Category: Travel
The optimal tax theory haven that is Iceland
Tourists are expected to outnumber the local population of 330,000 by seven to one next year, according to official data. By comparison, last year visitors to France outnumbered the French by two to one
…The number of tourists has risen by as much as 30 percent every year for the last four years, according to Iceland’s Tourist Board. They brought in revenues of $3.2 billion in 2015, a third of the country’s export earnings. Tourism is the single biggest employer, and many Icelanders are pouring money into services and new construction.
…“It’s like the city is not my city anymore,” Birgitta Jonsdottir, the leader of the Pirate Party, complained last month. “It’s like Disneyland downtown.”
A poll in October conducted by the national broadcaster RUV reported that 87 percent of Icelanders want the government to raise fees or taxes on tourists.
Think of that as Iceland’s version of Trumpism. Here is the full NYT story.
My conversation with Fuchsia Dunlop
Here is the link to video, podcast, and transcript. The Q&A segment was led by guests Ezra Klein, Megan McArdle, Mark Miller (Coyote Cafe), and Eva Summer. Fuchsia speaks in perfect British sentences and she always had an answer ready, with charm and extreme intelligence. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Three dishes one absolutely has to try are what?
DUNLOP: In Shanghai?
COWEN: In Shanghai. The city, not the region.
DUNLOP: I think you should have hong shao rou, red braised pork. Real home cooking. Delicious combination of soy sauce, rice wine, and sugar, and one of the favorite dishes.
I would recommend some Shanghainese wontons in soup stuffed with shepherd’s purse, which is a wild variety of the brassicas, and pork, just to show you the lighter, gentler side of Shanghainese cooking.
Then, perhaps, if we’re talking Shanghai, you might one to have one of these dishes that says something about Shanghai as being a mixing pot of different cultures.
There’s a very nice crab meat and potato and tomato soup served in some of my favorite Shanghainese restaurants. Which seems a little bit of a fusion with some European influences, the way they use potato and tomato in that soup with local seafood.
COWEN: As you know, the Michelin Guide recently has covered Shanghai, given some restaurants three, two, one star. There’s cheap places you can go. Conceptually, do they understand the food of Shanghai? To the extent they don’t, what are they missing?
DUNLOP: If you look at the restaurants they’ve selected, there’s a bit of a Cantonese bias. They do have some Shanghainese restaurants, but one thing that’s very conspicuous, there are some notable, some of the best Shanghainese local restaurants, which are missing from that list, in my opinion.
The reason is, I think, the methodology of Western food inspectors, which is they tend to go as individuals or small groups. Of course in many Chinese restaurants where you eat family style, to make the most of the restaurant, you have to eat as we’re doing now with a large group and a table full of dishes.
We cover much more, including her favorite parts of China, whether offal is an inferior good, whether one can acquire a taste for sea cucumber, what she thinks of Leonard Cohen, Dream of the Red Chamber, how newbies should approach Chinese food, what top Sichuan chefs thought of their trip to French Laundry, whether milk is overrated, whether Americans have done anything worthwhile with Chinese food, and her favorite Chinese movie.
Here is a short video excerpt from the Sichuan peppercorn tasting segment, namely what makes the very best peppercorns so good compared to the lesser peppercorns.
Here you can order Fuchsia’s new and excellent book The Land of Fish and Rice.
*Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts*
That is the new book by Christopher de Hamel, and it is one of the very best non-fiction books this year, in fact so far it might rank #1. It is twelve chapters, each one about an individual medieval manuscript, the best-known of those being the Book of Kells. The integration of text and the visuals is of the highest order of quality. Most of all, the book brings each manuscript to life, relating its creators and creation, the surrounding historical context, its subsequent preservation and fame, and how that history has embodied varying attitudes toward copying and preservation. No less illuminating is the anthropological treatment of how each manuscript is currently guarded and displayed, the author’s travel history in getting there, and a more general “philosophical without the philosophy” introspection on what these objects are really supposed to mean to us.
This book is not in every way light reading, and it does assume some (very broad) background in medieval history, but it brings a whole topic to light, and instructs, in a way that few other works do.
