1. Nicholas Kristof has a good piece on political dysfunction on the West Coast. He correctly points out that the problem is worse than in left wing areas of the East Coast. (I wish the editor had used the term “progressive” in the title, not “liberal”.) He also sees a few glimmers of light:
One encouraging sign is that the West Coast may be self-correcting. I’ve been on a book tour in recent weeks, and in my talks in California, Oregon and Washington I’ve been struck by the way nearly everyone frankly acknowledges this gulf between our values and our outcomes, and welcomes more pragmatic approaches.
I see the same thing, as we seem to be past “peak woke”. But the West Coast has a loooong way to go. if you are wondering about the sort of thing Kristof was referring to, check out this ABC news story.
2. Bill Kristol has an amusing tweet. One characteristic of a banana republic is a lack of self-awareness. They don’t even seem to be aware of how silly they look. Places like North Korea experience an almost unimaginable amount of suffering. But if you look past the tragedy, the situation there is actually extremely funny. Let’s hope America stays the lucky country, as we sure as hell don’t deserve our success.
3. A very funny tweet on what it takes to build a Costco in LA.
4. A conservative writer at The American Mind admits that conservatives have bad taste:
There must be reasons, besides cunning Gramsci-esque counter-maneuvering, why efforts to launch a conservative artistic movement so often droop their way unto death. There must be reasons why right-wing “alternatives” to mainstream culture still often feel like consolation prizes. I can’t help but suspect that what we have here is a problem of taste.
Sorry guys, but this is true.
4. According to the National Review, Trump’s conviction seems to have pushed 100,000 voters toward Biden:
The day he was convicted in Manhattan, Donald Trump led President Biden in the RealClearPolitics average by nine-tenths of a percentage point. Since then, the voting public has had time to ruminate on the significance of the presumptive Republican nominee’s legal straits, even the possibility he could be sent to jail, and figured: Meh.
As of publication time, Trump’s lead in the RCP average has dipped — to eight-tenths.
Of course that 100,000 shift to Biden is plus or minus a couple million. (No link, it came via email.)
5. This is a puzzling remark:
China’s President Xi Jinping told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that Washington was trying to goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Chinese leader has also delivered the warning to domestic officials in his own country, one person said.
This can be interpreted in several different ways. One interpretation is that he’s getting ready to blame the US for a Taiwan war. Another is that he’d rather avoid war, at least for the time being, and is telling nationalists within China that going to war now would play into US hands. Recall that Leopold Aschenbrenner claims that we are in a battle with China for AI supremacy. A war over Taiwan would likely cause China to lose that war, as it would face draconian economic sanctions.
This is one reason I oppose most US protectionist policies aimed at China (except where there’s a clear military angle.) I want China to have a lot to lose if it invades Taiwan. Here’s Dmitri Alperovitch (who is generally quite hawkish on China):
Complete decoupling is impossible given the volume of trade that exists. We also can’t get any of our allies on board with full decoupling. Finally, it’s counterproductive because if you have no economic relations, then you actually have no leverage. We want more leverage over them to try to deter nefarious actions.
6. The Economist has a good article discussing who hates whom in various European countries. This is just a few highlights:
The religious dimension remains crucial; in France antipathy towards North Africans is markedly higher than towards black Africans, according to the latest report by the country’s anti-discrimination monitor. . . .
Current events can also reduce prejudice. In the 1990s Italians stigmatised Albanian immigrants. But as Albania has grown more stable and less poor, they have slipped off the list of feared minorities. . . .
And when all else fails, they go after the Roma. Robert Fico, the Slovakian prime minister who survived an assassination attempt on May 15th, began his political career as a left-wing populist and is currently a right-wing one, but his Roma-bashing has remained constant. Portugal long lacked a big far-right party, explains Alexandre Afonso of Leiden University: it had little immigration, and those who did come, such as Brazilians, were not viewed unfavourably. So when the hard-right Chega party launched in 2019 it targeted the small, impoverished Roma population. Chega is now polling at 18%.
