Results for “food” 2044 found
Canine supply was elastic, too, South Korea edition
South Korea has now banned the dog meat trade:
Chan-woo has 18 months to get rid of 600 dogs.
After that, the 33-year-old meat farmer – who we agreed to anonymise for fear of backlash – faces a penalty of up to two years in prison.
“Realistically, even just on my farm, I can’t process the number of dogs I have in that time,” he says. “At this point I’ve invested all of my assets [into the farm] – and yet they are not even taking the dogs.”
By “they”, Chan-woo doesn’t just mean the traders and butchers who, prior to the ban, would buy an average of half a dozen dogs per week.
He’s also referring to the animal rights activists and authorities who in his view, having fought so hard to outlaw the dog meat trade, have no clear plan for what to do with the leftover animals – of which there are close to 500,000, according to government estimates.
“They [the authorities] passed the law without any real plan, and now they’re saying they can’t even take the dogs.”
…A spokesperson from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (Mafra) told the BBC that if farm owners gave up their dogs, local governments would assume ownership and manage them in shelters.
Here is the full BBC story, via Rich Dewey.
Chantilly destination achieved, the Limbourg brothers are amazing
Commissioned by the Duc de Berry, the enormously wealthy brother of King Charles V of France, this exquisite Book of Hours was begun by the Limbourg brothers, a trio of Netherlandish miniature painters, in around 1411. The Duc and the Limbourgs died in 1416. The manuscript was completed by other wealthy patrons and talented artists 70 years later and contains 131 full-page illuminations. Now, in a vanishingly rare opportunity, the general public has been invited to step into this world.
Until October, visitors to a special exhibition at the Condé Museum in the Château de Chantilly, 55km north of Paris, will be able to view as independent works the 12 monthly calendar pages of the Très Riches Heures, on which much of the fame of this 15th-century prayer book rests. Its importance and influence are contextualised by an exceptional display of some 100 medieval manuscripts, sculptures and paintings loaned from museums and libraries around the world.
…as the renowned scholar Christopher de Hamel, author of the 2016 book, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, explains, the Très Riches Heures are so much more than a luxury object. “The staggering originality of the design and composition is overwhelming,” he says. “The full-page calendar miniatures were the first ever made. It marks the very first moment when the Renaissance touched northern Europe.
Here is the full story. This is very likely the best and most important artistic exhibit in the world right now. It is only the third time (ever) the pages of the book have been on display for the public. In the exhibit more broadly, it is remarkable how many of the best works were created in the first decade of the fifteenth century.
All three of the brothers died before the age of thirty, possibly because of the plague.
Chantilly is about an hour north of Paris, and it is a pleasant but fairly extreme town. Think of it as a French version of Middleburg, VA? Or perhaps parts of Sonoma? It is their version of horse country, with non-spicy food to boot. The accompanying castle, by the way, also is interesting and has some wonderful art works, including by Poussin, Watteau, and Greuze. The decor and trappings give you a sense of what eighteenth century French Enlightenment nobles might have considered to be beautiful.
A major goal of this trip has been to get a better handle on the Western European medieval world, and visiting this exhibit has been a big and very successful part of that.
Reims and Amiens
Both cities have significant war histories, but they are very different to visit, even though they are only two hours apart by car.
Reims was largely destroyed in World War I, and so the central core was rebuilt in the 1920s, with a partial Art Deco look. The downtown is attractive and prosperous, the people look sharp and happy, and it is a university town. You arrive and feel the place is a wonderful success. If you had to live in a mid-sized French city, you might choose this one.
The main cathedral is one of the best in France, and arguably in the world. The lesser-known basilica also is top tier. There are scattered Roman ruins. French kings were coronated in Reims from early on, all the way up through 1825.
Amiens is on the Somme, and the 1916 Battle of the Somme, followed by a later 1918 offensive, was a turning point in WWI history. The town is a melange of architectural styles, with many half-timbered homes but also scattered works from different centuries. The town also has France’s “first skyscraper,” renowned in its time but now a rather short and out of place embarrassment. The main Amiens cathedral, however, is perhaps the best in all of France.
The town itself feels like visiting a banlieu, with large numbers of African and Muslim immigrants. It is lively, and it feels as if a revitalization is underway, though I do understand opinions on these matters differ. Real estate prices are at about 3x their 1990s levels. That to me is strong evidence that things are going well.
