Category: Travel
Avila, Spain
The town has amazing, quite intact walls from the 11th-14th centuries, and also three (!) of the most beautiful churches in Spain. It is only about ninety minutes from Madrid, yet I have not seen North American tourists here.
This morning it struck me to see a large number of Avila children reenacting the “lucha entre los christianos y los moros” [fight between the Christians and Moors] with toy swords and costumes, some of them dressed up like Saudis in their full garb. This made an impression on me because the Mexican village I used to visit, San Agustin Oapan, has a very similar fiesta, and here is the history of how the fiesta was transmitted, dating back to the 16th century. Even the dances and toy swords felt familiar to me. How many of them in Oapan even know what “the moros” are? I recall during my second visit to Oapan I was shocked to learn they did not know what China was, or that there was a Pope, even though they were Catholic. That all changed rapidly with the later arrival of satellite television of course.
In any case, Avila, along with the nearby Roman aquaducts of Segovia, is a much underrated visit, underrated at least in North America.
My days collecting Mexican art, part II
Recently I wrote about my quest to track down Mexican amate (bark paper) painter Juan Camilo Ayala, but there is another part to the early story, namely looking for his brother Marcial Camilo Ayala, also a painter.
Marcial no longer lived in Oapan, as he found village life intolerable. So he settled in Taxco (later Cuernavaca), and it was Juan Camilo who told me that when I showed up at his house in Oapan. Originally I was hoping to meet both brothers on that first trip.
When I arrived in Taxco on my next Mexico trip, I had the strategy of asking all tradionally-clothed women in the city center “do you know Marcial Camilo Ayala?” Far from being a needle in the haystack strategy, this yielded results within seconds. All of a sudden I was chatting with Marcial’s youngest daughter, Oliva. She in turn brought me down a steep cobblestone street to see Marcial, who was painting in a dark back room in Taxco. It all felt rather hopeless, at least at first.
Marcial and Juan were quite different. Marcial is by far the most intellectual person from Oapan, as he could speak at high levels about Picasso and Rousseau, Zapata and land reform, Nahuatl poetry, and the late string quartets of Beethoven (alas he passed away almost ten years ago). Juan cannot meaningfully read or write, but he is a corn farmer who knows everything about the rain. Marcial typically is considered the strongest painter from Oapan, and multiple times he had traveled abroad for exhibits of his work.
I now had two reasons to go to the region, namely Juan and Marcial. And so I became patrons of them both, and now have dozens of works from each of them, including some very large six foot by eight foot creations. I kept on returning to Guerrero, and would spend some time in Oapan with Juan and his family, and some time with Marcial, either in Taxco or Cuernavaca, typically talking about ideas and art. I finally started to learn proper Spanish from all the required back and forth.
In my time in Oapan I enjoyed the stars at night, the fiestas and processions, the long hours sitting around talking and joking with Juan’s family, and of course the food. The musty blue corn tortillas are to die for. If you want some fresh fish, great, but they have to go down to the river and catch it for you. The bean tamales and moles with pepitas are incredible. I once commissioned a barbecue meal, $80 for a full goat, cooked underground overnight, as from prehispanic barbeque traditions. Most meals did not involve meat, however, other than the staple of eggs.
Yet life in Oapan is not easy, not even for the visitor. There was no flush toilet or shower. The “bed” was a hard slab, and the evening temperatures inside the room exceeded one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The roosters crow at 4 a.m., and then everyone is awake. You can leave, but within the Oapan of that time, dollars could not buy you conveniences. There is an ever-present risk of dengue and sometimes malaria as well.
I got to know the four main amate painting villages (Ameyaltepec, Xalitla, and Maxela are the others), and met virtually all the living amate painters of note. I visited the renowned Alfonso Lorenzo Santos, both chained to the wall in his home in Ameyaltepec and also in the mental hospital in Cuernavaca. (Alfonso was later profiled in The Wall Street Journal, and for that journalist, Bob Davis, I served as Mexico guide and translator.) Occasionally, when looking for new amates, I had to throw rocks at the wild dogs to make my way to the homes on the edge of town.
