Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together

25:49Tyler Cowen:Has Mexico worried too much about land and not enough about human capital? No, I don't think so. But say you look at Lebanese migrants, right? They don't obsess over accumulating land. They have high human capital. They've done very, very well under the same regime. You could say that the same about the Lebanese globally. I mean, you want the great diaspora merchants. You think Armenia, you think Lebanon. And so I think they bring that. I don't think, I mean, you know, look at how much land there is in Lebanon. The Bakar Valley is tiny. You can drive up and down it in about three hours if you're feeling quite brave on any given day.

26:26And so I don't think you're absolutely right. Land is not a Lebanese aim. in Mexico as a very strongly peasant economy, peasant society until 1960s, really. They want what every peasant globally wants before you get rapid economic change, which is what they call subsistence autonomy. What does that mean? I want the guarantee that I can grow enough food to get my family through the next harvest cycle. And you can see the logic to that, that's actually a more conservative and stable economic structure than relying on commercial food purchase when your own income is low and unstable. What I'm trying to say is it makes very good sense.

27:12Tyler Cowen:Does the cargo system, which is common in Mexican pueblos, does it make any sense? Is it sustainable? Yeah, I think it is. Talking about human capital, I think that the cargo system actually, through its distribution of social capital, brings a lot of talented people to actually make the strange swap. I mean, the cargo system whereby you and an indigenous zone assume political office with absolutely zero payoff and at quite considerable cost in terms of cash and time, it makes sense because it brings the sort of brightest and best into office over and over again. This is when it works. This is a very broad generalization.

27:58The only real downside is a gerontocracy. And when you look around our political system, it's quite clear that gerontocracy isn't limited to societies which work the cargo system.

28:13Tyler Cowen:But say I'm a leader, commissario, I have to pay for part of the fireworks, part of the beer. Isn't my incentive as a talented person to minimize local state capacity rather than really having everything develop? Now, that's a good question. I would say no, actually, and that generally cargo holders work as intermediaries with the state in the 20th century. And so by investing in fireworks, buying a share in a bull for a fiesta and buying some pulque, whatever your local hooch is, and not just maintaining some stability, but doing it in part by bread and circuses, gives a level of control and local nuts and bolts of knowledge, which the central government then uses as part of this basic quest for stability.

29:04And with stability going all the way back to Porfiriato comes sort of development. And I think that this is a vast generalization. The cargo system has great flaws, but the reason it endures is it also has great strengths.

29:18Tyler Cowen:But a lot of these villages, they seem quite dysfunctional. It seems not uncommon for, say, half of the grown men to be alcoholics, right? There's a major problem with imbalance. The men leave, the women have to stay. They're abandoned, or they can't marry, or there's no one to support the kid. Wouldn't the central government do better actually just trying to minimize involvement in the villages? Sorry, I don't understand the last part of that question. When you say minimizing involvement, do you mean just stepping back and letting villages get on with whatever their collective goals are? I didn't quite understand.

29:55Tyler Cowen:Well, the village itself can make it hard to migrate because you cannot, in isolated fashion, sell your land to an outsider, right? Someone's willing to bid for it, but the whole village, in essence, has a veto on whether you can sell your land. Wages are much higher outside the village. Alcoholism is lower outside the villages, typically. So should the villages be subsidized or, in essence, should moving to the cities be subsidized in terms of the net effect of policy? I think that villages should be subsidized and Mexican policymakers have realized that for a long time and done so and I think that land is no longer the question most people in villages most this depends very much where you go but the reason half the men aren't there is precisely because they have migrated to work whether it be migrating to cities whether it be migrating to the north and remittances are a key source they are the lifeline for many villages and that's the way it's been for nearly a century and you get a certain amount of sort of small-scale cultivation as always of maize tomatoes squash chilies etc your full sort of nutrient package that's a small portion of what people are actually doing in villages.

