"There was no economically viable alternative to fossil fuels until 2010, so curbing emissions would have meant degrowth, which would have meant a deep slowdown in the rate of poverty reduction in developing nations."
Nuclear was viable! We killed it by making it too hard to build and too expensive. It might not outcompete solar on price NOW. But if we hadn't wasted most of the 70's and 80's making it almost impossible to build, it might look like the Jetsons around here.
It might look like the Jetsons in some places, but like New York or Moscow at the end of Fail Safe in others. See Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.
Humanity has been lucky that none of these were as catastrophic as they easily could have been. Build a lot more nuclear plants, and the odds that our luck will continue goes way down. That's basic Bayesian analysis.
It may well be that the benefits of nuclear power outweigh the risks, but the risks are of an entirely different nature than the risks of fossil fuels. Nuclear proponents completely ignore this, and it bugs me.
*sigh* Apparently you do not understand probabilistic reasoning. I repeat:
"Humanity has been lucky that none of these were as catastrophic as they easily could have been. Build a lot more nuclear plants, and the odds that our luck will continue goes way down. That's basic Bayesian analysis."
Yeah, there's some major revisionist history going on there. I think there is no question that nuclear, with a sober cost-benefit analysis for safety, would be far cheaper than any other source of energy, but that would mean accepting a non-trivial amount of risk.
The problem is we accepted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths, due to air pollution from power generation without anyone in the environmental movement even raising the subject. Shockingly negligent.
Not all deaths are psychologically equivalent. If Indian Point had melted down and taken out New York City, rendering it permanently uninhabitable, we might not care about the precise body counts.
A meltdown is why they have a containment structure. There isn’t a mechanism for Indian Point to “take out” NYC.
“ As Cohen point out about Chernobyl, "Post-accident analyses indicate that if there had been a U.S.-style containment, none of the radioactivity would have escaped, and there would have been no injuries or deaths."
"the explosion punched a second hole in the containment vessel; the first hole had been created earlier by melted nuclear material that passed through the bottom of the vessel"
It seems quite likely at this point we are going to lose much more inhabitable area to rising sea levels + worse storm surges, than to nuclear accident fallout. So using coal instead of nuclear was a mistake.
Nuclear was never going to be an alternative to fossil fuels. Cars were not going to be nuclear powered. And nuclear can only provide baseload. There's a reason even in France something like 30% of the power comes from fossil fuels.
And France doesn't look anything like the Jetsons, despite getting 70% of its electricity from nuclear.
We should have been taxing net emissions [i.e., excise tax on fossil fuels in proportion to carbon content] since the 70's when the externality was first recognized. No that would not have been de-growth if the tax revenues were used to reduce higher deadweight loss taxes like corporate income tax and deficits and research. It woud have been a stimulus for research into zero CO2 emitting processes. The opposite of de-growth!
Agree we could be up to nth Generation nuclear by now
Who's "we"? And if it's the US regulators that killed nuclear, why aren't there any other countries that lowered their regulatory barriers and reaped the benefits?
During the height of the cold war, nuclear technology was closely tied to military applications, and countries without strong ties to nuclear-capable nations like the U.S. or USSR often struggled to acquire the necessary technology and expertise. The U.S. needed to lead on technology development in this area and we slammed on the brakes after Three Mile Island.
Around the same time, the environmental movement took off and it applied pressure throughout the West, not just in the U.S. David Brower, the Sierra Club's executive director in the 60's, is on the record opposing nuclear energy *because* he feared the energy would be too cheap and abundant and that it would encourage population growth and industrial expansion, potentially harming the environment.
There as also the threat of nuclear war. Everyone who was alive in the 70's and 80's was constantly presented with the threat that Soviet radiation bombs would be raining down from the sky. Nuclear was simply associated with the very worst situations we could imagine and it made for really bad public perception.
It was no accident that the anti-nuclear-power movement became especially strong in Germany, given the old joke that "a tactical nuclear weapon is one which lands on Germany".
I've been waiting over 30 years for Asians to figure out that they are being viciously discriminated against. Back then I was told by a Univeristy of California Dean that Asian-American admissions were about a factor of 3 below what they would be if there were no anti-Asian discrimination. He justified this by claiming that the Californa legislature would cut UC funding if there weren't enough white kids. And this dude was Asian himself! I told him there was going to be an enormous backlash someday. I'm really surprised it's taken this long, but maybe it's finally here.
Yeah, 48 years ago (oof), when California law still stated that if you met the cutoffs for grades, test scores, and adequate math and language classes then UC *had* to let you in, everyone was shrieking about how Berkeley had turned into a Chinese girls' school. They complained about Lowell High School in the same way. Even back then I couldn't figure out why it was so bad that the smarter, harder-working kids were getting in. Seemed to me that the system was working.
I don’t know how we move away from this, but we need to find a new way to do admissions, because:
1) when I was younger I used to work for a college prep company, and our course on average raised students scores by 150 points out of 1600 - you might think ‘wow that kid with the 1400 is so much more deserving than the kid with the 1250’, but that kids parent basically bought the score.
2) childhood is being ruined by turning it into a resume building experience (and parents are draining their money and free time to facilitate it). We need to find a way to get everyone to chill out.
And the standard deviation on a person's score (that is, the spread in scores achieved by a particular person on multiple takes) is a comparable number.
I think chilling out might be independent of hardworking.
The high performing and low performing Asian Americans I know have equally insane immigrant parents. It's just some of them had good ideas of what to be insane about and some didn't. I don't know anyone with sane parents, either successful or unsuccessful.
(This is why every single Asian American written movie is about how much they hate their mothers.)
Actually I should amend that, Japanese parents aren't known for being tiger mothers, but I'm actually not sure what they are known for.
No, certainly not, life context is important. I would like to see race-based preferences ("affirmative action") replaced by class-based preferences. I would also like to see some sort of "bucket" system where doing very well in one "bucket" gets you in: test scores and rank in your high school are two particular buckets I would favor having.
Things are much better now at UC than 30 years ago, but a significant fraction of the Asian students now are from China (they pay the bills). I don't know how the numbers of domestic students compare with the state population. The SCOTUS Harvard/UNC case shows that anti-Asian discrimination is still rampant elsewhere. Biden condemned SCOTUS for ruling against it, and no Democrat in office publicly disagreed with him.
It's not easy if you can't open more schools because the state has banned building anything. The class of who gets educated will get very stereotypical.
To go from "Achievement is White Supremacy" to "Achievement is Good" is a pretty big pivot. Like going from "No abortions Ever" to "Abortion Cool until the Kid is 2".
While I would welcome this pivot, I don't see it happening.
Eh, the first camp was always relatively small, but had unusual power for a bit. The 2024 losses may have knocked that team into the back seat of the party. We'll see!
Has not knocked them back, as the response to Seth Moulton shows. (That's a different but related issue.)
Also, more on point, in the 2020 POTUS election, Californians voted 55% to 45% to reject race-based affirmative action. The exact same electorate voted for Biden 2-to-1 over Trump.
Democrats in office took no notice. Biden condemned the SCOTUS decision banning anti-Asian racism in college admissions ("not a normal court", he said), and no Democrat in office contradicted him.
When colonialism is taught in places like China and India or Nigeria, there is this implicit idea that Europeans got together in 1500 and made a multi century plan to take over the world.
That isn't what happened.
The world colonial system of say 1895 was the result of a long series of small steps that were taken in haphazard way over several centuries.
Say you're a Dutch trader in 1640 who is buying spices in Java. You make a deal with the local king to give him silver in exchange for spices. Great. Then, ten years later, the king dies, there is a new king. The new king doesn't like the deal. But his brother says that he will take the deal if you help him depose the new king, so could you send some dutch musketeers?
