I think if Harris had flipped harder and more spectcularly she could have won and could have pulled a few more Democrats into Congress. But even if she had lost, she would have left Democrats percieved as less toxically "Progressive." Shaking off that burden is a generational effort.
I gotta say, I have real issues with this thinking generally. For one, the reasoning here to my eyes is kind of self refuting. Harris ultimately lost by a pretty small popular vote margin. A world where "flipping harder" doesn't bring Harris victory is a world where "flipping harder" doesn't win her any extra votes or only an infinitesimal number of votes. Which would actually mean the far leftists would have a point in their theory of the case of how to win.
But it's really "Shaking off that burden is a generational effort." that I think is mistaken. Reality is the party nominee goes a LONG way into defining normies opinions of various parties. Nixon resigns in 1974, Carter wins...so that means the Watergate scandal forever defines the GOP? Yeah some guy named Reagan completely transforms the perception of the GOP and the Neoliberal consensus is established for 28 years. Speaking of which, economy has the worst nosedive in since the Great Depression under GWB in 2008 and Obama wins a massive popular vote victory. Dems are dominant long term right? Well that dominance lasts...almost exactly 2 years and the second most consequential midterm of my life occurs. Romney loses in 2012 and GOP runs an autopsy saying they need to moderate on immigration. Instead a populist wins in 2016 with a very tough on immigration message at the heart of his campaign and now the consensus is any candidate who wants to win in the Western world has to be at least somewhat tough on immigration.
Just pointing out that perceptions of both what defines political parties and issues are the skeleton keys to victory change way way quicker than we think. And so much is just dependent on who happens to be the party nominee the next Presidential cycle.
Harris primarily lost swing votes on inflation/economy and then to secondary extent, immigration. I do not know what kind of flip flop would solve this problem for her; many swing voters simply associated these topics with either specific policy failures or something vague being done poorly by the Democratic administration she was in.
She could have articulated her disagreements with Biden rather than saying, e.g., on The View, that there's "not a thing that comes to mind" that she would have done differently than Biden.
This is true, and some small fraction of swing voters would have believed her, but most would not have, because the campaign had a huge credibility problem.
(And yes, I am fully blackpilled on the fact that someone could have a credibility deficit vis a vis Donald Trump, the single lyingest liar who has existed in world politics at least since Goebbels and maybe ever.)
Highly recommend Strange Victory, which is essentially about intelligence failures. But it is also about the extreme importance of contingency (and why I think alt-history takes are so dumb). Something as small and contingent as the circumstances of Weyland's promotion after Gamelin's dismissal spells the difference between a German cakewalk and a grueling victory because Weyland wasn't able to organise a counterattack.
My one caveat to the Strange Victory type of explanation is that it tells you why the initial German invasion was such a smashing success, but NOT necessarily why that success ended French participation in the war. You can credit the surprise of the German push through the Ardennes with getting the Germans over the Meuse much more quickly than the French had anticipated; but there was a lot of war still to fight at that point, and the French lost it because of the incredibly passive and ineffectual performance by almost their entire military leadership, except de Gaulle. The best explanation for that baffling ineptitude, I think, is the fact that by 1940 most of the French military leadership didn't really think the Third Republic was worth saving.
Operation Barbarossa was, if anything, even more of a German success than Case Yellow had been. The reason France surrendered, but the Soviets didn't, wasn't because the French were in a worse military position than the Soviets after the initial German offensive. It was because the Soviets thought their government was worth the fight, and the French didn't.
That is true, and it is a key difference, but the Soviet manpower and material losses during the summer of 1941 also dwarfed what the French suffered. I think the shock to the Soviet system was at least as bad as the shock to the Third Republic.
Certainly. Another big difference is the German behavior in France vs in the Soviet Union, where it became clear pretty early on that the Germans were aiming for a war of extermination; that helped to clarify the stakes for the Soviets.
Exactly. The Germans had plenty of evidence that they simply did not have the resources to beat Russia absent a crushing and debilitating to the regime’s prestige. Hitler decided to gamble anyway, and we know where that ended up.
What is a one sentence summary of why the military leadership didn't like the Third Republic? Any recommended general survey history books on the subject (perhaps Strange Victory itself)?
I am realizing I know next to nothing about this period in French history, which is funny because I know a lot about the period in America and Russia, and a fair bit about the UK and Germany and Japan!
My one-sentence explanation would be: the French officer corps, like most officer corps, was overwhelmingly conservative, and by 1940 conservatives in France had really soured on the Third Republic, which they regarded as infested with communists and other degenerates. Given a choice between fascism and full-blown communism, they probably would've chosen fascism. A lot of what you saw in the Vichy government was basically this group getting the political upper hand.
The best book about this period I know is The Collapse of the Third Republic by William Shirer (who also wrote the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich).
^^^100% this. The feelings were also mutual: supporters of the Republic viewed the military as a bastion of reaction and the likeliest source of any pro-autocratic putsch. One of the reasons de Gaulle's prewar proposals for a smaller, more mechanized army never gained political support was that a professional standing army was viewed with suspicion; the citizen levy was seen as embodying democratic ideals and less likely to generate coup attempts.
I know the exact date I learned that so many things in history we think as inevitable is really really contingent on various "Sliding Door" moments; November 8th, 2016.
That date also taught me the KISS principle should always be kept in mind when trying to explain why things happened the way the did; "Keep it simple stupid". In the case of what happened on November 8th, 2016, forget "Russia stuff", Whitewater, was Hilary likeable etc. Everything that happened is downstream of one thing; the majority of mainstream media just assumed Trump had no chance of winning especially after the Access Hollywood tape came out. All of the news coverage, the slant it took, "Her emails", the fact that an astonishingly large number of voters thought Hilary was as corrupt as Trump (and clearly not just die in the wool GOP partisans) can all be explained by the fact that the Press by large though a) Hilary was basically already President b) Trump should not have been take seriously as a candidate.
To bring this back to the topic at hand. I think its worth stripping everything out about the supposed defects of the French Third Republic vs. internal dynamics of Soviet Union. To me the difference in outcomes can be explained by the following; Soviet Union had Georgy Zhukov and Richard Sorge and the French did not.
I think by the time Weygand takes command on May 17 the Battle of France is already lost; certainly Weygand seemed to think so at the time, since he spends the rest of the campaign trying not to be held responsible for the defeat rather than actually trying to turn the situation around.
It is always frustrating to discuss books online with people who haven't read them. The argument from the book isn't that France could have won. It is that France could have launched a counterattack that would have done material damage to Germany and turned the campaign into something that possibly lasted months instead of days, not only changing the war but the aftermath of the war. (Would France have insisted on their Indochine fiasco if they weren't humiliated by Germany?)
Weygand supported Gamelin's plan for a counterattack but, as he had just been appointed, felt he had to consult the field commanders before issuing orders of that magnitude. He felt it necessary to meet Billotte and the Belgian leaders in person. Flew(!) to meet them in Ypres. Gort and Blanchard didn't show. Billotte died in an automobile accident on the way back to HQ from the meeting. Everything paused while Blanchard took his place.
During all of this, Hitler had ordered the Panzer troops to stop moving on 17 May. At the time Kleist warned that his divisions had been on the move for two weeks, half his tanks were out of commission, and they were "little equipped for defense".
France paused due to weird circumstances -- a car accident -- and the moment for a counteroffensive passed. Within days the BEF was evacuated and the continent was considered lost.
This is the "Strange Victory" of the title. Not that Germany won, but that it won in such an easy, decisive, and relatively bloodless manner. Gamelin said "it is all a matter of hours" but Weygan felt he needed 48 hours to transition to his new role and speak to field commanders.
The moment passed.
If Reynaud had replaced Gamelin 48 hours earlier or later we might have a very different story of France, Germany, and WW2.
That is certainly a defensible possibility, and the delays caused by Weygand's bouncing around in person (see my comment elsewhere about comms failures being the true cause of French defeat) contributed to closing off the last real window of opportunity for the Allies to blunt the German offensive.
My argument, however, is that even if Weygand had arrived and promptly gotten to work (or even if he had arrived two days on May 15 like you suggest) the situation had already reached a crisis point from which it would have been nearly impossible to recover. By May 15 The Germans were already across the Meuse, the French armored divisions which would lead a counterattack had already been dispersed trying to hold the line, the French motorized units that would've also been needed for a counterattack were already in close contact with the enemy and bloodied from the fighting in the Gembloux Gap, the Allied forces to the north were already hard-pressed and having supply issues (not to mention Gort and the British already having one eye on the Channel), Huntziger was withdrawing to the East and further opening the gap in French lines, and Allied communications had completely broken down everywhere. So while I appreciate the argument that there was still time at this point to turn the Blitzkrieg into a grinding stalemate, I'm skeptical.
Does the book take a position on whether Weygand’s belief reflected sound leadership instincts versus an unjustified lack of confidence in his own authority or his subordinates’ willingness to carry out his orders?
I don't think it takes a position? From memory he had been sent to Turkey (because of political positioning by Gamelin) so he had been "out of the action" for a bit. It seems fairly understandable for a new guy coming in from Turkey to want to talk to actual field commanders before ordering a counterattack.
