How to Visit India for Normies
In the comments to my post, India has Too Few Tourists, many people worried about the food, the touts and the poverty. Many of these comments are mistaken or apply only if you are traveling to India on the cheap as an adolescent backpacker (nothing wrong with that but I suspect the MR audience is different.) I have spent some time traveling in India including at times with my wife, who puts up with my wanderlust but appreciates a fine hotel, with my teenage children, and once with my elderly mother. So how should normies travel in India?
- Don’t be afraid or ashamed to do the tourist stuff first. The golden triangle, Delhi-Agra-Jaipur is great! There is no shame in following the beaten path.
- For the slightly more adventurous, branch out to Udaipur, my favorite city in India, where you can easily spend a week walking around and doing day trips. Add in Jodphur, stay at the Raas hotel and see the magnificent Mehrangarh fort and stepwell. Try out a tiger safari.
- India has the best hotels in the world. Depending on the season, you can stay in literal palaces for about the same as a good American or European hotel, say $250 a night.
- The food in the hotels is excellent and perfectly safe. The food in high-quality restaurants is perfectly safe. If you want, get some Dukoral in advance and carry some loperamide for extra protection.
- You can rent a comfortable, air-conditioned car with a driver (tell them Alex sent you) for less than it costs to rent a car in the United States. Your driver will pick you up in the morning, take you where you want to go, drop you off in the evening and disappear when not needed.
- The poverty and the dirt and the cows blocking traffic are not a reason to say away but a reason to go to India (drag me in the comments all you like, it is true). In Mumbai, I have seen seen a Ferrari followed by a bullock cart. Where else but in India? It’s important to see real poverty if only because you will appreciate your world all the more and wonder how to keep it. India is rapidly becoming richer. See living history while you still can.
- South India is much richer than North India and much less polluted. My Indian friend from Kerala had never seen a slum before he visited Mumbai.
- India is relatively safe. Of course with 1.4 billion people, bad things happen. Don’t let anecdotes deter you. Overall, it’s safer than the US or say Mexico. Tourists following the above won’t have any problems at all.
- Touts can be a hassle but are not a problem in the tourist sites. In other place, like walking old Delhi, either ignore them completely or hire a guide who will bat the others away.
Here is Tyler’s post on how to travel to India. Slightly more adventurous than what I have outlined but entirely consistent.
Here is a picture of Udaipur. 
Saturday assorted links
France fact of the day
Consumption of red wine in France has fallen by about 90 per cent since the 1970s, according to Conseil Interprofessionnel du vin de Bordeaux (CIVB), an industry association. Total wine consumption, spanning reds, whites and rosés, is down more than 80 per cent in France since 1945, according to survey data from Nielsen, and the decline is accelerating, with Generation Z purchasing half the volume bought by older millennials.
Here is more from Adrienne Klasa at the FT. You will note these are declines from large numbers:
“With every generation in France we see the change. If the grandfather drank 300 litres of red wine per year, the father drinks 180 litres and the son, 30 litres,” said CIVB board member Jean-Pierre Durand.
In the USA, the Surgeon General is calling for cancer warnings on alcohol (NYT).
Friday assorted links
3. Scott Sumner movie reviews, plus Scott confirms that Solenoid is a classic.
4. “So if you’re nostalgic, as Trump and many of his supporters are, for the old days when the U.S. economy was dominated by heavy industry, you should know that it was Reagan, not some bunch of woke environmentalists, who brought that era to an end.” C’mon Paul, you might instead write: “The Reagan budget deficits somewhat accelerated the pace of American deindustrialization of employment, a common long-term trend shared by many advanced economies.” It is also worth noting that U.S. manufacturing output continued to rise through 2008. Of course the deindustrialization of employment has been due largely to automation, and as a trend has little to do with Reagan.
5. Top ten staircases of 2024, some good stuff in there.
6. Top ten Chinese architecture from 2024.
Richard A. Easterlin, RIP
He was one of the fathers of “happiness economics,” here is a NYT obituary. Via John Chamberlin.
