I like your analysis, until the end. I think it's impossible to disentangle American freedom and initiative from our culture, including the Second Amendment, individualistic health care, addictions to painkillers, etc. There are two sides to the coin, one good, one bad.
Is it really accurate to say the American health care system got “a lot better” after Obamacare passed?
I’m a big Obamacare supporter. I think it was a good idea that was sabotaged at every stage by Republicans(in congress and the Supreme Court) but I don’t think most people would say the health care system got “a lot better”. Improved coverage is of course a big deal(although again my experience isn’t that people got good coverage, they got bad coverage that was overpriced). So maybe an improvement? But hardly “a lot better” 🤷
Before the ACA, an insurance company could deny coverage or drop a person for almost any reason. Fixing that alone was huge for a lot of people. With regards to cost, the trends were already bad; the ACA actually restrained increases ("bent the cost curve").
As a high SES household our mantra is “earn in the US, spend in Europe”. The real question I can’t seem to answer despite having thought about this topic for a while is whether the US downsides are inextricably linked to its strengths, or there are practical ways we can copy European achievements without sacrificing our unique awesomeness. For example I am not sure that institutions that produce a lower regulatory burden and flexible bankruptcy code can be made to produce European like healthcare outcomes.
I'd like to see a breakdown on what specifically in our economy has grown so much. Is 100% of the gains because of increased fossil fuel output or 10%? Trying to review what happened is useless without actual numbers to back it up and I'm not seeing an indication here that Matt has broken up our economic growth into different sectors.
A big part of the reason the discussions/debates on this thread are so challenging is simply: the United States is a country and "Europe" isn't. The EU hasn't come particularly close to making it so. So there's more than a bit of an "apples and oranges" flavor to some of these sub-debates.
Not sure if anyone already highlighted this but I found this confusing "because all of these countries were bound together by the Euro, the harder-hit countries couldn’t adopt stimulative policies of their own accord" at first. It was obviously true, but what was the exact reason? Ie Italy doesn't have its own currency or central bank but _does_ control fiscal policy. Then I remembered that Euro membership also includes rules on deficit & debt to GDP ratios and it was those policies that made it even harder for southern EU countries to pursue the right policies.
Yeah, thanks for clarifying this, and moreover, there was the double standard of countries such as France (an EU heavyweight, so to speak), running deficits in contravention of EU rules since as long as there have been said rules...
Matt just to help: you don't have the units right on the Y axis of the US oil production chart. If you are going to stick with that notation--for example, currently "12000" barrels per day, you need to note those are thousands. i.e. we're producing 12 million barrels a day on average.
In 1990, EU GDP per capita PPP was 70.5% of the US(using current EU borders). In 2000, the EU was 69.0% of the US. By 2010, it was 71.5%, and in 2020 it was 69.5% of the US (bouncing back to 70.6% in 2022). Not exactly the US pulling away.
It's definitely true that more liberal US energy policy has strengthened the dollar, leading to a gap in nominal GDP per capita, and more liberal US immigration along with higher birth rates mean higher population growth. But it's a different story to the one you tell here.
The real story of falling behind is the UK, which went from 77% of US GDP per capita PPP in 1990, 2000, and 2010 to 72% in 2022. The gap has appeared entirely since the Brexit vote in 2016, when the UK was 76.8% of the US
Gavin Newsom waves hi to Britain as California overtakes it on the world economy scale. (We’re right behind Germany and right ahead of India.) Even the entertainment strike probably won’t slow that down too much because we have high tech and real estate which actually rake in more money.)
I think just having more insurance options on the exchange, at all price points, everywhere in the country, would be really beneficial. I haven't researched the current state of the exchange, but I remember in the past there was a huge difference in costs and options depending on where one lives, which state, in a bigger city or small rural area, etc.
Remember when there was a real risk that some markets would have no provider on the exchange? I'm glad to see that all apparently got sorted out, at least. But yeah, more couldn't hurt!
It's funny, I agree with Matt's observations in this post, but I would highlight very different reasons for them. Namely: natural resources. US has them, EU doesn't. I'll admit that as a young person during the Bush/Obama years, I was very against fracking (for the usual environmentalist reasons: artificial earthquakes, tap water lighting on fire, etc.). If asked, I would have said that the smartest country/civilization would win, regardless of where it was located. But that's all crap: young me needed to shut up and calculate the relative impacts of plentiful natural gas. It's all about natural resources: always has been, and probably always will be.
