Category: Travel
The anti-tourism movement continues into winter season
It’s well past the August holiday peak, but anger against over-tourism in Spain is spilling into the off-season, as holiday-makers continue to seek winter sun.
On Sunday locals in the Basque city of San Sebastian plan to take to the streets under the banner: “We are in danger; degrow tourism!”
And in November anti-tourism protesters will gather in Seville.
Thousands turned out last Sunday in the Canary Islands, so the problem is clearly not going away.
This year appears to have marked a watershed for attitudes to tourism in Spain and many other parts of Europe, as the post-Covid travel boom has seen the industry equal and often surpass records set before the pandemic.
Spain is expected to receive more than 90 million foreign visitors by the end of the year. The consultancy firm Braintrust estimates that the number of arrivals will rise to 115 million by 2040, well ahead of the current world leader, France.
Here is the full story.
“Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations”
By Rohit Krishnan:
Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations conducted a thousand times a day. And that drives the character of life here.
Now, I am seeing the country properly after several years. And it’s a major change.
Visible infrastructure has gotten much better. Roads are good, well maintained, and highways are excellent. They built 7500 miles last year, just as the year before. And they’re fantastic…
But:
Living in a country built off of bilateral negotiations for everything is simultaneously the libertarian dream and an incredibly inefficient way to do most collective things. Ronald Coase told us this in 1960.
“if property rights are well-defined and transaction costs are low, private parties can negotiate solutions to externalities without the need for government intervention”
But Indian life is dominated by transaction costs. Every time a driver pokes his car into a turn when the signal’s not for him it creates friction that ripples through the entire system. Every time someone has to spend effort doing a 1:1 negotiation they lose time and efficiency. Horribly so.
…The reason this isn’t an easy fix is that the ability to negotiate everything is also the positive. When every rule is negotiable you get to push back on silly things like closing off a section of a parking garage with rubber cones by just asking. Life in the West feels highly constricted primarily because of this, we’re all drowning in rules.
Here is the full essay.
My excellent Conversation with Tom Tugendhat
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tom Tugendhat has served as a Member of Parliament since 2015, holding roles such as Security Minister and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Before entering Parliament, Tom served in in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also worked for the Foreign Office, helped establish the National Security Council of Afghanistan, and served as military assistant and principal adviser to the Chief of the Defense Staff.
Tyler and Tom examine the evolving landscape of governance and leadership in the UK today, touching on the challenges of managing London under the UK’s centralized system, why England remains economically unbalanced, his most controversial view on London’s architecture, whether YIMBYism in England can succeed, the unique politics and history of Kent, whether the system of private schools needs reform, his pick for the greatest unselected prime minister, whether Brexit revealed a defect in the parliamentary system, whether the House of Lords should be abolished, why the British monarchy continues to captivate the world, devolution in Scotland and Northern Ireland, how learning Arabic in Yemen affected his life trajectory, his read on the Middle East and Russia, the Tom Tugendhat production function, his pitch for why a talented young person should work in the British Civil Service, and more.
And here is an excerpt:
COWEN: Okay. First question, what is your favorite walk around London, and what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand?
TUGENDHAT: Oh, my favorite walk is down the river. A lot of people walk down the river. One of the best things about walking down the river in London is, first of all, it shows two things. One, that London is actually an incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world within seconds, just by walking down the river. Very often, even in the middle of the day, there’s nobody there. You walk past things that are just extraordinary. You walk past a customs house. It’s not used anymore, but it was the customs house for 300, 400, 500 years. You walk past, obviously, the Tower of London. You walk past Tower Bridge. You walk past many things like that.
Actually, you’re walking past a lot of modern London as well, and you see the reality of London, which is — the truth is, London isn’t a single city. It’s many, many different villages, all cobbled together in various different ways. I think outsiders miss the fact that there’s a real intimacy to London that you miss if all you’re doing is you’re going on the Tube, or if you’re going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see real communities and real smaller communities.
And:
COWEN: Can the British system of government in its current parliamentary form — how well can that work without broadly liberal individualistic foundations in public opinion?
