Category: Political Science
Free Trade with Free Nations
Alec Stapp points out that Canada is the only NATO country that has a free trade agreement with the United States. That’s quite remarkable if you think about it. NATO allies are bound by mutual defense commitments, support for military cooperation, and a dedication to democratic principles. Despite these shared commitments, the U.S. still enforces tariffs and quotas on our NATO allies including France, Germany, the UK, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain. This is like getting married and not having a joint checking account. If they are good enough partners to commit to their defense then surely NATO allies are good enough partners to commit to free trade?
Free trade enhances the economic strength of countries, thus free trade should be a strategic asset in self-defense. Let’s be rich and safe together.
There are many reasons to have free trade agreements with countries that we don’t have a defense pact with but free trade with free nations should be a minimum standard. It’s not just the United States, of course, NATO allies don’t all have free trade agreements with fellow NATO members. So how about a North-Atlantic Trade Organization? You could call it NATO for short.
What should I ask Velina Tchakarova?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. She runs a geopolitics firm, hails from Bulgaria, is in my view broadly classical liberal, focuses on conflict in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, and is very active on Twitter.
Here is Velina on LinkedIn. She does not seem crazy.
So what should I ask her?
My Conversation with the excellent Coleman Hughes
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of colorblindness, including whether jazz would’ve been created in a color-blind society, how easy it is to disentangle race and culture, whether we should also try to be ‘autism-blind’, and Coleman’s personal experience with lookism and ageism. They also discuss what Coleman’s learned from J.J. Johnson, the hardest thing about performing the trombone, playing sets in the Charles Mingus Big Band as a teenager, whether Billy Joel is any good, what reservations he has about his conservative fans, why the Beastie Boys are overrated, what he’s learned from Noam Dworman, why Interstellar is Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, the Coleman Hughes production function, why political debate is so toxic, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How was it you ended up playing trombone in Charles Mingus Big Band?
HUGHES: I participated in the Charles Mingus high school jazz festival, which they still do every year. It was new at the time. They invite bands from all around to audition, and they identify a handful of good soloists and let them sit in for one night with the band. I sat in with the band, and the band leader knew that I lived close by in New Jersey, and so essentially invited me to start playing with the band on Monday nights.
I was probably 16 or 17 at this point, so I would take the NJ Transit into New York City on a Monday night, play two sets with the Mingus Band sitting next to people that had been my idols and were now my mentors — people like Ku-umba Frank Lacy, who is a fantastic trombone player; played with Art Blakey and D’Angelo and so forth. Then I would go home at midnight and go to school on Tuesday morning.
COWEN: Why is the music of Charles Mingus special in jazz? Because it is to me, but how would you articulate what it is for you?
Here is another:
COWEN: If I understand you correctly, you’re also suggesting in our private lives we should be color-blind.
HUGHES: Yes. Broadly, yes. Or we should try to be.
COWEN: We should try to be. This is where I might not agree with you. So I find if I look at media, I look at social media, I see a dispute — I think 100 percent of the time I agree with Coleman, pretty much, on these race-related matters. In private lives, I’m less sure.
Let me ask you a question.
HUGHES: Sure.
COWEN: Could jazz music have been created in a color-blind America?
HUGHES: Could it have been created in a color-blind America — in what sense do you mean that question?
COWEN: It seems there’s a lot of cultural creativity. One issue is it may have required some hardship, but that’s not my point. It requires some sense of a cultural identity to motivate it — that the people making it want to express something about their lives, their history, their communities. And to them it’s not color-blind.
HUGHES: Interesting. My counterargument to that would be, insofar as I understand the early history of jazz, it was heavily more racially integrated than American society was at that time. In the sense that the culture of jazz music as it existed in, say, New Orleans and New York City was many, many decades ahead of the curve in terms of its attitudes towards how people should live racially: interracial friendship, interracial relationship, etc. Yes, I’d argue the ethos of jazz was more color-blind, in my sense, than the American average at the time.
