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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
@Noahpinion
Aug 26, 2019 • 15 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
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Today's @bopinion post is about Mexico.

Mexico is doing a lot better economically than Americans might realize.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/Economists usually think of growth as exponential. In Mexico, it looks more like a straight line.

That's not great...but it's not terrible either.
3/Mexico is what the World Bank calls an "upper middle class" country.
worldpopulationreview.com/countries/midd…

It's per capita GDP (PPP) is over $20,000, putting it ahead of Argentina, and over 4 times as rich as, say, Bangladesh.
4/And Mexico's inequality is pretty bad, but it's been getting less bad.
5/But here's why Mexico's recent performance is actually pretty impressive - it comes IN SPITE of the country's once-mighty oil industry being in a death spiral.

Mexico's oil production peaked and went into steep decline since 2006, thanks to its biggest oil field running out.
6/When oil runs out, you have to switch to manufacturing and services.

That's much easier said than done.

But Mexico has been doing it!!
7/Mexico has more than doubled the percent of its GDP that it spends on education since the 1990s. And its literacy rate has climbed to essentially universal literacy.
8/Thanks to productivity improvements in Mexico and cost increases elsewhere, Mexican manufacturing is now one of the world's most competitive.

bcg.com/publications/2…
9/And foreign direct investment is pouring in.
10/Meanwhile, even as oil production has fallen by half, Mexico's exports - 90% of which are now manufactured goods - have continued to soar.
11/And we're not talking about toys and clothing. We're talking about electronics and cars. High-tech, high-value stuff!
12/No wonder Mexicans are, on net, leaving the U.S. for Mexico.
13/Of course, I don't want to be unrealistic here. Mexico still has huge challenges, including:
1. the Drug War
2. building global brands
3. still-high inequality
14/But in general, Mexico is doing much better than Americans may realize. It's not a basket case - it's an up-and-coming industrial powerhouse.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
(sorry, should be "upper middle income")

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Nov 25
This is a very subtle and interesting question. It seems clear that right-wing interest in personal health is a response to the terrible health of non-college Americans. And the rightists are trying to invent an alternative approach that resists the hegemony of academia.
The fact is, college-educated Americans tend to be hypocritical about health. They watch what they eat, get lots of exercise, and try to eat "organic", but they preach fat acceptance and a disability-based approach to poor health. Rightists don't know how to deal with that.
In fact, this is representative of a broader pattern. College-educated progressives get married and stay marriage, but denigrate the idea of marriage. They work hard but denigrate the idea of hard work. Their personal success is based on rampant, galloping hypocrisy.
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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Oct 20
1/Here's something a lot of people I talk to don't understand about Japanese urbanism, and why Japanese cities are so special. Image
2/Japanese cities feel different than big, dense cities elsewhere -- NYC, London, and Paris, but also other Asian cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore.

There are many reasons for this, but today I'll focus on one: Zakkyo buildings. Image
3/When many people think of "mixed-use development", they think of stores on the first floor, apartments on the higher floors. This is sometimes called "shop-top housing" or "over-store apartments".

This is how most cities in the world do mixed-use development. Image
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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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This will be a running thread of observations from my trip to Poland!
Most European apartment buildings don't look any better than an American 5-over-1. But people like them more, because:

1. "Thing, Europe! 😃"

2. They have shops on the first floor and you can walk in and out on the street -- i.e. the neighborhood is walkable. Image
One thing you see a lot of here are Polish flags. There's so much red and white around here it feels like I'm back at Stanford!
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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Jul 28
1/Here's something I've been wondering about recently: How did the U.S. miss the battery revolution?

With every other technological revolution, we anticipated it well in advance, and as a result we were the first -- or one of the first -- to take advantage of it.
2/The U.S. invented the computer, the internet, and modern AI. On all three of those, we were (or are) the leading nation. We talked ad infinitum about the benefits of those digital technologies long before they became a reality, allowing us to shape their eventual use.
3/We did the Human Genome Project. We invented mRNA vaccines. We did most of the research that drove down the costs of solar power. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House more than 30 years before it became economical.
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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Jun 10
Russia's empire is a nested hierarchy. At the center is Moscow. Under them are mid-tier Russian cities and rural areas, then subject peoples like the Buryats, Sakha, and these African folks.

The closer you are to the center, the less fighting you do, and the more money you get. Image
In fact, the circles of Russian hierarchy don't stop at Moscow. There are privileged subgroups of Muscovites, then more privileged groups inside that circle, all the way up to the Tsar himself.

The principle still holds: Closer to the center = less fighting, more money.
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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Jun 3
In fact, it's not law even now. This executive order is (sadly) AGAINST the law and will probably be struck down, because our asylum law says we can't discriminate against asylum claimants for crossing the border illegally. That law needs to be changed by Congress.
The problem is that the U.S. is a party to the 1967 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, which says that your asylum system can't discriminate against people for being in the country illegally. We wrote our domestic law to comply with that treaty.
The non-discrimination provision is obviously stupid, so what we need to do is flout the 1967 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, and simply amend our domestic law to say "You can't claim asylum if you crossed illegally". But this would require an act of Congress.
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