My first trip to Tokyo
To continue with the biographical segments:
My first trip to Tokyo was in 1992. I was living in New Zealand at the time, and my friend Dan Klein contacted me and said “Hey, I have a work trip to Tokyo, do you want to meet me there?” And so I was off, even though the flight was more of a drag than I had been expecting. It is a long way up the Pacific.
Narita airport I found baffling, and it was basically a two hour, multi-transfer trip to central Tokyo. Fortunately, a Japanese woman was able to help us make the connections. I am glad these days that the main flights come into Haneda.
(One Japan trip, right before pandemic, I decided to spend a whole day in Narita proper. Definitely recommended for its weirdness. Raw chicken was served in the restaurants, and it felt like a ghost town except for some of the derelicts in the streets. This experience showed me another side of Japan.)
We stayed in a business hotel in Ikebukuro, a densely populated but not especially glamorous part of Tokyo. It turned out that was a good way to master the subway system and also to get a good sense of how Tokyo was organized. I had to one-shot memorize the rather complicated footpath from the main subway station to the hotel, which had been chosen by my friend’s sponsors. As we first emerged from the subway station, we had, getting there the first time, to ask two Japanese high schoolers to help us find the way. They spoke only a few words of English, but we showed them the address in Japanese and they even carried our bags for us, grunting “Hai!” along the way, giving us a very Japanese experience.
In those days very little English was spoken in Tokyo, especially outside a few major areas such as Ginza. You were basically on your own.
I recall visiting the Sony Center, which at the time was considered the place to go to see new developments in “tech.” I marveled at the 3-D TV, and realized we had nothing like it. I felt like I was glimpsing the future, but little did I know the technology was not going anywhere. Nor for that matter was the company. Here is Noah, wanting the Japanese future back.
Most of all, Tokyo was an extreme marvel to me. I felt it was the single best and most interesting place I had visited. Everywhere I looked — even Ikebukuro — there was something interesting to take note of. The plastic displays of food in the windows (now on the way out, sadly) fascinated me. The diversity, order, and package wrapping sensibilities of the department stores were amazing. The underground cities in the subways had to be seen to be believed (just try emerging from Shinjuku station and finding the right exit). The level of dress and stylishness and sophistication was extreme, noting I would not say the same about Tokyo today. This was not long after the bubble had burst, but the city still had the feel of prosperity. Everything seemed young and dynamic.
I also found Tokyo affordable. The reports of the $2,000 melon were true, but the actual things you would buy were somewhat cheaper than in say New York City. It was easy to get an excellent meal for ten dollars, and without much effort. My hotel room was $50 a night. The subway was cheap, and basically you could walk around and look at things for free. The National Museum was amazing, one of the best in the world and its art treasures cannot, in other forms, readily be seen elsewhere.
Much as I like Japanese food, I learned during this trip that I cannot eat it many meals in a row. This was the journey where I realized Indian food (!) is my true comfort food. Tokyo of course has (and had) excellent Indian food, just as it has excellent food of virtually every sort. I learned a new kind of Chinese food as well.
The summer heat did not bother me. I also learned that Tokyo is one of the few cities that is better and more attractive at night.
I recall wanting to buy a plastic Godzilla toy. I walked around the proper part of town, and kept on asking for Godzilla. I could not figure out why everyone was staring at me like I was an idiot, learning only later that the Japanese say “Gojira.” So in a pique of frustration, I did my best fire-breathing, stomping around, “sound like a gorilla cry run backwards through the tape” imitation of Godzilla. Immediately a Japanese man excitedly grabbed me by the hand, walked me through some complicated market streets, and showed me where I could buy a Godzilla, shouting “Gojira, Gojira, Gojira!” the whole time.
I came away happy.
My side trip, by the way, was to the shrines and temples of Kamakura, no more than an hour away but representing another world entirely. Recommended to any of you who are in Tokyo with a day to spare.
Now since that time, I’ve never had another Tokyo trip quite like that one. These days, and for quite a while, the city feels pretty normal to me, rather than like visiting the moon. Fluent English is hard to come by, but most people can speak some English and respond to queries. You can translate and get around using GPS, AI, and so on. The city is much more globalized, and other places have borrowed from its virtues as well.