I also recommend "Case Red: The Collapse of France" by Robert Forczyk - although the book is ostensibly about the latter half of the Battle of France, he covers the lead-up to War and the first half of the campaign, and also addresses some of the other works on the topic (like Bloch's book)
The "big ideas" turned out to be quite bad and it is good we are less ideological. The big ideas often became an obsession that one issue was completely dominant in causing problems in society, which doesn't fit with the complexities of society and lead to many movements and people going down mad rabbit holes.
I do think the risk of famines in the 1960s was perfectly reasonable, China just had a huge one (caused by the leadership), the Green Revolution hadn't happened and fertility was still extremely high.
The damaging aspect is that they didn't change their mind when the facts changed, fertility collapsed and agriculture boomed within a few years and many of these figures continued preaching their message of doom even 50 years later when yields were 3 times higher and China and India had sub replacement fertility.
It will be interesting and depressing to see how many people are talking about the obesity crisis in 20 years after GLP-1s have solved the issue.
We're a year and some odd into having broad-based availability of GLP-1's, maybe we could also stop pretending like "solved the issue" is a justifiable statement on the basis of the data we have?
It makes you sound just as biased as the people who reflexively hate them as a "shortcut."
Social housing in Austria and Singapore is great (though I guess you could argue that HDBs aren’t really social housing).
The issue with it in the United States is that even if you could build it- and hope VI is evidence you can if you want to- middle class and up people should have zero confidence in government’s willingness to do what it takes to keep the housing safe.
We have this problem in DC. DC has zero willingness to enforce the law in a way that would make someone lose a home, so neighborhoods fight tooth and nail against inclusive zoning projects.
“DC has zero willingness to enforce the law in a way that would make someone lose a home”
Similarly, public schools in poor districts suffer enormously from the presence of 1-in-1,000 emotionally disregulated kids, each of whom will disrupt the classroom unless a single, skilled, full-time professional is dedicated to managing them.
I said this the other day but basically every time I've heard of a school of poor kids actually holding them to some serious standards, and helping empower them to live up to them, 95% of them get with the program.
For fear of the parents of that last 1 kid whining in public, we choose to write off the other 19.
I think a lot of housing issues are downwind of the fact your kids go to school with your neighbours. It is impossible but if you could form a school district for just upper middle class parents in urban areas then far more people would live in urban areas. The cost of not having that is suburbs and much higher house prices.
NYC kind of does that with the test schools, of which Stuyvesant is the most famous. It also helps that the kids can use public transit to get to these schools from pretty much anywhere in the city.
It probably gets 90% way there. You still need some discipline and there will be some upper middle class parents worried their kid won't be in the right school.
>According to an analysis by the Democratic super PAC Future Forward, "Kamala is for they/them" was one of Trump's most effective 30-second campaign ads, shifting the race 2.7 percentage points in favor of Trump after viewers watched it. According to polling by the Trump campaign, the commercial resonated with suburban women. This demographic had been a key factor in Joe Biden's 2020 victory over Trump.
>Former President Bill Clinton privately expressed concern about the ad and encouraged the Harris campaign to respond to it saying, "We have to answer it and say we won't do it." The Harris campaign had originally planned to release an ad responding, but the ad ended up performing poorly in internal tests and was ultimately never run.
It's all so nuts. Dems should have done whatever it takes to defeat Trump. They could see this disaster coming but chose to die on the hill of abolishing female sports.
I was on the FF mailing list for their ad testing in 2024. "Kamala is for they/them" was a 77th percentile GOP ad. The 99th percentile ones were all about prices/inflation. Just saying. Good ad, but it wasn't the best/most damaging Republican ad.
Oh, great, you're a raging transphobe, too. Fantastic.
Republicans have no problem whatsoever with "the for-profit genital mutilation of minors"; the difference between the parties is that a. Democrats generally want the minors in question to be able to consent, and b. they don't want to gatekeep surgery for minors based on religious definitions of which motives are holy and which are sinful.
Great, then I assume that you are in favor of a blanket ban on surgery for minors for any condition, including cancer, scoliosis, etc, right (in addition to the obvious cases of circumcision and intersex surgeries, each of which are SPECIFICALLY PERMITTED WITHOUT MINOR CONSENT in all of the Republican laws on this subject)? Since they can't consent?
Oh wait. That would be insane, because you can't just wait until someone is 18 before you treat them for conditions that will have irrevocable physical effects if not treated prior to that point.
Unless they have ads in voting booths, I don't really care about instant reactions. It seems to be an effective ad but I am sceptical of any measurement set up.
No they didn't! This is just factually false! The whole thing is a complete straw man.
The Biden Title IX rules very clearly allowed for the kind of research-based bans on trans women athletes that World Athletics, World Aquatics, etc have implemented.
The Third Republic is really fascinating. There are three monarchist movements backing rival dynasties all of which have successors in modern France. The Republic only surviving because the would be king dislikes the flag so much he refuses to take power unless he can change it. Depressingly one of the few times in history where anti-semitism becomes the dominant political issue and people are elected on a ticket based largely on anti-semitism.
Also the absurd frenchness of it all:
The wife of one of the most important politicians in the country murders the nations leading newspaper editor in cold blood and is found not guilty on the grounds that avenging insults to your husband is a perfectly reasonable exuse for shooting someone.
The almost dictator of France killing himself on his mistresses grave.
The president dying of a heart attack while a woman was....
Several leading politicians being the siblings of leading mathematicians or physicists.
In "fairness" to the Comte de Chambord re: the flag thing, it wasn't just the flag, it was the litmus test that if he was to be the kind of ceremonial monarch who didn't even have the power to change a flag or a national anthem, he didn't want the throne. Man was a Bourbon and was not interested in being a ceremonial figurehead monarch and used the flag issue as a testing ground for whether he'd be a "real" king or a British style king. When it became clear it was the latter at play he rejected the throne.
Don’t forget about the one who became president in part because his uncle was such a famous physicist. (Mostly because his grandfather had been the king of logistics, but the physicist uncle helped.)
Hoover lied about having an engineering qualification in his first job interview, he was trained as a geologist, he learned the engineering side of mining on the job.
For name for the telenovela, I suggest The Third Time’s the Charmé, though I would also accept Love, Lies, and Laïcité. Or Marianne’s Many Husbands. Or Liberté, Égalité, Infidélité
In re the second to last one, I looked up what you were referring to and it appears pretty heavily contested whether any such thing was going on at the time of his stroke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Faure#Death
I feel like just winning or losing big battles has become underrated as a causal force in history. Like the mystery of the Fall of Rome is more about how it came back from the crisis of the 3rd century and then lasted so long after a series of pretty big but contigent losses dating from Adrianople.
Or in the American Revolution you can tell a lot of thick history stories about why the Americans won that all have a lot of merit, but they lose Saratoga and you may be telling meritorious thick history stories about why that attempt failed.
I second the endorsement of the blog as well endorse listening whenever he shows up on a podcast.
... but he doesn't have a tenure line position which is kind of the point above. Some of the is just structural decline in universities leading to there being no jobs, but some of it academics being weird about military history. With the upshot that NATO militaries probably need to write some grants/endow some chairs in military history so that people (voters/civilian leadership) have a chance at understanding what's going on.
The hilarious counterexample being Roman resistance to Hannibal. Defeated again and again in the field and they just. Kept. Coming. It was like the ancient Mediterranean equivalent of fighting the Tyranids.
The population of the Italian peninsula in the 200s BC was a lot more than everywhere else in the Mediterranean. Rome was able to use essentially the classic Russian war strategy.
Classic Russian war strategy wasn't to abandon the countryside and hide out in cities hoping to tie the enemy up in prolonged sieges! That sort of defense-via-strongpoint strategy is more a prefiguring of Vauban than Kutuzov.
More broadly, though, after Cannae the Romans were done. They had conscripted everyone who was militarily capable of conscription, including two legions of slaves and ex-cons and some underage early recruits. There was no backup. They were well aware of this and did not throw the few forces they had left at that point into a meatgrinder offensive-- instead, they adopted the strongpoint strategy I just noted. A few years on, of course, they had enough of a population rebound with new troops coming of age that they were able to put additional armies in the field, but there was never any point where the arithmetic of attacking Hannibal and losing ten men for every one he lost could possibly have produced a war victory. They had to (and did) come up with a different strategy.
On the falling rate of couple formation: not only are people not going to parties, many of them don’t leave the house to go to work. If they go to work, no one has to run out and get lunch. If the commute is going to be bad due to weather/holiday/day of the week people work from home rather than everyone with no commitments decamping to the nearest bar at the end of the day to wait it out. There was once a large amount of casual social interaction in a large office outside of your immediate work group, and everyone knew a wide range of people at the office that they didn’t work with. Huge numbers of us who came of age before ubiquitous inexpensive meal delivery and working from home met our spouses at work.
I started doing exercise routines at home with YouTube videos because gyms near me have really cut their evening hours since COVID. Which I understand because they are pretty empty in the evenings now. Same with restaurants. It is getting harder and harder to find places open near me after 8:00 pm, but I don't fault the owners. Places are much slower than they used to be. Even the pub in a college neighborhood that we used to go to after long school board meetings because it served food until 2:00 am now stops around 10 pm.
On the positive side, I am hearing of more young people who want hybrid work and/or who get together regularly with colleagues in the same industry because they understand the work-related problems with working solely remotely. Also, a young couple who recently moved to my region started a group for 20 and 30-somethings that is based on making friends and doing fun things, not dating, and it is growing like gangbusters. I am hopeful that we are working out ways to emerge from this extremely isolating era, but while we are in the middle of it, it is difficult.
