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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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24 Oct, 5 tweets, 3 min read
Pro-business ideology will be more effective if it recognizes that pro-market and pro-business are not the same thing.

Economics will gain more credibility if people understand that it's not propaganda for pro-business interests.
A good example of the difference between pro-business and pro-market is this paper by @arvindsubraman and @rodrikdani. They argue that pro-business policies of the 80s were more important than pro-market reforms of the 90s in driving India's growth surge.

imf.org/External/Pubs/…
And @jamesykwak's book "Economism" gives a good rundown of how pro-market economic theories were always a rather poor tool for advancing pro-business ideology.

amazon.com/Economism-Bad-…
Of course, economics is not pro-market in general either. A lot of economics deals with market failures and how to correct them.

And sometimes, correcting market failures might involve pro-business policies!

lse.ac.uk/international-…
So:

1. Econ isn't inherently pro-business or pro-market

2. Pro-business and pro-market ideas are very different, and sometimes they conflict

3. Sometimes the right policy is neither pro-business *nor* pro-market. Sometimes it's one or the other, and sometimes it's both.

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
25 Oct
It's very hard to have a nice, civil discussion with a friend on Twitter without randos jumping in and insulting both participants and trying to make it into some sort of dunk contest.
Not only does this disrupt the discussion, and not only does this convince bystanders that they're witnessing a fight rather than a pleasant chat, but it also gives the false impression that one's interlocutor has deliberately summoned a gang of attack trolls.
For example, yesterday @tylercowen had a very nice chat about minimum wage policy. But as you can see from the replies to our tweets, a number of people jumped in on both sides to insult us. It was very unhelpful.

Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
23 Oct
I think people naturally trust big media outlets less when there are more small outlets (incl. Twitter accounts) to argue with them. Before, people naturally trusted the NYT because they didn't read 100 people shouting "The NYT sucks!" in response to every article.
I also think that in a highly fragmented, nationalized media marketplace, each outlet has an incentive to serve a narrow but loyal customer base, and that's probably going to make them less trustworthy to the people outside that narrow customer base.
Happily, this doesn't apply to Bloomberg nearly as much, because our terminal business insulates us to a large degree from the market incentive to cater to a narrow slice of society. (Yay my company! The most trusted name in news! Hehe)
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
22 Oct
1/In today's @bopinion post, I discuss the challenge from the Chinese model of political economy.

Has China found a more effective way to run a country? (Maybe.)

And if so, what should we do about it? (Steal their best ideas and discard the rest.)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/China's rapid growth is not, by itself, a reason to think the Chinese model is superior to the American model.

After all, China is still much poorer than the U.S. It's a lot easier to grow fast from a low base -- just build a lot of stuff and copy foreign technology...
3/But in recent years, China has advanced to the technological frontier in many areas. That's something few middle-income countries are capable of doing.

For example, China is clearly in the top rank of nations when it comes to A.I. technology.

nature.com/articles/d4158…
Read 23 tweets
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.
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.
Read 18 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
20 Oct
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…
Read 10 tweets

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