The Dutch do so. And then they maybe decide to put a permanent military presence to make sure the trade keeps flowing. Then they decide that they should really be approving the new kings beforehand.
By 1780, the Dutch are controlling the island, (in Java it would actually take a brief British occupation to completely break local power, but this is a hypothetical), but the point is that the Dutch didn't set out to take over the Dutch East Indies, but, because they wanted to keep making money there, they took more and more control from the locals.
That incentive, "How do we keep making money and make more money in foreign countries?" is what drove the creation of the world colonial system before the 20th century.
Chinese companies in China have the same incentive. They will be tempted to take more and more control from the locals to protect their investments. They will want to keep the money from their investments flowing back to China and not have so much going locally. They will want special legal protections for Chinese businessmen while in Zambia so they won't be tried under Zambian law. There are hotels that pop up in Tanzania that say, "Chinese only" and don't allow locals to stay.
Extraterritoriality and "no dogs or Chinese allowed" are the sort of thing that are taught in China as being really galling aspects of the "Century of Humiliation". That Chinese people and businesses are doing the exact same thing in Africa is just flying under the radar.
Part of the reason it flies under the radar is that Chinese people know that they never had the 1500 European "let's take over the world meeting". Without that meeting, then nothing China does is colonialism, right. But for Sri Lankans, Zambians, etc. it sure feels like colonization.
This idea of colonialism as multistage evil plan vs. being an amoral aggregation of rational responses to the need to make money abroad is important and not discussed. It's like the people who want Hitler to be theatrically evil in all aspects of his life, rather than grapple with the idea that one of history's greatest monsters also liked dogs and was good with kids.
So that was one.
For two, you say that the US spends a lot on our social safety net.
That isn't the right metric at all.
Again, with healthcare, any one of 30 other national systems cost HALF as much and actually provide universal coverage. So spending is the wrong metric to look at. It is disappointing that your rebuttal to Delong in this piece is just "lol, we actually spend a lot of money" without talking about what people get in their social safety net from that spending.
Colonial domination was a crime. Does it matter whether it was a crime carefully planned in advance or simply a crime of opportunity and improvisation?
The Chinese government and Chinese people very much are taught colonialism as being a carefully planned crime in advance.
Because of that, they don't see the need to implement safeguards against their own companies and people committing crimes of "opportunity and improvisation."
Those crimes of "opportunity and improvisation" are probably hurting China's image abroad.
(I actually really like the phrasing you used. I was not saying historical colonialism wasn't a crime. I am saying that the role of improvisation and opportunity is massively discounted in favor of it all being an evil master plan. That said, something like the Berlin conference was actaully an evil master plan, but that came 100 years after Europe had already taken over much of the world)
Moreover, isn't there a maxim that (historically) all cultures have exploited their technological advantages over others to the extent they could. The industrial revolution that began in Britain in the 18th century opened up advantages so wide on a global scale, it's little wonder less developed cultures were open to colonization. But across millennia they, and the rest of Europe, were hardly unique in spreading their technology to and power over others.
If you look at consumption vs healthcare spending, America spends more in health care because Americans are on average richer, just like how Manhattanites spend more than people in Austin who spend more than people in Worchester, MA. It's Balmoul cost disease, services are always more expensive in richer areas from haircuts, daycare, rent and healthcare. Americans have more disposable income than other countries as a result of 1) Americans having on average higher salaries and 2) Americans have lower taxes than Europe. (A Frenchman at $80K has roughly the same effective tax rate as an American making $400K - over 40% of their income is taxed).
If you look at a graph of disposable income on the x axis and healthcare spending on the y axis, then American spending actually aligns with the line of best fit.
BUT, if you look at a graph of gdp per capita on the x axis and healthcare spending on the y axis, then American spending is a major outlier.
The fact is both charts are true, but people think of healthcare with the latter and ignore the former. However, in reality if you want to match healthcare spending with people's actual incomes, then comparing healthcare spending to post tax disposable income makes more sense.
Please don’t link Twitter threads. It’s annoying to click on a link and see “If you want to know what's going on, start here. 🧵👇” and then nothing more after it. I don’t know why Twitter has decided over the past year or two that they don’t want readers, but I believe that it’s now more reliable to link some sort of third party unroll or whatever of a thread, since non-users can’t read threads.
1. I feel like fundamentally a town square is a terrible idea for a social network. I don’t really have big feels about Twitter in that it hasn’t been the thing I wanted it to be for more than 10 years. In like 2011 I found some cool shit for like Star Trek content but the way politics weasels into my feed all the time is really dull.
The fact that I don’t like blue sky is probably telling. I love new social networks, they’re exciting. Bluesky just seems like Twitter with different moderation ideas. Threads doesn’t feel this way if I want to post about my not-politics life Bluesky seems moribund.
2. I always am surprised the way people talk shit about non-English speaking students in classrooms. Because I have my license in Esl along with my k-6 and have a reputation for being good with these learners I’ve got a bunch of them over the years and they’re just not the terror of elementary school people think they are. Most homegrown difficult factors seem 1,000 times worse than kid just got here from Venezuela.
Local governments are an economic basket case. The fundamental structure of the suburban growth Ponzi scheme basically makes their finances unworkable. Which makes it kinda hard to separate out the impacts of illegal immigration from the shitty finances and the NIMBY-depressed growth rate.
Are you sure the drones are actually real, noah? My go-to site for things like this is Metabunk and their investigative thread is full of cases of proven misidentification of aircraft but nobody seems able to find any clear-cut cases of an actual drone. They argue, I think correctly, that this is a mass hysteria and in fact there are no drones and never were, obviously excluding the ones that have been sent up trying to find the "real" drones.
Every expert I've read seems to agree that there really were a bunch of drones, but that panic has caused a lot of people to misidentify planes as drones and to send up their own drones.
What kind of experts are we talking about here? Military radar operators? Or media "experts"? Because IMHO the real experts in such things are the guys at Metabunk. They have years of experience of dissecting UFO reports and did a better job of working out what they were than people who actually worked for the military (Elizondo et al)
It's really bothersome how accepting today's post is of the drones. I live in "drone central," a few minutes from Bedminster, and no report of drones is credible. The Picatinny Arsenel acknowledgement of drones counted any police or security guard on staff agreeing with a report as a drone sighting. As far as I know, no expert (meaning an air traffic controller or a radar operator or even an experienced pilot) has verified a drone. I go out at night and see the same things people call drones, and they're very evidently planes on FlightRadar24. Noah can motte-and-bailey this and say he just said it's reasonable that people are panicking around drones, but it's very clear in the text that he's accepting this instance of drones at face value.
And one more thing - if the drones fly low, it would be easy to take pictures that verify them as drones. If they fly high, it would be a major emergency unless they were using ADS-B transponders because they'd be missing in all the live data! If they are using transponders, we'd see them in our apps!
But what I'm saying is if they're flying that low, it's easy to photograph them and hear that they're drones. I was talking about ADS-B in the scenario where the hypothetical drones are flying high.
I mean, I just watched a segment on CNN. They were showing tons of video footage of the drones. They were quite obviously drones, and not aircraft, etc. This isn't 1931, it's not like people cannot recognize aircraft.
You may argue that people are overreacting to a "normal" amount of drones, but they are very obviously real.
People cannot recognize aircraft. Go look at the Twitter threads, or the Metabunk thread. Every single reported incident is found to be a plane. Every one.
I have to agree that Assad’s fall scores a point for Obama’s Syria policy. However, it’s too early to declare it a win.
We accomplished regime change in Afghanistan largely by proxy through local warlords. That left the warlords in de facto control afterwards, with the US-supported president merely the “Mayor of Kabul”. The flaws in that outcome were very much in the minds of the Bush administration when they chose to send American boots to Iraq, and the instant return of the Taliban after our withdrawal confirms the overall failure of that strategy.