Looking back, I am very glad I visited Tokyo in 1992. The lesson is that you can in fact do time travel. You do it by going to some key places right now.
Markets in everything?
Wealthy foreign gun enthusiasts paid Bosnian Serb forces for the chance to shoot residents of Sarajevo during the siege of the city during the 1990s, according to claims being investigated by Italian magistrates.
The investigation was prompted by new evidence that “weekend snipers” paid handsomely to line the hills around Sarajevo and join in the Bosnian Serb siege, which killed more than 11,500 people between 1992 and 1996 during the Balkan Wars.
The investigation into the alleged “human safari” in Sarajevo has been opened after years of research by the Italian writer Ezio Gavazzeni, who said a key source was a former Bosnian intelligence officer.
“What I learnt is that Bosnian intelligence warned the local office of the Italian secret service … about the presence of at least five Italians who were taken to the hills above Sarajevo to shoot civilians,” he told the Italian daily La Repubblica.
Here is more from the Times of London.
Thursday assorted links
2. John Cochrane on causal identification.
3. What are the density trends in major cities around the world?
4. “You Can Now Invest In A Hedge Fund Dedicated To Hermès Bags.”
5. What does it mean for an experiment to be beautiful?
8. New Yorker fact checkers confirm that AI song really did hit #1 on the C&W charts.
9. Here is the 5.1 Thinking model on different kinds of humor in Woody Allen movies, and then a follow-up question on the influence of Bergman. Impressive, as is the model more generally.
Waymo
Waymo now does highways in the Bay area.
Expanding our service territory in the Bay Area and introducing freeways is built on real-world performance and millions of miles logged on freeways, skillfully handling highway dynamics with our employees and guests in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This experience, reinforced by comprehensive testing as well as extensive operational preparation, supports the delivery of a safe and reliable service.
The future is happening fast.
My Conversation with the excellent Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Donald discuss the Buddha’s 32 bodily marks, whether he died of dysentery, what sets the limits of the Buddha’s omniscience, the theological puzzle of sacred power in an atheistic religion, Buddhism’s elaborate system of hells and hungry ghosts, how 19th-century European atheists invented the “peaceful” Buddhism we know today, whether the axial age theory holds up, what happened to the Buddha’s son Rahula, Buddhism’s global decline, the evidently effective succession process for Dalai Lamas, how a guy from New Jersey created the Tibetan Book of the Dead, what makes Zen Buddhism theologically unique, why Thailand is the wealthiest Buddhist country, where to go on a three-week Buddhist pilgrimage, how Donald became a scholar of Buddhism after abandoning his plans to study Shakespeare, his dream of translating Buddhist stories into new dramatic forms, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Fire is a central theme in Buddhism, right?
LOPEZ: Well, there are hot hells, and there are also cold hells. Fire comes up, really, in the idea of nirvana. Where we see the fire, I think most importantly, philosophically, is the idea of where did the Buddha go when he died? He was not reborn again. They say it’s really just like a flame going out, that is, the flame ends. Where did the fire go? Nowhere, that is, the wood that was producing the flame is all burned up, and you just end. Nirvana is not a place. It’s a state of extinction or what the Buddhists call cessation.
COWEN: What role does blood sacrifice play in Buddhism?
LOPEZ: Well, it’s not supposed to perform any role. There’s no blood sacrifice in Buddhism.
COWEN: No blood sacrifice. How about wrathful deities?
LOPEZ: Wrathful deities — there’re a lot, yes.
COWEN: Then we’re back to supernatural. Again, this gets to my central confusion. It’s atheistic, but there’s some other set of principles in the universe that generate wrathful deities, right?
LOPEZ: Wrathful deities are beings who were humans in one lifetime, animals in another, and born as wrathful deities in another lifetime. Everyone is in the cycle of rebirth. We’ve all been wrathful deities in the past. We’ll be wrathful deities in the future unless we get out soon. It’s this universe of strange beings, all taking turns, shape-shifting from one lifetime to the next, and it goes on forever until we find the way out.
