Results for “tyrone” 66 found
Tyrone’s immigration plan
Tyrone just sent me the following, I added in the link:
Tyler, you had a good point that the demand for immigrant labor is often the demand for illegal immigrant labor, but you didn’t take it far enough. We too frequently conflate illegal labor with unskilled labor, when instead this dichotomy should be challenged. We need to make illegal labor more highly skilled and thereby restore its good name.
Toward that end I have a modest proposal. The federal government should allow, by default, any northern European to work in the United States illegally. The labor would be legal in the sense that the employer would face no criminal penalties. But the worker would collect no social security or Medicare benefits, receive no OSHA protections, and the worker would never be sure how long this grace period would last.
Hi-tech employees, especially for short projects, would receive many offers very quickly. So would many medical professionals.
Who would come? It is obvious — those from high marginal tax rate countries. That means France and Sweden, etc. In essence our government would be engaging in tax arbitrage by not paying these people benefits. Those are the optimal illegals.
Transient communities of Swedes would congregate on the shores of the Minnesota Lakes, sharing lutefisk, waiting for rides (a lot of them come from Stockholm and thus can’t drive), and exchanging rumors about where hi-tech work is available.
These people would never fully integrate with the capital stock of the United States. But the program would attract people who already had high levels of human capital from their native Sweden.
Don’t charge them admission for a visa, that would give the gains to our rapacious and spendthrift government, rather than to the people of this fine land.
Do let them own pets.
But don’t make them legal, that just means higher wages for them and lower net gains for all right-thinking, baseball-loving Americans.
All the legal spots should be reserved for Mexicans.
Poor, poor Tyrone. His mind never recovered from that military ambush he faced in the Congo. That is why he talks of giving free entry to all Venezuelans, or at least the women. He wants to set up an artificial American island just off the shores of Cuba, with lighted beacons along the way. He wants to give "the Puerto Rico deal" to Trinidad, or indeed to any individual citizen of Trinidad who wishes to take it. He thinks that free citizenship should be offered to any person who can score in the 80th percentile on GREs.
Poor Tyrone has no idea of the cultural foundations of democracy.
Tyrone says it is easy to stop global warming
Tyrone, like many other people, enjoys reading Instapundit. Today he sent me the following by IM, or was it Google Talk?:
Global warming is easy to stop. Is a carbon tax costly? No way. Didn’t we already agree that stopping global warming is wealth-maximizing for the world as a whole? Then we just have to work out the right set of transfers. As a first-order oversimplification, global warming benefits North Dakota but harms Bangladesh by a greater amount. North Dakota cuts a deal with Bangladesh. The two state Senators will support a carbon tax in return for FREE CALL CENTRES FOR FIFTY YEARS. Or whatever is needed. After all, a bargain is there. We might even use the UN, or a revamped Kyoto agreement, to support and organize the deal.
You can see this agreement is self-enforcing, right? If payment is not made, we can always take the carbon tax away. Or do something even nastier with those silos up there in the Peace Garden State. Obviously America could turn a profit on this whole carbon tax deal. This might sound unfair, but surely it is less unfair than ignoring the problem altogether…
Sadly, Tyrone is still waiting for a response from Tyler. Tyler thinks Tyrone is a nasty, nasty man, who has grasped only the worst of Edgeworth and understood none of the best…
Opposite day: Tyrone on resource pessimism
Tyler, you are always so optimistic. But your own "dismal science" offers neither empirics nor analysis to back this attitude up.
The standard economic arguments about resources focus on the margin, while the real problem is infra-marginal. Don’t be misled by all that talk of prices and substitution. We are running out of resources and soon.
Think about eating your beloved dark chocolate, Tyler. Let’s say you have only four squares left of Lindt in the cupboard. Yes, as you eat more the shadow price of each remaining square goes up. Big deal. You are still going to eat all the chocolate before dinner. Economics tells us only that you will end up on the Pareto frontier, but that frontier still has some pretty miserable points. We are about to approach them. Who cares if prices mean that we meet our doom while equating private first-order conditions? We are simply too voracious for the resources at our disposal.
Market signals and property rights do not work for the globe as a whole, unless you have monopoly ownership of the entire world (hmm…). Property rights work best for local problems, such as fishing in a single lake or who should wash the dishes. Private property won’t cure the problems of bad air, poisoned oceans, global warming, or the overall carrying capacity of the planet. We will get doom, doom, and more doom.