SV can almost fit into this picture: call it an intellectual resource. There are plenty of smart Europeans, of course, but by and large they can't move fast and break things the way Americans do. But we shouldn't rest on our laurels: for me, visiting India makes the US seem as stagnant as Europe.
Not long ago, I had a young Indian guy in Europe asking me about the US. He said he asked people, for example, about starting a company in Europe and got blank stares - no one is interested. He wants to move to the US to work now.
My feeling is the same as yours, which is why I get so worried by everyone idolizing Europe and wanting to move the US in that direction.
I often humble-brag in these here comments about my familiarity with various European countries, so this is a topic of interest to me.
First of all, I apologize for the humble-bragging; it’s tacky. I mean, I think I’m pretty good at disguising my humble-bragging so that it appears to not be as such, but rest assured I’m doing it (and please call me out in the future!).
Anyway, I have now lived in some Europe for just over six years. Four of those were in Finland, and currently (and for the foreseeable and indefinite future) I’m in the UK. I’ve also lived for shorter periods (about 16 months total) in France. All of that time was spent in more or less prosperous, mostly urban environments, so even though I like to pass myself off as some kind of Europe-whisperer my experience is not much broader than what a tourist would encounter (see, again, my humble-bragging above). The only “poorer” European country I’ve spent any significant length of time in is Greece, and that was prior to the Euro/austerity crisis.
Like anyone who’s moved abroad, I have a lot of complex feelings both about being an American abroad (and who very well May live out the rest of my days abroad) and the places I’ve lived, and I keep thinking about the relationship between the macro-scale statistics and policy trends MY and people in the comments talk about on the one hand, and my experiences and feelings on the other. I think both kinds of data are meaningful and important when debating topics like this, and it’s interesting to see where my experience (and others’) does and doesn’t match with the bigger picture.
I will say that I like living in Europe, and probably even prefer it. I can’t really justify that with reference to any of the things that have been discussed; I just feel like, all other things being equal, I’d prefer to stay here if I can. I should note that I am, in a lot of ways, a weirdo, and I have specific preferences that run counter to majoritarian American lifestyle preferences.
Interestingly, while I don’t find myself becoming “British” per se, I also have started to tend to think of the U.S. as “exotic” in a low-grade way. That is, when I read e.g. the NYT and there’s a culture or human interest story on something they characterize as “American” I feel a sort of casual detachment from it, like I’m reading about a place I’ve never been. I don’t have any strong feelings about that, but I do find it interesting.
The last thing to mention, though, is something that surprisingly doesn’t appear to have come up: guns. I find the thought that - with some state and local variation - basically anyone in the US is potentially packing heat *terrifying.* That’s not a fully rational fear; I am very unlikely to be randomly shot when I visit the U.S. due to my sociodemographic characteristics and the fact that I tend to hang out in relatively safe places (though of course a mass shooting can occur anywhere). The same applies for avoiding violence here in the UK - I’m not exactly living in deepest South London, for example. To be blunt, I’m privileged enough to have a low probability of encountering gun violence ever in my life.
Still, though, it is something I think about a lot when I do consider the possibility of moving back. Guns, and also the possibility of politically-motivated violence in 2024 and perhaps beyond. But that’s a whole other can of worms!
I sympathize with your experience (shared, except in Ireland and Sweden) and attitudes here.
I’d also add that if/when you’re married and/or have kids, you’ll face the same anxieties that a lot of Americans Abroad like me discuss amongst ourselves a lot on the “If I returned…” theme: How would we pay for childcare? Would
my kids be traumatized by bi-annual lockdown drills? Would we have to drive everywhere all the time? What percentage of my time would be spent parsing bewildering healthcare plans and surprise bills—even when we’re well-insured!? What about when I or my partner or kid gets a “pre-existing condition?” And how the heck am I or my kids going to afford keeping me alive when I’m old?
It’s this less glamorous stuff that affects basically everyone when you exit the young, single professional stage of life that really becomes problematic in the US. Some of the stuff is vibes (like not having to think about the distant possibility of being shot today). But other issues are very dollars-and-cents: I’ve run the numbers and it would today cost me $50K+ to live in the US at an equivalent lifestyle, given having a toddler and a wife with diabetes. That gets better as my toddler reached K-12 age, but we’d still be on the hook for some major increases in baseline costs for just living. I’d probably get paid enough more to cover it, but then I’d have to keep earning that high amount to afford just living. Which is a reason why Americans are really anxious about keeping their job—causing them to be more conservative and subservient to employers in a way that I don’t see discussed enough.
