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'm less aggrieved that this was her true answer, and more aggrieved that she did not have a better canned answer to the most obvious question in the world. You're a politician, please do politics well!
Right, even just punting, "I'm not going to Monday morning quarter-back, my focus is on the next four years, yadda yadda..." would have been a better response.
Maybe, but this is exactly the failure: consider the counterfactual where she very publicly throws Biden under the bus; this would have generated much content that swing voters would have heard.
Maybe. Who knows. Or maybe the swing voters go, "Wait, you were in the room all the time and you never had a problem with Biden but now that you want to be President you're totally disloyal to the guy who rescued you from obscurity."
Politics is hard, and what you describe almost definitely would have happened; nonetheless, on the margin, it is still clearly the superior strategy and "politics is hard" doesn't mean there aren't things you can do to increase your chances of winning.
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.
That kind of thing matters. Biden could not control recovery and inflation, but he coudl have comrolled what he SAID about it. If you try to claim credid for what you don’t deserve you can complain about being unfairly blamed for what you didn’t do. And he could have made gestures like permittting reform ad tarrif reduction to “fight inflation.”
And the border was an own goal. And even if you and I and Matt Ygelesia know that it was a very contingent outcome, there are more thaa few voters that beleive that Democrates actively want lots of illegal immigration and will do it again the next chance they get..
I don't put all this out there to note that Biden and Harris couldn't have done something different with inflation and the border that might have made an impact with swing voters. Or that there isn't room to criticize their messaging or actual actions. But just more to note that Marc Robbins is right; at a certain point you're veering into "Green Lantern" territory as far as any candidate's ability to move the needle on public opinion via messaging or ads.
I'll go to my grave feeling pretty strongly about two takeaways of the 2024 election both based on the same piece of data; incumbent parties in peer countries all over the place lost by massive margins in 2023-2025 with the lone notable exception of Canada. Tells me a) Harris actually did pretty well all things considered and b) Trump was a very weak candidate in 2024 and a better candidate should have won by a lot higher margin. Which means his nosedive in popularity shouldn't be as surprising as it is to some people and also a lot of pronouncements about the rightward turn in the country in the wake of his victory were based on some pretty shaky foundations.
Yup - people want their own side to be able to blame the other side in a coalition knifefight, whether it's everybody in this comment section mad at 25-year old people with much more liberal views on social policy than them or those 25-year olds who think Israel is evil, but in reality, people all over the world punished partied as ideologically different as Labour in NZ and the BJP in India because of higher prices.
This is kind of Green Lantern stuff. People were super mad about inflation so if Biden had come out and said a few words people would have calmed down.
That's a mischaracterisation of his comment and something of a Fallacy of Excluded Middle
It certainly the long autistic play of the Democrats & Biden on "It's Transitory" facing into "but you're doing better than you think because our macro-data show your real income is starting to run in national aggregate into positive gain territory" - Inflation Denialism heavily reinforced an overall sense to Non-Democrats that the Democrats and Biden Admin did not get it.
Having a different tune wouldn't remove Mad. Mitigate, absolutely possible
Now happily Trump is repeating the Biden error but even worse
there is no 'slur" in using the term - any more than than it's a slur on sick people to call something fevered.
As like my own autistic cousin and likely undiagnosed father
1. Severe challenge to grasp or acc
2. Obsessive focus with on own-view analysis
3. Overweight focus on analytic
None of the faults say the autistic comm is wrong on facts, wrong on analysis, wrong on any point - but it does say that one has an issue - and pretending one doesn't causes self harm
Democrat's autistic messaging stands, it is not a slur it's analysis. A
But sure tedious language policing is your path to success
What could Democrats do in an alternate history given knowledge of how things turned out is interesting because stopping the inevitable inflation is still real hard.
This is easy to forget, but until fairly close to November Democrats thought "January 6" was necessary and sufficient to answer any question about the election. That's the first thing they'd need to unlearn.
The bizarre thing is that Trump himself left office in 2021 with a 34% approval rating, never apologized for attempting to overthrow the election, didn't change anything at all, ran again, and won.
There's a really bad lesson here that I hope no one learns, in that you can put up a complete literal criminal and still have approximately a 50:50 shot.
Yea the generational part is kinda crazy and probably just of this moment - W launched a war with Iraq that went poorly and Obama won it, the economy tanked under W and recovered under Obama, 9/11 and Katrina happened on Ws watch...and the country elected Donald Trump.
Dems are out of power right now and the country is being governed disastrously by a mad man that has taken iron control over the republican party and yea it sucks dems couldn't stop him. But the idea that progressivism did generational damage to the democratic brand ignores not just that W and Trump both ran the country poorly, but also that Clinton and Obama ran the country pretty well and half of all voters never had the opportunity to vote for Bush I, let alone Reagan.
I dunno how the democrats come back or if they win next byt if the Republicans could come back from W and Nixon and Hoover, coming back from Biden seems a surmountable challenge. (Altho to be fair it took a long time from Hoover).
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.)
I agree about inflationm aktiuyt makig a big deal out of Trump’s tariff inclinations might have helped a bit. But a hard flop on immigration (Trump sinking the July reforms) woud surely have helped, then and into the future.
She lost because of inflation. If inflation was 5% instead of 9%, she could've run a video of a transgender teenager winning a girl's swimming meet or whatever and still won.
This seems convenient to believe but why should we think it’s true? Politicians have been bothering to take positions on cultural issues for generations, has it been a waste of time all along?
Obviously, I'm being somewhat hyperbolic for effect, but for the most part, I don't really think transgender issues _or_ Gaza mattered enough to swing the election.
At times, cultural issues can matter, but I see no good evidence either from centrists (about wokeness et al) or my fellow lefties (who think it was about Gaza).
It was 90% inflation, let's say 5% immigration, and 5% other stuff that was all conflicting on its own.
Look at Virginia - putting aside VA is a much bluer state, they tried the same attacks on Spanberger and despite being a moderate, Spanberger has not moderated on trans stuff at all. But the combination of the economy being really bad + Winsome-Sears being a bad candidate means people didn't care enough Spanberger heavily outran even the blueness of Virginia.
So yeah, I firmly believe if inflation peaked at 5%, Kamala could've sounded like Josh Gottheimer on Israel _and_ every Gen X substack writer about transgender stuff _or_ like El Sayed/Mamdani and Chase Strangio and there would not have been an appreciative difference.
It's always good to be better but the widespread claims that her doing this could/would have flipped the outcome aren't based on much. It's just really hard to avoid the shadow of an unpopular incumbent. The parties tried "run someone who no connection to the unpopular president" in 2008, 1952, and 1920 and it very much did not work.
Or consider the counterfactuals. If Dems had replaced Carter with Ted Kennedy (or Birch Bayh) in 1980 would they have won? If Bush the Elder's "heart event" in 1991 had incapacitated him would Bob Dole or Dick Lugar have beaten Bill Clinton in 1992? I don't see really see it*.
*just imagine the takes about how Quayle is why the GOP lost in 1992 in that universe, his campaign was awful, Pat Buchanan would have won!
While I always love woke stuff going under the bus, it doesn't have to be just that. Just a strategy of going centrist where Biden was left and left where Biden was centrist would have signaled a new game in town.
The "Bidenomics is working" ads would still have been an issue.
Yes - my wokey and Biden phrasing was in a not-clear way intending to evoke this - select some salient representative break points (and esp. ones relevant to the Swing Geographies), be ready to lose some Groupey votes in Metros in exchange for improved competitive standing in different voting geographies rather than Votes Maxxing is if one was in a real national aggregate vote.
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 fact that TFR is falling globally, even in developing countries, and that the only time we’ve seen a substantial reversal of the trend required a world war to kick off, makes me concerned this trend is not reversible.
Like I said, predictions are hard. I'm very convinced that we'll never see 6 births per woman again but I wouldn't be shocked if it climbed back to 2 and that would be fine.
The fertility panic crowd tends to treat overpopulation panickers as having been totally deluded, but they were also assuming current trends would continue infinitely.
If there is one thing history has proven nearly conclusively, it's that thinking you can reliably predict the future is foolish. Maybe we depopulate to a much lower level, maybe we don't. Maybe we do and it's actually a great thing.
Small sample size, of course, but my observation is that the hospital today preserves a lot of that stuff in a way that bolsters this thesis. It's a workplace where lots of different people with cross-cutting identities are all physically in the same place, working together (often under adverse circumstances), and that leads to community formation. It's one of the many reasons that I love being a nurse.
I worry about the availability of extremely realistic sex androids or VR sex simulators in perhaps a decade. I don't think such a thing would be a complete substitute for human-on-human sex but I do think that it will move the needle away from human interaction.
I also worry about the availability of pornography today. It's much, much easier to access large amounts of pornography and more extreme pornography than even twenty years ago. This cannot be healthy for young people to see. This is something I think will get even worse quickly once some entrepreneur builds a generative-AI-for-porn service that costs $100/month.
>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.
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.
Yes, the Biden admin’s proposed rules received a fair bit of blowback from trans activists in 2023. They would have allowed schools to establish sports-specific criteria that could prevent trans girls and women from competing in women’s events (though they also would have restricted schools from creating categorical bans, such as bans on trans women in contact sports for example). Those rules were never actually implemented regardless, they were only proposed, and the Biden team dropped the effort to add them to the federal register in December of 2024.
Sure, I mean, I have my rants about the Administrative Procedure Act and its weaponization against liberal policymaking locked and loaded, but I don't get the sense that that's really the issue here.
The point is that the OP is an aggravated lie. Democrats did not "die on the hill of abolishing female sports," or propose to.
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.
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.
Do minors consent to having their tonsils removed?
More to the point, shouldn't the default to be to respect the wishes of families getting competent medical advice? I thought conservatives really valued the family and want to protect it from the suffocating hand of the state.
As I understand it, American medicine was reallllly into removing tonsils in the 70s & 80s, then realized it's basically unnecessary and quietly stopped doing it at some point......
True-- science marches on-- but there are plenty of other procedures that are still medically indicated and performed all the time, including on minors. AFAIK the number of appendectomies and gallbladder removals is still high enough to basically form the bread and butter of a general-surgery practice.
(That's not even to get into the cosmetic-surgery question, which I've mooted below.)
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.
You casually equivocate elective medical intervention for something untestable and unprovable with basic, physically-grounded things like straightening a kid's spine. Hillary had a word for views like yours--deplorable.
No, I casually equate [sic] it with other very legal and very cool medical interventions like [checks notes] the same ones I talked about in my post.
Or take boob jobs. You know boob jobs are legal for minors, right? Anyone here care to defend that distinction? It's incredibly obvious that you don't care about the things you claim to care about.
Anti-circumcision activists have basically won. It's less performed than ever. "Intersex surgeries" on minors are also very uncommon, mostly because DSDs that would actually require surgery are extremely uncommon, but also because people don't like that the patient can't really consent, which means your argument is self-refuting.
And just generally, this is a terrible argument. No one buys the "wrong puberty" nonsense, so calling it "conditions that will have irrevocable physical effects" is eye-rolling.
Where would one go to find data on current circumcision rates? I feel like anti-circumcision advocacy had a small moment in the mid 2010s, but I hadn’t heard anything since, so my assumption has been that it didn’t move the needle much.
Wait, is gender reassignment surgery now more common than circumcision?! Because that’s what I think it would be for anti-circumcision activists to have won.
The first paragraph here is a flagrant misrepresentation (at last count approximately half of newborn males were circumcised, which is... not what you imply here; and as I said, the minors-need-not-consent rules are written in haec verba into these laws, presumably for a reason). The rate of circumcision has dropped by about 10 percent, hardly some sea change in medical behavior.
The second is just... moronic. It's obvious that someone who transitions at age 12 is going to have better success than someone who transitions at age 20. Most gender-affirming surgeries are specifically trying to undo various irreversible things that happen as a result of puberty.
Either parental rights are a thing, or they're not. The current needle is in the direction of parental rights and if we're gonna indulge religious nonsense why not do the child mutilation thing? It's not worse than withholding cancer care.
My preference is no one being permitted to do it at all, but again, parental rights are considered to be a thing.
