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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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3 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
How Republicans will remember Biden:
They Might Be Giants taught me that this is how people actually remember history.

"I remember the book depository where they crowned the King of Cuba", etc.

"Martin X was mad when they outlawed bell-bottoms/ Ten years later they were sharing the same cell" is a line that hits pretty hard IMO
"Now I'm really big, I'm a big important man/ And the only thing that's different is underneath my hat" is possibly the best one-line summary of the Boomer generation

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
3 Nov
1/Today's Substack post is about Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

There's a mythology that has grown up around these two Presidents, and I aim to bust the myths.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/much-of-what…
2/The myth goes a little bit like this:
3/First, let's bust the myth that Reagan tamed inflation.

It was Paul Volcker who tamed inflation, by raising interest rates.

And who appointed Volcker? Jimmy Carter.

And under which President did Volcker raise interest rates? Again, Jimmy Carter.
Read 21 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
3 Nov
I'm not feeling too great about the 2022 midterms right now, folks.
We're seeing a classic "thermostatic backlash" here, just like when Dems won a bunch of minor elections in 2017. Unless something big changes, a red wave in 2022 seems like a safe prediction at this point.
Also I do not think that Biden passing the BBB bill -- even a version of BBB untouched by Manchin! -- would have much effect on this, any more than the ARRA and ACA helped Dems avoid a wipeout in 2010.
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
1 Nov
I'm reading "The Sleepwalkers". About 10 minutes into the section about European politics, you realize that the question of why these people went to war has an obvious, boring answer: All of these people were just totally batshit insane.
Everyone in Britain, Russia, France and (eventually) Germany was just constantly thinking of how to conquer more of the world -- not even considering the possibility that that might not be a good goal. Very few of them were particularly afraid of war.
When you have a bunch of countries that are used to constantly trying to conquer more territory, and who aren't particularly afraid of war, you will get a war. It's not even a question. Asking "What if they hadn't gone to war?" is like asking "What if my dog hadn't pooped?".
Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
1 Nov
The idea that "Japan is not really democratic" is very wrong. It is. The LDP occasionally does lose power, and doesn't use anti-democratic methods to prevent this. But the LDP is very good at triangulating on policy, so it bounces back.
Giving people a choice doesn't preclude that they'll make the same choice most of the time. The LDP plays the game fairly and usually wins, because it's generally pretty good at giving Japanese people what they want -- or at least, less bad than the opposition.
Most of the countries where one party usually (or always) wins have some sort of authoritarian structure that advantages the dominant party. Japan does not. This book is a little dated, but it basically explains why the LDP usually wins.

amazon.com/Democracy-with…
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
1 Nov
I'll write more about this, but it's easy to simultaneously believe that:

A) IQ is a poor proxy for true mental ability, and

B) CHANGE in IQ due to some environmental influence is a good proxy for CHANGE in true mental ability.

The math of this is pretty simple...
Suppose IQ = The kind of mental ability we actually care about + Some other pointless crap that's specific to the person being measured + random measurement error

Then someone's change in IQ = The change in the kind of mental ability we care about + random measurement error
In other words, even if the "pointless crap" part of IQ is very large, as long as it's specific to the person, it nets out when we look at the individual change.

(Economists recognize this as just a good old fixed-effects model.)
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
31 Oct
Our online replay of the 60s/70s is interesting, because in the original version, the "peace and love" hippies, the angry identitarians, and the leftist radicals all happened basically at the same time. But we got our peace-and-love in the 00s and our angry radicals in the 10s.
In 1969 you could be for "revolution", and that could either mean you wanted to change our culture so people weren't uptight assholes anymore, or it could mean you wanted to bomb bathrooms to bring down capitalism. (Only one of these worked.)
In the 2010s, both radical leftism and radical identitarian movements had a very downbeat, grim attitude (which persists to this day). No beads and flowers. Not much music or art or self-expression. No Age of Aquarius. Not much vision of utopia.
Read 13 tweets

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