31:12And that's increasingly uneconomic on a sort of market local level. And this is why you get this out-migration that you talk about. It's not just male, it's also women ever since they set up maquiladoras. There's been a huge outflow, the more entrepreneurial to these factories on the border, tax-free zones to assemble US components. Alcoholism, what remains the real economic stress with this huge outmigration of young people, expresses itself, as it does in a lot of people, with drinking. What's interesting though is not with drugs. Alcohol is this very strong constant. I mean, speaking as a Brit, speaking about other people's alcohol consumption is slightly hypocritical, and I'm not going to really go there.

32:01But it is interesting that historically, while Mexico is a hard-drinking society, and we're going back to the colony now.

32:08Tyler Cowen:Say I look at India, a country with a lot of problems. India typically grows between 4 % to 8 % a year, depending which numbers you believe. Mexico is lucky to grow at 2 % a year. What accounts for the difference? Like, where is Mexico failing? Oh, I think Mexicans would see that as extraordinary success, because Mexicans had the greatest demographic transition in history. You know, the way you get population growth in any species is basically an S-shaped curve in the right environment. And Mexico had this exceptionally steep curve, and its population in 1910 and 2000 increases 700%. And that is steeper than anywhere in the world.

32:53That's speed. And what does that mean? it means that you come to the 70s and just as population control starts to be a global concern, Mexico has this very joined up state. It's impoverished, but it's pretty joined up and takes a look at what they see as being a problem, which is population growth, putting too much strain on state infrastructure, social services. And okay, so we need to control that ASAP. And they put together this non-coercive campaign, unlike India. India identifies the same problem.

33:29Tyler Cowen:I'm talking about per capita income growth, though. So India gets a lot richer every year. Oh, sorry, I thought you meant population growth. Okay, maybe we can go back to that, because that also fascinates me. Per capita income growth, again, I think that's an extremely good question. I think that Mexico has an overall impressive medium-term GDP growth. And so at the end of the 60s, it's the 27th largest economy in the globe. Right now, it's the 13th. The question becomes really income distribution. So I think that if you look at it not in question of a few years or maybe a decade, but over a longer term, Mexican economic growth has been impressive.

34:15This isn't all down to hard work or smart policy. It's down to the great advantage of being next door to the world's largest market. No. But what it does mean is that you have maybe not the sort of extremely accelerated economic growth of right now in India, but post-NAFTA, you actually do get quite a lot of quite fast sort of takeoff almost speed of growth. So maybe it's just that Mexico has actually gone a stage beyond India. India is, if you want, playing catch up. That's me thinking on my feet. What do you think?

34:49Tyler Cowen:I think human capital is by far the biggest problem. And then the slow rate at which small informal businesses are willing to enter the more heavily regulated sector is a real bottleneck. But Mexico has a lot of human capital. One of the reasons that this population control works is because you get far more people going through those critical first three years of primary school. Ideally, everyone goes through high school and all, but that's just not a global reality. And the key metric is how many people are you getting through three years of school, which teach you to read, write, and do rudimentary maths.

35:22And Mexico's record on that is far better than most middle-income comparatives. There's a really good study which has especially women, far more get those first three years than precisely actually in India, Kenya, and Egypt. We're looking now at this phase of takeoff I'm talking about of the 70s and 80s. And so I think the human capital there is really there.

35:45Tyler Cowen:A lot of Latin America has above average years of schooling for their income level, but pretty low test scores, pretty low performance at the top. Just for instance, that English, even getting by in conversation in Mexico seems to be only about 7%. That to me is remarkably low, especially given how many of them migrate or wish to migrate. And I think education has failed Mexico. Even though people, yeah, they show up at the building, the teachers often aren't good. Sometimes in the Pueblos, they're not even there. I think that Mexicans would absolutely agree with view. And I would beg to differ, part differ.

36:25The first thing I'd say is that since forever, a key skill in migrating has precisely been English acquisition. And again, this is kind of global. No, I mean, you get this everywhere. There's this realisation. And migration selects the most entrepreneurial, the most dynamic, generally. And so this sector goes to the US, either preps beforehand or else learns very quickly here. It's one of the reasons that they're economically so successful. Back in Mexico, 7 % speaking English. Do you think by global comparatives that's low?