TUGENDHAT: I think it works extremely well at ensuring that truly liberal foundations are maintained. I mean that not in the American sense; I mean in a genuine, the old liberal tradition that emerges from the UK in the 1700s, 1800s, where freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, the right to own property, and all those principles that then became embedded in various different constitutions around the world, including your own. I think it does very well at doing that because it forces you, our system forces you, into partnership. There are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in Parliament over the next four or five years.
And there’s four of us currently going for leadership at the Conservative Party. There’s one reason why, despite the fact that we’re competing almost in a US primary system, the way in which we are dealing with each other is very different, is because we’re all going to have to work together for the next four years. Whoever wins is going to have to work with the other three, and the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn’t true. There’s only 121 of us Conservative MPs in Parliament, and what this system forces on us is the need to deal with each other in a way that you have to deal with somebody if you’re going to deal with them tomorrow. I think that’s one of the reasons why the British political system has endured because it forces you to remember that there’s a long-term interest, not an immediate one, not just a short-term one.
Recommended, highly intelligent throughout, including on China, Russia, and Yemen.
Are “anchor babies” underrated?
Did you worry about the 2020 fall in U.S. fertility? Well, ponder this:
Birth rates in Canada and the USA declined sharply in March 2020 and deviated from historical trends. This decline was absent in similarly developed European countries. We argue that the selective decline was driven by incoming individuals, who would have travelled from abroad and given birth in Canada and the USA, had there been no travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, by leveraging data from periods before and during the COVID-19 travel restrictions, we quantified the extent of births by incoming individuals. In an interrupted time series analysis, the expected number of such births in Canada was 970 per month (95% CI: 710-1,200), which is 3.2% of all births in the country. The corresponding estimate for the USA was 6,700 per month (95% CI: 3,400-10,000), which is 2.2% of all births. A secondary difference-in-differences analysis gave similar estimates at 2.8% and 3.4% for Canada and the USA, respectively. Our study reveals the extent of births by recent international arrivals, which hitherto has been unknown and infeasible to study.
That is from a new paper by Amit N. Sawant and Mats J. Stensrud, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Why Don’t We Have Flying Cars?
In the 1970s the general aviation aircraft industry was selling 15,000 or more aircraft a year but that number fell by a factor of about 10 in the early 1980s. What happened? One factor was a massive increase in tort liability as discussed in my paper with Eric Helland, Product Liability and Moral Hazard: Evidence from General Aviation. Another factor was ever-increasing FAA regulation.
But Max Tabarrok raises an interesting puzzle. It’s not at all obvious that the regulation of personal aircraft has been more strict than that of automobiles. So why the big difference in outcomes? There is, however, one small but potentially very important difference between the regulation of cars and aircraft.
By far the costliest part of the FAA’s regulation is not any particular standard imposed on pilot training, liability, or aircraft safety, but a slight shift in the grammatical tense of all these rules. The Department of Transportation (DOT) sets strict safety requirements for cars, but manufacturers are allowed to release new designs without first getting the DOT to sign off that all the requirements have been satisfied. The law is enforced ex post, and the government will impose recalls and fines when manufacturers fail to follow the law.
The FAA, by contrast, enforces all of its safety rules ex ante. Before aircraft manufacturers can do anything with a design, they have to get the FAA’s signoff, which can take more than a decade. This regulatory approach also makes the FAA far more risk-averse, since any problems with an aircraft after release are blamed on the FAA’s failure to catch them. With ex post enforcement, the companies that failed to follow the law would be blamed, and the FAA rewarded, for enforcing recall.
This subtle difference in the ordering of legal enforcement is the major cause of the stagnation of aircraft design and manufacturing.
In some ways, this is an optimistic message, since it illuminates an attractive political compromise: keep all of the safety standards on airplanes exactly as they are, but enforce these standards like they’re enforced with cars—i.e., through post-market surveillance, recall, and punishment. This small change would reinvigorate the general aviation industry, putting it back on the exponential trend upwards that it lost 50 years ago.
Banning Airbnb in NYC
- NYC is now a more expensive destination for visitors:
- The average hotel prices in New York City rose 7.4 percent over the past year (July 2023 to July 2024), compared with an only 2.1 percent increase nationally, according to data from CoStar.