Sure, like, if you are going to make all people under 18 wards of the state and give the government the power to dictate their medical care that's one thing, and you take the bitter with the sweet with that, but ~no one (probably some tankie somewhere-- or you, it seems?) is advocating for that as public policy.
Pointless IYKYK to signal tribal affinity: sometimes I doubt where I ended up sociopolitically, wonder if it was a mistake to walk away from bog-standard leftist positions and argumentative tactics. Have I been bamboozled? Then a periodic thread like this happens again, and I'm like...yeah, no, glad I got out of that dead-end is/ought dissembling mess.
It still feels like a high freeze peach bar to utilize mutes and blocks - trying to keep that list at only 1 person - but boy is it tempting sometimes.
:? I'm confused by this reply, since as far as I understand it, our views on The Topic are sympatico. Or at least far more aligned than the interlocutor I was actually considering ratio'ing. This was one of the very earliest SB interactions I remember having with you, in fact, before your Long Hiatus period. You said back then that finding actual people within the target demographic who shared your skeptical views made you feel more comfortable with expressing them confidently.
The only shift I've made is that a user named darwin over at ACX linked me to several pieces of empirical evidence studying the direct question of trans vs cis professional athlete performance, finding that despite the brouhaha about bone density, musculature, etc - if you take a *long-term* transitioned person, they perform statistically indistinguishably from a regular one, modulo perhaps some effect for characteristics like height that the drugs don't affect. So I did update that the optimal-case bailey is on sounder epistemic ground than I'd thought.
(But of course, it's the motte that everyone has an actual problem with, so this does not cut the Gordian knot! And political optics don't really care about mere facts anyway.)
I'd agree with your elaboration, based on my own misadventures and interactions with various birds of the same feather over the years. It's not a crime, but it is probably a mistake: a classic case of We Must Do Something, This Is Something. A latent attractor state that has unfortunately gotten way more official sanction than is merited by the evidence base. And after one transitions to this new part of the Nash equilibrium - well, it's just as hard to get out as it was to get in. Once you're in too deep, the only way out is through.
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.
Framing as the Russians / Slavs under Soviet rule "thought their government was worth the fight" is weirdly perverse - German own-behaviour made it rather clear that it was very genocidally oriented (unlike France)
Of course also the Stalin system kicking in on own-side (better a chance not to die fighitng Germans than die in a camp or just shot outright) has a factor.
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).
It's hard to overstate just how incredible it is that the US military in general, and officer corps in particular, has managed to stay mostly apolitical for our nation's history. Even now, I think this to be true. It's so important that this philosophy endures.
^^^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.
He doesn't say that France lost because the generals hated the Third Republic. He says that France lost because of the incompetence of the High Command, aided by poor communication/control and staff work. He does take aim at broader social failures.
My understanding is that part of the reason the French military performed poorly is that the civilian leadership didn't trust the military enough to supply them with large quantities of contemporary weapons. It wasn't clear if the Nazis or the French conservatives were the worse enemy.
Shirer was a great reporter, but Inquiry Into the Collapse of the Third Republic is an absolutely comical overstatement of the French decadence thesis. Shirer walks through every major political event between 1871 and 1940 (with the conservatives the villains in every episode) and claims that it somehow contributed to defeat in 1940. How did France manage to win World War I with 40+ years of catastrophe already accumulated?
May is a good corrective on this. Whatever the French generals may have thought of the Third Republic, Gamelin wasn't taking a revolver to every meeting with Daladier or Reynaud and trying to work up the nerve to shoot them, as Halder was with Hitler.
I have a longer comment below, but I absolutely don't agree with this explanation for French military passivity. You fight for your country, not your government. Even the most reactionary French generals were capable of distinguishing one from the other.
I think other commentors have pointed out the relevant differences between the Soviet and French situations.
The defining feature of French generalship during May and June 1940 was an inexplicable lack of urgency and an unseemly willingness to quit once their poor performance had caused France's military situation to dangerously deteriorate. It might just be a coincidence that many of those same generals supported the dissolution of the Third Republic, and happily served in a Vichy regime that looked an awful lot like the sort of government French conservatives had wanted before the war. But I find it hard to explain why French military leadership was so disastrously inert during 1939 and 1940 without at least some reference to the "Better Hitler than Blum" attitude that many of those officers had no doubt shared during the run-up to the war.
As for the Soviet comparison, yes, I am aware that the Soviet Union is bigger than France, and Moscow is much further from the German frontier than Paris. But the increased distances affected Germany's ability to win, NOT Soviet willingness to fight, and it's the latter I was addressing. The Red Army's defeats in the border battles, at Minsk and at Smolensk were much more disastrous than anything that happened to the French army in May 1940. If the Soviet government had been as polarized and weak as the French when the Germans attacked, the Soviets almost certainly wouldn't have made it past September 1941 before their government collapsed and they sued for peace. But Stalin's late 30s purges had created party, state and military organs that were entirely subservient to him; so as long as he was willing to fight, the Soviets were going to fight, even when it came to truly heroic measures like moving their heavy industry east of the Urals.
This goes back to my earlier point about operational depth: the Soviets spent the summer and fall of 1941 making all the same mistakes the French had and suffering the same consequences for it. The difference is that the huge spaces of Russia gave the Soviets the time, distance, and cover they needed to learn from their mistakes and adjust accordingly. The French forces in the second half of the 1940 campaign fought much more effectively than they had in the beginning and actually inflicted the majority of German losses during this period, and if a thousand miles lay between Paris and the German border the French might have been able to turn the tide as well.
I'm sorry, the seemly thing for a general to do is resign in the face of defeat?
How quickly were unsuccessful generals supposed to quit, exactly? The Germans attacked on May 10 and crossed the Meuse in force on the 13th. Most of the commanders in the vicinity of the Sedan breakthrough had been relieved of duty by the 15th. Corap, commander of the 9th Army, was sacked on the 15th. Gamelin, the supreme commander, was sacked on the 19th, which caused a couple days of confusion. I think that didn't matter much because I think the French army was beyond saving at that point, but many disagree. It certainly didn't help. By the 20th the Germans had reached the Channel. Billotte presumably would have been sacked had he not been in a fatal accident.
The French generals appeared to be overwhelmed, as well they might be, by the speed and ferocity of defeat. We have the following account from Gen. Georges' headquarters in the early hours of the 14th:
"At the telephone, Major Navereau repeats in a soft voice the information he is receiving. The others are silent. General Roton, the Chief of Staff, is slumped in an armchair. The atmosphere is that of a family keeping vigil over a dead member. [Gen.] Georges rises briskly and comes up to Doumenc. He is terribly pale. 'Our front has been pushed in at Sedan. There have been some failures...' He falls into an armchair and a sob silences him.
It was the first man that I had seen weep in the battle. I was to see many others, alas. It made a dreadful impression on me."
That account could be multiplied many times over.
French troops were similarly overwhelmed. There was a famous panic ("the panzers are at Bulson!") many hours before a single German tank had crossed the Meuse. There are many accounts of French troops baa-ing like sheep at their commanders, accusing other units of treason, and looting their own cities.
French generals <appeared> to act with a lack of urgency in the early days of the campaign because their system of command and control was fatally slow.
You are accusing a lot of people of treason without any evidence that I can see beyond the difference between what you think they did and what you think they should have done. That is not enough.
Turning to the difference between the Soviet Union and France, I'm sure it made a difference that (non-Jewish) French leaders and generals were likely to survive defeat, while Soviet leaders and generals could be confident that they would not. It also quickly became clear that the Germans were waging a genocidal campaign in the USSR, which they had not done in France. But even so, non-Russians and non-Jews collaborated with the Germans on a scale that dwarfed French collaboration.
And that Paris was about 100 miles from the frontier while Moscow was about 800 miles away made a huge difference, since the German armies had to stop, pause and resupply while still hundreds of miles from the ultimate objective. The French never got such a break.
"But I find it hard to explain why French military leadership was so disastrously inert during 1939 and 1940 without at least some reference to the "Better Hitler than Blum" attitude that many of those officers had no doubt shared during the run-up to the war."
But the British were equally inert, and so was the French political leadership. Partly because they thought that time was on their side, partly because no one was particularly enthusiastic about the war.
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.
I read Strange Victory (and To Lose a Battle, The Blitzkrieg Legend, Strange Defeat, An Inquiry Into the Collapse of the Third Republic, The Seeds of Disaster, Defending the Republic, The Fall of France, Tragedy in France (published before 1940 was over), Louis Spears' memoirs, Why France Collapsed, Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall of France, a thesis I found online, and various articles).
May says that circumstances were far less favorable to France in May 1940 than they were in September 1939 or September 1938. But if he ever said the French were doomed to eventual defeat in 1940 and it was merely a question of months rather than weeks, I missed it. "By May 28, with Dunkerque and Belgium's capitulation, France's defeat probably had become inevitable -- but not much sooner."
I'm probably more skeptical of France's chances after the German breakthrough than May was. A counterattack on the flanks of the German corridor to the channel was perfectly obvious to anyone looking at a map. I don't think Gamelin, Weygand, or any French commander was capable of pulling together a counterattack on the needed scale, however, because of the lethal sluggishness (I think I'm quoting Alistair Horne) of the French system of command. They really needed to prevent a large-scale breakthrough; once it happened, they seemed helpless.
I don't agree that the hostility of French generals to the Republic had much to do with the defeat (as opposed to the subsequent willingness to collaborate). I am sure it didn't help, and I understand that one reason Gamelin wound up in charge was that he was seen to actually favor the Republic. But I haven't seen anything to make me think that any of the leading French generals in the campaign were traitors or indifferent to winning or losing.
May makes another observation that I think gets less attention than it should. Gamelin, meeting with Polish army officers in the spring of 1939, stated that, if Germany concentrated its forces against Poland, "France would unleash an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of its forces, 15 days after mobilization."
France did not, obviously, do that. But it could have! Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. By September 6, the Maginot Line was fully manned with 75 mostly high-quality divisions in position opposite Germany or along the French and Belgian borders, along with 3,200 tanks and 115 air groups, as well ten squadrons of British bombers.
Opposite them were 30-40 German divisions composed mostly of second- or third-line troops with little training. No tanks, little artillery, and not even adequate supplies of horses and wagons. General Leeb, the German commander, rated German defenses before Belgium and Luxembourg as extremely weak. He deemed the Siegfried Line as little more than a facade.
There was no chance that the French and British were going to launch a massive offensive in September 1939. Gamelin was opposed, Gen. Georges was opposed, the British were opposed, to the extent that any of them were even considering the possibility. Nevertheless, the French and British had the capacity to launch a large offensive in the opening weeks of the war, and such an offensive would have had a very high probability of obtaining a crushing victory. May quotes Andreas Hillgruber, _Hitlers Strategy_ (1965): "A French attack on the weak German defensive front on the Siegfried Line [in September 1939]...would, as far it is humanly possible to judge, have led to a very quick military defeat of Germany and therefore a quick end of the war." But it didn't happen.
And this absolute Allied passivity continued until the moment the Germans attacked. I read somewhere that the British didn't suffer a single KIA until December 1939, and very few after that before the Germans attacked. Yes, the eventual German plan seemed almost perfectly designed to take advantage of the Allied plan, and there was luck involved in that. But the absolute Allied passivity and determination to undertake nothing (with the consequent obligation to defend everything) increased the chances that the Germans would achieve surprise and local superiority, as they did.
I don't know whether you can tie what seems like terrible Franco/British strategy to all the issues, alleged or real, with the Third Republic. But I don't think it's tenable to say the French lost the war in six weeks just because of bad luck.
Horne's book (To Lose a Battle) is probably semi-obsolete but it is magnificently researched and written. The first chapter is an account of the French victory parade in 1919 that was a visual representation of the terrible toll the first war had taken. He quotes more contemporaneous accounts than anyone else I've read.
Older books aren't necessarily more accurate, though. Maurois' Tragedy in France is fascinating (and a major source for Horne) but it's written in an absolute faith in (i) German numerical and technological superiority and (ii) the efficacy of a virulent fifth column that largely didn't exist. Probably the best book on strictly military issues, and one of the few written from the German perspective, is Blitzkrieg Legend.