Restaurant Momos Tibetian has excellent Chinese and Tibetan food. The Picardy museum has some very good works by Boucher, Balthus, Picabia, El Greco, and Chavannes.
Both cities are radically undervisisted. They do attract some tourists, but for the most part you feel you have them to yourself.
Bordeaux observations
The central core is one of the most consistent eighteenth century cities you will find in Europe. Until the visit, my first there, I had not realized how much of the town’s growth came during that time, in part because of some special trade privileges, and in part because of the slave trade. Here is some 18th century economic history of Bordeaux. The central plazas and radiating streets are splendid, as is the large Girondins monument nearby.
The main museum is subpar, with some good Redons (he is from there), and the main church is pretty good but excelled by other locales. In this sense there is not much to do in Bordeaux. There is, however, some good modern and also brutalist architecture near and across the main river bank. Check out this bridge. I enjoyed these creations, as they injected some element of surprise into my visit.
You can still get an excellent meal at the nearby country chateaus, but if you just stop for normal French food in the town it is pretty mediocre, not better than say WDC. The classic French food traditions are moving more and more into corners of the country, and away from everyday life.
Typically I am surprised by how normal France feels. People want to say “The French this, the French that…” but to me they are fairly Americanized, often speak good English, and have few truly unique cultural habits these days. They also seem reasonably well adjusted, normal mostly in the good sense, and thus of course somewhat boring too.
Walking and driving through the less salubrious parts of town is a useful corrective, but I do not feel the place is falling apart. And the best estimates are that six to nine percent of the city is Muslim, hardly an overwhelming number.
I learned just before leaving that Kevin Bryan was in town too, here are his observations. Bordeaux is certainly worth visiting, but I also am not surprised it is the last major French city I have been to in my life.
Some northern parts of Spain
Salamanca still feels part of the orbit of Madrid, but León does not. Many of the faces are more Celtic, and the mood of the city can be drab in an eastern European way. Deindustrialization can be observed. It is a real city, not much dependent on tourism, though the cathedral is one of the most beautiful in Europe.
Santander, a beach town, was much nicer than expected. There is not much to do there, but it reminds me of how perhaps Nice might have been in 1974. Fully for tourists, but somehow not very touristy? And thus extremely pleasant and charming. Places like that barely exist any more. They are either quite obscure, such as Durango, Mexico, or they are overwhelmed by tourists. Seafood was excellent, and it is a much larger city than I was expecting. Nice promenades on the water.
Hondarribia is a Basque town and fishing village that feels like it should be its own country. The half-timbered homes and unusual colors set it apart from anywhere else in Europe I have been. Small, one day there is fine, but one of Europe’s best undervisited locales?
The High Cost of Self-Sufficiency
Mike Riggs and his wife dreamed of returning to the land. It wasn’t as easy as it looks on Tik-Tok:
How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s strawberry demand? I still don’t know. We dedicated 80 square feet to strawberries last season. The bugs ate half our harvest, and the other half equaled roughly what our kid could eat in a week.
Have you ever grown peas? Give them something to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heavens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost criminal misuse of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 minutes to shell a single serving. Meanwhile, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Walmart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.
…In addition to possums and deer, we’ve faced unrelenting assaults from across the eukaryotic kingdoms: the tomato hornworm caterpillar, the cabbage looper caterpillar, the squash vine borer, the aphid, the thrip, the earwig and the sowbug; cucurbit downy mildew, powdery mildew, collar rot, black rot, sooty mold, botrytis gray mold and stem canker; the nematode, the gray garden slug, the eastern gray squirrel, the eastern cottontail rabbit and the groundhog. All of these organisms reside in the North Carolina Piedmont and like to eat what we eat. Many of them work toward this existential goal while humans sleep, which is why the North Carolina State Agriculture Extension advises growers to inspect their plants at night. No, thank you.
…. In the early 1900s, one of my paternal great-grandfathers moved from urban Illinois to a homestead in Oklahoma. Our only picture of him was taken shortly before the Dust Bowl destroyed his farm. After his farm failed, he abandoned my great-grandmother and their children and migrated to California with thousands of other Okies. When my crops fail, I go to Whole Foods.