- Despite the law’s promise, rent hits an all-time high and vacancy rates stay stagnant:
- Legislators claimed the law would protect affordable housing, yet rent climbed 3.4 percent during the first 11 months the law was enacted, according to StreetEasy, suggesting that other factors are driving up rent prices.
- The median asking price of rent downtown Manhattan over the past year reached a peak of $5,000 USD for the first time in history.
- The rent increase in New York City since the law took effect continues to outpace nearby cities like Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
- Vacancy rates for apartments in New York City have remained virtually unchanged at 3.4 percent since the law took effect, according to Apartment List.
- New York City’s vacancy rates also continue to significantly lag behind Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C.
Here is the full Airbnb blog post.
Mobility vs. density in American history
American history is much more about rapid and cheap transport than about extremes of population density. Even New York, our densest major city by far, became dense relatively late in American history. To this day, the United States is not extremely dense, not say by European or East Asian standards.
But in American history, themes of horses, faster ships, safer ships, turnpikes, canals, our incredible river network, railroads, cars, and planes have been absolutely central to our development. America has put in a very strong performance in all those areas. When it comes to density, we have a smaller number of victories. The moon landing was mobility, but not density.
Many of our Founding Fathers were in fact a bit suspicious of density. So why not play to your own cultural and also geographic strengths? After all, the United States is arguably the most successful country.
American SMSAs are so often more impressive than are American cities per se.
These days I see an urbanist movement that is more obsessed with density than with mobility. I favor relaxing or eliminating many restrictions on urban density, and American cities would be better as a result. Upward economic mobility would rise, and Oakland would blossom. But still I am more interested in mobility, which I see as having a greater upside.
One issue is simply that urban density seems to lower fertility. It is not obvious the same can be said for mobility.
And do you really want to spread and replicate the politics of our most dense areas?
Is not mobility rather than density better for raising a class of young men who will fight to defend their country?
Do not mobile, scattered immigrants assimilate better than densely packed ones?
The density crowd is very interested in high-speed rail, which I (strongly) favor for the Northeast corridor, but otherwise am not excited about, at least not for America. Otherwise, the density crowd works to raise the status of a lot of low-speed means of transport, for instance bicycles. Bicycles are also precarious, and their riders break the traffic laws at a very high frequency. I do not wish to ban bicycles, but I do wish we could program them not to run red lights. (I wonder how much the demand for them would then fall.)
I prefer to look to a better future where higher-speed transport is both affordable and green. Ultimately, low-speed transport is a poor country thing. It is also a poor country thing to have a lot of different speeds on your roads at the same time (I will never forget my first India visit in 2004). High variance of speed also can prove dangerous, as evidenced by the research of Charles Lave.
I do not want to see the United States moving in poor country directions.
If you are obsessed with mobility, you will attach great importance to Uber, Waymo, self-driving vehicles more generally, and better aviation. To me these are major advances, and they all can get much, much better yet.
I do not know if current plans for Neom, in Saudi Arabia, can prove workable or affordable. Nonetheless, the idea of rapid transport along “The Line” at least represents an attractive mode of thought. A better direction for future exploration than bicycles.
These points were obvious to many people in the 1960s. The Jetsons had their (safe) flying cars. The ultimate innovation in Star Trek was the transporter.
Jane Jacobs was obsessed with the West Village, an amazing part of America. Yet, as far as I can tell (I haven’t read all her work), she didn’t write much about how to get more people visiting, and learning from, the West Village. Hers was the perspective of the insider who already lives there. That is one valid perspective, but not the only one.
Robert Moses was obsessed with building the Cross-Bronx Expressway. That was a mixed blessing (see Robert Caro), but it did reflect his interest in mobility rather than density per se.
Today the world is full of anti-tourist movements, opposed to at least some kinds of mobility. I prefer to push back on most of those, using Pigouvian fees to protect Venice and other locales when needed.
Ireland strikes me as the one country today that truly should be obsessed with density, not mobility. Before 1840, the country had many more people than it does today. And it could once again, easily. In the meantime, there are far too few structures and the cost of living is very high. Dublin and Belfast also need more cultural infrastructure (requiring higher populations) to be bigger draws for talented foreign workers.