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
My understanding is that the fear isn’t whining in public, but expensive lawsuits being filed against the school district, at least talking to teachers in the Portland area. From what I’ve read, the concern is that problem students might have an undiagnosed disability (like a mood disorder), and that disciplining them could lead to litigation under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, but I don’t know enough to be sure. It might be state law too.
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.
I'm skeptical of certainty on this. It's going to be a while before we really understand what happens when huge numbers of people are taking GLP-1s indefinitely.
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.
Unfortunately Krugman is an example of what happens if one lets partisan political tribalism take over one's thinking... Pity really as he was a very very good economist and still can be, but after he decided he's more interested in being General Leftyish Democrat Pundit overall... not really same quality.
Agree it’s a shame. Doubly because if he took a break from basically pointless/endless anti-trump takes (who is this persuading at this point? Don’t think many of his subscribers are on the fence.) to offer critical feedback of bad Democrats/Democratic policies he could be immensely influential. Could it be he agrees with all the omnicause stuff? If not he could really help clean it up but for whatever reason seems to choose not to.
Yeah... he's really preaching to the choir... Fan Service not doing much - other than making I suppose subscribers feel validated.
If he focused on his real expertise (macro-economics) and stopped being the Pundit who Comments on Everything because He's a Smart Guy....
but he'd also need to get himself out of partisan pundit mentality - example inflation. I very much feel his partisan cheerleading on inflation and inflation denialism / minimisation helped reinforce a piss-poor Democratic (political) response to the inflation spike under Biden. Sure the extreme 2022 is going to be 1979 views were too far, but there were plenty of middle-road economic critiques that were not extreme but saying "woah, there's a problem emerging and not great idea to hand-waive it away."
Sitting down and trying to be constructively critical on econ policy not as pundit but as economist would have some real utility but he needs to wash his brain of political engagement and go technical.
His last note he had on econ that I read, on inflaion expectations although correct (the signs of expectations coming unanchored are emerging) was limpy. for my reading, he had to import excuse making around earlier inflation takes under Biden, making a limpy partisan analysis since he (a) hand-waive away Biden era inflation impact on mentalities (in my mind even the 70s lessons are often misframed as 70s inflation didn't happen in one go but over years as discrete policy errors built on each other over a good 5 years plus- same to me now, unanchoring now isn't happening in immaculate conception, but is happening from mental roots laid down in an acceleration that somewhat like 70s decelerated and then by policy error is reacclerating) (b) engage in fallacy of exluded middle as he hangs on to the most extreme inflation hawks on Biden era but plenty of comment was more middling and he had dismissed that too when he was all in as Team Transitory. This is letting partisan tribalism get in the way of being clear-headed. Grappling earlier with one-side error (which I hasten to add I felt was a legit error to make, that is wasn't pure idiocy like Trump but rather a Bet but when one sees a bet starting to go sour, one needs to rapidly recalibrate and not claim it's not going sour etc)
Krugmans point is actually that they're no bigger now than they were 20 years ago. Ie the median EU citizen is slightly worse off in material goods than the median US citizen but not any more so than they were in 2006. Which sounds and feels right if you've been in both places. Pretending that the tech industry based in one small part of the country has led to leaps and bounds of gains for everyone else in the US over that time period compared to people in the EU seems bizarre
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.
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
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.
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
Honestly the more that I think about it the better alt-history question would not have been "what if the 3rd Republic lasts longer" but rather "what if the 3rd Republic falls sooner". Would a France that had reverted to a monarchy have approached the June crisis of 1914 (or any of the other lead-up to WWI) any differently, for instance?
The alliance with Russia seems a bit odd, a secular Republic allying with the most religious autocracy in Europe. I wonder if France was a monarchy of any form and Mexico had worked, would France had viewed Austria-Hungary as its key ally in the East against Germany?
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 main factor that led to me pursuing military history and social science at the graduate level was my undergrad professor telling me last spring that it's a basically moribund field nowadays. There's a lot of cool stuff to unpack if you're enterprising enough, just because so few people have spent time picking up the low-hanging and even the medium-hanging fruit.
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.
He'd have stood around outside the Servian Walls looking like today's new idiot for two weeks before his army ran out of forage and had to withdraw.
There was never any point in the Second Punic War where the Carthaginian grand strategy involved laying siege to the city of Rome. They had no siege train or logistical backing for that. Hannibal's explicit objective was to get to, and then peel off Rome's allies in, southern Italy. If he could have durably achieved that, Rome would have been hopelessly outclassed and forced to sue for peace.
But the best way to peel off Rome's allies would have been to show how weak Rome was. Threatening the city might have helped. And fortified cities were taken all the time in that period. (Not saying it would have worked though.)
The technological change in the mass media is an underrated part of why the response to Watergate was different than Trump's various crimes IMO. In the film The Ice Storm, about two upper-middle class families coming apart in suburban Connecticut in the winter of 73'-74', is a good illustration of this. One of the characters, a latch-key kid comes home from school, lets herself in, and plops down in front of the TV to watch....Alexander Butterfield testify as part of the Watergate Hearings.
Back then TV's could only get the Big Three networks (and maybe a indy UHF or PBS station if you lived in a major market) and cable basically didn't exist. So if the networks decide the hearings are important then you don't get to watch cartoons. The nightly news was the same, all the networks broadcast their national news at the same time leaving basically no escape, so if you wanted to watch TV after work, welp there's more Watergate.
Today media markets are radically different* and you could easily go through life regularly watching "content related to news events" while having no idea Trump set up a giant slush fund or whatever.
*the whole idea of stations "signing off" would seem as truly alien to Gen Zers as well LOL
This is a great point. There were some very real advantages to broadcast TV and radio.
I feel that an under-discussed part of this is also resilience to disaster. Broadcast stations existed (and still exist) all over the country, and can operate autonomously in the event of a catastrophe. A broadcast station capable of covering a major metro area is a surprisingly inexpensive and straightforward thing to set up and operate. In contrast, some kind of crisis in Loudoun County, VA could seriously disrupt the entire internet.
(I'm using "broadcast" to mean one-way continuous RF transmissions like digital TV, analog TV, FM radio, and AM radio. I'm not including things like cell phone service and Starlink)
Mid 20th Century TV stations were basically highly regulated, highly lucrative businesses (TV ad time was basically a license to print money) aligned with giant national behemoths in NBC/CBS/ABC. So the lucrative markets could subsidize rural stations for civil defense reasons. Likewise you ended up with stuff like government mandates over disaster preparedness but also rules like "equal time", fairness doctrine, big fights over making TV programs have moral/education content (Vast Wasteland Speech). Why? Post-war elites were deeply concerned over how communists and fascists had pioneered the use of modern media like radio, film and TV (the first mass TV broadcast was a speech by Hitler!) Meanwhile the market incentives could lead to interesting places, humiliated by the quiz show scandals of the 50's the networks poured enormous resources into their newsrooms which arguably had a big effect in the 60's with stuff like coverage of the Civil Rights Movement. Likewise mini series were often made made for prestige not money, all those football games on ABC paid for Roots. Just a different world.
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.
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.
1) The particular date that the US (or any other country) went below replacement isn't relevant to my point? The point is that TFR has been dropping nearly continuously for the past 200 to 250 years in developed countries except really for the Baby Boom. Nothing happening in 2020 or 2010 or 2000 has any worthwhile explanatory power, IMO.
2) TFR has actually been below replacement in the US if you look at the native-born population since like the 1980s, just 10 to 15 years behind Western Europe and Japan. Overall US TFR has been propped up for the past 30 to 40 years by the fact that immigrants to the US have TFRs that look more like their home countries, but within 1 to 2 generations in the US, their TFRs basically sync up with other Americans of similar education/income levels.
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.
Studies show that moving to densely-populated urban areas probably has a causal relationship with bearing fewer children. I forget where I read this, maybe Caplan or Cowen.
Cities had much higher *death* rates than the countryside, mostly due to increased disease transmission, from Sumer until maybe 1950. Some of the fertility hit may have been downstream of this.
It's hard to disentangle "education of women" from "general affluence of the population", though, don't you think? Are there any rich societies where women's education didn't advance and birth rates stayed high? There's also childhood mortality going down and the availability of birth control, which all seem very linked.
The rebuttals to that are (1) TFR fell rapidly in communist countries post-1960 or so too (in fact, some East Bloc countries had TFRs below most Western European countries by the 1980s) and (2) countries with high degrees of affluence, but low levels of female education, like the Gulf states in the 1970s and '80s, had TFRs far above liberal societies in general.
The fertility rate thing comes off to me as the conservative version of degrowthers/climate doomers. Here’s a big scary problem, the solution to which conveniently happens to be doing all the stuff I want people to do but would never be able to sell people on absent the big scary problem.
I’m not totally on board with the feminist project, but women wanting to prioritize their careers is a basic expression of freedom for which I have immense solidarity.
Trying to conscript the uteri of unwilling women for different flavors of social engineering is icky.
And these hysterical worries about fertility are happening when human population is at an all time high and still increasing.
A large spectrum of basically normal men wants to push women towards having sex and kids they don’t want.
My hot take on this is that if we really need an effective lever to control the behavior of attractive men in the 22-35 age range. Normalization of casual sex and dating apps have enabled these men to live in comfortable long-term bachelorhood in a way that is basically unprecedented in human history. If access to regular sex required being married, more of these men would get married.
The problem is that there’s also a lot of discussion about the decline in fertility that comes from totally different directions, but people who have tuned it out because some of it comes from the social conservative side don’t even hear about this because they’ve tuned it out.
People have tuned it out because the talk always come from a socially conservative direction, and the people who espouse it almost always have a broader critique about modern day women.
Honest to God, I've never heard a fertility-alarmist comment coming from someone who hasn't also had a problem with feminism.
Actually, that's not true. I heard it from Steven Bartlett from Diary of a CEO. That's it.
You apparently haven’t been paying attention to Matthew Yglesias or Noah Smith or Dean Spears or any of the people like me who frequent the comments of many of these places.
I haven’t read that article or paid attention to what those other people are saying.
These people aren’t “fertility-alarmists.”
The fertility-rate going down is a real problem. But there’s a huge difference between acknowledging that it’s a problem and acting like it’s one of the biggest problems of our today.
The solutions proposed to this problem also matter, as well the issues one labels as “issues.”
If you want to define “alarmists” as people making bad points, then sure. But I’m saying you *should* pay attention to people who are concerned about fertility, even if they superficially sound similar to the right-wing “alarmists”.
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.)
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.
Mainstream culture on this has changed so much that only the Mormon corridor has retained halfway-sensible norms on family formation. And yet even Utah is well below replacement fertility these days…
I really think the cost of housing is the most important factor. Many articles have been written about how people feel the need to "establish their careers" before they have kids, but why do they feel the need to do that? Because you can't afford a house on an entry-level salary! I think most people work to afford their lives, and if people didn't have to get a couple promotions before they could buy a house, they wouldn't be "establishing their careers" first.
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.
There are so many things where individual choices have more or less public benefit that we allow because, freedom. Specifically targeting people for their reproductive choices when you don't look at all the other things people do to contribute or not contribute suggests either a lack of thought about all the things society needs from people or an agenda that is cares too much about how people procreate.
This is such a weird response. I'm not denying that people should have freedom. I'm saying that society needs kids and as such should encourage them through public benefits. If it makes you feel better, think of it as similar to how we forgive student debt if someone works for a U.S. federal, state, local, or tribal government or a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization because we recognize that people doing that benefit society. We don't look at the rest of their lives and decide whether it all balances out to whether they should get that benefit, they made a specific choice and we value that choice so reward it.
Do you think offering that student loan forgiveness is somehow denying freedom to all the people who don't choose to work for those entities?
So in that equation how do we square the unemployed full-time caregiver with two severely autistic non-verbal adult children? The welfare queens with five poorly behaved brats?
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."
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 think there is a VERY different perspective between individuals/families and children versus society and children. The former should very much a individual+partner choice with a heavy emphasis on effectively concluding that there is a strong partnership and surrounding support for parents and children.
