Random observations
1. This is an astute observation:
Notice how this blog has gone downhill as its become infected with politics.
2. The FT has an excellent interview with Adam Posen. This caught my eye:
Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has been a rare vocal critic of what he dubs the rise of “zero-sum economics”.
As I keep saying, we are in a new dark age of economics. Opponents of zero sum thinking are not now viewed as “rare” contrarians. What a sad state of affairs.
Read the whole thing.
3. The same issue of the FT has a piece criticizing America’s reckless fiscal policy:
Though public debt is at historic highs — more than 100 per cent of GDP across the developed world — it is stabilising in Europe but rising relentlessly in the US. With interest rates rising rapidly at the same time, the interest paid on public debt is increasing — and doing so much faster in the US.
In future years, people will regard the Trump/Biden period as a fiscal train wreck.
4. The NYT has a good piece on how we are shooting ourselve sin the foot when it come sto trade with China:
Mr. Manchin and Mr. Rubio may find ways to discourage this kind of partnership. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, electric vehicle batteries produced by a “foreign entity of concern” are ineligible for the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit. Although the meaning of that phrase remains unclear, one possible interpretation suggests that virtually any firm subject to Chinese law might be forbidden — meaning that even if Ford produced every part of a car in the United States, the Chinese company’s involvement might still disqualify the car’s buyer from receiving the $7,500 tax credit.
But rejecting Chinese know-how would make us, ironically, more dependent on China in any future security-related rupture — because we will simply have to import from China what we never learned to make ourselves.
This is the kind of dilemma that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had to navigate during her recent trip to China — and that federal officials must negotiate for years to come. If American firms can’t open factories with Chinese firms in the United States, then the country’s workers will miss out on jobs, its consumers won’t get new technology and its engineers will fall behind the world’s best. Competing with China is a good idea. Being so suspicious of it that you trip over your own feet isn’t.
5. As usual, Janan Ganesh hits the nail on the head:
At some point, demagogues will have to choose which they hate more: free trade or the blob. Curbing the one tends to empower the other. Notice that, though Trump started the move to industrial protection, it has achieved real substance under a centre-left government. The right could never follow its antitrade logic to its natural conclusion, which is the aggrandisement of officialdom. Trump managed to fall out with the national security state, of all things. The idea that he could abide a US version of Japan’s former, and lordly, Ministry of International Trade and Industry, is fanciful. Yet that kind of technocratic power is what, via the hand of his successor Joe Biden, populism has inadvertently created.
I fear, though cannot know, that we are living through the biggest wrong turn in government policy of my lifetime. A decade into this protectionist age, we might regret the waste, the pork, the higher consumer prices (do “workers” not pay those?) and the fragmentation of the west into squabbling trade zones. But the wrongness of this trend is another column. For now, what stands out is the improbable winner of it. Imagine being told in 2016 that elites would have more clout, not less, and owe it to their own tormentors.
6. Tucker Carlson and I have almost identical views of Trump. Here’s Reason:
Based on his private statements to colleagues, we know that former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson did not believe Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s wild claims about systematic fraud in the 2020 presidential election. “Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson flatly stated in a November 16, 2020, text message to fellow Fox News host Laura Ingraham that came to light as a result of the defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems filed against the channel. . . .
We also know, again thanks to discovery in the Dominion lawsuit, that Carlson had a low opinion of Donald Trump. In a November 10, 2020, text message, he called Trump’s decision not to attend Biden’s inauguration “hard to believe,” “so destructive,” and “disgusting.” He was more broadly critical in a January 4, 2021, text message to his staff. “There isn’t really an upside to Trump,” he said, describing “the last four years” as “a disaster.” Carlson was eager for a change: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately.” The day after the January 6 Capitol riot by Trump supporters, Carlson privately called him “a demonic force” and “a destroyer.”
The only difference is that I am not afraid to say this in public.
7. Joe McCarthy was a Wisconsin senator, so I guess it’s no surprise that the new McCarthyism is being spearheaded by another Wisconsin politician:
A US congressional committee is investigating a handful of venture capital firms for their investment in Chinese technology companies, the latest sign of Washington’s increasing scrutiny of American funds suspected of helping develop sensitive industries in China.
Investments by GGV Capital, GSR Ventures, Walden International and Qualcomm Ventures are being probed by the House select committee on China, led by Wisconsin Republican Michael Gallagher. The firms didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Remember when they said we don’t hate the Chinese people, just their government? Now all 1.4 billion Chinese are suspect:
“There’s no such thing as a truly private entity in China,” Gallagher told reporters Wednesday. “Democrats and Republicans agree that we don’t want to be fueling our own destruction, helping the Chinese perfect systems designed to kill Americans in future conflicts or helping to perfect an Orwellian techno-totalitarian surveillance state that’s being used to commit genocide.”
8. The Economist has a good article on scientific fraud:
For example, critically ill patients undergoing surgery were once sometimes given starch infusions to boost their blood pressure. This was based in part on seven now discredited studies by Joachim Boldt, a German anaesthesiologist. A revised round-up of the evidence published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in 2013, after his fabrications were discovered, concluded that giving starch infusions in these circumstances caused kidney damage and sometimes killed people.
