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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
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.
The advantage of this organizational structure is that the more power you have, the less likely you are to ever suffer negative consequences from adverse shocks or bad decisions. All the losses from failed wars, bad economic decisions, etc. get taken by the less powerful.
Read 16 tweets
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.
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
May 7
I'm incredibly bored of talking about the Palestine protests, but here are some results from the recent Generation Lab survey.

Key fact #1: College students just don't care about the Palestine issue that much.

axios.com/2024/05/07/pol…
Image
About 8% of students have participated in the protests on one side or the other. That's a substantial number, but less than the 21% who joined BLM protests in May/June 2020 (and the latter were pretty much all on one side of the issue).

collegepulse.com/blog/8-in-10-c…
Image
Only about 1/8 of students blame Biden for the conflict. 34% blame Hamas, and 31% blame either Israel in general or Netanyahu specifically. Image
Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
May 2
The Palestine protesters have created a dream Palestine that is almost entirely disconnected from the real place, in which all of their fantasies of a perfect society are realized.

This is a bit like what weebs do with Japan.
FromTheRiverToTheSeaboos
Most weebs don't actually want to live in Japan. They want to live in a local subculture of their own creation, whose values are based on gentleness and romance -- the ideals that attracted them to Japanese fantasies and made those fantasies resonate.

noahpinion.blog/p/weebs
Read 9 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
Mar 24
Comparisons between the Cultural Revolution and the Woke Era get laughed at. The Woke Era didn't use violence, of course. But the *motivation* of people wanting to overturn social hierarchies, especially students wanting to overturn academic hierarchies, is recognizably similar.
In 2010s America, there was a widespread desire to overturn local social hierarchies -- the classroom authority of teachers and professors, the cultural power of entertainment stars, the authority of nonprofit execs and heads of civic organizations.
In 1960s China, overturning local hierarchies happened via physical mob violence. In 2010, it happened through online mobs destroying people's reputations on social media. Obviously, the second is far preferable to the first. This is why economic development is good!
Read 10 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
Jan 19
Here are some countries that did catch up to other countries.

Poland caught up to Portugal: Image
South Korea caught up to Japan: Image
Ireland caught up to the UK

(graph ends before major Irish tax shenanigans begin) Image
Read 13 tweets

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