Society on the other hand recognizes the above, but also recognizes that while children are not *necessary* for an individual or even married partners to be successful in life, they are necessary for society's continued success both in providing labor for older people who can no longer do it themselves AND in order to perpetuate a society's continued existence. As such, there should be strong societal benefits to having children and those who do not should absolutely balance out the costs they avoid by not having children. This of course is balanced by other considerations, but compare a couple making 200k a year with three kids versus a DINK couple making 200k a year. The former is contributing significantly more to society than the measly tax deduction the former receive.
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.
Even outside the structure of social security, savings are only valuable to the extent they can purchase things made by working-age people. For the last ~200 years the population has grown and productive capacity has grown, which means the value of savings/investment has grown since there is more to go around. But there is not guarantee this is the case, and if the population pyramid goes the wrong direction there would be massive inflation and declining living standards as large amounts of "savings" is spent trying to employ fewer workers.
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.
Yes I have to agree with Mariana. The idea that we're going to penalize people who don't have kids is just completely unrealistic:
Some women are infertile, desperately want kids, and just can't have them. In addition to the crushing emotional pain of not being able to be a mother, you're...... going to financially penalize these women? Really?
Some people just can't find that someone to have kids with. You're going to charge higher taxes to women who spent their prime years with a cad who never committed and ultimately took off on them? Or whose husband turned out to be infertile? Or to ugly or socially awkward or mentally ill people who can't find someone? Seriously?
C'mon, like none of this is even a little bit realistic, just stop please
Thank you for this comment. I’m going to step away from this place for a while rather than get sucked into this discussion as I did in a similar recent thread. I will just reiterate, though, that judging people’s (strangers’!) situations and rating them against your own personal morality taxonomy is a pretty crass undertaking.
1. Having kids does NOT make you virtuous. Case in point: JD Vance has three children, and IIRC his wife is pregnant with his fourth. The drunken douchebag Pete Hegseth has a number of kids, including at least one that was the result of adultery. Crappy, dishonest, cruel, selfish assholes have children all the time! Conversely, there are many virtuous, kind, helpful, generous people with no children.
2. You have to have enough children to keep society going, if you value society. It's good to recognize that people who have children (and take good care of them!) are doing something valuable for society. There's no contradiction between saying "this farmer is a douchebag" and "being a farmer is good and useful, because people need to eat food."
Bonus opinion:
I'm disturbed by the way high fertility rates tend to be correlated with anti-feminist values. I don't want that to be the future! Come on, small-l liberal women, have more children so our way of life doesn't die out!
Fair points, dros, but once again I'll point to the decline in fertility being global, literally global. The most oppressive societies have falling fertility too! Shortly I'll dig up the charts I just saw the other day about this. I have to go do some actual chores right this second.
I do NOT think "having kids [is] . . . the most virtuous thing you could possibly do" and I can't begin to see how anything I wrote could be construed that way?
My response was based on the facts that: (1) a bunch of social welfare benefits are structured on a system that assumes a certain volume of new taxpayers entering the population, (2) that volume of new taxpayers isn't entering the population, so (3) you need to cut benefits and/or raise taxes to cover that shortfall. I'm personally fine with abolishing Social Security, etc. and going to purely privately financed retirements and so forth, but I have no illusions about that actually happening in the present political system. So then how do you finance those programs? And, if the answer is across the board tax increases, then why isn't that unfair to people who have had children?
Yeah I don’t see a lot of pronatalists grappling with the probability that a lot of the people who are on the fence or uninterested in having kids but would if forced/incentivized hard enough, would be turning out kids who’d be a net drain on society rather than a contributor.
I don't see that. There are plenty of conscientious, decent people who are like "I would love to have 2-3 children, but I met my future husband when I was 38, so realistically I can have only one" or "I wish I could have a third child, but then we would need an extra bedroom, and we can't afford a bigger house, and we don't want to move for career/family reasons" and such.
Romania provided a horrific example of that. An incredible number of children with severe disabilities because they were unwanted and sent into orphanages, where they were raised without love.
Today, in one of my therapy groups, several of my patients talked about how their parents told them they were nothing, losers and unwanted. Even if you're entirely without empathy, this is not how you produce future labor resources.
"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'm definitely not someone who thinks that having children is the most virtuous thing to do. This seems pretty intense so I don't want to push on this and I definitely acknowledge there are many complications involved here. But I would ask a question - I think there are many individuals and couples who are making a good choice NOT to have children. But do you agree that its good for a society to have plenty of children? And if so, can you see that granting benefits to those who provide children is good for society?
As with everything, the problem is that this is the bailey and the motte is the “those goddamn freeloaders who are worse than me” attitude that shows up first.
Your sister probably makes more money than your SIL, so she already pays more in taxes.
Are you opposed to existing things like the earned income tax credit (or, ya know, public school)? Because these could be construed, if you were maximally uncharitable, as favoring the deadbeat parent of five over the selfless childless person. It turns out that it's quite challenging to have prosocial policies that don't have a counterintuitive effect in some corner case. That doesn't mean we should give up on prosociality.
I'd argue that for roughly the median 80% of the population, who are neither going to be horrible parents on the one hand nor do something amazing for society if freed of the burden of raising kinds on the other, having children is indeed just about the most virtuous thing you can do.
To clarify I'd certainly prefer to reform away from that kind of treadmill, just speaking from a (IMO realistic) perspective that its unlikely to happen any time soon.
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.
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.
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."
"most American tourists who visit Europe love the experience and come back thanking god for their American comforts."
American tourists are almost by definition affluent and as tourists they are also only seeing the nice parts. If you're having breakfast at the George V and then walking around Paris it's easy to say, "This is the life!" The reality of living in France on half your income like would be the case for a French person with your job would be quite different.
As an example median nurse salaries in Paris are $40-$60k vs $133k to $150k in California. A nurse and accountant visiting Paris with a HHI of $300k are going to have a different experience than a similar French couple with a HHI of $120k actually living in Paris.
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.
That describes where I live and I love it (near UCLA)! And indeed it's an expensive neighborhood because there's only so much room for decently large houses.
This is, ultimately, my complaint with the entire "affordability" discourse in housing. What you said is absolutely workable. But people are convinced you can make these very expensive places affordable. Without getting any tradeoffs.
The point is that people largely want that decently large house that is just perfectly walkable. Is why you will see absurd stories of people looking at luxury townhouses and asking, "why can't we all live in this?" Complete with throwback to a time when the SRO was allowed and ignore how much of the economy that fueled.
I'm convinced that this would be much easier than we think. If light retail was legal everywhere with no parking minimums we would see a lot of 7/11, Starbucks, and Walgreens businesses in SFH neighborhoods.
I'm the problem, it's me. No thank you to small apartments, shitty dryers, and no icemaker. Certain current problems aside (cough cough), America rulez Europe droolz
Perhaps my favorite sick burn regarding soccer is that in our immensely most popular sport we import a few tiny, under muscled guys to kick the ball with their feet a few meaningless times in the game and yet we mock the rest of the world by calling this sport "football."
If I'm not mistaken, long long ago, field goals were once worth more than touchdowns. Then everyone realized this was stupid and we changed the rulebook.
This isn't really true. Even jobs in the US with decent work-life balance rarely provide European levels of vacation time or paid parental leave. In western Europe, 4-6 weeks of vacation time (separate from sick time) is normal and legally required, as is paid parental leave.
And yes, in the US you can find jobs that rarely ask you to work >40 hours a week, but if you want to work less than that you will likely lose all your benefits, including health insurance and PTO. Also ignoring that, "just work less" isn't really an available option in many professions, especially professional jobs. Employers generally prefer one full-time employee who occasionally works overtime to two part-time employees all else equal.
Go to Indeed and try to find professional jobs that only require 20-30 hours a week but still have benefits, you won't find very many of them.
That’s a fair point that most “professional” jobs require full time and if you drop below 40 hours you will lose your health insurance benefits, so yes I guess there is probably more of a discontinuity at that margin. Nonetheless, I imagine it is still quite possible to find ways to work less and earn less money in the US and still have a comparable standard of living to the average European. In addition, it is easy to over estimate the wealth of the average European: for example, don’t forget that GDP per capita in France is roughly the same as in Alabama. So what we might think of as a huge hit to standard of living to work less might actually put us quite close to a “normal” European.
A problem is offering less work to some employees and not others. How do you handle it when one guy only works 30 hours a week and still gets benefits? You can tell him "he doesn't get paid as much" but pay is very opaque.
There may be a market opportunity for employers to offer to everyone "30 hour work week, 5 weeks PTO, we expect hard work during those 30 hours but then you're offline, pay will be good but not awesome."
I mean, this seems like a non-problem to me? You, as the employee, get to pick which option you want, nobody is forcing you to do anything. The problem version of this is when people want 40+ hours per week but can't get it.
It's hard for one employer to offer mixed benefits to multiple employees because of morale. Every job has a part that sucks and if some people start getting exempted from them the ones remaining get mad. Management is hard.
It's difficult in most fields to exchange shorter hours for more leisure in many, many jobs in the US. Our companies aren't structured that way.
Also, the GDP of France vs. Alabama ignores PPP, income distribution, value of state provided benefits, etc. that make that silly. The middle class Europeans I know don't live in anything approaching poverty. Maybe they have smaller cars and houses, and if that's what you want, well, that's fine, but in terms of stuff that actually impacts quality of life, I don't see much difference.
It is very clear that US living standards have pulled significantly ahead of European living standards. As for substitute wages for leisure, there are plenty of people working hourly jobs who could easily do this. Sure, salarymen working 40 hours can’t do this in their current position, but I have no doubt they could find a way to earn less and have more leisure time.
Are the standard of living impactful, though? We have so much shit that contributes nothing to quality of life. None of my European friends appear to have greater financial difficulties, more financial stress or any other noteworthy hardship relative to my equally educated American friends. To be clear, I'm not saying the GDP gap isn't real, but there are a bunch of factors that make it less significant than the France = Alabama equation suggests. My guess is if you looked at measurements of life satisfaction, health, etc., a median French person will come out ahead of a median Alabamian.
As far as your presumption that it just must be doable, I see no evidence that it is broadly possible in a way that doesn't mean taking much less money per hour for your labor in most fields, to the point where you slide down the wage scale far enough that you need another job to keep going. By and large, outside of gig work, which usually pays poorly relative to other jobs, there isn't much flexibility for US workers.
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.
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.
Look, I pay for a SB membership. If you offered me a $20 bet to write a one-paragraph description of a so-called "abundance movement" to which E/D could give a pass/fail grade (i.e., I either win or lose twenty bucks), I wouldn't take the bet.
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.
Correct the book is pretty underwhelming, the only real skill in it is picking examples progressives will like.
Alas voters want big ass truck abundance not high speed train abundance. But people who pay $14.99 or whatever for political Kindle ebooks reeeeeally like high speed trains and net zero.
I can see the case for self-driving big ass truck abundance but having just ridden on a train for six hours, well it sure beats flying and the equivalent road trip would've been less pleasant.
What is the use case for a six hour train ride? HSR dominates between 300ish kilometers (Paris-Rennes 1hr25) and 750km (Paris-Marseille 2hr56). By the time you’ve spent six hours in a train flying would have been faster. One can fly Paris Nice downtown to downtown in under 5 hours, and the train is 6. That’s why Paris Nice is the most flown route within mainland France.
Yeah having taken Shinkansen in Japan there’s a considerable margin where I would pay more for a high-quality HSR that takes longer than a plane just because it’s so much easier and more pleasant than a plane.
Europe I can't comment on, but being crammed into a flying beer can within the United States over shorter distances I'll take the leg room/access to the diner car. Much more comfortable (also obviously Shinkansens would be better but we don't have those).
Pretty good book but when it went deep into science research grants I was wondering if they got good editorial advice. Not the hugest issue in the world.
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.
Any sort of Top 100 [whatever] lists, because they're entirely subjective, are just a perfect trap for clickbait because everyone loves to argue over how Wrong On The Internet those lists are in so many places. This also means that one can just publish new Top 100 lists and regenerate the arguments in a different valence. I first learned this lesson from being trolled by Rolling Stone's Top 100 Guitarists Of All Time, which of course they've done many iterations of since.