Some good lessons here in self-sufficiency, comparative advantage and the productivity of specialization and trade. Of course, it might have been easier for Mike had he read Modern Principles:
How long could you survive if you had to grow your own food? Probably not very long. Yet most of us can earn enough money in a single day spent doing something other than farming to buy more food than we could grow in a year. Why can we get so much more food through trade than through personal production? The reason is that specialization greatly increases productivity. Farmers, for example, have two immense advantages in producing food compared with economics professors or students: Because they specialize, they know more about farming than other people, and because they sell large quantities, they can afford to buy large-scale farming machines. What is true for farming is true for just about every field of production—specialization increases productivity. Without specialization and trade, we would each have to produce our own food as well as other goods, and the result would be mass starvation and the collapse of civilization.
Oh, and by the way, don’t forget Adam Smith, “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”
How to find the most talented people on earth
That is the title of my latest Free Press essay. Here is one relevant excerpt:
The suburbs of Toronto are one of the world’s most neglected talent areas. Cities such as Mississauga or Brampton are now quite familiar to me, because so many Emergent Ventures winners grew up there.
Virtually all of these young applicants from Ontario are either immigrants or children of immigrants. My (unconfirmed) hypothesis is that the most ambitious immigrant families decide to live in Ontario rather than other parts of the country. After all, so much of the opportunity is there because Toronto is the largest and most important city in the country. But they cannot afford Toronto proper, and so they end up in the suburbs. These teenagers have a stable and productive environment, but because of their backgrounds, typically from poorer countries, they do not take success or prosperity for granted. That is an ideal combination of factors for success.
There is great food in that region as well.
My days collecting Mexican art, part II
Recently I wrote about my quest to track down Mexican amate (bark paper) painter Juan Camilo Ayala, but there is another part to the early story, namely looking for his brother Marcial Camilo Ayala, also a painter.
Marcial no longer lived in Oapan, as he found village life intolerable. So he settled in Taxco (later Cuernavaca), and it was Juan Camilo who told me that when I showed up at his house in Oapan. Originally I was hoping to meet both brothers on that first trip.
When I arrived in Taxco on my next Mexico trip, I had the strategy of asking all tradionally-clothed women in the city center “do you know Marcial Camilo Ayala?” Far from being a needle in the haystack strategy, this yielded results within seconds. All of a sudden I was chatting with Marcial’s youngest daughter, Oliva. She in turn brought me down a steep cobblestone street to see Marcial, who was painting in a dark back room in Taxco. It all felt rather hopeless, at least at first.
Marcial and Juan were quite different. Marcial is by far the most intellectual person from Oapan, as he could speak at high levels about Picasso and Rousseau, Zapata and land reform, Nahuatl poetry, and the late string quartets of Beethoven (alas he passed away almost ten years ago). Juan cannot meaningfully read or write, but he is a corn farmer who knows everything about the rain. Marcial typically is considered the strongest painter from Oapan, and multiple times he had traveled abroad for exhibits of his work.
I now had two reasons to go to the region, namely Juan and Marcial. And so I became patrons of them both, and now have dozens of works from each of them, including some very large six foot by eight foot creations. I kept on returning to Guerrero, and would spend some time in Oapan with Juan and his family, and some time with Marcial, either in Taxco or Cuernavaca, typically talking about ideas and art. I finally started to learn proper Spanish from all the required back and forth.
In my time in Oapan I enjoyed the stars at night, the fiestas and processions, the long hours sitting around talking and joking with Juan’s family, and of course the food. The musty blue corn tortillas are to die for. If you want some fresh fish, great, but they have to go down to the river and catch it for you. The bean tamales and moles with pepitas are incredible. I once commissioned a barbecue meal, $80 for a full goat, cooked underground overnight, as from prehispanic barbeque traditions. Most meals did not involve meat, however, other than the staple of eggs.
Yet life in Oapan is not easy, not even for the visitor. There was no flush toilet or shower. The “bed” was a hard slab, and the evening temperatures inside the room exceeded one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The roosters crow at 4 a.m., and then everyone is awake. You can leave, but within the Oapan of that time, dollars could not buy you conveniences. There is an ever-present risk of dengue and sometimes malaria as well.
