The European Visa Mess
A US passport used to allow visa free travel to more countries than almost any other passport. No longer.
Yahoo: The days of visa-free travel throughout most of Europe are about to change. Starting early next year, the European Union will implement the European Travel Information and Authorization System requiring all visitors from visa-free countries to obtain travel authorization prior to their departure.
Terrorism! Crime! Paperwork!
Of course, this inconvenience will reduce travel to Europe (see here) but tell that to the Europeans and they respond, well the US imposes similar requirements on Europeans. This is not a logical response. As Ronald Reagan liked to say, “if one partner in the boat shoots a hole in the boat, it doesn’t make much sense for the other partner to shoot another hole in the boat.” Logical or not, however, it’s a predictable response so I blame the US and the EU for ruining a good thing.
I hate to be the grumpy old man but one day, not too long from now, I will be telling my children, “I remember when you didn’t need a visa to travel abroad. I also remember when there were no anti-money laundering and know your customer laws!” The kids probably won’t believe me. Of course, if I were a little older I could have said, I remember when you didn’t need a passport to travel abroad! The modern passport dates only to World War I:
Wikipedia: During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons, and to control the emigration of people with useful skills (italics added,AT). These controls remained in place after the war, becoming a standard, though controversial, procedure. British tourists of the 1920s complained, especially about attached photographs and physical descriptions, which they considered led to a “nasty dehumanisation”.
Try to tell anyone today, however, that we should have a world with no passports and they will think you bonkers. In a few years, Americans will not be able to imagine a world without visas. Apparently, we have gotten used to dehumanisation.
Would room temperature superconductivity benefit military offense or defense?
If, if, if, people we still do not know yet. But I am one who likes to ask if, and GPT-4 plus is willing to accommodate those desires:
Room temperature superconductivity could potentially benefit both offensive and defensive military capabilities, but it will depend on how this technology is applied.
Offense: The military could potentially use superconductors to develop high-energy weapons or improve the range and accuracy of existing weaponry. For instance, electromagnetic railguns, which use electric fields to launch projectiles at incredibly high speeds, could be made far more practical and powerful. Additionally, it could help with enhanced signal processing to improve intelligence gathering and surveillance capabilities.
Defense: On the other hand, room temperature superconductors could also be used defensively. They could enhance the shielding of military bases, vehicles, or personnel by enabling creation of powerful electromagnetic shields, improving stealth technology, or developing advanced missile defense systems. Superconductive tech could also enhance communication systems, making them more secure and less susceptible to interception or jamming by enemies.
Then some ethics blah blah blah. People, it seems to me that it is more likely to benefit military offense. Sources of strong power are simply more likely to be portable?
Emergent Ventures India, Cohort Five
The following was compiled by Shruti Rajagopalan, who directs Emergent Ventures India. I will not indent the material:
Ankita Vijayvergiya is a computer Science Engineer and an entrepreneur. She founded BillionCarbon along with her co-founder Nikhil Vijayvergiya, to work on solving two problems that plague India – soil degradation and managing biodegradable waste. At BillionCarbon, they are nutrient mining from biodegradable waste to convert it into liquid bio-fertilizer. Their EV grant is to execute proof of concept with pilots, field trials, and technology validation.
Sujata Saha is an Associate Professor of Economics at Wabash College, Indiana. Her primary research interests are in International Finance and Trade, Open Economy Macroeconomics, and Financial Inclusion. She received her EV grant to study entrepreneurship and economic development in Dharavi, Mumbai, the largest slum in the world.
Aditya Mehta is an Arjuna Award-winning professional snooker player. Through the non-profit organization, The ACE Snooker Foundation, he aims to teach and promote cue sports in India. He is creating a technology-based digital cue sports coaching solution, specifically aiming to develop a curriculum-based approach for schools and colleges across India.
Aditi Dimri (PhD, Economist) & Saraswati Chandra (Engineer, Entrepreneur) co-founded Cranberry.Fit to develop a virtual menstrual health coach with the aim to break through the traditional silence and apathy regarding painful periods and menstrual health. The EV grant supports the development of the virtual coach to help manage menstrual symptoms with the help of a personalized habits plan.
