I am going to Korea next year. I look forward to being able to relay travel observations. Here’s what I can say so far.
I have several distinct personal points of connection to Korea through my family, my husband’s family, and my next-door neighbor here in Alabama. There is a George Mason U. campus in Korea. I hope to explore all of those connections when I go.
KPop Demon Hunters was an absolute phenomenon on Netflix last year. Every school child in America, across every race and state, knew the songs. As for the soundtrack, I determine: “Golden” – correctly rated “Soda Pop” – overrated “What it Sounds Like” – underrated And what is interesting in September of 2026 is how fast the whole thing died out. Trends come and then they really go in the monoculture (is this the “unicontext”?).
I am learning Korean by doing one lesson per day on Duolingo. Progress is slow, partly because I do not expect to need to become fluent ever. I am enjoying this. I have frittered away a good number of hours on cognitive trivia like computer Solitaire and Wordle. On the margin, I encourage a few of you English speakers to make learning a Non-Romance Language your new game. I have also used Duolingo to try to brush up on Spanish and French, but it’s fun to enter a totally different mindset altogether. It’s also difficult and might be frustrating if I had a higher bar for my performance.
If any readers have a connection in Seoul, please let me know.
A childhood friend and Facebook contact of mine pleaded to her friends, “How do people afford multiple children?”
I checked up on her and saw delightful pictures of a second child who, one way or another, they are now financially supporting along with that firstborn girl, in 2026. I obviously won’t post her family photos, but they took a summer trip to Yosemite National Park that looked something like this
Image by Grok
Based on how she felt about supporting a second child, I would be surprised if they have a third, a “big family.” Two is about where most people can still afford to take trips across the country in the summer.
This caused me to reflect on Dolly Parton, who we all miss. The U.S. flag is at half-staff in recognition of Dolly’s passing.
Part of her charming narrative is the fact that she was born into poverty. Famously, Dolly grew up with 11 siblings in a two-room Tennessee cabin. I doubt their family made it out to Yosemite.
So, with some help from ChatGPT, I inquired about the Total Fertility Rate of those Parton children. In one generation, everything dramatically changed. The number of children born to the Parton clan ranges from three to zero. Chat writes:
Dolly and her five sisters appear to have had only about six biological children among them—an average of roughly one child per woman. Dolly herself had none. Including their brothers, the twelve Parton siblings seem to have produced only about sixteen children altogether.
The Parton family therefore compresses a major American demographic change into just two generations. Avie Lee had twelve children; her daughters averaged about one each.
When we recently traded in for a newer car, we were handed two fobs. These are push-button start cars, so you absolutely need a fob to drive one. An old-fashioned metal key will not work. Even the hidden metal key in your fob is only good for unlocking the door, not for starting the car. Since life has schooled me that things get lost, I asked how much it would cost to get a spare fob made at time of purchase, hoping I might catch a break. Nope, the dealer cost would be $436. Ouch.
So, I later asked AI what to do. I was advised to have a non-dealer locksmith or hardware store do it instead. With this route, you might save even more money if you buy the blank fob yourself on Amazon for something like $30, and just have the locksmith program it and cut the hidden metal key.
A local ACE hardware store quoted me a price of $330, which is better than $436, but still not great. But I located a mobile locksmith, who drives a big van loaded with spare keys and fobs, and the equipment to cut key copies and to program fobs. He specializes in going and helping folks who are locked out of their cars, and he will drive to your house to make spare fobs and keys. He would come to our house to make a new fob for $270. But it gets even better – – if I had two fobs made in one visit, the price would be only $220 apiece. It was an offer I could not refuse, so now I have spares for both cars.
If you don’t have a working fob for the locksmith to work from: It turns out that for many foreign cars (Subaru, Toyota, and especially most European brands), it can be very difficult for a non-dealer locksmith to create a fob for you. Normally, if you find yourself locked out of your car some dark, snowy night, the mobile locksmith can roll up and create a new fob for you so you can get back in business. For brands like Ford, GM, Honda, and Nissan, he can accomplish this even if you can’t provide him with a working fob to copy. He will charge you twice as much, because it is a much harder job with no working template fob. It gets even harder for, say, Subaru. But for Mercedes-Benz or BMW, it may be impossible for most locksmiths to get a fob made on the spot without a working model to copy. In a big metro area, there may be a few locksmiths who have the specialized equipment for these brands; you’d have to call around and ask the locksmith especially if they can make a new, say, Mercedes fob for an “all-keys-lost” situation. If not, you may have to get towed on a flat-bed ($$$) to a dealer, who can read your vehicle and program the fob ($$$). There may be a middle ground (which will take some days to play out) where you order a blank fob from a dealer along with some essential info for your locksmith to complete the programming, or where you order a programmed fob by mail.
