The Tropical Expat Lifestyle Comparison Matrix

The ideas in this post and the concept of the "matrix" spreadsheet tool were hammered out over a few beers with my mate Graham Coglan during our Shanghai teaching days, after I'd endured my 4th or 5th central China winter and had started plotting ways to do what I do (i.e. being a STEM Education Warrior and Renaissance Man) in more tropical locales.

I need to start by defining some key terms. Some of you might have noticed that I sometimes refer to myself as an "expatriate pirate" on social media. I can't quite remember who I should attribute the term to, but I remember reading about it around about the time I was constructing my Couchsurfing profile, circa 2008. It's related to the concept of location independence and geoarbitrage; the idea is that you move about from country to country, "plundering" the best exchange rates at the time. It was this idea that gave birth to the Tropical Expat Lifestyle Comparison Matrix.

The next term that requires explanation is "tropical expat". We've all seen them - that 30- or 40-something guy with a pony tail who lives in Mexico or Thailand, has an entire wardrobe of Hawaiian shirts and for whom "formal dress" means doing up a button or two and wearing flip flops.

A tropical expat - note the Hawaiian shirt, half unbuttoned. 

The tropical expat lifestyle

That then brings us to "the matrix". Rest assured, it has nothing to do with the movie series starring Keanu Reeves. Those of you in the teaching profession might be more familiar with the term "rubric". It basically refers to a set of criteria, usually with different numerical levels and connected by some kind of scoring system, arranged in a grid-like table. For some reason, back in those days at TAFE Queensland, we referred to it as a matrix. So when Graham and I started making a list of criteria by which to judge the suitability of tropical South East Asian countries for expat living, we naturally coined the term "Tropical Expat Lifestyle Comparison Matrix". As you do.

I'll let "the matrix", as I'll refer to it from now on, do most of the rest of the talking (writing?), but I'll finish by explaining the example numbers that I've included, and adding some clarifying comments on some of the criteria.

I often get asked why I chose to move to Vietnam after having spent 12 years in China. Well, I think these numbers tell that story. You can see how the criteria and importance weightings represent the lifestyle elements that I value and how much relative value I assign to each of them. Even when based on very rough, subjective ratings, Vietnam's normalised weighted score is significantly higher than the Pearl River Delta (where I lived for my final 4 years in China), indicating that my decision to move to Ho Chi Minh City was the right one.

A few clarifying points on the numbers and criteria that I've chosen:

• Cost scores are "best fit", and should probably be interpreted more as "price to quality ratio", with lower ratios (low price, high quality) obviously having higher scores out of 10. 
• My weather score assumes you are looking to live somewhere tropical, with lots of sunshine and mild or non-existent winter. It also refers to "quality" of weather, like humidity, temperature extremes, rainfall, etc (hence why even sub-tropical Canton scores rather low). If you are more of a "four seasons" person, adjust the scale. 
• Southern China's Wifi, while fast, is behind the "Great Firewall", hence the low score
• Language barrier refers to how easy or otherwise it is to find English speakers among the general population to communicate with in daily life, and not to how difficult the language is to learn (although these two factors may be correlated). 
• Some of the criteria are very "fine grain" while others have several factors lumped together. Feel free to combine, separate or remove criteria to suit your own situation and preferences. 

If you've been contemplating a similar move yourself, feel free to make a copy of the spreadsheet and adapt it for your own use.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this - have I missed any essential criteria? What other countries would you add to this list? Share your ideas in the comments below!

Optimising the Happiness Curve

(A shout out to Claudio Tereso for hammering out some of the ideas below with me over a beer somewhere near Marinha Grande, Portugal in summer 2018) 

A quick Google search will reveal that the Happiness Curve is "a thing", and it's roughly U-shaped, like this:

From https://smartliving360.com/the-little-known-happiness-curve/

You can triangulate this with multiple sources, and there was even a book written about it recently:

There's also the corresponding depression curve:

Depression probability vs age (Oswald and Blanchflower)

And of course the chicken of depression:

One of my favourite Larson comics of all time

Several questions spring to mind as I contemplate such graphs:

What are the units of the y-axis?
What kind of function is this?
What do the gradient and area functions represent, respectively?
What factors change the curve's shape?
How can we use this model to optimise life happiness?

The simplest mathematical models that have been proposed for happiness are those involving either a quotient or difference of expectations and reality, for example:

Source: psychologytoday.com

Obviously, these models imply that both reality and expectations are functions of time. In the case of the quotient model, this then implies that happiness is infinite at birth (as one has zero expectations). Such a model could still be made to fit the available data and is plausible (since we have no way of measuring the happiness of very young children, and perhaps they really do have crazy high happiness levels until we adults ruin it for them), but more thought needs to be given to how to create a function that bottoms out in midlife and then curves upward again - suggestions welcome!

Let's assume though, that that we can model the curve with a sensible mathematical function that behaves as we want it to and is consistent with underlying first principles. 

Assuming such a model exists, I'm working on a theory about the best actions to take being whatever will result in the optimisation of the integral of the happiness curve (ie happiness versus time, or h(t), where h is an arbitrarily defined "happiness level"), over the length of one's life (ie, the total area under the h(t) curve represents the total happiness in one's life, and it should be maximized).

This is similar to an idea from Rebecca Dias that I found a few years ago (funnily enough when looking for inspiring things for my maths classroom wall):

I'm not sure how to interpret integrating h(t)/t as opposed to just h(t) (again, I welcome your suggestions in the comments), but I can see how it would give the correct units of happiness, whereas my approach would give an answer in units of "happiness years". 

The problem with optimising the integral is you don't know when you're going to die (or lose your memory). To get around this, you'd have to simultaneously optimise the rate of happiness increase (dh/dt) and the current value of h(t) at any given point in time, in addition to the integral. 