The Iraq strategy had many obvious failings as well, but overall deaths were similar to those in Syria, and Iraq has, at least, had a functioning, non-terrorist, democratic government since then. No, it’s not a shining example, but it seems no democracy is this days.
In Syria, we achieved a regime change without any American blood. It required our stalwart support of very unpopular actions by Israel and expensive aid to Ukraine to weaken Iran and Russia sufficiently for this to happen. We need to see how the post-Assad political situation in the region develops before declaring this to have been an exemplary strategy.
As a person who is off Twitter because of the casual cruelty of gamergate I am very skeptical that in 2007 or even 2012 they were heavy handedly censoring any kind of content when just a little while later getting people thrown off for making my wife’s mentions full of death and rape threats just a minute later. So bad that Disney walked away from an acquisition over it.
I don’t believe any mammal biologists were ever kicked off Twitter. If you’re trying to make some sort of claim about sex or whatever, people didn’t get banned for denying gender in favor of sex, they got banned for getting in wars.
That is indeed an interesting string of blog posts by Brad Delong about the alleged failures of "neoliberalism," and a fairly persuasive set of brief responses from you, but what I find baffling is the absence of a Hexapodia episode (or more appropriately a string of them) in which the two of you hash all this out. Or more broadly, the lack of any Hexapodia episodes in my feed since mid-summer. What gives?
1. "The internet is better off fragmented; humanity wasn’t meant to be thrown into just one or two big rooms together."
Sounds a little like federalism, the very thing the Left has spent 100 years trying to kill off.
2. I showed my kids Slaughterbots when it was released. They were 11-13 years old. I believe that short is incredibly important for everyone to watch. The only thing in that film that can't be done yet is the micro-sized nature. Everything else is doable today.
3. I would love to see a breakout between sexes of the Asian shift. Were "Tiger-Moms" the laggards like Women everywhere else? Or were they the leaders? Did they shift further than their husbands? I suspect yes -- moms usually vote on personal safety and education, and those issues drove the shift.
5. Brad DeLong is halfway there in that he sees the Right's flaw: maximal financial autonomy. But he misses the same flaw on the Left: maximal personal autonomy. This is the uniparty consensus of 1970-2008 -- the Left gets their sexual revolution and civil rights and the Right gets its free trade and deregulation. They're 2 sides of the same coin, both caused by neo-liberalism (or just plain Millian liberalism) taken to its logical conclusion.
6. You mean those of us who wanted to curtail public services for illegals 30 years ago in CA (prop 187) were right? We were perhaps motivated by reason and not racism? Good, God, man... forget Deneen, you're starting to sound like Pat Buchanan. At this rate, The American Conservative may offer you column soon. :-)
Seriously, since the election, your analysis has been far more reasoned and less hyperbolic (now that you realize Trump isn't Hitler and the people who told you that were playing you.) It's a welcome change back to the Noah I first subscribed to.
The primary reasons that Trump isn't Hitler is that he's not competent enough to be Hitler, which, unfortunately, hasn't stopped him from trying to cosplay as Hitler. Trump's rhetoric is remarkably similar to that of Hitler in 1932; just replace "Germany" with "America" and "Jew" with "immigrant". And then there was that Nazi rally Trump held at Madison Square Garden...
"immigrant" should be "illegal immigrant", which is a completely different category, and especially different from "Jew". The "illegal immigrant" category is based on the ACTIONS of the individuals in that category (which are, by definition, against the law), while "Jew" is based on immutable characteristics at birth (as the category was defined by the Nazis). The comparison is facile.
Maybe not in a pure libertarian sense, but the WTO is certainly a much freer arrangement than that which prevailed in the Bretton Woods era. I agree that the Right has been gypped many times over the years though. One that poisoned the well the most was the 1985-86 illegal immigrant legalization. The legacy of that betrayal still echoes 40 years later in the form of lack of trust between the parties on the issue of immigration.
How should each or either trade or immigration have been done that woud NOT have been what you see as a betrayal? My view is that neither was.
Take first post WWII trade liberalization, both the domestic policy changes, technological changes like the fall in the cost of transporting goods across oceans and symbols across the globe, and foreign policy changes like China coming to participate in the world economy had great benefits in the aggregate for every nation but fewer than proponents of the policies expected for two reasons.
1. The benefits in the US and many places were used mainly to increase consumption rather than investment.
2. The next best use of some resources, specifically the skills of some people were much worse that their former uses.
This latter was exacerbated by the former. The effects of reductions in import restrictions (or technological changed that reduce the relative price of imported goods) are normally, properly analyzed under the assumption that the exchange rate adjusts to maintain the trade balance. Resources flow from producing import competing goods to producing exported goods. [In trade theory this has a name, the Lerner Theorem that a tax on imports is a tax on exports.] There is no presumption that resources will flow from sectors producing tradeable goods to non-tradable goods.
But that’s not what happened. Saving and investment fell in relation to income. The US went from being a capital exporting country to a capital importing one in part, especially from the Reagan presidency onwards, fiscal deficits increased. This was especially hard on manufacturing because the US developed two new exporting sectors, financial services and “intellectual property.” And on top of that, US manufacturing lost its technological edge in sectors like steel and automobiles. Detroit and Baltimore/Pittsburg/Gary are emblematic of these changes. And these cascading changed landed squarely on mid-skill firm and product specific manufacturing labor. My guess is that comparatively little of what happened to manufacturing labor had anything to do with reduction in import restrictions. [I do fault US trade negotiators over the decades for focusing more on getting foreigners to pay for intellectual property and reducing restrictions agricultural exports than on us _manufacturing_ exports.]
The economic and political dynamics of immigration are quite different and I notice you are talking about specifically about the failure to halt illegal immigration after the 1986 amnesty. Here I think it is difficult to find anyone who has been materially harmed by the sweep of illegal immigration and a lot of benefit. Every labor market transaction with an immigrant is mutually beneficial. The skills of immigrants are more complements than substitutes for non-immigrant labor. But on the other hand, failure to prevent it is not a “policy” that anyone in particular supported. It was a political sin of omission and it got in the way of increasing immigration of high skilled and educated people. That’s where the larger benefits lie.
You’re going too easy on Delong. First, the suggestion that energy was “left to the market” is ridiculous. Energy in 20th century America was heavily regulated and heavily subsidized. Fossil fuel extraction became increasingly efficient on the back of government rnd; nuclear was regulated out of existence. By contrast, tech actually was less regulated, and thank god for that. If it weren’t, we’d probably be having this conversation on green screen terminals. Delong’s second and third points are reasonable, but he gets 1 and 4 so wrong that I’m incredulous there is a useful overarching theory here.
<You’re going too easy on Delong. First, the suggestion that energy was “left to the market” is ridiculous. Energy in 20th century America was heavily regulated and heavily subsidized. Fossil fuel extraction became increasingly efficient on the back of government rnd; nuclear was regulated out of existence.>
I think DeLong's point is that neoliberalism changed the quality of energy regulations rather than the quantity. It's worth remembering that prior to the energy crisis of the 1970s, the energy industry was subject to strict production limits and price quotas that you'd expect in an Eastern Bloc command economy. The inflation-adjusted price of a barrel of oil was essentially frozen, contributing to the surge in productivity growth that characterized the postwar boom. After the 1970s and the emergence of neoliberalism, the focus of regulations changed: price controls and quotas were dismantled while regulators shifted focus towards safety/environmental regulations. Nuclear power was made inefficient by overly-zealous safety and environmental regulations, not old-fashioned command-style limits on the price and production of energy.