I got to know the four main amate painting villages (Ameyaltepec, Xalitla, and Maxela are the others), and met virtually all the living amate painters of note. I visited the renowned Alfonso Lorenzo Santos, both chained to the wall in his home in Ameyaltepec and also in the mental hospital in Cuernavaca. (Alfonso was later profiled in The Wall Street Journal, and for that journalist, Bob Davis, I served as Mexico guide and translator.) Occasionally, when looking for new amates, I had to throw rocks at the wild dogs to make my way to the homes on the edge of town.
Over the course of about a dozen years of visits, I built up what is the world’s largest and I would say best amate collection, with hundreds of quite distinct works. I also managed to buy an important early private collection, from the 1980s, with more than two hundred paintings. For years I tracked all the amate painting listings on eBay, snagging many a bargain. Later I served as (unpaid) amate painting consultant to the Smithsonian, when they set up the American Indian museum now on the mall. I am pleased that the assemblage of these works is preserving a significant cultural episode and tradition in Mexican history.
I also collected a good deal of village ceramics, still done with red clay using pre-conquest methods, noting that not all of them made it home intact. The Spanish word “burbuja” — bubble wrap — remains prominent in my mind and vocabulary. Ideally, I would like to do a major “air lift” of traditional pottery out of Oapan, but these days the drug gangs are a major obstacle.
Buying art works from Juan and Marcial also evolved into charity, and I developed my thoughts on direct cash transfers. I wrote those up on MR long ago, and I am pleased to report they had some influence in inspiring the non-profit Give Directly.
Eventually I wrote a whole book on the economy and polity of Oapan, and on the lives of the amate painters. It was published with the University of Michigan Press under the title Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of the Mexican Amate Painters. It has sold the least well of any of my books, by far, but it is one of my favorites and it is quite unlike all the others.
Over the years, there was one amate painter whose works I never tracked down, namely Jesus Corpos Aliberto. Marcial had told me he heard a rumor that Jesus Corpos was living in a dumpy hotel in the middle of Mexico City, Hotel Buenos Aires. I found my way to the hotel, and yes Jesus was there with a big stack of brilliant amates he was looking to sell. They let him stay there in a smelly back room. Sadly he was insane, and would sell the amates only for millions of pesos. During yet my next trip to Mexico City, I returned but the hotel was gone altogether, eliminated by gentrification. I had no remaining links to Corpos. At that point, and following the passing of Marcial, and the aging of the other main amate painters, that part of my life largely was over. And so my story with amate painting ends with the same basic obstacle it started with: a stubborn refusing to sell me something, thwarted markets in everything.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Interview with Galen Strawson, including about panpsychism.
2. Botched Dublin pipe bomb drone attack, neighborly feud edition. Solve for the equilibrium.
3. Claims that spicy food is good for you.
4. Unparalleled misalignments. Amazing what people will spend time on.
5. Why didn’t tariffs help the dollar?
6. Reforming naval shipbuilding.
7. The cardinals are watching Conclave to learn things.
Emergent Ventures, 9th India cohort
Ari Dutilh is a 19-year-old entrepreneur, community builder, and photographer. This grant is to help continue our work on UltraRice, a project to solve malnutrition in India by using ultrasonic treatment to create cost-effective, nutrient-scalable rice.
Rukmini S is Founder and Director of Data For India. Rukmini is an award-winning data journalist and won her first EV prize for her pandemic podcast, ‘The Moving Curve’. Her first book, ‘Whole Numbers & Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India’ awon literary awards.
Sworna Jung Khadka is an ESG entrepreneur. Stalwart International Private Limited is an agro startup funded by Emergent Ventures which leases unused government owned lands and non-agricultural but arable lands for the production of Cassava, drought resistant crops.
Suryesh Kumar Namdeo is a Senior Research Analyst at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, working on biosecurity policy and science diplomacy projects. He has received his EV grant to support his research and conference travels in biosecurity policy in India.
Susan Thomas – XKDR Forum aims to help litigants in India get more predictability about how their legal cases will progress in Indian courts. They propose to publish specific metrics of case progression, at a quarterly frequency, by developing a database of commercial cases from multiple courts in India. You can read more about XKDR Forum’s work in this field here.
Jayesh Rohatgi is an entrepreneur and law student at LSE, with an educational startup, Dialogue Dynamics. Targeting top independent schools globally, Dialogue Dynamics focuses on the four most critical sub-skills of communication: presenting viewpoints, strategic questioning, identifying misinformation, and mastering persuasion.