India has Too Few Tourists
In 2017, I wrote an article on India’s underperformance in tourism:
India is one of the most desirable tourist destinations in the world. Thirty-five [now 43, AT!] UNESCO World Heritage sites–among them the Taj Mahal, one of the “New Seven Wonders of the World”—attract a global audience. India’s many food, dance and religious cultures are enticing. The widespread availability of English speakers makes India a welcome destination not only for Americans, Canadians and the British but also for many Europeans and others who speak English as a second language. Prices in India are very reasonable for visitors from developed countries.
India has tremendous advantages as a producer of tourism, but its tourism sector is far too small. India is underperforming and in the process giving up tens of billions of dollars in foreign exchange revenue that could lift millions out of poverty.
The Economist concurs noting “a fabulous destination for foreign tourists does little to lure them.” Indeed, India had fewer tourists in 2024 than in 2017. Tunisia attracts more tourists than India! India did improve its visa process, which I complained about in 2017, but it could do much better:
To its credit, the government replaced the onerous process of applying for visas in person with online e-visas. But that was a decade ago and the process remains unpredictable and fiddly; it requires using a website that looks like it was designed during the dot-com boom. Most countries in South-East Asia and the Middle East have slicker sites. Many offer either visas on arrival or visa-free entry.
When I recently visited the UK I entered without being stopped or questioned by a single individual! In contrast, entering India can often take several hours and even with a visa there are forms that have to be filled out for no apparent reason or purpose. Moreover, exiting India is often more time consuming than entering! Yet when I visited India shortly after COVID our tour guide in Bundi was practically in tears as we were the first foreign tourists he had seen in over a year and the money was very welcome.
India should drop its visa requirements for US and European countries entirely and immediately. The tourism industry should be seen as an export industry. Countries go to great lengths to increase exports but India’s government does little to help its tourism industry despite the fact that it’s actually a huge export industry–far bigger than India’s export of pharmaceuticals for example!
Turkey has 55 million tourist visitors a year. That’s 5 times India’s rate which suggests that India could dramatically increase earnings from tourism. More tourists would be great for India and also great for the tourists!
Here is a picture of the fourth tallest statue in the world, in a tiny town in India that no one goes to. Amazing!
My 92nd St. Y debate with Robert Kuttner on income inequality
Here goes:
Ex po st, the Manhattan audience swung thirty (!) points in my favor, compared to the pre-debate poll. This was a fun event for me.
When did sustained economic growth begin?
The subtitle is New Estimates of Productivity Growth in England from 1250 to 1870, and the authors are Paul Bouscasse, Emi Nakamura, and Jón Steinsson. Abstract:
We estimate productivity growth in England from 1250 to 1870. Real wages over this period were heavily influenced by plague-induced swings in the population. Our estimates account for these Malthusian dynamics. We find that productivity growth was zero prior to 1600. Productivity growth began in 1600—almost a century before the Glorious Revolution. Thus, the onset of productivity growth preceded the bourgeois institutional reforms of 17th century England. We estimate productivity growth of 2% per decade between 1600 and 1800, increasing to 5% per decade between 1810 and 1860. Much of the increase in output growth during the Industrial Revolution is explained by structural change—the falling importance of land in production—rather than faster productivity growth. Stagnant real wages in the 18th and early 19th centuries—“Engel’s Pause”—is explained by rapid population growth putting downward pressure on real wages. Yet, feedback from population growth to real wages is sufficiently weak to permit sustained deviations from the “iron law of wages” prior to the Industrial Revolution.
The 17th century truly is the important century.
Asimov Press has a new kind of book
Today we launched our second Asimov Press book…The book’s theme is “technology,” and so we encoded a complete copy of the book into DNA, and are making those DNA copies available to consumers for the first time.
We worked with three companies (CATALOG, Plasmidsaurus, and Imagene) to make 1,000 copies of the DNA and package them into stainless steel capsules under an inert atmosphere, thus preserving the nucleotides for tens of thousands of years.
