Possible objection is that BAD information is cheap and GOOD information is expensive. It is easy for people to have access to information that supports their already-existing vibes but difficult for people to get information about issues with a lot of complex moving parts. Sources of bad information may also work overtime to discredit the good information sources.
There's also the problem that BAD information is usually way more engaging than GOOD information. Someone shouting, “If you don't fight like hell, you won't have a country anymore,” is far more engaging than a person saying, "In the United States things are going along fairly normally—some folks are struggling, but generally speaking we are moving with some hiccups in a positive direction.”
It's been true since the Paleolithic era— we are very good at jumping at tigers that turn out to not be there.
I quit on the MSM years ago. Not so much tired of any threats, more so tired of all the partisan overwrought bullshit. And this was before Trump. The NYT (for example, but not by limitation) became unreadabe, and NPR was just the audio version. Besides, you already know every story, because they are all the same. So, you are correct in that my wife and I do not consume news, so to speak, but wrong the reason, at least in our case.
We live in an age of information abundance. There are literally hundreds of credible news services that can replace the MSM (without sending you into total partisan echo chambers.) I’m not so much criticizing you as pointing out that your choosing two random news services as “the MSM” and then abandoning them feels like a good illustration of Noah’s point: people don’t respond to abundance by hand-curating a healthy menu of alternatives, they just quit in frustration.
So am I. What I like about it is that it allows both the writer and me to filter our interests, and this helps keep the conversations manageable. Since Noah primarily discusses economics, this helps to moderate the conversation because it does require some familiarity with the piece and the subject matter to have an opinion.
Something else I like: All the replies are text. You have to write out your thoughts and read other people's. One of the primary reasons why I quit Twitter (years before Elmo's $44 billion Nazi Bar remodel) is that a lot of what came through my feed, and the replies, weren't even text. Everything was memes, memes, memes. Not only that, but it was always the same two to three dozen memes (e.g., Black man doing the thinking gesture by pointing to his temple; spit take woman; little girl with the Yikes! look on her face). I remembered Orwell writing about the Newspeak lexicon in "1984" and how the party created an impoverished vocabulary so people couldn't think their way to rebellion. And Twitter was the lexicon come to life.
But especially when dealing with Trump the partisan overwrought bullshit expresses a sense of threat and the readers want something to confirm the deep sense of threat that they feel. My favorite example was the Times only being interested in Kavanaugh as a threat to Roe in any of their news coverage before Christine Blasey Ford came forward.
Kavanaugh is a threat to the 4th Amendment. That's about it. Blasey Ford is fine example of overwrought bullshit. "Some guy got handsy with me at a high school party 35 years ago. Rheeeeeeeeeeeee"
But people had to go to Scotusblog to know that Kavanaugh was a threat to the 4th Amendment. That's the point. (I already knew that Kavanaugh had neutered Boumediene on the appeals court)
Maybe, but I doubt it. I did risk infecting my computer a few years back and read comments on a NYT article regarding forcing 5 year old kids to wear double masks at school if they were not vaccinated. I'd say 95% of the comments must have been 60 year old grandmas clutching their NPR tote bags over the imminent deaths of their grandchildren because some murderous parent would not get their kid vaxxed. I had to tap out after that.
You might say that there's a Gresham's Law of Information. Bad information drives out good information. Especially in the "It's true because I want it to be true" zeitgeist.
I think it's more that good information now has the same kind of cost structure as, say, a pharmaceutical: It's very expensive to get a good piece of information, but once you know it's good, it's incredibly cheap to reproduce, and absent some kind of government granted monopoly, you'll never be able to recoup your cost.
See: news gathering organizations being undercut by sites that provide summaries based on their reporting, and steal whatever ad dollars the original reporters might've gotten from direct views.
This is an excellent point. OTOH, privately funded news source needs to be financed by imperfect paywalls, or a wealthy benefactor, or perish. Government subsidized (via directly or through monopoly grant) new source is beholden to the government.
I think it's perfectly plausible to spend a week in a CBD of a city which contains millions of people and come away with a sense of it being extremely clean and its streets safe at night, but this is an experience I have had all over the world.
The sense I always got about Chinese cities is that there is a level of cleanliness evident when the effort is taken in very specific places, but that there is also a level of disrepair and dinginess that can usually be found an extremely short distance away if you walk the right direction. It built for me the sense of three Chinas; the first China is Future China, the pre-depreciation China that you mention. It feels like next year. Big city CBDs felt this way, Hong Kong felt this way. The second China is Yesterday China, which is post-depreciation China that you can experience outside the inner ring roads. It feels like a shabby industrial city that someone is maybe trying to do urban renewal on, or maybe someone tried and it really didn't take off. Kunming and Fuzhou felt like this to me outside of a very restricted area. The third China is 1960 China, where you begin to really have the sense that you are in a nation with 1/3 the income of a Western one. This is what you experience if you travel between cities of any type and stop for any reason. I feel like travelers are likely to only glimpse the second China and not even have any contact at all with the third, especially if they are traveling there for conferences or the information economy. If you travel there for industry you will have a lot of contact with the other Chinas.
The feeling I got the first time I went to big Chinese cities was "this city is so Chinese", and then by the time I came back through after experiencing the central mainland, especially the industrial third tier cities, was "an extensive veneer of modernity has been put on top of this place."
I don't see your point. The same can be said about the USA. You have shitty cities, with even shittier 3rd world ghettos rife with gang on gang violence if you just venture a little bit outside of the city.
The point is not that we're better; as you correctly state, his description also applies here. The point is that the claim he's responding to is that this does not describe China at all - that they don't have any failings in their society (at least on the physical level) anywhere that can be seen. And this is just plainly false; granted it's been 12 years since I was there, but I saw open sewers in Guanzhou, and the fancy new "western" hotel we stayed out had mildew already in the hallway carpets, the shower doors looked like they were hung by a guy eyeballing it with a plumb-bob, and the toilets could not handle my mighty American waste output. But it was shiney and there was lots of neon everywhere, which apparently is all you need to fool Americans into believing that they're in the near future.
The same can't really be said for the US though, as US city centers are not particularly clean, well maintained, safe, etc. both by US standards and relative to the rest of the city.
A tourist walk around SF might leave you in the dark about how truly terrible it gets in rural Appalachia or Central Valley, but it's still a pretty terrible impression. It's very clearly dirty and unsafe, and if you take too many steps in the wrong direction, it's obvious that society there is deeply broken.
Most of the US isn't significantly worse and is typically in many ways better. The suburbs of SF are generally at least somewhat safe and clean if you don't go walking between places you should drive between. And while Silicon Valley is on the nice end of suburban hell, the suburban hell I've experienced in Midwest and Southwest flyover country isn't that much worse assuming you don't go walking between places you should drive between.
Never been to rural West Virginia, so idk. I have a good friend in Elaine, AR and used to work in Osceola, AR, and those are very depressing places. Cheap housing though!
At least in WV I imagine it’s pretty topography, but Eastern AR there ain’t nothing but poverty and decay.
