Category: Travel
There is No Such Thing as Development Economics
I used to think there was such a thing as development economics. There are still richer and poorer countries, of course, but is there a “development economics,” a special type of economics for poor countries? I don’t think so. Maybe there once was. In the twentieth century, divergence in per-capita GDP increased big time and it was a burning question why poor countries weren’t on the same development path as the developed nations. Starting around 1990-2000, however, we have seen convergence. Most countries are now on the same path. Poorer countries and richer countries are becoming more alike, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. I tweeted the following news headline recently:
Notice the commentary on NYC infrastructure but also the man bites dog angle. In Pakistan people on social media are apparently sharing videos of flooding in the New York subway to complain about the poor state of infrastructure in Pakistan!
My own anecdote fit the pattern. This week I am in Delhi and due to a series of unfortunate supply chain shocks at my house-build in the US, for the first time in 3 weeks I have running hot water and reliable internet access! Not only that but although India has sadly fallen for the paper straw nonsense the top hotels remain free from flow constrictors so the water gushes out of the shower with elan just as God intended. Civilization is truly moving back east.
More generally, poorer and richer countries face many of the same problems today: infrastructure, low-skill workers and technological change, climate adaption and so forth. Is the latest paper on cash transfers, pollution, or corruption about a poor country or a rich country? It’s hard to tell. Poor countries still have their own unique problems, of course, but those problems are best analyzed by country rather than by income category. India is not the same as Thailand or Peru. I see little that unites poor countries under the rubric development economics.
Cali bleg
Your advice is much appreciated, thank you!
Medellin bleg
What to do and where to eat — your suggestions are most welcome!
My Conversation with Barkha Dutt
Here is the link, and here is part of the CWT summary:
Barkha joined Tyler to discuss how Westerners can gain a more complete picture of India, the misogyny still embedded in Indian society, why family law should be agnostic of religious belief, the causes of declining fertility in India, why relations between Hindus and Muslims seem to be worsening, how caste has persisted so strongly in India, the success of India’s subsidized institutes of higher education, the best city for Indian food, the power of Amar Chitra Katha’s comics, the influence of her English liberal arts education, the future of Anglo-American liberalism in India, the best ways to use Twitter, and more.
And from the conversation:
COWEN: Many outsiders have the impression that relations between Hindus and Muslims and the aggregate in India have become worse over the last 10 to 15 years. If you put aside particular actions of particular political personalities, and you try to think of a structural reason why that might be true — because normally the intuition is, people grow richer, they’re more tolerant, there’s more commercial interaction, there’s more intermingling — what would be your structural account of why, in some ways, that problem has become worse?
DUTT: You just spoke of intermingling, Tyler. I think that one of the biggest reasons for the worsening relations, or the othering, as it were, of communities that are not your own is the ghettoization of how people live. For example, if there were neighborhoods where people live cheek by jowl — that still happens, of course, in many cities, but it also happens less than it used to, and that is true. We are seeing a Muslim quarter, to give an example, or a Christian quarter in a way that we wouldn’t have before our cities were so ghettoized.
I think that kind of intermingling, of living in the same housing societies or neighborhoods, participating in each other’s festivals as opposed to just tolerating them — those are the structural changes or shifts that we are witnessing. It’s also true that it is tougher for a person from a religious minority — in particular, an Indian Muslim — to get a house as easily as a non-Muslim. I think I would be lying if I did not acknowledge that. Also, the last point is interfaith marriages or interfaith love. This is a deeply politicized issue as well.
While I’m talking to you, in the last 24 hours in the Southern city of Hyderabad, one of our big technology hubs, we’ve had reports of a Muslim family that attacked a Hindu man for marrying a Muslim woman. In reverse, we see Muslim women also targeted all the time if they choose to marry Hindus. This is not helped by the fact that you’ve had several states now talking about what they call love jihad. That’s the phrase they use for marriages that are across religious communities, in particular between Hindus and Muslims.
The percentage of Indians marrying not just outside their religion but also outside their caste — which in Hinduism is a hierarchical system of traditional occupation that you’re born into — is woefully low. I don’t know if I remember my data correctly, but I think less than 5 percent of Indians actually marry outside of their own communities. I would need to go back to that number and check it, but that’s what I remember off the top of my head.
Those are the structural reasons: the fact that people don’t love or have relationships outside of their community, don’t live enough with people of diverse faiths, and don’t participate in each other’s lives.