The real question is empirical: are global demands for resources big enough so that the problem resembles you with your four squares of chocolate? Yes. The environment is toast, sooner or later and probably sooner. And it is doomed precisely because capitalism is such a wonderful productive machine. Do you really think you can fill the planet with so much rapacious human biomass without significant and indeed overpowering external effects? Our only hope is that we all become plugged-in machines who don’t need much of an environment any longer.
It is true that resources prices have been falling, on average, for some time now. But the Industrial Revolution is a remarkably recent development and we are just getting started. Mankind’s current productive powers truly are unprecedented, a fact which you libertarians love to stress in other contexts, just not this one.
It would be mere luck if energy-saving technologies outraced nature-destroying ones. And even if this were the case for a while, energy-saving technologies, in the long run, simply encourage us to raise our rapaciousness up another notch. The infra-marginal becomes even more infra- than we ever dreamed.
Now let us get speculative. Did I mention that in the economics of the future — once we are in exponential growth modes — the concept of price will hardly matter? It will be more like an engineering problems where 10x of today’s gdp is produced every week, and we have to see whether this wrecks the globe in ten or rather twenty years’ time. Don’t even bother recycling. Furthermore all you futuristic nerds out there should downgrade the relevance of price theory, given the size of the changes you have in mind.
My parting shot: Maybe you think I am a pessimist. But it probably is better if resource pessimism is true. Life as a hunter-gatherer is still life. And those Pygmies produced some pretty good vocal music. If the price of energy were to keep falling, that would mean everyone could, within a few generations time, own the destructive power of a nuclear weapon in his or her iPod. Now that’s scary.
As I have said in the past, Tyrone really is a pessimistic fellow. If that dark chocolate is gone, it is usually because I ate it in advance, knowing he would otherwise steal my supply. There are only so many cupboards in the kitchen, and Tyrone has learned all my hiding places. And why didn’t I buy more at the store in the first place? It is simple: I had to take Tyrone to his Zen Buddhism class; this sad sack doesn’t own a car.
Tyrone on single-payer health insurance
"Any dummkopf can see we should value human life at replacement cost, not willingness to pay in a market setting. (If P > MC, due to monopoly, MC is the correct measure of value, especially if we can produce more of the stuff.) And what is the replacement cost required to get another baby into the world? A pittance. We should spend half as much on health care as we are doing now, perhaps less.
Let’s institute rationing, and yes nationalization of either insurance or service provision are possible means to that end. Let’s give everyone access to basic preventive care but limit or perhaps even ban all expensive life-prolonging procedures. At the same time, our other policies should be pro-natalist, and that includes a favorable environment for religion and restricted vacation time, not just dollar bonuses for kids and free public education. No good utilitarian can resist that conclusion.
Yes, that treats human lives as interchangeable, but if you don’t buy that, you have no business defending the economic approach to human life in the first place. (The Devil in Goethe’s Faust: "Warum machst Du gemeinschaft mit uns, wenn Du sie nicht durchfuehren kannst?")
By the way, let’s drive down pharmaceutical prices. Subsidizing babies is a cheaper way of producing more years of life.
Yup, it’s all about churning out those Quality-Adjusted Life Years. Current unborns may feel hypothetical or contingent to you, but I tell you, they are just as real as I am. And when those people come into existence — if they come into existence — they will be more real than I am.
At best, even assuming away the usual market failure issues, market-driven health care allows people to invest too many real resources keeping themselves alive. You can kick and scream all you want, but at the end of the day you cannot escape this obvious overinvestment. The problem is that the market works, in the sense of getting people what they want. And if government involvement can save on insurance company overhead at the same time, or alleviate adverse selection, so much the better."
Tyrone is so depressed, and so unhappy with who he is, that he comes up with drivel like this. Why did I even pass on the request? After jotting down these notes, Tyrone told me that if push ever came to shove, I should not spend more than $8000 keeping him alive. Of course I refused to agree; what would I do without him? What would my wife do without him? And what kind of person would you think I am, to sell him for mere dollars and cents?
Addendum: Here is Will Wilkinson’s health care plan.
