I wrote about the unexpected success of economic sanctions against Putin — unexpected both in degree and in kind. Which adds to my puzzlement at the weird aversion much of the foreign-policy commentariat seems to have to success 1/ nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opi…
I'm seeing more and more pieces that seem weirdly distressed, even panicked, by the possibility that Ukraine will win a clear military victory. Not my usual arena, but I have a guess about what's going on 2/
It looks to me as if many foreign-policy pundits suffer from the same delusions that afflicted many "centrist" domestic pundits until recently (and still does, for a few): refusal to acknowledge that we're not dealing with politics as usual 3/
For years, many of my pundit colleagues kept wanting to believe that the GOP was still a normal political party; bipartisanship was their holy grail, and anyone pointing out right-wing radicalization was "shrill" 4/
The equivalent in foreign affairs, I'd suggest, is wanting to see Putin's Russia as a normal power, respecting the kinds of limits — e.g., no outright wars of conquest — that were pretty much universally enforced under the Pax Americana 5/
Given that view, they want to give Putin an out, letting him save face and avoid humiliating defeat; the idea is that he will henceforth behave himself. Or as Susan Collins might say, that he will have learned his lesson 6/
But of course that's not what Putin or Putinism is. We're talking about an imperialist, authoritarian regime that is also at the center of a global anti-democratic, ethnonationalist movement. If he gets away with this, he and similar-minded people will just be encouraged 7/
So it's very much in the interest of allies of democracy to see Putin defeated, clearly and unmistakably — to provide an object lesson that wars of aggression don't pay, and also to demonstrate that unfree societies are weaker, not stronger, than democracies 8/
Concretely: Why is Putin entitled to keep the territory he seized in 2014? As a practical matter, regaining all that territory, Crimea in particular, may be unrealistic — although predictions from military "realists" haven't been great lately. 9/
But in principle, we should want to send the message that military conquest will not stand. And the desire to make nice with war criminals and would-be conquerors seems just bizarre 10/
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With the recent rise in consumer sentiment, time to revisit this excellent Briefing Book paper. On reflection, I'd do it a bit differently; same basic conclusion, but I think partisan asymmetry explains even more of the remaining low numbers 1/ briefingbook.info/p/asymmetric-a…
The Michigan sentiment index has two components: current conditions and expectations. It's kind of legitimate to have partisan diffs on expectations, if you think your party has better policies. It's the gap on current conditions that's startling 2/
Michigan doesn't provide partisan breakdowns every month until 2017 (hence the limited range of that chart). A quick and dirty approach is to use annual averages, with whatever months they do provide for each year, which lets us push back to 2006 3/
Recent economic news has been extremely good. But there's a strange meme among some D consultants that Biden shouldn't boast about it, because it seems out of touch — that people aren't feeling the good economy. But they are! 1/
The venerable Michigan survey has rocketed up lately 2/
It's true that consumer sentiment is still weaker than you might expect given the economic numbers. But that's largely partisanship. Using Civiqs numbers, Democrats have more or less fully accepted the good news 3/
Immigration is looming larger in the campaign, partly because it's becoming harder for Republicans to run against Biden on the economy. But there's a strong case that immigration has been a key part of Biden's economic success 1/
Inflation has come down so easily in part because of strong labor force growth. How much of that growth can be attributed to foreign-born workers? All of it 2/
Some people might look at that and say that foreigners have stolen 3 million jobs from Americans. But we have full employment, indeed a very tight labor market. Look at what the Conference Board survey says 3/
A tale of two inflation measures. Some analysts are still citing the blue line, when they should be citing the red line. This is professional malpractice 1/
Using annual core CPI puts you way behind the curve, for 2 reasons. First, annual: even core CPI was 4.6 in the first half of 2023, 3.2 in the second half. Second, known lags in official shelter prices lagging far behind market rents 2/
So annual CPI creates a spurious impression of stubborn inflation, with a difficult last mile to cover. PCE puts a lower weight on shelter, and on a shorter-term basis tells us that we've already traveled that last mile 3/
The debate over Fed policy, especially about when to start cutting rates, seems to have become disconnected from the reality of rapid disinflation. Thinking about it reminded me of ... an experience I once had on a cycling trip 1/
In 2015, I think, I went on a week-long cycling tour in Vermont. I was in pretty good shape, but hadn't done a trip like that for a while, and was slightly worried about my stamina 2/
On the second day, I was getting close to what the notes from Discovery Tours said was a major climb. As I approached, there were a series of short, sharp uphills, and I thought "if this is the approach, the real thing must be really hard" 3/
Debates about the causes of inflation and disinflation are getting strangely tangled, partly because some people don't seem to recognize that both aggregate demand and aggregate supply can shift. Here, using standard textbook pictures, is what I think happened 1/
During the pandemic and early aftermath, we had a lot of fiscal stimulus. This sustained growth and employment despite an adverse supply shock, but doing so involved a temporary surge in inflation. Then the supply shock reversed, and we got immaculate disinflation 2/
Doing it this way avoided one risk — long-term scarring from a persistently depressed economy — while running another — inflation getting entrenched. Given how things have actually turned out, it seems obvious that policymakers made the right call 3/