Aakash Agrawal is a neuroscience and AI researcher who investigates the neural mechanisms that enable fluent reading. He aims to leverage his research and develop gamified cognitive tasks to help children improve their reading skills without adult supervision.
Ada Choudhry is an 18-year-old student from Bareilly, India, who received an EV grant to build AI supply chain platforms under the mentorship of Shell executives. The goal is to reduce supply chain risk and improve procurement data quality. She will be beginning her undergraduate studies at Minerva University in San Francisco, and you can look through her portfolio here!
Aditya Kedlaya is a hardware product designer and entrepreneur from Bangalore. He received his EV grant to develop prototypes of carbon capture modules through his startup. He founded Matterak Technologies to design, develop and deploy products related to decarbonization including carbon capture, infrastructure for carbon neutral fuels production and energy efficient hardware.
Adon Banker, is 16 years old and currently enrolled in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program at Chatrabhuj Narsee School, Mumbai, with a major in Computer Science. His project, the Jewish Virtual Museum, aims to create a lasting legacy for the Bene Israel community in the history of India. He also will develop an application that analyzes antisemitism globally in real-time using Twitter data.
Aishwarya Das, from Bangalore, is the co-founder of Dirac Labs, a spin-off from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His team is developing quantum magnetometers for GPS-free navigation.
Akash Kumar Seth, a software developer, is working on freeCodeProjects.org, which will help potential students become job-ready under the mentorship of experienced developers absolutely free.
Ayush Majumdar, 22, originally from Calcutta, is a writer and translator currently translating the works of Rabindranath Tagore.
Chetan Kandpal is works in computer science, cognitive science, and now neuroscience, and his research delves into human social dynamics, particularly how information transmission and normative assumptions are influenced by the presence of agents in multi-agent environments. Chetan received the EV grant for the opportunity to present his work on social dynamics at MIT.
Deepika Gopal, Balaji Bangolae Lakshmikanth, Dr. Lakshmi Santhanam, and Deepika Gopal are the founders of Renkube, a deep-tech solar startup to lower cost and increase safety. The EV grant will support their efforts in creating a Fire Prediction and Prevention solution for rooftop solar installations, aimed at preventing fire accidents and improving overall safety.
Digvijay Singh is building large scale diagnostics (LSDs) at Drizzle Health to eliminate epidemics by testing large volumes of food, water, and eventually air in real-time.
Druhin Lamba is a BS-MS student in Mathematics and Computing at IIT Roorkee. He received his EV grant for education and career development.
Khushi Mittal is a 20-year-old from Lucknow and is interested in propulsion systems. She received an EV grant to take a gap year from University of Alberta in Canada and move to Bangalore to work on her projects related to aerospace and build a hardware community with the Wayfarers group.
Manas Goyal, a 23-year-old Impact Finance entrepreneur, is the founder of All Asia NetBanking, a platform dedicated to providing accessible and seamless banking solutions. He received an EV grant to develop a new, innovative model that simplifies access to unified banking solutions. Currently based in the US at MIT, Manas is focused on making banking easier and more accessible for everyone.
I thank Shruti Rajagopalan for the information and selection. And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.
Our non-eggcellent regulations
Germany, Italy, Poland and Sweden are among the nations the U.S. Department of Agriculture approached to address the shortage brought on by a bird flu outbreak, according to European industry groups.
But supplying Americans with eggs would be complicated for foreign producers — but not because of political tensions over the myriad import tariffs President Donald Trump has imposed or threatened to impose on his nation’s top trading partners.
Even if they were eager to share, European countries don’t have many surplus eggs because of their own avian flu outbreaks and the growing domestic demand ahead of Easter.
One of the biggest obstacles, however, is the approach the United States takes to preventing salmonella contamination. U.S. food safety regulations require fresh eggs to be sanitized and refrigerated before they reach shoppers; in the European Union, safety standards call for Grade A eggs to be sold unwashed and without extended chilling.
Here is the full story, via Rich Dewey. So no, American scientists will not be moving to Europe — their eggs are too dangerous. And yes it is Germany too:
It is common in parts of Europe, for example, for consumers to buy eggs that still have feathers and chicken poop stuck to them.