Tyrone takes on free will
Just last week Tyrone told me the following:
The traditional debate pits determinists against voluntarists. The determinists believe that man is caught up in the grand causal nexus. The voluntarists believe you somehow break free of cause and effect. You are able to spew forth "uncaused events" more or less at will. You are a truly special being, rather than just another toad.
As for the compatibilists, I say ugh. I am sorry, but you can’t believe A and non-A at the same time.
The voluntarists just don’t cut it. What strange theory of physics do they hold? At what moment in the evolution of man (or monkeys) did cause and effect cease to apply to brains? Plus neuroscience shows that subconscious brain activity, in the relevant parts of the brain, precedes the moment of conscious decision.
Furthermore I doubt if the voluntarist vision of free will is so fun. How sad to have to stand apart from the causal nexus. How alienating. How totally gauche. Isn’t the causal nexus what makes sex so fun?
My vision of free will starts with the problems in defining the self. You know: Parfit, Hume, time-slices, and the fact that I cannot remember what I did last night (fyi, I don’t remember what my wife and I discussed on our first date but I do remember what she ordered).
If you are nothing but a time-slice, the free will "problem" goes away. There is no "you" freely choosing, but there is also no "you" caught up as a prisoner of the causal chain. Instead you are your choice. At least "that you" was your choice at the time. No more and no less.
You are identical to your choice. What more dignity or freedom could you possibly expect? Surely that is better than the voluntarist notion of exogenously originating autonomous control.
This view allows us to maintain that human beings are ruled by the same natural laws which govern the behavior of stones. Physics remains monistic. At the same time, you are not reduced to a mere puppet. Ha! There’s not even a "you" to be subject to reduction!
To up the ante just a bit, dare I mention multiple worlds quantum mechanics, David Lewis’s modal realism, and inflationary cosmology? These views are distinct but all lead us to the conclusion that many possible universes, perhaps all possible universes, exist in some fashion. They will give you lots of time-slices and lots of bits of you walking around. Who cares in what order the deck is shuffled, or where the different cards lie spatially? The time-slice you, temporary as he or she may be, is connected to an infinite or very large number of other time-slices. A very large number of those time slices will be very close to the "you" that constituted your choice. Furthermore some other time-slice will get to experience some almost identical version of your choice, sooner or later. Being a solitary fellow, I like that better than voluntarism.
In some versions of these views, literally everything is removed from the causal nexus. In fact there is no causal nexus in the first place. Surely that should make you feel better and restore your underlying pantheism. No self. No reduction. No causal nexus. Just lots of you, you, you. Better than having your own TV show.
Tyler, of course, is a determinist. He thinks I had to write this post. More to the point, this post is who Tyrone really is.
Tyrone is really quite a sad fellow. Many of you believe in free will, but I know determinism applies to me and to my choices. I feel the pull of those causal chains, day in and day out.
Lunch with Tyrone
I have had lunch with Tyrone many times. He is never invited. Tyrone is devious, untrustworthy and worst of all, brilliant. It often take days to sort out the fallacies, sophistries, and half-truths that invade my mind after lunch with Tyrone. Sometimes it takes much longer. He makes my head hurt. Even when Tyrone is not at lunch, I worry. Tyrone does not always announce himself. Maybe he really was at lunch…I told you he was devious.
Please do not encourage Tyrone. He is a bad, bad, man.
Opposite Day: Tyrone on the minimum wage
"Minimum wage, bah humbug. It is easy to defend. Tyrone snorts at you.
First let us clear out some garbage. The minimum wage should not be $50 an hour, and simply citing this possibility does not serve as an effective reductio. And yes racist South African labor unions supported minimum wages, but wouldn’t you expect them, vile as they may have been, to support higher wages in any case?
We know the empirical evidence on minimum wages is mixed. I am familiar with the Card-Krueger smackdowns but at the end of the day you have to work hard to get a big effect on employment. Most importantly, all of these studies miss the longer-run effects that make a legally binding minimum wage such a good idea.
Don’t obsess over static neoclassical economics, where you start with a firm, a competitive market, and a set of marginal products already in place. Think dynamic and look at the longer-run. If you ban jobs beneath some hourly wage, you will end up with more jobs above that wage. Ex ante, companies can set up their production to mesh with high-wage rather than low-wage jobs. Surely we should prefer an economy with higher marginal products, higher wages, and higher median income. Yes this redistributes a bit of wealth from capital but what an efficient way to do so. And we all know that long-run dynamic gains tend to swamp one-time static losses.