All this argues for having a spare fob made ahead of time; maybe stash it somewhere that a friend or family member could bring it to you, if you were in distress not too far away.
Bonus fob tip: If your fob battery dies, you can still start your car by using the conventional metal key hidden inside your fob to open the car door, and then hold the fob very close to the car ignition button as you push the button, with your foot on the brake as usual.
The Atlantic has a great article about the history of the Boeing 747 aircraft, which is slowly being retired by airlines. Lots of fun details in the article about the plane itself and about that era. The author is also conscious of the fact that flying was expensive back then, and that a lot more people fly today (though in part, the 747 was a cause of mass flying). Still, the tone of the article is nostalgic for the era, in addition to just being a nice obituary for a marvel of engineering and luxury.
But just how much more expensive was flying when the 747 was introduced? The article doesn’t exactly tell us, though they do give some inflation-adjusted figures on the cost of building the planes. They do give us some hint of how luxurious flying was, even in coach: “on a 1970 Pan Am flight from JFK to Heathrow, a coach-class passenger would have enjoyed filet mignon.”
Sounds nice! But expensive. In 1970, a roundtrip flight on Pan Am from New York to London was $420. First class was $750. To put those numbers in context, the average wage in 1970 was $3.40, meaning it would have taken 124 hours of work to buy the coach ticket, and 221 hours to buy the first class ticket. The average wage today is $32.31, meaning that the coach ticket is the equivalent of almost $4,000 today, and the first class ticket is over $7,000. Filet mignon is nice, but not $4,000 nice.
Today, you can buy a coach ticket from New York to London for around $800. Of course, there is no one single price today, as there was in 1970 (something that frustrates buyers, to be sure), but I’ve searched multiple websites in different months, and you can generally get a direct flight for around $800 in economy class (often cheaper if you don’t have a direct flight). Today most airlines have multiple upper classes for international flights, not a single first class, but on American Airlines you can generally get a business class ticket to London for around $4,000 and a first class ticket for a bit over $5,000 (both direct flights from NYC).
In other words, for the same amount of work as buying one coach ticket in 1970, you could buy five tickets in 2026. Or, if you desire that luxury, you could also buy one business class ticket today, for roughly the same amount of hours worked as the coach ticket in 1970. Business class seats today take about half the hours of work as a first class seat in 1970, and an international first-class ticket today takes about 75% of the hours worked in 1970 as a first class ticket (American Airlines Flagship First class is a truly luxury experience, probably better than 1970, even though there is no piano bar on the plane).
The decline is much smaller than the decline for coach seats, but it is still a decline. But that is an important point: the biggest gains from deregulation and competition in air travel and the non-rich, who mostly weren’t flying anyway. Is the experience as good as 1970? Of course not, and The Atlantic article stresses this point repeatedly. You won’t get filet mignon, you’ll probably be in a cramped seat, with a frustrated flight attendant. But you can afford it, which for most middle-class families is probably the most important fact.
This restlessness and energy likely has something to do with us being currently in the lead for the race to AI. Ho hum… building God while still having the equivalent of the GDP of a small country to drop on Halloween trinkets.
I had planned to write about the Trump-BLS fight today. But considering that two of my co-bloggers have already written about this (Mike on Monday and Scott on Tuesday) and that I have written about supposedly “fake” jobs numbers before several times (see January 2024 and August 2024), I will hold off on that topic until all of the dust settles. But this is a very important topic, and I believe Trump is clearly in the wrong (as is Kevin Hassett, see my tweets from this week), so please do continue to follow this topic and sane voices on it (see a Tweet from Ernie Tedeschi and from me for a long-run perspective on data accuracy).
But now, on to something a little more light-hearted: is everyone traveling to Europe these days?
Judging by my Facebook feed, it seems that Yes, lots of people are traveling to Europe. But this could be a result of selection bias in at least two ways: the people I am friends with on Facebook, and what people choose to post about on Facebook.
So what does the hard data say? We actually have pretty good long-run data on this question. In short: yes, lots more Americans are traveling to Europe (and overseas generally). Though don’t worry: not everyone went to Europe this summer, despite what social media might have you believe.
For starters, here’s a chart showing three decades of US overseas travel:
I posted See New York City for Free in 2022 and See New York City for Cheap in 2024. In summer 2025, we spent 4 nights in Midtown. I will post general reflections about kids and New York here. Last week, l posted a short itinerary for our half-week in Manhattan with elementary-aged kids, as suggestions for other parents: NYC Family Summer Trip Itinerary
1. Assuming a middle-income family with 1-3 kids, when it comes to travel, I propose Do Less for Preschool. Save money by staying close to home when the kids are under the age of 6. I know people who do international trips with babies, usually because they are visiting family. I have not.