Thought-provoking article, but I have one quibble. When it comes to drafting serious legislation and negotiating the final provisions, the work is almost always done by or carefully overseen by the more senior Congressional staff. These are men and women who have been at it for years and often have served in executive branch positions or with subject area companies or non-profits. In my 40 years in and around the federal government, I saw lots of bonus babies on both sides of the aisle, but I almost never saw one entrusted with heavy lifting on legislation. In the few instances where they were, it was always in the early days of a change in the party in control. When this happens, especially if the margin of victory is large, there often are quite a few new members who do not yet know the ropes and thus lack serious people on their staff. These members learn quickly or they inevitably crash and burn. Either way, adults are usually back in charge by Labor Day.
How has this process changed over those 40 years? From my very limited and more recent exposure, lobbyists seem to write a lot of legislation. Senior staffers (at the committee and chamber level moreso than individual congressional staff) insert the lobbyist output into the bill (with some negotiation, prioritization, horse trading and shaking down, of course). And you are right, lots of the staffers have worked for these same special interests and with the lawyers writing the legislation (as have the regulatory appointees in the agencies).
No surprise that such a process is quite disconnected from the public interest.
First, I apologize if this is redundant. I had almost finished my reply when it disappeared into the ether. To your question -- I can't claim to know if it has always been this way because I only know what went on in the program areas and departments I was in when I was there. However, that included a large percentage of the civilian agencies and, from time to time, I did get a glimpse into the national security side. It is my impression that things are cleaner now than when I arrived in Washington in the 60s. probably because information is more readily available and the press is more sophisticated and less eager to belong to the old boy network. There were times over the years when lobbyists were quiet and other times when they came in waves. The drivers were the significance of the legislation and once again, whether the party in power in the legislature or the executive branch had changed. New party control always meant a wave of new lobbyists -- apparently, they thought they could win issues they had consistently lost under the old regime. Sometimes, they were right; more often, they were wrong. Change also meant naive legislators and appointees and a few awful crooks. Neither survived very long in most cases. Some of the worst cases I saw involved new executive branch appointees from both parties who refused to accept that they were no longer in the private sector and had to comply with federal rules. So, they would bull ahead with actions that violated the law on the grounds that "we won the election" and then go down in flames as their party threw them under the bus. Lobbyists do seem more visible right now, but that may be because there hasn't been a scandal lately. The number of lobbyists, or perhaps only their visibility, drops off noticeably after major scandals like the 1990 Savings and Loan mess or the Jack Abramoff bribery scandal in 2005. Unfortunately, people without Washington experience often do not understand that the federal government has a truly awesome investigative and enforcement capability. Also, after a period of time without scandal, lobbyists, legislators, and even career staff become cavalier about the law and forget that no secret is safe in Washington. It seems that each generation has to learn this for themselves. I must say, however, that having been in private business both as an employee and as an owner, advised state and federal governments, and been a career employee at both the state and federal levels, the federal government is the most honest working environment I know.
How long are people gonna keep doing that? Because most likely there is no political or economic reward for good legislative work. Liberal democracy runs on patriotic beauracrats' career success.
Tangential tidbit: broccoli and cauliflower are genetically the same plant, they are just a different color, as many humans are. Based on color alone, broccoli is probably more nutritious because many of the most valuable phytochemicals show up as colors (like carotene).
If liberal democracy fails, it will fail from within. People aren't voting for Trump, Modi, Orban etc because they are impressed by Chinese trains, they are doing so because they want to stick it to their fellow citizens.
Also because the cost of getting it wrong has gone down a lot. Sticking it to your fellow citizens is a more attractive strategy if there is not much at stake. With overall returns going down across the globe, sticking it to your fellow citizen becomes more tempting, as even a good government would not be expected to achieve much. But try raising the stakes, even if the incentive is negative (surviving a war) rather than positive (doing good investments for the future). I bet Ukrainians would not vote a populist into office now!
Nothing wrong with populism. Populism is a symptom of your elites having failed. I see Biden enacting trade barriers right now and being tough on China. Initiatives that were started by Donald Trump. I remember the absolute mayhem the world was in when Trump started putting tarrifs in place back in 2017. Which, right now, many 'elites' agree where the right moves to take.
I like how Trump took an action because he wanted to build more coal plants in Ohio and now that Biden is building more semiconductor fabs in the southern US, people like you are suggesting that it's somehow exactly the same thing and that Trump was right all along. The guy barely even knows what a tariff is.
Millions of people are literally risking death just to get to the USA. Also, despite having super aggressive limits on legal immigration, USA still has a net migration ratio comparable to EU countries. But I guess you "see" some Europeans who decide to raise their children in their home country, so that trumps data.
If you go to modern Budapest, and this is going on the observations of my family members and acquaintances who've been there recently or a couple who are residents, they've told me that it's not far off from San Fransicko.
Rapidly increasing real estate prices have led to an estimated permanent and visible homeless population of around 30,000. Thefts and fights are rampant on Budapest's trains and buses. Shoplifting is becoming a big problem. Graffiti and littering are becoming prevalent. Jews, Muslims and Roma are complaining about hate incidents. Deaths-of-despair type casualties are increasing, like opioid and fentanyl overdoses in restrooms and parks.
Hungary is proud of its past and takes good care of its historic treasures, but the day-to-day life is very hard. Employment has long been hard to come by, plus wages are lower and taxes are as high or higher than the rest of the EU so purchasing power is lower. Their best and brightest young adults continue to leave Hungary, and they tend to assimilate in their new residencies. There's a large middle age and elderly population that need health care, exacerbated by high alcoholism, cigarette smoking and diabetes.
Hungary is nice to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. And Hungarians become unwelcoming if you do.
Hungary has a pretty crummy past. It can be counted on for lots of reaction and anti-democratic actions. Please see the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the interwar period and today.
San Francisco is one of the nicest cities in the U.S., heck even the world, as is Budapest for very much the same reasons. Heck, the Buda side has urbanism on hills if that's your thing. :) (Budapest is a portmanteau of Buda and Pest, which were separate cities on either side of the Danube until consolidating in 1873.)
A lot of the problems in San Francisco, Budapest and really many cities in the developed world is the spread of drugs, particularly heroin, opioids, meth and now fentanyl. They are all highly potent, highly addictive, and users become addled to the point of psychosis or irreversible cognitive and neurological damage. This is also coupled with the rise in homelessness, owing to real estate values appreciating faster than wages or population growth. The real estate crisis is global.
You can pretty much say [any OECD city] is way safer and nicer than any big city in the USA. America's problems are self-inflicted and cultural. We don't even stack up well to Canada, our culturally similar neighbors. Canada has guns and diversity, and Canadians don't shoot each other in the street.
(That is amazing that people think the stock market is down. According to Krugman Trump was even trying to explain the good stock market numbers in terms of the market anticipating the good times when he will be president)
People are nuts! They don’t believe they can buy the same house or same new car brand for the same payment as three years ago. Some of these numbskulls thinks payments have more than doubled, meaning they can’t afford a house or a car. Crazy! At least they feel rich when they go out to eat or buy groceries, and they know they’re getting great value for college tuition.
I didn't get that that was sarcasm when I liked it. Not being able to afford cars, houses or food might make people think that the economy is bad and they might know that if inflation is high the Fed may not make the stock market even better by cutting rates but the state of the stock market may be the piece of economic news that gets the widest distribution in at least traditional broadcast news outlets. If I search for the price of an individual stock the search engine will give me that result without sending me to another site.
Very true. You’d think everyone would know stocks are back over record highs, but 40 percent of Americans don’t own stocks. Some of those people might laugh at our lack of knowledge about guns, plumbing, corn, fentanyl, whatever.
