Category: Travel

My excellent Conversation with Brian Winter

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the video, audio, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

It’s not just the churrasco that made him fall in love with Brazil. Brian Winter has been studying and writing about Latin America for over 20 years. He’s been tracking the struggles and triumphs of the region as it’s dealt with decades of coups, violence, and shifting economics. His work offers a nuanced perspective on Latin America’s persistent challenges and remarkable resilience.

Together Brian and Tyler discuss the politics and economics of nearly every country from the equator down. They cover the future of migration into Brazil, what it’s doing right in agriculture, the cultural shift in race politics, crime in Rio and São Paulo, the effectiveness and future consequences of Bukele’s police state in El Salvador, the economic growth of Colombia despite continued violence, the prevalence of startups and psychoanalysis in Argentina, Uruguay’s reduction in poverty levels, the beautiful ugliness of Sao Paulo, where Brian will explore next, and more.

And here is one excerpt;

COWEN: What’s the economic geography of Brazil going to look like? All the wealth near Mato Grosso and the north just very, very poor? Or the north empties out? How’s that going to work? There used to be some modest degree of balance.

WINTER: That’s true. Most of the population in Brazil and the economic center, for sure, was in the southeast. That means, really, São Paulo state, which is about a quarter of Brazil’s population but roughly a third of its GDP. Rio as well, and the state of Minas Gerais, which has a name that tells its history. That means “general mines” in Portuguese. That’s the area where a lot of the gold came out of in the 18th and 19th centuries. That’s gone now, so it’s not as much of an economic pull.

You’re right, Tyler, though, that a lot of the real boom right now, the action, is in places like Mato Grosso, which is in the region of Brazil called the Central West. That’s soy country. I’m from Texas, and Mato Grosso is virtually indistinguishable from Texas these days. It’s hot. It’s flat. The crop, like I said, is soy. There’s cattle ranching as well.

Even the music — Brazil, as others have noted, has gone from being the country of bossa nova and the samba in the 1970s to being the country of sertanejo today. Sertanejo is a Brazilian cousin of country music with accordions, but it’s sung by people — men mostly — in jeans, big belt buckles, and cowboy hats. They’re importing that — not only that economic model but that lifestyle as well.

COWEN: What is the great Brazilian music of today? MPB is dead, right? So, what should someone listen to?

Recommended, interesting throughout.

The tourist culture that is Copenhagen

by  Tyler Cowen in

A new fee for Venice day trippers. A looming ban on vacation rentals in Barcelona. Restrictions on the sale of alcohol in Majorca. At a time when overwhelmed European destinations are slapping tourists with restrictions and fees, Copenhagen is trying a different approach: rewarding visitors who act responsibly.

Beginning July 15, tourists who demonstrate climate-friendly travel behavior by participating in the city’s green initiatives — including cycling, train travel and clean-up efforts — will be granted access to museum tours, kayak rentals, free meals and more.

Here is more from  Ceylan Yeğinsu at the NYT.

The Turku food hall

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is perhaps my favorite food hall.  Dating from 1896, the basic building is notable, the displays are lovely and suitably Nordic, and for lunch you can try a wide variety of cuisines, including excellent Mexican food, a rarity in Europe.  (They told me they buy their tortillas from other Mexicans in Czechia.)  From separate stalls I bought some salami and also black bread, and both were as good as any I have tried, ever.

Many food halls are overrated.  They create an illusion of plenitude, while not offering many items you actually wish to buy and consume.  The Turku food hall, however, is a real winner.

Overall, Turku felt more Swedish and also more stylish than Helsinki.  The Swedish name for the city — Åbo — you see all over, and one of the universities still teaches in Swedish.  It is much more of a college town.  That said, at population 202,000 it is slower and there is much less to do there.  You can see some of Alvar Aalto’s early buildings.

I was told that 77 Mexicans live in Turku.

Helsinki notes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Most of all, I like the city for its visual complexity, and for its recurring architectural surprises.  It is the best Art Nouveau city in the world, with only Brussels as a rival, and also a top tier modernist city.  Public buildings are excellent, and unlike in Stockholm you are never quite sure what is coming next.