We used to have this politically correct phrase called tolerance, which I actually just hate, and I keep nudging people towards the Indian military. The Indian military actually has a system of the commanding officer taking on the faith of his troops during religious prayers. The military has multireligious places of worship. It even has something called an MMG, which is not just a medium machine gun but a Mandir Masjid Gurdwara, which is all the different faiths praying together at the same place. We don’t see a lot of that kind of thing happening outside of the military.
Another survey done by Pew reinforced this when it spoke of Indians today being more like a thali than khichri. Let me just explain that. A thali is a silver tray where you get little balls of different food items. Pew found that Hindus and Muslims — when surveyed, both spoke of the need for religious diversity as being a cornerstone of India. They like the idea of India as a thali, where there were different little food items, but separate food items. The khichri is rice and lentils all mixed up and eaten with pickle. The khichri is that intermingling, the untidy overlapping.
We are just seeing less and less of that overlapping. In my opinion, that is tragic. Where there is social interdependence, where there is economic interdependence, where there is personal interdependence is when relationships thrive and flourish and get better. But when they remain ghettos, separations just tolerating each other — that, I think, remains in the realm of othering.
Recommended, interesting throughout.
How much pilot training should be required?
[Derek} Thompson: To what extent do you think regulatory policy is making America’s airlines particularly fragile to the sort of problems we’re currently experiencing?
[Scott] Keyes: One of the front-and-center issues discussed in the airline industry right now is this question of pilot training. Is 1,500 hours the proper amount of air time we should be expecting from pilots before we certify them to fly commercial jets? On the one hand, it’s easy to say, “You can’t be too careful.” Just imagine the attack ads if somebody votes to decrease the training requirement, and then all of a sudden there’s a crash. The optics are horrendous. On the other hand, the U.S. is a bit of an outlier. Most other countries do not require anything near this level of training ahead of being certified. The U.S. historically has not required that level of training. And we let foreign pilots fly to JFK and SFO and LAX without this requirement. All that said, there’s still no quick overnight fix that will immediately get you more flights, more pilots, and a greater supply of air travel. Certainly not for this summer.
Here is more on why air travel is so screwed up this summer, via Daniel Wilner.
Cork notes
It is a lovely town to walk in, seems to have better weather than Dublin, and Honan Chapel is to my mind Ireland’s single greatest sight. Most of the time, you can look around in any direction — not just the best direction — and see pleasing sights. So I can heartily recommend a visit.
But I am puzzled by the near-complete absence of restaurant food, at least in the city centre. You can walk for half an hour and maybe see only one or two places you would even consider eating in. Especially at lunch time. So many places open at five. Other places close at three. I’ve not been looking for “a standard mid-level pizzeria,” but at times I would have settled for one but I never saw one. Not once. There are a reasonable number of coffee places that serve some sandwiches. Only a small number of pubs serve much food. I saw two Chinese restaurants, neither of which seemed appealing. I walked for at least ten minutes from the main cinema down a main street — nothing, not one place to eat. Many neighborhoods, whether residential or commercial, seem to have zero restaurants whatsoever. No fish and chips takeaways either.
I looked for Indian food, and was pleased to walk by Eastern Tandoori across from the opera house. The wooden sign out on the street says they open at 5 p.m. But they don’t, and if you dig deep enough on the web you will find they are closed until July 1. I didn’t find any other (actually open) Indian restaurant to eat at. I ate at Ignite (Pakistani, and quite excellent). Their Facebook page says they open at noon, but alas no they open at 5 p.m. Many other restaurants exist on paper but seem to never open, and this is in a prosperous and bustling town. It is easier to find a barbershop here, or a book store.
The English Market, the main place to buy raw ingredients in town, is excellent. It has one OK cafe upstairs, and that closes well before dinner time. It is fine for a chowder and some smoked trout spread, but not too much more.
Nor is the city inundated with American fast food. Nor does Dublin have this problem.
Within an hour of Cork city centre, there are numerous excellent restaurants, including with Michelin stars. Cork is set in the heart of Irish food country, believe it or not. Breads and cheeses are excellent.
So what gives? Why are the corporate entities here so reluctant to sell me cooked food?
Cork bleg
Yes, Cork Ireland. What should I do and where should I eat? Your advice is most welcome, thank you in advance.