Let’s be honest - it is an election year and people are out there saying stuff to help their candidate. We can probably ignore (certainly for this year) whatever Krugman says about Americans. I’m guessing he doesn’t get out to the hinterlands much and we can also guess what he is likely to say on almost any subject this year.
I was trying to be funny rather than being rude to you personally. Was trying to find a funny way to mock Krugman for mocking people complaining about the economy. Sure, lots of people believe crazy things, but that doesn’t explain economic dissatisfaction.
There’s an interesting zero-order story here about how, at least from the point of view of the visitors you cite, Chinese cities (probably, I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting but I would certainly love to) do seem much nicer than American cities? The underlying thing here is that you’re measuring developed-ness by “quality of city,” and America is uniquely bad at them among rich countries. I don’t mean this as a counterpoint in favor of the American model - I think it is genuinely terrible how we manage our cities - but it’s interesting how American urban decline seems to be both a fairly expected policy outcome and probably undermining legitimacy in at least the progressive model of governance.
If anything the terribleness of US cities is a point in favor of capitalism and liberalism, as US urban planning is one of the most illiberal, centrally planned aspects of the US.
While the people in charge were often democratically elected, local politics receive relatively little interest, and are effectively controlled by a corrupt tyrannical oligarchy of dedicated minorities and local bigwigs. And democracy is actually trying to respond, with the worst affected areas electing state level politicians with a mission to crush local tyrants into serving the people.
And we know capitalism and liberalism can create great cities. Tokyo is the best city in the world, despite having far fewer resources per person to work with than US cities, in very large part because urban planning here is about as liberal as it gets in the developed world. Tokyo manages to outperform most Western European cities on left leaning goals like socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods and cycling as a form of transport, under a government that barely pays lip service to those goals.
Evidence shows that liberalism in urban planning works. The US just needs to be brave enough to try it.
Hah, yes, American urban planning is the worst of both worlds - resources are allocated by prices, but production is allocated by, like, a Gosplan run entirely by HOA-board-member retirees who think that the built environment peaked in 1974.
I remember coming home from China many years ago and it really making me think about how my city was cleaned, and how, while there was certainly a lot of cleaning in specific places, there was a baseline of absolute unacceptable uncleanliness that was way lower in China than here, and it all boiled down to a massive amount of labor being directed to low productivity cleaning there in specific places, and being entirely absent elsewhere. In America (Baltimore in particular!) there was less overall variance, being for sure a really low tier city in comparison to a place like Beijing, but the baseline was significantly higher. Much of the cleaning in a place like Baltimore is automated, but where it's difficult to automate it's often dirtier.
My brother spent 14 years in China, 2006-2020. The modern infra is impressive for sure, but he would strongly disagree with modern China being a desirable model. The crushing oppression of Xiism is real and palpable and depressing if you're not a fly by tourist. Maybe women feel safe on the streets, but they're also not allowed to have... any civil society at all. And the alipay and wechat and everything is also part of the digital system that means you can be banned from any geographic location, job, institution, or public benefit the government feels like banning you from arbitrarily.
The nice thing about an autocracy is that even if life is oppressive and you have no rights. There is no reason to get angry about it anyway because nobody will listen.
The chaos the USA is in right now is also a feature as much as it is a bug. Even Chinese commentators are currently saying things like "The USA is currently socially divided, with many different tensions between elites and non-elites as well as racial tensions" --> "However, although to us this looks like the USA is collapsing, note that the USA as a society has a much greater tolerance for chaos than we do"
Is that something Chinese commentators are allowed to say? (That the US had a higher tolerance for chaos. Honest question. I'm no expert China watcher.)
We could make the US just as safe if we were willing to disappear people who committed petty crimes and lined every street with CCTV. People fail to realize there are tradeoffs involved. Perhaps we're too far towards chaos and could stand a little more surveillance/policing, but it isn't without its downsides.
FWIW, I don’t think markets are going away, and markets are the source of many of the advantages over command economies and authoritarian regimes, along with property rights and freedom of speech. The last is under threat from elites eager to suppress “disinformation” and control narratives, but I don’t think elites will be able to control the public sentiment. Look at Ireland.
China, for awhile, had successfully integrated market forces and was giving well-connected entrepreneurs the illusion they had property rights and financial security, but Xi has moved away from this and toward more planning and control. This won’t work, so I don’t fear China long term.
I’m also not worried about finance as a percent of US GDP, which I also don’t consider as “spending” - as if we have a fixed wallet and allocate our last dollar to x instead of y.
Our politicians have become irrelevant because the priorities of the people that own them don’t match the priorities or needs of the citizenry. That is OK because politics is usually only important in war and crises. In everything else they will eventually follow public opinion rather than lead it. It is not the man (or woman) or the party, it is the time.
The next crisis is coming- likely a budget crisis before a war. Maybe both. Politics will be important then, and we hope there will be some reasonable people out there who will do what is necessary, in concert with the people.
One of the correct conlusions to draw from the 20th centuries is that markets 'mostly won'. Communism everywhere has failed. China is however showing that a state-backed market economy may be able to outperform a pure market play like the USA.
My intuition was always that authoritarian systems have more long term variance than democratic ones. If you're lucky enough to get a good run of kings/chairmen/premiers, you will run a tighter ship than the democracies and make progress against them. The risk of catastrophic failure however is higher, since once a whacko is sufficiently entrenched there's no way to get him out except by force.
Democracies by contrast are always....fine, unless there's a sufficiently large external event where the democratic society fully aligns itself and pulls in the same direction (see: US in WW2).
I also have an adjacent intuition on the amount of energy and authoritarian regime has to spend policing its population that both costs the regime resources and diminishes returns on human capital in the long run. This lines up with the performance of democracies in modern war, which so far has been honestly great. They're more efficient societies than authoritarian ones once the democracies get their act together.
The relevant variable might be the "skill/quality" of the decision-makers in your government.
At one extreme, as you say a truly amazing autocrat might have a high skill level and be making most of the decisions, so you get good outcomes. But if the next one has a low skill level, the opposite occurs and everyone loses.
Versus in a democracy the broader public has more input, so you are likely to stay closer to your population median skill level.
Now, my controversial opinion is that in the past we had more elite control over our American democracy, so we were able to arrive at a higher skill level. Mainstream media, elite consensus, general inability of the peasants to coordinate, etc all kept the range of choice on the higher quality side. (I so fondly remember the Obama/Romney election, which felt like a "can't lose" moment for our country.)
But technological change and a fragmented media system have really empowered the masses, and that has brought our governing skill level down closer to the median. I mean surely we've all pondered if there could be some way to stop the stupidest third of Americans from voting? Obviously the direct result of that that would be better government.
Pre-Xi, I thought maybe the CCP approach had some merit. A large enough portion of the population to be representative, but with an effort to be the cream of the crop. Many people have no business making important decisions, after all. But this recent angle with Xi has been a crushing disappointment - though potentially such a stupid "own goal" that it will set China back from becoming more powerful than the US.
The grim thing is, I find this theory the one that feels the most intuitively correct.
As an anxious observer of politics living in Europe, I've come to think that the Achilles Heel of liberal democracies is granting enough small groups, which a sufficiently large voice, the ability to destroy their institutions.