Announcement: https://www.asimov.press/p/technology-book
X: https://x.com/NikoMcCarty/status/1874859187676852636
Website: https://press.asimov.com/books
Thursday assorted links
1. Disequilibrium play in tennis.
2. Tax cuts are expansionary even at the zero lower bound.
3. Art museum openings in 2025.
4. Teaching data analytics with generative AI.
6. The two states without Chick-Fil-A. And why.
7. Life without stars? Stellar, not celebrities.
9. Very good but difficult Sophie Smith piece on the Pelicot case.
Marc Andreessen on Atlas Shrugged
Excellent clip from longer interview.
What should I ask Carl Zimmer?
Yes, I will be having a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia on Carl:
Carl Zimmer (born 1966) is a popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity. The author of many books, he contributes science essays to publications such as The New York Times, Discover, and National Geographic. He is a fellow at Yale University‘s Morse College and adjunct professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University. Zimmer also gives frequent lectures and has appeared on many radio shows, including National Public Radio‘s Radiolab, Fresh Air, and This American Life…He is the only science writer to have a species of tapeworm named after him (Acanthobothrium zimmeri).
There is much more at the link. Carl has a new book coming out, namely Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Air We Breathe, an in-depth look at the history of aerobiology. So what should I ask him?
Covering immigration is a mixed bag
This paper investigates the effect of media coverage on immigration attitudes. It combines data on immigration coverage in French television with individual panel data from 2013 to 2017 that records respondents’ preferred television channel and attitudes toward immigration. The analysis focuses on within-individual variations over time, addressing ideological self-selection into channels. We find that increased coverage of immigration polarizes attitudes, with initially moderate individuals becoming more likely to report extremely positive and negative attitudes. This polarization is mainly driven by an increase in the salience of immigration, which reactivates pre-existing prejudices, rather than persuasion effects from biased news consumption.
That is by Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski and Jérôme Valette, and here is the AEA-gated link, here are less gated copies. You can even see this effect in the MR comments section and also on Twitter. People are not persuaded by good arguments, rather they just think about the issue more, which in many cases leads them into further error and negative contagion.
Those new service sector jobs, Ace Ventura edition
But Butcher relies on old-fashioned detective work and his 10-year-old working cocker spaniel. Together, the pair have recovered hundreds of pets.
“I could work every single day of the week and every weekend there’s so much demand right across the board,” he said. “I probably get about on average 15 emails or calls just on missing cats every single week, a busy week might be as many as 30.”
His successful recovery rate for cats is somewhere between 82% and 85%. And his work has taken him across the world, tracking down a yorkshire terrier who went missing on the Grenadian island of Carriacou, and investigating a corrupt dog rescue centre in Turkey.
Often he recovers the animals within a day – he found a snatched cavapoo by tracking down CCTV, noticing an identifiable sticker in the window of the offending car, and putting out an appeal leading to the too-hot-to-handle dog being found dumped shortly after.
The AIs will not take these jobs anytime soon. Here is more from The Guardian. Via Henry Oliver.
My Shakespeare and literature podcast with Henry Oliver
Here is the audio and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Tyler and I spoke about view quakes from fiction, Proust, Bleak House, the uses of fiction for economists, the problems with historical fiction, about about drama in interviews, which classics are less read, why Jane Austen is so interesting today, Patrick Collison, Lord of the Rings… but mostly we talked about Shakespeare. We talked about Shakespeare as a thinker, how Romeo doesn’t love Juliet, Girard, the development of individualism, the importance and interest of the seventeenth century, Trump and Shakespeare’s fools, why Julius Cesar is over rated, the most under rated Shakespeare play, prejudice in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare as an economic thinker. We covered a lot of ground and it was interesting for me throughout.
Excerpt:
Henry No, I agree with you. The thing I get the most pushback about with Shakespeare is when I say that he was a great thinker.
Tyler He’s maybe the best thinker.
And:
Henry Sure. So you’re saying Juliet doesn’t love Romeo?
Tyler Neither loves the other.
Henry Okay. Because my reading is that Romeo has a very strong death drive or dark side or whatever.
Tyler That’s the strong motive in the play is the death drive, yeah.
Henry and I may at some point do a podcast on a single Shakespeare play.