The correct answers here really are going to depend on the countries and regions under consideration.
Switzerland, a highly successful country, also pays great heed to mobility. The Swiss tunnels through the Alps are some of Europe’s greatest achievements, though today we take them for granted. And the Swiss are trying to do road upgrades without slowing traffic. You don’t have to put more people in Bern if it is easier to get to Bern, and away from Bern.
Mobility often gives you more algorithmic freedom than does density.
So, at least amongst the urbanists, perhaps density is these days a wee bit overrated? After all, the net flow of American citizens still is to the suburbs.
The new Elizondo book
The title is Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs. This is a difficult book to review. For instance, it has passages like the following:
In one particular instance, a senior CIA official and his wife had a terrifying UAP experience in the backyard of their own home. When they awoke lying on the ground in the yard, the CIA officer had a small hole punched in the back of his neck and his wife had a small metallic object recovered from her nose when she sneezed [TC: what percentage of younger American women have this?]. Making things even more interesting, CIA doctors were notified of the circumstances and examined the patients.
I would bet very heavily against what seems to be Elizondo’s interpretation of those events. So if you read this book, do not trust any section that puts forward propositions about aliens. And that is much of the book.
That said, no matter what your view on aliens, the bureaucratic history surrounding debates on aliens is a fascinating one, and one very much underexplored by serious scholars. For instance, the more skeptical you are about aliens, the more you have to think our military and intelligence bureaucracies are just entirely, out of control insane. Here you will get a first person account of how incidents such as Tic Toc and GIMBAL evolved. I am not talking about interpretations concerning the aliens, I mean just the history of how these events were processed, recorded, and discussed. Along that exceedingly scarce dimension, this is indeed a valuable memoir.
Can you trust Elizondo on such “ordinary” matters when you cannot trust him on the accounts of the aliens? I am not sure, but my intuition says yes? So in probabilistic terms, this is a historical document of import. If used with care.
I cannot recommend a book which to me has so many apparent blatant falsehoods, but I would not try to talk you out of reading it either. There is something here, and time will tell what exactly that is.
My excellent Conversation with Nate Silver
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
In his second appearance, Nate Silver joins the show to cover the intersections of predictions, politics, and poker with Tyler. They tackle how coin flips solve status quo bias, gambling’s origins in divination, what kinds of betting Nate would ban, why he’s been limited on several of the New York sports betting sites, how game theory changed poker tournaments, whether poker players make for good employees, running and leaving FiveThirtyEight, why funky batting stances have disappeared, AI’s impact on sports analytics, the most underrated NBA statistic, Sam Bankman-Fried’s place in “the River,” the trait effective altruists need to develop, the stupidest risks Tyler and Nate would take, prediction markets, how many monumental political decisions have been done under the influence of drugs, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why shouldn’t people gamble only in the positive sum game? Take the US stock market — that certainly seems to be one of them — and manufacture all the suspense you want. Learn about the companies, the CEO. Get your thrill that way and don’t do any other gambling. Why isn’t that just better for everyone?
SILVER: Look, I’m not necessarily a fan of gambling for gambling’s sake. Twice a year, I’ll be in casinos and in Las Vegas a lot. Twice a year, I’ll have a friend who is like, “Let’s just go play blackjack for an hour and have a couple of free drinks,” and things like that. But I like to make bets where I think, at least in principle, I have an edge, or at least can fool myself into thinking I have an edge.
Sometimes, with the sports stuff, you probably know deep down you’re roughly break-even or something like that. You’re doing some smart things, like looking at five different sites and finding a line that’s best, which wipes out some but not all of the house edge. But no, I’m not a huge fan of slot machines, certainly. I think they are very gnarly and addictive in various ways.
COWEN: They limit your sports betting, don’t they?
SILVER: Yes, I’ve been limited by six or seven of the nine New York retail sites.
COWEN: What’s the potential edge they think you might have?