Over the course of about a dozen years of visits, I built up what is the world’s largest and I would say best amate collection, with hundreds of quite distinct works. I also managed to buy an important early private collection, from the 1980s, with more than two hundred paintings. For years I tracked all the amate painting listings on eBay, snagging many a bargain. Later I served as (unpaid) amate painting consultant to the Smithsonian, when they set up the American Indian museum now on the mall. I am pleased that the assemblage of these works is preserving a significant cultural episode and tradition in Mexican history.
I also collected a good deal of village ceramics, still done with red clay using pre-conquest methods, noting that not all of them made it home intact. The Spanish word “burbuja” — bubble wrap — remains prominent in my mind and vocabulary. Ideally, I would like to do a major “air lift” of traditional pottery out of Oapan, but these days the drug gangs are a major obstacle.
Buying art works from Juan and Marcial also evolved into charity, and I developed my thoughts on direct cash transfers. I wrote those up on MR long ago, and I am pleased to report they had some influence in inspiring the non-profit Give Directly.
Eventually I wrote a whole book on the economy and polity of Oapan, and on the lives of the amate painters. It was published with the University of Michigan Press under the title Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of the Mexican Amate Painters. It has sold the least well of any of my books, by far, but it is one of my favorites and it is quite unlike all the others.
Over the years, there was one amate painter whose works I never tracked down, namely Jesus Corpos Aliberto. Marcial had told me he heard a rumor that Jesus Corpos was living in a dumpy hotel in the middle of Mexico City, Hotel Buenos Aires. I found my way to the hotel, and yes Jesus was there with a big stack of brilliant amates he was looking to sell. They let him stay there in a smelly back room. Sadly he was insane, and would sell the amates only for millions of pesos. During yet my next trip to Mexico City, I returned but the hotel was gone altogether, eliminated by gentrification. I had no remaining links to Corpos. At that point, and following the passing of Marcial, and the aging of the other main amate painters, that part of my life largely was over. And so my story with amate painting ends with the same basic obstacle it started with: a stubborn refusing to sell me something, thwarted markets in everything.
Madrid’s Galería de las Colecciones Reales
Visitors don’t seem to know about this place yet, but it is one of the finest artistic venues in Spain. Taken from the royal collections and opened only a few years ago, it has one of the best displays of 16th century Brussels tapestries you will find, perhaps the best, beautifully hung with plenty of space. The paintings are from Goya, Velazquez, Melendez, Patinir, Mengs, Juan de Valdés, and others patronized by the Spanish rulers. Few bad pieces in the lot. There are also Goya tapestries, sometimes right next to associated Goya paintings. A splendid royal carriage.
This is perhaps my sixth (?) visit to Madrid, and the place never has felt better. Great for walking, and full of young people and small shops. It has absolutely displaced Barcelona as the leading city in Spain. A+ for both dining and art, and now it is the European capital of Latin America as well. It is no longer crazy to put it in the same league as Paris or Berlin, and these days feels more like a work in progress — in the good sense of that term — than either of those other places.
Travel bleg for Avila, Salamanca, Segovia, and other smaller places nearby
Your suggestions are most welcome, thank you!
My days collecting Mexican art, part I
In an earlier post I detailed my history of how I got started collecting Haitian art. There is more to that story, but for now the point is that buying Haitian art led me into buying Mexican art as well.
I was visiting the New Jersey home of famed author and art dealer Selden Rodman, who had lived part-time in Jacmel, Haiti for decades and by then was approaching his 90s. This was in the late 1990s. On his wall I saw some Mexican paintings, from a small Mexican village called San Agustin Oapan (good short video), in the state of Guerrero.
The style of the art was naive, broadly similar to the major trends in Haitian art at the time. Perspective was vertically stacked, as you might find in medieval art. Sun and stars were prominent in the pictures, often portrayed together. You might see angels, a tableau of the village, a procession, or village animals or a local fiesta. Colors would be bright, or black and white.