Here is Patrick Collison, comparing the virtues of America to the virtues of Europe. I do not mind that he left out the chicken poop, for me it is a sign of authenticity. As for eggs, the best ones I ever had were in Chile.
Subterranean sentences to ponder
But the fact that it’s commonplace is precisely why Earth’s subsurface biosphere is so compelling. Mud is everywhere, which means it is important. If you add up the total amount of mud underneath all the worlds’s oceans, you come up with a volume equivalent to about the entire Atlantic Ocean. And, per cubic meter, there are 100 to 100,000 times more microbial cells in mud than there are in seawater. That means that there’s so much intraterrestrial life in the subsurface that it’s hard to even fathom it. The total amount of microbial cells in the marine sediment subsurface is estimated to be 2.9 x 10 [to the 29th] cells. This is about 10,000 times more than the estimated number of stars in the universe. But that’s not the whole subsurface. You’d have to at least double this number to include the microbial cells living deep underneath the land. And some of these cells may have found pockets where the food is more abundant than the average location, so more cells can live there than our models predict. For these reasons, the actual number of microbial cells in the subsurface biosphere is certain to be much higher than our current estimates.
That is from the new and interesting IntraTerrestrtials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth, by Karen G Lloyd.
Five insights from farm animal economics
By Martin Gould, here is one excerpt:
Halting plans for a large, polluting factory farm feels like a clear win — no ammonia-laden air burning residents’ lungs, no waste runoff contaminating local drinking water, and seemingly fewer animals suffering in industrial confinement. But that last assumption deserves scrutiny. What protects one community might actually condemn more animals to worse conditions elsewhere.
Consider the UK: Local groups celebrate blocking new chicken farms. But because UK chicken demand keeps growing — it rose 24% from 2012-2022 — the result of fewer new UK chicken farms is just that the UK imports more chicken: it almost doubled its chicken imports over the same time period. While most chicken imported into the UK comes from the EU, where conditions for chickens are similar, a growing share comes from Brazil and Thailand, where regulations are nonexistent. Blocking local farms may slightly reduce demand via higher prices, but it also risks sentencing animals to worse conditions abroad.
The same problem haunts government welfare reforms — stronger standards in one country can just shift production to places with worse standards. But advocates are getting smarter about this. They’re pushing for laws that tackle both production and imports at once. US states like California have done this — when it banned battery cages, it also banned selling eggs from hens caged anywhere. The EU is considering the same approach. It’s a crucial shift: without these import restrictions, both farm bans and welfare reforms risk exporting animal suffering to places with even worse conditions. And advocates have prioritized corporate policies, which avoid this problem, as companies pledge to stop selling products associated with the worst animal suffering (like caged eggs), regardless of where they are produced.
In Defense of Econ 101
People sometimes dismiss basic economic reasoning, “that’s just Econ 101!” yet most policymakers couldn’t pass the exam. Here’s an apropos bit from our excellent textbook, Modern Principles of Economics.
Do you shop at Giant, Safeway, or the Piggly Wiggly? If you do, you run a trade deficit with those stores. That is, you buy more goods from them than they buy from you (unless, of course, you work at one of these stores or sell them goods from your farm). The authors of this book also run a trade deficit with supermarkets. In fact, we have been running a trade deficit with Whole Foods for many years. Is our Whole Foods deficit a problem?
Our deficit with Whole Foods isn’t a problem because it’s balanced with a trade surplus with someone else. Who? You, the students, whether we teach you or whether you have bought our book. You buy more goods from us than we buy from you. We export education to you, but we do not import your goods and services. In short, we run a trade deficit with Whole Foods but a trade surplus with our students. In fact, it is only because we run a trade surplus with you that we can run a trade deficit with Whole Foods. Thanks!
The lesson is simple. Trade deficits and surpluses are to be found everywhere. Taken alone, the fact that the United States has a trade deficit with one country is not special cause for worry. Trade across countries is very much like trade across individuals. Not every person or every country can run a trade surplus all the time. Suddenly, a trade deficit does not seem so troublesome, even though the word “deficit” makes it sound like a problem or an economic shortcoming.
We continue on to discuss ” What if the United States runs a trade deficit not just with China or Japan or Mexico but with the world as a whole, as indeed it does? Is that a bad thing?”