The Finns are amazing at building out lovely, cozy rooms.  In a used bookstore you might find a room for sitting on a comfortable chair and reading.  It will look and feel perfect.  I even saw one men’s room with this flavor, and yes it had a comfy chair.

It is striking, and instructive, that the Japanese have such a strong presence in tourism in Finland.  Their groups dominate visits to the underground rock church, for instance.  Japan and Finland both have something inscrutable in common?  And they both share an obsession with design and with small detail.

One nice thing about Helsinki is you can find a good restaurant in almost any part of town.  Unlike say Paris, New York, or London, they do not have “dining deserts” where tasty places are absent for reasons of rent or zoning.  Similarly, Helsinki also has a very high quality of small shop, in areas such as jewelry, used clothing, and design.  Again, as with the restaurants, you can find these in almost any part of town.  Helsinki has avoided the trap of looking and feeling like the other global cities, as the price-rent gradients simply are not that oppressive.

Along related lines, you will see non-white immigrants in great numbers in the center of town.  In Stockholm, in contrast, non-white immigrants are priced out of the center to a considerable degree, though of course you can see them working in service jobs there,

The spaces in the new public library are remarkably inviting for sitting and reading.  The interior is also an example of an institution that has leapt into being retro, without ever having managed to be fashionable in the interim (the opposite of mobile money in Kenya leapfrogging more antiquated money and banking institutions).  In an act of supreme wisdom, they have stacked the library with “technology,” most of all 3-D printers and advanced sewing machines.  It now looks quaint and charming, much like the older buildings around town.  It is the smart phones that hold the attention of the library visitors, even in this relatively reading-sympathetic culture.

In Nordic countries, Thai food usually is better than Chinese.  Georgian food is something you also might try in Helsinki.  Salmon soup is good, but you don’t need to have it more than once.  The whitefish and small river fish I enjoyed.

The Finns are interesting to speak to, especially about Finland.  One woman said (paraphrased): “We can talk to each other for hours, and still not understand, so how do you expect the immigrants to understand us?”  Multiple meanings can be assigned to that remark.

Another said something like: “No, the Finns are not the happiest people in the world.  Once foreigners stop asking us how happy we are, we go back to complaining at each other about everything.”  Was she complaining about that?

Everywhere you go, you see Finns doing things with each other.

In my view, Helsinki is one of Europe’s great cities, information-rich and out of the ordinary. It should be noted, however, that hardly anyone else agrees with this assessment, least of all the residents here.

*Jan Morris: life from both sides*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the recent biography from Paul Clements, which I enjoyed very much.  In part I liked it because I have never much loved her writing, or found it insightful.  To me the book (to some degree unintentionally) raises the questions of why so much travel writing does not age well, and why so much travel writing is simply boring to read, even though a trip to the same place might be fascinating.

Here was one good passage:

…at a conservative estimate, Morris’s books alone contain more than five million words — and then there is her journalism and literary criticism, which run to several million more.  From the days of the Arab News Agency in 1948 until its conclusion, her career spanned seventy-three years of publication.  Every aspect of her life fuelled her writing; her entire published corpus, from 1956 to 2021, totalled fifty-eight books, while she edited a further five volumes.

Posterity will remember Jan Morris.  What makes her work sui generis is the genre-less way that she combined topography, the social landscape, history, personal anecdote, and an acute imagination.  Morris forged an unlikely style that was vigorous, precise, and entertaining.  Hers was a language nourished by the music of childhood, conditioned by The Book of Common Prayer and Shakespeare, energised by journalism, and inspired by travelling the world as a student of human nature.  Like all writers, Morris had her foibles: her voluptuous vocabulary included words such as ‘tatterdemalion,’ ‘swagger,’ ‘gallimaufry,’ ‘coruscate,’ ‘fizz,’ ‘parvenu,’ ‘rodomontade,’ ‘gasconade,’ ‘palimpset,’ ‘simulacrum,’ ‘fandango,’ and ‘chimerical.’  The three Morris m’s — magnificent, melancholy, and myriad — ripple through her work, not forgetting her love of the two Welsh h’s —hwyl and hiraeth.  Her writing could be indulgent at times, but Morris did not take an exalted view of herself as a writer.  She was the one who called her work, in A Writer’s World, ‘hedonistic,’ ‘boisterous,’ and ‘impertinent,’  In a newspaper questionnaire in 1998, Morris was asked how she would like to be remembered, and she replied: ‘As a merry and loving writer.’

