Category: Travels
Now is the Time for the Buffalo Commons
The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map for more. It is time for a sale. Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars – perhaps trillions of dollars – for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes. At the same time, a sale of western land would improve the efficiency of land allocation.
Does a sale of western lands mean reducing national parkland? No, first much of the land isn’t parkland. Second, I propose a deal. The government should sell some of its most valuable land in the west and use some of the proceeds to buy low-price land in the Great Plains.
The western Great Plains are emptying of people. Some 322 of the 443 Plains counties have lost population since 1930 and a majority have lost population since 1990.
Now is the time for the Federal government to sell high-priced land in the West, use some of the proceeds to deal with current problems and use some of the proceeds to buy low-priced land in the Plains creating the world’s largest nature park, The Buffalo Commons.
Hat tip to Carl Close for the pointer to the map.
I’ve never traveled with Alex before
Until now, that is. We’re even in a country with a partially nationalized banking system.
The headline from yesterday’s Daily Mail is scary: "It’s outrageous that banks demand taxpayers’ money yet impose 15 pc interest rates on small businesses." The article then outlines the high interest rates that borrowers have to pay.
I guess more easy credit is what we need and nationalization is the way to get there. If I can believe this morning’s headline, the United States may be headed to the same place. Remember all that junk — like the subsidy for small arrows — that they ended up sticking into the Paulson plan?
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Jetman
What we need today is a superhero. Thus, I give you Jetman.
Swiss adventurer Yves Rossy flew from England to France Friday
propelled by a jetpack strapped to his back — the first person to
cross the English Channel in such a way.Rossy, a pilot who normally flies an Airbus airliner, crossed the 22
miles between Calais and Dover at speeds of up to 120 mph in 13
minutes, his spokesman said.
And Now for Something Completely Different
- Philosopher Saul Smilansky says his work is a cross between Kant and Monty Python. I’m not sure I’d go that far but I enjoyed hearing Smilansky and Will Wilkinson on blogginheadstv. I discussed Smilansky’s paradox of retirement argument earlier. He is now out with a book, Ten Moral Paradoxes.
- Pictures from the most alien place on earth. Worth a look (scroll down). Hat tip to Craig Newmark.
- The Sarah Connor Chronicles doesn’t get any respect but I thought the first season was great in an action-packed, edge-of-your seat, thrill-seeking sort of way. The second season has just begun. Summer Glau plays the Spock/Data learning-to-be-human cyborg that John Connor can’t admit he wants to interface with.
Mean and Lowly Things
The two Pygmies persuaded to work for me have reputations as the worst guides in the village. Their cooking often includes rotting fish, which they serve cold for breakfast if I don’t finish it at dinner. They are supposed to do my laundry, but they find women’s underwear too embarrassing to contemplate. They won’t go out after dark, and they consider wading in the swamp to be absolute folly. So I’m almost late one night when I fall over a log and scrape my left leg, on my way back from the swamp with a bag of treefrogs.
I think nothing of the scrape until 5 days later, when my temperature shoots to 104F and my leg swells and turns red. Some microbe from the swamp has entered through the scrape and spread to infect my whole body. Perhaps the Pygmies had some sense in refusing to wade in the swamp.
That is from Kate Jackson’s Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science and Survival in the Congo. It is an excellent and very fun book on fieldwork and on the topics mentioned in its subtitle. I think of this as "a Chris Blattman book" and yes you should be reading Chris’s blog.
Economic Philately
Which stamp predicts development and which stamp dissension?
For the answer, Chris Blattman points us to Michael Kevane’s paper on stamps and development.
An analysis of the imagery on postage stamps suggests that regimes in Sudan
and Burkina Faso have pursued very different strategies in representing the
nation. Sudan’s stamps focus on the political center and dominant elite (current
regime, Khartoum politicians, and Arab and Islamic identity) while Burkina
Faso’s stamps focus on society (artists, multiple ethnic groups, and
development). Sudan’s stamps build an image of the nation as being about the
northern-dominated regime in Khartoum (whether military or parliamentary);
Burkina Faso’s stamps project an image of the nation as multi-ethnic and
development-oriented.