2. A mentor encouraged me to have kids early. One of my objections in 2014 was that I hadn’t traveled the world yet. Everyone I knew was posting selfies in Thailand. How could I have kids if I haven’t even posted from Thailand yet? He told me that you can travel with your kids when they are older. Now it’s 2025. Did that time go by fast? It’s a blur at this point. I remember the time when I read in a book that your kids will potty train themselves if you let them walk around with no diaper. When I tried that, my folks just went on the floor. That’s the stage of life when you might want to put unnecessary travel on hold.
3. Someone had told us that the NYC Subway is not safe and we should not take our kids on it. We used the Subway every day and it was fine. I saw one young man jump the turnstile. The elevator smelled bad. One night when I was checking routes, I noticed a warning on the map reading, “trains are delayed while we request NYPD for someone being disruptive on train…” So, people who rely on the Subway at all times might still have some complaints.
We enjoyed peace and safety in touristy areas between the hours of 8am and 9pm. Were we the beneficiaries of the crime decrease? I saw a bus ad celebrating the decrease in murders in NYC. Before I left Birmingham, Mayor Woodfin announce a big decrease in murders. The trend seems to be real.
Last year was the largest one-year percentage point decline in murder ever recorded. This year is on track to do so again. In fact, nearly every category of crime is down sharply, with many at multi-decade lows or even the lowest per-capita rates ever recorded. pic.twitter.com/5ZLsNVwyhO
4. The Observation Deck of the Empire State Building trip is almost more meta than the MOMA. You are inside the building looking at pictures of the outside of the building. You are posting pictures of yourself next to 50-year-old pictures of the outside of the building. People appear to go to the real thing in order to poast.
You can just do things, as they say, or at least you could in 1930.
Both kids voted that the Empire State Building was more “wow” than the MOMA. Maybe they like constructing more than deconstructing.
5. I vote the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) as more “wow” because the permanent installations include many famous pieces including Starry Night by Van Gogh.
I had booked a day at MOMA without knowing exactly what was inside. My kids got to see me going around saying things like, “Wow. They have a real Picasso!” Instead of acting as a docent through a world I’ve already explored, my kids get to discover a lot along with me. We discussed what counts as “art” and “how did that get on the wall of a museum?”
6. If you are going to Lower Manhattan to see the New York Stock Exchange and the World Trade Center, don’t miss a free tour of Trinity Church. (Hamilton’s tomb is in the churchyard.) It is an example of progress to see the cathedral dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers considering that: “With its 281-foot steeple, the third Trinity Church became the tallest building in the United States.”
Here at EWED, Jeremy has often pointed out that people are richer today than in the past. The maligned Boomers would have seen a shorter New York skyline as children. Many of the supertall glass structures you see today were built after 2001, meaning it’s Gen Z who gets to live with them. (I learned that on our harbor boat tour.)
7. The 7-year-old got Lion King and the M&M store in Times Square. The tour of the United Nations headquarters was for the older people. The 10yo and I learned a lot from an excellent tour guide.
The 7yo had to be carried. She did not understand why they were calling “an emergency meeting on Syria.” The next day I asked her what she remembered from touring the UN. She sincerely replied, “What United Nations?” If you are wondering if she remembers anything from the trip, the answer is yes. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler building, among many other things, are newly part of the family vocabulary.
After the UN tour, I took the family back across 1st Avenue to see the Isaiah Wall. Scaffolding blocked our view, which is not encouraging for the hope of peace. The idea is that: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Imagine a child named Johnny trying to form a model of the universe from the journey I set up for my kids this summer. In New York, Johnny embarked on a cultural safari that began at the MoMA, where he stood wide-eyed before melted clocks and soup cans, absorbing the idea that the world might be an absurd, fragmented collage. Then came The Lion King as a dazzling counterpoint, suggesting that the world is imbued with cosmic purpose. Every giraffe, ghost-dad, and blade of savannah grass existed in service of a divine, eternal monarchy. Finally, at the United Nations, he was led past flags and translation booths, where no one bowed to anyone and the world’s contradictions were negotiated over coffee. By the end of the day, Johnny wondered: is meaning a myth, a fact taught by the Spirit, or a matter of committee?
I noticed that they serve Starbucks coffee in the basement of the UN and in the Empire State Building. As long as we can get coffee before and dinner after, no one seems to care if the message is coherent.
This is a condensed list of what we did with elementary-aged kids for three fun days in Manhattan in July.
