as a leap year. Even though these years are divisible by four, February 29, 1700, 1800 and 1900 did NOT happen. In 1903, for example, the world had gone without a February 29 for 7 years so that the summer solstice in 1903 didn't happen until more than half way through the 22nd day of June. By comparison, the summer solstice in 1896 (the last leap year) was happening towards the end of the day on June 20th. 

First of all, isn't that wild? There I was, thinking that I knew the calendar that I have spent nearly 30 years interacting with on a near daily basis! Maybe this is all common knowledge, I don't know. Usually I have a chance to talk through blog posts before I write them up but I didn't get a chance to talk through this one. I'm assuming this isn't common knowledge.

There's more.

So, most centennial years omit February 29, but not all of them. As it is, the extra fraction of a day we add each February 29th only adds up to 3/4 of a day each century. So dropping February 29 from centennial years puts us behind a total 1/4 of a day every 100 years. Again, small potatoes, but over the course of thousands of years, that could throw us off by a whole week!

I found this on Wikipedia. Search for "Leap Year" and prepare to sacrifice half a day learning about the calendar that measures your life. Don't worry though, you'll make up for the lost 12 hours over the course of the next 100 years.

Thank goodness the Gregorians saved us from this confusion though. The ultimate correction in solving the leap year problem comes by celebrating February 29th on the centennial years that are divisible by 400. This means that the years 1200, 1600 and yes, 2000, celebrated February 29 in order to correct 400 years of ever so slightly shifting the summer solstice later in the year. 

The exciting conclusion to all of this is that the year 2096 will see the earliest summer solstice since 1696; it will actually occur in the MORNING of June 20 (Greenwich Mean Time) opposed to the average of June 21, and the extreme of the afternoon of June 22 witnessed in 1903.

Unfortunately, I probably won't be around in 2096 to experience this once-in-a-quarter-millennium phenomenon, but maybe my kids will? I'll be sure to forward this blog post along to them at some point.

It also means that I missed the similarly momentous occasion of celebrating February 29 in 2000. It didn't occur to me at all that that specific leap year was so phenomenal. We were so caught up in the whole millennium and Y2K business and I was still riding the high of my 16th birthday. What a shame.

Finally, in my lifetime I will likely never experience an non-leap year. And I have to say, I'm ok with that. Leap years are confusing enough, celebrating a non-February 29 would just be confounding. 

Informal Economy

As you may have guessed from the three weeks of silence, classes have started full-time and they are keeping me very busy. I'll give a quick update on academic stuff and then get on to what I've learned about the informal economy since I got here and why that matters in the first place.

SAIS is unique among the graduate programs for international relations in that it requires all students to specialize in economics. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to come here in the first place - to strengthen my economics background. This semester, I'm taking intermediate macroeconomics, corporate finance, weak and failed states and sitting in on a risk management class. Fortunately, I tested out of German, so that covers my language requirement for graduation. Since I still have access to language courses though, I'm taking Italian this semester. Once I get to DC I think I'm going to change to Spanish.

What I really want to talk about in this post though is the informal economy. You'll remember a couple of posts ago I wrote about my interest in the field of threat finance. Very closely related to threat finance and a much more researched field of study is the informal or underground economy. The two are very much linked.

I'm reading a book right now titled "Treasury's War" by Juan Zarate. It's a history of how the Treasury Department has developed a strategy of finding and shutting down terrorist or multi-national criminal financing over the past decade- specifically after 9/11. The thesis of the book is that the US Treasury Department, with its influence over financial institutions around the world, is uniquely positioned to collect financial intelligence on individuals deemed a threat to the US. Before 9/11, the Treasury Department was much more wary of manipulating its power over the global financial networks for political or even domestic security motives. It wanted to maintain neutrality in the markets. 9/11 changed that and the Treasury Department shedded its inhibitions. At first, the mission was relatively easy: terrorist and criminal financiers were easy targets, sending money through conventional networks and keeping their money in major, international banks. For the Treasury Department, it was only a matter of convincing bank presidents and local leaders of the value of shutting down suspect accounts.

