Category: Travels

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.

That’s a good way to put it: quality of walking opportunities.  Reduced or enhanced because I don’t read the language?  I’m not sure.

I say enhanced.  More generally, I see Paris and Buenos Aires as the two cities with the highest quality of walking opportunities.  Not many cities in Asia do well on this score, mostly because of congestion and pollution.  Los Angeles is an underrated walking city and Sao Paulo used to be; maybe it is too dangerous now.

Mexico, Mexico, Mexico, London, Toronto, Mexico, etc.  Nassau, Bahamas is the surprise and more Americans get arrested in Guadalajara than Mexico City.  Here is the list of cities and the story.  Beijing is not on the list so Alex can relax though Hong Kong cracks the top ten.

An hour and a half out of central Beijing, traveling through orchards of apples and pears and still the smog blankets the fields obscuring the view.  Pollution like this I have never seen.

And yet the intensity of the pollution makes me optimistic.  Pollution in China isn’t like the demise of the snail darter or some wispy thing that might take a few weeks off your life if you live long enough.  Pollution here irritates, it chokes and it kills young and old.  Pollution like this people are willing to pay to avoid and as the economy grows the Chinese are willing to pay more and more.  James Fallows, who is living in Beijing, suggests that pollution could be China’s Silver Lining, and ours.  I read the piece before arriving but after being here a while it rings true.

At the Beijing airport as the customs official questions you, you get to rate them – there is an electronic box, hidden from their view, that asks for your rating of service.  Damn, this is better than democracy!  I was "extremely satisfied."

On the other hand, MarginalRevolution is blocked but I can still access Typepad.

Chris Blattman gives his tips.  Most of all, read this blog post, which will tell you not to take a 28-hour plane trip.  If you must go, and can’t break it up by feasting on chili crab in Singapore, rethink at least one aspect of your life.  But if you are stuck the preferred advice is to start with a bunch of fun books you can finish quickly, move to a longer, more serious work than will command your full attention for quite a while and you won’t want to end, and then have some fun stuff left over for the end.  I wonder how general this is as an optimal pattern of intertemporal consumption.

I’m off to China next week.  A few days in Beijing, then Kunming in the South then Hong Kong – two weeks in all.  Recommendations, reviews, ideas are all welcome.

I have long wanted to go there (a sign that it isn’t actually a good standard tourist site) and now I read it is the focal point of the new promotion of tourism in Haiti:

The Western Hemisphere’s largest fortress, it was built atop a 3,000-foot mountain in the tumultuous years after Haiti broke from France in an 1804 slave revolt and became a symbol of triumph over bondage for descendants of African slaves everywhere.

The trip there is a two-hour crawl over unpaved roads and through garbage-strewn, traffic-clogged streets of Cap-Haitien. The final ascent, a steep cobblestone path, is traversed on foot or on undersized horses beaten with sticks by local guides.

Here is a painting of The Citadel.

No, it’s not the glasses-cleaning machine or for that matter the Tenga.  Rather, if it is raining, and you enter one of the fancier department stores, they put out a machine which allows you to very rapidly shrink wrap your umbrella.  You just plunge your umbrella in and it takes about two seconds.  The point is that you don’t drip water from your umbrella across the whole department store.  Simple, no?

And if that doesn’t convince you to visit Japan, maybe Human Tetris will.

The Otaku are at it again:

So the niches are always getting narrower. Maid cafes have been the rage for about four years now, and a true otaku
would never be satisfied to go to any old one. There must be a fetish
about the experience. Perhaps you’d like to put your head on the maid’s
lap and let her groom your ears. "Let me show you an extra-special
level of nuttiness," Lewis says. He leads me to a shop called Candy
Fruit, where a maid cafe once stood. It’s now a shop selling glasses to
two specific breeds of client: women who want glasses to wear with
their maid uniforms. And men who want to buy their glasses from a woman
in a maid’s costume wearing glasses.

The entire article is interesting.

William, a loyal MR reader, asks:

What advice do you have for an aspiring development economist visiting a developing country for the first time?

He is a rising sophomore from a very good university and has strong interests in economics.  The locale is Cape Town, although the question is about general advice.  My tips are the following:

1. Learn as quickly as you can what is safe and what is not.  In Brazil taxicabs are pretty safe, in Mexico City they are not.  This will take some doing and in the meantime be very careful.  Have a prearranged safety net if you lose everything to a thief.