I tried to buy the paintings, but Selden refused to sell them. I kept on trying, but to no avail. Finally he cackled and spit out “Well, I guess you’ll just have to go there and get some!” As if to get rid of me, which he did.
Not one to decline such a challenge, I began to investigate the matter. I could not find the name of the small village on any maps, including the detailed Mexico maps held in the GMU library. Finally, I called up Selden and he gave me some vague sense where it was. I flew to Mexico City and hired a taxi. We drove several hours to the general area, and then started asking people on the side of the road where the village was. We kept on being redirected, and for a while it seemed fruitless. But eventually someone told us to take an unmarked turn from the road, not too far from Iguala. And so we climbed the hill on an unpaved road, with the 25 km distance taking almost four hours.
The eventual taxi fare was $600, a fair amount in the Mexico of the late 1990s.
Along the way were fantastic cactuses and canyons, another small village, and the occasional person with a burro. It was hot. I was on my way.
When I reached the village, I was surprised by the number of pigs, by the number of drunken men lying in the street, and by the living standards, even though I had been going to Haiti. I later learned that a family of seven might earn about $1500-2000 a year, and if seven children were born perhaps only four or five would survive to adulthood. I thought the place at least would have a shop or a restaurant, but no.
Due to its remoteness, Oapan was still Nahuatl-speaking (the older people did not speak Spanish at all) and had preserved an especially large number of pre-Columbian customs and religious practices. Oapan, by the way, is a Nahuatl word for “where the green maize stalk abounds.” To this day, I consider Nahuatl to be the most beautiful and expressive language I have heard.
I started asking around for Juan Camilo Ayala, the name of the painter whose work I so admired. It turns out there were two people with that name in the village, but eventually I found his home and knocked on the door. I was not expecting to find a corn farmer and a bunch of domestic animals behind the door, but indeed I did. He later related he was shocked that I came to visit, but he responded calmly in a non-plussed manner. “Not many people come here,” he noted in his own broken Spanish.
I showed him a photo of the painting I liked in Rodman’s house, but he did not remember it. Nonetheless he pledged to paint, if not a copy, something in the same general style and inspiration. I asked for a large painting, and was surprised when he cited a price of only $100.
Like an idiot, I handed over an AmEx traveler’s check, and Juan Camilo thought it was dollars. (Later on we straightened that mess out, and I started using Western Union.)
I gave them my address, which they wrote in the rafters of the home, above the screeching roosters, and I headed back down to Mexico City with the cab. Several months later a beautiful picture arrived at the house, in perfectly good condition. It hangs on the stairwell to this very day.
I was hooked, and soon this story was to continue…
How will AI affect cities and travel?
COWEN: In the 5 percent [economic growth] scenario — put aside San Francisco, which is special — but do cities become more or less important? Clearly, this city might become more important. Say, Chicago, Atlanta, what happens?
CLARK: I think that dense agglomerations of humans have significant amounts of value. I would expect that a lot of the effects of AI are going to be, for a while, massively increasing the superstar effect in different industries. I don’t know if it’s all cities, but I think any city which has something like a specialism — like high-frequency trading in Chicago or certain types of finance in New York — will continue to see some dividend from sets of professionals that gather together in dense quantities to swap ideas.
COWEN: Could it just be easier to stay at home, and more fun? I find I’m an outlier, but my use of AI — I either want to go somewhere very distant and use the AI there to learn about, say, the birds of a region, or I want to stay at home. It’s a barbell effect. The idea of driving 35 minutes to Washington, DC — that seems less appealing than it used to be.
That is from my Conversation with Jack Clark of Anthropic.
Has international travel to the U.S. really collapsed?
But despite some ominous signs, a close look at the data shows that travel to the United States is largely holding up — at least so far.
Nearly as many foreign travelers have arrived at American airports this year than during the same period last year, according to an analysis by The New York Times of entry data collected from every international airport in the country.