However, over the past 12 years, threat finance has become much more sophisticated. Threat financiers have learned to avoid conventional financial vehicles and institutions for moving their money around. This is where informal and underground economies come into play. By definition, these economies are unregulated and decentralized - havens for tax evaders, drug traffickers, terrorist financiers and the like. The Treasury Department's success at shutting criminals and terrorists out of the formal financial sector made their job of maintaining pressure on illegal networks harder. It drove the illicit finances deeper underground where the Treasury Department has less visibility and less influence.

Italy is a great place to study the informal economy. Italy gets a bad reputation these days for its financial capabilities, but don't forget that modern banking was invented in Florence and northern Italy is one of the wealthiest regions of Europe. Italy doesn't lack wealth, it lacks the ability to centralize that wealth. Instead of flowing through regulated, centralized channels, wealth gets squirreled away and hidden out of reach of the central government. The strategies and tactics for doing this are fascinating.

But Italy is also an interesting case in that informal economies are built into the system. A professor of Italian economics came and gave a talk at SAIS a couple of weeks ago and she pointed out that Italy does not have the mega-corporate national giants that Germany and the US have. Italy has no GE, Siemens or Windows. Fiat is perhaps the biggest company in Italy but they are still pretty small in the grand scheme of things. The average Italian company is much more likely to small - around 14 employers. Really small. As a whole, these companies are generally very profitable and very good what they do, mostly being in the high-tech sector making specialty equipment or providing boutique services not found anywhere else. They make up most of Italy's exports.

While these small companies are a blessing to Italy's economy, they are also a curse when it comes to tax collection. It's much harder to police 10,000 small companies than 10 really big companies. Specifically, it's much more expensive to tax a decentralized economy. Each company makes up a very small chunk of the tax base and there aren't any obvious behemoths to keep an extra close eye on to make sure they are paying their taxes. Also, large companies have to keep their reputation in mind. Getting caught not paying your taxes is potentially more harmful to their business than a tiny firm of 20 people making motorcycle brake pads that nobody's heard of.

The decentralized nature of Italy's economy makes for a natural environment of doing things off of the books since it's less likely you'll get caught and if you do get caught, the consequences likely won't hurt your reputation with your customers.

This isn't to say that drug traffickers or terrorists are using tech firms in Bologna to move their money around, but Italy does have a general economic environment that is conducive to concealing the flow of money. It may be a bit easier here to set up a small company and misreport its primary line of business. In a country full of mom and pop shops, adding another to the pile will hardly get noticed.

Possibly contributing to the incentive to misreport business activity here are the multitude of very strict laws and measurements in place to prevent ililicit financial activity from happening. Italy has attacked the underground economy through higher and more taxes along with more bureaucracy. Raising the cost of doing business increases the incentives to do business off the books, so it creates a kind of self-defeating spiral.

As I find time to do more research on this topic, I'll keep updating on what I learn and provide more examples.

Have a good week!

Christmas Race

Last night, a bunch of us took a break from studying, bought a few bottles of wine and went down to Piazza Maggiore - the main square in Bologna - to have an open air night. Public consumption is a-ok here and, as a student, I try to remind myself of that when others want to go to the bar. You can get a bottle of wine from the store for the same cost as a glass of wine at a bar. Plus, in the Piazza, you have a much nicer ambiance. Towards the end of the night, the natural competitiveness between us students came out and it was resolved through a foot race across one side of the square. It reminded me of how central "racing" is to my life. To some, a foot-race across an Italian square at midnight might sound like the result of inebriation, but I don't need encouragement for a head-to-head sprint.

I've found myself telling people more often about the tradition of the foot-race in my family. It's this tradition that my uncle started when I was a little kid - maybe five years old. My grandparents had a circular drive in front of their house that was about 50 yards in circumference. I don't remember a time in my life when the circular drive wasn't associated with running around it; specifically racing against my uncle.