And for some enterprising commentor there's the "Top 100 Slow Boring Posts" just sitting there waiting to happen.
Oh, and of course, "The Top 100 Slow Boring Comments" and the "Top 100 Slow Boring Sick Burn Comments" and "The Worst 100 Slow Boring Comments" (all won by Barry J. Kaufman DO but maybe we could exclude those).
It rates some books by black people highly and therefore, since It Is Known that they can't write well, is therefore Woke and an Attack on Traditional Western Values.
Sigh. I'm not familiar with every book on the list but at a glance it seems like it is mostly well-regarded classics or highly acclaimed more recent literary fiction (or at least they are very well represented). Kindred is awful though--I was super disappointed in that book and I truly do not understand what people see in it. Reads like it was written by a high schooler.
I've never read any Morrison--perhaps I should check out Beloved. Middlemarch was, in fact, extremely good when I read it recently so they picked a solid #1 choice. Just an astonishing feat of characterization and the narration is incredibly engaging given how boring I might have otherwise found the subject matter, and I was surprised at how funny it was.
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.
"Moar police" has been one of my biggest political turnarounds as an adult. The quality-of-life improvements from having even minor stuff addressed quickly are huge, and more police also, ironically, lets us punish softer. If we're clearing a lot of crimes we're inherently identifying repeat offenders, which lets us be very gentle with first-time offenders.
2. The TFR collapse is so extreme in some parts of the world that you could plop a few Mennonites in South Korea, and by 2100, a significant number of South Koreans would be Mennonites. I'm not quite as convinced there's NOTHING we can do about it, or that it won't bounce back, but maybe technology is a population bottleneck that selects for people who don't entertain themselves out of the gene pool. In the scenario in which TFR continues to nosedive, only a certain type of person will remain. I have no idea what that will look like.
3. From what I understand, one aspect of Vienna style social housing that makes it less dysfunctional is that they're not income limited, so residents don't lose their housing situation if they get a better job. This has the result of giving well off people free housing, which is not a great use of resources, but eliminates the disincentive to work that exists in American social housing.
Re: 3- early US public housing supporters understood this dynamic very well, and lots of now-infamous housing projects were *supposed* to be mixed income. Cabrini Green in Chicago, etc. What happened in practice was that all the middle class people immediately moved out when they saw lower income folks move in. Obviously there's a racial angle here too...... That's not really something mid-20th century Sweden or Austria had to deal with
Were they allowed to stay past their income exceeding a certain point?
Really the most functional way to do it would be to give people actual ownership of the units like a condo and only have them be responsible for their share of the property taxes and utilities. But then eventually most of those people would sell their units, and at a certain point it would cease to be public housing (which is fine with me, I'm daydreaming about what I would do with Vancouver’s downtown public housing).
This exists! It’s called a “limited equity [condo/co-op/whatever]”. Prices to initially purchase are affordable, and on sale the permitted price is capped to allow some appreciation (maybe just to keep up with inflation?) but remain affordable.
Ah. That seems like a recipe for subletting. I'm just saying go ahead and give it to the occupants and have them own it. Of course at that point it's not really public housing anymore which I'm also fine with.
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.
For example, when asked what she would have done differently from Biden, and she said nothing…
I'm less aggrieved that this was her true answer, and more aggrieved that she did not have a better canned answer to the most obvious question in the world. You're a politician, please do politics well!
It's worse than a crime, it's a mistake.
Right, even just punting, "I'm not going to Monday morning quarter-back, my focus is on the next four years, yadda yadda..." would have been a better response.
Fundamental mass-market politics....
Democrats: look for people who actually are good at this.... (and in face of not just talking to selves...)
Yes. Besides the border she could have criticized Biden for not criticzing the Fed for allowing iinflation to go on too long.
I doubt very many swing voters were even aware of what she said one time on The View. Were they pounded by Trump ads highlighting that?
Maybe, but this is exactly the failure: consider the counterfactual where she very publicly throws Biden under the bus; this would have generated much content that swing voters would have heard.
Maybe. Who knows. Or maybe the swing voters go, "Wait, you were in the room all the time and you never had a problem with Biden but now that you want to be President you're totally disloyal to the guy who rescued you from obscurity."
Politics is hard.
Politics is hard, and what you describe almost definitely would have happened; nonetheless, on the margin, it is still clearly the superior strategy and "politics is hard" doesn't mean there aren't things you can do to increase your chances of winning.
Trump adds did clip the interview in question. I saw them all the time at sports bars, etc.
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.
That kind of thing matters. Biden could not control recovery and inflation, but he coudl have comrolled what he SAID about it. If you try to claim credid for what you don’t deserve you can complain about being unfairly blamed for what you didn’t do. And he could have made gestures like permittting reform ad tarrif reduction to “fight inflation.”
And the border was an own goal. And even if you and I and Matt Ygelesia know that it was a very contingent outcome, there are more thaa few voters that beleive that Democrates actively want lots of illegal immigration and will do it again the next chance they get..
I mean Biden did do this. He talked about "shrinkflation" a lot; brought it up in his 2024 state of the union https://www.npr.org/2024/03/08/1236921674/biden-state-of-the-union-shrinkflation-prices.
He also put out a ton of ads about tackling inflation generally. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/us/politics/biden-ad-inflation-trump.html
In regards to the border, Biden pushed strongly for passage of the 2024 border bill; a bill Trump deliberately tanked as he knew (or likely Susie Wiles knew) it would help Biden's re election campaign. But you know who else came out strongly on border security? Kamala Harris. https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2024/where-trump-and-harris-stand-on-immigration-and-border-security/
I don't put all this out there to note that Biden and Harris couldn't have done something different with inflation and the border that might have made an impact with swing voters. Or that there isn't room to criticize their messaging or actual actions. But just more to note that Marc Robbins is right; at a certain point you're veering into "Green Lantern" territory as far as any candidate's ability to move the needle on public opinion via messaging or ads.
I'll go to my grave feeling pretty strongly about two takeaways of the 2024 election both based on the same piece of data; incumbent parties in peer countries all over the place lost by massive margins in 2023-2025 with the lone notable exception of Canada. Tells me a) Harris actually did pretty well all things considered and b) Trump was a very weak candidate in 2024 and a better candidate should have won by a lot higher margin. Which means his nosedive in popularity shouldn't be as surprising as it is to some people and also a lot of pronouncements about the rightward turn in the country in the wake of his victory were based on some pretty shaky foundations.
Yup - people want their own side to be able to blame the other side in a coalition knifefight, whether it's everybody in this comment section mad at 25-year old people with much more liberal views on social policy than them or those 25-year olds who think Israel is evil, but in reality, people all over the world punished partied as ideologically different as Labour in NZ and the BJP in India because of higher prices.
This is kind of Green Lantern stuff. People were super mad about inflation so if Biden had come out and said a few words people would have calmed down.
I don't think that's the way it works.
That's a mischaracterisation of his comment and something of a Fallacy of Excluded Middle
It certainly the long autistic play of the Democrats & Biden on "It's Transitory" facing into "but you're doing better than you think because our macro-data show your real income is starting to run in national aggregate into positive gain territory" - Inflation Denialism heavily reinforced an overall sense to Non-Democrats that the Democrats and Biden Admin did not get it.
Having a different tune wouldn't remove Mad. Mitigate, absolutely possible
Now happily Trump is repeating the Biden error but even worse
Hey, everyone: STOP using "autistic" as some kind of slur.
Just. Stop. It.
Ah the fusssy Democratics Woke Language police.
Great ongoing habit.
there is no 'slur" in using the term - any more than than it's a slur on sick people to call something fevered.
As like my own autistic cousin and likely undiagnosed father
1. Severe challenge to grasp or acc
2. Obsessive focus with on own-view analysis
3. Overweight focus on analytic
None of the faults say the autistic comm is wrong on facts, wrong on analysis, wrong on any point - but it does say that one has an issue - and pretending one doesn't causes self harm
Democrat's autistic messaging stands, it is not a slur it's analysis. A
But sure tedious language policing is your path to success
What could Democrats do in an alternate history given knowledge of how things turned out is interesting because stopping the inevitable inflation is still real hard.
This is easy to forget, but until fairly close to November Democrats thought "January 6" was necessary and sufficient to answer any question about the election. That's the first thing they'd need to unlearn.
It should've been... It's glaring proof that the "humans are basically evil" framework is true.
Yeah, they thought that the voters really cherished their democracy and would turn against the people trying to destroy it.
Silly Democrats.
The bizarre thing is that Trump himself left office in 2021 with a 34% approval rating, never apologized for attempting to overthrow the election, didn't change anything at all, ran again, and won.
There's a really bad lesson here that I hope no one learns, in that you can put up a complete literal criminal and still have approximately a 50:50 shot.
Losing Votes: Geography not national aggregate matters.
Losing proggy votes in the large coastal metros but gaining in Swing States is a actionable tradeoff.
Given the loss margins in the Swings - it is not numerically implausible in the least.
Disaggregation by Geography (State, Swing Regional).
Yea the generational part is kinda crazy and probably just of this moment - W launched a war with Iraq that went poorly and Obama won it, the economy tanked under W and recovered under Obama, 9/11 and Katrina happened on Ws watch...and the country elected Donald Trump.
Dems are out of power right now and the country is being governed disastrously by a mad man that has taken iron control over the republican party and yea it sucks dems couldn't stop him. But the idea that progressivism did generational damage to the democratic brand ignores not just that W and Trump both ran the country poorly, but also that Clinton and Obama ran the country pretty well and half of all voters never had the opportunity to vote for Bush I, let alone Reagan.
I dunno how the democrats come back or if they win next byt if the Republicans could come back from W and Nixon and Hoover, coming back from Biden seems a surmountable challenge. (Altho to be fair it took a long time from Hoover).
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
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.)
Also being a black woman.
I fully expected the hidden Democrat "autopsy" to be that union workers hate women and minorities
I agree about inflationm aktiuyt makig a big deal out of Trump’s tariff inclinations might have helped a bit. But a hard flop on immigration (Trump sinking the July reforms) woud surely have helped, then and into the future.
+1
This Is Known.
She lost because of inflation. If inflation was 5% instead of 9%, she could've run a video of a transgender teenager winning a girl's swimming meet or whatever and still won.
This seems convenient to believe but why should we think it’s true? Politicians have been bothering to take positions on cultural issues for generations, has it been a waste of time all along?
Obviously, I'm being somewhat hyperbolic for effect, but for the most part, I don't really think transgender issues _or_ Gaza mattered enough to swing the election.
At times, cultural issues can matter, but I see no good evidence either from centrists (about wokeness et al) or my fellow lefties (who think it was about Gaza).
It was 90% inflation, let's say 5% immigration, and 5% other stuff that was all conflicting on its own.
Look at Virginia - putting aside VA is a much bluer state, they tried the same attacks on Spanberger and despite being a moderate, Spanberger has not moderated on trans stuff at all. But the combination of the economy being really bad + Winsome-Sears being a bad candidate means people didn't care enough Spanberger heavily outran even the blueness of Virginia.
So yeah, I firmly believe if inflation peaked at 5%, Kamala could've sounded like Josh Gottheimer on Israel _and_ every Gen X substack writer about transgender stuff _or_ like El Sayed/Mamdani and Chase Strangio and there would not have been an appreciative difference.
It's always good to be better but the widespread claims that her doing this could/would have flipped the outcome aren't based on much. It's just really hard to avoid the shadow of an unpopular incumbent. The parties tried "run someone who no connection to the unpopular president" in 2008, 1952, and 1920 and it very much did not work.
Or consider the counterfactuals. If Dems had replaced Carter with Ted Kennedy (or Birch Bayh) in 1980 would they have won? If Bush the Elder's "heart event" in 1991 had incapacitated him would Bob Dole or Dick Lugar have beaten Bill Clinton in 1992? I don't see really see it*.
*just imagine the takes about how Quayle is why the GOP lost in 1992 in that universe, his campaign was awful, Pat Buchanan would have won!