Don’t expect to pick up these effects in any study with a short time horizon.
Furthermore there is more slack in the system than many economic models would indicate. As a young’un, I worked in a supermarket. When they raised the legal minimum wage, they raised my wage as well. I was happy. No one fired me.
Minimum wages probably lower the net amount of government intervention in an economy. Lower minimum wages would mean higher welfare payments to make up the difference. Ever heard of EITC? In reality, minimum wages and EITC work together to keep the poor at decent standards of living. More importantly, they keep poor workers in the private sector rather than letting them become wards of the state. Try living on the minimum wage (much less beneath it), and without the safety net of your parents, if you don’t get my point.
Perhaps you think the minimum wage is an excessively blunt policy instrument, given that many near-minimum jobs are held by upper middle class teenagers. Fair enough, but this also means that the minimum wage doesn’t put many of those people out of work. We can go back to focusing on the net effects on the poor.
Tyler, what is really your problem with the minimum wage? Free market economists love to bash it because they can posture as friends of the poor. They can pretend that basic economics has great relevance. They can claim to know something useful, rather than facing the fact that opposition to big government really means opposition to massive income transfers. Since the American public is not willing to go this route, free market economists have to focus their yapping on the minimum wage and the (actually quite small) benefits of free trade.
Tyler, don’t you agree? Tyrone signs off."
There he goes again. As a child, he would never even sit straight at the dinner table. Readers, if you now wish to refresh yourself, try this, or perhaps even this. And maybe someone over at CrookedTimber is up for Opposite Day, but on some other topic…?
Salta (and Jujuy) notes
The food is excellent. Don’t worry about choosing the right restaurant, just try to eat the simple things. Corn products. Beans. Baked goods such as empanadas. Don’t waste your time on the steak. The food stalls in the Mercado Municipal are a good place to start, and many items there cost fifty cents to a dollar. The “sopa de mani” (peanut soup) is especially good, and almost identical to what you find in Bolivia.
The overall vibe in Salta reminds me of both northern Mexico and the older parts of the American Southwest. And the adjacent parts of Bolivia. It is hot, the cities are surrounded by beautiful scenery, and it still all feels rather wild. Salta is also much safer than Buenos Aires, and you don’t see many beggars here. In B.A. they are now asking for food rather than money.
There’s not much to do in Salta, as the central sights in town are the two mummified remains of young Incan girls in the archaeological museum. They are memorable, as it feels like they are staring right back at you.
Spending time here will cure you of utopianism, and also of pessimism. Whatever issues you might think are really important, most people here really don’t care about them or even know about them.
American brands at the retail level are not to be seen. Nor will you run across Chinese or Indian merchants. Perhaps a Syrian or Lebanese is to be found, but not in any great numbers.
Tyrone is accompanying me, and I asked him what he thinks. As you might expect, he had only stupid rudeness in response. Tyrone said that northern Argentina is the true essence of the Argentinean nation, and that everyone interested in Argentina should visit here. In fact, having visited North Macedonia, he wishes to rename the country South Bolivia — were they not once part of the same Viceroyalty? Is it not enough to share the same soup? Do they not have broadly the same accent, devoid of all that B.A. slurring? Was not the country born here in the north? That is where the decisive battle for national independence was fought and won. Do we not all agree with theories of deep roots? It is not just who moves to your nation, but it is about how and where your nation was founded. And for Argentina that is in the north, and with violence and corruption and economic decline. Tyrone even wishes to hand over the rest of Patagonia to the Chileans, so that Argentina may better recognize its true self.
In the twisted view of Tyrone, the creation of the modernist city of Brasilia was a big success. The real failure, hermetically hidden by some charming Parisian and Barcelona-style architecture, was the attempted modernist outpost of Buenos Aires, an immature and underdeveloped excrudescence from the real nation of chocro, horse saddles and the quebrada. It tricked a few Johnny-come-lately migrants during the early 20th century, and neglected to tell them they still would be ruled by the ideas and the norms of the north.