As an aside, not all those words cited seem so weird to this writer.  Swagger, fizz, and parvenu are in ordinary usage, chimerical too.

Among its other virtues, I feel this book captures British history and British intellectual history very well.  In any case, you can buy the book here, and I have ordered some additional Morris works to read.  If I really like any of them, I will let you all know.

Does visiting South Africa make you more right-wing or more left-wing?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Perhaps “both” is the correct answer?

The right-wing tendencies are easiest to explain.  South Africa is obviously much wealthier than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and of course Westerners play a larger role in its history and also in its present.  You can put different glosses on that, but a variety of those paths lead to right-wing conclusions.  The left-wing lessons are more novel to ponder, here are a few:

1. Following the removal of apartheid, a black middle class and upper class arose fairly quickly.  That testifies to the importance of environment, opportunity, and circumstance.  Of course most of the blacks in South Africa still lack adequate opportunity, most of all because of poor education and also sometimes because of poor location within the country, a legacy from segregated apartheid times.  Overall, visiting the country causes one to upgrade the importance of opportunity, and to recognize that bad circumstances for talented people can continue for a very long time.

2. Post-apartheid economic performance has been disappointing, and economic inequalities have risen not declined.  That suggests more capitalism can exacerbate economic inequality, even as political inequalities are eased.

3. Apartheid was enforced with a remarkably small number of police, per capita much less than most Western countries at the time.  That might suggest a kind of Marxian and Foucauldian view that oppressive systems take on a force of their own, through norms and expectations, and are harder to dismantle than an analysis of simple coercion might indicate.  The disappointments of post-apartheid South Africa hardly refute that suggestion, as those earlier norms and expectations are by no means entirely gone.

4. In the new, non-apartheid South Africa, sometimes class appears to be far more important than race per se.  A certain number of blacks have been slotted into the upper classes, through their business successes, but the all-important role of class continues very much as before.  Tthat point appears more Marxian than contemporary leftist, but Marx still is on the left.

5. You can see how much of South African history has been shaped by the roles of gold and diamonds in their economy.  That again points in Marxian directions, more than today’s left.  In South Africa, the means of production really mattered.

6. What is the ideal of color-blindedness supposed to mean there, after so many centuries of color mattering so much and in so many formal ways?  They even still call one group “Coloureds.”  Would it be so wrong to suspect SA color-blindedness advocates of somehow missing the point, and asking for something that is both illusory and unobtainable?

I am not sure how much I agree with all of these, only that they are ways I can imagine visiting South Africa and coming away more rather than less left-wing.

What else?

Why you should visit Cape Town, South Africa

by  Tyler Cowen in

First, it is one of the most beautiful cities and surrounding environs.  I would put it on a par with Vancouver and Hong Kong and Wellington, New Zealand.  Perhaps it is closest to Wellington.

Second, it is far safer than I was expecting.  Throughout the week, I never once experienced angst, and that included walks at night and a visit to a township.  Certainly there are dangerous places around, but you can do a whole, fulfilling trip without them.  I felt safer than in NW Washington, DC.

Third, the flight wasn’t nearly as bad as I had thought.  I am used to very long flights to Asia that leave at 11 a.m., wihch is suboptimal for me.  The flights DC to Cape Town — both ways direct I might add — left early evening.  So you read for a few hours, sleep for seven hours, and then read for a few hours again.  Then you arrive.  I’ve experienced more painful flights going to the West Coast from Dulles.  It never felt like 15 hours, nor the 14 hours coming back.

Fourth, it is inexpensive.

Fifth, the people are very friendly.

Sixth, during my trip the weather was excellent.  Some rain, but mostly during my other commitments.  It was in the 65 to 70 degree range, and sunny, most of the time I was going around.