In this and other ways, I would likely feel a lot less *free* in the US. A surprising statement, I know! But there’s a lot of factors that Americans are blinded to which actually reduce their daily room for maneuver in ways that you only recognize after they’re no longer there. It took some years, but I really mellowed out over here and began to stop fretting about “holding it all together all the time.” Which, ironically, enabled me to take some very edifying personal and professional risks. And to just be way happier. I worry about losing that if/when we move back to the States. And I say that with sadness and resignation rather than smugness because I really do love many things about the US and I’ll always be very American at heart. It’s just now that I find I can get my American Dream better… in Europe.
Thanks (tak!) for your response - you articulate way better what I was trying to say. I would expand on that, but it would lead to more unnecessary words on my part when you really have laid out very effectively a lot of the points I had in mind.
Child care and parental leave *is* something many European countries do better than the US. It’s a sense of kids as being a communal good (future tax payers and workers) and less “property (and I mean just that) of their individual family” the way it is in the US. (Side note, I wonder if this is why many countries around the world, even poor countries - Kenya and Costa Rica being two examples - ban corporal punishment, including spanking, but the US does not: kids are much more *family property* in the US, and we have some of the most cosseted and helicoptered kids right along some of the most abused and neglected, and it’s all down to what family they are born into.)
It would help us a lot to have better parental leave and child care across the board, but some companies are great on this and others not so much. There is the question of how to pay for it, especially when it comes to child care workers. You can’t have women paid in hugs and kisses and pin money these days, because women are main earners in families, too. I think we *could* pay for it but not in a way a lot of people would like, or rather, some people would like and others raise holy hell.
This piece has some valuable perspective on Obama's macroeconomic policies which were, notably, (1) directionally correct and (2) really good relative to his contemporary leaders.
The global economy being under-stimulated in the wake of the financial crisis is an indictment of the pro-austerity/neo-classical economic views of that era, but these basically came from Obama's opponents and from the European right. At a time when people were yelling about Hayek and expansionary austerity, the Recovery Act was bigger than any New Deal-era fiscal stimulus in both absolute terms and as a share of GDP (and it had some beneficial lasting legacies like its clean energy R&D program).
And because austerity advocates like Wolfgang Schäuble and David Cameron had more influence in Europe while Obama mostly beat Paul Ryan here, America enjoyed much better economic performance. Post-recession unemployment in the EU didn't peak until 2013 (!) by which time it had been declining in America for several years. Certainly if we had been able to do even more fiscal stimulus that would have been better ... but Obama really stands out from his contemporaries in ways that are now easier to see. And as this piece also notes, the better macroeconomic policy was pared with expansions of the social insurance system to move us more in the direction of Europe in the area where we most needed to do so.
I agree overall with your points but I wonder if the income comparisons are totally accurate. With higher taxes there is more demand for perks in lieu of salary. I recall someone saying that in Denmark it’s common for companies to take employees on a vacation junket to (as an exampel) the Costa del Sol. Or in Germany health insurance pays for 2 weeks at a spa that I don’t believe counts toward your vacation days.
I appreciate some of the pushback in the comments (especially given how much less oil Europe has to develop anyways and how much more urbanized the continent is), but another reading of this piece is that early 21st century Republicans are less dysfunctional and wiser politicians than their center-right party equivalents across the Atlantic. The IRA tax credit fund winning out over a carbon tax (arguably hyped almost everywhere in DC except Congress for a decade) seems straight out of a 2008 Cato essay ... and sure enough, there is just the thing:
I know this is not central to your piece, but I want to note that it's not obvious that "Americans’ very high per-capita oil consumption... did worsen our global terms of trade." The key relationship driving deficits is the balance of capital flows, which were not obviously impacted by rising commodity prices. See this piece from Robert Lawrence:
>We got back in the van, and she said to the driver very definitively, “that’s the American spirit!”
Perhaps revealing a little too much Yglesias content consumption on my own part but you told this story before, and this new version is a tad sanitized. Last time the lady said "see, this is why you guys lost the war!" Which is funnier but also potentially meaner, so I can't blame you for changing it.