Imagine thinking that you could govern a nation with high modernism and Freudian psychoanalysis — what folly! And now, Tyrone tells us, we have the Milei revolution, attempting to replace one Viennese modernism — that of Freud — with the Viennese modernist revolution of Mises. Good luck with that one, Tyrone says. What kind of fool would think that the future of South America would be determined by a war across different Viennese modernisms? Those mummified corpses still will rule the day, whether or not the feds balance the budget in the short term. Desiccated ever-young girls are in perpetual deficit, no matter how the daily fiscal accounts may read.
I had to stop Tyrone right then and there, as he was explaining why the current hyperinflation probably was a good thing, as the only path to true dollarization and at least one symbolic unification with North America. Tyrone was shouting that such symbolic unification nonetheless was impossible, and thus the corpses had brought in Milei to restore fiscal sanity and prevent dollarization and thus protect the true Incan and Andean nation.
Such thoughts are not allowed on Marginal Revolution, and so I am now trying to persuade Tyrone to visit Iguassu, in the hope that I can induce him to take a quick swim in those falls…
I hope the rest of you will visit northern Argentina nonetheless, and put all that nonsense aside. The empanadas await you.
Conversations with Tyler 20th year of MR anniversary episode
CWT producer Jeff Holmes is the moderator, the panel of guests is Tyler, Alex, Vitalik Buterin, and Ben Casnocha — self-recommending!
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Topics include:
…the golden age of blogging in the mid-2000s, the decline of independent blogs and the rise of social media, why Tyler usually has a post at 1 AM, the consistent design of the site, the peak of the blogosphere in the Great Recession, the robust community — and even marriage — forged through MR, the site’s most underrated feature, Alex and Tyler’s favorite commenters, how MR catalyzed separate real-world pandemic responses by each of them, the cessation of book clubs, Alex and Tyler’s distinct writing style, iconic MR memes, what’s happened to Tyrone, whether the site’s popularity has tempted them into self-censoring, why it was Alex and Tyler who paired up amongst the other Mason econ bloggers, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: There’s an MR marriage.
CASNOCHA: There is an MR marriage.
COWEN: Kathleen and Eric, who at the time lived in the state of Texas. I think they still do. It turns out it’s legal in Texas, that if you pledge marriage through a backtrack feature of blogging which goes back, that it counts as a legally binding pledge, and they literally legally married on Marginal Revolution…
BUTERIN: Wow, you guys are almost beating the blockchain here.
And this excerpt:
COWEN: We have no plans to change.
Tyrone seconds that claim.
Twenty Years of Marginal Revolution!
Who would have guessed that after twenty years Tyler and I would still be writing Marginal Revolution! Thanks especially to Tyler, we have had multiple new posts every single day for twenty years! Incredible.
We had some idea when starting Marginal Revolution that it would provide the foundation for our eventual textbook, Modern Principles of Economics, but we didn’t imagine that it would also become the foundation for our online platform for economics education, Marginal Revolution University and Conversations with Tyler, Emergent Ventures and various other projects of Tyler and myself.
We never imagined that Marginal Revolution would one day be archived by the Library of Congress or become one of the world’s nexus points for debating and understanding events like the Financial Crisis and the Covid Pandemic. It was a shock when the first undergrad told us that they had been reading MR since the age of 12. Today, there are multiple PhD economists who grew up reading Marginal Revolution.
In this conversation, with David Perell, we reflect on 20 years and talk about our process of writing and working together. Tyler is very funny. Tyrone makes an appearance or two, albeit never announced. (Apple podcast, Spotify).
We also thank our many readers and the commentators. You all make MR better (ok, most of you make MR better).
We are still excited to write about economics every day and we don’t think we have peaked! Let’s see what happens over the next 20 years. Thank you all.
Friday assorted links
1. The history of Japanese stock prices.
3. Who are the top 15 liberal economists of France, 1695–1776?
4. New Netflix trailer, “They Cloned Tyrone.”
5. Young people are leaving big U.S. cities.
6. The accelerationists were always going to win.
7. Coleman Hughes piece. Note #9 And Kevin Bryan. Solve for the equilibrium!
Saturday assorted links
1. Forthcoming Netflix movie: “They Cloned Tyrone.”
2. “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” by Roald Dahl 1954.