There's a tendency to treat current conditions as a straight line vector heading into infinity. Maybe -- but maybe things will just change all the time. The extreme drop in TFR is pretty recent, like within the last 20 years. Who is to say that it won't bounce back and the depopulation fear will just be a flash in the pan?
We're suffering from isolation, elimination of public spaces, addiction to our phones yadda yadda but who is to say that these trends will continue indefinitely? Maybe people will rebel against them and seek out their opposites? All these things have been occurring in such a compressed amount of time that it's ridiculous to say that this will be the new normal forever. People are ornery and contrary and keep refusing to be herded in one direction.
Your last paragraph is a wonderful (and hopeful) illustration of exactly that.
The point that fertility falling is mostly about lower couple formation rather than people deciding to have fewer kids is why a lot of pro-natal policies designed to incentivize births and punish people without kids really rubs me the wrong way. Having kids isn’t just something you can decide to do, the way you could go buy a more efficient appliance or something! It takes two people, and the process of finding a partner is *supposed* to be competitive and weed a lot of people out by the nature of natural selection and evolution! Very few people are voluntarily childless (polls suggest it’s in the single-digit %s). So punishing people without kids really just seems to be punch down at losers who, for the most part, can’t actually change their situation.
Voluntarily childless is more true of the under 50 crowd than you might think. (Though this article is messy to navigate because a lot of it is about percentages of percentages.)
That number is, if true, pretty disturbing, and is going to require a pretty major set of transfers from them to others to deal with the huge externalities of that decision.
Paying taxes and not burdening the school system with your offspring is hardly selfish. Immigration pairs very well with this strategy. Also you seem too eager to tell the childless what to do.
This seems silly. Unless robots really do change the world, every older person is going to be dependent on younger people to provide what they need. People who had children likely spent a great deal of money on those children that people without children didn't. It seems reasonable to ask the latter to contribute more elsewhere to make up for that gap.
Few say they frequently felt pressure to have children from family, friends or society in general.
"
I think this is a key part. The cultural norm has been broken.
Grow up get married have kids
Once something changes from a norm that everybody does to an option that some do
You're gonna get a lot less of it.
Of course. This is by no means the only reason. There are a lot of other reasons. In particular, I think the cost of housing is a big factor.
My wife and I refuse to have kids in an apartment. We even moved in with my parents.For over two years to save up to buy a house and even then we got lucky and bought in 2010.
A very short window, when housing prices made sense
Strong agree on the cultural norms. I have two kids in high school looking at colleges, and the idea of "Hey you are approaching your most fertile years, have you thought about having kids soon after finishing college?" seems bizarre.
I mean kids are barely dating in high school these days. There's this extended adolescence - fun teen years that people now start later and stretch into their 20s - that really does not align with optimal fertility patterns.
A lot of the fertility/birth-rate discourse is off putting. It often feels like a banner for people who hold much more odious views about culture -- complaints about the normalization of casual sex, liberalism degrading the social fabric, women being “too uppity,” or the secularization of the country. Many of these people blame women for being hypergamous and act like educated women are the reason that the birth rate is going down. To them, men are out here trying to get married by 25 and women are to blame for people getting married later and the reduction of child births. Just look at the Alex Cooper outrage this week.
It's so obviously coming from a socially conservative view of the world that hates the rise of the "girlboss", and it's poisoned the discourse about an otherwise serious problem.
To be fair, educated women *are* pretty much the biggest single reason that the birth rate is going down? My recollection is that in many studies of both historical "Western" fertility rates and modern developing countries rising female educational levels are literally *the* single strongest correlate to falling fertility rates, because almost everything else that might contribute to falling fertility rates (e.g., wider availability of birth control, independent income, greater legal rights, etc.) is directly impacted by women becoming more educated. The issue is just whether you prioritize having more children being born versus girls and women enjoying the same educational opportunities as boys and men.
I don't think this is really accurate. The birth rate decline is especially large among less educated women, teenagers, and unmarried women and marriage decline is also concentrated among less educated women. It's possible to try to tell a composition effect story where education is significant but it would not be easy or straightforward.
This is where the birth-rate alarmists give away the game. They always blame educated women but it's the non-educated women that don't get married. I don't even hear anyone talk about non-educated women. I don't hear them talked about in politics and I don't hear any of the podcast-bros talk about their needs or desires.
Non-college educated women are just absent from the discourse.
I think people mean "education" here to mean women are literate and have at least finished middle school, not about having higher degrees. A lot of the drop-off in fertility seems to happen right around literacy.
I think it's very accurate. What you're talking about, AFAICT from some quick Googling, is basically a post-2000 and especially post-2010 phenomenon. I'm talking the about the last 250 years or so.
It's true that increasing population education levels (not just among women) is correlated with the broader fertility transition. I think if you look at say the post WW2 experience in the West, though, there have been a bunch of ups and down that don't correlate with education at all.
If the entire debate was academic then that's one thing, but tenor is one of scorn and contempt. I think something can be true without having scorn or contempt.
I'm 35 and I'm surrounded by educated, intelligent, "girlboss" women. I've *never* met a woman who has said "I don't want to be a wife or a mother; I just want to sleep around and work on my career." That just isn't a thing. I **have** however, heard plenty of men in the late-20s and 30s talk about wanting something casual, not taking dating seriously, or having a girlfriend they have no intent to marry and are just waiting for someone else better.
I've also heard plenty of horror stories from women about dates they've gone on where the man doesn't put in any effort and wants sex more than a relationship. I've also heard plenty of women say "My boyfriend of 3+ years won't marry me." I've never heard a man say "My girlfriend of 3+ years won't marry me." If men wanted to get married by their mid 20s, I don't think women would object if the man was of marriage material.
Basically, I think there are many reasons as to why relationships have decreased. It's complex that doesn't fall neatly onto an ideological spectrum. But if a sex had to be blamed for the decline of marriages, it's inarguable that its the fault of men.
A friend of my argues that it's all down to urbanization and female literacy is just a correlate (since subsistence farmers don't need to read) and points to e.g. Iran (where women are literate, but oppressed). I don't know enough about this to evaluate the claim.
I think you're right about this. The caveat I'd add is that the childless should be paying higher taxes, maybe much higher, not as a stick or a punishment but to try to do some offset against the free (or at least significantly discounted) rider problem it creates in the entitlement system. However I think it's a very complicated cultural issue. All evidence is that even very generous government subsidy doesn't move the needle. Plenty of places have tried it to no avail and without rhyme or reason to fertility rates.
>>offset against the free (or at least significantly discounted) rider problem it creates in the entitlement system.>>
This seems unfair if the childless are only putative beneficiaries of that system thanks to a crappy design put in place before they were born (and it's not like they had a say in being born). "Sorry kid, FDR & co. designed a shitty system where the young of the present pay the old of the present so now you have to bring children into the world so they can be bound to the wheel of supporting it and sacrifice their youth on the altar of age."
This is totally wrong. That the workers of the present pay for the consumption of the old, the young, and those who are otherwise unable to work is a fundamental feature of society, not something cooked up by FDR. The structure of social security has some distributional implications, especially between retired people, but it isn't what creates this fact.
Given that referenced entitlement system didn't exist prior to FDR, I feel pretty confident that this system was, in fact, cooked up by FDR. You're conflating a normative claim with a positive one.
More generally, having children just so that you can put them in harness is a bad reason to have children, and it's the hypothesized rationale for the stated tax.
To elaborate on Sam's comment, it doesn't matter how much money you've saved up if there are no younger people making things for you to buy or providing services you need. Unless AI takes over, the cycle will continue where the young need the old and then the old need the young.
While I feel confident that AI will take over in any event, I do not think that "the old need the young to support them" is a valid freestanding rationale to have children. I think it's acceptable as a contingent fact of some other other societal telos, preferably offset by warm feelings towards the old and the old's accumulation of productive capital while they themselves were young (thus monotonically reducing the necessary claims on the labor of the young every generation, which even pre AI has basically worked -- food and textiles are cheap instead of dear!), but not as a terminal rationale, which is how it's characterized in InMD's proposal.
So my childless sister who taught special ed for 37 years has to pay more in taxes than my loser SIL who cranked out five kids, two of whom are dead due to drugs and alcohol and all of whom are criminals?
You people who pat yourselves on the back for having kids and acting like that's the most virtuous thing you could possibly do really make me ill.
I still think we should do it, though, even if it doesn't increase fertility rates. It is good for kids, who have no voice, and it may lead to people having kids at a younger age, which is a benefit for many reasons, including that the people who want to have kids actually being able to have them.
Agree 100% there are many 'pronatal' and/or 'pro parent' things I think are good ideas on their own merits. I just meant I don't think they're going to be meaningful for the TFR or whatever metric.
To add to your first point about the influence of big books- I think a lot of people have probably not read Abundance, but instead are familiar enough with the ideas via Ezra and Derek Thompson both having hugely successful podcasts.
I feel that might low-key be a good thing insofar as whenever Democrats learn about/start embracing something, it instantly negatively polarizes Republicans. Let's keep it our little elite secret.
I read Abundance last week... well sort of. By the latter half of the book I was just skimming through because I realized I had already heard all the ideas in it over and over again in podcasts, so the only thing that was left was specific examples in the book.
