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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
Writes about economics, posts about rabbits. For serious opinions/analysis, read my blog: https://t.co/KfUxUlCYPz (Avatar = Utsumi Yukie from Battle Royale)
210 subscribers
Nov 25 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Oct 20 • 33 tweets • 12 min read
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
Sep 1 • 38 tweets • 12 min read
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
Jul 28 • 24 tweets • 6 min read
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.
Jun 10 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
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.
Jun 3 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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.
May 7 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
I'm incredibly bored of talking about the Palestine protests, but here are some results from the recent Generation Lab survey.

Key fact #1: College students just don't care about the Palestine issue that much.

axios.com/2024/05/07/pol…
Image About 8% of students have participated in the protests on one side or the other. That's a substantial number, but less than the 21% who joined BLM protests in May/June 2020 (and the latter were pretty much all on one side of the issue).

collegepulse.com/blog/8-in-10-c…
Image
May 2 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
The Palestine protesters have created a dream Palestine that is almost entirely disconnected from the real place, in which all of their fantasies of a perfect society are realized.

This is a bit like what weebs do with Japan. FromTheRiverToTheSeaboos
Mar 24 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Comparisons between the Cultural Revolution and the Woke Era get laughed at. The Woke Era didn't use violence, of course. But the *motivation* of people wanting to overturn social hierarchies, especially students wanting to overturn academic hierarchies, is recognizably similar. In 2010s America, there was a widespread desire to overturn local social hierarchies -- the classroom authority of teachers and professors, the cultural power of entertainment stars, the authority of nonprofit execs and heads of civic organizations.
Jan 19 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Here are some countries that did catch up to other countries.

Poland caught up to Portugal: Image South Korea caught up to Japan: Image
Jan 10 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
This thread asks how we should deal with inborn inequality, and concludes that the best solution is noblesse oblige.

I think the best solution is public goods. Public goods have two advantages:

1. They engender material equality more efficiently than any other economic intervention, and

2. They create an equality of respect, through the habit of mutual use.
Dec 7, 2023 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
1/Here's a thread in which the Economist's Mike Bird tries to rebut my recent post about decoupling. I think this thread is useful for understanding why the doubters are making the mistakes that they're making.

Let's go through it! 2/Here was my original post. I've updated it with a response at the bottom.

noahpinion.blog/p/stop-saying-…
Nov 20, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Illegal immigration went into reverse for over a decade, but as of 2021 it's positive again.

pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…
Image Just over 1 out of 5 U.S. immigrants are unauthorized, according to Census data. Image
Oct 31, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The reason Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza is bad isn't because civilian casualties are never acceptable when fighting against evil, but because bombing Gaza seems like it will not actually do much to eliminate Hamas, and will simply kill civilians for no purpose. "The Allies leveled German cities, Hamas are as bad as Nazis, thus it's OK to level Gaza" ignores the fact that even if strategic bombing had been as effective as people thought (note: it wasn't), leveling Gaza will not produce a WW2-like outcome.
Oct 18, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I basically missed this whole news cycle.

Are you telling me that the front page of the New York Times reported that Israel bombed a hospital and killed 500 kids, and it turned out that what actually happened was that an Islamic Jihad rocket fell on a parking lot??? I feel like I really lucked out by being too busy to read Twitter today 😅
Oct 14, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
If this is true, it's evidence for the "Pax Americana is failing but hasn't completely failed yet" perspective. If Hamas thought Iran wouldn't be scared of America, it means American power isn't as much of a deterrent as it once was. But if America's response successfully scared Iran, it means there is still some deterrence there.
Oct 8, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The far left dreams of nothing but power. Their ideology is utterly plastic, and malleable; a tool to be modified or discarded at will. They are obsessed with power -- it's their constant daydream, their entire vision of the world, the very air they breathe. This is slightly different than the far right, btw. The far right dreams of cruelty -- of visiting pain on those they hate. The far left sees cruelty primarily as a tool of gaining and asserting power. It's a subtle distinction, I admit.
Oct 1, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
China is utter screwing over small indebted poor countries by refusing to take a haircut on the money they loaned them, which thus makes it very difficult for anyone else to lend to those countries or bail them out.

Champion of the Global South, LOL

economist.com/finance-and-ec… Oh and of course China loaned the small poor countries all that money so they could use it to *pay Chinese companies* to build economically non-viable infrastructure projects designed by those same Chinese companies!
Sep 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
As Ursula K. LeGuin noted in The Dispossessed, every society has a revolutionary ideology that serves as a latent opposition, usually lying submerged and occasionally bursting into the light, seemingly out of nowhere. In most of Europe and the Eastern part of the U.S., that latent revolutionary ideology has always been some form of socialism. In the Western part of the U.S., it's anarchism. This is the key to understanding what's happening on the West Coast in recent years.
Sep 11, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The problem is not that elites refuse to tell working-class people to get married, get in shape, eat healthy, etc.

It's that there's no forum for them to do so. Elites just never encounter the working class except when they're buying stuff. This is why I do think some nostalgia for the age of widespread churchgoing is appropriate. Churches were a forum for class-mixing, allowing elites to pass their values directly to the working class through personal interaction. Now they only meet at Olive Garden.
Sep 11, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The big irony of NATO expansion is that it prevents Poland from jumping into the war on Ukraine's side, because Russian strikes would then trigger Article 5. Thus, NATO expansion ultimately helped Russia in Ukraine. If Ukraine supported by the West can fight Russia to a standstill or better, Ukraine + Poland would have just stomped Putin's army.