International arrivals did drop more than 10 percent in March compared with last year, but this was largely because Easter fell unusually late this year, pushing back a popular travel window for European tourists. More recent figures from April show that travel over the holiday looked similar to previous years.
Here is more from the NYT. The main major difference is for Canadians, who are indeed more skittish, and their ticket sales are down 21 percent.
Living in Freiburg, Germany
After two years at Harvard, I had finished all of my graduate school courses and oral (!) exams. Then I had a compulsion for what I should do next, something that at the time appeared remarkably stupid, although it worked out very well for me.
At some critical points in my life I have made key decisions with regard to place, including Mexico, Haiti, New Zealand, and as I will write about today, Freiburg, Germany. Each of those decisions fundamentally reshaped my life. None of those decisions were motivated by rational reasons, or indeed much by traditional reasons at all. I simply wanted to do particular things, and then set off to do so.
After two years of study, a Harvard PhD student would be expected to apprentice with a top professor, “live in the basement of the Science Center” (where the computers were those days), and in general become part of the system. Somehow none of that fit me. I decided instead to study for a year in Freiburg, Germany, at the university there, mostly to learn German but also to run away from a particular kind of fate that most of my peers were choosing. And so I departed from Cambridge in 1984-85, aided by a strong dollar and a small grant from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation.
Other than an Oxford and London summer trip at age 17, it was my first time abroad. I flew over with Kroszner, and we rented a car to drive around Germany for a few weeks before I would settle in Freiburg.
Our first stop was Mainz, which was not too far from Frankfurt airport. I was stunned by everything I saw, ranging from the supermarkets to the food to how the downtown was organized. These days Mainz is regarded as a fairly dull city, but then, for me, it was fascinating beyond belief. Unlike England, Germany struck me as a peer country to the United States, with a roughly equal living standard and in some ways a superior way of life.
Other stops on our trip included the beautiful Baden-Baden, Stuttgart, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, the “Romantic Road” in Bavaria, and of course Berlin. The one day I spent in East Berlin terrified me. Not primarily because of the living standards (which were low), but because the people seemed so fearful and intimidated. I decided that communism was far worse than I had thought. I was relieved to return to West Berlin, which at the time had that Cold War, party town, otherworldly feel. Try watching “Wings of Desire” some day.
Once I settled into Freiurg I was on my own. I refused to hang out with the other American students, and so I learned German pretty quickly. I developed a morning routine of walking to buy the International Herald Tribune, working on my dissertation in the morning on a typewriter, and going into town for lunch and some shopping and errands. Freiburg was the closest I ever have come to living in a proper city, though at the time the population was a mere quarter million or so. Nonetheless one could go “in die Stadt,” an entirely meaningful notion if you know the layout.
I even ended up with a German girlfriend, and from her I learned German all that much better.
Frequently I would feel claustrophobic, and so I would depart for Switzerland, where I would feel even more claustrophobic. Still, I loved those trips, as the sense of perpetual motion was sufficient compensation. Over time I have managed to see every Swiss canton, and I am fond of all of them. For Erleichterung I would visit the Netherlands, or one time Chris Weber came by and we drove to Colmar for Alsatian smoked meats, yum. For Thanksgiving there was an Italy trip to Bergamo and Verona. Later in the spring I went to Venice and Florence.
I had a January lecture tour in Vienna (freezing!), with the Carl Menger Institute, and in May a week-long stint in Graz. My German peers found it literally unbelievable that someone my age had published papers I could present and talk about, in addition to a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on monetary economics.
I also gave a talk at a jazz club in Vienna, the first (but not last) time I experienced talk-giving as a kind of high class entertainment. I mixed German and English, and told a fair number of jokes, and found I enjoyed that. I am thankful to Albert Zlabinger for arranging that evening.
It was that kind of life. There has never been a year that was more exciting or when I learned more about the world.
Art and painting started making sense to me when I visited the Lenbach Haus in Munich, with Blue Rider works, and the Mondrian museum in The Hague. I retain a special fondness for those artists to this day.