SILVER: It’s just that. If you’re betting $2,000 on the Wizards-Hornets game the moment the line comes out on DraftKings, you’re clearly not a recreational bettor. Just the hallmarks of trying to be a winning player, meaning betting lines early because the line’s early and you don’t have price discovery yet. The early lines are often very beatable. Betting on obscure stuff like “Will this player get X number of rebounds?” or things like that. If you have a knack for — if DraftKings has a line at -3.5 and it’s -4 elsewhere, then it can be called steam chasing, where you bet before a line moves in other places. If you have injury information . . .
It’s a very weird game. One thing I hope people are more aware of is that a lot of the sites — and some are better than others — but they really don’t want winning players. Their advertising has actually changed. It used to be, they would say for Daily Fantasy Sports, which was the predecessor, “Hey, you’re a smart guy” — the ads are very cynical — “You’re a smart guy in a cubicle. Why don’t you go do all your spreadsheet stuff and actually draft this team and make a lot of money, and literally, you’ll be sleeping with supermodels in two months. You win the million-dollar prize from DraftKings.”
And:
COWEN: If we could enforce just an outright ban, what’s the cost-benefit analysis on banning all sports gambling?
SILVER: I’m more of a libertarian than a strict utilitarian, I think.
COWEN: Sure, but what’s the utilitarian price of being a libertarian?
Recommended, interesting and engaging throughout. And yes, we talk about Luka too. Here is my first 2016 CWT with Nate, full of predictions I might add, and here is Nate’s very good new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.
India’s Cities
The Economist has a good piece on India’s cities. Mumbai has done a great job in recent years at building more infrastructure but infrastructure alone is not enough:
…An overly prescriptive, 2,200-page National Building Code and a surfeit of local rules prevent developers from making optimal use of pricey urban land. Mumbai has some of the most restrictive land-use regulations of any global megacity. In most well-functioning cities about 90% of land is given over to streets, public spaces and buildings. In Mumbai and other Indian cities, those uses take up less than half of the land area, according to analysis by Bimal Patel, an urban planner. The rest is wasted on “private open spaces”—mostly building compounds that are walled off and put to no good use.
The result is that Indian cities are sparsely built-up yet feel densely crowded, note Sanjeev Sanyal and Aakanksha Arora of the prime minister’s Economic Advisory Council. Cities sprawl outwards, driving up the cost of providing infrastructure.
The Economist misses, however, that to truly solve the problem what is needed is better institutions including private cities. Here’s Shruti Rajagopalan and myself writing in the NYTimes:
If China shows the costs of too much top-down planning, India shows the costs of too little. Indian urban development has suffered under an imposing edifice of overlapping bureaucracies and a philosophy of economics that prioritizes village life over urbanization. Together, Nehruvian bureaucracy and Gandhian economics, romanticizing rural agrarian life, have made it extremely costly to convert rural land for urban use. Indian urban development has lagged that of China, and the pressures for urbanization have resulted in the unofficial building of slums and illegal and chaotic development in large cities.
Gurgaon, a city southwest of New Delhi, is an exception. Gurgaon was a small town 25 years ago, but today it’s a city of some two million people filled with skyscrapers, luxury apartment towers, golf courses, five-star hotels and shopping malls. Often called “the Singapore of India,” Gurgaon is home to offices for nearly half the Fortune 500 firms.
Gurgaon, however, grew not by plan but in a fit of absence of mind. After the state of Haryana streamlined the licensing process, it left developers in Gurgaon to their own devices with little intervention from any national, state or local government. As a result, almost everything that works in Gurgaon today is private. Security, for example, is privately provided for almost all housing, shopping and technology complexes. Over all, about 35,000 private security guards protect Gurgaon, compared with just 4,000 public officers. Gurgaon also has India’s only private fire department, filling an important gap, because it must be capable of reaching Gurgaon’s tallest skyscrapers.
But not all is well. No developer in Gurgaon was large enough to plan for citywide services for sewage, water or electricity. For a price, private companies provide these, but in inefficient ways. Sewage doesn’t flow to a central treatment plant but is often collected in trucks and then dumped on public land. Tap water is often delivered by private trucks or from illegally pumped groundwater. Reliable electricity is available 24 hours a day, but often using highly polluting diesel generators.
