2026-01-28 13:30:27
I recent wrote about driving around New Zealand, but I lived in Wellington. Here are a few of my impressions:
1. It is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, top five easily. The best view is from Mount Victoria, incredible vistas are everywhere, and the Victorian homes are very nice too. Very little of it is downright ugly.
2. I do not love either steep inclines or wind. So in those regards Wellington was less than ideal for me. Think of the basic weather as like that of San Francisco. I preferred the warmer climes of Auckland.
3. In the early 90s, the city did not have excellent Chinese food. But Malaysian and Burmese alternatives made up for that. Bistro food, in nouvelle New Zealand styles, was very good.
4. Most of the best fish and chips was outside city limits, for instance in nearby Newtown. There was one good local fish and chips shop near Parliament.
5. The major government buildings were remarkably close together, does any other capital city in the world have this? You could just walk from one meeting to another in a small number of minutes.
6. I was very much an outsider there, but if I went to a classical music concert it was remarkable how many of the attendees I would recognize.
7. There was not much of an internet to speak of back then, keep that in mind when processing these remarks. When the Fischer-Spassky match #2 was being played in Yugoslavia, I relied on the movves of the games being faxed to me. The Kiwi newspapers just were not that good or that timely. Phone calls were expensive too, and the mail was slow.
8. The biggest/best bookstore in town, on Lambton Quay, had a quality feel but still a pretty limited selection and a general lack of timeliness. Fortunately, the library of Victoria University was pretty good. I spent much of that period of my life reading books about the Italian Renaissance and eighteenth century England.
9. My overall feeling was that Wellington residents were pretty happy and had a high quality of life. If nothing else, you could just drive around the bays and have, within minutes, a quality “vacation” better than almost anywhere else in the world. That said, it was not the best place for very ambitious people, most of all for reasons of size and distance.
10, I found the small wooden church in Wellington — Old St. Paul’s — to be one of the nicest and most moving religious structures I have seen.
11. I forget the name of the place, but the main area supermarket was the very best I ever have enjoyed. It offered superb seafood (good luck finding that in the U.S.), first-rate lamb, a suitable array of spices and Asian condiments, and amazing fruits and vegetables across the board and also in most seasons. Very good chocolate, and also ice cream. And all at very good prices and low hassle.
12. Often I was expected to work on something, or to give advice, “simply because I was there.” We again return to the importance of no real internet. I sometimes think of that time as my “beginning as a blogger,” though of course there was no such thing. The deadline always was “now,” and the relevant standards were comparative. Good luck!
13. If you ever got tired of Wellington, you could just go drive around the rest of New Zealand, though that did not remove any of the frustrations (e.g., small book shops) that one had with Wellington. Nearby, Lower Hutt has some good Art Deco structures.
14. Overall, one could learn a lot there very, very quickly, and that automatically made it great.
The post Wellington, New Zealand appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-28 01:10:12
1. Apply for Mercatus Emerging Scholars program.
2. A simple summary of some mainstream views on social media.
4. Using Gemini to draft DOT regulations.
5. Sly Dunbar, RIP. Here is one dub cut.
6. Strauss on AI. And AI and quant labs (FT).
7. Travels in the Horn of Africa.
8. Luke Burgis.
9. Economist John Roberts, RIP.
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-28 00:02:52
This paper examines the sharp decline in fertility across Latin America using both period and cohort measures. Combining Vital Statistics, Census microdata, and UN population data, we decompose changes in fertility by age, education, and joint age–education groups. We show that the decline in period fertility between 2000 and 2022 is driven primarily by reductions in within-group birth rates rather than by changes in population composition, with the largest contributions coming from younger and less-educated women. Comparing the cohort born in the mid 1950s and the one born in the mid 1970s, we find that the decline in completed fertility reflects not only delayed childbearing but also substantial reductions in the average number of children per woman. This is driven primarily by lower fertility among mothers rather than by rising childlessness. Our findings provide new evidence on the nature of Latin America’s transition to below-replacement fertility and highlight several open questions for future research.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The post Understanding Latin America’s Fertility Decline appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-27 20:54:25
This study explores the psychological profiles of elite soccer players, revealing that success on the field goes beyond physical ability. By analyzing a sample of 328 participants, including 204 elite soccer players from the top teams in Brazil and Sweden, we found that elite players have exceptional cognitive abilities, including improved planning, memory, and decision-making skills. They also possess personality traits like high conscientiousness and openness to experience, along with reduced neuroticism. Using AI, we identified unique psychological patterns that could help in talent identification and development. These insights can be used to better understand the mental attributes that contribute to success in soccer and other high-performance fields.
That is from a new paper by Leonardo Bonetti, et.al., via Yureed Elahi.
The post Who is good at soccer? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-27 13:31:45
By Bryan Caplan, now on sale. From Bryan’s Substack:
My latest book of essays, You Have No Right to Your Culture: Essays on the Human Condition, flips this narrative. All of these demands for “reshaping culture” are thinly-veiled calls for coercing humans. As the title essay explains:
[C]ulture is… other people! Culture is who other people want to date and marry. Culture is how other people raise their kids. Culture is the movies other people want to see. Culture is the hobbies other people value. Culture is the sports other people play. Culture is the food other people cook and eat. Culture is the religion other people choose to practice. To have a “right to your culture” is to have a right to rule all of these choices — and more.
What’s the alternative? Instead of treating capitalism as the root of cultural decay, the world should embrace capitalist cultural competition. Actions speak louder than words; instead of using government to “shape” culture, let’s see what practices, beliefs, styles, and flavors pass the market test. Which in practice, as I explain elsewhere in the book, largely means the global triumph of Western culture, infused with an array of glorious culinary, musical, and literary imports. Nativists who bemoan immigrants’ failure to assimilate are truly blind; the truth is that even non-immigrants are pre-assimilating at a staggering pace.
Recommended. Bryan also offers some essays on what he finds valuable in GMU Econ sub-culture.
The post *You Have No Right to Your Culture: Essays on the Human Condition* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-01-27 02:26:45
Shikha Dalmia moderates, here is the link. Excerpt from the summary:
One reason for the populist revolt in America is the notion of the “deep state”—that an unaccountable bureaucracy is secretly ruling the country. Frank and Tyler come from very different intellectual traditions. Frank, a centrist, is a student of Max Weber and Tyler is a limited government libertarian. Yet they have both argued that liberal states in complex modern societies need a functional bureaucracy—a.k.a. state capacity—to deliver public goods and solve collective action problems. But they also have a ton of disagreements, especially on just how broken American governance is—and they duke it out in a spirited discussion.
And an excerpt from me:
Cowen: I don’t think American state capacity historically is that weak. We built this incredible empire, often unjustly. We put a man on the moon. We developed the atom bomb. We’re leaders in aviation and computers in part because of government. A lot of our state governments work really quite well. It’s a mixed bag, but I think we’d be in the world’s top 10 easily. Noah Smith had a great blog post on this.
Self-recommending! And yes with tons of disagreement, the dialogue is a good overview of where my views are at in this moment, stated super clearly as usual. There is a transcript at the link, it is easy to read through the slight typos.
The post My podcast with Frank Fukuyama appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