Vedanth Ramji is a 15-year-old high school junior from Chennai, passionate about research at the intersection of Math, Computer Science, and Biology. He is currently a student researcher at the Big Data Biology Lab at QUT, Australia, where he develops software tools for Antimicrobial (AMR) research. He received his EV grant to travel to his lab at QUT, to develop deeper insights into AMR research and collaborate with his team on a publication which he is currently co-authoring.
Abhishek Nath is a 43-year-old entrepreneur tackling public restroom infrastructure and sanitation in urban areas head on. He is determined to bring Loocafe – a safe, hygienic, and accessible restroom for everyone – to cities around the world. He seeks to ensure that no city is more than a kilometer away from accessing a safe public toilet, providing youth easy and safe access to hygienic urban sanitation.
Sandhya Gupta is the founder of Aavishkaar, a teacher professional development institute that aims to educate, equip, and enable teachers of K-10 to become excellent science and math educators. Sandhya and Aavishkaar received an EV grant to help create an army of female Math educators helping students enjoy Math while chartering a career pathway for themselves in STEM fields.
Ankur Paliwal is a queer journalist and founder of queerbeat, a collaborative journalism project to cover the historically underserved LGBTQIA+ community in India. Over the last 13 years, Ankur has written narrative journalism stories about science, inequity, and the LGBTQIA+ community. He received an EV grant to build an online community and newsletter alongside queerbeat, to help transform public conversation about LGBTQIA+ persons in India.
Arsalaan Alam is a web developer, machine learning enthusiast, and aspiring rationalist. He is working on improving the conditions of harmonic coexistence between humans and wildlife. He got his Emergent Ventures grant to continue building Aquastreet, which consists of a hardware device that can be attached beneath a boat, after which it takes in audio of fish’s voices and converts the audio into a MEL frequency and then performs machine learning to classify the fish species, which is then displayed on the Aquastreet mobile app.
Soundarya Balasubramani is a 26-year-old writer, author, and former product manager. She moved to the United States to pursue her master’s at Columbia University in 2017. Immigrants in the US face several barriers, including the decades-long wait times to get a green card for Indians, the lack of a startup visa for entrepreneurs, and the constant political battle that thwarts immigration reform. To reduce the barrier skilled immigrants face, Soundarya is has written a comprehensive book (Unshacked) and is building an online community where immigrants can congregate, get guidance, and help each other.
Aadesh Nomula is an engineer focused on cybersecurity. He is working on a single-point cybersecurity device for Indian homes and small-scale factories. His other interest is Philosophy.
Aurojeet Misra is an 18-year-old biology student at IISER Pune. He received his EV grant for his efforts on a radioactive tracing system to detect and locate forest fires. He hopes to test a prototype of this system to better understand its practical feasibility. He is interested in understanding different scientific disciplines like molecular biology, public health, physics, etc., and working on their interface.
Divyam Makar is a 24-year-old entrepreneur and developer working on Omeyo, a platform to connect local pharmacists, which aims to provide a large inventory to users with all the needed items, along with being super low-cost and interactive. They aim to deliver medicine to their users in as little as 20 minutes.
Divas Jyoti Parashar is a 23-year-old climate entrepreneur from Assam. He founded Quintinno Labs, a cleantech company driving the electric vehicle revolution by developing power banks for EVs. These compact and portable devices that fit in your car’s trunk aim to reduce range anxiety and offer emergency relief to EV users in developing countries that lack a charging station network. He is also working on deploying hydro-kinetic turbines in Assam to generate clean energy from flowing water. His recent passion project was a documentary about the impact of the 2021 volcanic eruption on the local population in La Palma Island.
Ray Amjad is prototyping scalable tools for finding and supporting the lost Einsteins and Marie Curies of the world – young people with exceptional math and science ability from under-resourced backgrounds. He received his EV Grant to help him find collaborators. He graduated from Cambridge, where he filmed many educational videos.
Amandeep Singh is a 22-year-old inventor and entrepreneur interested in machine learning and deep learning. He is building ‘Tiktok for India’, a short video-sharing app that allows people to edit and share videos with the world, create communities, and deliver authentic video content. Prior to this, he founded an AI surveillance startup, particularly for CCTV cameras.