Delong’s article doesn’t draw any distinction like that. If overzealous safety regulations were “neoliberal”, then presumably we’d already have them for social media, and Delong could scratch problem four off his list. The lens is incoherent. It’s more effective to address issues on their own terms than to shoehorn them into a grand theory.
<Delong’s article doesn’t draw any distinction like that.>
To be fair, history isn't exactly his strong suit (I personally have broader questions about his economic issues, but that's a different conversation).
<If overzealous safety regulations were “neoliberal”, then presumably we’d already have them for social media, and Delong could scratch problem four off his list.>
I wouldn't go so far as to say that overzealous safety regulation is "neoliberal" (though I personally think we've gone a little too far when it comes to safetyism and modern life, especially with respect to raising children). It would be more appropriate to say that there's a broad spectrum of regulatory approaches, from the comparatively minor (say, ethical guidelines and safety regs) to the rather draconian (price controls and quotas). Prior to the 1970s, policymakers were (for better or worse, better imo) more willing to engage in strikingly-active interventions in the broader economy, up to and including controlling prices and production levels (see the CAB with respect to airline regulation or the ICC regarding trucking regulation, or the use of price controls during the Nixon administration). Neoliberalism discouraged that kind of heavy-handed intervention in favor of a more "targeted" approach: regulations should facilitate market transactions rather than actively discouraging or imposing them by fiat. Once you get rid of the onerous price controls and production quotas, what's left are labor standards, environmental rules, and occupational safety regulations. As for social media, the traditional regulatory posture in that area has been relatively laissez-faire (which is different than neoliberalism): it took years for regulators to apply sales tax to e-commerce and other internet transactions, and even today, social media companies are regulated more lightly than traditional media institutions (I'm specifically thinking about Section 230 liability standards).
<It’s more effective to address issues on their own terms than to shoehorn them into a grand theory.>
Sometimes it is, and sometimes it's not. Personally, I think DeLong is trying to add some theoretical muscle to his historical theory of the "crisis of the twenty-first century." Personally I buy into the whole "polycrisis" narrative, although I have to agree with Noah that greater skepticism is warranted given how intent the media is at convincing you that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
Re social media, one of my teens is a big discord user. Similar to Whatsapp, it's more of a group chat situation rather than posting for the masses. I do think that kind of broadcasting is less popular with the youths, who see it as a risk of getting targeted by parents and school admins. In their Discord chats they can be politically incorrect with less worry about problems.
I'm a millennial and I use discord daily for the various gaming type groups I have with my friends. It's about community and groups. i don't think it's all about just just having a space to politically incorrect. Just my 2 cents.
In hindsight, I wish I had structured my first comment as two separate points.
1. Discord is a popular "chat style" messaging/social application amongst the younger crowd (and even some less-young people). Ideally it would have been included in the survey data.
2. I suspect Chat-style/Messaging apps may be more popular than older "broadcast" social platform because the downsides of having public randos patrol your comments has become more clear over the years.
Fair enough, and I agree with both your points. Regarding your 2nd point though, there is a lot of harm in what we've seen teens do their teachers, and fellow classmates on social media. So we may consider it harmful that public rando's patrol comments, but if kids are sharing fake ai nude pics of their classmates, bullying or spreading rumors about teachers that isn't exactly helpful either. Honestly, teaching kids that what they say in printed form on social media at a young age can be harmful is probably a good lesson to learn.
On the other hand, community and chat style apps like Discord are probably way better for connection and long form communication for people of all ages. I think its a healthier way to talk to each other.
As to the podcast, while I loved seeing Mona’s cats make regular appearances in the background, I think some things have been left out of the discussion, and, to be honest, I was somewhat disconcerted by what I know is necessary advertising yet which does not fit comfortably into the format.
We are by evolutionary standards a very parochial species, a group who has spent the vast majority of our time on earth in groups of 50 or less in which every member had a vital role to play in the survival of the group. Admittedly we were in a world in which great and mysterious powers sometimes utterly disrupted life, or at least made it more dangerous than we would have liked, and of course we found ways in which to propitiate or at least mitigate those powers (which remains the basis of most if not all major religious faiths). But at least in terms of our everyday experiences, our lives were fairly simple and very very local. We could see and deal with the vicissitudes of those lives, knowing that apart from those great powers, we were pretty much on our own in our groups, dealing wholly with whatever came up among us in ways easy to understand.
With relative rapidity, following the extraordinary population explosion created by the Agricultural Revolution, the even more rapid rise of urban civilization, and the invention of writing which triggered at first slow but increasing rapid technological advances, we now find find ourselves in a world so completely unlike that in which we became human as to be unrecognizable.
Now vast economic, social, technological powers, and even climatological powers and forces we cannot control, and which most of us do not completely, and sometime not even remotely understand rule our everyday experiences. And after August 6th, 1945, we understood that we could now destroy all life on earth if we could not control our ancient impulses to differentiate ourselves from each other in all sorts of ways, creating boundaries over which we periodically began killing each other in increasing large numbers.
And people wonder why so many of us want to take back control of our lives, even if we have no idea how to do it. That is, after all, the basis of populism.
And on top of all that, we as Americans are engaged in the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human government ever attempted. And it is by nature a messy business, requiring for its successful maintenance an understand of our design and the reasons for it which far too many of us do not have, nor often seem to really want beyond the simplest parts possible, even further exacerbated by an ossified binary political party system that often seems to lock us into one of only two, often simplistic responses to any problem we face.
Back in our little prehistoric groups, we also often faced uncertainty, but we knew the all the people with whom we shared that uncertainty and whatever disruptions we faced. We knew whom to trust, whom to rely on, to whom we could turn. That time is long gone. Now we turn to men like Donald Trump, who tells us what we can do to make it all alright. And it often doesn’t matter if he’s right about that so long we feel he’ll do it for us, until he doesn’t. Then we turn on him with fury, seeking the next savior. The fact that such men most often prove to be wrong is something we tend to forget, even we know the history of such ones, which most do not.
I’m nearly 80, and there are times when I feel I’ve lived my whole life in a storm largely created by sheerly human misunderstandings, misperceptions, distortions, lies, parochialism, unremitting recourse to violence, and a great deal of pure damn foolishness and stupidity. I look at the increasingly fewer remaining pieces of this extraordinary and lovely world we were given in which to try out our humanity, and I can’t help but wonder if we were not the worst thing that ever happened to it.
> And so there’s a natural tendency to read the news and think that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket
Ok "hell in a handbasket" has some minor alliteration. But is otherwise such a meaningless, not even evocative idiom. And yet, annoyingly, it persists.
"There was no economically viable alternative to fossil fuels until 2010, so curbing emissions would have meant degrowth, which would have meant a deep slowdown in the rate of poverty reduction in developing nations."
Nuclear was viable! We killed it by making it too hard to build and too expensive. It might not outcompete solar on price NOW. But if we hadn't wasted most of the 70's and 80's making it almost impossible to build, it might look like the Jetsons around here.
Fair point
It might look like the Jetsons in some places, but like New York or Moscow at the end of Fail Safe in others. See Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-Safe_(novel)
What about three mile island?
Are you trolling?
"The Three Mile Island accident was a partial nuclear meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
Humanity has been lucky that none of these were as catastrophic as they easily could have been. Build a lot more nuclear plants, and the odds that our luck will continue goes way down. That's basic Bayesian analysis.
It may well be that the benefits of nuclear power outweigh the risks, but the risks are of an entirely different nature than the risks of fossil fuels. Nuclear proponents completely ignore this, and it bugs me.
And the impact do the partial meltdown was? Zero.
*sigh* Apparently you do not understand probabilistic reasoning. I repeat:
"Humanity has been lucky that none of these were as catastrophic as they easily could have been. Build a lot more nuclear plants, and the odds that our luck will continue goes way down. That's basic Bayesian analysis."