I like your analysis, until the end. I think it's impossible to disentangle American freedom and initiative from our culture, including the Second Amendment, individualistic health care, addictions to painkillers, etc. There are two sides to the coin, one good, one bad.
Is it really accurate to say the American health care system got “a lot better” after Obamacare passed?
I’m a big Obamacare supporter. I think it was a good idea that was sabotaged at every stage by Republicans(in congress and the Supreme Court) but I don’t think most people would say the health care system got “a lot better”. Improved coverage is of course a big deal(although again my experience isn’t that people got good coverage, they got bad coverage that was overpriced). So maybe an improvement? But hardly “a lot better” 🤷
Before the ACA, an insurance company could deny coverage or drop a person for almost any reason. Fixing that alone was huge for a lot of people. With regards to cost, the trends were already bad; the ACA actually restrained increases ("bent the cost curve").
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.01478
As a high SES household our mantra is “earn in the US, spend in Europe”. The real question I can’t seem to answer despite having thought about this topic for a while is whether the US downsides are inextricably linked to its strengths, or there are practical ways we can copy European achievements without sacrificing our unique awesomeness. For example I am not sure that institutions that produce a lower regulatory burden and flexible bankruptcy code can be made to produce European like healthcare outcomes.
I'd like to see a breakdown on what specifically in our economy has grown so much. Is 100% of the gains because of increased fossil fuel output or 10%? Trying to review what happened is useless without actual numbers to back it up and I'm not seeing an indication here that Matt has broken up our economic growth into different sectors.
A big part of the reason the discussions/debates on this thread are so challenging is simply: the United States is a country and "Europe" isn't. The EU hasn't come particularly close to making it so. So there's more than a bit of an "apples and oranges" flavor to some of these sub-debates.
Not sure if anyone already highlighted this but I found this confusing "because all of these countries were bound together by the Euro, the harder-hit countries couldn’t adopt stimulative policies of their own accord" at first. It was obviously true, but what was the exact reason? Ie Italy doesn't have its own currency or central bank but _does_ control fiscal policy. Then I remembered that Euro membership also includes rules on deficit & debt to GDP ratios and it was those policies that made it even harder for southern EU countries to pursue the right policies.
Yeah, thanks for clarifying this, and moreover, there was the double standard of countries such as France (an EU heavyweight, so to speak), running deficits in contravention of EU rules since as long as there have been said rules...
Matt just to help: you don't have the units right on the Y axis of the US oil production chart. If you are going to stick with that notation--for example, currently "12000" barrels per day, you need to note those are thousands. i.e. we're producing 12 million barrels a day on average.
In 1990, EU GDP per capita PPP was 70.5% of the US(using current EU borders). In 2000, the EU was 69.0% of the US. By 2010, it was 71.5%, and in 2020 it was 69.5% of the US (bouncing back to 70.6% in 2022). Not exactly the US pulling away.
It's definitely true that more liberal US energy policy has strengthened the dollar, leading to a gap in nominal GDP per capita, and more liberal US immigration along with higher birth rates mean higher population growth. But it's a different story to the one you tell here.
Source: https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/world-development-indicators/series/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD
The real story of falling behind is the UK, which went from 77% of US GDP per capita PPP in 1990, 2000, and 2010 to 72% in 2022. The gap has appeared entirely since the Brexit vote in 2016, when the UK was 76.8% of the US
Gavin Newsom waves hi to Britain as California overtakes it on the world economy scale. (We’re right behind Germany and right ahead of India.) Even the entertainment strike probably won’t slow that down too much because we have high tech and real estate which actually rake in more money.)
I think just having more insurance options on the exchange, at all price points, everywhere in the country, would be really beneficial. I haven't researched the current state of the exchange, but I remember in the past there was a huge difference in costs and options depending on where one lives, which state, in a bigger city or small rural area, etc.
Remember when there was a real risk that some markets would have no provider on the exchange? I'm glad to see that all apparently got sorted out, at least. But yeah, more couldn't hurt!
It's funny, I agree with Matt's observations in this post, but I would highlight very different reasons for them. Namely: natural resources. US has them, EU doesn't. I'll admit that as a young person during the Bush/Obama years, I was very against fracking (for the usual environmentalist reasons: artificial earthquakes, tap water lighting on fire, etc.). If asked, I would have said that the smartest country/civilization would win, regardless of where it was located. But that's all crap: young me needed to shut up and calculate the relative impacts of plentiful natural gas. It's all about natural resources: always has been, and probably always will be.