Govinda Prasad Dhungana is an assistant professor at Far Western University, Nepal, and a doctoral candidate at Ghent University, Belgium. He is a public health researcher and co-founder of the Ostrom Center and he designs and implements high-impact HIV/Family Planning programs in marginalized communities. His EV grant will be used for piloting the community-based distribution (using Ostrom’s Design Principles and behavior change models) of a new self-injectable contraception (Sayana Press).
Kalash Bhaiya is a 17-year-old high-school student and social entrepreneur. She founded Fun Learning Youth (or FLY), a nonprofit that employs cohort-based mentorship by volunteers in their localities and received her EV grant to help reduce middle-school dropouts within underserved communities.
Kranthi Kumar Kukkala is a serial entrepreneur and technologist from Hyderabad. He is working on a health care device – HyGlo – a non-invasive anemia diagnosing device. HyGlo is similar to a pulse oximeter, when a person puts their finger in the device probe, it investigates blood inside the finger without taking a blood sample and finds the hemoglobin percentage in the blood. This device can help young girls and women manage anemia (a big problem in India).
Kulbir Lamba is a 35-year-old researcher and practitioner, interested in understanding the startup landscape and received an EV grant for studying the evolution of DeepTech startups in India.
Keshav Sharma is a 23-year-old entrepreneur working at the intersection of design, technology & marketing. Two years ago, he founded Augrade, a deeptech startup with his college friends. Augrade is an AI+AR platform to streamline the creation, editing, validation & visualization of 3D models at scale.
Srijon Sarkar is a 19-year-old researcher from Kolkata interested in mathematical oncology and applied rationality. He received his EV grant to study cancer systems, particularly Epithelial/Mesenchymal Plasticity through a lens of mathematical models and statistical algorithms, during his gap year. He will start his undergraduate degree (mathematics and biology) with a full scholarship at Emory University starting Fall 2023.
Shubham Vyas s an advocate for open discourse and democratic dialogue in India. With a background in data science and interest in philosophy, he received his EV grant to build his venture “Conversations on India,” into a multi-platform media venture to help shape the Indian political and economic discourse landscape.
Navneet Choudhary is an entrepreneur, and his journey started when he was 21 with a food delivery app for trains and buses across 70 cities in India. He received his EV Grant to develop LAMROD, a mobile application-based platform to manage trucking and cargo fleet operations at one place.
Srinaath Krishnan is a 20-year-old entrepreneur from Chennai. He received his EV grant to work on Zephyr, a start-up making credit scores universal and mobile, to enable immigrants to qualify for financial products using their international credit history.
Venkat Ram is an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur, researching the development and deployment of human capital. He received his EV grant to study the structure and functioning of labor addas (proverbial marketplaces most daily wage laborers in India find work).
Arvind Subramanian, is a 25-year-old sailor from Chennai and works as a product manager at Sportstar, the oldest sports magazine in India. He won his EV grant to enable his (and his team’s) participation in the 2022 J80 World Sailing Championship in Rhode Island, USA. He is working towards building and scaling the niche sporting scene in India.
Some past winners received additional grants:
Karthik Nagapuri, a 21-year-old programmer and AI engineer, for general career development.
Akash Kulgod is a 23yo cognitive science graduate from UC Berkeley founded Dognosis, where he is building tech that increases the bandwidth of human-canine communication. His grant will go towards launching a pilot study in Northern Karnataka testing the performance of cyber-canines on multi-cancer screening from breath samples. He writes on his Substack, about effective altruism, talent-search, psychedelics, and sci-fi uplift.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort, third cohort, and fourth cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
What should Jeff Holmes ask Alex and me?
Rumor has it that there will be a special edition of Conversations with Tyler, to commemorate the pending 20th year anniversary of Marginal Revolution (yes, we have posted multiple times each day, without exception).
We will be recording, of course, in Chennai. So what should Jeff ask Alex and me? If you don’t already know, Jeff from the inception has been the producer of CWT.