Yes, I agree. One thing in abundance that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves is drug prices and innovation. Would recommend people read “Why nothing Works” for a funhouse mirror discussion of it as well that is less politically focused.
I get Paul Krugman's substack in my email and he is trying very hard to pretend that 'growth' in America isn't really growth, while growth in Europe is the 'proper' sort of growth. Look, the normal middle class houses that Americans live in seems to be vastly bigger than the same for Europeans. 'Money isn't everything' of course (America seems to be leading the way in masturbators on public transport as well from what I read), but it's a lot for most people.
I feel like there should be interesting alternate histories involving Powell - but I also feel the way he got rolled & used in the Iraq War run-up suggests a Powell presidency would have gone badly.
From what I've read about his decision-making at the time, Powell's career in the military had given him a mindset of having to be a good soldier to the CiC to such a large extent he basically trashed his reputation at the UN. If he himself was the CiC, the dynamic might have been different. Then again, he probably never would have won the nomination.
I mean, isn't it a classic "was he wrong or was he lying?", where neither is a good outcome?
My understanding is that he believed what he was saying, that he had spent time directly with the intelligence, and he was mortified when he realized it had been bullsh*t. Which is why I say he got rolled. If true, wouldn't the same thing have happened as president? Not great.
If it's about how he was a loyal soldier, well, ok but that's kind of saying that becoming the decider would have been a big job change for him & I have no reason to be confident he would have done it well.
If he got rolled by intel, it was intel that was put together and slanted to hell and gone at the behest of the Administration, and wouldn't have been put together under any other Administration...
It was a combination of (very) motivated reasoning and failure to understand just how thin our intelligence was. Saddam Hussein and Jafar Dhia Jafar who had run the clandestine nuclear program when it was operational thought they had made it obvious to American intelligence agencies that the program was defunct.
I read a piece one time arguing that America is just unusually bad at human intelligence for a variety of cultural & institutional reasons. The US basically didn't have a foreign spying apparatus until WW2, compared to Britain or France which have been doing it for centuries. The US is very solipsistic/unusually uninterested in other cultures, which makes spying difficult. Being a presidential system means less continuity and a constantly rotating cast of new administration figures every 4ish years, who are frequently smitten with a charismatic foreign con man (Karzai, some of the Iraqi exiles, etc.)
The US does dominate in signals intelligence due to superior technology, but this piece argued we just suck compared to peer countries at tradecraft, vetting sources, etc. I think about this argument from time to time
On the one hand, yes, I agree that I've read similar things on the strength of the US on SIGINT versus the strength of the UK on HUMINT. On the other hand, I have often wondered about the extent to which British HUMINT strength is overstated given how thoroughly various British intelligence agencies post-WW2 got penetrated by Soviet spies and the fact that even post-Cold War Russian spies seem to be able to operate nearly at will in the UK.
Indeed, and neither a Powell nor a Gore administration would have been breathing down the intelligence community's neck on the former, which likely would have led to people admitting how thin a reed our knowledge was, as opposed to our conjecture.
I can't say that I had the foresight either on interest rates related to fertility decline, but with hindsight it now makes sense to me that with fewer people around, interst rates and thus inflation would be higher as there's just fewer people to do the jobs that the aggregate demand is asking for.
I was quite struck by your tweet, and I remain so after reading your answer here, because it seems like your only avenue toward increased birth rates was financial redistribution, which as you say is less viable now. So it feels like this major plank of the One Billion Americans platform just has to go by the wayside. So does that mean just hope for the best from immigration? Despite Donald Trump's best efforts, we're probably better suited for that, hopefully within our lifetimes, but fertility rates are falling worldwide...
Re: left-of-center Americans defending Europe, yes transit and universal health care are a big part of what appeals to them, but I also think a lot of it is Europe's superior work-life balance and greater leisure time. Western Europe has legally protected paid parental leave, mandatory (and generous) vacation time, companies will often shut down for weeks at at time in the summer, and even when not on leave Europeans work fewer hours per week than Americans working equivalent jobs.
I think a lot of people left-of-center, including me, would be willing to take a small hit to economic growth for more western European levels of leisure and time off. Of course, as Matt has pointed out, the gap in growth can't just be explained by that difference. But I think the impulse to defend European growth is in part to defend against the idea that growth should trump work-life balance and quality of life concerns.
Americans who admire European lifestyles would like to be able to live that lifestyle in the US. Obviously. But most Americans would not. If asked to trade big suburban homes, big TVs, and more economic dynamism for the gentler, urban-focused lifestyle of Europeans, the vast majority of Americans would say no thanks.
There's a lot of path dependency accounting for the differences between these two cultures but there's a lot of revealed preferences too.
Why can’t you have some of both? There is some level of tradeoffs between them but there are in fact a lot of neighborhoods where people have decently large houses but that are still walkable to a lot of amenities. They just tend to be very expensive partly because of their rarity.
If you look at people's preferences there's clearly much more demand than supply among Americans for a western European-style of living. Government jobs can pay far less than their private sector equivalents because employees value the security and work-life balance so highly. Meanwhile, walkable urban areas in blue states are among the most expensive places to live in the country because far more people want to live that lifestyle than there is supply of housing in those cities.
Would a majority of Americans give up big houses and cars for European urban living? Probably not, but I think a much larger share would than you might think.
I'm not sure what how big the share is in my thinking but my guess is that most American tourists who visit Europe love the experience and come back thanking god for their American comforts.
And as Noah Smith writes, "And in fact, as their incomes have grown, West Europeans have generally been moving out to the ‘burbs and buying more cars as well."
Growth is important for making sure the people of a society can have a good life, but the way Americans have directed our economic benefits for the past decade seem to have just made as miserable as a society.
The failing of the Third Republic was not the defeat on the battlefield - that was the fault of the generals - but the failure to fight on afterwards.
Even with the loss of Metropolitan France, the Third Republic had:
1) Substantial colonial areas and forces
2) A powerful navy
3) A resilient British ally
4) An extremely good relationship with the USA, which would have supported the government-in-exile with lend lease
The Dutch and Norwegians chose to fight on with far fewer resources. There was no need, or even a real benefit, to capitulating. The Vichy regime couldn't even secure the release of French POWs for example.
So the Third Republic failed not because of the military defeat, but because of their reaction to it.
Mainly because there was a strong faction within the French government (and within French society writ large) who actively disliked the Third Republic and were not displeased that defeat on the battlefield seemingly vindicated their beliefs and would give them the opportunity to remake the French state. By June 1940 this faction included Petain, the Deputy Primer Minister, and Weygand, the supreme military commander, who argued against fighting on in the colonies and basically toppled Reynaud in order to seek an armistice instead.
The answer to the Vienna social housing question reminds me again that YIMBYism necessarily needs to come first even if it isn't sufficient. Even with all the money in the world, you can't bui.d anything if it's illegal to do so. And then as Matt also says, market conditions and demand also matter.
It’s mentioned in another comment upthread but as far as social housing goes, YIMBYism isn’t going to be enough if you aren’t willing to address anti-social behavior. My sense is that the “we need way more social housing” proponents overlap significantly with the ACAB caucus. Same thing with SROs- we can and should re-legalize them, but it won’t make a difference if you don’t allow them to kick out residents behaving in anti-social ways.
I think if Harris had flipped harder and more spectcularly she could have won and could have pulled a few more Democrats into Congress. But even if she had lost, she would have left Democrats percieved as less toxically "Progressive." Shaking off that burden is a generational effort.
I gotta say, I have real issues with this thinking generally. For one, the reasoning here to my eyes is kind of self refuting. Harris ultimately lost by a pretty small popular vote margin. A world where "flipping harder" doesn't bring Harris victory is a world where "flipping harder" doesn't win her any extra votes or only an infinitesimal number of votes. Which would actually mean the far leftists would have a point in their theory of the case of how to win.
But it's really "Shaking off that burden is a generational effort." that I think is mistaken. Reality is the party nominee goes a LONG way into defining normies opinions of various parties. Nixon resigns in 1974, Carter wins...so that means the Watergate scandal forever defines the GOP? Yeah some guy named Reagan completely transforms the perception of the GOP and the Neoliberal consensus is established for 28 years. Speaking of which, economy has the worst nosedive in since the Great Depression under GWB in 2008 and Obama wins a massive popular vote victory. Dems are dominant long term right? Well that dominance lasts...almost exactly 2 years and the second most consequential midterm of my life occurs. Romney loses in 2012 and GOP runs an autopsy saying they need to moderate on immigration. Instead a populist wins in 2016 with a very tough on immigration message at the heart of his campaign and now the consensus is any candidate who wants to win in the Western world has to be at least somewhat tough on immigration.
Just pointing out that perceptions of both what defines political parties and issues are the skeleton keys to victory change way way quicker than we think. And so much is just dependent on who happens to be the party nominee the next Presidential cycle.
Harris primarily lost swing votes on inflation/economy and then to secondary extent, immigration. I do not know what kind of flip flop would solve this problem for her; many swing voters simply associated these topics with either specific policy failures or something vague being done poorly by the Democratic administration she was in.
She could have articulated her disagreements with Biden rather than saying, e.g., on The View, that there's "not a thing that comes to mind" that she would have done differently than Biden.
This is true, and some small fraction of swing voters would have believed her, but most would not have, because the campaign had a huge credibility problem.