Compared with the rest of India, Gurgaon fares well but its functioning is far from ideal. Is there a middle ground between China’s ghost cities and the anarchy of Gurgaon? Surprisingly, privately planned cities may be an answer. And one of the oldest is in India.
Jamshedpur was founded by Tata Steel, as a company town, in 1908. It has landscaped parks, paved roads and even a lake, but it’s no playground for the rich. It’s a working town. Nevertheless, it is the only city in the state of Jharkhand with a sewage treatment plant, and it’s one of the few cities in all of India where residents enjoy reasonably priced, reliable electricity and safe tap water. In a survey by the marketing research company Nielsen, residents ranked the city among the best in India for its cheap and reliable provision of sewage, water, electricity, public sanitation and roads.
Jamshedpur works because Tata owned enough land so that it had the right incentives to plan and invest in citywide infrastructure. Tata has also had to maintain good services in order to attract workers. In Gurgaon, private developers built lots of infrastructure, but only up to the property line. By extending the property line to city-scale, the incentives to build large-scale infrastructure like sewage, water and electricity plants are also extended.
See also Lessons from Gurgaon: India’s Private City and my MRU video Skyscrapers and Slums: What’s Driving Mumbai’s Housing Crisis?
Hat tip: Salim Furth.
Europeans deserve to be as cool as Americans
That is the (very good) title they gave my recent Bloomberg column. Should Europe have more air conditioning? Basically yes. Here is one excerpt:
Some 90% of the US has air conditioning, according to one estimate, compared to only 19% for Europe. Worldwide, the US, China and Japan account for about two-thirds of all air conditioning…
And yet it will not be easy to make Europe as cool (speaking only in terms of temperature) as America. Much of the continent faces higher energy prices than does the US, and there are taxes — in France, they are 20% on AC systems.
And then there are the esthetics. Many Europeans complain that artificially cooled air is less healthy or less pleasant to breathe — a view this American has some sympathy for. (I am not much bothered by the heat and enjoyed the fresh air of Siena.) European buildings are also on average older than those in the US, and were not built to make AC units easy to install. So issues may arise from local regulations and historic-preservation laws.
Some Europeans also have an option unavailable to Americans if the temperature truly is unbearable: They can take the entire month of August off. They can swim in the Mediterranean, or take a quick flight to Finland or Ireland. The economic lesson that people adjust to their circumstances is borne out by these realities.
Personally, I would prefer a world with less air conditioning, or with temperatures not so low. And in Europe in particular, I enjoy how the relative paucity of AC forces people outdoors and into public squares. But that is only me. In sum;
So the best argument an American can make for why Europe should have more air conditioning is this: because Europeans want it. There are cultural forces keeping the shift toward more AC from proceeding as quickly as it ought to, but the transition will eventually happen. Why not accelerate the pace of installation and get to where much of Europe is likely to end up anyway?
My current hotel in Ireland…has no air conditioning.
The most typical place in each country?
For the United States, might it be a suburb of Columbus, Ohio? Or perhaps Knoxville, Tennessee, which is not too far from the country’s population center?
Those locales are relatively generic, and not too much of any single region, or perhaps they straddle regions. They represent life in the United States as a whole, unlike say NYC or Miami or San Francisco, or a small town.
For Germany, how about the town of Mainz?
For France, somewhere near Lyon?
Japan has to be the outskirts of Tokyo.
For the UK, you cannot name such a place, unless you think there is an “in-between” north of London and south of northern England? I can’t think of one.
For Italy, how about Bologna or Turino?
For Mexico, how about Puebla? An Ontario suburb for Canada?
For Brazil, Belo Horizonte?
Where else?
Sam Mendelsohn’s Travel Blog
When I travel abroad, I will often get recommendations of where to eat, what to do and what to read and watch from Sam Mendelsohn. Not just a few sentences, as if from a travel guide, but pages of unique and original material. I often have time to pick only one or two recommended items but invariably they are excellent. When I stayed in the Devigarh palace outside of Udaipur, for example, Sam pointed me to the movie Eklavya: The Royal Guard which is set in the palace. Watching the movie added to the stay. Not your usual material.
