Professor @uwpolisci & @UWLaFollette. International political economy & international relations. Policy & politics. Music & sports. Tradeoffs in everything.
3 added to My Authors
Apr 24 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Again: we simply cannot draw general conclusions about "academic freedom" from this sample:
The entire "viewpoint diversity" argument & assumption of a "problem" assumes a "solution" that does not involve imposing political litmus tests on hiring decisions for scholars. That is impossible to do in any way compatible w/ actual serious research.
Look, if you want to publish pieces <just asking questions> about whether we really need elections to be a democracy, b/c you can play clever parlor games w/ our 200+ year old constitution to justify authoritarianism, off you go. But you should be deeply ashamed & embarrassed.
Stop & appreciate, for a moment, how this can be true - the fastest economic growth in 40 years & a totally unprecedented economic crisis recovery - while our national media Narrative™️ has obsessed over 7% inflation & the Carter-esque malaise/failure of the Biden presidency 🤷♂️
Again, tradeoffs in everything. We’ve lost the plot focusing on the negatives relative to the incredibly positive economic news. That we can’t hear the signal amidst the noise or seriously discuss who is responsible for it is a damning indictment of 🇺🇸 political discourse.
The WI GOP starved the state/public institutions of ~$10BB in revenue over the last 12 years, for tax cuts that did ~nothing to 📈 jobs, growth, or real income, & now they want to do it again b/c it's the only play in the playbook
Counterfactuals are hard, & the media never reports what our levels of tax revenue would look like if the pre-2010 trend had continued, but it's important to think about this. A decade+ of massively larger investments in schools, UW, roads, public health, social services, etc.
Jan 25 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
"Was Larry Summers Right All Along?"
🤷♂️🤦♂️
No. Once again. We don't have to do this, folks. Truly, other alternatives, and other people to listen to, are readily available.
👇 Also, once again, <real> income (& consumption) for the average American <has not declined at all> since the pandemic, w/ a large policy-induced spike in the middle of 2021. This lede about reduced spending power is borderline misinformation.
At some point, we need the media to get past its own inflation hysteria and actually do the homework to see if The Narrative™️ accords with the data. We’ve totally, completely, lost the plot on inflation.
Here's monthly job growth since 2002. It took ~10 seconds to find on @stlouisfed. Note also, if you take out the early 2020 crash so you can read the Y-axis: the <fastest> growth in decades.
I mean, sure, except it took <checks notes> ~SEVEN YEARS to fall from its peak during the Great Recession to this level.
Jan 8 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
“Every day is Jan 6”, except the days when we erase the far right authoritarianism from the front pages & hammer the lazy narrative™️ re: the most successful year of macro policy & economic recovery in decades 🤷♂️🤦♂️
It's nearly impossible to overstate how good this news is, or how insane the obsession over modest inflation that may last two years is for such a remarkable & total labor market recovery this time around.
One sh/d be clear: when people like Larry Summers say that fiscal policy was excessive & we should worry more about inflation, what they're also saying is that they want the recovery to look more like the other ones on 👆graph. That's fine, but there are tradeoffs in everything.
Jan 7 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Today is yet another good day to remind ourselves of Adam Przeworski’s classic definition of democracy: “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.”
👇 The media continues to cover the Fidesz on Mendota party as a normal party doing normal things. Normal parties don’t engage in nullification or rewrite the powers of the Governor b/c they lost an election. They don’t put blanket blocks on the Governor staffing the government.
Many serious people like @tzimmer_history & @paulwaldman1 are rightly concerned that the GOP has collapsed into far right authoritarianism, poses a grave threat to 🇺🇸 democracy, & our media doesn't seem up to the task. Apparently, clearly stating that makes some uncomfortable 🤷♂️
No, yet again - & I don’t know how one can say this more clearly - the current inflation neither proves Summers right on outcomes or causal mechanisms. His victory lap & ongoing platforming is totally unwarranted & you should go read @M_C_Klein instead.
👇🎯. It’s amazing how many folks seem unable to understand this.
The <only> solution is major institutional reforms. The GOP isn’t going to moderate w/ hyper-gerrymandered SMDs, a 60-vote/50-state Senate & an EC, nor will a new center-right party emerge
Come on, folks, this is intentionally misleading. The ECB targets 2% HICP and HICP came in at 2.6%, the first time the Eurozone did not massively undershoot its 🎯 in over a decade.
Also, no one wants to hear this, least of all in 🇩🇪, but the ECB is supposed to 🎯 area-wide inflation & if you’re the largest surplus country while others are mired in an unending Great Depression, your national inflation rate systematically needs to exceed the area 🎯 by a lot.
Nov 29, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
When people show you who they, over and over again, believe them
No, it's not the 1970s.
Nov 14, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Sigh. Once again: current inflation is nothing like that of the 1940s or 1970s, & the far more serious threat to progressive politics (not to mention 🇺🇸democracy) is the continued feeding of the media narrative™️ about modest pandemic-related inflation.
If you're truly concerned w/ progressive politics, you don't feed the frenzy of the Carter-esque failure narrative™️ over 6% inflation, ~1/2 of which is a global supply shock. You don't make it your daily business to publicly kneecap Biden in the face of the far right party.