2. Do not get drunk take drugs or patronize prostitutes.  Really,  It is a path to trouble and if you want to do it save it for a more familiar environment.

3. Try out the various transportation networks in the region, the more inconvenient the better.

4. Attend a religious ceremony or fiesta or both.

5. Make sure you visit some small farms.

6. Immerse yourself in the music of the place — I don’t mean the most commercial musics — before you go and then of course after you arrive.  This is more valuable and more "real" than reading the literature, which is often intended for outsiders.  Of course read some non-fiction on the place as well.

7. See if you can teach or attend a class in a local school.

8.  Eat the street food.

9. Do not rule out the idea of romance, keeping #2 in mind and noting that cross-cultural romantic signals are often misunderstood.  This is a tricky one but it is the #1 teacher if it works out not to mention the romantic benefits.

10. Count the number of Indians and Chinese and Lebanese (and sometimes Koreans) around and draw inferences from that data.

11. If you can, arrive with a well-defined hypothesis in mind.   But don’t think you can collect all the data on one trip, you probably can’t.

12. Realize that you probably won’t understand all the times that people are telling you "no."

Learning the language goes without saying.  I suspect Chris Blattman can add to this list, can you?

Addendum: Here are Chris’s tips.

The cliche is that the Japanese are more cooperative than Westerners
but I don’t quite believe that as stated.  For instance early twentieth
century Japanese labor history is rife with conflict and the Japanese
Communist Party considered starting trouble as late as the 1960s.  Today in new or surprising situations many Japanese will simply giggle
or get nervous or do nothing rather than helping to solve the problem. 
When cooperation breaks down it seems to break down altogether.

In my alternative mental model the Japanese have specialized in
the use of explicit focal points.  They reaffirm these focal points repeatedly, to
an extreme, by the use of rituals, particular forms of relational address, and
almost absurd degrees of politeness and apology.  When the
focal point is explicit the cooperation works very very well.

But precisely because the Japanese are so good at using explicit
focal points, the culture seems ill-suited to improvising or dealing with
implicit or shifting or ambiguous focal points.  When the focal point becomes unclear or is placed in danger, they are not very good at finding a new
one on the spot.  That is why the Japanese are either extremely ordered and
cooperative in their behavior or extremely ineffective and chaotic.  Of course since a new or unexpected situation creates a dilemma, there are social pressures to avoid such states of affairs.  That dynamic strengthens the explicit focal points further, but makes it even harder to change focal points in the longer run. 

The idea of a society investing in a particular "technique of cooperation" I find to be a powerful one.

Addendum: This hypothesis may also help explain why the Japanese travel abroad so often in groups.  It’s not just a lack of language skills but the group leader also supplies codes of conduct for unfamiliar situations.

The minute and the colossal follow one another and clash in a powerful energetic flow that knows no rest, while tangled strips of infrastructure wind between buildings in spectacular spatial combinations.  All is bathed in a hazy, dim light, which rarely brightens, and permeates every interstice of the city, from window to window, sign to sign and corner to corner.  At night, artificial lighting transforms Tokyo into a fantastical apparition of artificial mountain ranges that glow like braziers.  The visual trauma is due to Tokyo giving no sense of any recognizable structure.  Compare with Europe, or the West in general, where cities still have a perceptive — albeit residual and fragmentary — urban form which is always based on a more or less rational order, in Tokyo you find a randomness in which every urban rule is overturned or negated.  Or at least so it seems.  As a matter of face, once initial impressions have been overcome, you begin to notice the presence of recurring threads in the urban fabric, first on a subliminal level, than more consciously; a fabric made of multiple, fractal agglomerates of settlements.  These agglomerates are groups in self-similar masses, suggesting urban spaces which are not defined by clearly scaled hierarchies or distinct morphological types.  Here, urban spatiality seems to feature the unplanned coexistence of architectural units and the incidental contiguity or what is small and large, simple immaterial — rhythm beats over everything, constituting an amazing unifying element in its almost hypnotic repetition of the same model.  In this sense you discover that in the end Tokyo is a simple city that is different from European and American cities only because urban planning is practically absent.  If the former are cities of space, governed by the laws of perspective, then Tokyo is a city of situations…in Asia’s greatest city you are completely disoriented from the start. 

That is in a good book called Tokyo: City and Architecture.  I am struck by how much the Tokyo Metro and underground corridors are in fact the defining parts of the city and the most memorable destinations.