3. One account of how GPTs hallucinate.
4. More on MusicLM from Google. Yet Google won’t release the model.
5. An AI-generated image? This one is marginally not safe for work, though not at the very extreme.
6. In which Peter Thiel speaks to the Oxford Union and calls Greta Thunberg “complacent.” Good Q&A.
The medical culture that is Britain
Universities have been told they must limit the number of medical school places this year or risk fines, a move attacked as “extraordinary” when the NHS is struggling with staff shortages.
Medical schools have been told to curtail offers to ensure that there is “no risk” of them accepting more would-be doctors than permitted by a government cap, with universities saying they are likely to offer fewer places than normal to sixth-formers this year.
Ministers have been criticised for holding firm to a 7,500 cap on new medical students in England while also acknowledging that a chronic shortage of doctors and nurses is contributing to long delays for NHS treatment.
Robert Halfon, the universities minister, wrote to vice-chancellors last week telling them to limit their offers to sixth-formers, causing frustration among universities, which face fines of £100,000 per student for persistent over-recruitment. Universities say that in the summer, they were forced to reject students for administrative reasons such as submitting vaccine certificates late to stay within permitted numbers.
Here is more from the Times of London (gated). Perhaps Tyrone approves!
The Great (British) Stagnation
David Wallace-Wells in the NYTimes:
In December, as many as 500 patients per week were dying in Britain because of E.R. waits, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, a figure rivaling (and perhaps surpassing) the death toll from Covid-19. On average, English ambulances were taking an hour and a half to respond to stroke and heart-attack calls, compared with a target time of 18 minutes; nationwide, 10 times as many patients spent more than four hours waiting in emergency rooms as did in 2011. The waiting list for scheduled treatments recently passed seven million — more than 10 percent of the country — prompting nurses to strike. The National Health Service has been in crisis for years, but over the holidays, as wait times spiked, the crisis moved to the very center of a narrative of national decline.
It’s not just the NHS
By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one.
Wallace-Wells puts the blame on “austerity”. I see austerity as more obviously a consequence than a cause of stagnation. Government spending in Poland and Slovenia is modestly less than in the UK and the central government in Poland and Slovenia spend far less than the UK does on health. The question is not why the UK spends less–it doesn’t–the question is why it spends so much and gets so little.
AI and language learning
Rob asks:
I would love to see you write on how AI changes the value of language learning, at the margin.
Two thoughts:
The value of learning languages in order to “get” a culture more deeply probably doesn’t change much.
On the other hand, international students probably have much less incentive to learn English — they are mostly interacting with other non-native speakers anyway, there is little cultural knowledge to be gleaned from it.
What else?
(I’m thinking of this because I just moved to Paris with my French wife . . . and thinking about the value of improving my French)
Let’s say that soon we have universal translators as good as on Star Trek, except the words are spoken first in the foreign language and then repeated/translated by the AI (i.e., the AI can’t just make “Romulans speak perfect TV English”). There is then one obvious reason not to learn foreign languages, especially for short interactions and travel interactions. For short interactions, the doubling time for the verbal exchange isn’t a big deal. So instead of learning the foreign language, the AI does the work for you.
But under which conditions does this not hold?
Alternatively, let us say you wanted to be “matched” to the most appropriate person in the entire world on some topic. It could be a marriage match, a friendship match, or simply a “I need to spend many hours discussing Tibetan traditional music with this person” match. The doubling time for the exchange now is a big deal. “Yes we are married, but it is not so bad that everything is repeated by the AI — it limits the amount of time we have to talk to each other and it also slows down our arguments” –no, that just doesn’t cut it, perhaps only for Tyrone.
These ideal matches still will provide a robust reason to learn foreign languages, at least provided you know the language you wish to match into, or perhaps you simply wish to match into something. If the people you wish to match to speak decent English, however, that is again a reason not to learn.
You also might value the “perspectival” benefits of a foreign language more in a world with AI. Perhaps the humanities and multi-perspectival approaches will rise in value, given the ability of the AI to execute very well on technical tasks. Under those assumptions, AI increases the returns to learning the appropriate foreign languages.
Plus AI itself will make languages easier to learn — imagine having a companion to practice with, at any level of desired difficulty, all the time.
Since the short, travel-based interactions were never the main reason to learn foreign languages anyway, perhaps the demand to learn other languages will prove more robust than many are expecting?