I don’t have much to add to the tips in the guidebooks, and from MR readers.  But definitely take a day tour by car down to the bottom of the Cape, and see where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet.  Along the way, without much trying, you likely will see ostriches, baboons, and many penguins, in addition to various exotic African birds.

South Africa is one of those countries that has no other country like it.  That means you can learn more by going there.  That means you should go there.  Q.E.D.

My Conversation with the excellent Michael Nielsen

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Michael Nielsen is scientist who helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He’s worked at Y Combinator, co-authored on scientific progress with Patrick Collison, and is a prolific writer, reader, commentator, and mentor. 

He joined Tyler to discuss why the universe is so beautiful to human eyes (but not ears), how to find good collaborators, the influence of Simone Weil, where Olaf Stapledon’s understand of the social word went wrong, potential applications of quantum computing, the (rising) status of linear algebra, what makes for physicists who age well, finding young mentors, why some scientific fields have pre-print platforms and others don’t, how so many crummy journals survive, the threat of cheap nukes, the many unknowns of Mars colonization, techniques for paying closer attention, what you learn when visiting the USS Midway, why he changed his mind about Emergent Ventures, why he didn’t join OpenAI in 2015, what he’ll learn next, and more. 

And here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Now, you’ve written that in the first half of your life, you typically were the youngest person in your circle and that in the second half of your life, which is probably now, you’re typically the eldest person in your circle. How would you model that as a claim about you?

NIELSEN: I hope I’m in the first 5 percent of my life, but it’s sadly unlikely.

COWEN: Let’s say you’re 50 now, and you live to 100, which is plausible —

NIELSEN: Which is plausible.

COWEN: — and you would now be in the second half of your life.

NIELSEN: Yes. I can give shallow reasons. I can’t give good reasons. The good reason in the first half was, so much of the work I was doing was kind of new fields of science, and those tend to be dominated essentially, for almost sunk-cost reasons — people who don’t have any sunk costs tend to be younger. They go into these fields. These early days of quantum computing, early days of open science — they were dominated by people in their 20s. Then they’d go off and become faculty members. They’d be the youngest person on the faculty.

Now, maybe it’s just because I found San Francisco, and it’s such an interesting cultural institution or achievement of civilization. We’ve got this amplifier for 25-year-olds that lets them make dreams in the world. That’s, for me, anyway, for a person with my personality, very attractive for many of the same reasons.

COWEN: Let’s say you had a theory of your collaborators, and other than, yes, they’re smart; they work hard; but trying to pin down in as few dimensions as possible, who’s likely to become a collaborator of yours after taking into account the obvious? What’s your theory of your own collaborators?

NIELSEN: They’re all extremely open to experience. They’re all extremely curious. They’re all extremely parasocial. They’re all extremely ambitious. They’re all extremely imaginative.

Self-recommending throughout.

Monaco on the Marin Headlands

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Dalmation Coast in Croatia, the Amalfi Coast in Italy and Monaco’s coast on the Mediterranean Sea are often found on lists of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. Here are some pictures. Hard not to agree. The fourth picture is of the Marin coastline near San Francisco. It’s also beautiful but is it obviously more beautiful than the other coastlines? Personally, I don’t think so. But one thing is different. Far fewer people are enjoying the Marin coast. Why? Because fewer people live there. Can something be beautiful if there is no one to see it?

There is something to be said for protecting natural wilderness but must we do so on some of the most valuable land in the world?

I agree with Market Urbanism, “Quite simply, we must build Monaco on the Marin Headlands.”

Hat tip to Bryan Caplan who makes the point about beauty in his excellent, Build, Baby, Build.

Croatia

 

Amalfi

Monaco

Marin:

My excellent Conversation with Benjamin Moser

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Benjamin Moser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer celebrated for his in-depth studies of literary and cultural figures such as Susan Sontag and Clarice Lispector. His latest book, which details a twenty-year love affair with the Dutch masters, is one of Tyler’s favorite books on art criticism ever.