The Atacama desert
It’s the world’s driest desert. We’ve seen flamingos, vicunas, llamas, and beautiful smaller birds. The mountains are stunning. Tierra Atacama is arguably the best hotel experience I’ve had. Cheese on seafood actually can taste good, even in the desert; that is the real Chilean miracle. Bolivia is about twenty kilometers away. I am told there are 100,000 active land mines around (all marked and thus safe); the only question is which neighbor is a bigger worry. The town of San Pedro de Atacama remains in that rare sweet spot between under- and over-touristed. Very good sweaters go for $26. One restaurant advertises that the apples in its "Apple Pie a la Mode" come from the United States; Alex at least will get the joke. A visit here is likely to convince you there is life on Mars.
Two links, from the Atacama desert
1. More polemic against the Milton Friedman Institute, from Marshall Sahlins.
2. Play MR Jeopardy again: the answer is Andrew Jackson, what is the question? This is from Andrew Sullivan, who is the first blogger I ever read and remains one of my favorites.
Chile impressions
Santiago now feels like a huge city rather than a collection of neighborhoods. The old center of town (Plaza de Armas) has become a bit of a dump but the outskirts are booming. Parts of the city are even hip and trendy, a shock to anyone who knows the older Chile. The variety of faces reminds me, oddly, of Oslo. The "Dissidents Cemetery" in Valparaiso is full of Scottish and German names. The seafood remains superb, most of all the clams and mussels and ceviche and shrimp and conch and abalone. And the other stuff too. Some restaurants, rather than giving you a lemon for your fish, offer you a small glass of lemon juice and a squeezer. There are many more immigrants from the northern Andes than before and many more tourists from Brazil.
I was stunned by this, which is even more impressive when you are standing by it. Some of the surrounding apartment blocks have a nice modern Art Deco style. There remain deep pockets of poverty but overall the nation is pulling away from the other Latin American countries. The Chileans basically need more of the same, rather than having to solve some deep structural problem. Usually drivers stay in their lanes. People don’t always dress that well. It was a page 3 story in El Mercurio, with photo, that "Oprah won a million votes for Obama."
It is a common claim that Catholicism is bad for growth but in fact Chile is arguably the most seriously Catholic of the South American countries.
Tomorrow we head off to a remote place which I dare not reveal; I am surprising Yana and Natasha and perhaps you too.
Three indicators of cultural success
As distinct from happiness, of course:
1. If a kid does badly in school, does the parent genuinely get mad at the kid and withhold affection?
2. Can people wait in an orderly line?
3. Can people stay in their designated lane when driving a car?
I wonder how these variables, if measured, would fare in cross-country growth regressions. I covered these points and others in my talk in Buenos Aires. Going way back, here is my sushi test for minimal levels of social trust.
Good quotations about India
This one comes from Borges:
India is larger than the world.
It’s also cited in the new Paul Theroux book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, which is occasionally entertaining but not up to his best material.
For ESEADE
Here is the post my favorite things Argentina, from two years ago. Not much change since then. Here is my post on B.A., arguably my favorite city. Here are other Argentina posts.
Santiago bleg
For part of next week I will be in Santiago, Chile. I haven’t been there for nineteen years. What should I do?
Addendum: Seth Roberts sends me this interesting link on travel.
Cleveland
Joshua Hall asked me why the people who research economics of sports tend to be so free market in their orientation (do they love competition and measurement? I still don’t have a good answer; any takers?). Sarah Skwire (a LibraryThing fan) and I debated who had geekier taste in popular culture; it remains a stand-off to be settled upon a future meeting. Paul Cantor promoted his theory that Dante was a heretic and possibly a follower of Averroes; I wondered why Christ isn’t prominent in Paradiso and why isn’t Saladin of all people in the Inferno? Medieval Sufi poetry, and the voyage of discovery toward God, is all over his work. There was a contrast between commercial society in Deadwood vs. Mad Men (I prefer the latter). The very charming Rachel Lomasky and I discussed which is more beautiful: natural logs or the fact that the square root of two is an irrational number? I wondered whether a good conference could be organized on "Liberty and Computation." And there is eugenics all over both Dreiser and Norris. The buildings in downtown remain superb, as does the art museum.
That’s what’s so good about Liberty Fund conferences.
Mr Fantastic