Liberal Democracies worked in the 20th century because there was enough capable and motivated people to assume command of companies, positions as lawyers, government staffers, institution heads. and they succeeded, in part, because liberal democracies granted them the freedom to do so. And there was relative trust amongst the general population that the institutions work and we're in their interest.
In the 21st century, I think these freedoms become flaws. When enough people realise they can pull the government one way or another if they try, they realise they can break it and generate enough chaos to profit/become someone important/just feel heard.
I think Liberal Democracies have to draw some lines and clarify what is free speech.
Free speech, from what I know, was a relatively noble concept. It guarantees your right, as an AMERICAN CITIZEN, that the AMERICAN GOVERNMENT can not punish someone from criticising the government.
But now, in essence, Free Speech is the guarantee that anyone, from any country, can use massive social media platforms to levy their support and influence on any given political topic.
And the real advantage for authoritarians is, because they have a closed internet space, their citizens can't be influenced by liberal ideals, while their governments can directly access and participate on western platforms and discuss Liberal Democracies politics.
In my estimation, if liberal societies are to succeed, the absolute priority right now is to:
1. Codify that Free Speech protections do not guarantee your right to use Massive Social Media platforms to advocate and organise whatever you want.
2. Introduce some sort of verification ID to massive social media platforms.
3. Liberal Democratic countries need to rapidly update and rebuild faith in their institutions. And they need a better and more available way directly communicate with their own citizens, exclusively.
A good example is that in the Netherlands, we publically fund islamic schools that teach their children to kill non-believers (this was in the news a few years ago), and, we continue to fund this because freedom of speech.
So, what you’re saying is don’t beat them, join them? I don’t see your ID number or commentary license in your profile, so I will report this post to the disinformation governance board.
The Slippery Slope thing is always people's first argument against introducing some level of moderation on global social media institutions.
It doesn't have to be "1984/China Techno Dystopia" Vs "Free for all with Russian foreign ministers posting 'Biden Old' memes"
Right now one of the primary and most effective ways democratic governments communicate with their population is through social media. Where they are sharing and competing for space with hostile authoritarian government officials, russian bot farms, Saudi eBoi princelings, Musili-noid wanna-be populists and anyone else that wants to feel important.
I don't think it's that extreme to implement measures to restrict, at the very least, massive-million daily user social media websites from hosting open discussion on how best to undermine exclusively liberal governments. That an account called Caturd can have a MORE prominent voice than those that are leading your institutions.
I'm not saying arrest people (Slippery Slope fallacy) for what they post.
I'm saying you finally codify the fact that "Freedom of Speech" does NOT equal "Guaranteed access to the largest social media platforms to organise and rally for undermining of the country"
People walking don’t need to be licensed. Not do people bicycling. But you need a license to drive a car and a more difficult to obtain and more specialized license to drive a big truck and years of training and accreditation to drive an ocean going vessel or an airplane.
Maybe speech is the same way. Not saying I agree, but you have something here.
Anecdotes and theories are fine. Who doesn’t like them and collect them as “information.” But I favor facts:
-- Putin’s war strategy was shredded by 30 drone hobbyists on bicycles.
-- as for the dictator buddy system, how is it Iran’s President fell to his death in a decades-outdated helicopter (sanctions do bite). Why didn’t China, North Korea, or Russia send him a better helicopter?
-- I know people who have gone to China for more than one week. One spends three-weeks at a time in China and is happy to return home so he can continue to cough the black soot out of his lungs. There are American executives who quit their jobs in China to protect their children’s health.
I don’t know what China people visited for one week, but this is the China the Chinese people live in year round:
China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran can produce military hardware, but that isn’t going to feed them when push comes to shove. These are physically isolated countries. Politics made the mistake of forgetting we live in a physical world. Ergo, climate change. The future of fresh water is nowhere more dire than in China.
Russia lost most of its young, educated and tech-savvy youth to the West in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Iran is economically hurting from sanctions. As for technical expertise, it took a couple of year’s for Iran’s nuclear engineers to figure out why the centrifuges weren’t working. U.S. and Israeli software engineers invaded, undetected, Iranian nuclear labs. But we can’t overrate surveillance expertise and technology. Israel has some of the best surveillance software in the world, yet it was clueless to a pending Hamas invasion.
As for the Chinese people being tired from work, more than 20% of its educated youth -- self-proclaimed “ghosts” -- are well-rested in unemployment. Those numbers were probably significantly worse. As we know, China quit publicizing them. Well, there goes that information.
“One who controls the past controls the present. One who controls the present controls the future.”
I think that Russia is an interesting example. When the initial invasion failed, there was a lot of talk about how that demonstrated an inherit weakness of autocracy and --- by extension --- proof that democracy was better than autocracy.
It's absolutely true that we saw a failure of autocracy, but it's not March 2022 any more. Russia has the initiative on the battlefield right now, and we're currently seeing some of the strengths of an autocracy vs weakness of democracy. E.g., when Putin needed troops, he just rounded up a bunch of people and threw them into battle. When Ukraine needed troops, drafting more people was really unpopular, so their government dithered for months and months before passing new laws to draft more people, and the shortage of troops is really hurting them. Even now that the law has been passed, it will take months for the troops to appear on the battlefield. (I don't know about the final version of the law, but the draft law specified a minimum training time specifically so that people couldn't be thrown into battle without training --- as Putin sometimes did.)
Meanwhile, continued US support for Ukraine is far from certain, but Russia will continue to fight until Putin decides otherwise. And Russian disinformation may help elect their preferred candidate in the upcoming election.
"Russia lost most of its young, educated and tech-savvy youth to the West in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine."
It's true, but many of them have returned. To quote [1]
"... the Kremlin boasted that half of all who fled in those early days had already returned, and that seems to reflect available statistics from the most popular destination countries as well as data from relocation companies. Based on client data at one relocation firm, Finion in Moscow, an estimated 40%-45% of those who left in 2022 have returned to Russia, said the company’s head, Vyacheslav Kartamyshev."
Note also that many Ukrainian males have left Ukraine to avoid being drafted! And the stigma of that may make them hesitant to return.
In short, it's easy to draw incorrect or incomplete lessons from Russia by being selective with facts. In Russia, we are seeing both the weaknesses and strengths of autocracy, and the jury is still out on which will outweigh the other.
Possible objection is that BAD information is cheap and GOOD information is expensive. It is easy for people to have access to information that supports their already-existing vibes but difficult for people to get information about issues with a lot of complex moving parts. Sources of bad information may also work overtime to discredit the good information sources.
There's also the problem that BAD information is usually way more engaging than GOOD information. Someone shouting, “If you don't fight like hell, you won't have a country anymore,” is far more engaging than a person saying, "In the United States things are going along fairly normally—some folks are struggling, but generally speaking we are moving with some hiccups in a positive direction.”
It's been true since the Paleolithic era— we are very good at jumping at tigers that turn out to not be there.
And it then turns into a vicious cycle where people are tired of feeling the sense of threat all the time and do not consume news.
I quit on the MSM years ago. Not so much tired of any threats, more so tired of all the partisan overwrought bullshit. And this was before Trump. The NYT (for example, but not by limitation) became unreadabe, and NPR was just the audio version. Besides, you already know every story, because they are all the same. So, you are correct in that my wife and I do not consume news, so to speak, but wrong the reason, at least in our case.