Benjamin joined Tyler to discuss why Vermeer was almost forgotten, how Rembrandt was so productive, what auctions of the old masters reveals about current approaches to painting, why Dutch art hangs best in houses, what makes the Kunstmuseum in the Hague so special, why Dutch students won’t read older books, Benjamin’s favorite Dutch movie, the tensions within Dutch social tolerance, the joys of living in Utrecht, why Latin Americans make for harder interview subjects, whether Brasilia works as a city, why modernism persisted in Brazil, how to appreciate Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag’s (waning) influence, V.S. Naipaul’s mentorship, Houston’s intellectual culture, what he’s learning next, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: You once wrote about Susan Sontag, and I quote, “So much of Sontag’s best work concerns the ways we try, and fail, to see.” Please explain.

MOSER: This is what On Photography is about. This is what Against Interpretation is about in Sontag’s work. Of course, in my new book, The Upside-Down World, I talk about how I’m not really great at seeing, particularly. I’m not that visual. I’m a reader. I’m a bookworm. Often, when I’ve looked at paintings, I’ve realized how little I actually see. Sometimes I do feel embarrassed by it. You’ll read the label and it’ll be three sentences, and it’ll say like, A Man with a Dog. You’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even see the dog.” You know what I mean?

On these very basic levels, I just think, “Oh, if someone doesn’t point it out to me, I really don’t see.” I think that that was one of the fascinating things about Sontag, that she was not really able to see. She was actually quite terrible at seeing, and this was especially true in her relationships. She was very bad at seeing what other people were thinking and feeling.

I think because she was aware of that, she tried very hard to remedy it, but it’s just not something you can force. You can’t force yourself to like certain music or to like certain tastes that you might not actually like.

COWEN: What was Sontag most right about or most insightful about?

MOSER: I think this question of images — what images do — and photography and how representations, metaphors can pervert things. She had a very deep repulsion to photography. She really hated photography, and this is why a lot of photographers hated her because they felt this, even though she didn’t really say it. She really didn’t trust it. She really thought it was wicked. At the same time, for somebody who had a deficit, I guess you could say, in seeing, she really relied on it to understand the world.

I think that tension is very instructive for us, because now, she already says 50 years ago, “There are all these images. We don’t know what to do with them. We don’t know how to process them.” Forget AI, forget Russian trolls on Twitter. She uses this word I really like, hygiene, a lot. She talks about mental hygiene and how you can clean the rusty pipes in your brain. That’s why I think reading her helped me at least to understand a lot of what I’m seeing in the world.

COWEN: Do you think she will simply end up forgotten?

Again, I am happy to recommend Benjamin’s latest book The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters.

The Screwworm

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Atlantic: Screwworms once killed millions of dollars’ worth of cattle a year in the southern U.S. Their range extended from Florida to California, and they infected any living, warm-blooded animal: not only cattle but deer, squirrels, pets, and even the occasional human. In fact, the screwworm’s scientific name is C. hominivorax or “man eater”—so named after a horrific outbreak among prisoners on Devil’s Island, an infamous 19th-century French penal colony in South America.

For untold millennia, screwworms were a grisly fact of life in the Americas. In the 1950s, however, U.S. ranchers began to envision a new status quo. They dared to dream of an entire country free of screwworms. At their urging, the United States Department of Agriculture undertook what would ultimately become an immense, multidecade effort to wipe out the screwworms, first in the U.S. and then in Mexico and Central America—all the way down to the narrow strip of land that is the Isthmus of Panama. The eradication was a resounding success. But the story does not end there. Containing a disease is one thing. Keeping it contained is another thing entirely, as the coronavirus pandemic is now so dramatically demonstrating.

To get the screwworms out, the USDA to this day maintains an international screwworm barrier along the Panama-Colombia border. The barrier is an invisible one, and it is kept in place by constant human effort. Every week, planes drop 14.7 million sterilized screwworms over the rainforest that divides the two countries. A screwworm-rearing plant operates 24/7 in Panama. Inspectors cover thousands of square miles by motorcycle, boat, and horseback, searching for stray screwworm infections north of the border. The slightest oversight could undo all the work that came before.

A reminder that civilization takes work. Excellent piece by Sarah Zhang. Read the whole thing.

Hat tip: Stone Age Herbalist.