Yeah, there's some major revisionist history going on there. I think there is no question that nuclear, with a sober cost-benefit analysis for safety, would be far cheaper than any other source of energy, but that would mean accepting a non-trivial amount of risk.
The problem is we accepted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths, due to air pollution from power generation without anyone in the environmental movement even raising the subject. Shockingly negligent.
Not all deaths are psychologically equivalent. If Indian Point had melted down and taken out New York City, rendering it permanently uninhabitable, we might not care about the precise body counts.
A meltdown is why they have a containment structure. There isn’t a mechanism for Indian Point to “take out” NYC.
“ As Cohen point out about Chernobyl, "Post-accident analyses indicate that if there had been a U.S.-style containment, none of the radioactivity would have escaped, and there would have been no injuries or deaths."
Chernobyl was a nuclear reactor built in a shed.
Fukushima breached containment:
"the explosion punched a second hole in the containment vessel; the first hole had been created earlier by melted nuclear material that passed through the bottom of the vessel"
https://www.britannica.com/event/Fukushima-accident
So that is what, two bad accidents in 50 years?
It seems quite likely at this point we are going to lose much more inhabitable area to rising sea levels + worse storm surges, than to nuclear accident fallout. So using coal instead of nuclear was a mistake.
A heck of a lot less than coal fired electricity!
Operative qualifier: "non-trivial risk". I've got some properties adjoining Fukushima daichi that I still can't seem to sell.
Nuclear was never going to be an alternative to fossil fuels. Cars were not going to be nuclear powered. And nuclear can only provide baseload. There's a reason even in France something like 30% of the power comes from fossil fuels.
And France doesn't look anything like the Jetsons, despite getting 70% of its electricity from nuclear.
We should have been taxing net emissions [i.e., excise tax on fossil fuels in proportion to carbon content] since the 70's when the externality was first recognized. No that would not have been de-growth if the tax revenues were used to reduce higher deadweight loss taxes like corporate income tax and deficits and research. It woud have been a stimulus for research into zero CO2 emitting processes. The opposite of de-growth!
Agree we could be up to nth Generation nuclear by now
Who's "we"? And if it's the US regulators that killed nuclear, why aren't there any other countries that lowered their regulatory barriers and reaped the benefits?
During the height of the cold war, nuclear technology was closely tied to military applications, and countries without strong ties to nuclear-capable nations like the U.S. or USSR often struggled to acquire the necessary technology and expertise. The U.S. needed to lead on technology development in this area and we slammed on the brakes after Three Mile Island.
Around the same time, the environmental movement took off and it applied pressure throughout the West, not just in the U.S. David Brower, the Sierra Club's executive director in the 60's, is on the record opposing nuclear energy *because* he feared the energy would be too cheap and abundant and that it would encourage population growth and industrial expansion, potentially harming the environment.
There as also the threat of nuclear war. Everyone who was alive in the 70's and 80's was constantly presented with the threat that Soviet radiation bombs would be raining down from the sky. Nuclear was simply associated with the very worst situations we could imagine and it made for really bad public perception.
It was no accident that the anti-nuclear-power movement became especially strong in Germany, given the old joke that "a tactical nuclear weapon is one which lands on Germany".
I've been waiting over 30 years for Asians to figure out that they are being viciously discriminated against. Back then I was told by a Univeristy of California Dean that Asian-American admissions were about a factor of 3 below what they would be if there were no anti-Asian discrimination. He justified this by claiming that the Californa legislature would cut UC funding if there weren't enough white kids. And this dude was Asian himself! I told him there was going to be an enormous backlash someday. I'm really surprised it's taken this long, but maybe it's finally here.
Yeah, 48 years ago (oof), when California law still stated that if you met the cutoffs for grades, test scores, and adequate math and language classes then UC *had* to let you in, everyone was shrieking about how Berkeley had turned into a Chinese girls' school. They complained about Lowell High School in the same way. Even back then I couldn't figure out why it was so bad that the smarter, harder-working kids were getting in. Seemed to me that the system was working.
Aren’t Asians over represented 3-5x over the general population at the UC? Hard to seriously consider this a sign of viscous discrimination.
Over represented with respect to population. Underrepresented with respect to grades and test scores which is what matters here.
Are grades and test scores the only criteria ever to consider?
I don’t know how we move away from this, but we need to find a new way to do admissions, because:
1) when I was younger I used to work for a college prep company, and our course on average raised students scores by 150 points out of 1600 - you might think ‘wow that kid with the 1400 is so much more deserving than the kid with the 1250’, but that kids parent basically bought the score.
2) childhood is being ruined by turning it into a resume building experience (and parents are draining their money and free time to facilitate it). We need to find a way to get everyone to chill out.
“ our course on average raised students scores by 150 points”
The data is pretty clear that this is also the boost you’d get from taking a study guide out from the library and doing the prep tests.
And the standard deviation on a person's score (that is, the spread in scores achieved by a particular person on multiple takes) is a comparable number.
I think chilling out might be independent of hardworking.
The high performing and low performing Asian Americans I know have equally insane immigrant parents. It's just some of them had good ideas of what to be insane about and some didn't. I don't know anyone with sane parents, either successful or unsuccessful.
(This is why every single Asian American written movie is about how much they hate their mothers.)
Actually I should amend that, Japanese parents aren't known for being tiger mothers, but I'm actually not sure what they are known for.
No, certainly not, life context is important. I would like to see race-based preferences ("affirmative action") replaced by class-based preferences. I would also like to see some sort of "bucket" system where doing very well in one "bucket" gets you in: test scores and rank in your high school are two particular buckets I would favor having.
No, other things like low parental SE status, attending underperforming high school, paid work, etc.
Things are much better now at UC than 30 years ago, but a significant fraction of the Asian students now are from China (they pay the bills). I don't know how the numbers of domestic students compare with the state population. The SCOTUS Harvard/UNC case shows that anti-Asian discrimination is still rampant elsewhere. Biden condemned SCOTUS for ruling against it, and no Democrat in office publicly disagreed with him.
Agree, but I also get worried because the Whites have never been great sports about losing a fair fight.
Fortunately it's easy not to discriminate.
If only it were that simple.
It's not easy if you can't open more schools because the state has banned building anything. The class of who gets educated will get very stereotypical.
Tangential from the Asian voter thread, I really do want the Democrats to come back around to common sense positions like
- Crime is bad
- Achievement is good
I *think* the party is ready to get there, but it's been a strange few years.
To go from "Achievement is White Supremacy" to "Achievement is Good" is a pretty big pivot. Like going from "No abortions Ever" to "Abortion Cool until the Kid is 2".
While I would welcome this pivot, I don't see it happening.
Eh, the first camp was always relatively small, but had unusual power for a bit. The 2024 losses may have knocked that team into the back seat of the party. We'll see!
Has not knocked them back, as the response to Seth Moulton shows. (That's a different but related issue.)
Also, more on point, in the 2020 POTUS election, Californians voted 55% to 45% to reject race-based affirmative action. The exact same electorate voted for Biden 2-to-1 over Trump.
Democrats in office took no notice. Biden condemned the SCOTUS decision banning anti-Asian racism in college admissions ("not a normal court", he said), and no Democrat in office contradicted him.
And deficits are bad!
Two things here,
On China, there is also the colonial aspect.
When colonialism is taught in places like China and India or Nigeria, there is this implicit idea that Europeans got together in 1500 and made a multi century plan to take over the world.
That isn't what happened.
The world colonial system of say 1895 was the result of a long series of small steps that were taken in haphazard way over several centuries.