We live in an age of information abundance. There are literally hundreds of credible news services that can replace the MSM (without sending you into total partisan echo chambers.) I’m not so much criticizing you as pointing out that your choosing two random news services as “the MSM” and then abandoning them feels like a good illustration of Noah’s point: people don’t respond to abundance by hand-curating a healthy menu of alternatives, they just quit in frustration.
Well, here I am on Substack ...
So am I. What I like about it is that it allows both the writer and me to filter our interests, and this helps keep the conversations manageable. Since Noah primarily discusses economics, this helps to moderate the conversation because it does require some familiarity with the piece and the subject matter to have an opinion.
Something else I like: All the replies are text. You have to write out your thoughts and read other people's. One of the primary reasons why I quit Twitter (years before Elmo's $44 billion Nazi Bar remodel) is that a lot of what came through my feed, and the replies, weren't even text. Everything was memes, memes, memes. Not only that, but it was always the same two to three dozen memes (e.g., Black man doing the thinking gesture by pointing to his temple; spit take woman; little girl with the Yikes! look on her face). I remembered Orwell writing about the Newspeak lexicon in "1984" and how the party created an impoverished vocabulary so people couldn't think their way to rebellion. And Twitter was the lexicon come to life.
But especially when dealing with Trump the partisan overwrought bullshit expresses a sense of threat and the readers want something to confirm the deep sense of threat that they feel. My favorite example was the Times only being interested in Kavanaugh as a threat to Roe in any of their news coverage before Christine Blasey Ford came forward.
Kavanaugh is a threat to the 4th Amendment. That's about it. Blasey Ford is fine example of overwrought bullshit. "Some guy got handsy with me at a high school party 35 years ago. Rheeeeeeeeeeeee"
But people had to go to Scotusblog to know that Kavanaugh was a threat to the 4th Amendment. That's the point. (I already knew that Kavanaugh had neutered Boumediene on the appeals court)
Maybe, but I doubt it. I did risk infecting my computer a few years back and read comments on a NYT article regarding forcing 5 year old kids to wear double masks at school if they were not vaccinated. I'd say 95% of the comments must have been 60 year old grandmas clutching their NPR tote bags over the imminent deaths of their grandchildren because some murderous parent would not get their kid vaxxed. I had to tap out after that.
You might say that there's a Gresham's Law of Information. Bad information drives out good information. Especially in the "It's true because I want it to be true" zeitgeist.
Well then, get on it. Or at least tell someone else this secret you seem to know about how to message good information so well.
I think it's more that good information now has the same kind of cost structure as, say, a pharmaceutical: It's very expensive to get a good piece of information, but once you know it's good, it's incredibly cheap to reproduce, and absent some kind of government granted monopoly, you'll never be able to recoup your cost.
See: news gathering organizations being undercut by sites that provide summaries based on their reporting, and steal whatever ad dollars the original reporters might've gotten from direct views.
This is an excellent point. OTOH, privately funded news source needs to be financed by imperfect paywalls, or a wealthy benefactor, or perish. Government subsidized (via directly or through monopoly grant) new source is beholden to the government.
I was thinking more of the difficulty of finding the information than discovering it in the first place.
That is a really good point
Gresham’s law of info?
I think it's perfectly plausible to spend a week in a CBD of a city which contains millions of people and come away with a sense of it being extremely clean and its streets safe at night, but this is an experience I have had all over the world.
The sense I always got about Chinese cities is that there is a level of cleanliness evident when the effort is taken in very specific places, but that there is also a level of disrepair and dinginess that can usually be found an extremely short distance away if you walk the right direction. It built for me the sense of three Chinas; the first China is Future China, the pre-depreciation China that you mention. It feels like next year. Big city CBDs felt this way, Hong Kong felt this way. The second China is Yesterday China, which is post-depreciation China that you can experience outside the inner ring roads. It feels like a shabby industrial city that someone is maybe trying to do urban renewal on, or maybe someone tried and it really didn't take off. Kunming and Fuzhou felt like this to me outside of a very restricted area. The third China is 1960 China, where you begin to really have the sense that you are in a nation with 1/3 the income of a Western one. This is what you experience if you travel between cities of any type and stop for any reason. I feel like travelers are likely to only glimpse the second China and not even have any contact at all with the third, especially if they are traveling there for conferences or the information economy. If you travel there for industry you will have a lot of contact with the other Chinas.
The feeling I got the first time I went to big Chinese cities was "this city is so Chinese", and then by the time I came back through after experiencing the central mainland, especially the industrial third tier cities, was "an extensive veneer of modernity has been put on top of this place."
I don't see your point. The same can be said about the USA. You have shitty cities, with even shittier 3rd world ghettos rife with gang on gang violence if you just venture a little bit outside of the city.
The point is not that we're better; as you correctly state, his description also applies here. The point is that the claim he's responding to is that this does not describe China at all - that they don't have any failings in their society (at least on the physical level) anywhere that can be seen. And this is just plainly false; granted it's been 12 years since I was there, but I saw open sewers in Guanzhou, and the fancy new "western" hotel we stayed out had mildew already in the hallway carpets, the shower doors looked like they were hung by a guy eyeballing it with a plumb-bob, and the toilets could not handle my mighty American waste output. But it was shiney and there was lots of neon everywhere, which apparently is all you need to fool Americans into believing that they're in the near future.
The same can't really be said for the US though, as US city centers are not particularly clean, well maintained, safe, etc. both by US standards and relative to the rest of the city.
A tourist walk around SF might leave you in the dark about how truly terrible it gets in rural Appalachia or Central Valley, but it's still a pretty terrible impression. It's very clearly dirty and unsafe, and if you take too many steps in the wrong direction, it's obvious that society there is deeply broken.
Most of the US isn't significantly worse and is typically in many ways better. The suburbs of SF are generally at least somewhat safe and clean if you don't go walking between places you should drive between. And while Silicon Valley is on the nice end of suburban hell, the suburban hell I've experienced in Midwest and Southwest flyover country isn't that much worse assuming you don't go walking between places you should drive between.
I’d like to show you some parts of rural Arkansas that are every bit as fucked as rural China
Are they as fucked, more fucked, or less fucked than rural West Virginia? I've been there a lot.
Never been to rural West Virginia, so idk. I have a good friend in Elaine, AR and used to work in Osceola, AR, and those are very depressing places. Cheap housing though!
At least in WV I imagine it’s pretty topography, but Eastern AR there ain’t nothing but poverty and decay.
Thought-provoking article, but I have one quibble. When it comes to drafting serious legislation and negotiating the final provisions, the work is almost always done by or carefully overseen by the more senior Congressional staff. These are men and women who have been at it for years and often have served in executive branch positions or with subject area companies or non-profits. In my 40 years in and around the federal government, I saw lots of bonus babies on both sides of the aisle, but I almost never saw one entrusted with heavy lifting on legislation. In the few instances where they were, it was always in the early days of a change in the party in control. When this happens, especially if the margin of victory is large, there often are quite a few new members who do not yet know the ropes and thus lack serious people on their staff. These members learn quickly or they inevitably crash and burn. Either way, adults are usually back in charge by Labor Day.
Thanks for sharing some GOOD information!
How has this process changed over those 40 years? From my very limited and more recent exposure, lobbyists seem to write a lot of legislation. Senior staffers (at the committee and chamber level moreso than individual congressional staff) insert the lobbyist output into the bill (with some negotiation, prioritization, horse trading and shaking down, of course). And you are right, lots of the staffers have worked for these same special interests and with the lawyers writing the legislation (as have the regulatory appointees in the agencies).
