Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
Writes about economics, posts about rabbits. For serious opinions/analysis, read my blog: https://t.co/KfUxUlCYPz
Chris Bugbee Profile picture Neapolitan Profile picture eDo Profile picture Sue Strong @strong_sue@mastodon.sdf.org 🇺🇦 Profile picture George Pastrana Profile picture 198 subscribed
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.
Jul 28, 2023 9 tweets 4 min read
The idea that America is unpopular all over the world is just total horseshit...America is extremely popular. https://t.co/TmXERnKjHR https://t.co/VspP80MOPptwitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Image India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Mexico all love America.

America is even more popular in the Global South than in the Global North. Image
Jul 15, 2023 9 tweets 2 min read
"Let's help poor Black kids by just not teaching anyone math" is the most fucking boneheaded idea I've ever heard. Those kids are behind in math because they get less parental help. And now you're going to give them less help at school, too? Fucking brain-dead!!! The whole idea of public education is that the state can compensate for the inequality of parental resources and level the playing field somewhat.

Eliminating math courses doesn't level the playing field -- it tilts it even more toward kids whose parents teach them math!!!
Jul 13, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
For 20 years, China used financial repression to force working-class savers to subsidize a crap-ton of investment, only some of which benefitted those savers. At the same time, it let people ignore the financial repression by pretending their apartments would make them rich. Now the apartment bubble has burst and no matter whether anyone realizes the losses right away or not, everyone now realize their apartments are NOT going to make them rich.
Jul 5, 2023 11 tweets 3 min read
I've seen 4 eras of SF tech people:

Era 1 (2000s): hoodie-wearing utopians who wanted to unite all humanity through social media and raves

Era 2 (2010s): hard-charging refugees from the finance bust who were always trying to sell you on their mobile app startup Era 3 (2020-2021): really creepy but incredibly rich crypto people who always seemed a little like spies

Era 4 (2022-present): mildly conservative but extremely laid-back AI nerds
Jun 16, 2023 20 tweets 13 min read
1/In this thread, I will address this rather absurd thread of allegations by @jvtklooster, a professor of political economy at the University of Amsterdam. 2/A week ago, @jvtklooster called my post about price controls a "silly polemic", lifting a quote from the post. I was rightfully annoyed at this characterization. A week later, @jvtklooster writes that only now has he "dug into" the work of mine that he insulted a week ago! ImageImage
Jun 7, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
One out of every 30 deaths in Canada, and one out of every 22 deaths in the Netherlands, is a medically assisted suicide.

reuters.com/world/americas… They euthanized a guy for HEARING LOSS

apnews.com/article/covid-…
Jun 6, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
One big problem with this story is that the papers that people claim support the "greedflation" narrative do nothing of the kind, as @MattBruenig explains here:

mattbruenig.com/2023/05/04/mor… As far as I can tell, "greedflation" proponents seized on several different papers, all of which tell very *different* stories about inflation, and two of which disavow the idea of "greedflation", as supporting their narrative, and just...ran with that.
Jun 5, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Which of these Chinese dynasties was the best? Which of these Chinese dynasties was the best?