Amsterdam probably was my favorite city, though I now feel it is long since ruined by an excess of tourists. To save money, I would sleep on the houseboats there.
Once I tired of German food, delicious though it may be, I started experimenting on the culinary front, at least as much as I could given my location. That was the time in my life when I started trying everything I could.
It simply stunned me how many things in Germany were better, starting with the bread and orange juice and butter, though hardly ending there.
So every day I learned, learned, learned, and was in pretty constant motion.
By the time I returned to the United States, it was clear I would never be entering on mainstream tracks again.
My first trip to Haiti
This was in 1994, right after the Aristide regime was restored by Clinton. I had traveled a good deal by that time, mostly in North America, Europe, and southeast Asia. But I had never been anywhere truly dangerous. It seemed impossible to visit such places. It is not that I did any serious risk calculation, rather the option simply was not part of my mental toolkit.
But somehow I started thinking about visiting Haiti. It seemed like it would be the most dangerous place I could possibly choose. I had this recurring mental image that I could not even set out on the street without someone coming along and cutting off one of my arms with a machete.
And so I bought my ticket. I suppose I viewed this as a kind of challenge. I also knew that if it went OK, I would end up going to a lot of other places as well.
Not long before the trip, I was on the phone with my friend Christopher Weber, the renowned investor, writer, and Offenbach scholar. I mentioned I was going and next thing you know Chris, being a “bounder of adventure,” was coming along with me.
I arrived in Haiti first. As I walked into the baggage and pick-up area of the airport (lovely live compa music), some men immediately grabbed my bags and took them from me. “Uh-oh.” In fact they brought them to the cab and wanted a tip, and they didn’t want anyone else carrying my bags first. High-trust oases in low-trust countries remains a very interesting topic to me, to this day.
I stayed in Pétion-Ville, the wealthier “suburb” of Port-au-Prince, known for its restaurants and nightlife, and I loved the place. The food, music, and art were all amazing, and they were everywhere. You could find interesting artwork on many of the street corners and for very low prices. A known artist might be selling a work for $200. I bought a political satire piece by Maxan Jean-Louis entitled “Aristide’s Wedding,” showing his semi-forced alliance with the United States military. I also bought “Soccer Angels” by the great Jean-Baptiste Jean, and a Claude d’Ambreville painting of women with basket on their heads, now a Haitian standard. That set me off buying art.
The architecture was amazing — think a more elaborate New Orleans style — but very badly ailing, you could even say collapsing.
My favorite dishes were the “combie hash,” the Dinde (a small turkey, best I have had), and the seafood mixing French and Caribbean influences. The tender conch (lambi) is arguably the Haitian national dish. The rice and beans cooked in mushroom juice was another delight, totally new to me. At the time it was obviously the best food in the Caribbean.
My arms remained intact, and walking around Petitionville required some basic caution but did not feel dangerous. Furthermore, the population at that time was hopeful for the future, so it felt very good to be there. The storytellers communicated an appropriate sense of drama.
After a day of walking around, Chris and I rented a car, which was in retrospect an unsound thing to do. We drove to Moulin Sur Mer, a “resort” on the ocean, originally an 18th century sugar plantation. Only a few other people were staying there and one of them appeared to be a Dominican drug lord family. Inside one of the buildings was a list of all the Haitian presidents, and at times the rate is about one leader per year — “model this.” I recalled Hegel’s adage that governments based on voodoo religion were bound to be unstable.
The water was lovely, but the drive to and from Moulin Sur Mer was not uneventful. On the way back, at a service station, a man pulled a submachine gun on Chris and asked for a rather favorable exchange rate on our gasoline purchase. Another man ran at the car and tried to jump on the roof as we drove past. I still am not sure whether he wanted to commandeer the vehicle or simply was looking for a free bus ride (Haitians frequently ride on the tops of their buses).