37:03Tyler Cowen:For a neighbor, it's very, very low. And what percent of the Mexican population has lived in the US at some point, right? It's got to be at least 10%, probably higher. So that to me is stunningly low. I'd say that probably is part due to the urban-rural divide, and Mexico's population is now overwhelmingly urban. It tips in 1960 for the first time there's more city dwellers than country dwellers. There is a chasm between education in the countryside and education in the city. So I would be interested in those numbers if you disaggregated them down to towns of, I would say, 4 ,000 plus and saw how that broke down, because my bet would be that you would have far higher globally comparative or even beyond rates in the cities, which, as you say, would make sense.

37:54You think, well, hold on a minute, you've got a country which invests by comparatives relatively well in education. You're a neighbor to the US. Where's the English? Good question. As I said, I would disaggregate the data before I'm taking home the idea that there is a massive failure in that specific sector of the education system.

38:15Tyler Cowen:To return to population, why is the Mexican total fertility rate now below that of the United States? Much poorer country, right? One thinks of Latin America as having high fertility, but it doesn't anymore. What's happened there? This again is the product really of two things, which we've already been covering. And one is this really joined up, non-coercive population control of the 70s and 80s, which was a global model. Mexico hosted the global conference on this, I think twice or three times. It got a prize from the UN. And how could it do this compared to the rest of Latin America? Two things.

38:55First of all, by keeping Catholicism out of political life more than almost anywhere else. And so whereas you have priests in vain against the evils of contraception, again, across most other Latin American societies, the revolution and the 19th century before it meant that Mexico has a unique degree of separation of church and state. As the church just doesn't say anything, as the government goes about aggressively pushing the pill, condoms, etc. Now, at this stage, the obvious question was, okay, well, hold on. So the church doesn't say anything. But on a micro level, inside families, conservative people used to, until the 70s, the total fertility rate was nearly seven per family.

39:38And, you know, traditionally having children, especially male children, is a symbol of success. And, you know, economically, it used to be useful to have the spare hands and all. So what changes at a micro level goes back to education. Women who are educated have far more autonomy to say yes to contraception. And you see this really clearly in rates of uptake of the pill, which in the 60s goes through the roof as soon as it's available. And we've got surveys from hospitals and people are there, do you take the pill? Yes or no? Yes, you do. And even in really conservative societies. There's a village which has been very studied.

40:19It's wonderful, called San Jose de Gracia in the highlands of Jalisco. And there, we've got this really good qualitative sort of micro-study. And women just say, yes, actually, we don't want to have 6.7 children, thank you very much. And so we will use contraception. And sorry to the men, you're just going to have to like that. And why is that? That globally correlates to primary education. and women's primary education, how many women for all the floors are getting through the doors for those first three years? By the end of the 60s, it's 73%. Again, go global to what was then a band of middle-income countries.

40:58There's nothing like it.

40:59Tyler Cowen:Now, most historians of Mexico, they're not British, and you are. Where were you from in Britain, and how do you think that's shaped how you read Mexican history? I think there's a small group of, well, I know there's a small group of British historians and, you know, they're rather good at what they do. My own story is actually not wholly British because I grew up in Ireland in the southwest in a county called Cork. And I was actually thinking... That's the accent you have, by the way. So I was confused when you said you were British. Yeah, no, it's a strange mix, isn't it? But this fellow has an Irish accent.

41:34Yeah, you've got a good ear. It's sort of a hybrid. Growing up in Cork, I was supposed to give a talk last month at the university there, and I was thinking, you know, what can I say to link the two up? And truth is, what I've been talking about, this fierce local independence, local pride, identity, this is so Cork. I mean, Cork sees itself. I am, also. Oh, no, totally. And land, as you say, and hardship. Cork is one of the centres of the great hunger, the great famine of the 19th century. So there's that. But then I was educated in Britain, and I was lucky enough to come across the smartest historian I'd ever met, a historian of the revolution called Alan Knight.