Say you're a Dutch trader in 1640 who is buying spices in Java. You make a deal with the local king to give him silver in exchange for spices. Great. Then, ten years later, the king dies, there is a new king. The new king doesn't like the deal. But his brother says that he will take the deal if you help him depose the new king, so could you send some dutch musketeers?
The Dutch do so. And then they maybe decide to put a permanent military presence to make sure the trade keeps flowing. Then they decide that they should really be approving the new kings beforehand.
By 1780, the Dutch are controlling the island, (in Java it would actually take a brief British occupation to completely break local power, but this is a hypothetical), but the point is that the Dutch didn't set out to take over the Dutch East Indies, but, because they wanted to keep making money there, they took more and more control from the locals.
That incentive, "How do we keep making money and make more money in foreign countries?" is what drove the creation of the world colonial system before the 20th century.
Chinese companies in China have the same incentive. They will be tempted to take more and more control from the locals to protect their investments. They will want to keep the money from their investments flowing back to China and not have so much going locally. They will want special legal protections for Chinese businessmen while in Zambia so they won't be tried under Zambian law. There are hotels that pop up in Tanzania that say, "Chinese only" and don't allow locals to stay.
Extraterritoriality and "no dogs or Chinese allowed" are the sort of thing that are taught in China as being really galling aspects of the "Century of Humiliation". That Chinese people and businesses are doing the exact same thing in Africa is just flying under the radar.
Part of the reason it flies under the radar is that Chinese people know that they never had the 1500 European "let's take over the world meeting". Without that meeting, then nothing China does is colonialism, right. But for Sri Lankans, Zambians, etc. it sure feels like colonization.
This idea of colonialism as multistage evil plan vs. being an amoral aggregation of rational responses to the need to make money abroad is important and not discussed. It's like the people who want Hitler to be theatrically evil in all aspects of his life, rather than grapple with the idea that one of history's greatest monsters also liked dogs and was good with kids.
So that was one.
For two, you say that the US spends a lot on our social safety net.
That isn't the right metric at all.
Again, with healthcare, any one of 30 other national systems cost HALF as much and actually provide universal coverage. So spending is the wrong metric to look at. It is disappointing that your rebuttal to Delong in this piece is just "lol, we actually spend a lot of money" without talking about what people get in their social safety net from that spending.
Colonial domination was a crime. Does it matter whether it was a crime carefully planned in advance or simply a crime of opportunity and improvisation?
Yes, it does matter and here's why.
The Chinese government and Chinese people very much are taught colonialism as being a carefully planned crime in advance.
Because of that, they don't see the need to implement safeguards against their own companies and people committing crimes of "opportunity and improvisation."
Those crimes of "opportunity and improvisation" are probably hurting China's image abroad.
(I actually really like the phrasing you used. I was not saying historical colonialism wasn't a crime. I am saying that the role of improvisation and opportunity is massively discounted in favor of it all being an evil master plan. That said, something like the Berlin conference was actaully an evil master plan, but that came 100 years after Europe had already taken over much of the world)
Moreover, isn't there a maxim that (historically) all cultures have exploited their technological advantages over others to the extent they could. The industrial revolution that began in Britain in the 18th century opened up advantages so wide on a global scale, it's little wonder less developed cultures were open to colonization. But across millennia they, and the rest of Europe, were hardly unique in spreading their technology to and power over others.
If you look at consumption vs healthcare spending, America spends more in health care because Americans are on average richer, just like how Manhattanites spend more than people in Austin who spend more than people in Worchester, MA. It's Balmoul cost disease, services are always more expensive in richer areas from haircuts, daycare, rent and healthcare. Americans have more disposable income than other countries as a result of 1) Americans having on average higher salaries and 2) Americans have lower taxes than Europe. (A Frenchman at $80K has roughly the same effective tax rate as an American making $400K - over 40% of their income is taxed).
If you look at a graph of disposable income on the x axis and healthcare spending on the y axis, then American spending actually aligns with the line of best fit.
BUT, if you look at a graph of gdp per capita on the x axis and healthcare spending on the y axis, then American spending is a major outlier.
The fact is both charts are true, but people think of healthcare with the latter and ignore the former. However, in reality if you want to match healthcare spending with people's actual incomes, then comparing healthcare spending to post tax disposable income makes more sense.
https://www.econlib.org/is-the-us-an-outlier-on-health-care-spending/
Please don’t link Twitter threads. It’s annoying to click on a link and see “If you want to know what's going on, start here. 🧵👇” and then nothing more after it. I don’t know why Twitter has decided over the past year or two that they don’t want readers, but I believe that it’s now more reliable to link some sort of third party unroll or whatever of a thread, since non-users can’t read threads.
They're trying to block search engines and AI scrapers.
1. I feel like fundamentally a town square is a terrible idea for a social network. I don’t really have big feels about Twitter in that it hasn’t been the thing I wanted it to be for more than 10 years. In like 2011 I found some cool shit for like Star Trek content but the way politics weasels into my feed all the time is really dull.
The fact that I don’t like blue sky is probably telling. I love new social networks, they’re exciting. Bluesky just seems like Twitter with different moderation ideas. Threads doesn’t feel this way if I want to post about my not-politics life Bluesky seems moribund.
2. I always am surprised the way people talk shit about non-English speaking students in classrooms. Because I have my license in Esl along with my k-6 and have a reputation for being good with these learners I’ve got a bunch of them over the years and they’re just not the terror of elementary school people think they are. Most homegrown difficult factors seem 1,000 times worse than kid just got here from Venezuela.
Local governments are an economic basket case. The fundamental structure of the suburban growth Ponzi scheme basically makes their finances unworkable. Which makes it kinda hard to separate out the impacts of illegal immigration from the shitty finances and the NIMBY-depressed growth rate.
Are you sure the drones are actually real, noah? My go-to site for things like this is Metabunk and their investigative thread is full of cases of proven misidentification of aircraft but nobody seems able to find any clear-cut cases of an actual drone. They argue, I think correctly, that this is a mass hysteria and in fact there are no drones and never were, obviously excluding the ones that have been sent up trying to find the "real" drones.
Every expert I've read seems to agree that there really were a bunch of drones, but that panic has caused a lot of people to misidentify planes as drones and to send up their own drones.
What kind of experts are we talking about here? Military radar operators? Or media "experts"? Because IMHO the real experts in such things are the guys at Metabunk. They have years of experience of dissecting UFO reports and did a better job of working out what they were than people who actually worked for the military (Elizondo et al)
It's really bothersome how accepting today's post is of the drones. I live in "drone central," a few minutes from Bedminster, and no report of drones is credible. The Picatinny Arsenel acknowledgement of drones counted any police or security guard on staff agreeing with a report as a drone sighting. As far as I know, no expert (meaning an air traffic controller or a radar operator or even an experienced pilot) has verified a drone. I go out at night and see the same things people call drones, and they're very evidently planes on FlightRadar24. Noah can motte-and-bailey this and say he just said it's reasonable that people are panicking around drones, but it's very clear in the text that he's accepting this instance of drones at face value.
And one more thing - if the drones fly low, it would be easy to take pictures that verify them as drones. If they fly high, it would be a major emergency unless they were using ADS-B transponders because they'd be missing in all the live data! If they are using transponders, we'd see them in our apps!
They use Bluetooth transponders. Down load the app to your phone.
I mean if they were using ADS-B transponders, they'd be in apps like FlightRadar24 and adsbexchange.
ADS-B could be problematic as they fly low and low is where I lose sight of my wife's signals when I follow her adventures on FlightRadar.
But what I'm saying is if they're flying that low, it's easy to photograph them and hear that they're drones. I was talking about ADS-B in the scenario where the hypothetical drones are flying high.