Likewise, for more than a decade cardiac patients in Europe were given beta-blockers before surgery, with the intention of reducing heart attacks and strokes—a practice that rested on a study from 2009 which was eventually determined to have been based, at least in part, on fabricated data. By one estimate, this approach may have caused 10,000 deaths a year in Britain alone. And a systematic review showing that infusion of a high-dose sugar solution reduces mortality after head injury was retracted after an investigation failed to find evidence that any of the trials included in it, which were all ascribed to the same researcher, had actually taken place.
9. I opposed Brexit. It seems the British public is coming around to the same opinion. Here’s The Economist:
Politics is routinely dominated by the short run: in-party scraps; looming by-elections. But quietly shifting and longer-term trends risk being neglected. One such is the rise of disillusion with Brexit. Polls from YouGov, Ipsos and NatCen Social Research all find that sizeable majorities of Britons now regret the decision to leave the European Union. The latest numbers show a margin as wide as 60-40% for those wishing that Britain had remained in the eu, compared with the 52-48% vote to leave in June 2016.
10. It’s always amusing to see people try to promote their candidate using fascist iconography.
Tags:
24. July 2023 at 07:02
“opponents of zero-sum thinking are not viewed as ‘rare’ contrarians”
Did you intend to type “now” instead of “not”?
24. July 2023 at 08:15
Thanks, I fixed it.
24. July 2023 at 10:09
1. People went from predicting a mass exodus of Twitter users or the website crashing to tweeting about the “disastrous handling of Twitter.” #RevealedPreference #NetworkEffect
24. July 2023 at 15:10
8. If you are interested in the general topic, an excellent book is Ending Medical Reversal by Vinayak K Prasad & Adam S. Cifu. The problem is more refusal to keep up with research than outright fraud.
25. July 2023 at 00:32
Remember when they said we don’t hate the Chinese people, just their government? Now all 1.4 billion Chinese are suspect:
“There’s no such thing as a truly private entity in China,”–SS
I don’t hate anybody.
And this statement may be mildly false; there are small private outfits in China probably sans the internal CCP committees and mandatory CCP board seats.
But any large enterprise in China is an accessory to the CCP. Not only that, all Chinese citizens are expected to act as eyes and ears of the state, under Chinese law.
Not doubt, Russians are much the same. If a Russian returns from US to Moscow, she/he will be debriefed. The middle-finger option to the state…well, is not an option.
So it goes.
25. July 2023 at 11:59
Partisanship, as opposed to say, policy, makes people stupid in the same way that team sporting rivalry often makes people stupid. Hence the concept of the ‘one-eyed’ supporter, who cannot see umpiring decisions that favour his team or that do not favour his team’s rivals. I think of both partisanship and team sport as modern forms of tribal warfare, in which it makes sense for people to become irrational before trying to kill other humans.
Janan Ganesh is the only columnist I read (and worth reading) in the FT.
26. July 2023 at 14:52
1.
I’m making the obvious contrarian argument here:
Elon Musk has not changed his strategy. He has always been extremely partisan. And this is a good thing.
SpaceX is largely based on his absurd partisan view that his idea of space travel to Mars is realistic, possible, and cost-covering. And guess what, he was right.
Tesla is based on his partisan assumption that the e-car is the next big thing. He realized that before most other people.
The Twitter statement is itself partisan and too blind to see this simple truth.
Perhaps both sides should leave partisan politics out of it. But ultimately, of course, it’s difficult to impossible for Musk to separate this. Firstly, because it is hardly possible for him subjectively, and secondly, because it is difficult objectively.
Take Scott as an example. Scott has a hard time keeping his libertarian ideology and his love for fellow Chinese people out of everything. He is no Robert Solow, whom everything reminds of procreation, but who somehow managed to keep it out of his papers. At least he said so. I suspect: probably not, probably Solow’s papers were mostly about sex after all.
26. July 2023 at 14:53
#1
I’m making the obvious contrarian argument here:
Elon Musk has not changed his strategy. He has always been extremely partisan. And this is a good thing.
SpaceX is largely based on his absurd partisan view that his idea of space travel to Mars is realistic, possible, and cost-covering. And guess what, he was right.
Tesla is based on his partisan assumption that the e-car is the next big thing. He realized that before most other people.
The Twitter statement is itself partisan and too blind to see this simple truth.
Perhaps both sides should leave partisan politics out of it. But ultimately, of course, it’s difficult to impossible for Musk to separate this. Firstly, because it is hardly possible for him subjectively, and secondly, because it is difficult objectively.
Take Scott as an example. Scott has a hard time keeping his libertarian ideology and his love for fellow Chinese people out of everything. He is no Robert Solow, whom everything reminds of procreation, but who somehow managed to keep it out of his papers. At least he said so. I suspect: probably not, probably Solow’s papers were mostly about s** after all.
28. July 2023 at 10:23
Christian, regarding space travel to Mars, do you make a wager on that? When do you think Musk will land the first living humans on Mars successfully (i.e. not dead on impact)? Pick a date and I might be up for taking the other end of that bet. Then we can discuss a dollar amount.