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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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20 Oct, 10 tweets, 5 min read
1/The Middle East is now a big mess of proxy wars, so here's a random thread about that.

With the U.S. having withdrawn, the Syrian Civil War is pretty much a proxy war between Turkey and Russia/Iran:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_ci…
2/The Libyan Civil War is a proxy war between Turkey and Syria on one side, and Egypt, UAE, Sudan, and Russia on the other side.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_Ci…
The Yemeni Civil War is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with a bunch of other random countries declaring their support for one side or another.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Ci…
The Armenia-Azerbaijan War has Turkey backing Azerbaijan, but Russia and Iran (who generally support Armenia more) might jump in on Armenia's side at some point.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nago…
5/Those are the main wars, but there are some other lower-level conflicts. There's still an insurgency in Iraq, for example. A ton of countries, including both the U.S. and Iran, support the Iraqi government.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_ins…
6/Anyway, it sort of looks like the main regional powers are Turkey, Iran, and Russia, while Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt and Qatar are involved to a more minor degree. The U.S. seems to have mostly withdrawn, while Israel doesn't seem to be doing much.
7/Anyway, this seems like a preview of what happens when hegemony disintegrates. The end of Pax Americana (which, in the case of the Middle East, was ended intentionally by America when it invaded Iraq) seems likely to lead to a bunch of jostling, squabbling regional powers.
8/Also, if you're into facile, mostly-wrong historical analogies, it looks like the Middle East's "Wars of Religion" are trailing off, replaced by an era of limited conflict between regional powers, a little like late 1600s/1700s Europe.

noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-mi…
9/At any rate, I hope the Middle East ends its era of war soon, and turns into a stable region focused on prosperity and cooperation! But if that's going to happen, it looks like it's going to have to happen without U.S. help.

(end)
I should mention that one hopeful factor is falling fertility. Total fertility rates have dropped substantially in most Middle Eastern countries, which will mean fewer and fewer surplus young men to fight wars going forward.

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
22 Oct
1/I see that there are still a few people shrieking their heads off about how voting Trump out of office will lead to America being overrun by hordes of migrants.

Luckily, I think the last 4 years have clarified our minds on this issue.

kaus.substack.com/p/the-biden-bo…
2/First of all, you know what HASN'T wrecked our country?

Asylum-seekers from Central America.

You know what HAS wrecked our country?

A plague, which was much worse than it had to be, because we elected a horrible President who focused mainly on cracking down on migrants.
3/Maybe in 2016, with economic recovery underway, it was possible for some people to convince themselves that the biggest threat to our nation was migrant caravans from Honduras.

In 2020, that whole notion just seems laughable.
Read 14 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
21 Oct
1/Today's @bopinion post is about the economic threat from population aging.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/The world's industrialized nations are getting older. That includes China, whose median age was almost equal to that of the U.S. in 2019, and probably passed it up this year.

But Japan is the oldest of them all. Image
3/Some people say that population aging isn't a threat to living standards.

They point out -- correctly -- that Japan's GDP per working-age person has continued to grow at a robust pace. Image
Read 18 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
15 Oct
1/A follow-up thread on Nobel Prizes and Big Questions.

Branko asks: Why don't we award prizes for economists who work on the incredibly important question of how China grew so fast?

It's a very good question...
2/Why DID China develop?

Many people who read the news think that the answer is perfectly obvious. Unfortunately, these "perfectly obvious" answers tend to be quite lacking:

3/Sure, lots of politicians yell about China playing unfair on trade. But does that mean restricting imports makes you grow fast? LOL, no.

Lots of countries restrict imports. Most do not exhibit China-like development.

blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/20…
Read 26 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
14 Oct
1/This thread argues that prizes like the Econ Nobel should be given based on the importance of the questions people *ask*, not on how sure we are that they got good *answers*.

I pretty strongly disagree.
2/We used to award Nobel Prizes to people for thinking long and hard about big issues. For example, Friedrich Hayek, who thought a lot about the causes of economic fluctuations and the political effects of the welfare state, won the prize in 1974.

nobelprize.org/prizes/economi…
3/No one can accuse Hayek of avoiding the big questions.

But did he get any of those big questions right?

One of Hayek's core theses was that countercyclical policy would lead to totalitarianism. This turned out to be completely wrong.
Read 20 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
14 Oct
1/People sometimes ask me how I form my ideas about the world! Well, folks, there are basically two ingredients: Song lyrics, and data.

Just read a bunch of papers and articles and stuff, and try to relate it to song lyrics.
2/Let's go through an example: How the song "Kyoto", by Phoebe Bridgers, illustrates some of the problems with the American development model (infrastructure, education, and health).

3/We start the song in Japan, where the narrator (presumably, Phoebe herself) is utterly uninterested in the country or its culture, but finds bullet trains, pay phones (!!), and chain convenience stores pretty convenient. Image
Read 16 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
13 Oct
1/Buildings in San Francisco that look like sand-colored rectangles: A thread
2/Let's start with Market Center, a tower complex that looks like it was designed by a 6-year-old boy learning to use the rectangle tool in Microsoft Paint:
3/Or 525 Market Street, which looks like the same kid's drawing, but several minutes later
Read 20 tweets

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