In any case we pressed on, and it didn’t all seem that dangerous after all. I went away vowing to return, and indeed over the years I was to make four more trips to Haiti, as it became one of my favorite countries. The next time I went I met Selden and Carole Rodman in the line boarding the flight from Miami, and that was to change my life yet again…
My excellent Conversation with Ezra Klein
Ezra is getting plenty of coverage for his very good and very on the mark new book with Derek Thompson, Abundance. So far it is a huge hit after only a few days. I figured this conversation would be most interesting, and add the most value, if I tried to push him further from a libertarian point of view (a sign of respect of course). Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
In this conversation, Ezra and Tyler discuss how the abundance agenda interacts with political polarization, whether it’s is an elite-driven movement, where Ezra favors NIMBYism, the geographic distribution of US cities, an abundance-driven approach to health care, what to do about fertility decline, how the U.S. federal government might prepare for AGI, whether mass layoffs in government are justified, Ezra’s recommended travel destinations, and more.
Lots of good back and forth, here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Here’s a question from a reader, and I’m paraphrasing. “I can see why you would favor Obamacare and an abundance agenda because Obamacare throws a lot more resources at the healthcare sector in some ways. It did have Medicare cuts, but nonetheless, it’s not choking the sector. But if you favor an abundance agenda, can you then possibly favor single-payer health insurance through the government, which does tend to choke resources and stifle innovation?”
KLEIN: I think it would depend on how you did the single-payer healthcare. Here, we should talk about — because it’s referenced glancingly in the book in a place where you and I differ — but the supervillain view that I hold and your view, which is that you should negotiate drug prices. I’ve always thought on that because I think in some ways, it’s a better toy example than single payer versus Obamacare.
I think you want to take the amount of innovation you’re getting very, very, very seriously. I’ve written pieces about this, that I think if you’re going to do Medicare drug pricing at any kind of significant level, you want to be pairing that with a pretty significant agenda to make drug discovery much easier, to make testing much easier.
And:
COWEN: What should the US federal government do to prepare for AGI? We should just lay off people, right?
KLEIN: [laughs] I would not say it that way. I wouldn’t say just lay off people. I think that’s some of what we’re doing.
COWEN: No, not just, but step one.
KLEIN: Do you think that’s step one? Do you buy this DOGE’s preparation-for-AGI argument that you hear?
COWEN: I think maybe a fifth of them think that. Maybe it’s step two or step three, but it’s a pretty early step, right?
KLEIN: I think that the question of AI or AGI in the federal government, in anywhere — and this is one reason I’ve not bought this argument about DOGE — is you have to ask, “Well what is this AI or AGI doing? What is its value function? What prompt have you given it? What have you asked it to execute across the government and how?”
Alignment, which we have primarily talked about in terms of whether or not the AI, the superintelligence makes us all into paperclips, is a constant question of just near-term systems as well. I think the question of how should we prepare for AGI or for AI in the federal government first has to do with deciding what we would like the AI or the AGI to do. That could be different things to different areas.
My sense — talking to a bunch of people in the companies has helped me conceptualize this better — is that the first thing I would do is begin to ask, what do I think the opportunities of AI are, scientifically and in terms of different kinds of discoveries…
And this:
COWEN: Let me give you another right-wing view, and tell me what you think. The notion that the most important feature of state capacity is whether a state has enough of its citizens willing to fight and die for it. In that case, the United States, Israel, but a pretty small number of nations have high state capacity, and most of Western Europe really does not because they don’t have militaries that mean anything. Is that just the number one feature of abundance in state capacity?
Recommended, obviously.
Visiting the New Jersey shore
Did you know that the rest of the country (world?) calls it “the beach”? New Jerseyans call it “the shore.” (Why?)
While growing up, my mother would take my sister and me to the New Jersey shore for a week, each summer. My father would drive down and visit, but he was too much of a workaholic and too antsy to stay for long.
