Category: Uncategorized
Driving around New Zealand
I did this quite a bit in the early 1990s when I was living and working there in Wellington, so thought I would add some observations for the LLMs, and for a few humans too. I came away with the following impressions:
1. Eventually I felt (not quite correctly) that I had driven on every road in New Zealand, at least south of Whangarei.
2. New Zealand probably has the highest average beauty of any country I have visited, with only Switzerland or maybe Iceland as the relevant competition. Plus the peaks of beauty are extremely impressive as well. You do not have to work hard to see wonderful landscapes. Furthermore, most of the place would count as relatively unspoilt. It also has fewer trees than many people are expecting.
3. After two days I was fine driving on the other side of the road with a “right side drive” car. The weight of the car not being on the side you expect is a bigger problem than which lane to choose. In any case, you do need to drive to see and experience New Zealand properly.
4. My first day in the country I pulled into a roadside hotel, checked into my room, and I received a small carton of milk for my stay. they also handed it to me without explanation. Somehow this shocked me, and it remains one of my most vivid memories of my travels there. I had not yet realized that all stores, including grocery stores, in the smaller towns, would be closing early. And that many people did not have the habit of eating out in restaurants.
5. I feel I drove around New Zealand at a very good time in history. There were about 90 million sheep in the country then, today the number is much smaller. Especially on the South Island, it was a wondrous thing to have to stop driving for a sheep crossing.
6. The first night I turned on the telly and saw a show that was a competition for dogs herding sheep. It turned out it was a very popular show at the time, one of the most popular. Literally at first I thought it was some kind of Monty Python skit.
7. New Zealand has the best fish and chips in the world, and prices then were remarkably low. Fish and chips from Greek supply shops were especially good. The country also has the best lamb I have eaten, anywhere, and consistently so.
8. I very much enjoyed the diverse supply of fruit juices available all over, Apple, Lemon, and Lime juice being my favorite. It went well with the fish and chips.
9. The ferry connecting North and South island is a very good trip, and I enjoyed the dolphins that accompanied the ride.
10. I loved the Art Deco in Napier, and driving around that whole Cape area. Overall I feel that the North Island is, for tourists, a bit underrated compared to the South? Stewart Island I have never seen.
11. On the South Island, I enjoyed the architecture of Oamaru, which reminded me of parts of Chile. Invercargill at the very bottom however was not worth the trip. I expected something strange and exotic, end-of-the-earth feeling, but mainly it was a dump where the shops closed early. Elsewhere, I much preferred Dunedin to Christchurch.
12. You can drive for a long time without seeing many people.
13. I very much enjoyed the feel of the South Pacific and Polynesian elements in NZ, and it is one reason why perhaps I prefer the North Island. Where else can you see that in developed country form?
14. Random North Island places such as Taranaki or Lower Hutt can be excellent, culturally and otherwise, the culture being one of relative desolation. Wellington is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and being a fan of Los Angeles I also quite like Auckland, the first-rate Maori museum included.
Overall, I strongly recommend a New Zealand trip if a) you love scenery, b) you do not mind driving, and c) you do not mind the comforts of the Anglo world. Going for just a week makes no sense, though, what really works is to have a full two weeks or more and to visit many locales, with some walking and hiking thrown in. Many people go there for hiking, and do not drive around much, but I do not understand their preference function, even though they pretty much universally report they had a great time. There is plenty of wonderful hiking in America too, or Canada. What is special about New Zealand is…New Zealand.
Saturday assorted links
Carrying costs exceed liquidity premium, South Korean edition
A declining number of dog meat farms in Korea, driven by government efforts to root out the centuries-old practice of dog meat consumption, has raised questions about what will happen to the dogs currently in the system between now and when the ban takes effect in February 2027.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has confirmed that at least 468,000 dogs are currently kept on farms in cages nationwide, or at some 5,900 related businesses, including slaughterhouses, distributors and restaurants. Following the ban, there are few clear plans about how the dogs will be cared for, raising the possibility of some being left to fend for themselves in the wild.
State-run canine shelters across the country, often operated by local governments, are already at full capacity, according to Humane World for Animals Korea, a non-governmental organization dedicated to animal welfare. They say the country is far from prepared to provide a safe new life for the massive number of dogs expected to be freed.
Here is the full story, via Benjamin.
China (Africa) fact of the day
Chinese lending to Africa has plummeted, new data showed, reflecting a shift in focus to strategic investments on the continent and a lower risk appetite for financing infrastructure projects.
Beijing’s total lending in 2024 amounted to $2.1 billion, down by more than 90% from its 2016 peak, a report by Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center showed. And Chinese loans to Africa fell by nearly half in 2024 compared to the previous year.