Here is just one short excerpt:
My initial inquiry as to whether I might see the manuscript of the Aratea in the Universiteitsbibliotheek in Leiden was met with the reply that this would hardly be necessary, since there is a high-class published facsimile from 1989 and the complete book is in any case digitized and freely available on-line. It was a response entirely within the theme of copying. If you had applied to the palace librarians of Aachen in the early ninth century to see the late-antique Terence, they would almost certainly have assured you that you would be better off with their nice new copy by their scribe Hrodgarius.
Hamel worked for a long time in the book department at Sotheby’s and then in a library at Cambridge University. He is a bit of a fuddy-duddy (he thinks the bustle of NYC is extreme, for instance), but nonetheless has produced a lovely and complete work that virtually every author should envy. I am ordering his other books too, mostly on the history of books.
Here is a Guardian review, John Banville in the FT raves about it, and here is The Paris Review. I believe I ordered it on Amazon.uk, all five-star reviews by the way. Here is the U.S. Amazon listing, with access to used copies, I am not sure when the American edition comes out.
From pack animals to carts pulled by beasts
…the most important technological change for the transportation of heavy goods in nineteenth-century India was not the arrival of the quick, expensive railway: it was the move from pack animals to carts pulled by two or four beasts in the first half of the century. This was the process historian Amalendu Guha calls ‘the bullock cart revolution’. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s railways found it impossible to compete not only with bullock carts, but also with human-powered river transport. Rowing boats along the Ganges and Jamuna won a price war with the railways over the cost of transporting heavy goods. Vessels powered by human beings were able to undercut steam vessels elsewhere.
That is from Jon Wilson, The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India, a new and excellent book that stresses how much British rule of India was rooted in chaos and violence, rather than the smooth operation of a colonial elite.
America fact of the day a few of us like to complain a lot
A small number of people complain a lot about the airports.
As for the noise complaints about National Airport, two individuals at one residence in NW D.C. made 6,852 complaints, 78% of the total number of noise complaints.
My Conversation with Ezra Klein
The very beginning is a little slow, but I thought Ezra was one of the very best guests. The topics include the nature and future of media, including virtual reality, the nature of leadership (including Ezra’s own), how running a project shapes your political views, a wee bit on health care, what he thinks are the Obama and Clinton models of the world, Robert Putnam’s research on the costs of diversity, the proper role of shame in society, animal welfare, and of course Ezra’s underrated and overrated, with takes on Bob Dylan, The Matrix, William F. Buckley, Joe Biden, and more. There is no video but here is the podcast and transcript. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: …Now Putman, let me ask you about Putnam, and how Putnam relates to Donald Trump. As you know, Robert Putnam at Harvard, he has some work showing that when ethnic diversity goes up that there’s less trust, less cooperation, less social capital.
If you think of yourself in the role of an editor, so you have an American society, diversity has gone up, and a lot of people have reacted to this I would say rather badly — and I think you would agree with me they’ve reacted rather badly — but there’s still a way in which the issue could be framed that while diversity is actually a problem, we can’t handle diversity.
Putnam almost says as such, and do you think there’s currently a language in the media where you have readers who are themselves diverse, where it’s possible not to just be blaming the bigots, but to actually present the positive view, “Look, people are imperfect. A society can only handle so much diversity, and we need to learn this.” What’s your take on that?
KLEIN: I strongly agree. We do not have a language for demographic anxiety that is not a language that is about racism. And we need one. I really believe this, and I believe it’s been a problem, particularly this year. It is clear, the evidence is clear. Donald Trump is not about “economic anxiety.”
COWEN: A bit, but not mainly, I agree.
KLEIN: That said, I think that the way it’s presented is a choice between economic anxiety and racism. And one I don’t think that’s quite right, and two I don’t think that’s a productive way of having that conversation.
COWEN: Why don’t we have that language? Where did it go, or did we ever have it?
And:
COWEN: You see this with Medicaid. A lot of people don’t sign up. They don’t have addresses. You can’t even get them, whatever.
KLEIN: They don’t like doctors. They’re afraid of doctors.
COWEN: This is me.
KLEIN: You’re afraid of doctors?
COWEN: “Afraid” isn’t the word.
KLEIN: Averse. [laughs]
COWEN: Maybe dislike. Averse. [laughs] They should be afraid of me, perhaps.
Definitely recommended. The same dialogue, with a different introduction, is included in The Ezra Klein Show podcast.
