In a recent post, Tyler Cowen offers some views on a wide variety of issues. He begins with some reassuring remarks about the future of American democracy, and then offers some highly pessimistic remarks about Germany:
Meanwhile, being reasonable with your constituents is overrated. Look at Germany, which has non-ideological, non-polarized politics. They’ve gotten every decision wrong. Their whole strategy of buying cheap energy from Russia to sell to China was a huge blunder. They bet most of their economy on it, and neither of those two things will work out. They also have no military whatsoever. It’s not like, “Ok, they don’t spend enough.” They literally had troops that didn’t have rifles to train with and were forced to use broomsticks.
I see a jarring inconsistency in the analysis of the two countries. In the case of the US, I see Tyler as saying something to the effect, (my words) “Reject anecdotes about Trump, look at the deeper strength of the US political system.” But when it comes to Germany, he seems to rely heavily on some highly unreliable anecdotes about broomsticks and exports to China.
In fairness to Tyler, I imagine you could find lots of experts who agree with him about Germany. I suspect that these are largely the same experts who made these predictions in early 2022:
1. Russia would easily defeat Ukraine within a few weeks.
2. The European economy would be badly hurt by a cutoff of Russian gas.
3. Draconian sanctions on Russia would devastate their economy.
These were not predictions made by a few experts, this was the consensus view of the vast majority of pundits. And they were completely wrong about almost everything. Ukraine is still fighting, Europe did fine without Russian gas, and Russia is booming despite sanctions. Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.
So why does anyone trust experts?
I decided to check the “expert” claims that Germany has no military, and must rely on broomsticks. I found that they have one of the world’s largest militaries. (Yes, compared to Russia the figures are distorted by PPP factors, but Germany spends about the same as other big European powers, and unlike the UK and France, devotes it all to conventional forces.)
Then I checked Germany exports to China and discovered that the claim of German dependence on China was also exaggerated:
And if trade with China is a potential problem, what are we to make of the US import dependence on China:
By the way, it’s actually good to trade with potential adversaries. I’m worried about the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but I’d be far more worried if we did not trade with China. In that case, they’d have absolutely nothing to lose from an invasion. As it is, they still might invade, but they know that an invasion would severely damage their trade relations with the rest of the world. The recent US move away from globalization is making WWIII more likely, not less.
In the end, the truth lies somewhere between Tyler’s optimistic take on the US and his highly pessimistic take on Germany. We probably won’t become a fascist dictatorship (despite Trump’s best efforts), but that’s partly because people do worry about the situation, and resist his attempts to abolish American democracy. Germany probably won’t be conquered by Russia, but that’s partly because some Germans are increasing worried about their neighbor to the east, and they are currently ramping up their military spending to a level closer to 2% of GDP.
Don’t worry, be happy??
No: Worry, but also be happy.