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Mark Copelovitch Profile picture
Mark Copelovitch
@mcopelov
Professor @uwpolisci @UWLaFollette @ESatUWMadison. Jean Monnet Chair: EU & the Global Economy. IPE, IR, politics, policy. Tradeoffs in everything.
4 subscribers
Aug 25 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"Do consumers pay tariffs?"

"Will tax cuts pay for themselves?"

"Is the debt an imminent danger?"

These are the equivalent of "does the sun rise in the East?" They are questions with known answers. Our politics suffers by treating them as debates.


I guess it's fine if the journalistic purpose here is to then write, "JD Vance lies about tariffs." But that's almost certainly not what's going on here, & we'll almost certainly get future articles about the <debate> over tariffs, tax cuts, etc.
Aug 14 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
One of the key reasons I can't take the "Harris must give a press conference so we can learn her concrete policy views" claims seriously is bc I remember how deeply uninterested in policy the Papers of Record were when Joe Biden passed landmark climate legislation in August 2022. Another is that the media has shown little interest in seriously covering the details, complexities, tradeoffs, or consequences of Biden's foreign policies, as illustrated by its utterly shameful behavior during the 🇦🇫 withdrawal & 👇now re: peace & war:

Aug 9 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Today in "neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with a far right authoritarian party" No one could possibly have predicted that the Trump press conference would turn out this way, or that we'd see entirely different standards requested of the Democrats when it comes to answering questions, offering policy specifics, & all the other things.

Jul 24 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
I'm heartened we've finally, at long last, found the plot again. I wish it hadn't required Biden's departure & years of Inflation/Recession Hysteria/platforming the same few economists who wrongly told you the ARP had caused all the inflation to get there

intereconomics.eu/contents/year/…

Image We could have avoided the deeply parochial story about 🇺🇸 inflation by following the freely-available monthly-data that @OECD puts out, which showed that Joe Biden & US fiscal policy were not remotely the main culprit. We knew that way back in 2022-23.

Jul 7 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is a a fundamental category error misunderstanding of 🇺🇸 politics, because the identity of the Democratic presidential candidate is neither the cause of the GOP’s collapse into far right authoritarianism nor the reason roughly half the country supports it. Yes Biden’s age is a serious issue and he should probably step down. No, that’s not the main issue & it’s not the central problem facing the Republic. It’s just the easy thing to talk about because the other thing is so awful.
Jul 6 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Everyone should read this entire 🧵, just so everyone understands that absolutely nothing about how the media covers the two parties completely differently, & how it will continue normalizing/erasing the far right authoritarianism, is going to change once Harris is the candidate. I don’t think Biden can stem the damage at this point, & he should probably step aside for Harris. Again, we could’ve discussed that a year ago, except for The Narrative™️. But folks didn’t want to do that, so I’m having a hard time taking their Fierce Urgency seriously now.
Jun 22 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
👇 The thing with having absolutely no elite accountability for a certain class of male academics/public intellectuals at elite private institutions is that they keep doing the same things over & over again bc they have learned there are no consequences


Not a single one of these men, Ferguson included, has been asked to explain why they signed this ridiculous letter. They just keep getting platformed as serious people, because apparently nothing matters.
May 5 • 48 tweets • 12 min read
Signs you might be a far right authoritarian party (#2663): Signs you might be a far right authoritarian party (#2664):

May 2 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
The Narrative™️ cannot fail. It can only be failed 🧐🤷‍♂️



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Image I am perfectly open to the possibility that people are Suffering From Inflation™️ & angry because they are being forced to curtail spending & consumption due to falling real wages/income. It's just that, month after month after month, there's ~no data to support this argument.
Apr 13 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Once again, this misses the key point, which is that we do large-scale, expensive, non-universal redistribution all the time in 🇺🇸 politics, but we only seem to clutch pearls about cost, fairness, moral hazard, & such about the student loan debt relief


And, of course, it’s not actually all that big a difference anyway, despite it being everyone’s favorite talking point
Mar 9 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Today, class, we will once again discuss “revealed preferences”