The Insane Wait Times to Get an Appointment for a US Visitor Visa
The wait times to get an appointment to get a visa to visit the US are absurdly long. To get an appointment for a Visitor Visa in New Delhi, for example, takes 291 days. In Mexico City the wait time is 581 days. In Nairobi, Kenya it takes 664 days! Moreover, “It should be noted that the “Wait Times for a Nonimmigrant Visa to be Processed” information by country does not include time required for administrative processing.”
In the past, I’ve criticized India for making it cumbersome to get a tourist visa–greatly lowering much needed tourism revenues in India–but India has been moving in the right direction. The US in contrast is just an embarassment.
Hat tip: Todd Moss on twitter.
Qubit teleportation between non-neighbouring nodes in a quantum network
Future quantum internet applications will derive their power from the ability to share quantum information across the network. Quantum teleportation allows for the reliable transfer of quantum information between distant nodes, even in the presence of highly lossy network connections. Although many experimental demonstrations have been performed on different quantum network platforms, moving beyond directly connected nodes has, so far, been hindered by the demanding requirements on the pre-shared remote entanglement, joint qubit readout and coherence times. Here we realize quantum teleportation between remote, non-neighbouring nodes in a quantum network. The network uses three optically connected nodes based on solid-state spin qubits. The teleporter is prepared by establishing remote entanglement on the two links, followed by entanglement swapping on the middle node and storage in a memory qubit. We demonstrate that, once successful preparation of the teleporter is heralded, arbitrary qubit states can be teleported with fidelity above the classical bound, even with unit efficiency. These results are enabled by key innovations in the qubit readout procedure, active memory qubit protection during entanglement generation and tailored heralding that reduces remote entanglement infidelities. Our work demonstrates a prime building block for future quantum networks and opens the door to exploring teleportation-based multi-node protocols and applications.
Here is the Nature paper, by S.L.N. Hermans, et.al., via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The best arguments for and against the alien visitation hypothesis
Those are the subject of my latest Bloomberg column, about 2x longer than usual, WaPo link here. Excerpt, from the segment on arguments against:
The case against visits by aliens:
1. Alien sightings remain relatively rare.
Let’s say alien drone probes can make it here. That would imply the existence of a very advanced civilization that can span great distances and command energy with remarkable efficiency. If that’s the case, why isn’t the sky full of aliens? Why aren’t there sightings from more than just military craft?
So the question is not so much, “Why don’t we see aliens?” as, “Why don’t we see more of them?” It is a perfectly valid (and embarrassing) question. On one hand, the aliens are impressive enough to send craft here. On the other, they seem constrained by scarcity.
Are we humans like those bears filmed in the Richard Attenborough nature programs, worthy of periodic visits from drone cameras but otherwise of little interest? The reality is that bears, and indeed most other animals, see humans quite often…
3. The alien-origin hypothesis relies too much on the “argument from elimination.”
The argument from elimination is a common rhetorical tactic, but it can lead you astray. You start by listing what you think are all the possibilities and rule them out one by one: Not the Russians, not sensor error, and so on — until the only conclusion left is that they are alien visitors. As Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes once said: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
The argument from elimination works fine when there is a fixed set of possibilities, such as the murder suspects on a train. The argument is more dangerous when the menu of options is unclear in the first place. Proponents of the alien origin view spend too much time knocking down other hypotheses and not enough time making the case for the presence of aliens.
And this:
There is an argument that is often used against the alien-origin hypothesis, but in fact can be turned either way: If they are alien visitors, why don’t we have better and more definitive forms of evidence? Why is the available video evidence so hard to interpret? Why isn’t there a proverbial “smoking gun” of proof for an alien spacecraft?
This particular counter isn’t entirely convincing. First, the best evidence may be contained in the still-classified materials. Second, the same question can be used against non-alien hypotheses. If the sensor readings were just storms or some other mundane phenomena, surely that would become increasingly obvious over time with better satellite imaging.
The continued, ongoing and indeed intensifying mystery of the sightings seems to militate in favor of a truly unusual explanation. It will favor both the alien-visitation and the religious-miracle hypotheses. If it really were a flock of errant birds, combined with some sensor errors, we would know by now.
Recommended.
Slovakian Asks Good Questions About American Suburbs
My questions are:
What do you actually do? Are you always stuck inside? What did you do when you were a child and couldn’t drive?