I mean, I just watched a segment on CNN. They were showing tons of video footage of the drones. They were quite obviously drones, and not aircraft, etc. This isn't 1931, it's not like people cannot recognize aircraft.
You may argue that people are overreacting to a "normal" amount of drones, but they are very obviously real.
People cannot recognize aircraft. Go look at the Twitter threads, or the Metabunk thread. Every single reported incident is found to be a plane. Every one.
Eh, it's the Martians. They've been hiding out in New Jersey since 1938.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0K4ApWl4g
I have to agree that Assad’s fall scores a point for Obama’s Syria policy. However, it’s too early to declare it a win.
We accomplished regime change in Afghanistan largely by proxy through local warlords. That left the warlords in de facto control afterwards, with the US-supported president merely the “Mayor of Kabul”. The flaws in that outcome were very much in the minds of the Bush administration when they chose to send American boots to Iraq, and the instant return of the Taliban after our withdrawal confirms the overall failure of that strategy.
The Iraq strategy had many obvious failings as well, but overall deaths were similar to those in Syria, and Iraq has, at least, had a functioning, non-terrorist, democratic government since then. No, it’s not a shining example, but it seems no democracy is this days.
In Syria, we achieved a regime change without any American blood. It required our stalwart support of very unpopular actions by Israel and expensive aid to Ukraine to weaken Iran and Russia sufficiently for this to happen. We need to see how the post-Assad political situation in the region develops before declaring this to have been an exemplary strategy.
"humanity wasn’t meant to be thrown into just one or two big rooms together"
Old Twitter was NEVER open to everyone. Anyone who belived in textbook mammalian biology, and said so, was kicked off.
As a person who is off Twitter because of the casual cruelty of gamergate I am very skeptical that in 2007 or even 2012 they were heavy handedly censoring any kind of content when just a little while later getting people thrown off for making my wife’s mentions full of death and rape threats just a minute later. So bad that Disney walked away from an acquisition over it.
I don’t believe any mammal biologists were ever kicked off Twitter. If you’re trying to make some sort of claim about sex or whatever, people didn’t get banned for denying gender in favor of sex, they got banned for getting in wars.
"people didn’t get banned for denying gender in favor of sex"
They absolutely did.
That is indeed an interesting string of blog posts by Brad Delong about the alleged failures of "neoliberalism," and a fairly persuasive set of brief responses from you, but what I find baffling is the absence of a Hexapodia episode (or more appropriately a string of them) in which the two of you hash all this out. Or more broadly, the lack of any Hexapodia episodes in my feed since mid-summer. What gives?
1. "The internet is better off fragmented; humanity wasn’t meant to be thrown into just one or two big rooms together."
Sounds a little like federalism, the very thing the Left has spent 100 years trying to kill off.
2. I showed my kids Slaughterbots when it was released. They were 11-13 years old. I believe that short is incredibly important for everyone to watch. The only thing in that film that can't be done yet is the micro-sized nature. Everything else is doable today.
3. I would love to see a breakout between sexes of the Asian shift. Were "Tiger-Moms" the laggards like Women everywhere else? Or were they the leaders? Did they shift further than their husbands? I suspect yes -- moms usually vote on personal safety and education, and those issues drove the shift.
5. Brad DeLong is halfway there in that he sees the Right's flaw: maximal financial autonomy. But he misses the same flaw on the Left: maximal personal autonomy. This is the uniparty consensus of 1970-2008 -- the Left gets their sexual revolution and civil rights and the Right gets its free trade and deregulation. They're 2 sides of the same coin, both caused by neo-liberalism (or just plain Millian liberalism) taken to its logical conclusion.
6. You mean those of us who wanted to curtail public services for illegals 30 years ago in CA (prop 187) were right? We were perhaps motivated by reason and not racism? Good, God, man... forget Deneen, you're starting to sound like Pat Buchanan. At this rate, The American Conservative may offer you column soon. :-)
Seriously, since the election, your analysis has been far more reasoned and less hyperbolic (now that you realize Trump isn't Hitler and the people who told you that were playing you.) It's a welcome change back to the Noah I first subscribed to.
The primary reasons that Trump isn't Hitler is that he's not competent enough to be Hitler, which, unfortunately, hasn't stopped him from trying to cosplay as Hitler. Trump's rhetoric is remarkably similar to that of Hitler in 1932; just replace "Germany" with "America" and "Jew" with "immigrant". And then there was that Nazi rally Trump held at Madison Square Garden...
"immigrant" should be "illegal immigrant", which is a completely different category, and especially different from "Jew". The "illegal immigrant" category is based on the ACTIONS of the individuals in that category (which are, by definition, against the law), while "Jew" is based on immutable characteristics at birth (as the category was defined by the Nazis). The comparison is facile.
The "Right" was gypped. There was never free trade and even less deregulation, no fiscal discipline, no Pigou taxation.
Maybe not in a pure libertarian sense, but the WTO is certainly a much freer arrangement than that which prevailed in the Bretton Woods era. I agree that the Right has been gypped many times over the years though. One that poisoned the well the most was the 1985-86 illegal immigrant legalization. The legacy of that betrayal still echoes 40 years later in the form of lack of trust between the parties on the issue of immigration.
How should each or either trade or immigration have been done that woud NOT have been what you see as a betrayal? My view is that neither was.
Take first post WWII trade liberalization, both the domestic policy changes, technological changes like the fall in the cost of transporting goods across oceans and symbols across the globe, and foreign policy changes like China coming to participate in the world economy had great benefits in the aggregate for every nation but fewer than proponents of the policies expected for two reasons.
1. The benefits in the US and many places were used mainly to increase consumption rather than investment.
2. The next best use of some resources, specifically the skills of some people were much worse that their former uses.
This latter was exacerbated by the former. The effects of reductions in import restrictions (or technological changed that reduce the relative price of imported goods) are normally, properly analyzed under the assumption that the exchange rate adjusts to maintain the trade balance. Resources flow from producing import competing goods to producing exported goods. [In trade theory this has a name, the Lerner Theorem that a tax on imports is a tax on exports.] There is no presumption that resources will flow from sectors producing tradeable goods to non-tradable goods.
But that’s not what happened. Saving and investment fell in relation to income. The US went from being a capital exporting country to a capital importing one in part, especially from the Reagan presidency onwards, fiscal deficits increased. This was especially hard on manufacturing because the US developed two new exporting sectors, financial services and “intellectual property.” And on top of that, US manufacturing lost its technological edge in sectors like steel and automobiles. Detroit and Baltimore/Pittsburg/Gary are emblematic of these changes. And these cascading changed landed squarely on mid-skill firm and product specific manufacturing labor. My guess is that comparatively little of what happened to manufacturing labor had anything to do with reduction in import restrictions. [I do fault US trade negotiators over the decades for focusing more on getting foreigners to pay for intellectual property and reducing restrictions agricultural exports than on us _manufacturing_ exports.]
The economic and political dynamics of immigration are quite different and I notice you are talking about specifically about the failure to halt illegal immigration after the 1986 amnesty. Here I think it is difficult to find anyone who has been materially harmed by the sweep of illegal immigration and a lot of benefit. Every labor market transaction with an immigrant is mutually beneficial. The skills of immigrants are more complements than substitutes for non-immigrant labor. But on the other hand, failure to prevent it is not a “policy” that anyone in particular supported. It was a political sin of omission and it got in the way of increasing immigration of high skilled and educated people. That’s where the larger benefits lie.
You’re going too easy on Delong. First, the suggestion that energy was “left to the market” is ridiculous. Energy in 20th century America was heavily regulated and heavily subsidized. Fossil fuel extraction became increasingly efficient on the back of government rnd; nuclear was regulated out of existence. By contrast, tech actually was less regulated, and thank god for that. If it weren’t, we’d probably be having this conversation on green screen terminals. Delong’s second and third points are reasonable, but he gets 1 and 4 so wrong that I’m incredulous there is a useful overarching theory here.