Or put in another way: "Thrown some old ultra-wokey positions and Biden under the bus in a very unambiguous way"
While I always love woke stuff going under the bus, it doesn't have to be just that. Just a strategy of going centrist where Biden was left and left where Biden was centrist would have signaled a new game in town.
The "Bidenomics is working" ads would still have been an issue.
Yes - my wokey and Biden phrasing was in a not-clear way intending to evoke this - select some salient representative break points (and esp. ones relevant to the Swing Geographies), be ready to lose some Groupey votes in Metros in exchange for improved competitive standing in different voting geographies rather than Votes Maxxing is if one was in a real national aggregate vote.
Yes, particulalry the failure to provide resources to process asylum claims at the border.
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 fact that TFR is falling globally, even in developing countries, and that the only time we’ve seen a substantial reversal of the trend required a world war to kick off, makes me concerned this trend is not reversible.
Like I said, predictions are hard. I'm very convinced that we'll never see 6 births per woman again but I wouldn't be shocked if it climbed back to 2 and that would be fine.
“Wouldn’t be shocked” is still quite different from “think it’s moderately likely”.
The fertility panic crowd tends to treat overpopulation panickers as having been totally deluded, but they were also assuming current trends would continue infinitely.
If there is one thing history has proven nearly conclusively, it's that thinking you can reliably predict the future is foolish. Maybe we depopulate to a much lower level, maybe we don't. Maybe we do and it's actually a great thing.
Indeed, when 10-30% lose their jobs to machines, there will be much more social interaction and procreation!
Church used to be an extremely common way to find a spouse as well and that has collapsed quicker than any other vector.
Small sample size, of course, but my observation is that the hospital today preserves a lot of that stuff in a way that bolsters this thesis. It's a workplace where lots of different people with cross-cutting identities are all physically in the same place, working together (often under adverse circumstances), and that leads to community formation. It's one of the many reasons that I love being a nurse.
I worry about the availability of extremely realistic sex androids or VR sex simulators in perhaps a decade. I don't think such a thing would be a complete substitute for human-on-human sex but I do think that it will move the needle away from human interaction.
I also worry about the availability of pornography today. It's much, much easier to access large amounts of pornography and more extreme pornography than even twenty years ago. This cannot be healthy for young people to see. This is something I think will get even worse quickly once some entrepreneur builds a generative-AI-for-porn service that costs $100/month.
>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.
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.
Yes, the Biden admin’s proposed rules received a fair bit of blowback from trans activists in 2023. They would have allowed schools to establish sports-specific criteria that could prevent trans girls and women from competing in women’s events (though they also would have restricted schools from creating categorical bans, such as bans on trans women in contact sports for example). Those rules were never actually implemented regardless, they were only proposed, and the Biden team dropped the effort to add them to the federal register in December of 2024.
Sure, I mean, I have my rants about the Administrative Procedure Act and its weaponization against liberal policymaking locked and loaded, but I don't get the sense that that's really the issue here.
The point is that the OP is an aggravated lie. Democrats did not "die on the hill of abolishing female sports," or propose to.
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.
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.
Do minors consent to having their tonsils removed?
More to the point, shouldn't the default to be to respect the wishes of families getting competent medical advice? I thought conservatives really valued the family and want to protect it from the suffocating hand of the state.
As I understand it, American medicine was reallllly into removing tonsils in the 70s & 80s, then realized it's basically unnecessary and quietly stopped doing it at some point......
True-- science marches on-- but there are plenty of other procedures that are still medically indicated and performed all the time, including on minors. AFAIK the number of appendectomies and gallbladder removals is still high enough to basically form the bread and butter of a general-surgery practice.
(That's not even to get into the cosmetic-surgery question, which I've mooted below.)
The default doesn't apply here because TRAAAAAAAAAAANS
"We conservatives respect the wishes of parents regarding their kids except when they do something we disapprove of."
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.
You casually equivocate elective medical intervention for something untestable and unprovable with basic, physically-grounded things like straightening a kid's spine. Hillary had a word for views like yours--deplorable.
No, I casually equate [sic] it with other very legal and very cool medical interventions like [checks notes] the same ones I talked about in my post.
Or take boob jobs. You know boob jobs are legal for minors, right? Anyone here care to defend that distinction? It's incredibly obvious that you don't care about the things you claim to care about.
Anti-circumcision activists have basically won. It's less performed than ever. "Intersex surgeries" on minors are also very uncommon, mostly because DSDs that would actually require surgery are extremely uncommon, but also because people don't like that the patient can't really consent, which means your argument is self-refuting.
And just generally, this is a terrible argument. No one buys the "wrong puberty" nonsense, so calling it "conditions that will have irrevocable physical effects" is eye-rolling.
Where would one go to find data on current circumcision rates? I feel like anti-circumcision advocacy had a small moment in the mid 2010s, but I hadn’t heard anything since, so my assumption has been that it didn’t move the needle much.
Wait, is gender reassignment surgery now more common than circumcision?! Because that’s what I think it would be for anti-circumcision activists to have won.
The first paragraph here is a flagrant misrepresentation (at last count approximately half of newborn males were circumcised, which is... not what you imply here; and as I said, the minors-need-not-consent rules are written in haec verba into these laws, presumably for a reason). The rate of circumcision has dropped by about 10 percent, hardly some sea change in medical behavior.
The second is just... moronic. It's obvious that someone who transitions at age 12 is going to have better success than someone who transitions at age 20. Most gender-affirming surgeries are specifically trying to undo various irreversible things that happen as a result of puberty.
Either parental rights are a thing, or they're not. The current needle is in the direction of parental rights and if we're gonna indulge religious nonsense why not do the child mutilation thing? It's not worse than withholding cancer care.
My preference is no one being permitted to do it at all, but again, parental rights are considered to be a thing.
>if we're gonna indulge religious nonsense..... It's not worse than withholding cancer care
Which is illegal, and Christian Scientists are occasionally prosecuted and jailed for this sort of thing
Sure, like, if you are going to make all people under 18 wards of the state and give the government the power to dictate their medical care that's one thing, and you take the bitter with the sweet with that, but ~no one (probably some tankie somewhere-- or you, it seems?) is advocating for that as public policy.
"I am a bigot who cannot defend my own positions"
it's always 2020 in some quarters....
Pointless IYKYK to signal tribal affinity: sometimes I doubt where I ended up sociopolitically, wonder if it was a mistake to walk away from bog-standard leftist positions and argumentative tactics. Have I been bamboozled? Then a periodic thread like this happens again, and I'm like...yeah, no, glad I got out of that dead-end is/ought dissembling mess.
It still feels like a high freeze peach bar to utilize mutes and blocks - trying to keep that list at only 1 person - but boy is it tempting sometimes.
:? I'm confused by this reply, since as far as I understand it, our views on The Topic are sympatico. Or at least far more aligned than the interlocutor I was actually considering ratio'ing. This was one of the very earliest SB interactions I remember having with you, in fact, before your Long Hiatus period. You said back then that finding actual people within the target demographic who shared your skeptical views made you feel more comfortable with expressing them confidently.
Apologies for confusion!
The only shift I've made is that a user named darwin over at ACX linked me to several pieces of empirical evidence studying the direct question of trans vs cis professional athlete performance, finding that despite the brouhaha about bone density, musculature, etc - if you take a *long-term* transitioned person, they perform statistically indistinguishably from a regular one, modulo perhaps some effect for characteristics like height that the drugs don't affect. So I did update that the optimal-case bailey is on sounder epistemic ground than I'd thought.
(But of course, it's the motte that everyone has an actual problem with, so this does not cut the Gordian knot! And political optics don't really care about mere facts anyway.)
I'd agree with your elaboration, based on my own misadventures and interactions with various birds of the same feather over the years. It's not a crime, but it is probably a mistake: a classic case of We Must Do Something, This Is Something. A latent attractor state that has unfortunately gotten way more official sanction than is merited by the evidence base. And after one transitions to this new part of the Nash equilibrium - well, it's just as hard to get out as it was to get in. Once you're in too deep, the only way out is through.
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.
Framing as the Russians / Slavs under Soviet rule "thought their government was worth the fight" is weirdly perverse - German own-behaviour made it rather clear that it was very genocidally oriented (unlike France)
Of course also the Stalin system kicking in on own-side (better a chance not to die fighitng Germans than die in a camp or just shot outright) has a factor.
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).
It's hard to overstate just how incredible it is that the US military in general, and officer corps in particular, has managed to stay mostly apolitical for our nation's history. Even now, I think this to be true. It's so important that this philosophy endures.
^^^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’d add Robert Paxton’s “Vichy France” (1972). The early bits offer some acute analysis of the interwar period.
Liked because I appreciate these deep-cut recs, not because I’ve read the book!
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.
He doesn't say that France lost because the generals hated the Third Republic. He says that France lost because of the incompetence of the High Command, aided by poor communication/control and staff work. He does take aim at broader social failures.
The broader social failures were the analysis I was referring to.
My understanding is that part of the reason the French military performed poorly is that the civilian leadership didn't trust the military enough to supply them with large quantities of contemporary weapons. It wasn't clear if the Nazis or the French conservatives were the worse enemy.
Shirer was a great reporter, but Inquiry Into the Collapse of the Third Republic is an absolutely comical overstatement of the French decadence thesis. Shirer walks through every major political event between 1871 and 1940 (with the conservatives the villains in every episode) and claims that it somehow contributed to defeat in 1940. How did France manage to win World War I with 40+ years of catastrophe already accumulated?
May is a good corrective on this. Whatever the French generals may have thought of the Third Republic, Gamelin wasn't taking a revolver to every meeting with Daladier or Reynaud and trying to work up the nerve to shoot them, as Halder was with Hitler.
Beautiful maps in Shirer's book, though.
France didn't win WW1. They avoided losing. Not the same thing.
Okay. " How did France manage to avoid defeat in World War I with 40+ years of catastrophe already accumulated?"
I have a longer comment below, but I absolutely don't agree with this explanation for French military passivity. You fight for your country, not your government. Even the most reactionary French generals were capable of distinguishing one from the other.
I think other commentors have pointed out the relevant differences between the Soviet and French situations.
The defining feature of French generalship during May and June 1940 was an inexplicable lack of urgency and an unseemly willingness to quit once their poor performance had caused France's military situation to dangerously deteriorate. It might just be a coincidence that many of those same generals supported the dissolution of the Third Republic, and happily served in a Vichy regime that looked an awful lot like the sort of government French conservatives had wanted before the war. But I find it hard to explain why French military leadership was so disastrously inert during 1939 and 1940 without at least some reference to the "Better Hitler than Blum" attitude that many of those officers had no doubt shared during the run-up to the war.
As for the Soviet comparison, yes, I am aware that the Soviet Union is bigger than France, and Moscow is much further from the German frontier than Paris. But the increased distances affected Germany's ability to win, NOT Soviet willingness to fight, and it's the latter I was addressing. The Red Army's defeats in the border battles, at Minsk and at Smolensk were much more disastrous than anything that happened to the French army in May 1940. If the Soviet government had been as polarized and weak as the French when the Germans attacked, the Soviets almost certainly wouldn't have made it past September 1941 before their government collapsed and they sued for peace. But Stalin's late 30s purges had created party, state and military organs that were entirely subservient to him; so as long as he was willing to fight, the Soviets were going to fight, even when it came to truly heroic measures like moving their heavy industry east of the Urals.
This goes back to my earlier point about operational depth: the Soviets spent the summer and fall of 1941 making all the same mistakes the French had and suffering the same consequences for it. The difference is that the huge spaces of Russia gave the Soviets the time, distance, and cover they needed to learn from their mistakes and adjust accordingly. The French forces in the second half of the 1940 campaign fought much more effectively than they had in the beginning and actually inflicted the majority of German losses during this period, and if a thousand miles lay between Paris and the German border the French might have been able to turn the tide as well.
I'm sorry, the seemly thing for a general to do is resign in the face of defeat?