Uber Versus Taxi Cab Racism
Film maker Charles Mudede, a black Zimbabwean living in the United States, is thrown back into the racist past by a visit to Vancouver.
Vancouver B.C. does not have Uber or Lyft, the ridesharing service I mainly use in Seattle and New York City…the absence of ridesharing companies in Vancouver has meant the persistence of a problem that, in my experience, pretty much vanishes from the surface of things when you have an account with Uber or Lyft: taxi cab racism….I had all but forgotten this form of racism until this weekend, when I found myself in downtown Vancouver unable to hail a cab. They just simply passed by me, though many were not engaged. At first I thought I was not visible enough to drivers, but after a few cabs passed by my increasingly theatrical waving, I remembered the color of my skin.
It’s important to note that many of the taxi drivers were not white but South Asians—some who were even blacker than me. But when it comes to taxi racism, the color of the driver often does not matter. White racism, in this sector, has been adopted, sometimes even intensified, by all other races, many of which have been and still are the victims of white racism. Even in Seattle, when Yellow Cab was the top dog, East African drivers would pass by me because I looked like them. All of that nonsense came to an end with ridesharing, whose apps made hailing unnecessary.
The author, it’s worth noting, is not a fan of neoliberalism:
The sad thing is that much of my thinking is strongly opposed to the sharing economy because the society in which its modes are expressed, a neoliberal society, results, for one, in the encroachment of the “entrepreneurial spirit” into all aspects of our lives.
So give him credit for grudgingly acknowledging one important benefit.
Factor price equalization the border that is Mexico
The shortcomings of the catapult method do not appear to have deterred traffickers from seeking ways to shoot drugs from Mexico into the United States. Authorities in the Mexican state of Sonora recently discovered a vehicle modified to serve as a mobile air cannoncapable of launching packages of drugs across the border. It is not clear whether the apparatus — described by the news outlet Fusion as something that looked like it “came out of the Mad Max movie” — was ever used, nor is it clear if it even functioned as intended.
There are other documented instances in which traffickers have used cannon to launch drugs across the border, including another truck-mounted device discovered by Mexican authorities in 2013.
Here is the full story, via Norden Intelligence.
Suburbs will soar on the wings of tech
That is my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Self-driving vehicles are also likely to help the suburbs most. One of the worst things about the suburbs is the commute to the city or to other parts of the suburbs. But what if you could read, text or watch TV – safely — during that commuting time? What if you could tackle your day’s work just as you do on a train or plane? Commuting would seem a lot less painful. As driverless vehicles evolve to accommodate work and leisure uses of the automobile space, pleasure will replace commuting stress.
What about drones? They too would seem to favor remote areas where it is harder to access useful goods and services. Drones may do more for exurbs and rural areas than for the suburbs, but it seems cities will gain least. Walking or biking to nearby shops is a potential substitute for drone delivery. Rolling sidewalk drones might find it harder to negotiate crowded cities, and cities with a dense network of tall buildings may be less friendly to flying drones. Population density may increase the risk of a drone falling on someone.
And another:
Or consider the advent of the “smart home” and the Internet of things. Wouldn’t it be nice to just talk to your stove/computer/3-D printer/robot and say, “Make me some pureed squash”? Any forecast on this topic seems speculative. Still, the suburbs often have more new homes and more new appliances because it’s harder to rebuild or to re-equip older city apartments. So I suspect the arrival of the smart home will favor the suburbs, too.
There is much more at the link. Note that unlike the earlier “telecommuting revolution,” which did not harm cities at all, many of these changes will speed the actual movement of people and goods, not just information. Their effects will be more like those of the interstate highways of the 1950s and 60s, and that favored the suburbs not cities.
Shout it from the rooftops, Protestant Uber freedom edition
Our findings provide empirical evidence that ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease the traffic congestion after entering an urban area.
Here is the paper, by Li, Hong, and Zhang, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. Kevin also directs our attention to this paper by Arye Hillman & Niklas Potrafke:
Simple correlations show that Protestantism is associated with economic freedom, Islam is not, with Catholicism in between. The Protestant ethic requires economic freedom. Our empirical estimates, which include religiosity, political institutions, and other explanatory variables, confirm that Protestantism is most conducive to economic freedom.