Sam is now formalizing his notes into a travel blog. He’s starting with some of lesser known places in India but will soon add more. He is also an expert on Thailand. Email him for some out-of-the-ordinary tips.
Every place is its own distinctive world: some combination of intellectual, literary, culinary, musical, sonic, linguistic, spiritual, philosophical, visual, architectural, geographic, botanic, olfactory, and cinematic worlds, and etc, brought together by different cultural and historical currents, and that’s all only a small part of the story of any given place. That such worlds of worlds actually exist, and the planet is full of them, seems underappreciated. Few people have the time or background knowledge to give anything more than a very superficial exploration of any of these while traveling, and I won’t claim to either. Despite my ambitions, I’m quite mediocre. Nonetheless, attempting to get lost in these worlds, however briefly and incompletely, is incredibly stimulating and meaningful for me. I like cities more than most people because they contain more worlds to get lost in, but on a short trip less can be more.
Walking around Frankfurt
I am here only briefly, and earlier I had visited the city perhaps seven or eight times, typically when passing through. But not within the last twenty years. My main impressions are thus:
1. The city itself has not radically changed in quite a while. Everything seemed familiar, and the types of stores were pretty familiar too.
2. The people walking around Frankfurt are very different. During an early evening walk, it seemed that perhaps 30-40% of the people I saw would classify as “potentially objectionable immigrants,” at least by the standards of anti-immigrant Germans. In earlier times perhaps this would have been five percent?
Do keep in mind my time and location may have embodied selection biases in favor of seeing more immigrants.
The evidence I can find does show that Frankfurt has the highest crime rate in Germany, although perhaps much of that standing comes from the presence of the financial district and the city being such a transport and convention hub, rather than from the immigrants per se.
In any case, if you wish to understand the popularity of AfD — which now seems to be Germany’s #2 political party — I suggest you take a walk around Frankfurt. I didn’t even go near the train station.
3. It is also striking to me, in a limited number of service sector encounters, that the immigrants with jobs have a “hessisch” accent and Germanic mannerisms. Of course there is selection going on here too, but this does show some degree of assimilation. I do not know what percentage of them are assimilating in this fashion, but it seems to be rising. Earlier, immigrants in German service sector jobs more likely seemed “right off the boat.”
4. Frankfurt in 1984 seemed to be on a rough wealth parity with the United States. But now it seems decidedly poorer, and I am not referring to the immigrants, rather the rate of progress on the upside seems pretty low. It just doesn’t feel like a “Luxus-Stadt.”
5. Lots of merchants still encourage you to pay with cash.
MR and Guinea (Conakry), a short history (from my email)
I will not double indent:
“Dear Tyler,
I am a great fan. I am currently focused on Guinea (Conakry) and wondered what you might have posted about the country over the years. My search for “Guinea” in Marginal Revolution results in 50 posts:
- In 13 of them you are referring to “guinea pigs”.
- In 9 of them you are referring to “Papua New Guinea”.
- In 9 you refer to “Equatorial Guinea”.
- In 5 of there is no explicit mention of Guinea (I assume the reference to Guinea can be found if one follows the links?)
- In 4 you refer to “Guinea Bissau”.
- In 4 you refer to “Guinea”, the country of that name with capital in Conakry
- In 3 the reference is to the broader region (Gulf of Guinea, etc).
- One reference to the island of “New Guinea”.
- One reference to the “guinea worm”.
- One reference to “guineas” as in the coins.
Of the references to the country of Guinea, one refers to Bembeya Jazz (good one!), another to press coverage from that country on the DSK affair in 2011, one mentions Guinea as one of the countries of origin for Africans in Guangzhou, and a final one appropriately mentions it on the topic of “Wikipedia knowledge deserts”.
None of these is a dedicated post to the country, something each of the other Guineas does enjoy on Marginal Revolution. I wondered if you might consider redressing the balance?
If it helps, here I write for the Centre for African Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University on how Asian demand, investment and policies is driving a mining boom in Guinea. Guinea is posed to be one of the top 2 growing economies in the world over the next five years on the back of the $20 billion Simandou iron ore mining project. You heard it here first!
Cordialement,
Bernabé Sánchez”