Numlock Sunday: February 10, 2019

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Dan Kopf of Quartz, who this past week wrote “New Zealand may soon join the more-tourists-than-residents club.” Here’s what I wrote about it:

In 2017, New Zealand enjoyed 0.74 tourists per resident. With their tourism business on the rise, the current projection has it passing 5 million visitors by 2024, compared to a current population of 4.8 million. When that goes down, New Zealand will join the rare club of nations where the number of people coming by on vacation annually exceeds the permanent residents. In 2017, there were 18 countries with a population over 2 million that fit the bill, Croatia paramount above them with 3.78 tourists per resident. They’re followed by Greece (3.34 tourists per resident), Austria (2.53), Singapore (2.48), Ireland (2.15) an…