COWEN: Are they like ghosts at all — the wrathful deities?
LOPEZ: There’s a whole separate category of ghosts. The ghosts are often called — if we look at the Chinese translation — hungry ghosts. The ghosts are beings who suffer from hunger and thirst. They are depicted as having distended bellies. They have these horrible sufferings that when they drink water, it turns into molten lead. They’ll eat solid food — it turns into an arrow or a spear. Constantly seeking food, constantly being frustrated, and they appear a lot in Buddhist text. One of the jobs of Buddhist monks and nuns is to feed the hungry ghosts.
COWEN: Is it a fundamental misconception to think of Buddhism as a peaceful religion?
And:
COWEN: …If one goes to Borobudur in Java — spectacular, one of the most amazing places to see in the world.
LOPEZ: Absolutely.
COWEN: We read that it was abandoned. It wasn’t even converted into a tourist site or a place where you would sell things. Why would you just toss away so much capital structure?
LOPEZ: I think it just got overgrown by the jungle. I think that people were not going there. There were no Buddhist pilgrims coming. The populace converted to Islam mostly, and it just fell into decline, just to be revived in the 19th, 20th century.
COWEN: Turn it into a candy store or something! It just seems capital maintenance occurs across other margins. The best-looking building you have — one of the best-looking in the world — is forgotten. Don’t you find that paradoxical?
Definitely recommended, interesting throughout and I learned a great deal doing the prep. One of my favorite episodes of this year. And I am happy to recommend all of Donald’s books on Buddhism.
Prediction markets in everything? Tariff refund edition
Oppenheimer changed its terms from offers earlier this year. The firm said it would consider bids starting at 20 percent per refund claim pertaining to “reciprocal” or IEEPA tariffs and 10 percent for tariffs tied to fentanyl.
Gabriel Rodriguez, the president and co-founder of A Customs Brokerage, in Doral, Fla., and a recipient of several emails from Oppenheimer, said he believed Oppenheimer was offering to pay the equivalent of 80 cents on the dollar per claim.
Here is more from the NYT, via Amy.
Lô Borges, RIP
Here is the obituary, via John.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Marginal product. And more.
2. On Richard II.
3. Brief comments on stablecoins.
4. Decorating with information density (NYT).
5. Susan Athey and Fiona Scott Morton on the economics of AI. They actually have something new to say.
UCSD Faculty Sound Alarm on Declining Student Skills
The UC San Diego Senate Report on Admissions documents a sharp decline in students’ math and reading skills—a warning that has been sounded before, but this time it’s coming from within the building.
At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.
Moreover, weaknesses in math and language tend to be more related in recent years. In 2024, two out of five students with severe deficiencies in math also required remedial writing instruction. Conversely, one in four students with inadequate writing skills also needed additional math preparation.
The math department created a remedial course, only to be so stunned by how little the students knew that the class had to be redesigned to cover material normally taught in grades 1 through 8.
Alarmingly, the instructors running the 2023-2024 Math 2 courses observed a marked change in the skill gaps compared to prior years. While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).
In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021)
(The figure gives some examples of remedial class material and the percentage of remedial students getting the answers correct.)
The report attributes the decline to several factors: the pandemic, the elimination of standardized testing—which has forced UCSD to rely on increasingly inflated and therefore useless high school grades—and political pressure from state lawmakers to admit more “low-income students and students from underrepresented minority groups.”
…This situation goes to the heart of the present conundrum: in order to holistically admit a diverse and representative class, we need to admit students who may be at a higher risk of not succeeding (e.g. with lower retention rates, higher DFW rates, and longer time-to-degree).
The report exposes a hard truth: expanding access without preserving standards risks the very idea of a higher education. Can the cultivation of excellence survive an egalitarian world?
Solve for the NIMBY equilibrium?
We are just beginning to think these issues through:
The government’s plan to use artificial intelligence to accelerate planning for new homes may be about to hit an unexpected roadblock: AI-powered nimbyism.