COWEN: But maybe there’s some portfolio effect here. So yes, Benny Goodman hires Teddy Wilson to play for him. Teddy Wilson was black, as I’m sure you know. And that works marvelously well. It’s just good for the world that Benny Goodman does this.
Can it still not be the case that Teddy Wilson is pulling from something deep in his being, in his soul — about his racial experience, his upbringing, the people he’s known — and that that’s where a lot of the expression in the music comes from? That is most decidedly not color-blind, even though we would all endorse the fact that Benny Goodman was willing to hire Teddy Wilson.
HUGHES: Yes. Maybe — I’d argue it may not be culture-blind, though it probably is color-blind, in the sense that black Americans don’t just represent a race. That’s what a black American would have in common — that’s what I would have in common with someone from Ethiopia, is that we’re broadly of the same “race.” We are not at all of the same culture.
To the extent that there is something called “African American culture,” which I believe that there is, which has had many wonderful products, including jazz and hip-hop — yes, then I’m perfectly willing to concede that that’s a cultural product in the same way that, say, country music is like a product of broadly Southern culture.
COWEN: But then here’s my worry a bit. You’re going to have people privately putting out cultural visions in the public sphere through music, television, novels — a thousand ways — and those will inevitably be somewhat political once they’re cultural visions. So these other visions will be out there, and a lot of them you’re going to disagree with. It might be fine to say, “It would be better if we were all much more color-blind.” But given these other non-color-blind visions are out there, do you not have to, in some sense, counter them by not being so color-blind yourself and say, “Well, here’s a better way to think about the black or African American or Ethiopian or whatever identity”?
Interesting throughout.
Trump and the Fed
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
Trump advisers have been drafting plans to limit significantly the operating autonomy of the Fed. The Trump campaign has disavowed these plans, but the general ideas have been spreading in Republican circles, as evidenced by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report. Trump himself has called for a weaker dollar policy, which could not be carried out without some degree of Fed cooperation. As a former businessman and real-estate developer, Trump seems to care most about interest rates, banking and currencies.
One concrete proposal reported in the Wall Street Journal would require the Fed to informally consult with the president on decisions concerning interest rates and other major aspects of monetary policy. That would make it harder for the central bank to commit to a stated policy of disinflation, since the ongoing influence of the president would be a wild card in the decision. Presidents would likely give more consideration to their own reelection prospects than to the advice of the Fed staff. Further confusion would result from the reality that the responsibility of the president in these matters simply would not be clear.
It’s important not to be naïve: Regardless of who is in the White House, the Fed already cares what the president and Congress think, as its future independence is never guaranteed. Still, explicit consultation would undercut the coherence of the decision-making process within the Fed itself and send a negative signal to investors. There is no upside from this approach.
There is much more at the link.
Trade reform and economic growth
From the excellent Doug Irwin:
Do trade reforms that significantly reduce import barriers lead to faster economic growth? In the twenty-five years since Rodríguez and Rodrik’s (2000) critical survey of empirical work on this question, new research has tried to overcome the various methodological problems that have plagued previous attempts to provide a convincing answer. I examine three strands of recent work on this issue: cross-country regressions focusing on within-country growth, synthetic control methods on specific reform episodes, and empirical country studies looking at the channels through which lower trade barriers may increase productivity. A consistent finding is that trade reforms have had a positive impact on economic growth, on average, although the effect is heterogeneous across countries. Overall, these research findings should temper some of the previous agnosticism about the empirical link between trade reform and economic performance.
Here is my much earlier CWT with Doug Irwin.
Four Thousand Years of Egyptian Women Pictured
In an excellent, deep-dive Alice Evans looks at patriarchy in Egypt using pictures drawn from four thousand years of history. Here are three examples.
A wealthy woman, shown at right circa 116 CE. Unveiled, immodest, looking out at the world. A person to be reckoned with.
After the Arab conquests, pictures of people in general disappear, and there are no books written by women. With the dawn of photography in the 19th century we see (at left) what was probably typical, veiled women, and very few women on the street.
