More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

@Noahpinion

Jan 22

The critics of NATO expansion are overplaying their hand. We DID leave Russia a sphere of influence: Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Current and recent events are just the verification of that new sphere-of-influence equilibrium.

You can argue that we shouldn't have included the Baltics -- that all Soviet successor states should have been left within Russia's sphere of influence (though this would have sucked for the Baltics obviously).

But Poland? Romania? No, those were always going to join the West.

Russia invading Ukraine and Georgia and sending troops to Belarus and Kazakhstan is just the inevitable confirmation of the resolution of the Cold War -- that Europe gets to expand to include the old Warsaw Pact, but (mostly) not the old Soviet Union.

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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

@Noahpinion

Jan 18

At age 6 I was obsessed with the idea that nuclear disarmament could be achieved by having Godzilla eat all the nuclear warheads.

Crazy thing is that I didn't even think of using Godzilla to make nuclear power more sustainable by feeding him all the radioactive waste.

I think growing up in a house with many pets makes one perceive any animal, even an imaginary 400-foot-tall fire-breathing monster, as a potential pet

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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

@Noahpinion

Jan 17

@LittleKeegs0

@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 The story since the 70s has been:
* Wages ⬆️ a little
* Hourly comp ⬆️ more
* Working hours ⬇️, so individual annual earnings only ⬆️ a little
* Govt benefits & investment income⬆️ so individual income ⬆️
* # of workers/household went up so household income ⬆️ a lot

@LittleKeegs0

@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 So overall story: Your average worker is consuming a lot more and working a lot fewer hours, but now women have jobs

@LittleKeegs0

@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 This is why much of progressive policy is now focused on taxing the rich to pay for child care...

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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

@Noahpinion

Jan 13

A graph of home affordability in the U.S.

The ratio of median home price to median personal income has increased since 1980, but only by about 15%.

Here you can see median home price and median income side by side, relative to their 1980s levels.

Home prices and incomes track each other very well until around 2003, then diverge, then come back again, then diverge a bit after 2012.

But also note that the type of homes people have been buying have not stayed constant. The median size of a single-family house, for example, has increased by about 13% since 2000.

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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇

@Noahpinion

Jan 13

"Americans don't have health care" is one of those things that, if you said it in real life, would cause people to look at you as if you were crazy, but which 1000 people will dogpile you on Twitter if you contradict

The truth is that Americans use lots and lots of health care, they just pay an ungodly obscene amount for it.

And this is not a technical or cute distinction; by far the biggest problem with American health care is simply its high cost, meaning that cost control measures are the most important policy that we need in order to fix the system.

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