42:20And I was deciding what I wanted to do with my sort of intellectual life. I met this person and thought, OK, that's what I'd like to do. And thanks to the Oxford system, I could spend one semester entire just working with him, just on the Mexican Revolution, and that changed everything. And then there's a flip answer, which is Mexico's weather is a lot better than England's.

42:43Tyler Cowen:Now, when it comes to crime and violence, why is the state of Guerrero traditionally so tough, so violent, so difficult? Is it just mountains? Is it something else? Low state capacity? Ethnic groups that are there? Guerrero is a place which is very dear to me. I actually, from my doctorate really tried to dive deep into two states and Guerrero was one of them. So I went to villages and did sort of that level work in various places. And in part, yes, it's geographic determinism. It's mountains. But then you say, well, hold on, the Sierra Madre runs all the way up into the Rockies. Can you tell us a bit more?

43:21And I think it's because of a long tradition of the drive for political independence, exacerbated in its intensity by a large Afro-Mexican population on the coast who, distinctly conscious that they have been discriminated against, who are good at violence. I think it's because Guerrero is next door, or it's relatively close to Mexico City. And so it's threatening to Mexico City in the way, say, Sonora or Yucatan isn't so much. And so when some fairly oppressive conditions, you can imagine them, land monopolization, political thuggery, etc., combine in a state with people who really are very keen on independence and are relatively close to city, the answer is this sort of reinforcing cycle of repression, opposition, repression.

44:26And that's what you've seen in Guerrero going back really on and off across two centuries of Mexican independence, but specifically intensified from Porfiriato onwards. And what's forgotten sometimes, really interesting, is that there's three families which really run de Guerrero Coast. And one of them is actually American. A hugely successful major landowners. And so you think of Guerrero as being, you know, slightly remote, etc. It's also got the major port of Acapulco. It's extremely dynamic. It's multi-ethnic. There's a lot of competition. And there's a long history of, again, this desire to be left alone.

45:08Tyler Cowen:What's your favorite part of Guerrero? Ah, if you drive north at what's called the Costa Grande, so you go to Acapulco, you turn right, you go up what's called the Costa Grande, and you get to tourist towns, Iguacnejo, Iztapa. And after about four hours of driving, you get to a place called Saladita, which is basically a restaurant with a surf break. And that and the village just about next door called Troncones. I spent a lot of very, very happy time there when I was a kid. So that's my favourite part. Did you spend any time in the Rio Balsas villages? No, I didn't. There was a couple of reasons.

45:52And one of the key ones was that region was perceived as being extremely dangerous while I was there. And so there were horror stories like the Egyptian consul took a wrong turn. Instead of going along the coast, went up into that area and was sort of killed and dismembered, completely breaking the rule that foreigners are untouchable. And no, I didn't. And I wouldn't put it at the top of parts of Guerrero. I would like to explore at length either.

46:27Tyler Cowen:Why, have you been there? Yeah, I've spent a lot of time there. They're very beautiful. I used to go there to buy amates and pottery. The road in can be tricky, but they're very safe once you get there. Which period are we talking about with that? I was mostly there in the 90s and early 2000s, which was safer than today. You and me both, yeah. But then they were completely safe, no problems whatsoever. I think one of that was the roadway, that was one of the roads like the Costa Grande, where you were told, okay, between basically dawn and dusk, it's not too bad as a sort of roll of the dice, but from dusk to dawn, that would be foolish to travel.

47:04Tyler Cowen:Lack of a guardrail would worry me as much as anything. But for another Nahuatl-speaking villages. It's the best place to go in Mexico, I think, that I know of. There, and I would say the northern Sierra of Puebla is also strong concentrations. But was that just for the off-the-beaten-track fascination, or was there a specific reason which took you there? I ended up writing a book about it, but mostly for art collecting. And, you know, one comes to have friends in these places, as I'm sure you have too. and you want to visit them and they regard you as a kind of family or compadre, whatever you'd call it.