No surprise that such a process is quite disconnected from the public interest.
Has it always been this way?
First, I apologize if this is redundant. I had almost finished my reply when it disappeared into the ether. To your question -- I can't claim to know if it has always been this way because I only know what went on in the program areas and departments I was in when I was there. However, that included a large percentage of the civilian agencies and, from time to time, I did get a glimpse into the national security side. It is my impression that things are cleaner now than when I arrived in Washington in the 60s. probably because information is more readily available and the press is more sophisticated and less eager to belong to the old boy network. There were times over the years when lobbyists were quiet and other times when they came in waves. The drivers were the significance of the legislation and once again, whether the party in power in the legislature or the executive branch had changed. New party control always meant a wave of new lobbyists -- apparently, they thought they could win issues they had consistently lost under the old regime. Sometimes, they were right; more often, they were wrong. Change also meant naive legislators and appointees and a few awful crooks. Neither survived very long in most cases. Some of the worst cases I saw involved new executive branch appointees from both parties who refused to accept that they were no longer in the private sector and had to comply with federal rules. So, they would bull ahead with actions that violated the law on the grounds that "we won the election" and then go down in flames as their party threw them under the bus. Lobbyists do seem more visible right now, but that may be because there hasn't been a scandal lately. The number of lobbyists, or perhaps only their visibility, drops off noticeably after major scandals like the 1990 Savings and Loan mess or the Jack Abramoff bribery scandal in 2005. Unfortunately, people without Washington experience often do not understand that the federal government has a truly awesome investigative and enforcement capability. Also, after a period of time without scandal, lobbyists, legislators, and even career staff become cavalier about the law and forget that no secret is safe in Washington. It seems that each generation has to learn this for themselves. I must say, however, that having been in private business both as an employee and as an owner, advised state and federal governments, and been a career employee at both the state and federal levels, the federal government is the most honest working environment I know.
Which is why it’s really important for Trump to not be able to run out the clock
Thank you.
How long are people gonna keep doing that? Because most likely there is no political or economic reward for good legislative work. Liberal democracy runs on patriotic beauracrats' career success.
Tangential tidbit: broccoli and cauliflower are genetically the same plant, they are just a different color, as many humans are. Based on color alone, broccoli is probably more nutritious because many of the most valuable phytochemicals show up as colors (like carotene).
Brussels sprouts are also the same plant, but definitely different in taste
All brassicas are related, sure. Just eat purple or orange cauliflower for nutrients! Easy to grow
If liberal democracy fails, it will fail from within. People aren't voting for Trump, Modi, Orban etc because they are impressed by Chinese trains, they are doing so because they want to stick it to their fellow citizens.
Also because the cost of getting it wrong has gone down a lot. Sticking it to your fellow citizens is a more attractive strategy if there is not much at stake. With overall returns going down across the globe, sticking it to your fellow citizen becomes more tempting, as even a good government would not be expected to achieve much. But try raising the stakes, even if the incentive is negative (surviving a war) rather than positive (doing good investments for the future). I bet Ukrainians would not vote a populist into office now!
Nothing wrong with populism. Populism is a symptom of your elites having failed. I see Biden enacting trade barriers right now and being tough on China. Initiatives that were started by Donald Trump. I remember the absolute mayhem the world was in when Trump started putting tarrifs in place back in 2017. Which, right now, many 'elites' agree where the right moves to take.
I used to think this was true, until I got to see and smell populism firsthand.
Populism is the totalitarianism of the unremarkable.
I like how Trump took an action because he wanted to build more coal plants in Ohio and now that Biden is building more semiconductor fabs in the southern US, people like you are suggesting that it's somehow exactly the same thing and that Trump was right all along. The guy barely even knows what a tariff is.
In my opinion, Hungary is a nicer place to live than the USA. But, tbf, basically any european country is.
The rate of people attempting to immigrate to the USA would suggest that your opinion is not in the majority.
Europeans aren't keen on the "why do you shoot each other in the street?" thing.
Millions of people are literally risking death just to get to the USA. Also, despite having super aggressive limits on legal immigration, USA still has a net migration ratio comparable to EU countries. But I guess you "see" some Europeans who decide to raise their children in their home country, so that trumps data.
"subsidized by your military".
You're welcome.
If you go to modern Budapest, and this is going on the observations of my family members and acquaintances who've been there recently or a couple who are residents, they've told me that it's not far off from San Fransicko.
Rapidly increasing real estate prices have led to an estimated permanent and visible homeless population of around 30,000. Thefts and fights are rampant on Budapest's trains and buses. Shoplifting is becoming a big problem. Graffiti and littering are becoming prevalent. Jews, Muslims and Roma are complaining about hate incidents. Deaths-of-despair type casualties are increasing, like opioid and fentanyl overdoses in restrooms and parks.
Hungary is proud of its past and takes good care of its historic treasures, but the day-to-day life is very hard. Employment has long been hard to come by, plus wages are lower and taxes are as high or higher than the rest of the EU so purchasing power is lower. Their best and brightest young adults continue to leave Hungary, and they tend to assimilate in their new residencies. There's a large middle age and elderly population that need health care, exacerbated by high alcoholism, cigarette smoking and diabetes.
Hungary is nice to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. And Hungarians become unwelcoming if you do.
Hungary has a pretty crummy past. It can be counted on for lots of reaction and anti-democratic actions. Please see the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the interwar period and today.
San Francisco is one of the nicest cities in the U.S., heck even the world, as is Budapest for very much the same reasons. Heck, the Buda side has urbanism on hills if that's your thing. :) (Budapest is a portmanteau of Buda and Pest, which were separate cities on either side of the Danube until consolidating in 1873.)
A lot of the problems in San Francisco, Budapest and really many cities in the developed world is the spread of drugs, particularly heroin, opioids, meth and now fentanyl. They are all highly potent, highly addictive, and users become addled to the point of psychosis or irreversible cognitive and neurological damage. This is also coupled with the rise in homelessness, owing to real estate values appreciating faster than wages or population growth. The real estate crisis is global.
You can pretty much say [any OECD city] is way safer and nicer than any big city in the USA. America's problems are self-inflicted and cultural. We don't even stack up well to Canada, our culturally similar neighbors. Canada has guns and diversity, and Canadians don't shoot each other in the street.
(That is amazing that people think the stock market is down. According to Krugman Trump was even trying to explain the good stock market numbers in terms of the market anticipating the good times when he will be president)
People are nuts! They don’t believe they can buy the same house or same new car brand for the same payment as three years ago. Some of these numbskulls thinks payments have more than doubled, meaning they can’t afford a house or a car. Crazy! At least they feel rich when they go out to eat or buy groceries, and they know they’re getting great value for college tuition.
I didn't get that that was sarcasm when I liked it. Not being able to afford cars, houses or food might make people think that the economy is bad and they might know that if inflation is high the Fed may not make the stock market even better by cutting rates but the state of the stock market may be the piece of economic news that gets the widest distribution in at least traditional broadcast news outlets. If I search for the price of an individual stock the search engine will give me that result without sending me to another site.
Very true. You’d think everyone would know stocks are back over record highs, but 40 percent of Americans don’t own stocks. Some of those people might laugh at our lack of knowledge about guns, plumbing, corn, fentanyl, whatever.