At my current level of mathematical mastery (I teach a university preparation calculus course), I'm stumped on a possible analytical approach. But perhaps the principles of PID control could be applied here? For those unfamiliar with the idea, read the first two paragraphs of the Wikipedia entry. 

Essentially what I'm proposing is that e(t) in the diagram below is the difference between the actual happiness level and some optimal happiness level:

PID control block diagram (Uppala, 2017)

This then raises the question of what the "set point" should be - and whether happiness has an upper limit, or whether it can approach infinity. 

Maybe I should take up a religion after all...

Technological Leapfrogging - there's an app for everything now, but are we making progress where it really matters?

Bagan, Myanmar

I was stoked to discover this week that I could call a tuk tuk on my phone in Mandalay through the same Grab app that I use in my day to day life in Vietnam. I rocked up at Mandalay airport and paid for my tourist SIM card using Thai Baht, and within seconds had access to 4G mobile data. You enter your destination (which you can look up on Google Maps, even if you don't speak a word of the local language) and a few minutes later, a three-wheeler shows up at your feet. No fuss, no hassle, no haggling.

"Wait a minute...we're supposed to haggle, aren't we?"

That famous scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian springs to mind as the driver smiles at me, presses a button on his smartphone and the payment goes through on my Citibank credit card. Money has just changed hands between an Australian bank and a guy with betel nut stained teeth wearing a longyi. Welcome to the future.

You may be familiar with the concept of Technological Leapfrogging. Here's a concise definition according to leapfrog.cl:

 "Leapfrogging is the notion that areas which have poorly-developed technology or economic bases can move themselves forward rapidly through the adoption of modern systems without going through intermediary steps."

Myanmar would seem to be a prime example of this. Driving through parts of the countryside that remind you of a scene from a Rambo movie, you have 4G internet. They are introducing mobile payment systems similar to China's WeChat, like KBZPay. In Bagan, tourists zip around silently on eBikes instead of the petrol guzzling motorbikes that you still find in Vietnam, and even the local street signs have changed accordingly:

Park your eBike at the local temple

I chuckled as I read a quote attributed to King Anawrahta of Bagan today: "if a pilgrim can make homage to all 4 pagodas within a day (before noon), and make a same wish with the same offering to all 4 pagodas, and if the pilgrim undertakes 5 precepts, his or her wish will be fulfilled straight away". 

I wonder what the King would think if he knew we could zip between all 4 pagodas on our eBikes in an hour or two before grabbing a latte and a foot massage in Old Bagan, all before the the clock strikes twelve?

Of course, it hasn't all been smooth sailing. On the bus ride between Mandalay and Bagan, the aircon on our bus stopped working, and we were stuck at a dusty roadside stall for an hour or so while we waited for a replacement vehicle. It was a timely reminder that smartphone apps still can't fix a broken bus or clean a dirty toilet. But at least I had 4G internet while I waited. 

At the time of writing, Grab is only available in Mandalay and Yangon, so you'll be relieved to hear that you'll still be able to use your haggling skills elsewhere in the country. One particularly unique example was this horse and cart driver in Pyin Oo Lwin, who couldn't read Google Maps and had to make an old school phone call to my hotel in order to figure out a price:

This guy won't be signing up for a Grab account anytime soon

So are the people of Myanmar really benefiting from "technological leapfrogging"? The jury is still out on that one, if you ask me. Yes, many of them now have access to smartphones, 4G internet and phone banking - but are they using it to improve their individual lives and their country? Or are they just taking selfies and playing Candy Crush, while continuing to breathe in dust and make do with poor plumbing?

If King Anawrahta was miraculously teleported into 2020 and told about smartphones, the internet and personal computers, I'm sure he would be immediately imagining the limitless possibilities for education and furthering of human knowledge that they present (assuming he hadn't died of shock), just as Doc Brown and Marty McFly did, in their hilarious reunion on the Jimmy Kimmel show in October 2015.

Like any technology, smartphones and fast internet can be a curse or a blessing, constructive or destructive, a positive or a negative - it all depends on how you use them. This isn't just a problem for people in the developing world either. Sure, we've already got plumbing and paved roads figured out, but we probably all know someone (maybe even yours truly) who has experienced the negative effects of too much time spent on video games, social media and/or mindless scrolling. 

You have all the tools you need to learn whatever you want to learn and improve your individual situation at your fingertips. The question is, what are you going to do with them?

And...we're back!

Wow. 7+ years since the I last posted. 10+ years since my last mass email "Christmas Newsletter" (which I never would publish in time for Christmas - but I was being ironic of course). An unsent opus sitting in my Google Drive folder from July 2013. Two zero birthdays down. Something's not working here. It's time for a reboot. It's time for Benson Wallace 2.0.

Rather than trying to write half a book once a year, I thought, maybe it's time to finally jump on the blogging bandwagon. Yes, I know the Blogger platform is so "2000s", but hey, so am I :-)

Starting from today, I will publish something at least once per week. It might not be a travel story, and it might only be a few paragraphs, but the point is to force myself to write something non-work related at least once per week, to get those creative juices flowing again.

I anticipate posts being a mixture of past and present expat life/travel adventures, and musings/insights on various topics that I'm into such as living abroad, minimalism and financial freedom, STEM education, science popularisation and critical/skeptical thinking, personal efficacy and self-improvement, and the meaning of life in general.

Let me know if there's something you'd like to see me write about, and please do remind me if I forget to post - I need my friends and family to keep me accountable (although it's in my Google Goals mix now - write a blog post, once a week - so it's gonna happen)!

Talk soon,
Benson