How quickly were unsuccessful generals supposed to quit, exactly? The Germans attacked on May 10 and crossed the Meuse in force on the 13th. Most of the commanders in the vicinity of the Sedan breakthrough had been relieved of duty by the 15th. Corap, commander of the 9th Army, was sacked on the 15th. Gamelin, the supreme commander, was sacked on the 19th, which caused a couple days of confusion. I think that didn't matter much because I think the French army was beyond saving at that point, but many disagree. It certainly didn't help. By the 20th the Germans had reached the Channel. Billotte presumably would have been sacked had he not been in a fatal accident.
The French generals appeared to be overwhelmed, as well they might be, by the speed and ferocity of defeat. We have the following account from Gen. Georges' headquarters in the early hours of the 14th:
"At the telephone, Major Navereau repeats in a soft voice the information he is receiving. The others are silent. General Roton, the Chief of Staff, is slumped in an armchair. The atmosphere is that of a family keeping vigil over a dead member. [Gen.] Georges rises briskly and comes up to Doumenc. He is terribly pale. 'Our front has been pushed in at Sedan. There have been some failures...' He falls into an armchair and a sob silences him.
It was the first man that I had seen weep in the battle. I was to see many others, alas. It made a dreadful impression on me."
That account could be multiplied many times over.
French troops were similarly overwhelmed. There was a famous panic ("the panzers are at Bulson!") many hours before a single German tank had crossed the Meuse. There are many accounts of French troops baa-ing like sheep at their commanders, accusing other units of treason, and looting their own cities.
French generals <appeared> to act with a lack of urgency in the early days of the campaign because their system of command and control was fatally slow.
You are accusing a lot of people of treason without any evidence that I can see beyond the difference between what you think they did and what you think they should have done. That is not enough.
Turning to the difference between the Soviet Union and France, I'm sure it made a difference that (non-Jewish) French leaders and generals were likely to survive defeat, while Soviet leaders and generals could be confident that they would not. It also quickly became clear that the Germans were waging a genocidal campaign in the USSR, which they had not done in France. But even so, non-Russians and non-Jews collaborated with the Germans on a scale that dwarfed French collaboration.
And that Paris was about 100 miles from the frontier while Moscow was about 800 miles away made a huge difference, since the German armies had to stop, pause and resupply while still hundreds of miles from the ultimate objective. The French never got such a break.
"But I find it hard to explain why French military leadership was so disastrously inert during 1939 and 1940 without at least some reference to the "Better Hitler than Blum" attitude that many of those officers had no doubt shared during the run-up to the war."
But the British were equally inert, and so was the French political leadership. Partly because they thought that time was on their side, partly because no one was particularly enthusiastic about the war.
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.
> the majority of mainstream media just assumed Trump had no chance of winning especially after the Access Hollywood tape came out.
sorry, it seems I'm super slow today, what's the chain of causality here?
is your claim that the media went too light on Trump and too hard on Hillary and this biased (enough) people?
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.
I read Strange Victory (and To Lose a Battle, The Blitzkrieg Legend, Strange Defeat, An Inquiry Into the Collapse of the Third Republic, The Seeds of Disaster, Defending the Republic, The Fall of France, Tragedy in France (published before 1940 was over), Louis Spears' memoirs, Why France Collapsed, Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall of France, a thesis I found online, and various articles).
May says that circumstances were far less favorable to France in May 1940 than they were in September 1939 or September 1938. But if he ever said the French were doomed to eventual defeat in 1940 and it was merely a question of months rather than weeks, I missed it. "By May 28, with Dunkerque and Belgium's capitulation, France's defeat probably had become inevitable -- but not much sooner."
I'm probably more skeptical of France's chances after the German breakthrough than May was. A counterattack on the flanks of the German corridor to the channel was perfectly obvious to anyone looking at a map. I don't think Gamelin, Weygand, or any French commander was capable of pulling together a counterattack on the needed scale, however, because of the lethal sluggishness (I think I'm quoting Alistair Horne) of the French system of command. They really needed to prevent a large-scale breakthrough; once it happened, they seemed helpless.
I don't agree that the hostility of French generals to the Republic had much to do with the defeat (as opposed to the subsequent willingness to collaborate). I am sure it didn't help, and I understand that one reason Gamelin wound up in charge was that he was seen to actually favor the Republic. But I haven't seen anything to make me think that any of the leading French generals in the campaign were traitors or indifferent to winning or losing.
May makes another observation that I think gets less attention than it should. Gamelin, meeting with Polish army officers in the spring of 1939, stated that, if Germany concentrated its forces against Poland, "France would unleash an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of its forces, 15 days after mobilization."
France did not, obviously, do that. But it could have! Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. By September 6, the Maginot Line was fully manned with 75 mostly high-quality divisions in position opposite Germany or along the French and Belgian borders, along with 3,200 tanks and 115 air groups, as well ten squadrons of British bombers.
Opposite them were 30-40 German divisions composed mostly of second- or third-line troops with little training. No tanks, little artillery, and not even adequate supplies of horses and wagons. General Leeb, the German commander, rated German defenses before Belgium and Luxembourg as extremely weak. He deemed the Siegfried Line as little more than a facade.
There was no chance that the French and British were going to launch a massive offensive in September 1939. Gamelin was opposed, Gen. Georges was opposed, the British were opposed, to the extent that any of them were even considering the possibility. Nevertheless, the French and British had the capacity to launch a large offensive in the opening weeks of the war, and such an offensive would have had a very high probability of obtaining a crushing victory. May quotes Andreas Hillgruber, _Hitlers Strategy_ (1965): "A French attack on the weak German defensive front on the Siegfried Line [in September 1939]...would, as far it is humanly possible to judge, have led to a very quick military defeat of Germany and therefore a quick end of the war." But it didn't happen.
And this absolute Allied passivity continued until the moment the Germans attacked. I read somewhere that the British didn't suffer a single KIA until December 1939, and very few after that before the Germans attacked. Yes, the eventual German plan seemed almost perfectly designed to take advantage of the Allied plan, and there was luck involved in that. But the absolute Allied passivity and determination to undertake nothing (with the consequent obligation to defend everything) increased the chances that the Germans would achieve surprise and local superiority, as they did.
I don't know whether you can tie what seems like terrible Franco/British strategy to all the issues, alleged or real, with the Third Republic. But I don't think it's tenable to say the French lost the war in six weeks just because of bad luck.
Horne's book (To Lose a Battle) is probably semi-obsolete but it is magnificently researched and written. The first chapter is an account of the French victory parade in 1919 that was a visual representation of the terrible toll the first war had taken. He quotes more contemporaneous accounts than anyone else I've read.
Older books aren't necessarily more accurate, though. Maurois' Tragedy in France is fascinating (and a major source for Horne) but it's written in an absolute faith in (i) German numerical and technological superiority and (ii) the efficacy of a virulent fifth column that largely didn't exist. Probably the best book on strictly military issues, and one of the few written from the German perspective, is Blitzkrieg Legend.
A belated thanks for this incredibly thoughtful and thorough comment.
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
My understanding is that the fear isn’t whining in public, but expensive lawsuits being filed against the school district, at least talking to teachers in the Portland area. From what I’ve read, the concern is that problem students might have an undiagnosed disability (like a mood disorder), and that disciplining them could lead to litigation under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, but I don’t know enough to be sure. It might be state law too.
To be fair, it’s probably fear of lawsuits as much as anything else
I mean, social housing requires people to pay rent so it shouldn’t be full of social problems like public housing.
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.
It is a solved issue, the data is pretty clear.
I'm skeptical of certainty on this. It's going to be a while before we really understand what happens when huge numbers of people are taking GLP-1s indefinitely.
My favorite example is prohibition. It was sold as solving crime, disorder, spousal abuse, and many more ills.
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.
Unfortunately Krugman is an example of what happens if one lets partisan political tribalism take over one's thinking... Pity really as he was a very very good economist and still can be, but after he decided he's more interested in being General Leftyish Democrat Pundit overall... not really same quality.
Agree it’s a shame. Doubly because if he took a break from basically pointless/endless anti-trump takes (who is this persuading at this point? Don’t think many of his subscribers are on the fence.) to offer critical feedback of bad Democrats/Democratic policies he could be immensely influential. Could it be he agrees with all the omnicause stuff? If not he could really help clean it up but for whatever reason seems to choose not to.
Yeah... he's really preaching to the choir... Fan Service not doing much - other than making I suppose subscribers feel validated.
If he focused on his real expertise (macro-economics) and stopped being the Pundit who Comments on Everything because He's a Smart Guy....
but he'd also need to get himself out of partisan pundit mentality - example inflation. I very much feel his partisan cheerleading on inflation and inflation denialism / minimisation helped reinforce a piss-poor Democratic (political) response to the inflation spike under Biden. Sure the extreme 2022 is going to be 1979 views were too far, but there were plenty of middle-road economic critiques that were not extreme but saying "woah, there's a problem emerging and not great idea to hand-waive it away."
Sitting down and trying to be constructively critical on econ policy not as pundit but as economist would have some real utility but he needs to wash his brain of political engagement and go technical.
His last note he had on econ that I read, on inflaion expectations although correct (the signs of expectations coming unanchored are emerging) was limpy. for my reading, he had to import excuse making around earlier inflation takes under Biden, making a limpy partisan analysis since he (a) hand-waive away Biden era inflation impact on mentalities (in my mind even the 70s lessons are often misframed as 70s inflation didn't happen in one go but over years as discrete policy errors built on each other over a good 5 years plus- same to me now, unanchoring now isn't happening in immaculate conception, but is happening from mental roots laid down in an acceleration that somewhat like 70s decelerated and then by policy error is reacclerating) (b) engage in fallacy of exluded middle as he hangs on to the most extreme inflation hawks on Biden era but plenty of comment was more middling and he had dismissed that too when he was all in as Team Transitory. This is letting partisan tribalism get in the way of being clear-headed. Grappling earlier with one-side error (which I hasten to add I felt was a legit error to make, that is wasn't pure idiocy like Trump but rather a Bet but when one sees a bet starting to go sour, one needs to rapidly recalibrate and not claim it's not going sour etc)
Krugmans point is actually that they're no bigger now than they were 20 years ago. Ie the median EU citizen is slightly worse off in material goods than the median US citizen but not any more so than they were in 2006. Which sounds and feels right if you've been in both places. Pretending that the tech industry based in one small part of the country has led to leaps and bounds of gains for everyone else in the US over that time period compared to people in the EU seems bizarre
The best part of Krugman's newsletters is the musical coda at the end, which are often bangers
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.
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.
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!
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
Honestly the more that I think about it the better alt-history question would not have been "what if the 3rd Republic lasts longer" but rather "what if the 3rd Republic falls sooner". Would a France that had reverted to a monarchy have approached the June crisis of 1914 (or any of the other lead-up to WWI) any differently, for instance?
The alliance with Russia seems a bit odd, a secular Republic allying with the most religious autocracy in Europe. I wonder if France was a monarchy of any form and Mexico had worked, would France had viewed Austria-Hungary as its key ally in the East against Germany?
> 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.
The main factor that led to me pursuing military history and social science at the graduate level was my undergrad professor telling me last spring that it's a basically moribund field nowadays. There's a lot of cool stuff to unpack if you're enterprising enough, just because so few people have spent time picking up the low-hanging and even the medium-hanging fruit.
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.
One does wonder what would have happened if after Cannae Hannibal had gone straight to Rome.
He'd have stood around outside the Servian Walls looking like today's new idiot for two weeks before his army ran out of forage and had to withdraw.
There was never any point in the Second Punic War where the Carthaginian grand strategy involved laying siege to the city of Rome. They had no siege train or logistical backing for that. Hannibal's explicit objective was to get to, and then peel off Rome's allies in, southern Italy. If he could have durably achieved that, Rome would have been hopelessly outclassed and forced to sue for peace.
That may be the case!
But the best way to peel off Rome's allies would have been to show how weak Rome was. Threatening the city might have helped. And fortified cities were taken all the time in that period. (Not saying it would have worked though.)
They were also able to keep a lot more men under arms than many of their contemporaries, and recruit them quickly.