Let’s be honest - it is an election year and people are out there saying stuff to help their candidate. We can probably ignore (certainly for this year) whatever Krugman says about Americans. I’m guessing he doesn’t get out to the hinterlands much and we can also guess what he is likely to say on almost any subject this year.
I was trying to be funny rather than being rude to you personally. Was trying to find a funny way to mock Krugman for mocking people complaining about the economy. Sure, lots of people believe crazy things, but that doesn’t explain economic dissatisfaction.
Yeah that could have used a sarcasm tag
😊
There’s an interesting zero-order story here about how, at least from the point of view of the visitors you cite, Chinese cities (probably, I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting but I would certainly love to) do seem much nicer than American cities? The underlying thing here is that you’re measuring developed-ness by “quality of city,” and America is uniquely bad at them among rich countries. I don’t mean this as a counterpoint in favor of the American model - I think it is genuinely terrible how we manage our cities - but it’s interesting how American urban decline seems to be both a fairly expected policy outcome and probably undermining legitimacy in at least the progressive model of governance.
Some countries borrow money to overbuild infrastructure. Others borrow money to distribute handouts.
You can’t buy drugs with a nice building. Well, maybe with the copper 😊
Also, china supplies the fentanyl. Payback from the opium wars.
Hey, pal, that was a British thing, not an American thing. Are you going to go off on collective guilt now?
If anything the terribleness of US cities is a point in favor of capitalism and liberalism, as US urban planning is one of the most illiberal, centrally planned aspects of the US.
While the people in charge were often democratically elected, local politics receive relatively little interest, and are effectively controlled by a corrupt tyrannical oligarchy of dedicated minorities and local bigwigs. And democracy is actually trying to respond, with the worst affected areas electing state level politicians with a mission to crush local tyrants into serving the people.
And we know capitalism and liberalism can create great cities. Tokyo is the best city in the world, despite having far fewer resources per person to work with than US cities, in very large part because urban planning here is about as liberal as it gets in the developed world. Tokyo manages to outperform most Western European cities on left leaning goals like socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods and cycling as a form of transport, under a government that barely pays lip service to those goals.
Evidence shows that liberalism in urban planning works. The US just needs to be brave enough to try it.
Hah, yes, American urban planning is the worst of both worlds - resources are allocated by prices, but production is allocated by, like, a Gosplan run entirely by HOA-board-member retirees who think that the built environment peaked in 1974.
I remember coming home from China many years ago and it really making me think about how my city was cleaned, and how, while there was certainly a lot of cleaning in specific places, there was a baseline of absolute unacceptable uncleanliness that was way lower in China than here, and it all boiled down to a massive amount of labor being directed to low productivity cleaning there in specific places, and being entirely absent elsewhere. In America (Baltimore in particular!) there was less overall variance, being for sure a really low tier city in comparison to a place like Beijing, but the baseline was significantly higher. Much of the cleaning in a place like Baltimore is automated, but where it's difficult to automate it's often dirtier.
My brother spent 14 years in China, 2006-2020. The modern infra is impressive for sure, but he would strongly disagree with modern China being a desirable model. The crushing oppression of Xiism is real and palpable and depressing if you're not a fly by tourist. Maybe women feel safe on the streets, but they're also not allowed to have... any civil society at all. And the alipay and wechat and everything is also part of the digital system that means you can be banned from any geographic location, job, institution, or public benefit the government feels like banning you from arbitrarily.
The nice thing about an autocracy is that even if life is oppressive and you have no rights. There is no reason to get angry about it anyway because nobody will listen.
The chaos the USA is in right now is also a feature as much as it is a bug. Even Chinese commentators are currently saying things like "The USA is currently socially divided, with many different tensions between elites and non-elites as well as racial tensions" --> "However, although to us this looks like the USA is collapsing, note that the USA as a society has a much greater tolerance for chaos than we do"
Is that something Chinese commentators are allowed to say? (That the US had a higher tolerance for chaos. Honest question. I'm no expert China watcher.)
We could make the US just as safe if we were willing to disappear people who committed petty crimes and lined every street with CCTV. People fail to realize there are tradeoffs involved. Perhaps we're too far towards chaos and could stand a little more surveillance/policing, but it isn't without its downsides.
I’m not sure I can think of any significant downsides from widespread CCTV in public places
Interesting theory, thanks!
FWIW, I don’t think markets are going away, and markets are the source of many of the advantages over command economies and authoritarian regimes, along with property rights and freedom of speech. The last is under threat from elites eager to suppress “disinformation” and control narratives, but I don’t think elites will be able to control the public sentiment. Look at Ireland.
China, for awhile, had successfully integrated market forces and was giving well-connected entrepreneurs the illusion they had property rights and financial security, but Xi has moved away from this and toward more planning and control. This won’t work, so I don’t fear China long term.
I’m also not worried about finance as a percent of US GDP, which I also don’t consider as “spending” - as if we have a fixed wallet and allocate our last dollar to x instead of y.
Our politicians have become irrelevant because the priorities of the people that own them don’t match the priorities or needs of the citizenry. That is OK because politics is usually only important in war and crises. In everything else they will eventually follow public opinion rather than lead it. It is not the man (or woman) or the party, it is the time.
The next crisis is coming- likely a budget crisis before a war. Maybe both. Politics will be important then, and we hope there will be some reasonable people out there who will do what is necessary, in concert with the people.
One of the correct conlusions to draw from the 20th centuries is that markets 'mostly won'. Communism everywhere has failed. China is however showing that a state-backed market economy may be able to outperform a pure market play like the USA.
My intuition was always that authoritarian systems have more long term variance than democratic ones. If you're lucky enough to get a good run of kings/chairmen/premiers, you will run a tighter ship than the democracies and make progress against them. The risk of catastrophic failure however is higher, since once a whacko is sufficiently entrenched there's no way to get him out except by force.
Democracies by contrast are always....fine, unless there's a sufficiently large external event where the democratic society fully aligns itself and pulls in the same direction (see: US in WW2).
I also have an adjacent intuition on the amount of energy and authoritarian regime has to spend policing its population that both costs the regime resources and diminishes returns on human capital in the long run. This lines up with the performance of democracies in modern war, which so far has been honestly great. They're more efficient societies than authoritarian ones once the democracies get their act together.
Just my thoughts.
If I might try an iteration on your idea:
The relevant variable might be the "skill/quality" of the decision-makers in your government.
At one extreme, as you say a truly amazing autocrat might have a high skill level and be making most of the decisions, so you get good outcomes. But if the next one has a low skill level, the opposite occurs and everyone loses.
Versus in a democracy the broader public has more input, so you are likely to stay closer to your population median skill level.
Now, my controversial opinion is that in the past we had more elite control over our American democracy, so we were able to arrive at a higher skill level. Mainstream media, elite consensus, general inability of the peasants to coordinate, etc all kept the range of choice on the higher quality side. (I so fondly remember the Obama/Romney election, which felt like a "can't lose" moment for our country.)
But technological change and a fragmented media system have really empowered the masses, and that has brought our governing skill level down closer to the median. I mean surely we've all pondered if there could be some way to stop the stupidest third of Americans from voting? Obviously the direct result of that that would be better government.