SV can almost fit into this picture: call it an intellectual resource. There are plenty of smart Europeans, of course, but by and large they can't move fast and break things the way Americans do. But we shouldn't rest on our laurels: for me, visiting India makes the US seem as stagnant as Europe.
Not long ago, I had a young Indian guy in Europe asking me about the US. He said he asked people, for example, about starting a company in Europe and got blank stares - no one is interested. He wants to move to the US to work now.
My feeling is the same as yours, which is why I get so worried by everyone idolizing Europe and wanting to move the US in that direction.
I often humble-brag in these here comments about my familiarity with various European countries, so this is a topic of interest to me.
First of all, I apologize for the humble-bragging; it’s tacky. I mean, I think I’m pretty good at disguising my humble-bragging so that it appears to not be as such, but rest assured I’m doing it (and please call me out in the future!).
Anyway, I have now lived in some Europe for just over six years. Four of those were in Finland, and currently (and for the foreseeable and indefinite future) I’m in the UK. I’ve also lived for shorter periods (about 16 months total) in France. All of that time was spent in more or less prosperous, mostly urban environments, so even though I like to pass myself off as some kind of Europe-whisperer my experience is not much broader than what a tourist would encounter (see, again, my humble-bragging above). The only “poorer” European country I’ve spent any significant length of time in is Greece, and that was prior to the Euro/austerity crisis.
Like anyone who’s moved abroad, I have a lot of complex feelings both about being an American abroad (and who very well May live out the rest of my days abroad) and the places I’ve lived, and I keep thinking about the relationship between the macro-scale statistics and policy trends MY and people in the comments talk about on the one hand, and my experiences and feelings on the other. I think both kinds of data are meaningful and important when debating topics like this, and it’s interesting to see where my experience (and others’) does and doesn’t match with the bigger picture.
I will say that I like living in Europe, and probably even prefer it. I can’t really justify that with reference to any of the things that have been discussed; I just feel like, all other things being equal, I’d prefer to stay here if I can. I should note that I am, in a lot of ways, a weirdo, and I have specific preferences that run counter to majoritarian American lifestyle preferences.
Interestingly, while I don’t find myself becoming “British” per se, I also have started to tend to think of the U.S. as “exotic” in a low-grade way. That is, when I read e.g. the NYT and there’s a culture or human interest story on something they characterize as “American” I feel a sort of casual detachment from it, like I’m reading about a place I’ve never been. I don’t have any strong feelings about that, but I do find it interesting.
The last thing to mention, though, is something that surprisingly doesn’t appear to have come up: guns. I find the thought that - with some state and local variation - basically anyone in the US is potentially packing heat *terrifying.* That’s not a fully rational fear; I am very unlikely to be randomly shot when I visit the U.S. due to my sociodemographic characteristics and the fact that I tend to hang out in relatively safe places (though of course a mass shooting can occur anywhere). The same applies for avoiding violence here in the UK - I’m not exactly living in deepest South London, for example. To be blunt, I’m privileged enough to have a low probability of encountering gun violence ever in my life.
Still, though, it is something I think about a lot when I do consider the possibility of moving back. Guns, and also the possibility of politically-motivated violence in 2024 and perhaps beyond. But that’s a whole other can of worms!
I sympathize with your experience (shared, except in Ireland and Sweden) and attitudes here.
I’d also add that if/when you’re married and/or have kids, you’ll face the same anxieties that a lot of Americans Abroad like me discuss amongst ourselves a lot on the “If I returned…” theme: How would we pay for childcare? Would
my kids be traumatized by bi-annual lockdown drills? Would we have to drive everywhere all the time? What percentage of my time would be spent parsing bewildering healthcare plans and surprise bills—even when we’re well-insured!? What about when I or my partner or kid gets a “pre-existing condition?” And how the heck am I or my kids going to afford keeping me alive when I’m old?
It’s this less glamorous stuff that affects basically everyone when you exit the young, single professional stage of life that really becomes problematic in the US. Some of the stuff is vibes (like not having to think about the distant possibility of being shot today). But other issues are very dollars-and-cents: I’ve run the numbers and it would today cost me $50K+ to live in the US at an equivalent lifestyle, given having a toddler and a wife with diabetes. That gets better as my toddler reached K-12 age, but we’d still be on the hook for some major increases in baseline costs for just living. I’d probably get paid enough more to cover it, but then I’d have to keep earning that high amount to afford just living. Which is a reason why Americans are really anxious about keeping their job—causing them to be more conservative and subservient to employers in a way that I don’t see discussed enough.