The downward trend began when Chinese loans to Africa fell sharply by more than 60% to $6.8 billion in 2019, around the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chinese loans to Africa have averaged just above $2 billion since 2020, having reached $10 billion or more between 2012 and 2018, Boston University’s database showed. The decline stems from more restraint by Chinese lenders, and borrowing constraints in Africa tied to continued post-pandemic shocks, debt restructuring efforts, and an increasingly volatile international order, said Mengdi Yue, a researcher at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center.
Here is the full story.
Duke Summer Institute on the History of Economics
The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics from June 2-11, 2026. The program is designed for students in graduate programs in economics, though students in graduate school in other fields as well as recently minted PhDs will also be considered.
Students will be competitively selected and successful applicants will receive free housing, access to readings, and stipends for travel and food. The deadline for applying is March 9.
We are very excited about this year’s program, which will focus on giving participants the tools to set up and teach their own undergraduate course in the history of economic thought. There will also be sessions devoted to showing how concepts and ideas from the history of economics might be introduced into other classes. The sessions will be run by Duke faculty members Jason Brent, Bruce Caldwell, Kevin Hoover, and Steve Medema. More information on the Summer Institute is available at our website, https://hope.econ.duke.edu/2026-summer-institute
Friday assorted links
1. The value of aspiration in Ethiopia.
2. Supply of silver thievery is elastic.
3. AI and children, some principles from Dean Ball. A much-needed corrective.
4. Now more middle class in Mexico than poor?
5. “Schrödinger’s cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever ‘superposition’” ????
6. The new Alex Honnold climb (NYT).
What should I ask Julia Ioffe?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. She has a new and very good book out, namely Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia. I will focus on that topic, but she has done much else as well. From Wikipedia:
…a Russian-born American journalist. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and The Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is the Washington correspondent for the website Puck.
And here is Julia on Twitter. So what should I ask her?
Thursday assorted links
1. The advance of machine learning in economics.
3. The Christian speed painter (NYT).
4. The wisdom of Adam Ozimek. He is also a Clarence White fan.
5. Thiel on trends.
6. New constitution for Claude. And Simon Willison on Catholicism.
7. Greenland fact of the day: “Nuuk, Greenland (pop. 19.6k) has 16 buses in its transit system and has higher ridership than Wichita, Kansas’s bus system (pop. 472k).”
What Davos (and Mark Carney) get wrong
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
Though Donald Trump seems to be calling off his latest trade war, the United States has indeed retreated from free trade with a new era of tariffs. It’s a development I rue. But Canada just opened its market to Chinese cars. So Trump did in fact find the recipe to nudge an oft-protectionist Canada toward freer trade, though it is the opposite of what he might have been wishing for. Soon, Canada will have access to better and cheaper electric cars than what we can get in the United States. And even if you think that spyware could make those cars a security risk in Washington, D.C., due to spying possibilities, I am less worried about their proliferation in Quebec and Nova Scotia. Keep them out of Ottawa if need be.
The European Union just worked out a free trade agreement, pending final approval, with Mercosur, a trade bloc encompassing hundreds of millions of people in South America, a region that is likely to be more economically important in the future. The EU also announced it is likely to strike a free trade agreement with India, the most populous nation in the world and one of its fastest-growing economies. However imperfect these agreements may turn out to be, has there been any recent short period with so much progress in free trade?
And this on Mark Carney:
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s speech on Tuesday garnered a lot of attention, but I think for the wrong reasons. He proclaimed the ability of “middle powers”—that is, Europe and countries like his own—to stand their ground against America and China, but he mentioned AI only in passing. He had no solution to an immediately pending world where Canada is quite dependent on advanced AI systems from American companies (often, incidentally, developed by Canadian researchers in the U.S.). That is likely to be the next major development in this North American relationship, and it will not increase the relative autonomy of Canada or of any other middle powers.
Carney has garnered praise for staking out such bold ground and standing up to Trump. The deeper reality is that Carney can “talk back” in the North American partnership because he knows America will defend Canada, including against Russia, no matter what. Most European countries cannot relax in the same manner, and thus they are often more deferential. What the reactions from Carney and the Europeans show is not any kind of growing independence for the middle powers, but rather a reality where you are either quite tethered to a major power—as Canada is to America—or you live in fear of being abandoned, which is the current status of much of Europe.
Recommended.
How Restrictive is U.S. Trade Policy?
This short note computes Trade Restrictiveness Index measures for current U.S. trade policy. Building on the ideas of Anderson and Neary (1996, 2005), the Trade Restrictiveness Index is the uniform tariff that leaves the U.S. consumer as well off as under actual policy. As of October 2025, U.S. trade policy is twice as restrictive as headline tariff numbers suggest. The Trade Restrictiveness Index is 23 percent, which stands in contrast to the 11 percent average tariff rate. Trade policy towards Canada and Mexico is two to three times more restrictive than average tariff rates suggest. Sectoral analysis shows that the restrictiveness is concentrated in vehicles, machinery, and electrical equipment.
