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𝕆𝕝𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕣 𝔹𝕖𝕚𝕘𝕖

@oliverbeige

Mar 8

That Ukraine thing. I have to admit that I had little to say about the topic, and I didn't pay much attention to frontline shifts or photo-ops in fatigues. The flag-waving and treating the war as some kind of real-life video game was more than a bit unseemly. That said... /1

It was and should've been very clear to anyone with a passing knowledge of strategy that by the time Ukraine switched from a mobile, asymmetric warfare to a grinding trench war of attrition against a resource rich hegemonial power in Nov 2022 its chances of winning evaporated. /2

It's pretty much the last thing one should do in an asymmetric scenario. It still boggles the mind that a major power like the US would misjudge the situation so badly. There was, to stay in the timeframe, the same strategic incompetence on display as during the Corona crisis. /3

Read 21 tweets

𝕆𝕝𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕣 𝔹𝕖𝕚𝕘𝕖

@oliverbeige

Feb 15

There seems to be some trouble understanding the new "transactional" geopolitical stance of the US by those not conversant in politics, strategy, or English. The fundamental idea of a transaction is that it's entered voluntarily and based on an expectation of mutual benefit. /1

If that mutual expectation is no longer given, the transaction is subject to termination or renegotiation, typically at the instigation of the party that no longer benefits – which can also be both parties. /2

An important element to any negotiation is the best available outside option. Beside negotiation skills, divergence in outside options is the key determining factor for how mutually created benefits are divided between parties. /3

Read 7 tweets

𝕆𝕝𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕣 𝔹𝕖𝕚𝕘𝕖

@oliverbeige

Feb 2

I'm mildly amused about the commentariat drawing up Harberger triangles from Econ 101 to "show" that Trump's tariffs are "bad for the economy". That's literally demonstrating that they haven't learned anything new over the last 30 years – or even the last five. /1

Trump has been pretty blunt that he sees the US offshoring its extraction and manufacturing base (its industry for short) as a fatal strategic blunder that sits at the heart of its declining role in the global theater, and that he intends to reverse this. /2

A strategic blunder shared among all administrations of the Reagan-to-Obama era, and the oft-forgotten key element of Trump's political ascendancy was that he pushed the Republican "country club" establishment aside before he did the same with the Democrats. /3

Read 16 tweets

𝕆𝕝𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕣 𝔹𝕖𝕚𝕘𝕖

@oliverbeige

Dec 6, 2024

As a pretty good rule of thumb, you can think of the political travails of most Western economies as a rearguard of an increasingly washed-out center against encroaching, increasingly doctrinary challenges from left and right, with the doctrinary left holding a terrain advantage.

The end of the Hotelling era as I call it, or more popularly, the end of the Merkel era. Left behind by most of the credentialed class that happily moved over to the left-doctrinary camp there's a smattering of hold-outs in the center who cling to dear life for nostalgic reasons.

There's on an abstract level some justification for it. The functioning of a nation state critically depends on an orderly transfer of power, something only a Hotelling competition over the ideological center (the famous "median voter") can provide.

Read 7 tweets

𝕆𝕝𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕣 𝔹𝕖𝕚𝕘𝕖

@oliverbeige

Apr 3, 2024

Emerging public discussion in 🇩🇪 that the internal debate of the German health office @rki_de didn't match the political pronouncements, centering on 17 March 2020 and the call to increase Covid hazard level from "moderate" to "high".

A good opportunity to recapitulate...

...the biggest mistakes that drove the response to the pandemic.

1⃣ The perpetual lack of recognition that we were observing events that had occurred weeks before, and the refusal to account for this.

What exactly happened on March 17? Nothing much in terms of the spread. /2

Like most other countries, Germany started to expand testing rapidly, leading to a massive increase in cumulative numbers, dramatically visualized in dashboards and charts.

But the rate of positive tests (MPC in my nomenclature) stayed mostly the same thru March. /3

Read 44 tweets

𝕆𝕝𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕣 𝔹𝕖𝕚𝕘𝕖

@oliverbeige

Aug 7, 2023

The German health authority @rki_de has evaluated the efficacy of pandemic restrictions it supported, and unsurprisingly it awarded itself a good grade. Overall everything worked out quite well, it says. We looked under the hood and found some surprises. A thread (🇩🇪 below). /1

For starters, in order to show that an intervention had a hypothesized causal effect, a study has to be able to reject the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis generically says that the observed curved, with its ups and downs, was not caused by the hypothesized factors. /2

To reject the null hypothesis in a setting like this, a study has to show two things: that an effect happened after an intervention ("post hoc"), and that it happened because of the intervention ("propter hoc"). The RKI study ignores the first and fails at the second. /3

Read 28 tweets

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