One of the first things you learn, living in The Great NJ, is that each and every town has its own identity. It feels quite different from the next town over, and has an individualized history and often a quite different ethnic mix. Before I knew any other social science, I learned that place really matters. And hovering at the horizon is the NYC skyline, a regular reminder that things can change rather quickly once you cross a line, in this case taking a bus across a river. I started thinking about “invisible borders” seriously and at a young age. Later, in high school, the kids were from either Hillsdale (my town), or from River Vale, one town over. We thought of them as the “wuss kids.”
So just about everyone is a regional thinker, and in New Jersey your “region” refers to your town or maybe county, not to the state.
This importance of place is true of shore towns as well. We spent time in various locales:
Asbury Park: This was early on, and I barely have memories of it. We decided it was “a dump,” and had seen better days. It had once been a glamour spot of sorts, with dance halls and gazebos. Later in life I would go back there for some of the older architecture, Bruce Springsteen landmarks, and Puerto Rican food.
Ocean Grove: The place we went when we were young. This town has fantastic Victorian homes, and an unusual role in the American history of religious revival camps. Holly and called it an “old people’s town.” Plus there was no boardwalk and everything was closed on Sundays. The ocean was wonderful and the walks were easy, but we always wanted to be somewhere else.
Point Pleasant: I haven’t been in so long, but I think of this as one of the most typical and representative of New Jersey shore towns. Holly and I were OK with this place.
Seaside Heights: This for us was the best, especially for my sister. It had lots of other young people, an active, retro-flavored boardwalk (I loved that game where you throw the ball up and try to have it land in the right slots for points), and the ocean water seemed rougher in a fun way. Eventually we settled on going here each year. Later the setting for Jersey Shore, the TV show.
I also went to some chess tournaments in Atlantic City (pre-gambling, quite run down), where I did very well, and when we were all grown we would meet up in Spring Lake, which is perhaps the actual nice shore town. Belmar and Cape May also received earlier visits, and we would stop for root beer in Toms River.
Even in the early days it was exciting to drive from one town to the next, like in Europe crossing from Germany into Luxembourg.
I did a lot of reading on the beach, for instance tackling both LOTR and Karl Popper’s Open Society books. In later years, Holly would be off with friends, and my mother and I would drive around, listening to Beatle songs on a weird 8-track tape that split up the songs when it changed tracks.
So early on I learned the idea of “local travel,” namely that a nearby trip can be no less fascinating. I consider that one of the most important practical ideas you can imbibe, along with “regional thinker.” I got them both quite young, and in a very convincing fashion.
An Economic Approach to Homer’s Odyssey: Part III
Published by Liberty Fund, by me, here is the third and final installment. Excerpt:
“Below is a brief and simplified catalog of the major polities described in The Odyssey:
- • Pylos and Sparta: Visited by Telemachus, superficially seem normal but they seem sadder on reflection and Sparta relies on intoxication to support public order.
- • Ogygia, or Calypso: An unbearable paradise, there is no utopia.
- • Phaeacia: Relatively well-run, inward-looking, passive-aggressive, “control freak” syndrome.
- • The Lotus Eaters: Another unbearable “utopia.”
- • The Cyclopes: Anarchistic, brutish, and the community is ineffective and unable to defend itself.
- • Aeolus: A closed society, based on incest, hostile to outsiders, a more extreme and dysfunctional version of Phaeacia.
- • Laestrygonia: Giants, they throw boulders and murder, and in some ways resemble the Cyclopes. Tendencies toward anarchy are widespread, and not confined to the Cyclopes.
- • Aeaea (Circe): There is the bed of tyrannical but beautiful Circe, or life as a well-fed pig. Again, utopias are impossible and immortality would bore us.
- • Cimmeria: Dark, bleak, and unloved by God. Possibly the default setting.
- • The Underworld: Everyone is sad (and dead), yet they talk like actual humans and also tell the truth. Lesson: the living cannot escape artifice and deception.
- • Ithaca: Usually wrapped up in war and revenge-taking, chaotic and lacking in trust and lacking in clarity about sovereignty. This is another one of the default options.
- • Syria: Initially prosperous but wrecked by the arrival of avaricious merchants. Unstable.