Monday assorted links
1. Is HHS the ugliest building in DC, or is it just fine? Why was it once considered “too opulent”?
2. Solar energy fact of the day. Should this make you less bullish about nuclear?
3. Edward Sexton, tailor to the Beatles, passes away RIP.
4. David Card on writing controversial papers.
5. Lord Monboddo would be proud (can an orangutan drive a golf cart?)
Sam Peltzman on American happiness
Sam is still writing good papers:
Since 1972 the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a representative sample of US adults “… [are] you …very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Overall, the population is reasonably happy even after a mild recent decline. I focus on differences along standard socio demographic dimensions: age, race, gender, education, marital status income and geography. I also explore political and social differences. Being married is the most important differentiator with a 30-percentage point happy-unhappy gap over the unmarried. Income is also important, but Easterlin’s (1974) paradox applies: the rich are much happier than the poor at any moment, but income growth doesn’t matter. Education and racial differences are also consequential, though the black-white gap has narrowed substantially. Geographic, gender and age differences have been relatively unimportant, though old-age unhappiness may be emerging. Conservatives are distinctly happier than liberals as are people who trust others or the Federal government. All above differences survive control for other differences.
Here is the SSRN link, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
How to eat well in Sri Lanka
Food here is excellent, but eating well involves some counterintuitive advice.
For one thing, there are few “undiscovered gems” along the roadways. It is just not a thing here, and several Sri Lanka residents have confirmed this to me (one person suggested there used to be lots of them, but they have faded). During my extensive road travels, I saw many many closed, empty, or otherwise deserted roadside restaurants. The open ones had few or no customers. So don’t put a lot of time into searching for them. You will do just fine eating at the obvious restaurants, including hotel restaurants.
Often breakfast is the best meal, as you can sample hoppers and string hoppers. If they will cook a hopper for you with an egg (and spices) inside, do that. Think of it as a spongy carbohydrate turned into a kind of crepe. The egg inside should not be overdone, but the woman cooking it for you has done this 7,834 times before, so probably it will be just right.
When you get string hoppers, it is all a matter of composition. Put the right spices, sauces, and sambals on top. Ask for assistance. The quality of the string hoppers varies only marginally, it is really all about your skills at composition and at asking for aid.
Hoppers and string hoppers are pretty much always very good. You want to keep on ordering them. And yes, food in Sri Lanka is somewhat of an exercise in repeated monotony, but it is a very appealing repeated monotony.
Vegetables in Sri Lanka are first-rate, and if you visit the vegetable markets in and near Dambulla you will come away impressed. If you are served just ordinary broccoli or cauliflower, without spice or garnish, it will be as good as anywhere.
The best vegetable to eat Sri Lankan style is the green beans. Never turn them down. Overall, Sri Lanka is one of the very best countries for vegetarians or vegans. You’ll see many other kinds of curry, such as with jackfruit or manioc, and they are not bad, but once you have tried them you will be returning to the green beans.
The lentils are consistently superb, arguably better overall than in India, though in fewer styles. Keep on ordering them.
Thou shalt not refuse any curry served with cashews in it.
If you are at a buffet, sample any item that has a small green leaf in the sauce. Sample any item with an unusual name, with “tempered cowpeas” being one but not the only example.
Beware of buffets designed for Russian or Chinese package tourists, though usually there will be hoppers or string hoppers somewhere to be had.
Coconut roti is a wonderful snack, but you should not eat too many of them, either at once or across the course of a lifetime.
There is the usual array of tropical fruits, high in quality, though to be frank most of them bore me at this point.
Both pork and bacon are excellent (and common) in Sri Lanka. The pork is much better than the beef. So far I’ve had better luck with shrimp than with fish, though I don’t feel I’ve cracked the cultural codes yet for seafood. Some love Sri Lankan crab, but I haven’t had the chance to explore that direction.
Western-style baked goods are by no means a total disaster here, and it is not a mistake to try them. The high quality is supposed to stem from the earlier Portuguese influence, at least if you can believe llama Chat.
Aqua Forte, in Galle, is a Michelin star-quality Italian restaurant with affordable prices. The chef is from Trentino. The cured raw fish with pistachios is one of the best courses I’ve had in years.