Here’s a good Noah Smith piece if you want the details.
Living in Freiburg, Germany
After two years at Harvard, I had finished all of my graduate school courses and oral (!) exams. Then I had a compulsion for what I should do next, something that at the time appeared remarkably stupid, although it worked out very well for me.
At some critical points in my life I have made key decisions with regard to place, including Mexico, Haiti, New Zealand, and as I will write about today, Freiburg, Germany. Each of those decisions fundamentally reshaped my life. None of those decisions were motivated by rational reasons, or indeed much by traditional reasons at all. I simply wanted to do particular things, and then set off to do so.
After two years of study, a Harvard PhD student would be expected to apprentice with a top professor, “live in the basement of the Science Center” (where the computers were those days), and in general become part of the system. Somehow none of that fit me. I decided instead to study for a year in Freiburg, Germany, at the university there, mostly to learn German but also to run away from a particular kind of fate that most of my peers were choosing. And so I departed from Cambridge in 1984-85, aided by a strong dollar and a small grant from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation.
Other than an Oxford and London summer trip at age 17, it was my first time abroad. I flew over with Kroszner, and we rented a car to drive around Germany for a few weeks before I would settle in Freiburg.
Our first stop was Mainz, which was not too far from Frankfurt airport. I was stunned by everything I saw, ranging from the supermarkets to the food to how the downtown was organized. These days Mainz is regarded as a fairly dull city, but then, for me, it was fascinating beyond belief. Unlike England, Germany struck me as a peer country to the United States, with a roughly equal living standard and in some ways a superior way of life.
Other stops on our trip included the beautiful Baden-Baden, Stuttgart, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, the “Romantic Road” in Bavaria, and of course Berlin. The one day I spent in East Berlin terrified me. Not primarily because of the living standards (which were low), but because the people seemed so fearful and intimidated. I decided that communism was far worse than I had thought. I was relieved to return to West Berlin, which at the time had that Cold War, party town, otherworldly feel. Try watching “Wings of Desire” some day.
Once I settled into Freiurg I was on my own. I refused to hang out with the other American students, and so I learned German pretty quickly. I developed a morning routine of walking to buy the International Herald Tribune, working on my dissertation in the morning on a typewriter, and going into town for lunch and some shopping and errands. Freiburg was the closest I ever have come to living in a proper city, though at the time the population was a mere quarter million or so. Nonetheless one could go “in die Stadt,” an entirely meaningful notion if you know the layout.
I even ended up with a German girlfriend, and from her I learned German all that much better.
Frequently I would feel claustrophobic, and so I would depart for Switzerland, where I would feel even more claustrophobic. Still, I loved those trips, as the sense of perpetual motion was sufficient compensation. Over time I have managed to see every Swiss canton, and I am fond of all of them. For Erleichterung I would visit the Netherlands, or one time Chris Weber came by and we drove to Colmar for Alsatian smoked meats, yum. For Thanksgiving there was an Italy trip to Bergamo and Verona. Later in the spring I went to Venice and Florence.
I had a January lecture tour in Vienna (freezing!), with the Carl Menger Institute, and in May a week-long stint in Graz. My German peers found it literally unbelievable that someone my age had published papers I could present and talk about, in addition to a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on monetary economics.
I also gave a talk at a jazz club in Vienna, the first (but not last) time I experienced talk-giving as a kind of high class entertainment. I mixed German and English, and told a fair number of jokes, and found I enjoyed that. I am thankful to Albert Zlabinger for arranging that evening.
It was that kind of life. There has never been a year that was more exciting or when I learned more about the world.
Art and painting started making sense to me when I visited the Lenbach Haus in Munich, with Blue Rider works, and the Mondrian museum in The Hague. I retain a special fondness for those artists to this day.
Amsterdam probably was my favorite city, though I now feel it is long since ruined by an excess of tourists. To save money, I would sleep on the houseboats there.
Once I tired of German food, delicious though it may be, I started experimenting on the culinary front, at least as much as I could given my location. That was the time in my life when I started trying everything I could.
It simply stunned me how many things in Germany were better, starting with the bread and orange juice and butter, though hardly ending there.
So every day I learned, learned, learned, and was in pretty constant motion.
By the time I returned to the United States, it was clear I would never be entering on mainstream tracks again.