In the 1950s and 1970s we see a remarkable revitalization and liberalization noted most evidently in advertisements (advertisers being careful not to offend). Note the bare legs and the fact that many advertisements are directed at women (below)
This period culminates in a remarkable video unearthed by Evans of Nasser in 1958 openly laughing at the idea that women should or could be required to veil in public. Worth watching.
In the 1980s, however, it all ends.
Egyptians who came of age in the 1950s and ‘60s experienced national independence, social mobility and new economic opportunities. By the 1980s, economic progress was grinding down. Egypt’s purchasing power was plummeting. Middle class families could no longer afford basic goods, nor could the state provide.
As observed by Galal Amin,
“When the economy started to slacken in the early 1980s, accompanied by the fall in oil prices and the resulting decline in work opportunities in the Gulf, many of the aspirations built up in the 1970s were suddenly seen to be unrealistic and intense feelings of frustration followed”.
‘Western modernisation’ became discredited by economic stagnation and defeat by Israel. In Egypt, clerics equated modernity with a rejection of Islam and declared the economic and military failures of the state to be punishments for aping the West. Islamic preachers called on men to restore order and piety (i.e., female seclusion). Frustrated graduates, struggling to find white collar work, found solace in religion, whilst many ordinary people turned to the Muslim Brotherhood for social services and righteous purpose.
That’s just a brief look at a much longer and fascinating post.
Do protests matter?
Only rarely:
Recent social movements stand out by their spontaneous nature and lack of stable leadership, raising doubts on their ability to generate political change. This article provides systematic evidence on the effects of protests on public opinion and political attitudes. Drawing on a database covering the quasi-universe of protests held in the United States, we identify 14 social movements that took place from 2017 to 2022, covering topics related to environmental protection, gender equality, gun control, immigration, national and international politics, and racial issues. We use Twitter data, Google search volumes, and high-frequency surveys to track the evolution of online interest, policy views, and vote intentions before and after the outset of each movement. Combining national-level event studies with difference-in-differences designs exploiting variation in local protest intensity, we find that protests generate substantial internet activity but have limited effects on political attitudes. Except for the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd, which shifted views on racial discrimination and increased votes for the Democrats, we estimate precise null effects of protests on public opinion and electoral behavior.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Amory Gethin and Vincent Pons.
My excellent Conversation with Peter Thiel
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, along with almost thirty minutes of audience questions, filmed in Miami. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Peter Thiel dive deep into the complexities of political theology, including why it’s a concept we still need today, why Peter’s against Calvinism (and rationalism), whether the Old Testament should lead us to be woke, why Carl Schmitt is enjoying a resurgence, whether we’re entering a new age of millenarian thought, the one existential risk Peter thinks we’re overlooking, why everyone just muddling through leads to disaster, the role of the katechon, the political vision in Shakespeare, how AI will affect the influence of wordcels, Straussian messages in the Bible, what worries Peter about Miami, and more.
Here is an excerpt:
COWEN: Let’s say you’re trying to track the probability that the Western world and its allies somehow muddle through, and just keep on muddling through. What variable or variables do you look at to try to track or estimate that? What do you watch?
THIEL: Well, I don’t think it’s a really empirical question. If you could convince me that it was empirical, and you’d say, “These are the variables we should pay attention to” — if I agreed with that frame, you’ve already won half the argument. It’d be like variables . . . Well, the sun has risen and set every day, so it’ll probably keep doing that, so we shouldn’t worry. Or the planet has always muddled through, so Greta’s wrong, and we shouldn’t really pay attention to her. I’m sympathetic to not paying attention to her, but I don’t think this is a great argument.
Of course, if we think about the globalization project of the post–Cold War period where, in some sense, globalization just happens, there’s going to be more movement of goods and people and ideas and money, and we’re going to become this more peaceful, better-integrated world. You don’t need to sweat the details. We’re just going to muddle through.