(And yes, I am fully blackpilled on the fact that someone could have a credibility deficit vis a vis Donald Trump, the single lyingest liar who has existed in world politics at least since Goebbels and maybe ever.)
For example, when asked what she would have done differently from Biden, and she said nothing…
Agreed. I don't recall harris, ever coming out strongly against any of her previous positions
She more just tried to stop talking about.The more soft pedal them
Highly recommend Strange Victory, which is essentially about intelligence failures. But it is also about the extreme importance of contingency (and why I think alt-history takes are so dumb). Something as small and contingent as the circumstances of Weyland's promotion after Gamelin's dismissal spells the difference between a German cakewalk and a grueling victory because Weyland wasn't able to organise a counterattack.
My one caveat to the Strange Victory type of explanation is that it tells you why the initial German invasion was such a smashing success, but NOT necessarily why that success ended French participation in the war. You can credit the surprise of the German push through the Ardennes with getting the Germans over the Meuse much more quickly than the French had anticipated; but there was a lot of war still to fight at that point, and the French lost it because of the incredibly passive and ineffectual performance by almost their entire military leadership, except de Gaulle. The best explanation for that baffling ineptitude, I think, is the fact that by 1940 most of the French military leadership didn't really think the Third Republic was worth saving.
Operation Barbarossa was, if anything, even more of a German success than Case Yellow had been. The reason France surrendered, but the Soviets didn't, wasn't because the French were in a worse military position than the Soviets after the initial German offensive. It was because the Soviets thought their government was worth the fight, and the French didn't.
Having a thousand miles of operational depth to fall back through didn't hurt the Soviets either, though
That is true, and it is a key difference, but the Soviet manpower and material losses during the summer of 1941 also dwarfed what the French suffered. I think the shock to the Soviet system was at least as bad as the shock to the Third Republic.
Certainly. Another big difference is the German behavior in France vs in the Soviet Union, where it became clear pretty early on that the Germans were aiming for a war of extermination; that helped to clarify the stakes for the Soviets.
I think this is huge. As Sarah Paine puts it, the Soviets were on death ground and knew they should fight to the very end.
Exactly. The Germans had plenty of evidence that they simply did not have the resources to beat Russia absent a crushing and debilitating to the regime’s prestige. Hitler decided to gamble anyway, and we know where that ended up.
What is a one sentence summary of why the military leadership didn't like the Third Republic? Any recommended general survey history books on the subject (perhaps Strange Victory itself)?
I am realizing I know next to nothing about this period in French history, which is funny because I know a lot about the period in America and Russia, and a fair bit about the UK and Germany and Japan!
My one-sentence explanation would be: the French officer corps, like most officer corps, was overwhelmingly conservative, and by 1940 conservatives in France had really soured on the Third Republic, which they regarded as infested with communists and other degenerates. Given a choice between fascism and full-blown communism, they probably would've chosen fascism. A lot of what you saw in the Vichy government was basically this group getting the political upper hand.
The best book about this period I know is The Collapse of the Third Republic by William Shirer (who also wrote the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich).
^^^100% this. The feelings were also mutual: supporters of the Republic viewed the military as a bastion of reaction and the likeliest source of any pro-autocratic putsch. One of the reasons de Gaulle's prewar proposals for a smaller, more mechanized army never gained political support was that a professional standing army was viewed with suspicion; the citizen levy was seen as embodying democratic ideals and less likely to generate coup attempts.
Marc Bloch is very good on this in Strange Defeat and it was written at the time.
Always useful to go back to primary sources.
I know the exact date I learned that so many things in history we think as inevitable is really really contingent on various "Sliding Door" moments; November 8th, 2016.
That date also taught me the KISS principle should always be kept in mind when trying to explain why things happened the way the did; "Keep it simple stupid". In the case of what happened on November 8th, 2016, forget "Russia stuff", Whitewater, was Hilary likeable etc. Everything that happened is downstream of one thing; the majority of mainstream media just assumed Trump had no chance of winning especially after the Access Hollywood tape came out. All of the news coverage, the slant it took, "Her emails", the fact that an astonishingly large number of voters thought Hilary was as corrupt as Trump (and clearly not just die in the wool GOP partisans) can all be explained by the fact that the Press by large though a) Hilary was basically already President b) Trump should not have been take seriously as a candidate.
To bring this back to the topic at hand. I think its worth stripping everything out about the supposed defects of the French Third Republic vs. internal dynamics of Soviet Union. To me the difference in outcomes can be explained by the following; Soviet Union had Georgy Zhukov and Richard Sorge and the French did not.
I think by the time Weygand takes command on May 17 the Battle of France is already lost; certainly Weygand seemed to think so at the time, since he spends the rest of the campaign trying not to be held responsible for the defeat rather than actually trying to turn the situation around.
It is always frustrating to discuss books online with people who haven't read them. The argument from the book isn't that France could have won. It is that France could have launched a counterattack that would have done material damage to Germany and turned the campaign into something that possibly lasted months instead of days, not only changing the war but the aftermath of the war. (Would France have insisted on their Indochine fiasco if they weren't humiliated by Germany?)
Weygand supported Gamelin's plan for a counterattack but, as he had just been appointed, felt he had to consult the field commanders before issuing orders of that magnitude. He felt it necessary to meet Billotte and the Belgian leaders in person. Flew(!) to meet them in Ypres. Gort and Blanchard didn't show. Billotte died in an automobile accident on the way back to HQ from the meeting. Everything paused while Blanchard took his place.
During all of this, Hitler had ordered the Panzer troops to stop moving on 17 May. At the time Kleist warned that his divisions had been on the move for two weeks, half his tanks were out of commission, and they were "little equipped for defense".
France paused due to weird circumstances -- a car accident -- and the moment for a counteroffensive passed. Within days the BEF was evacuated and the continent was considered lost.
This is the "Strange Victory" of the title. Not that Germany won, but that it won in such an easy, decisive, and relatively bloodless manner. Gamelin said "it is all a matter of hours" but Weygan felt he needed 48 hours to transition to his new role and speak to field commanders.
The moment passed.
If Reynaud had replaced Gamelin 48 hours earlier or later we might have a very different story of France, Germany, and WW2.
That is certainly a defensible possibility, and the delays caused by Weygand's bouncing around in person (see my comment elsewhere about comms failures being the true cause of French defeat) contributed to closing off the last real window of opportunity for the Allies to blunt the German offensive.
My argument, however, is that even if Weygand had arrived and promptly gotten to work (or even if he had arrived two days on May 15 like you suggest) the situation had already reached a crisis point from which it would have been nearly impossible to recover. By May 15 The Germans were already across the Meuse, the French armored divisions which would lead a counterattack had already been dispersed trying to hold the line, the French motorized units that would've also been needed for a counterattack were already in close contact with the enemy and bloodied from the fighting in the Gembloux Gap, the Allied forces to the north were already hard-pressed and having supply issues (not to mention Gort and the British already having one eye on the Channel), Huntziger was withdrawing to the East and further opening the gap in French lines, and Allied communications had completely broken down everywhere. So while I appreciate the argument that there was still time at this point to turn the Blitzkrieg into a grinding stalemate, I'm skeptical.
Does the book take a position on whether Weygand’s belief reflected sound leadership instincts versus an unjustified lack of confidence in his own authority or his subordinates’ willingness to carry out his orders?
I don't think it takes a position? From memory he had been sent to Turkey (because of political positioning by Gamelin) so he had been "out of the action" for a bit. It seems fairly understandable for a new guy coming in from Turkey to want to talk to actual field commanders before ordering a counterattack.
Will take a look. I read Strange Defeat by Bloch. Fantastic book.
I also recommend "Case Red: The Collapse of France" by Robert Forczyk - although the book is ostensibly about the latter half of the Battle of France, he covers the lead-up to War and the first half of the campaign, and also addresses some of the other works on the topic (like Bloch's book)
The "big ideas" turned out to be quite bad and it is good we are less ideological. The big ideas often became an obsession that one issue was completely dominant in causing problems in society, which doesn't fit with the complexities of society and lead to many movements and people going down mad rabbit holes.
The population control big idea of the mid 20th century is the greatest example I can think of regarding that.
I do think the risk of famines in the 1960s was perfectly reasonable, China just had a huge one (caused by the leadership), the Green Revolution hadn't happened and fertility was still extremely high.
The damaging aspect is that they didn't change their mind when the facts changed, fertility collapsed and agriculture boomed within a few years and many of these figures continued preaching their message of doom even 50 years later when yields were 3 times higher and China and India had sub replacement fertility.
It will be interesting and depressing to see how many people are talking about the obesity crisis in 20 years after GLP-1s have solved the issue.
We're a year and some odd into having broad-based availability of GLP-1's, maybe we could also stop pretending like "solved the issue" is a justifiable statement on the basis of the data we have?
It makes you sound just as biased as the people who reflexively hate them as a "shortcut."
It is a solved issue, the data is pretty clear.
Generally speaking, experts want a decade or more of population-level data before making declarations like these, lol.
And rightfully so.
My favorite example is prohibition. It was sold as solving crime, disorder, spousal abuse, and many more ills.
Social housing in Austria and Singapore is great (though I guess you could argue that HDBs aren’t really social housing).
The issue with it in the United States is that even if you could build it- and hope VI is evidence you can if you want to- middle class and up people should have zero confidence in government’s willingness to do what it takes to keep the housing safe.