In Colombo, Monsoon is a good Asian fusion place, get the beef rendang. Shang Palace is a good Chinese restaurant.
In sum, you can eat very well here at great prices and booking doesn’t ever seem to be a problem. You do need to be willing to double and triple down on some items, but don’t worry — you’ll like them!
Addendum: The perceptive reader will note I have covered only the food of southern Sri Lanka. That is also the part of the country — by far — that you are most likely to visit.
One simple reason why travel is important
Travel makes you a better reader, especially for history, geography, (factual) economics, and political science.
I have been reading two good books about Sri Lanka, namely K.M. de Silva’s Sri Lanka and the Defeat of the LTTE and also his A History of Sri Lanka. Both would be very difficult to follow if I didn’t already have a decent sense of the place names, how the country “fits together,” and many other features of life here. If I read about a 12th century Buddhist kingdom, in fact I absorb and retain much more of that knowledge if I have visited the ruins of said kingdom. It is more intellectually and emotionally salient to me, whether or not that process is rational.
In part you visit places simply to make your later reading about them more productive.
And there is nowhere in the world that is not a place.
Addendum: This effect is not a small one. If a said civilization has vanished, or is almost entirely gone, that is also an enormous blow to our reading. It is so much easier to keep track of “the Florentines” than “the Assyrians.” There is also a question of optimal timing — don’t read about a place too early! Yet some early reading is necessary, so that you may develop the curiosity to want to go there.
Sunday assorted links
1. Questions that are rarely asked: “At the breakfast bar and wondering if having everybody touch the same pair of tongs in the same place is proven to be better than having everybody simply pick up their own piece of bread”
2. The importance of high school guidance counselors.
3. Is fish and chips disappearing? (As an aside, I don’t find this to be the case.)
4. Jake Seliger tells his story.
5. Mental health problems diminish with income.
6. MIE: “you can now charge your phone with a cassette tape.”
7. Some new UFO bits, not necessarily true, involving Russia.
The political impact of social media has been grossly overrated
Finally the truth is coming out. A series of new research papers, surveyed in the NYT, present a pretty sobering reality. Here is just one excerpt:
One of the studies was titled “How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes?” In that research, which included more than 23,000 Facebook users and 21,000 Instagram users, researchers replaced the algorithms with reverse chronological feeds, which means people saw the most recent posts first instead of posts that were largely tailored to their interests.
Yet people’s “polarization,” or political knowledge, did not change, the researchers found. In the academics’ surveys, people did not report shifting their behaviors, such as signing more online petitions or attending more political rallies, after their feeds were changed.
And:
In another paper, researchers found that reducing the amount of content in 23,000 Facebook users’ feeds that was posted by “like-minded” connections did not measurably alter the beliefs or political polarization of those who participated.
“These findings challenge popular narratives blaming social media echo chambers for the problems of contemporary American democracy,” the study’s authors said.
In a fourth study that looked at 27,000 Facebook and Instagram users, people said their knowledge of political news fell when their ability to reshare posts was taken away in an experiment. Removing the reshare button ultimately did not change people’s beliefs or opinions, the paper concluded.
This entire episode is one of the more egregious instances of an anti-business, anti-tech falsehood taking root and being repeated endlessly. Of course, some of us having been saying this for years — the basic point is not hard to grasp if you are someone who…writes for a public audience…
The economics of NBA contracts
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The Boston Celtics just set an NBA record by agreeing to a five-year, $304 million contract with two-time All-Star Jaylen Brown. The obvious question is whether any single basketball player can be worth that much money — especially someone who is not even the best player on his team, much less on a par with Lebron James, Stephen Curry or any number of other shoo-in hall of famers.
I’m not here to make predictions about Brown’s career. But the odds are the deal will be seen as a good one — maybe even a bargain. The economics of the National Basketball Association have been shifting toward more and more money.
This trend is evident in the rising value not just of players but of teams. Last year the Phoenix Suns sold for $4 billion (with the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury). To put that number in perspective, the Brooklyn Nets sold for $3.3 billion in 2019, the Houston Rockets sold for $2.2 billion in 2017, and the Atlanta Hawks sold for a mere $850 million in 2015.