Like a camping trip, NYC with kids depends on the weather. In good walking weather you can occupy many hours exploring free outdoor attractions. In bad weather, you might feel the need to constantly buy admission tickets, retail, taxis and sit-down restaurant meals.
Our hotel was a 5-minute walk from Grand Central Station. We had a good view from our room on the 28th floor. We could even look down on an interesting active construction site. When traveling with kids, or any group larger than a couple, you’ll probably be stuck in the hotel sometimes, so paying extra for a good view might be worth it.
In the hotel lounge, adults could drink a free glass of wine and listen to a guy playing calm piano songs from memory like “My Heart Will Go On.” When my ten-year-old (10yo) asked for “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes, the request was denied.
Tuesday
We walked to The Empire State Building. Passing the Public Library was a highlight although it was not open yet. I had booked entry tickets to the Empire State building online months ahead of time for a 9:30am time on a Tuesday. We spent no time waiting in line.
Next, we took the Subway to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). I had reserved tickets for the day. If your kids need a break from quietly appreciating art on the wall, there is a garden courtyard and kid’s craft area.
It was hot but we were lucky to not be in the middle of a genuine heat wave. We got to-go food from a shop and walked north to Central Park for a picnic on rocks in the shade. Playgrounds and fun statues provide points of interest for kids.
We walked up to the Chess pavilion where my kids dropped in on chess games with friendly strangers (a nice man provided the pieces). You could bring your own chess or checkers pieces if you want to guarantee a game.
Note: Even though many places claim to have bag polices online, you can almost always get a regular sized backpack and/or metal water bottle through security.
Wednesday
This might sound like a planned itinerary, but the only thing we locked in ahead of time for Wednesday was an afternoon Broadway show. By the time we got back to our hotel at night, my phone had counted over 14,000 steps for the day. Our first stop was Clinton Castle on the southern edge of the island. Benefits to children include bathrooms and a museum display of how Manhattan was expanded through land reclamation. I’m not including all the places we stopped to eat in this blog but we especially liked discovering Liberty Bagels.
We saw the bull statue and the New York Stock Exchange (from the outside). A great stop in Lower Manhattan is a free self-guided tour of Trinity Church. We walked to the 9/11 memorial and then back to the subway so we could rest in our hotel during the hottest part of the day.
Lion King on Broadway was fun (and expensive). Afterwards, we were in Time Square, and it was finally time to do what my kids had been talking about all year: return to the M&M store. Kids love the M&M store.
Then we walked to Hell’s Kitchen for dinner. We went back east to Rockefeller Center and bought books for the kids at McNally Jackson. From there, with a “we can make it” attitude, we walked back to the hotel in the dark. This is where the “safe streets” matter as much as the weather.
Thursday
This morning had not been planned ahead of time, so we spent some of our time figuring things out. We walked to the United Nations headquarters. I was able to get visitor passes and a guided tour. We had a great guide who explained the building and the aims of the UN for 45 minutes. I learned a lot and my 10yo was engaged.
Should you take your children on a tour of the UN? I had to carry my 7yo most of the time. The next day, I asked her what she remembered. She sincerely replied, “What United Nations?” If you don’t think your younger child will be outright disruptive, then you might take a younger kid along with an older kid who can appreciate it.
We had an appointment to enter the USS Intrepid Museum at 2:30. We didn’t make it until 3:30 and it closes at 5pm. The place deserves more than 90 minutes. It has a big kids’ activity area that is fully indoors.
Our last scheduled event was a Circle Line Harbor Lights Cruise from 7pm to 9pm. In the summer, this is a sunset cruise of lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. Just at the end you see the city lights against the night sky. The tour guide was entertaining and smart! I learned interesting NYC facts and history. They have enclosed areas with windows for bad weather but that would not be as fun. Being able to sit up on the open-air top deck made the view amazing for everyone.
I recently spent a week in Norway with my family. Highly recommended overall. While we were mostly able to get around the country by train, we needed to rent a car to get to a small, remote village where my great grandfather came from, and where I still have relatives. Prior to the drilling of several massive car tunnels in the 1980s and 1990s, Fjaerland was only accessible by boat.
And if you are renting a car in Norway today, it’s highly likely you will be renting an electric car (unless you specifically ask for a gas-powered car, as the older German couple in front of me at the rental counter did). The vast majority of new cars sold in Norway (over 90%) are electric, and since most rentals are new cars, that’s what they have.
Norway has made the biggest push in the world through public policy to encourage EV adoption, both for buying cars and for building up a charging infrastructure. In this post I will primarily focus on the consumer experience of renting an EV, though the public policy surrounding it is worth a discussion too.
Economist Writing Every Day 