We have this problem in DC. DC has zero willingness to enforce the law in a way that would make someone lose a home, so neighborhoods fight tooth and nail against inclusive zoning projects.
“DC has zero willingness to enforce the law in a way that would make someone lose a home”
Similarly, public schools in poor districts suffer enormously from the presence of 1-in-1,000 emotionally disregulated kids, each of whom will disrupt the classroom unless a single, skilled, full-time professional is dedicated to managing them.
I said this the other day but basically every time I've heard of a school of poor kids actually holding them to some serious standards, and helping empower them to live up to them, 95% of them get with the program.
For fear of the parents of that last 1 kid whining in public, we choose to write off the other 19.
I think a lot of housing issues are downwind of the fact your kids go to school with your neighbours. It is impossible but if you could form a school district for just upper middle class parents in urban areas then far more people would live in urban areas. The cost of not having that is suburbs and much higher house prices.
NYC kind of does that with the test schools, of which Stuyvesant is the most famous. It also helps that the kids can use public transit to get to these schools from pretty much anywhere in the city.
But thet are elite schools, not for the average middle class resident who wants to avoid the worst aspects of the worst schools.
Singapore has a lot of problems but having test thresholds for essentially every school solves that specific problem
It probably gets 90% way there. You still need some discipline and there will be some upper middle class parents worried their kid won't be in the right school.
>According to an analysis by the Democratic super PAC Future Forward, "Kamala is for they/them" was one of Trump's most effective 30-second campaign ads, shifting the race 2.7 percentage points in favor of Trump after viewers watched it. According to polling by the Trump campaign, the commercial resonated with suburban women. This demographic had been a key factor in Joe Biden's 2020 victory over Trump.
>Former President Bill Clinton privately expressed concern about the ad and encouraged the Harris campaign to respond to it saying, "We have to answer it and say we won't do it." The Harris campaign had originally planned to release an ad responding, but the ad ended up performing poorly in internal tests and was ultimately never run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_is_for_they/them
It's all so nuts. Dems should have done whatever it takes to defeat Trump. They could see this disaster coming but chose to die on the hill of abolishing female sports.
I was on the FF mailing list for their ad testing in 2024. "Kamala is for they/them" was a 77th percentile GOP ad. The 99th percentile ones were all about prices/inflation. Just saying. Good ad, but it wasn't the best/most damaging Republican ad.
"on the hill of abolishing female sports and encouraging the for-profit genital mutilation of minors."
FTFY
Oh, great, you're a raging transphobe, too. Fantastic.
Republicans have no problem whatsoever with "the for-profit genital mutilation of minors"; the difference between the parties is that a. Democrats generally want the minors in question to be able to consent, and b. they don't want to gatekeep surgery for minors based on religious definitions of which motives are holy and which are sinful.
No, minor can consent to something like that.
They are not an adult. And they don't understand what they are doing.
Great, then I assume that you are in favor of a blanket ban on surgery for minors for any condition, including cancer, scoliosis, etc, right (in addition to the obvious cases of circumcision and intersex surgeries, each of which are SPECIFICALLY PERMITTED WITHOUT MINOR CONSENT in all of the Republican laws on this subject)? Since they can't consent?
Oh wait. That would be insane, because you can't just wait until someone is 18 before you treat them for conditions that will have irrevocable physical effects if not treated prior to that point.
Still not worth my time or anyone else's, Zig-Zag.
"I am a bigot who cannot defend my own positions"
As you will, Zaggy Stardust.
I mean...that's not what your source says? We don't know what the new ads said, just that they didn't perform well?
More broadly, this is just a wedge issue for Democrats that Republicans are unified on.
Unless they have ads in voting booths, I don't really care about instant reactions. It seems to be an effective ad but I am sceptical of any measurement set up.
No they didn't! This is just factually false! The whole thing is a complete straw man.
The Biden Title IX rules very clearly allowed for the kind of research-based bans on trans women athletes that World Athletics, World Aquatics, etc have implemented.
The Third Republic is really fascinating. There are three monarchist movements backing rival dynasties all of which have successors in modern France. The Republic only surviving because the would be king dislikes the flag so much he refuses to take power unless he can change it. Depressingly one of the few times in history where anti-semitism becomes the dominant political issue and people are elected on a ticket based largely on anti-semitism.
Also the absurd frenchness of it all:
The wife of one of the most important politicians in the country murders the nations leading newspaper editor in cold blood and is found not guilty on the grounds that avenging insults to your husband is a perfectly reasonable exuse for shooting someone.
The almost dictator of France killing himself on his mistresses grave.
The president dying of a heart attack while a woman was....
Several leading politicians being the siblings of leading mathematicians or physicists.
In "fairness" to the Comte de Chambord re: the flag thing, it wasn't just the flag, it was the litmus test that if he was to be the kind of ceremonial monarch who didn't even have the power to change a flag or a national anthem, he didn't want the throne. Man was a Bourbon and was not interested in being a ceremonial figurehead monarch and used the flag issue as a testing ground for whether he'd be a "real" king or a British style king. When it became clear it was the latter at play he rejected the throne.
Don’t forget about the one who became president in part because his uncle was such a famous physicist. (Mostly because his grandfather had been the king of logistics, but the physicist uncle helped.)
America has only had one president who was the nephew of a (semi) famous physicist. I don't think he is that popular.
OTOH we have had two presidents who were themselves trained engineers. Neither served more than one term…
Hoover lied about having an engineering qualification in his first job interview, he was trained as a geologist, he learned the engineering side of mining on the job.
In that era, I'd say learning engineering on the job counts as being a trained engineer!
Yes, someone could make a five year telenovela on it and change essentially nothing.
For name for the telenovela, I suggest The Third Time’s the Charmé, though I would also accept Love, Lies, and Laïcité. Or Marianne’s Many Husbands. Or Liberté, Égalité, Infidélité
Excellent! If we went for a more demotic title, it could be Sex, Lies, and Suicides.
In re the second to last one, I looked up what you were referring to and it appears pretty heavily contested whether any such thing was going on at the time of his stroke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Faure#Death
> dying of a heart attack
Of a stroke!
You are right
I feel like just winning or losing big battles has become underrated as a causal force in history. Like the mystery of the Fall of Rome is more about how it came back from the crisis of the 3rd century and then lasted so long after a series of pretty big but contigent losses dating from Adrianople.
Or in the American Revolution you can tell a lot of thick history stories about why the Americans won that all have a lot of merit, but they lose Saratoga and you may be telling meritorious thick history stories about why that attempt failed.
Military history is extremely important history that should not be devalued to the point that only right-wing cranks write it!
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I recommend Bret Devereaux’s ACOUP blog.
I second the endorsement of the blog as well endorse listening whenever he shows up on a podcast.
... but he doesn't have a tenure line position which is kind of the point above. Some of the is just structural decline in universities leading to there being no jobs, but some of it academics being weird about military history. With the upshot that NATO militaries probably need to write some grants/endow some chairs in military history so that people (voters/civilian leadership) have a chance at understanding what's going on.
It was a well-understood causal force for a very long time, and only became underrated relatively recently.
The hilarious counterexample being Roman resistance to Hannibal. Defeated again and again in the field and they just. Kept. Coming. It was like the ancient Mediterranean equivalent of fighting the Tyranids.
The population of the Italian peninsula in the 200s BC was a lot more than everywhere else in the Mediterranean. Rome was able to use essentially the classic Russian war strategy.
Classic Russian war strategy wasn't to abandon the countryside and hide out in cities hoping to tie the enemy up in prolonged sieges! That sort of defense-via-strongpoint strategy is more a prefiguring of Vauban than Kutuzov.
More broadly, though, after Cannae the Romans were done. They had conscripted everyone who was militarily capable of conscription, including two legions of slaves and ex-cons and some underage early recruits. There was no backup. They were well aware of this and did not throw the few forces they had left at that point into a meatgrinder offensive-- instead, they adopted the strongpoint strategy I just noted. A few years on, of course, they had enough of a population rebound with new troops coming of age that they were able to put additional armies in the field, but there was never any point where the arithmetic of attacking Hannibal and losing ten men for every one he lost could possibly have produced a war victory. They had to (and did) come up with a different strategy.
They were also able to keep a lot more men under arms than many of their contemporaries, and recruit them quickly.
On the falling rate of couple formation: not only are people not going to parties, many of them don’t leave the house to go to work. If they go to work, no one has to run out and get lunch. If the commute is going to be bad due to weather/holiday/day of the week people work from home rather than everyone with no commitments decamping to the nearest bar at the end of the day to wait it out. There was once a large amount of casual social interaction in a large office outside of your immediate work group, and everyone knew a wide range of people at the office that they didn’t work with. Huge numbers of us who came of age before ubiquitous inexpensive meal delivery and working from home met our spouses at work.
I started doing exercise routines at home with YouTube videos because gyms near me have really cut their evening hours since COVID. Which I understand because they are pretty empty in the evenings now. Same with restaurants. It is getting harder and harder to find places open near me after 8:00 pm, but I don't fault the owners. Places are much slower than they used to be. Even the pub in a college neighborhood that we used to go to after long school board meetings because it served food until 2:00 am now stops around 10 pm.