A new service called Objector is offering “policy-backed objections in minutes” to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes.
It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as “high”, “medium” or “low” impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to “influence councillors”.
Kent residents Hannah and Paul George designed the system after estimating they spent hundreds of hours attempting to navigate the planning process when they opposed plans to convert a building near their home into a mosque.
Here is the full story. Via Aaron K.
Mexico estimates of the day
Ms Sheinbaum’s government says Mexico’s murder rate has come down by 32% in the year since she took office. Analysis by The Economist confirms that the rate has fallen, though by a significantly smaller margin, 14%. Counting homicides alone misses an important part of the picture, namely the thousands of people who disappear in Mexico every year, many of whom are killed and buried in unmarked graves. A broader view of deadly crime that includes manslaughter, femicide and two-thirds of disappearances (the data for disappearances is imperfect), shows a more modest decline of 6% (see chart). Still, Mexico is on track for about 24,300 murders this year, horribly high, but well below the recent annual average of slightly over 30,000. Ms Sheinbaum is the first Mexican leader in years to push violent crime in the right direction.
Here is more from The Economist.
Tuesday assorted links
2. Road network of the Roman empire.
3. NIMBYs will pay to keep low income people away. Job market paper from Helena Pedrotti of NYU.
4. Kennedy Center update (NYT). And the Washington National Opera might leave the Kennedy Center.
5. Decoupling dollar and Treasury privilege.
6. In a mock trial, the AIs acquit a teen who was ruled guilty by the judge.
One-Third of US Families Earn Over $150,000
It’s astonishing that the richest country in world history could convince itself that it was plundered by immigrants and trade. Truly astonishing.
From Jeremy Horpedahl who notes:
This is from the latest Census release of CPS ASEC data, updated through 2024 (see Table F-23 at this link).
In 1967, only 5 percent of US families earned over $150,000 (inflation adjusted).
And even though it says so in the chart and in the text let me say it again, this is inflation adjusted and so yes it’s real and no the fact that housing has gone up in price doesn’t negate this, it’s built in. We would have done even better had NIMBYs not reduced the supply of housing.
See also Asness and Strain.
Addendum: Note it isn’t the rise of dual-earner households which haven’t increased for over 30 years.
European Stagnation
Excellent piece by Luis Garicano, Bengt Holmström & Nicolas Petit.
The continent faces two options. By the middle of this century, it could follow the path of Argentina: its enormous prosperity a distant memory; its welfare states bankrupt and its pensions unpayable; its politics stuck between extremes that mortgage the future to save themselves in the present; and its brightest gone for opportunities elsewhere. In fact, it would have an even worse hand than Argentina, as it has enemies keen to carve it up by force and a population that would be older than Argentina’s is today.
Or it could return to the dynamics of the trente glorieuses. Rather than aspire to be a museum-cum-retirement home, happy to leave the technological frontier to other countries, Europe could be the engine of a new industrial revolution. Europe was at the cutting edge of innovation in the lifetime of most Europeans alive today. It could again be a continent of builders, traders and inventors who seek opportunity in the world’s second largest market.
The European Union does not need a new treaty or powers. It just needs a single-minded focus on one goal: economic prosperity.
I’ve quoted the call to arms but there is much more substantive and deep analysis. Naturally, I approve of this theme “If a product is safe enough to be sold in Lisbon, it should be safe enough for Berlin.” Not the usual fare, read the whole thing.
Old school workplace feminization
We investigate whether consequential decisions made by judges are impacted by the gender composition of these judges’ peer group. Using the universe of decisions on juvenile defendants in each courthouse in a Southern state over 15 years, we estimate two-way fixed effects models leveraging random assignment of cases to judges and variations in judge peer composition generated by judicial turnover. The results show that an increase in the proportion of female peers in the courthouse causes a rise in individual judges’ propensity to incarcerate, and an increase in prison time. This effect is driven by the behavior of female judges. We examine the sensitivity of our findings to heterogeneous-robust difference-in-differences estimators for continuous and nonabsorbing treatments.
Here is the full article by Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan, tekl.