47:43Well, I'm glad I wasn't more rude about it than I was already.

47:47Tyler Cowen:Well, it's a tough place. Your living standard once you arrive is extremely low. Yeah. The place I spent longest in is a village in the north called Ixcateopan, about an hour and a half drive, at least back then, out of Tascua, where a lot of people go, sort of silver city. Ishka Teopan was about 1 ,500 people then, really very poor, and one cafe on the main square and virtually very, very little else. I ended up like a feeble foreigner, going with sort of a little camping stove and many, many cans of Campbell's soup and tuna fish and saltines. Yeah, those parts of the countryside then, you had endemic threats to your stomach.

48:36Tyler Cowen:Now, 30 years ago, I would not have thought, did not think that Mishuakhan would end up so violent, and yet it has. What's the story in that state? First of all, me neither. The story in that state is a combination of production and transshipment. For transshipment, you've got the port of Lazaro Carnas, which is a huge port that is a total white elephant. It was built in the 70s as a way of sort of honouring the great revolutionary leader, Carnas. It was not connected ever to anything really. So you've got this fantastic infrastructure for both coastal but also trans-Pacific trade. So it's a very good place to bring in precursors and fentanyl more recently, precursors for meth.

49:21So that's part of the transcription, the transshipment. It's also that whole Pacific coast, obviously, is a major transshipment zone. There's also the production. Methamphetamine is large recently, but in the highlands also. Heroin, poppy and marijuana. You've got the avocado industry. Huge prize for extortion, which is increasingly many drug trading organisations. principle or major part of their portfolio and avocado farmers and lime farmers are great to extort and then finally we come back to my favorite themes mountains it is quite easy to hide things like meth labs and it's quite easy to kill soldiers who come looking for you mitchell kind of made for guerrilla warfare it's this combination of a place where you can produce a lot of excellent illicit goods.

50:20You can transship them, and you can kill state actors who come after you and make Michoacán this re-centre of violence. The final piece is, over all these resources, it's been a front line over different cartels, shifting over the last 20 years as cartels come and go. But it's never had that single organization dominance, which makes places safe.

50:44Tyler Cowen:Now, in your model of how Mexico is evolving, As you know, Monterey is quite a wealthy part of Mexico, and it's growing. 20 years from now, will that just be safe and normal? Or is it still going to be in this in-between state where you have to worry what road you're on? Are you too close to the border? Or will it just all be fine because of the wealth? Well, already Monterey is one of the places where I would feel really quite safe. Oh, in town, but out of town, right? You have to ask questions. No, yeah. But yeah, Nuevo León, the state, it's also not sort of, it's not front line. These things, as you sort of imply, shift rapidly.

51:25And so until quite recently, Colima, Pacific coastal state, was really quite tranquil. It's now the most violent state in Mexico until two years ago, Sinaloa, because it was controlled by a single drug trading organization. The Sinaloa cartel was also counterintuitively really quite safe. It's not anymore because there's internecy in war there. Monterrey, I think it's very bad business to have a war over drugs in somewhere which doesn't grow them. somewhere which isn't important to transshipment and somewhere where there are such fantastic possibilities of extortion, middle and small income businesses.

52:14And so I would already be quite happy around Nueva León and I would predict because of those structural factors, nothing to grow, little to try the ship, that it will, and the wealthy point out, It will continue thus. And in 20 years, I would hope with an even greater sense of security in the countryside around it.

52:40Tyler Cowen:Now, the recent judicial reforms, which spilled over into the more recent administration, a lot of outsiders said, well, that's taking away the independence of the Mexican judiciary. Do you agree, or how bad is it, or does it not matter much? What's your sense? I think it matters greatly. I always found it strange the idea of electing any sort of judicial official. And so when I moved to the US, I thought, well, hold on, you do what? The idea of electing judges is a really poor idea, I think, in Mexico, because of the interest of local drug trading organisations in having sympathetic judges, and it's a lot lower cost to get them elected than to threaten them.

