Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Jun 11, 2021 13 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Biden's defeat of Trump has led to a sharp rebound in opinions of the U.S. among developed countries.
Confidence in Biden vs. confidence in Trump.

Simply astounding.
Confidence in U.S. democracy has fallen precipitously. A majority say the U.S. used to be a good example of democracy, but has not been a good example in recent years.
Biden and Merkel inspire high confidence in developed countries, while Xi and Putin get lower marks.
Of all developed countries, the U.S. is the least popular in New Zealand, with Australia also ambivalent.
It's interesting to compare opinions of the U.S. in 2021 to opinions in 2000.

South Korea and Spain are significantly MORE favorable to the U.S. now than they were under Clinton, while Germany and the UK are significantly less favorable.
The biggest fans of the U.S. political system are South Korea, Greece, Italy, Japan and Taiwan.
But by the same token, essentially nobody says the U.S. is a good model of democracy now.
And most countries say the U.S. doesn't consider their interests when making foreign policy.

(This seems like an important area for improvement!)
Still, most countries say the U.S. is at least a "somewhat reliable" partner.
The only rich country among those surveyed that has high trust in Xi Jinping is Singapore. Greece and Singapore both have fairly high confidence in Putin.
What's more, Biden's specific foreign policies are incredibly popular across the board.
Anyway, the original source is here.

For my part, I really wish they'd do more of these surveys in DEVELOPING countries, not just developed ones!!

(end)

pewresearch.org/global/2021/06…

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More from @Noahpinion

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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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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Sep 1
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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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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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.
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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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