Much of the rest of the column considers the impact of foreign money on other sports, and perhaps someday the NBA:
And then there is the growing internationalization of capital in sports, which will buttress high prices for both players and teams. This trend goes beyond American basketball: One Saudi Arabian club, Al-Hilal, has offered French soccer star Kylian Mbapp é $333 million to play next year in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are already paying Cristiano Ronaldo $220 million over two years. Lionel Messi turned the Saudis down, but surely the offer increased his bargaining power with MSL’s Inter Miami, where his deal is valued at $50 to $60 million annually.
Might the Saudis consider something similar for a US basketball star? Lebron James already tweeted that he would gladly accept a comparable offer, and many others would accept far less.
The Desert Kingdom would probably have a hard time putting together a full NBA-like season with 30 teams. But it could bring in more European or other foreign players to its current league, shorten the season, or feature 3-on-3 games. In addition to wealth, they need to rely on innovation.
These scenarios don’t have to happen to serve as a check on NBA management or owners.
Qatar owns five percent of the Washington Wizards, we will see if this becomes a larger basketball trend or not.
Are “circuit breakers” overrated?
Maybe so:
Market-wide trading halts, also called circuit breakers, have been widely adopted as part of the stock market architecture, in the hope of stabilizing the market during dramatic price declines. We develop an intertemporal equilibrium model to examine how circuit breakers impact market behavior and welfare. We show that a circuit breaker tends to lower the overall level of the stock price and significantly alters its dynamics. In particular, as the price approaches the circuit breaker, its volatility rises drastically, accelerating the chance of triggering the circuit breaker — the so-called “magnet effect”; in addition, returns exhibit increasing negative skewness and positive drift, while trading activity spikes up. Our empirical analysis finds supportive evidence for the model’s predictions. Moreover, we show that a circuit breaker can affect the overall welfare either negatively or positively, depending on the relative significance of investors’ trading motives for risk sharing vs. irrational speculation.
That is from a recent paper by Hui Chen, Anton Petukhov, Jiang Wang, and Hao Xing, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Saturday assorted links
1. #lazygirljob (WSJ).
2. The economic foundations of Kenyan street protests. And some interest groups are rebelling against Nigerian reforms.
3. Product liability for defective AI. A law and economics study.
4. Diagnostic medical errors are a huge problem.
5. Lebanese man holds up bank to get his own money out (NYT).
More on the Merger Guidelines
Jason Furman and Carl Shapiro write about the merger guidelines. On the thrust of the guideline as political rather than summarzing existing law they are very much in agreement with the Hurwicz and Manne piece that I summarized last week.
Merger guidelines aren’t enforceable regulations. They have also never attempted to be a legal brief or offered an interpretation of the case law. Instead they have described widely accepted economic principles that the Justice Department and the FTC use to analyze mergers. As a result, the guidelines have commanded widespread respect and bipartisan support. Amazingly, for at least 25 years, when regulators have challenged mergers in court, the merging firms themselves have accepted the framework articulated in the guidelines.
The new draft guidelines depart sharply from previous iterations by elevating regulators’ interpretation of case law over widely accepted economic principles. The guidelines have long helped courts use economic reasoning to evaluate government challenges to mergers. They shouldn’t become a debatable legal brief or, worse, a political football.
But in addition Furman and Shapiro make specific critiques:
,,,parts of the draft lack an adequate economic foundation. They contain a structural presumption against many vertical mergers unsupported by theory or evidence. The proposed guideline on acquisitions of products or services that rivals may use to compete includes legal wishful thinking about how commitments made by the merging parties are treated, as the recent court rebuke of the FTC’s attempt to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision illustrates.
Likewise, a new guideline states that “mergers should not entrench or extend a dominant position,” where a “dominant position” means a market share of at least 30%. As we read this guideline, many nonhorizontal deals that enable the acquiring firm to become more efficient, and thus gain market share or compete more effectively in adjacent markets, would be considered illegal even if they benefit consumers and workers….we are troubled by the draft guidelines’ claim that efficiencies won’t be counted, even if they benefit consumers and workers, for a merger that furthers a trend toward horizontal concentration or vertical integration. Imagine if regulators had applied such a rule to the automobile industry in the 1910s.