On the positive side, I am hearing of more young people who want hybrid work and/or who get together regularly with colleagues in the same industry because they understand the work-related problems with working solely remotely. Also, a young couple who recently moved to my region started a group for 20 and 30-somethings that is based on making friends and doing fun things, not dating, and it is growing like gangbusters. I am hopeful that we are working out ways to emerge from this extremely isolating era, but while we are in the middle of it, it is difficult.
There's a tendency to treat current conditions as a straight line vector heading into infinity. Maybe -- but maybe things will just change all the time. The extreme drop in TFR is pretty recent, like within the last 20 years. Who is to say that it won't bounce back and the depopulation fear will just be a flash in the pan?
We're suffering from isolation, elimination of public spaces, addiction to our phones yadda yadda but who is to say that these trends will continue indefinitely? Maybe people will rebel against them and seek out their opposites? All these things have been occurring in such a compressed amount of time that it's ridiculous to say that this will be the new normal forever. People are ornery and contrary and keep refusing to be herded in one direction.
Your last paragraph is a wonderful (and hopeful) illustration of exactly that.
The point that fertility falling is mostly about lower couple formation rather than people deciding to have fewer kids is why a lot of pro-natal policies designed to incentivize births and punish people without kids really rubs me the wrong way. Having kids isn’t just something you can decide to do, the way you could go buy a more efficient appliance or something! It takes two people, and the process of finding a partner is *supposed* to be competitive and weed a lot of people out by the nature of natural selection and evolution! Very few people are voluntarily childless (polls suggest it’s in the single-digit %s). So punishing people without kids really just seems to be punch down at losers who, for the most part, can’t actually change their situation.
This Pew Research survey had some interesting numbers:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-experiences-of-u-s-adults-who-dont-have-children/
Voluntarily childless is more true of the under 50 crowd than you might think. (Though this article is messy to navigate because a lot of it is about percentages of percentages.)
It's a good read though!
That number is, if true, pretty disturbing, and is going to require a pretty major set of transfers from them to others to deal with the huge externalities of that decision.
Paying taxes and not burdening the school system with your offspring is hardly selfish. Immigration pairs very well with this strategy. Also you seem too eager to tell the childless what to do.
This seems silly. Unless robots really do change the world, every older person is going to be dependent on younger people to provide what they need. People who had children likely spent a great deal of money on those children that people without children didn't. It seems reasonable to ask the latter to contribute more elsewhere to make up for that gap.
Yes, yes. Exhaust the world's seed corn the moment after you die and be damned to what you leave behind.
We. Get. It.
"
Few say they frequently felt pressure to have children from family, friends or society in general.
"
I think this is a key part. The cultural norm has been broken.
Grow up get married have kids
Once something changes from a norm that everybody does to an option that some do
You're gonna get a lot less of it.
Of course. This is by no means the only reason. There are a lot of other reasons. In particular, I think the cost of housing is a big factor.
My wife and I refuse to have kids in an apartment. We even moved in with my parents.For over two years to save up to buy a house and even then we got lucky and bought in 2010.
A very short window, when housing prices made sense
Strong agree on the cultural norms. I have two kids in high school looking at colleges, and the idea of "Hey you are approaching your most fertile years, have you thought about having kids soon after finishing college?" seems bizarre.
I mean kids are barely dating in high school these days. There's this extended adolescence - fun teen years that people now start later and stretch into their 20s - that really does not align with optimal fertility patterns.
A lot of the fertility/birth-rate discourse is off putting. It often feels like a banner for people who hold much more odious views about culture -- complaints about the normalization of casual sex, liberalism degrading the social fabric, women being “too uppity,” or the secularization of the country. Many of these people blame women for being hypergamous and act like educated women are the reason that the birth rate is going down. To them, men are out here trying to get married by 25 and women are to blame for people getting married later and the reduction of child births. Just look at the Alex Cooper outrage this week.
It's so obviously coming from a socially conservative view of the world that hates the rise of the "girlboss", and it's poisoned the discourse about an otherwise serious problem.
To be fair, educated women *are* pretty much the biggest single reason that the birth rate is going down? My recollection is that in many studies of both historical "Western" fertility rates and modern developing countries rising female educational levels are literally *the* single strongest correlate to falling fertility rates, because almost everything else that might contribute to falling fertility rates (e.g., wider availability of birth control, independent income, greater legal rights, etc.) is directly impacted by women becoming more educated. The issue is just whether you prioritize having more children being born versus girls and women enjoying the same educational opportunities as boys and men.
I don't think this is really accurate. The birth rate decline is especially large among less educated women, teenagers, and unmarried women and marriage decline is also concentrated among less educated women. It's possible to try to tell a composition effect story where education is significant but it would not be easy or straightforward.
This is where the birth-rate alarmists give away the game. They always blame educated women but it's the non-educated women that don't get married. I don't even hear anyone talk about non-educated women. I don't hear them talked about in politics and I don't hear any of the podcast-bros talk about their needs or desires.
Non-college educated women are just absent from the discourse.
I think people mean "education" here to mean women are literate and have at least finished middle school, not about having higher degrees. A lot of the drop-off in fertility seems to happen right around literacy.
I think it's very accurate. What you're talking about, AFAICT from some quick Googling, is basically a post-2000 and especially post-2010 phenomenon. I'm talking the about the last 250 years or so.
It's true that increasing population education levels (not just among women) is correlated with the broader fertility transition. I think if you look at say the post WW2 experience in the West, though, there have been a bunch of ups and down that don't correlate with education at all.
If the entire debate was academic then that's one thing, but tenor is one of scorn and contempt. I think something can be true without having scorn or contempt.
I'm 35 and I'm surrounded by educated, intelligent, "girlboss" women. I've *never* met a woman who has said "I don't want to be a wife or a mother; I just want to sleep around and work on my career." That just isn't a thing. I **have** however, heard plenty of men in the late-20s and 30s talk about wanting something casual, not taking dating seriously, or having a girlfriend they have no intent to marry and are just waiting for someone else better.
I've also heard plenty of horror stories from women about dates they've gone on where the man doesn't put in any effort and wants sex more than a relationship. I've also heard plenty of women say "My boyfriend of 3+ years won't marry me." I've never heard a man say "My girlfriend of 3+ years won't marry me." If men wanted to get married by their mid 20s, I don't think women would object if the man was of marriage material.
Basically, I think there are many reasons as to why relationships have decreased. It's complex that doesn't fall neatly onto an ideological spectrum. But if a sex had to be blamed for the decline of marriages, it's inarguable that its the fault of men.
What are you rambling on about? This is a global, multi-century phenomenon we're talking about.
A friend of my argues that it's all down to urbanization and female literacy is just a correlate (since subsistence farmers don't need to read) and points to e.g. Iran (where women are literate, but oppressed). I don't know enough about this to evaluate the claim.
I think looking at TFRs in places that have been highly urbanized for several centuries (e.g., coastal China) would be one way to test that theory.
It doesn't help that everyone at the Institute for Family Studies is a creep or a weirdo.
As I've said at SB before, I'm not an anti-natalist, but the pro-natalists are working really hard to turn me into one!
If western liberal societies can't figure out how to have a stable population
They will be replaced by other societies that we probably wouldn't want to live in
I think you're right about this. The caveat I'd add is that the childless should be paying higher taxes, maybe much higher, not as a stick or a punishment but to try to do some offset against the free (or at least significantly discounted) rider problem it creates in the entitlement system. However I think it's a very complicated cultural issue. All evidence is that even very generous government subsidy doesn't move the needle. Plenty of places have tried it to no avail and without rhyme or reason to fertility rates.
>>offset against the free (or at least significantly discounted) rider problem it creates in the entitlement system.>>
This seems unfair if the childless are only putative beneficiaries of that system thanks to a crappy design put in place before they were born (and it's not like they had a say in being born). "Sorry kid, FDR & co. designed a shitty system where the young of the present pay the old of the present so now you have to bring children into the world so they can be bound to the wheel of supporting it and sacrifice their youth on the altar of age."
This is totally wrong. That the workers of the present pay for the consumption of the old, the young, and those who are otherwise unable to work is a fundamental feature of society, not something cooked up by FDR. The structure of social security has some distributional implications, especially between retired people, but it isn't what creates this fact.
Given that referenced entitlement system didn't exist prior to FDR, I feel pretty confident that this system was, in fact, cooked up by FDR. You're conflating a normative claim with a positive one.
More generally, having children just so that you can put them in harness is a bad reason to have children, and it's the hypothesized rationale for the stated tax.
To elaborate on Sam's comment, it doesn't matter how much money you've saved up if there are no younger people making things for you to buy or providing services you need. Unless AI takes over, the cycle will continue where the young need the old and then the old need the young.
While I feel confident that AI will take over in any event, I do not think that "the old need the young to support them" is a valid freestanding rationale to have children. I think it's acceptable as a contingent fact of some other other societal telos, preferably offset by warm feelings towards the old and the old's accumulation of productive capital while they themselves were young (thus monotonically reducing the necessary claims on the labor of the young every generation, which even pre AI has basically worked -- food and textiles are cheap instead of dear!), but not as a terminal rationale, which is how it's characterized in InMD's proposal.
I'd say it's not particularly unfair if it's introduced on some sort of phase-in basis?
So my childless sister who taught special ed for 37 years has to pay more in taxes than my loser SIL who cranked out five kids, two of whom are dead due to drugs and alcohol and all of whom are criminals?
You people who pat yourselves on the back for having kids and acting like that's the most virtuous thing you could possibly do really make me ill.