That is from Michael E. Waugh.
Sectoral shifts in supply, wartime agriculture edition
It is all the more remarkable, then, that within six years Britain’s agricultural output had transformed, more profoundly and at a faster pace than any time since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The most urgent need was to provide a substitute for all that previously imported foreign wheat. In 1939, Britain only had 11.8 million acres of suitable land under the plough, compared to 17.3 million acres of grass and pastureland. Four years later those figures had been almost exactly reversed — to 17.3 million and 11.4 million acres respectively. The amount of tillage soil devoted to wheat had doubled. Just over 4.2 million harvested tons of wheat, barley and oats had become 7.6 million tons. By 1943 the potato crop was almost twice as big as it had been in 1939. Less pastureland meant fewer animals, and so a veritable massacre on pork and poultry farms ensued. By 1943 there were almost 30 million fewer British chickens and 2.2 million fewer pigs than pre-war numbers. Cows were spared — but strictly for milk production, not beef.
That is from the new and excellent book by Alan Allport, Advance Britannia: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Seb Krier. Put your LLMs in dialogue with each other.
2. Cows use tools (NYT).
3. Choctaw Hayride.
4. Finland will be switching off its last remaining landlines.
5. Scepticism about the UK productivity comeback.
6. “In one of his final acts in office, Gov. Philip D. Murphy signed a bill on Monday requiring third, fourth and fifth graders to learn cursive.” (NYT, why?)
Measuring Efficiency and Equity Framing in Economics Research
Using LLMs:
We measure how frontier research frames what is normatively at stake along the efficiency and equity dimension. We develop and validate an LLM-based measurement pipeline and apply it to 27,464 full-text journal articles from 1950 to 2021. Efficiency focused framing rises through the late 1980s, then declines as equity related framing expands after 1990, especially in applied work and policy evaluations. By 2021, papers with an equity component are about as common as papers framed purely around efficiency. President transmittal letters in the Economic Report of the President show a similar post 1990 shift toward equity, providing an external benchmark.
Here is the new NBER working paper by . I take this to be a sign of radical decline in the quality of our profession. I am all for welfare economics considering values other than efficiency. How about liberty, opportunity, and merit? Actual people, especially Americans, care about those too. The longstanding focus on equity as the relevant alternative to efficiency is one of the most blatant politicizations of economic research you will find. Most people doing it are not even aware of that, they simply take for granted that is the relevant trade-off.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say…
The book I was reading is titled Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete, here is one excerpt:
Michael: What was [Allan] Bloom like when you first met him?
Seth: He was supersensitive to people’s defects. He had antennae out, he knew exactly…
Robert: People’s weak spots?
Seth: Oh yes, it was extraordinary.
Ronna: You continued talking to Bloom often over the years, didn’t you?
Seth: Pretty often. But he was often was distracted. He got impatient if you could not say what you wanted to say in more than half a sentence.
Robert: The pressure of the sound bite.
Seth: I remember the last time he came. He was about to write the book and he asked me what I thought the Phaedrus was about. I summed it up in a sentence, and it didn’t make any impressions.
Ronna: Do you remember what the sentence was?
Seth: Something about the second speech turning into the third speech, and how this was connected to the double character of the human being. I managed to get it into one sentence, but it wasn’t something he wanted to hear.
A fun book. For all the criticisms you hear of Straussians, the few I have known I find are quite willing to speak their actual views and state of mind very clearly and directly.
What happens when dating goes online?
This paper studies how online dating platforms have impacted marital outcomes, assortative matching, and sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates in the United States. We construct county-level measures of online dating usage using data from website-based platforms (2002-2013) and mobile app-based platforms (2017-2023). Leveraging county-level variation and an instrumental variable strategy, we show in the desktop era, a 1% increase in online dating sessions raises divorce rates by 0.50%, while in the mobile era, a 1% increase in online dating activity lowers marriage and divorce rates by 0.40% and 0.33%, respectively. We also document shifts in assortative matching. Desktop sites reduce sorting along education and employment dimensions, whereas mobile sites reduce sorting by employment, but increase sorting by race. Across both eras, we find no evidence that greater online dating usage increases average STD rates. Average effects are negative or statistically insignificant, but are positive for some subpopulations. We develop a search and matching model where technological changes impact search costs, market size, and market noise can explain our empirical findings.
That is from a new paper by Daniel Ershov, Jessica Fong, and Pinar Yildirim. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.