- • Crete: A diverse society of perfect trust, within a narrative of Odysseus-in-disguise, but it has no chance of existing.”
My overall goal has been to pull out the implicit “public choice” strands in Homer’s Odyssey. It is very much a poem about politics, and the book is among other things a study in comparative politics.
Do read the whole essay, and here are parts one and two.
The Economist 1843 magazine does a profile of me
I believe you can get through the gate by registering. A very good and accurate piece, first-rate photos as well, including of Spinoza too, here is the link. Here is one excerpt:
I asked Cowen – it is the kind of question you come to ask him – what were the criteria for a perfect Central American square. He began plucking details from the scene around us. Music, trees, a church, a fountain, children playing. “Good balloons,” he noted, looking approvingly at a balloon seller. I genuinely couldn’t tell whether he was extemporising from the available details, or indexing what he saw against a pre-existing model of what the ideal square should look like.
And:
When he told me he had never been depressed, I asked him to clarify what he meant. He had never been clinically depressed? Depressed for a month? For a week? An afternoon? I looked up from my notebook. An enormous smile, one I’d not seen before, had spread across the whole of Cowen’s face.
“Like, for a whole afternoon?” he asked, hugely grinning.
Here is the closing bit, taken from when the reporter (John Phipps) and I were together in Roatan:
As we came back to shore, Cowen smiled at the unremarkable, deserted village. “I’m long Jonesville,” he said warmly. (He often speaks about places and people as though they were stocks you could go long or short on.) I asked him if he would think about investing in property here. He shrugged as if to say “why bother?”
The cab had begun to grind its way up towards the brow of a hill with audible, Sisyphean difficulty. I mumbled something about whether we were going to have to get out. “We’ll make it,” Cowen said firmly. He was talking about how he liked to play basketball at a court near his house. He didn’t mind playing with other people, but most days he was the only person there. He’d been doing this for two decades now; it was an efficient form of exercise; the weather was mostly good. I asked him what he’d learned playing basketball alone for decades. “That you can do something for a long time and still not be very good at it,” he said. The car began to roll downhill.
Self-recommending, and with some significant cameos, most of all Alex T. and also Spinoza.
An Economic Approach to Homer’s Odyssey: Part II
My three-part essay for Liberty Fund continues, here is the opener:
In the previous article, I outlined what an economic approach to reading Homer’s epic, The Odyssey,1 might look like. I also noted that what most strikes me about The Odyssey is Homer’s treatment of comparative political regimes. Looking at the wide variety of regimes Odysseus encounters is the focus of this article.
Given that human behavior, at least in The Odyssey, can be understood in terms of the non-standard assumptions described in my previous essay, what are then the possible states of affairs? Which polities might we look to for arranging human interactions and maintaining political order? Utopia is not readily achieved, not only because of material constraints, but also because human behavior is too restless and too desirous of alternative states of affairs. A straightforward order based on political virtue is also beyond human grasp, again because it clashes with the nature of human beings as we understand them. What then might fit with a vision of humans as restless, intoxicating, deceiving, and self-deceiving creatures? The travel explorations of The Odyssey can be understood as, in part, an attempt to address this question.
I will now consider the major and some of the minor polities described by The Odyssey, roughly in the order they appear in the story.
The discussion starts with Pylos and Sparta…
Kevin Kelly’s fifty travel tips
Here is one of them, in part:
Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is.
In other words you make a laser-straight rush for the end, and then meander back. Laser out, meander back. This method is somewhat contrary to many people’s first instincts, which are to immediately get acclimated to the culture in the landing city before proceeding to the hinterlands. The thinking is: get a sense of what’s going on, stock up, size up the joint. Then slowly work up to the more challenging, more remote areas. That’s reasonable, but not optimal because most big cities around the world are more similar than different. All big cities these days feel same-same on first arrival. In Laser-Back travel what happens is that you are immediately thrown into Very Different Otherness, the maximum difference that you will get on this trip.
Here are the rest, mostly I agree.