<You’re going too easy on Delong. First, the suggestion that energy was “left to the market” is ridiculous. Energy in 20th century America was heavily regulated and heavily subsidized. Fossil fuel extraction became increasingly efficient on the back of government rnd; nuclear was regulated out of existence.>
I think DeLong's point is that neoliberalism changed the quality of energy regulations rather than the quantity. It's worth remembering that prior to the energy crisis of the 1970s, the energy industry was subject to strict production limits and price quotas that you'd expect in an Eastern Bloc command economy. The inflation-adjusted price of a barrel of oil was essentially frozen, contributing to the surge in productivity growth that characterized the postwar boom. After the 1970s and the emergence of neoliberalism, the focus of regulations changed: price controls and quotas were dismantled while regulators shifted focus towards safety/environmental regulations. Nuclear power was made inefficient by overly-zealous safety and environmental regulations, not old-fashioned command-style limits on the price and production of energy.
Delong’s article doesn’t draw any distinction like that. If overzealous safety regulations were “neoliberal”, then presumably we’d already have them for social media, and Delong could scratch problem four off his list. The lens is incoherent. It’s more effective to address issues on their own terms than to shoehorn them into a grand theory.
<Delong’s article doesn’t draw any distinction like that.>
To be fair, history isn't exactly his strong suit (I personally have broader questions about his economic issues, but that's a different conversation).
<If overzealous safety regulations were “neoliberal”, then presumably we’d already have them for social media, and Delong could scratch problem four off his list.>
I wouldn't go so far as to say that overzealous safety regulation is "neoliberal" (though I personally think we've gone a little too far when it comes to safetyism and modern life, especially with respect to raising children). It would be more appropriate to say that there's a broad spectrum of regulatory approaches, from the comparatively minor (say, ethical guidelines and safety regs) to the rather draconian (price controls and quotas). Prior to the 1970s, policymakers were (for better or worse, better imo) more willing to engage in strikingly-active interventions in the broader economy, up to and including controlling prices and production levels (see the CAB with respect to airline regulation or the ICC regarding trucking regulation, or the use of price controls during the Nixon administration). Neoliberalism discouraged that kind of heavy-handed intervention in favor of a more "targeted" approach: regulations should facilitate market transactions rather than actively discouraging or imposing them by fiat. Once you get rid of the onerous price controls and production quotas, what's left are labor standards, environmental rules, and occupational safety regulations. As for social media, the traditional regulatory posture in that area has been relatively laissez-faire (which is different than neoliberalism): it took years for regulators to apply sales tax to e-commerce and other internet transactions, and even today, social media companies are regulated more lightly than traditional media institutions (I'm specifically thinking about Section 230 liability standards).
<It’s more effective to address issues on their own terms than to shoehorn them into a grand theory.>
Sometimes it is, and sometimes it's not. Personally, I think DeLong is trying to add some theoretical muscle to his historical theory of the "crisis of the twenty-first century." Personally I buy into the whole "polycrisis" narrative, although I have to agree with Noah that greater skepticism is warranted given how intent the media is at convincing you that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
Re social media, one of my teens is a big discord user. Similar to Whatsapp, it's more of a group chat situation rather than posting for the masses. I do think that kind of broadcasting is less popular with the youths, who see it as a risk of getting targeted by parents and school admins. In their Discord chats they can be politically incorrect with less worry about problems.
I'm a millennial and I use discord daily for the various gaming type groups I have with my friends. It's about community and groups. i don't think it's all about just just having a space to politically incorrect. Just my 2 cents.
In hindsight, I wish I had structured my first comment as two separate points.
1. Discord is a popular "chat style" messaging/social application amongst the younger crowd (and even some less-young people). Ideally it would have been included in the survey data.
2. I suspect Chat-style/Messaging apps may be more popular than older "broadcast" social platform because the downsides of having public randos patrol your comments has become more clear over the years.
Fair enough, and I agree with both your points. Regarding your 2nd point though, there is a lot of harm in what we've seen teens do their teachers, and fellow classmates on social media. So we may consider it harmful that public rando's patrol comments, but if kids are sharing fake ai nude pics of their classmates, bullying or spreading rumors about teachers that isn't exactly helpful either. Honestly, teaching kids that what they say in printed form on social media at a young age can be harmful is probably a good lesson to learn.
On the other hand, community and chat style apps like Discord are probably way better for connection and long form communication for people of all ages. I think its a healthier way to talk to each other.
As to the podcast, while I loved seeing Mona’s cats make regular appearances in the background, I think some things have been left out of the discussion, and, to be honest, I was somewhat disconcerted by what I know is necessary advertising yet which does not fit comfortably into the format.
We are by evolutionary standards a very parochial species, a group who has spent the vast majority of our time on earth in groups of 50 or less in which every member had a vital role to play in the survival of the group. Admittedly we were in a world in which great and mysterious powers sometimes utterly disrupted life, or at least made it more dangerous than we would have liked, and of course we found ways in which to propitiate or at least mitigate those powers (which remains the basis of most if not all major religious faiths). But at least in terms of our everyday experiences, our lives were fairly simple and very very local. We could see and deal with the vicissitudes of those lives, knowing that apart from those great powers, we were pretty much on our own in our groups, dealing wholly with whatever came up among us in ways easy to understand.
With relative rapidity, following the extraordinary population explosion created by the Agricultural Revolution, the even more rapid rise of urban civilization, and the invention of writing which triggered at first slow but increasing rapid technological advances, we now find find ourselves in a world so completely unlike that in which we became human as to be unrecognizable.
Now vast economic, social, technological powers, and even climatological powers and forces we cannot control, and which most of us do not completely, and sometime not even remotely understand rule our everyday experiences. And after August 6th, 1945, we understood that we could now destroy all life on earth if we could not control our ancient impulses to differentiate ourselves from each other in all sorts of ways, creating boundaries over which we periodically began killing each other in increasing large numbers.
And people wonder why so many of us want to take back control of our lives, even if we have no idea how to do it. That is, after all, the basis of populism.
And on top of all that, we as Americans are engaged in the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human government ever attempted. And it is by nature a messy business, requiring for its successful maintenance an understand of our design and the reasons for it which far too many of us do not have, nor often seem to really want beyond the simplest parts possible, even further exacerbated by an ossified binary political party system that often seems to lock us into one of only two, often simplistic responses to any problem we face.
Back in our little prehistoric groups, we also often faced uncertainty, but we knew the all the people with whom we shared that uncertainty and whatever disruptions we faced. We knew whom to trust, whom to rely on, to whom we could turn. That time is long gone. Now we turn to men like Donald Trump, who tells us what we can do to make it all alright. And it often doesn’t matter if he’s right about that so long we feel he’ll do it for us, until he doesn’t. Then we turn on him with fury, seeking the next savior. The fact that such men most often prove to be wrong is something we tend to forget, even we know the history of such ones, which most do not.
I’m nearly 80, and there are times when I feel I’ve lived my whole life in a storm largely created by sheerly human misunderstandings, misperceptions, distortions, lies, parochialism, unremitting recourse to violence, and a great deal of pure damn foolishness and stupidity. I look at the increasingly fewer remaining pieces of this extraordinary and lovely world we were given in which to try out our humanity, and I can’t help but wonder if we were not the worst thing that ever happened to it.
> And so there’s a natural tendency to read the news and think that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket
Ok "hell in a handbasket" has some minor alliteration. But is otherwise such a meaningless, not even evocative idiom. And yet, annoyingly, it persists.