In this and other ways, I would likely feel a lot less *free* in the US. A surprising statement, I know! But there’s a lot of factors that Americans are blinded to which actually reduce their daily room for maneuver in ways that you only recognize after they’re no longer there. It took some years, but I really mellowed out over here and began to stop fretting about “holding it all together all the time.” Which, ironically, enabled me to take some very edifying personal and professional risks. And to just be way happier. I worry about losing that if/when we move back to the States. And I say that with sadness and resignation rather than smugness because I really do love many things about the US and I’ll always be very American at heart. It’s just now that I find I can get my American Dream better… in Europe.
Thanks (tak!) for your response - you articulate way better what I was trying to say. I would expand on that, but it would lead to more unnecessary words on my part when you really have laid out very effectively a lot of the points I had in mind.
Child care and parental leave *is* something many European countries do better than the US. It’s a sense of kids as being a communal good (future tax payers and workers) and less “property (and I mean just that) of their individual family” the way it is in the US. (Side note, I wonder if this is why many countries around the world, even poor countries - Kenya and Costa Rica being two examples - ban corporal punishment, including spanking, but the US does not: kids are much more *family property* in the US, and we have some of the most cosseted and helicoptered kids right along some of the most abused and neglected, and it’s all down to what family they are born into.)
It would help us a lot to have better parental leave and child care across the board, but some companies are great on this and others not so much. There is the question of how to pay for it, especially when it comes to child care workers. You can’t have women paid in hugs and kisses and pin money these days, because women are main earners in families, too. I think we *could* pay for it but not in a way a lot of people would like, or rather, some people would like and others raise holy hell.
This piece has some valuable perspective on Obama's macroeconomic policies which were, notably, (1) directionally correct and (2) really good relative to his contemporary leaders.
The global economy being under-stimulated in the wake of the financial crisis is an indictment of the pro-austerity/neo-classical economic views of that era, but these basically came from Obama's opponents and from the European right. At a time when people were yelling about Hayek and expansionary austerity, the Recovery Act was bigger than any New Deal-era fiscal stimulus in both absolute terms and as a share of GDP (and it had some beneficial lasting legacies like its clean energy R&D program).
And because austerity advocates like Wolfgang Schäuble and David Cameron had more influence in Europe while Obama mostly beat Paul Ryan here, America enjoyed much better economic performance. Post-recession unemployment in the EU didn't peak until 2013 (!) by which time it had been declining in America for several years. Certainly if we had been able to do even more fiscal stimulus that would have been better ... but Obama really stands out from his contemporaries in ways that are now easier to see. And as this piece also notes, the better macroeconomic policy was pared with expansions of the social insurance system to move us more in the direction of Europe in the area where we most needed to do so.
I agree overall with your points but I wonder if the income comparisons are totally accurate. With higher taxes there is more demand for perks in lieu of salary. I recall someone saying that in Denmark it’s common for companies to take employees on a vacation junket to (as an exampel) the Costa del Sol. Or in Germany health insurance pays for 2 weeks at a spa that I don’t believe counts toward your vacation days.
I appreciate some of the pushback in the comments (especially given how much less oil Europe has to develop anyways and how much more urbanized the continent is), but another reading of this piece is that early 21st century Republicans are less dysfunctional and wiser politicians than their center-right party equivalents across the Atlantic. The IRA tax credit fund winning out over a carbon tax (arguably hyped almost everywhere in DC except Congress for a decade) seems straight out of a 2008 Cato essay ... and sure enough, there is just the thing:
https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1556438907541106688
I know this is not central to your piece, but I want to note that it's not obvious that "Americans’ very high per-capita oil consumption... did worsen our global terms of trade." The key relationship driving deficits is the balance of capital flows, which were not obviously impacted by rising commodity prices. See this piece from Robert Lawrence:
https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/looking-all-wrong-places-reduce-us-trade-deficit
>We got back in the van, and she said to the driver very definitively, “that’s the American spirit!”
Perhaps revealing a little too much Yglesias content consumption on my own part but you told this story before, and this new version is a tad sanitized. Last time the lady said "see, this is why you guys lost the war!" Which is funnier but also potentially meaner, so I can't blame you for changing it.