I'm not sure if the first race was actually on Christmas day, but tradition quickly took hold and deemed that December 25th was race day. Running a race around the circular drive quickly became synonymous with the Christmas Day Race. Every year throughout my childhood, my uncle and I would approach the starting line (usually some sort of crack in the pavement) and run a lap around the circle back to the same point. As most activities involving uncle and nephew, he used it as an opportunity to torment me. He'd run shortcuts through the yard, run the opposite direction, hold the back of my shirt... all sorts of things. It wasn't too far removed from a Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon. Maybe that's where he got his inspiration. As we both got older, I got faster and he got slower. The race course got shorter, the finish-line less precise, and cousins got added to the mix. By the time I was in my late teens, it wasn't just me and my uncle running around the drive, there were four other cousins gunning for us. We started spending Christmas at other people's houses. My aunt's driveway served as the course one year - we abandoned all orthodoxy and even swam the short length of Barton Springs one year (although I think that one was technically Christmas eve).

One year my uncle introduced a new standard for victory: the winner was the one who demonstrated the most "horsepower", not the one who crossed the finish-line first. He weighed considerably more than me at the time and was clearly hedging his options in the likely case that he was not the first to cross the finish-line. He argued that the energy he expended during the duration of the race was considerably more than the energy I expended, and therefore evidence of his victory. The race was over in a matter of seconds, but I think the calculations and disputes over the result of that year's race are still pending today.

The Christmas Race, in other words, became much bigger than just a race. It was a yardstick that measured the increasing complexity of life as I got older. By the time I was seven, I knew to expect some kind of foul-play and would argue with my uncle over the validity of his short-cuts. This evolution in my critical thinking skills raised the ante and my uncle responded. He suggested that, to ensure cheating didn't affect the integrity of the Christmas Race, we draw up official rules to the execution of the race. This appeased me at the time because, as a seven year old, I associated rules with fairness. I made the fatal mistake of letting him be the rule keeper.

The result of that decision was a continuation of the same Wile E. Coyote tactics, but insistence from my uncle that they were permitted in the rule book. He wouldn't actually let me see the rule book (transparency was, apparently, not stipulated in the rule book) and within a year, I challenged him on whether the rule book even existed.

By the time I was in my early teens, the Christmas Race was essentially just the material for a year-long debate over the technicalities and legal philosophical approaches to judging the outcome of races. The following year's race would make sure to correct the injustices of the previous years, only to present a whole new set of perplexing questions after the race was run. For example, after the "horsepower" incident, we agreed from then on that the winner was definitely the one who crossed the finish line first. But then, the following year, my uncle gathered everyone Christmas morning and ran the race while I was in the bathroom. He won, apparently. I believe there was some collusion on the part of other family members that year, but that's beyond the point. Over the span of many Christmases running races against my uncle, the prestige and immaculateness of words like "fairness", "rules" and "spirit of the law" became heavily tarnished. I might be taking the parable of the Christmas Race a little far when I say this, but over the years, I realized that the creative capability of humans trumps our attempts to constrain them.

Of course, the Christmas Race had no real legal enforcement arm. We were operating in a state of anarchy where only our words and arguing skills could have possibly gotten us anywhere - and they rarely did. One year, when my cousin was about six, she decided that she would end all the bickering and reign as judge over the decision of who won the race. We both presented our cases for why we thought we won, pressured her to see it our way and within about five minutes, she was ran away crying. It just wasn't fair to her. I had had all those years of experience arguing with my uncle over who won the race. By the time she came along, the debate had evolved well passed the faculties of a six year old.

So really, I only share this story because it's come up a few times in the past week. In my Italian class, I had to tell the story as an introduction to my family. Also, my uncle has already started the trash talking (via email) for this year's Christmas Race. Just as an example, this year the taunting started with a suggestion from my uncle that all the tortellini I'm eating in Bologna will surely slow me down this year. I countered by pointing out that I'm running up mountains three times a week. My uncle responded by pointing out that long-distance running doesn't make you faster... you get the point.

But when I sat down to write this blog, it was last night's race across the piazza that stuck out in my mind. I realize now what was really so strange about it: I crossed the finish line first and that was it - no challenges, no appeals, no consultations with the spectators to get "their perspective of who won". The whole affair was just a little too straightforward for my taste. Although, I won't say I didn't enjoy the victory.