By the way, here is my earlier column on the benefits of Uber, one product of economic freedom. By the way, do not try this driverless car trick at home.
Give me video games or give me death
Once the craft approaches Mars — a trip of about 20 months or more — the craft will have to get through the atmosphere, reaching a temperature of 1,700°C, and use rockets to lower the craft gently onto the moon.
That is a description of the new Elon Musk plan to settle Mars. He hinted at the ticket price someday being as low as 200k. By the way, space flight is bad for your eyes, and here is Alex on the dangers of space travel.
I get that planet earth someday may be destroyed, but does that give anyone a private incentive to leave for Mars in the meantime?
Seasteading is looking better all the time…
What is the social value of Uber?
That is my latest column for Bloomberg, here is the method:
Uber calculates figures for surge pricing at times of high demand, but it rounds off. So a computation of market conditions that might lead to a surge price that is 1.249 times higher than normal fares is rounded down to 1.2, but 1.251 would be rounded up to 1.3. Yet the initial, unrounded 1.249 and 1.251 estimates represent almost the same underlying market tightness.
Using data from Uber, the authors therefore could see how the demand for Uber varied with surge prices that vary (say from 20 percent to 30 percent above normal fares) even when market conditions are roughly constant.
Here is the source:
A new paper by Peter Cohen, Robert Hahn, Jonathan Hall, Steven Levitt…and Robert Metcalfe…
They conclude UberX produces about $6.8 billion in consumer surplus a year. My caveat:
If anything, this method underestimates the worth of Uber, as it doesn’t capture what economists call “option value.” Let’s say you walk home with a guy or gal late at night, hoping something nice will happen. But you’re not quite sure, as he or she might make the wrong noises about a particular political candidate, and then you would wish to bail out quickly. Uber would be the safety net. Most of the time you don’t end up using the service or recording a transaction that would count for this study, but you can start making plans because you know you have Uber as a fallback.
Or consider those urban residents who have ditched their cars altogether. They know they can take Uber to the local market if they need to, even if most of the time they have not run out of milk and dog food. Similarly, the existence of Uber is helping some localities economize on mass transit expenditures.
The study also doesn’t measure how Uber might help get the U.S. to the next level of market innovation, which in this case might mean a network of on-demand, self-driving vehicles.
Do read the whole thing.
Internet comments, before the internet
In the four years that Ayanna Chisholm has worked collecting tolls out of tiny glass booths at the Holland Tunnel and elsewhere in New Jersey, there have been several constants. There are familiar commuters, malfunctioning toll arms, occasional scofflaws — and an incessant barrage of come-ons, sexual comments, lecherous stares and crude gestures from male motorists.
Some of Ms. Chisholm’s colleagues say they have been subjected to drivers exposing themselves. The fusillade is especially menacing because it is inescapable, the workers confined to small hutches on the highway.
Like other women in her profession, Ms. Chisholm, who works for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, has learned to wear little makeup, crack her booth’s window open as little as possible, and drop change into waiting hands to avoid drivers who try to stroke her palm.
That is from the NYT, and of course the same was true decades ago. No one from New Jersey should be surprised at how most internet comments have turned out.
Lima, Peru bleg
Your assistance is humbly requested, noting that the shortness of the trip will prevent any significant excursions outside of the city. Do note I have been there twice, though not in the last nineteen years or so.
I thank you all in advance for your suggestions.
First self-driving taxis hit the road in Singapore
Singapore’s nuTonomy, founded by two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Thursday it began testing a free taxi-hailing service in a small business district in Singapore called one-north, a campus-like space dominated by tech firms and biotechnology companies. Other tech companies including Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc. have been testing self-driving cars on the roads for years, but this is the first time the vehicles have been open to public use.
…Mr. Parker said the Singapore government had laid out a series of milestones for nuTonomy to achieve before it is allowed to extend its trials to other areas of the city. He declined to provide details on those milestones, but said the next stage would be to expand the service to a neighborhood adjacent to one-north.
Here is the WSJ piece, here are other articles. I recall predicting about a year and a half ago that Singapore would be the first to do this. A Singaporean countered me, and interjected they were very worried that their plans were falling behind. I said: “That is exactly my point. You are worried that you are falling behind. Congratulations.”
Worry. Singapore. Think about it.