Then, in my telling, there were a lot of things around that story that went very haywire. One simple version is, the US-China thing hasn’t quite worked the way Fukuyama and all these people envisioned it back in 1989. I think one could have figured this out much earlier if we had not been told, “You’re just going to muddle through.” The alarm bells would’ve gone off much sooner.
Maybe globalization is leading towards a neoliberal paradise. Maybe it’s leading to the totalitarian state of the Antichrist. Let’s say it’s not a very empirical argument, but if someone like you didn’t ask questions about muddling through, I’d be so much — like an optimistic boomer libertarian like you stop asking questions about muddling through, I’d be so much more assured, so much more hopeful.
COWEN: Are you saying it’s ultimately a metaphysical question rather than an empirical question?
THIEL: I don’t think it’s metaphysical, but it’s somewhat analytic.
COWEN: And moral, even. You’re laying down some duty by talking about muddling through.
THIEL: Well, it does tie into all these bigger questions. I don’t think that if we had a one-world state, this would automatically be for the best. I’m not sure that if we do a classical liberal or libertarian intuition on this, it would be maybe the absolute power that a one-world state would corrupt absolutely. I don’t think the libertarians were critical enough of it the last 20 or 30 years, so there was some way they didn’t believe their own theories. They didn’t connect things enough. I don’t know if I’d say that’s a moral failure, but there was some failure of the imagination.
COWEN: This multi-pronged skepticism about muddling through — would you say that’s your actual real political theology if we got into the bottom of this now?
THIEL: Whenever people think you can just muddle through, you’re probably set up for some kind of disaster. That’s fair. It’s not as positive as an agenda, but I always think . . .
One of my chapters in the Zero to One book was, “You are not a lottery ticket.” The basic advice is, if you’re an investor and you can just think, “Okay, I’m just muddling through as an investor here. I have no idea what to invest in. There are all these people. I can’t pay attention to any of them. I’m just going to write checks to everyone, make them go away. I’m just going to set up a desk somewhere here on South Beach, and I’m going to give a check to everyone who comes up to the desk, or not everybody. It’s just some writing lottery tickets.”
That’s just a formula for losing all your money. The place where I react so violently to the muddling through — again, we’re just not thinking. It can be Calvinist. It can be rationalist. It’s anti-intellectual. It’s not thinking about things.
Interesting throughout, definitely recommended. You may recall that the very first CWT episode (2015!) was with Peter, that is here.
*The Carnation Revolution*
The author is Alex Fernandes, and the subtitle is The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell. A very good and well-written book, here is one short excerpt:
The First Republic is sixteen years of unrelenting chaos, one that sets the scene for the fascist state that follows it. Between 1910 and 1926 Portugal goes through eight presidents and forty-five governments, all the while experiencing an economic crisis, crushing debt and the Europe-spanning threats of the First World War. Mirroring similar movements in France and Mexico, early Portuguese republicanism’s defining feature is its fierce anti-clericalism, imposing a crackdown on churches, convents and monasteries and persecuting religious leaders. The turbulent political landscape is marked by escalating acts of violence, militant strike action, periodic military uprisings and borderline civil war, the government fluctuating wildly between different republican factions.
Unfortunately, this book does not read as if it is about a niche topic. And don’t forget Salazar was an economist.
Build Back Key Bridge Better
The collapse of the Key Bridge is a national disaster but also an opportunity for societal advancement. We must rebuild but in doing so we must also address the historical discrimination faced by workers in Baltimore and beyond. Ensuring the participation of Baltimore’s workforce in the reconstruction project is essential. It’s Baltimore’s bridge and in rebuilding we must actively engage and employ a diverse pool of local talent, reflecting the city’s rich cultural tapestry. We can Build Back Better by providing meaningful, well-paying jobs to those who have been historically marginalized, fostering economic growth and equity within the community.
Furthermore, offering accessible, quality day care for workers will directly contribute to an equitable working environment, enabling parents and guardians to participate fully in the reconstruction effort without the burden of child care concerns. We must reject the idea that equity and productivity are at odds. A more inclusive workforce is a more productive workforce.