If the “nation” were actually “craving change,” then we would have observed a mainstream challenger to Biden gaining widespread support in the Democratic primaries, & a different result in the Republican primaries. Prominent Dem Senators/governors could have challenged Biden, as McCarthy/RFK did in 1968 & TK did in 1980. They chose not to do so. Prominent GOPers did challenge Trump & got crushed. We should give voters credit for their choices & believe them when they tell us who they want.
Jan 1 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Happy 2024. Since we're still pretzeling ourselves to explain why folks think the economy is bad despite all the data, here's the latest update of media coverage of inflation/recession vs unemployment/recovery, thru 12/31/23. The truly astounding imbalances persist even in Q423. Image One can argue the tone's shifted, & that's likely true on inflation & recession since Oct, but framing even the good economic news through the lenses of inflation/recession still shapes public opinion. And the near total lack of coverage of the unprecedented recovery is shocking.
Jun 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The new angle, apparently, is to invent some idea that there are now novel “internal politics” in a monetary policy institution. Really, it would just be easier to admit that your personal preferences continue to be different than the Fed’s & not imply others are incoherent. Politics. Politics, I tell you!
Jun 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Pretty amazing that we’ve had a near-total & unprecedentedly rapid recovery, while 🇪🇺 is well on its way to a second Lost Decade in a row, all for the price of an inflation premium barely higher than the long-term historical gap between 🇺🇸 & 🇪🇺

Once again, the key takeaway here is that the story you were told for 2 years about 🇺🇸 fiscal policy being the main cause of inflation - & 🇪🇺 being supporting evidence - was a deeply parochial one that could have been avoided by tracking the freely available cross-national data.
Jun 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Counterpoint: it will be states, and primarily superpowers It will still be states, climate change edition

Jun 7, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
The less straw man 2 ways are:

1. Getting to 2% isn't "easy" but is happening. It's just taking far longer than anyone predicted given the shocks ()

2. There are tradeoffs that aren't worth it or compatible with the Fed's mandate () Lots of folks seem to be arguing 2. I don't know anyone serious who's claiming 1 is "easy." And again, the asymmetry of the concern about getting quickly back to 2% starkly constrasts with the notable lack thereof during a decade of undershooting.

Jun 7, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This. This isn’t making “tough choices.” It’s not taking the dual mandate seriously. It’s a personal preference for privileging inflation over the other part of the mandate. That’s fine, but own it. Don’t couch it in the language of mature responsibility.

Image This view is how we undershot the inflation target for most of a decade
Jun 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 4 min read
One reason we never seriously wrestled w/ Obama's (& Clinton's) fiscal policy errors, was that Trump's & GWB's fiscal policies were so obviously & clownishly bad that O/C got free passes for totally embracing the household analogy & the deficit hackery (cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/st…). ImageImageImage Re: Clinton: The idea that the late 1990s was a time for the country issuing the global reserve currency to run a budget <surplus> given <gestures at interest rates, global capital flows & decades of public underinvestment in everything> was just mind-boggling fiscal malfeasance. ImageImageImageImage
Jun 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It’s almost as if…the country issuing the global reserve currency, w/ a flexible exchange rate, in an age of unprecedented global capital flows, doesn’t face the urgent & hard fiscal constraints so many folks in the National Conversation™️ claim it does

Yes, we should have a serious convo about debt, deficits, taxes, & spending. But if the same dire predictions made with debt/GDP at 40%, 60%, & 80% keep not happening, & 🇺🇸/world interest rates keep doing 👇, we need a different frame for understanding actual fiscal constraints. ImageImageImage
Jun 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
The knowledge, deep down, that this is almost certainly true, one suspects, has driven much of the backlash by certain economists against the macroeconomic policies of Biden & Powell. Fully reckoning with the disaster of 2008-18 must be deeply painful.






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Apr 25, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
It’s striking, here in the 🇺🇸, how we talk constantly about US debt & invoke it as part of broader endless discussions of 🇺🇸’s/the dollar’s inevitable hegemonic decline, while we completely ignore 🇨🇳’s vastly more serious debt problems amidst all the New Cold War hysteria 🤔🤷‍♂️ We're in the midst of a National Conversation™️ about how the country issuing the global reserve currency is on the brink of a debt crisis (), & panicking about 🇨🇳 taking over the world, when its debt burdens are far less sustainable than ours. It vexes me. ImageImageImage