Pre-Xi, I thought maybe the CCP approach had some merit. A large enough portion of the population to be representative, but with an effort to be the cream of the crop. Many people have no business making important decisions, after all. But this recent angle with Xi has been a crushing disappointment - though potentially such a stupid "own goal" that it will set China back from becoming more powerful than the US.
The grim thing is, I find this theory the one that feels the most intuitively correct.
As an anxious observer of politics living in Europe, I've come to think that the Achilles Heel of liberal democracies is granting enough small groups, which a sufficiently large voice, the ability to destroy their institutions.
Liberal Democracies worked in the 20th century because there was enough capable and motivated people to assume command of companies, positions as lawyers, government staffers, institution heads. and they succeeded, in part, because liberal democracies granted them the freedom to do so. And there was relative trust amongst the general population that the institutions work and we're in their interest.
In the 21st century, I think these freedoms become flaws. When enough people realise they can pull the government one way or another if they try, they realise they can break it and generate enough chaos to profit/become someone important/just feel heard.
I think Liberal Democracies have to draw some lines and clarify what is free speech.
Free speech, from what I know, was a relatively noble concept. It guarantees your right, as an AMERICAN CITIZEN, that the AMERICAN GOVERNMENT can not punish someone from criticising the government.
But now, in essence, Free Speech is the guarantee that anyone, from any country, can use massive social media platforms to levy their support and influence on any given political topic.
And the real advantage for authoritarians is, because they have a closed internet space, their citizens can't be influenced by liberal ideals, while their governments can directly access and participate on western platforms and discuss Liberal Democracies politics.
In my estimation, if liberal societies are to succeed, the absolute priority right now is to:
1. Codify that Free Speech protections do not guarantee your right to use Massive Social Media platforms to advocate and organise whatever you want.
2. Introduce some sort of verification ID to massive social media platforms.
3. Liberal Democratic countries need to rapidly update and rebuild faith in their institutions. And they need a better and more available way directly communicate with their own citizens, exclusively.
A good example is that in the Netherlands, we publically fund islamic schools that teach their children to kill non-believers (this was in the news a few years ago), and, we continue to fund this because freedom of speech.
So, what you’re saying is don’t beat them, join them? I don’t see your ID number or commentary license in your profile, so I will report this post to the disinformation governance board.
The Slippery Slope thing is always people's first argument against introducing some level of moderation on global social media institutions.
It doesn't have to be "1984/China Techno Dystopia" Vs "Free for all with Russian foreign ministers posting 'Biden Old' memes"
Right now one of the primary and most effective ways democratic governments communicate with their population is through social media. Where they are sharing and competing for space with hostile authoritarian government officials, russian bot farms, Saudi eBoi princelings, Musili-noid wanna-be populists and anyone else that wants to feel important.
I don't think it's that extreme to implement measures to restrict, at the very least, massive-million daily user social media websites from hosting open discussion on how best to undermine exclusively liberal governments. That an account called Caturd can have a MORE prominent voice than those that are leading your institutions.
I'm not saying arrest people (Slippery Slope fallacy) for what they post.
I'm saying you finally codify the fact that "Freedom of Speech" does NOT equal "Guaranteed access to the largest social media platforms to organise and rally for undermining of the country"
People walking don’t need to be licensed. Not do people bicycling. But you need a license to drive a car and a more difficult to obtain and more specialized license to drive a big truck and years of training and accreditation to drive an ocean going vessel or an airplane.
Maybe speech is the same way. Not saying I agree, but you have something here.
So are we talking about the FCC licensing and regulating internet access/bandwidth like they do old fashioned media- tv and radio?
FIRST!
Superb.
Anecdotes and theories are fine. Who doesn’t like them and collect them as “information.” But I favor facts:
-- Putin’s war strategy was shredded by 30 drone hobbyists on bicycles.
-- as for the dictator buddy system, how is it Iran’s President fell to his death in a decades-outdated helicopter (sanctions do bite). Why didn’t China, North Korea, or Russia send him a better helicopter?
-- I know people who have gone to China for more than one week. One spends three-weeks at a time in China and is happy to return home so he can continue to cough the black soot out of his lungs. There are American executives who quit their jobs in China to protect their children’s health.
I don’t know what China people visited for one week, but this is the China the Chinese people live in year round:
https://earth.org/environmental-issues-in-china/
China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran can produce military hardware, but that isn’t going to feed them when push comes to shove. These are physically isolated countries. Politics made the mistake of forgetting we live in a physical world. Ergo, climate change. The future of fresh water is nowhere more dire than in China.
Russia lost most of its young, educated and tech-savvy youth to the West in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Iran is economically hurting from sanctions. As for technical expertise, it took a couple of year’s for Iran’s nuclear engineers to figure out why the centrifuges weren’t working. U.S. and Israeli software engineers invaded, undetected, Iranian nuclear labs. But we can’t overrate surveillance expertise and technology. Israel has some of the best surveillance software in the world, yet it was clueless to a pending Hamas invasion.
As for the Chinese people being tired from work, more than 20% of its educated youth -- self-proclaimed “ghosts” -- are well-rested in unemployment. Those numbers were probably significantly worse. As we know, China quit publicizing them. Well, there goes that information.
“One who controls the past controls the present. One who controls the present controls the future.”
-- George Orwell
Time is the ultimate critic.
I think that Russia is an interesting example. When the initial invasion failed, there was a lot of talk about how that demonstrated an inherit weakness of autocracy and --- by extension --- proof that democracy was better than autocracy.
It's absolutely true that we saw a failure of autocracy, but it's not March 2022 any more. Russia has the initiative on the battlefield right now, and we're currently seeing some of the strengths of an autocracy vs weakness of democracy. E.g., when Putin needed troops, he just rounded up a bunch of people and threw them into battle. When Ukraine needed troops, drafting more people was really unpopular, so their government dithered for months and months before passing new laws to draft more people, and the shortage of troops is really hurting them. Even now that the law has been passed, it will take months for the troops to appear on the battlefield. (I don't know about the final version of the law, but the draft law specified a minimum training time specifically so that people couldn't be thrown into battle without training --- as Putin sometimes did.)
Meanwhile, continued US support for Ukraine is far from certain, but Russia will continue to fight until Putin decides otherwise. And Russian disinformation may help elect their preferred candidate in the upcoming election.
"Russia lost most of its young, educated and tech-savvy youth to the West in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine."
It's true, but many of them have returned. To quote [1]
"... the Kremlin boasted that half of all who fled in those early days had already returned, and that seems to reflect available statistics from the most popular destination countries as well as data from relocation companies. Based on client data at one relocation firm, Finion in Moscow, an estimated 40%-45% of those who left in 2022 have returned to Russia, said the company’s head, Vyacheslav Kartamyshev."
Note also that many Ukrainian males have left Ukraine to avoid being drafted! And the stigma of that may make them hesitant to return.
In short, it's easy to draw incorrect or incomplete lessons from Russia by being selective with facts. In Russia, we are seeing both the weaknesses and strengths of autocracy, and the jury is still out on which will outweigh the other.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-02/russians-who-fled-war-return-in-boost-for-putin-s-war-economy?sref=ujjUxZdM
“One who controls the past controls the present. One who controls the present controls the future.”
-- George Orwell
Ergo one who controls the past controls the future?
Haven’t read it yet… but… DAMN, Noah, that headline made me wonder “Did Noah get JVL-pilled?!?”.
Great piece Noah!