Just pay people for their labor and time spent raising kids instead of trying to do some weird bankshot policy through the tax code.
I still think we should do it, though, even if it doesn't increase fertility rates. It is good for kids, who have no voice, and it may lead to people having kids at a younger age, which is a benefit for many reasons, including that the people who want to have kids actually being able to have them.
Agree 100% there are many 'pronatal' and/or 'pro parent' things I think are good ideas on their own merits. I just meant I don't think they're going to be meaningful for the TFR or whatever metric.
To add to your first point about the influence of big books- I think a lot of people have probably not read Abundance, but instead are familiar enough with the ideas via Ezra and Derek Thompson both having hugely successful podcasts.
NYT polling from yesterday says 91% of Democratic voters haven't heard of the "abundance movement." It's much more niche than people realize. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/21/polls/times-siena-poll-democrats-crosstabs.html
I would have guessed 75%. That’s remarkable
I feel that might low-key be a good thing insofar as whenever Democrats learn about/start embracing something, it instantly negatively polarizes Republicans. Let's keep it our little elite secret.
I read Abundance last week... well sort of. By the latter half of the book I was just skimming through because I realized I had already heard all the ideas in it over and over again in podcasts, so the only thing that was left was specific examples in the book.
Yes, I agree. One thing in abundance that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves is drug prices and innovation. Would recommend people read “Why nothing Works” for a funhouse mirror discussion of it as well that is less politically focused.
I get Paul Krugman's substack in my email and he is trying very hard to pretend that 'growth' in America isn't really growth, while growth in Europe is the 'proper' sort of growth. Look, the normal middle class houses that Americans live in seems to be vastly bigger than the same for Europeans. 'Money isn't everything' of course (America seems to be leading the way in masturbators on public transport as well from what I read), but it's a lot for most people.
I feel like there should be interesting alternate histories involving Powell - but I also feel the way he got rolled & used in the Iraq War run-up suggests a Powell presidency would have gone badly.
From what I've read about his decision-making at the time, Powell's career in the military had given him a mindset of having to be a good soldier to the CiC to such a large extent he basically trashed his reputation at the UN. If he himself was the CiC, the dynamic might have been different. Then again, he probably never would have won the nomination.
I mean, isn't it a classic "was he wrong or was he lying?", where neither is a good outcome?
My understanding is that he believed what he was saying, that he had spent time directly with the intelligence, and he was mortified when he realized it had been bullsh*t. Which is why I say he got rolled. If true, wouldn't the same thing have happened as president? Not great.
If it's about how he was a loyal soldier, well, ok but that's kind of saying that becoming the decider would have been a big job change for him & I have no reason to be confident he would have done it well.
If he got rolled by intel, it was intel that was put together and slanted to hell and gone at the behest of the Administration, and wouldn't have been put together under any other Administration...
It was a combination of (very) motivated reasoning and failure to understand just how thin our intelligence was. Saddam Hussein and Jafar Dhia Jafar who had run the clandestine nuclear program when it was operational thought they had made it obvious to American intelligence agencies that the program was defunct.
I read a piece one time arguing that America is just unusually bad at human intelligence for a variety of cultural & institutional reasons. The US basically didn't have a foreign spying apparatus until WW2, compared to Britain or France which have been doing it for centuries. The US is very solipsistic/unusually uninterested in other cultures, which makes spying difficult. Being a presidential system means less continuity and a constantly rotating cast of new administration figures every 4ish years, who are frequently smitten with a charismatic foreign con man (Karzai, some of the Iraqi exiles, etc.)
The US does dominate in signals intelligence due to superior technology, but this piece argued we just suck compared to peer countries at tradecraft, vetting sources, etc. I think about this argument from time to time
On the one hand, yes, I agree that I've read similar things on the strength of the US on SIGINT versus the strength of the UK on HUMINT. On the other hand, I have often wondered about the extent to which British HUMINT strength is overstated given how thoroughly various British intelligence agencies post-WW2 got penetrated by Soviet spies and the fact that even post-Cold War Russian spies seem to be able to operate nearly at will in the UK.
Indeed, and neither a Powell nor a Gore administration would have been breathing down the intelligence community's neck on the former, which likely would have led to people admitting how thin a reed our knowledge was, as opposed to our conjecture.
I mean to be fair in his shoes "the CIA is just making all this stuff up to trick me" would not be my default view. I find it hard to fault him.
Thank you very much for answering my question!
I can't say that I had the foresight either on interest rates related to fertility decline, but with hindsight it now makes sense to me that with fewer people around, interst rates and thus inflation would be higher as there's just fewer people to do the jobs that the aggregate demand is asking for.
I was quite struck by your tweet, and I remain so after reading your answer here, because it seems like your only avenue toward increased birth rates was financial redistribution, which as you say is less viable now. So it feels like this major plank of the One Billion Americans platform just has to go by the wayside. So does that mean just hope for the best from immigration? Despite Donald Trump's best efforts, we're probably better suited for that, hopefully within our lifetimes, but fertility rates are falling worldwide...
Hope for the robo-nannies, I guess.
Waymo.... but for childcare. (sucks in breath) Yeah, we'll see.
Thanks for answering my question!
Re: left-of-center Americans defending Europe, yes transit and universal health care are a big part of what appeals to them, but I also think a lot of it is Europe's superior work-life balance and greater leisure time. Western Europe has legally protected paid parental leave, mandatory (and generous) vacation time, companies will often shut down for weeks at at time in the summer, and even when not on leave Europeans work fewer hours per week than Americans working equivalent jobs.
I think a lot of people left-of-center, including me, would be willing to take a small hit to economic growth for more western European levels of leisure and time off. Of course, as Matt has pointed out, the gap in growth can't just be explained by that difference. But I think the impulse to defend European growth is in part to defend against the idea that growth should trump work-life balance and quality of life concerns.
"would be willing to take a small hit to economic growth for more western European levels of leisure and time off."
The problem is a 1.5% hit means a 50% gap in living standards in a generation.
Americans who admire European lifestyles would like to be able to live that lifestyle in the US. Obviously. But most Americans would not. If asked to trade big suburban homes, big TVs, and more economic dynamism for the gentler, urban-focused lifestyle of Europeans, the vast majority of Americans would say no thanks.
There's a lot of path dependency accounting for the differences between these two cultures but there's a lot of revealed preferences too.
Why can’t you have some of both? There is some level of tradeoffs between them but there are in fact a lot of neighborhoods where people have decently large houses but that are still walkable to a lot of amenities. They just tend to be very expensive partly because of their rarity.
If you look at people's preferences there's clearly much more demand than supply among Americans for a western European-style of living. Government jobs can pay far less than their private sector equivalents because employees value the security and work-life balance so highly. Meanwhile, walkable urban areas in blue states are among the most expensive places to live in the country because far more people want to live that lifestyle than there is supply of housing in those cities.
Would a majority of Americans give up big houses and cars for European urban living? Probably not, but I think a much larger share would than you might think.
I'm not sure what how big the share is in my thinking but my guess is that most American tourists who visit Europe love the experience and come back thanking god for their American comforts.
And as Noah Smith writes, "And in fact, as their incomes have grown, West Europeans have generally been moving out to the ‘burbs and buying more cars as well."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/yes-europeans-are-poorer-than-americans
Growth is important for making sure the people of a society can have a good life, but the way Americans have directed our economic benefits for the past decade seem to have just made as miserable as a society.
The phones have made us miserable - economically we're doing great.
The failing of the Third Republic was not the defeat on the battlefield - that was the fault of the generals - but the failure to fight on afterwards.
Even with the loss of Metropolitan France, the Third Republic had:
1) Substantial colonial areas and forces
2) A powerful navy
3) A resilient British ally
4) An extremely good relationship with the USA, which would have supported the government-in-exile with lend lease
The Dutch and Norwegians chose to fight on with far fewer resources. There was no need, or even a real benefit, to capitulating. The Vichy regime couldn't even secure the release of French POWs for example.
So the Third Republic failed not because of the military defeat, but because of their reaction to it.
Mainly because there was a strong faction within the French government (and within French society writ large) who actively disliked the Third Republic and were not displeased that defeat on the battlefield seemingly vindicated their beliefs and would give them the opportunity to remake the French state. By June 1940 this faction included Petain, the Deputy Primer Minister, and Weygand, the supreme military commander, who argued against fighting on in the colonies and basically toppled Reynaud in order to seek an armistice instead.
Fighting on while your enemy controls your homeland and can have its way with your population is hardly an obvious choice.
It's not?
The answer to the Vienna social housing question reminds me again that YIMBYism necessarily needs to come first even if it isn't sufficient. Even with all the money in the world, you can't bui.d anything if it's illegal to do so. And then as Matt also says, market conditions and demand also matter.
It’s mentioned in another comment upthread but as far as social housing goes, YIMBYism isn’t going to be enough if you aren’t willing to address anti-social behavior. My sense is that the “we need way more social housing” proponents overlap significantly with the ACAB caucus. Same thing with SROs- we can and should re-legalize them, but it won’t make a difference if you don’t allow them to kick out residents behaving in anti-social ways.
You talk to any NYer who remembers the bad old days and I guarantee they’ll say banning SROs was one of the big factors in the city’s turnaround.
And it will be dramatically easier to re-legalize them if they don't result in the surrounding area being over-run with begging and public drug use.