53:27Judges are people who it's generally a bad idea to kill. The state doesn't like it. Happens really regularly, but still quite a high-risk strategy as opposed to just having them in your pocket. And while electoral turnout across Mexico is admirably high and remarkable. Judicial elections have just been the glaring exception to that. I think turnout was 13%. And I think that in itself is a condemnation of the whole project. And so while recognizing flaws in, longstanding flaws in the Mexican judicial system, this is, I think, a disastrous reform.

54:07Tyler Cowen:Why'd they do it then? They did it, I think, because of a desire to get the current dominant party Morena really further dug into regional power by having sympathetic judiciary. I think that Morena's local and regional activists were very keen on it. I think it was philosophical populism as well from the AMLO government and I think it was absolutely it's one of the most unfortunate things I've seen come out of Mexican politics in the last decade. For our last segment, just some rapid-fire questions about Mexico. What's your favorite Mexican movie?

54:52Tyler Cowen:I'm going to say Winter Light, but your view may differ. Anything with Maria Felix in it. Name one. Doña Barbara? Superb. I'd also say, though, more recently, Y Tu Mamá También. That's a great film. It's difficult to stop laughing at. And Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, I like very much. I think that's the black, dark humor there is profoundly Mexican. I think that's one of the reasons why the British can really appreciate Mexico, is we've got a similarly dark sense of humor. Now, Howard Stern was famously rude about Mexican music. What in it do you like best? I like the fact that they do superb girly pop.

55:37That's a terrible, I'm right, but they have really good, from the last 20 years, women singers who are extremely intelligent, tuneful, dynamic, varied. I'm thinking specifically of Julieta Benegas and Natalia Lafourcade. The latter, and this is in my book, wrote a song back in the year 2000, which is a hilarious reflection on her sister's pregnancy, the state of the world, and called the First Lady of Mexico a racist worm. This is music which, you know, it's thought-provoking and tuneful. And so I like that. I think at its best it's a very clever music. And at what for me is its worst, with apologises to everybody who likes San Los Tigres del Norte, Norteño music, I cannot stand recorded.

56:24But if you've ever heard it live in a night spot, Suddenly the polkas, the wheezing, the songs which sort of makes conversion of gangster rap. You think, actually, yeah, this is quite good. I was in Ensenada a couple of years ago and I'm in this bar with a masked guy with an M16 on the door and three Norteño bands inside. And it was fabulous. So, you know, even my least favorite has some legs to it. It can be very good fun and very evocative.

56:57Tyler Cowen:What's the great classic Mexican novel? Ah, has to be La Muerte de Artemio Cruz, the death of Artemio Cruz. Pedro Palermo, for me, or even Savage Detectives. I know Bolaños from Chile, but to me it's a Mexican novel. Totally, and I'm glad you say that because Savage Detectives is very much a sort of insider's novel of Mexico. I mean, the mockery of the UNAM and specifically its faculty, its faculty of law and philosophy, is just so spot on. And yet, in part, because it is so close to what I study, which is the mystery of the origins of the one-party state and the PRI. And in part, also, I think it's one of the first Mexican novels I read.

57:39And things you read or things you listen to between the ages of 14 and 18, they mark you and stay with you fairly or unfairly.

57:47Tyler Cowen:And why Artemio Cruz as your pick? Artemio Cruz because of the real human complexity of it. So it's the story of a young revolutionary who manages through violence, luck, business smarts, extortion, to move from being very poor beginnings to being a major Mexican mogul. The story skips between his life in sort of decadent old age and he's made it, but in a classic sort of the hollowness of wealth down. He's made it, but in human times, he's totally emptied. And then the beginning, the story, if he got there. I find it so moving, so tragic and so deeply evocative of the Mexico I read about, the Mexico I study.

58:36I say if I'd read it 10 years later, who knows? And if I'd read it last year, I might actually be ranking it below the recent novels of Alvaro Enrique, who two novels really stick out. One is like a modern muerte de Artemio Cruz. It's called decency, decencia, which anybody who sort of likes Mexican humour, likes Mexico City will just get. And the other is your empires have been dreams in English, which is a retelling of the conquest as this glorified heist by a bunch of unfortunate thugs, which I think most historians would agree with and has some twists in it, which are stunning. And Alvaro, of course, has the advantage of he actually reads quite a lot of history.

