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Mark Copelovitch Profile picture
Mark Copelovitch
Professor @uwpolisci & @UWLaFollette. International political economy & international relations. Policy & politics. Music & sports. Tradeoffs in everything.
Brendo RN Profile picture Puneet Kollipara Profile picture Geoff Carr Profile picture 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:


And neither Goodwin nor anyone else knows what the "right" composition of political views among faculty is. 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.

Apr 23 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
💯 🧵 on the NYT’s obsessive Le Pen coverage of the <taps mic> “deeply unpopular Emmanuel Macron” ().

The Narrative™️ cannot fail. It can only be failed, 🇫🇷 politics edition. Of course, the same thing has gone on with the @nytimes and 🇩🇪 politics for years.
Feb 19 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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. This, of course, is not the first source of embarrassment and shame and complicity in condoning the far right authoritarianism:

Jan 28 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
No, actually, it <also> has everything to do with the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.

Image 👇

Jan 27 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
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.
Jan 26 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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.

Once again:
Jan 23 • 5 tweets • 4 min read
Again, the papers of record are circulating borderline misinformation on this

Real wages fell 2.3% from 12/20 to 12/21...now benchmark to pre-pandemic 👇

Also, the checks, child tax credits, & PPP loans meant that real income/consumption did not fall

nytimes.com/2022/01/22/opi… Also, you buried the ledes:

From @arindube on real wages by income group:
Jan 22 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
👇 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.

🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️

ImageImage 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.
Jan 8 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
Still pondering this epic @nytimes failure:

"Another soft month of US job growth"

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. "Long term unemployment remains high"

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 🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Your model is broken @nytimes. Fix it.

The narrative™️ cannot fail. It can only be failed:
Jan 7 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The signal amidst the inflation hysteria noise ().

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. Image 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.
Jan 6 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Today in "neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with a far right authoritarian party" 🤷‍♂️ We're doomed

Jan 5 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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 🤷‍♂️ Image The signs are everywhere:
Dec 11, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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.

From February:
Dec 10, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
👇🎯. 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

“But those reforms have no chance of happening”

Yes, I know…
Dec 10, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Nov 30, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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 Image No, it's not the 1970s. Image
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.

Image 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. Image