American workers are the most productive in the world thus to Build American we must Buy American. Reconstruction of the Key Bridge is not just a matter of national pride but also an essential strategy for growing our economy. By prioritizing American materials and labor, we invest in our communities, support local industries, and ensure that the economic benefits of the reconstruction project are felt widely, especially in areas hardest hit by economic challenges.
We can build back better. We must build back better. By engaging Baltimore workers in Baltimore’s bridge we can rectify long-standing discrimination. By providing accessible child care, and adhering to “Buy American” rules we can build America as we build America’s bridge. Building back better is not simply about building physical infrastructure. It’s about building a bridge to the future. A bridge of progress, equality, and unity, symbolizing our collective commitment to a future where every individual has the opportunity to thrive.
Addendum: April 1, 2024.
*Accelerating India’s Development*
The author is Karthik Muralidharan, and the subtitle is A State-Led Roapmap for Effective Governance. If you imagine a 600 pp. “state capacity libertarian” take on Indian development this is what you get, admittedly with the libertarian side of the equation downplayed a bit. Excerpt:
A common misconception is that the inefficiencies of the Indian state stem from its large size — that there are too many workers doing too few things. In practice, the opposite is true, and the Indian state is highly understaffed. As Figure 3.1 shows, India has only 16 public employees per 1000 people. For comparison, China has over three times as many (57) and Norway has nearly ten times as many (159). Even the US, often viewed as a leading example of a market-driven economy with limited government, has 77 public employees per 1000 people — nearly five times as many as India!
Recommended, here is the link on Amazon India. An American edition is needed. Here is a review of the book from The Economist.
What should I ask Brian Winter?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is his bio:
Brian Winter is the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and a seasoned analyst of Latin American politics, with more than 20 years following the region’s ups and downs. He lived in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico as a correspondent for Reuters before taking on his current role in New York, where he is also the vice president of policy for the Americas Society and Council of the Americas. He has been called “the best foreign expert on Brazil of this moment” by GloboNews. Brian is the author of several books including Why Soccer Matters, a New York Times bestseller he wrote with the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé; The Accidental President of Brazil, co-authored with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso; and Long After Midnight, a memoir about trying (and failing) to learn to tango in Argentina. He is a regular contributor to television and radio, the host of the Americas Quarterly Podcast and a prolific barbecuer and chef. Proficient in Spanish and Portuguese, Brian speaks frequently about Latin America’s past, present and future to investors and general-interest audiences. Follow him on Twitter @BrazilBrian
So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with Fareed Zakaria
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. You can tell he knows what an interview is! At the same time, he understands this differs from many of his other venues and he responds with flying colors. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler sat down with Fareed to discuss what he learned from Khushwant Singh as a boy, what made his father lean towards socialism, why the Bengali intelligentsia is so left-wing, what’s stuck with him from his time at an Anglican school, what’s so special about visiting Amritsar, why he misses a more syncretic India, how his time at the Yale Political Union dissuaded him from politics, what he learned from Walter Isaacson and Sam Huntington, what put him off academia, how well some of his earlier writing as held up, why he’s become focused on classical liberal values, whether he had reservations about becoming a TV journalist, how he’s maintained a rich personal life, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why couldn’t you talk Singh out of his Nehruvian socialism? He was a great liberal. He loved free speech, very broad-minded, as you know much better than I do. But he, on economics, was weak. Or no?
ZAKARIA: Oh, no, you’re entirely right. By the way, I would say the same is true of my father, with whom I had many, many such conversations. You’d find this interesting, Tyler. My father was a young Indian nationalist who — as he once put it to me — made the most important decision in his life, politically, when he was 13 or 14 years old, which was, as a young Indian Muslim, he chose Nehru’s vision of secular democracy as the foundation of a nation rather than Jinnah’s view of religious nationalism. He chose India rather than Pakistan as an Indian Muslim.