7. For the third time in a row, Wisconsin is likely to be the tipping point state in the election. The Economist has an interesting article about the state. One thing is clear, whatever this election is about, it’s not about “the issues”:
Charlene, a farmer in western Wisconsin who works a second job as a cleaner to supplement her family’s income, says she’ll be voting for Mr Trump because of his strength on the economy and health care. Her son struggled to afford care when he fell ill recently. Because of Republican resistance, Wisconsin remains one of ten states yet to expand Medicaid to cover those whose incomes fall just above the poverty line.
8. People who favored making pot illegal ought to be ashamed of themselves. Thousands rotted in prison for selling pot, despite the fact that legalization has produced none of the disasters that drug warriors predicted:
In 2014, 44% of Americans over the age of 12 said that they had tried the drug. By 2022, the figure had risen to just 47%. Regular use by adolescents is still much lower than it was in the 1970s.
An extensive study published last year in the journal Psychological Medicine found that people who live in states where weed is legal consume more than their identical-twin siblings in states where it is not. But they are no more likely to suffer mental, physical, relationship or financial problems. Another study looked at health-insurance data to see whether states with legal cannabis saw more claims for psychosis. The authors found no relationship.
9. Singapore benefits from the fact that most American protectionists are dumb as a rock:
Singapore also has one of the largest current-account surpluses in the world. As a small country and a close partner of America in security, Singapore avoids the scrutiny others might endure for its huge savings and managed exchange rate. The fact that America has a bilateral trade surplus with Singapore tends to keep it out of the glare of protectionist American politicians.
Bilateral deficits are obviously meaningless. Fortunately, our politicians are too dumb to understand that Singapore’s surplus contributes to our deficit.
10. Matt Yglesias has another great post explaining why Trump’s first term was terrible. He concludes as follows:
And it’s definitely true that if you judge him by outcomes rather than inputs and also make an exception for the bad outcomes, then his presidency was fine. . . . Everyone makes mistakes and ideally learns from them. As best I can tell, what Trump learned from his term is that he needs to double-down on surrounding himself with craven loyalists who won’t contradict him. Not only did he tell congressional Republicans that we should replace the income tax with tariffs, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody bothered to tell him that’s a stupid idea, because at this point everyone knows that you either get on the Trump Train or do what Mitt Romney is doing and quit congress. Will governance outcomes be better or worse when nobody wants to contradict the president’s dumb ideas? It does not seem, historically, that it’s a good idea to combine an ignorant leader with a team of sycophants.
11. It’s interesting how America appears in the eyes of our East Asian allies:
They know that China plays hardball with American firms; they accept the region is rife with industrial policy; they understand that Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have to pay a price for living under America’s security blanket. They are loyal soldiers defending the silicon island chain. . . .
What irks them, though, is the feeling that America is upsetting one of the last remaining bastions of globalisation not just for geopolitical reasons, but out of a selfish desire to preserve its economic dominance. One Japanese executive fumes that America is “childish” to try to stifle Chinese competition. A Taiwanese expert asks drily whether it would satisfy the “America First” contingent if TSMC simply changed its name to America Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Quietly, many hope their firms will continue to straddle the geopolitical divide for years to come.
12. Bloomberg says that NIMBYIsm has come to the south:
The [Nashville] boom — driven by transplants from blue states like New York and California — has spurred a right-wing group that marries conservative religious beliefs with restrictive policies on growth into control of the local legislative body. At a planning board meeting in May, the pressing agenda item was whether to boost minimum lot sizes in rural areas to at least 2.3 acres; big enough to ward off housing developers who need more density.
Was Jesus a NIMBY?
13. Let’s end with a slightly more optimistic link:
Zhou Qiren is an unusual economist. A professor at Peking University, he spent ten years toiling in the countryside during China’s cultural revolution. “The same farmer”, he observed, “worked like two totally different persons on his private plots versus on collective land.” Unlike most economists, Mr Zhou still studies incentives and constraints from the ground up, starting not with abstract principles, but with concrete cases, often drawn from his travels around China and beyond. . . .
He is sceptical of state-owned enterprises, which he once compared to public passages crowded with private “sundries”. He also has doubts about the feasibility of national self-reliance. Prosperity, he has pointed out, is built on “coming and going” across borders.
It was, therefore, a surprise when Mr Zhou was invited to brief Xi Jinping, China’s ruler, at a symposium on May 23rd in Shandong, a coastal province.