Sri Lanka travel notes
Have you ever been to a perfect spot and wished “there should be an amazing hotel right there, except I want the hotel without any accompanying crowding or corruptions of tourism?”
If that is your desire, Sri Lanka is the country for you. (Who cares if that is an apparent violation of the laws of economics and location theory?) If you have visited Sri Lanka, likely you will know what I mean — it is simply so nice. So much the right blend of exotic and comfortable. It feels so unspoilt, so fresh, and so natural. So easy on the visitor, as if it were a well-run state of India with a big dose of Buddhism and a vaguely Caribbean vibe, and without the extreme population density.
Here was my Kandalama hotel, let the link rotate through all the images.
Here is my current hotel, only about 30 or 40 feet away from one of the world’s major Buddhist temple complexes, medieval and mostly dating from the 12th century. None of it is close to expensive, no matter how high the quality.
Galle, on the southern coast, is a lovely colonial city, largely intact, with notable Dutch, Portuguese, and British buildings, as well as mosques. It is ringed by an old fort, and has numerous good views of the ocean. Everything is walkable. Russians are the single largest tourist group there (no visa required), and yet the town does not feel overwhelmed, even on the cusp of August. Try Galle Fort Hotel, which is also a UNESCO heritage site.
There is an aesthetic look to so many things. If a farmer builds a tree house so he can monitor his crops at night without being stomped by elephants, the tree house will be pretty nice, even though the farmer is poor.
So much of Sri Lanka feels like the 1980s, in a way that is good for you but not good for them. On the plus side, education, literacy (92%), and social indicators are high. Life expectancy is higher than in the United States. You can drive around deep into the rural areas, and you just won’t see extreme poverty. Nor are the drivers crazy, so the travel isn’t stressful. The country never seems internet-obsessed.
The total fertility rate is currently about 2.0, a blessing in the short run but likely a disaster over time. At about 4k per capita income (about 14k PPP), Sri Lanka cannot afford to grow old before it becomes wealthy. And I can assure you, it is not on the verge of becoming wealthy.
The important buildings — and there are many of them — are all of earlier vintages. The hotels of Geoffrey Bawa — in a style sometimes called “tropical modernism” — are of special interest. Simply tracking down all of the Bawa hotels would be a good way of organizing your trip. Sri Lanka is one of the few countries in the world where the very nice old architecture and the very nice newer architecture bear some aesthetic relation to each other.
Did I mention this?:
In 2022, with its GDP contracting by 7.8%, Sri Lanka was one of the worst performing economies in the world. Annual inflation was around 60%, and the currency depreciated by over 80%. These quantifiable measures of pain were exacerbated by severe shortages and uncertainty in accessing fuel, gas and medicines. Daily power cuts became normalized.
Living standards remain lower, yet visible signs of those earlier troubles are gone. The infrastructure now works once again, yet the country feels psychically scarred by the recent economic collapse.
One Sri Lankan MR reader, with whom I chatted, argued that the country has no person or not even a group “in charge” at the wheel. So small problems drift and sometimes turn into major crises. The country’s “immune system” simply is not functioning.
It is striking that none of the major parties have good ideas, as there is mainly corrupt oligarchy or Marxists. Liberalism is nowhere to be seen. Behind the scenes, Sri Lanka is a country that outside parties (most of all China and India, earlier the colonial powers) have cared about far too much. It never feels like there is a stable political equilibrium upon which to build, because the outsiders have so much power.
Internally, they still have not generated a true consensus on what the country is about, and if they are all willing to live in peace with each other. As one of my drivers put it succinctly: “I don’t like the other religions.”
With textiles and tea as the major exports, the country shows no signs of moving up the value chain. Nonetheless Sri Lanka remains richer per capita than India. And easier to handle, albeit far less dynamic. Someone could write a very Sri Lankan version of “the complacent class.”
How good is Buddhism for economic growth anyway?
I will do a separate post on food in Sri Lanka.