Why do you have these sorts of strange regulations? Are your officials so incompetent? Is this due to lobbying from car or oil companies? I don’t get it.
Why is there no public transport? It seems like the only thing is the yellow school bus, idk.
He says there can be only one family houses. Why? Why can’t you have idk a commie block in the middle of such a suburb? Or row houses or whatever.
Why are there no businesses inside these? I mean, he says it’s illegal, just why? If I lived in such a place, I’d just buy a house next to mine and turn it into a tavern or a convenience store or whatever. Is that simply not possible and illegal?
These places have front and backyards. But they’re mostly empty. Some backyards have a pool maybe, but it’s mostly just green grass. Why don’t you grow plants in your yards? Like potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes or whatever. Why do you own this land, if you never use it?
Originally from Reddit.
My Conversation with the excellent Chris Blattman
Here is the audio, transcript, and video, we did this one face-to-face. Here is part of the summary:
What causes war?…Chris and Tyler also cover why he doesn’t think demographics are a good predictor of a country’s willingness to go to war, the informal norms that restrain nations, the dangers of responding to cyberattacks, the breakdown of elite bargains in Ethiopia, the relationship between high state capacity and war, the greatest threats to peace in Ireland, why political speech isn’t usually a reliable indicator of future action, Vladimir Putin’s centralized motives for invading Ukraine, why he’s long on Colombia democratically — but not economically, why more money won’t necessarily help the Mexican government curb cartel violence, the single-mindedness necessary for bouldering, how Harold Innis’s insights about commodities led Chris to start studying war, how the University of Chicago has maintained a culture of free inquiry, and more.
And from the dialogue:
COWEN: If you look at the marginal cases — since there are some wars — there’s a bunch of cases, even if unusual, where someone is right at the margin. At the margin, what are the factors that are most likely to account for the explanatory variation in whether or not a country goes to war?
BLATTMAN: For me, the one that people talk the least about that strikes me as the most important is how concentrated is power in the country. What’s holding back someone from considering all of the implications of their actions on other people, should they decide to take their society to war?
It’s maybe the most important margin in history, and it’s maybe the one that no one of my tribes — which are political economists — think and talk the least about. It’s the one that — in journalism, people leap to psychological explanations, and they try to understand the psychology of leaders, but they don’t try to understand the way in which they’re constrained. So, it’s this combination of the most important and the most ignored.
COWEN: So federal societies are less likely to go to war?
Interesting throughout. And I am very happy to recommend Chris’s new and important book Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Path to Peace. And here is my earlier 2018 Conversation with Chris.
The pull of the equilibrium?
“Man who never wanted to ride in fighter jet accidentally ejects himself”
A man who was terrified by his retirement gift from co-workers — a ride in a fighter jet — grabbed the ejector handle in a panic and was launched through the skies 2,500 feet above the ground, says the official government report on the incident.
The ride on March 20, 2019, had been arranged as a surprise gift to the 64-year-old man, who was leaving his job at a French defense contractor. His co-workers took him to the Saint-Dizier air base, 100 miles east of Paris, and announced he would be flying in a Dassault Rafale B.
The man had never expressed any desire to fly in a fighter jet and had no military aviation experience, said the report by investigators for France’s aviation safety agency…
Safety checks were apparently lax, and he was allowed to adjust his own gear. His helmet strap was unfastened, his oxygen mask unattached, his visor was up, and his seat harness was loose.
On takeoff, the pilot and passenger were subjected to 4 Gs. Leveling off around 2,500 feet, that dropped to negative 0.6 Gs, a feeling of weightlessness. At that point, said a translated version of the report, “the insufficiently strapped and totally surprised passenger” grabbed for the nearest handle — which turned out to activate the ejector seat.
He landed in a field near the German border with only minor injuries. Here is the full story.
Manchester airport car parking fact of the day
In 2019, Manchester Airport Group’s aviation revenue was £218m yet car-parking alone was £147m.
For contrast, note that the largest car-parking provider in the UK does only about £250m a year. It is funny to think of an airport as being so much in the car parking business.
Here is the full report, all via Nick Thornsby.
James Person’s Hawaii bleg
Could you please recommend or ask your readers’ recommendations for books about Hawaiian history and culture? I am visiting the state for the first time and like to approach my travels with a deeper understanding as you exemplify in your MR travel posts. Thank you for your time and help and especially for MR and Conversations!
Your assistance for James would be much appreciated!