He was politically so interesting and forward-leaning, but he was a hopeless social — a sort of social democrat, but veering towards socialism. Both these guys were. Here’s why, I think. For that whole generation of people — by the way, my father got a scholarship to London University and went to study with Harold Laski, the great British socialist economist. Laski told him, “You are actually not an economist; you are a historian.” So, my father went on and got a PhD at London University in Indian history.
That whole generation of Indians who wanted independence were imbued with . . . There were two things going on. One, the only people in Britain who supported Indian independence were the Labour Party and the Fabian Socialists. All their allies were all socialists. There was a common cause and there was a symbiosis because these were your friends, these were your allies, these were the only people supporting you, the cause that mattered the most to you in your life.
The second part was, a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.
My own view was, that was a big mistake, though I do think there are elements of what the state was able to do that perhaps were better done in a place like South Korea than in India, but that really explains it.
My father was in Britain in ’45 as a student. As a British subject then, you got to vote in the election if you were in London, if you were in Britain. I said to him, “Who did you vote for in the 1945 election?” Remember, this is the famous election right after World War II, in which Churchill gets defeated, and he gets up the next morning and looks at the papers, and his wife says to him, “Darling, it’s a blessing in disguise.” He says, “Well, at the moment it seems very effectively disguised.”
My father voted in that election. I said to him, “You’re a huge fan of Churchill,” because I’d grown up around all the Churchill books, and my father could quote the speeches. I said, “Did you vote for Churchill?” He said, “Oh good lord, no.” I said, “Why? I thought you were a great admirer of his.” He said, “Look, on the issue that mattered most to me in life, he was an unreconstructed imperialist. A vote for Labour was a vote for Indian independence. A vote for Churchill was a vote for the continuation of the empire.” That, again, is why their friends were all socialists.
Excellent throughout. And don’t forget Fareed’s new book — discussed in the podcast — Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.
*Nuclear War: A Scenario*
By Annie Jacobsen, a very good book. What would happen if a nuclear weapon actually were launched at the United States? On the ground? In the chain of command? Organizationally and otherwise? A good book, sadly still of relevance. Full of drama throughout, and tactically astute. Excerpt:
Ted Postol is blunt. “Russian early-warning satellites don’t work accurately,” he says. “As a country, Russia doesn’t have the technological know-how to build a system as good as we have in the United States.” This means “their satellites can’t look straight down at the earth,” a technology known as look-down capability. And as a result, Russia’s Tundra satellites “look sideways,” Postol warns, “which handicaps their ability to distinguish sunlight from, say, fire”
Notably troublesome is how Tundra sees clouds.
It was North Korea who started the whole thing, you can buy the book here.
Do current trends in drone technology favor offense or defense?
At first people thought that drones favored defense, since Ukraine, in its war against Russia, was defending successfully with drones. But now Ukraine is using drones to attack Russia, and Russian oil refinery assets and warships. It is less obvious that drones are defensive assets on net. Furthermore, Russia is now using more electronic jamming, and more weapons that are drone-avoiding or drone-resistant, thereby limiting the defensive value of drones.
Overall, current drones seem to increase the vulnerability of fixed assets such as tanks or troop formations, or for that matter oil refineries or Moscow or Ukraine fixed landmarks. A very large and sophisticated U.S. aircraft carrier might be able to repel the drones (albeit at high dollar cost), but a bunch of tanks in an open field will not have comparable protection.
In the abstract, “mid-valued assets become more vulnerable” could favor either offense or defense.
The more obvious trend is that it favors nations willing and able to lose lots of mid-sized assets. That is either because a) the nation doesn’t care, because it is evil, or b) because the nation can replace them quickly, for instance by building more tanks or by drafting more soldiers.
So could it be that in the long run steady state (albeit not today) drones favor the more evil nations? Factor a) is clearly a marker of evil, whereas factor b) might be modestly correlated with evil. I consider this an unconfirmed hypothesis, but it reflects my thinking at the moment.