59:23So when he writes history, the details are there and you find yourself nodding. Oh, yeah, yeah, I can believe that. Ezra Klein is a big fan of the Conquest book. I think, well, it did very well. And I can see why. It was clever, complex. It was provocative. And it had a killer twist to it.

59:41Tyler Cowen:What's not to like? Let's say an educated person comes to you. They live in the United States and they have two weeks to spend. and they want to learn Mexico, but put aside Mexico City and put aside the ruins. They want to learn Mexico, Mexico proper. Where do you send them? What's the ideal Mexico trip? Okay. I'm thinking ideal in terms of educational, not necessarily. But it should be fun and interesting too, right? Okay. So I would send them across the border in California and Tijuana. I would then tell them to fly to, I think, probably Zacatecas, because the sort of baroque splendor of Mexico, it's not captured anywhere with the same intensity.

1:00:21I mean, this was the centre of the sort of financial, the wealth-producing world. It had the biggest mine in the world under the colony. That translated into this absolutely just, it's beyond words, architecture. It's stunning. You get buildings, There's a style called the Chirigoresque where every inch is carved with extraordinary detail. So I think Tijuana, Zacatecas. And from Zacatecas, I'd go to a town called Aguas Calientes. And I would make sure to go there during the annual feria, which is notable for two things, apart from the fact that it's a great week-long party. And one is you get some of the best bullfights in Mexico.

1:01:01And two is this is one of the very few times when gambling is legal. temporarily there. When you combine that, again, it's a pretty colonial town. And I'd make sure and go and see that symphony orchestra, which is superb. Argentine conductor. From Aguas Calientes, I think I'd take a plane and go to, I'm trying to do maths now, three days in each place. Nine days, two more cities. I would go to Jalapa in Veracruz, precisely because it's particularly untouristed for its quality as a city, and their surroundings are beautiful sort of temperate climate. And then the final one is really cramming things in.

1:01:43I'd hope to have a private jet on this or else a driver. I would go to San Cristobal Las Casas, the colonial capital of Chiapas.

1:01:50Tyler Cowen:Great trip. Last two questions. First, what's the best Mexican restaurant in or near Chicago? In or near Chicago? I'm not sure for the simple reason my family is actually based in new york and so when i go out for dinner it's usually in new york near new york then so oh now that's great because i just found a place no um it's downtown it's called um santo loco and it's a taqueria which is exceptional and in case you find that to be inverse snobbery i would say that underneath the taqueria there's a hidden quite smart restaurant It was almost a sort of speakeasy restaurant. Both of them were superb, and I intend spending a lot of time in both of them.

1:02:31So that's my answer for New York. Get to Santo Loco and have their, two of their, you have to try two. One is their mushroom taco, which is a revelation, and the other is their carnitas.

1:02:44Tyler Cowen:For the last question, just to plug your book again, Mexico, the 500-year history, everyone should buy and read it. Finally, what will you do next? I'm writing a book which is a prehistory of money laundering. It's based on a document I found in the British Foreign Office, which is a query from a director of the great bullion dealers, Johnson Mathey. And it says, I've just been in touch with a person on a steamship lying off in the Channel Islands who has five million pounds worth of illicit government, Mexican government silver on board. I'd like to buy it pennies on the pound. What would your advice be?

1:03:27And the first bit of advice is check that the silver actually exists and don't tell the Mexican government. I would like to know what happened next at that end, because I think I know at the Mexican end where it came from and how it got onto the ship in New York Harbour. So I'm hoping to reconstruct using Mexican, American, there's FBI involvement and British archives as much as I can the path of the silver in this decade, the first great decade of money laundering, which is the 1920s. Paul Gillingham, thank you very much. Tyler, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.

1:04:32Thank you.