The technological change in the mass media is an underrated part of why the response to Watergate was different than Trump's various crimes IMO. In the film The Ice Storm, about two upper-middle class families coming apart in suburban Connecticut in the winter of 73'-74', is a good illustration of this. One of the characters, a latch-key kid comes home from school, lets herself in, and plops down in front of the TV to watch....Alexander Butterfield testify as part of the Watergate Hearings.
Back then TV's could only get the Big Three networks (and maybe a indy UHF or PBS station if you lived in a major market) and cable basically didn't exist. So if the networks decide the hearings are important then you don't get to watch cartoons. The nightly news was the same, all the networks broadcast their national news at the same time leaving basically no escape, so if you wanted to watch TV after work, welp there's more Watergate.
Today media markets are radically different* and you could easily go through life regularly watching "content related to news events" while having no idea Trump set up a giant slush fund or whatever.
*the whole idea of stations "signing off" would seem as truly alien to Gen Zers as well LOL
This is a great point. There were some very real advantages to broadcast TV and radio.
I feel that an under-discussed part of this is also resilience to disaster. Broadcast stations existed (and still exist) all over the country, and can operate autonomously in the event of a catastrophe. A broadcast station capable of covering a major metro area is a surprisingly inexpensive and straightforward thing to set up and operate. In contrast, some kind of crisis in Loudoun County, VA could seriously disrupt the entire internet.
(I'm using "broadcast" to mean one-way continuous RF transmissions like digital TV, analog TV, FM radio, and AM radio. I'm not including things like cell phone service and Starlink)
Mid 20th Century TV stations were basically highly regulated, highly lucrative businesses (TV ad time was basically a license to print money) aligned with giant national behemoths in NBC/CBS/ABC. So the lucrative markets could subsidize rural stations for civil defense reasons. Likewise you ended up with stuff like government mandates over disaster preparedness but also rules like "equal time", fairness doctrine, big fights over making TV programs have moral/education content (Vast Wasteland Speech). Why? Post-war elites were deeply concerned over how communists and fascists had pioneered the use of modern media like radio, film and TV (the first mass TV broadcast was a speech by Hitler!) Meanwhile the market incentives could lead to interesting places, humiliated by the quiz show scandals of the 50's the networks poured enormous resources into their newsrooms which arguably had a big effect in the 60's with stuff like coverage of the Civil Rights Movement. Likewise mini series were often made made for prestige not money, all those football games on ABC paid for Roots. Just a different world.
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.
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.
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
It's pretty much a general collapse outside of maybe subSaharan Africa. Like the incredible fall in central America.
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.
Making women literate. There. Right there. That obviously was the big mistake.
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.
I don't think that's an accurate statement about the post-WW2 experience -- there's basically one big "up" (the Baby Boom) and that's it:
France: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033137/fertility-rate-france-1800-2020/
UK: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033074/fertility-rate-uk-1800-2020/
US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-us-1800-2020/
Canada: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033373/fertility-rate-canada-1860-2020/
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.
Hasn’t TFR only been below replacement in the US for a decade or so? The trend is long, but no one wants to get to the super high birthrates of old
1) The particular date that the US (or any other country) went below replacement isn't relevant to my point? The point is that TFR has been dropping nearly continuously for the past 200 to 250 years in developed countries except really for the Baby Boom. Nothing happening in 2020 or 2010 or 2000 has any worthwhile explanatory power, IMO.
2) TFR has actually been below replacement in the US if you look at the native-born population since like the 1980s, just 10 to 15 years behind Western Europe and Japan. Overall US TFR has been propped up for the past 30 to 40 years by the fact that immigrants to the US have TFRs that look more like their home countries, but within 1 to 2 generations in the US, their TFRs basically sync up with other Americans of similar education/income levels.
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.
Studies show that moving to densely-populated urban areas probably has a causal relationship with bearing fewer children. I forget where I read this, maybe Caplan or Cowen.
Cities had much higher *death* rates than the countryside, mostly due to increased disease transmission, from Sumer until maybe 1950. Some of the fertility hit may have been downstream of this.
It's hard to disentangle "education of women" from "general affluence of the population", though, don't you think? Are there any rich societies where women's education didn't advance and birth rates stayed high? There's also childhood mortality going down and the availability of birth control, which all seem very linked.
The rebuttals to that are (1) TFR fell rapidly in communist countries post-1960 or so too (in fact, some East Bloc countries had TFRs below most Western European countries by the 1980s) and (2) countries with high degrees of affluence, but low levels of female education, like the Gulf states in the 1970s and '80s, had TFRs far above liberal societies in general.
The fertility rate thing comes off to me as the conservative version of degrowthers/climate doomers. Here’s a big scary problem, the solution to which conveniently happens to be doing all the stuff I want people to do but would never be able to sell people on absent the big scary problem.
That’s why we have big scary problems
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!
I’m not totally on board with the feminist project, but women wanting to prioritize their careers is a basic expression of freedom for which I have immense solidarity.
Trying to conscript the uteri of unwilling women for different flavors of social engineering is icky.
And these hysterical worries about fertility are happening when human population is at an all time high and still increasing.
A large spectrum of basically normal men wants to push women towards having sex and kids they don’t want.
My hot take on this is that if we really need an effective lever to control the behavior of attractive men in the 22-35 age range. Normalization of casual sex and dating apps have enabled these men to live in comfortable long-term bachelorhood in a way that is basically unprecedented in human history. If access to regular sex required being married, more of these men would get married.
The problem is that there’s also a lot of discussion about the decline in fertility that comes from totally different directions, but people who have tuned it out because some of it comes from the social conservative side don’t even hear about this because they’ve tuned it out.
People have tuned it out because the talk always come from a socially conservative direction, and the people who espouse it almost always have a broader critique about modern day women.
Honest to God, I've never heard a fertility-alarmist comment coming from someone who hasn't also had a problem with feminism.
Actually, that's not true. I heard it from Steven Bartlett from Diary of a CEO. That's it.
You apparently haven’t been paying attention to Matthew Yglesias or Noah Smith or Dean Spears or any of the people like me who frequent the comments of many of these places.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/opinion/population-climate-progress.html
I haven’t read that article or paid attention to what those other people are saying.
These people aren’t “fertility-alarmists.”
The fertility-rate going down is a real problem. But there’s a huge difference between acknowledging that it’s a problem and acting like it’s one of the biggest problems of our today.
The solutions proposed to this problem also matter, as well the issues one labels as “issues.”
If you want to define “alarmists” as people making bad points, then sure. But I’m saying you *should* pay attention to people who are concerned about fertility, even if they superficially sound similar to the right-wing “alarmists”.
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!
"
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.
Mainstream culture on this has changed so much that only the Mormon corridor has retained halfway-sensible norms on family formation. And yet even Utah is well below replacement fertility these days…
I really think the cost of housing is the most important factor. Many articles have been written about how people feel the need to "establish their careers" before they have kids, but why do they feel the need to do that? Because you can't afford a house on an entry-level salary! I think most people work to afford their lives, and if people didn't have to get a couple promotions before they could buy a house, they wouldn't be "establishing their careers" first.
I was in california so...
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.
Isn’t that what “paying your taxes” means?
Are people without children contributing more in taxes than those with children? Especially relative to the cost of raising a child?
There are so many things where individual choices have more or less public benefit that we allow because, freedom. Specifically targeting people for their reproductive choices when you don't look at all the other things people do to contribute or not contribute suggests either a lack of thought about all the things society needs from people or an agenda that is cares too much about how people procreate.
This is such a weird response. I'm not denying that people should have freedom. I'm saying that society needs kids and as such should encourage them through public benefits. If it makes you feel better, think of it as similar to how we forgive student debt if someone works for a U.S. federal, state, local, or tribal government or a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization because we recognize that people doing that benefit society. We don't look at the rest of their lives and decide whether it all balances out to whether they should get that benefit, they made a specific choice and we value that choice so reward it.
Do you think offering that student loan forgiveness is somehow denying freedom to all the people who don't choose to work for those entities?
I don't think adding more people is a "burden..." educating people has a massive ROI.
So in that equation how do we square the unemployed full-time caregiver with two severely autistic non-verbal adult children? The welfare queens with five poorly behaved brats?
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."
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 think there is a VERY different perspective between individuals/families and children versus society and children. The former should very much a individual+partner choice with a heavy emphasis on effectively concluding that there is a strong partnership and surrounding support for parents and children.
Society on the other hand recognizes the above, but also recognizes that while children are not *necessary* for an individual or even married partners to be successful in life, they are necessary for society's continued success both in providing labor for older people who can no longer do it themselves AND in order to perpetuate a society's continued existence. As such, there should be strong societal benefits to having children and those who do not should absolutely balance out the costs they avoid by not having children. This of course is balanced by other considerations, but compare a couple making 200k a year with three kids versus a DINK couple making 200k a year. The former is contributing significantly more to society than the measly tax deduction the former receive.
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.
Even outside the structure of social security, savings are only valuable to the extent they can purchase things made by working-age people. For the last ~200 years the population has grown and productive capacity has grown, which means the value of savings/investment has grown since there is more to go around. But there is not guarantee this is the case, and if the population pyramid goes the wrong direction there would be massive inflation and declining living standards as large amounts of "savings" is spent trying to employ fewer workers.
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.
Yes I have to agree with Mariana. The idea that we're going to penalize people who don't have kids is just completely unrealistic:
Some women are infertile, desperately want kids, and just can't have them. In addition to the crushing emotional pain of not being able to be a mother, you're...... going to financially penalize these women? Really?
Some people just can't find that someone to have kids with. You're going to charge higher taxes to women who spent their prime years with a cad who never committed and ultimately took off on them? Or whose husband turned out to be infertile? Or to ugly or socially awkward or mentally ill people who can't find someone? Seriously?
C'mon, like none of this is even a little bit realistic, just stop please
Thank you for this comment. I’m going to step away from this place for a while rather than get sucked into this discussion as I did in a similar recent thread. I will just reiterate, though, that judging people’s (strangers’!) situations and rating them against your own personal morality taxonomy is a pretty crass undertaking.
And they wonder why there are so few women here.
There are two facts here:
1. Having kids does NOT make you virtuous. Case in point: JD Vance has three children, and IIRC his wife is pregnant with his fourth. The drunken douchebag Pete Hegseth has a number of kids, including at least one that was the result of adultery. Crappy, dishonest, cruel, selfish assholes have children all the time! Conversely, there are many virtuous, kind, helpful, generous people with no children.
2. You have to have enough children to keep society going, if you value society. It's good to recognize that people who have children (and take good care of them!) are doing something valuable for society. There's no contradiction between saying "this farmer is a douchebag" and "being a farmer is good and useful, because people need to eat food."
Bonus opinion:
I'm disturbed by the way high fertility rates tend to be correlated with anti-feminist values. I don't want that to be the future! Come on, small-l liberal women, have more children so our way of life doesn't die out!
Fair points, dros, but once again I'll point to the decline in fertility being global, literally global. The most oppressive societies have falling fertility too! Shortly I'll dig up the charts I just saw the other day about this. I have to go do some actual chores right this second.
I do NOT think "having kids [is] . . . the most virtuous thing you could possibly do" and I can't begin to see how anything I wrote could be construed that way?
My response was based on the facts that: (1) a bunch of social welfare benefits are structured on a system that assumes a certain volume of new taxpayers entering the population, (2) that volume of new taxpayers isn't entering the population, so (3) you need to cut benefits and/or raise taxes to cover that shortfall. I'm personally fine with abolishing Social Security, etc. and going to purely privately financed retirements and so forth, but I have no illusions about that actually happening in the present political system. So then how do you finance those programs? And, if the answer is across the board tax increases, then why isn't that unfair to people who have had children?
Yeah I don’t see a lot of pronatalists grappling with the probability that a lot of the people who are on the fence or uninterested in having kids but would if forced/incentivized hard enough, would be turning out kids who’d be a net drain on society rather than a contributor.
I don't see that. There are plenty of conscientious, decent people who are like "I would love to have 2-3 children, but I met my future husband when I was 38, so realistically I can have only one" or "I wish I could have a third child, but then we would need an extra bedroom, and we can't afford a bigger house, and we don't want to move for career/family reasons" and such.
Romania provided a horrific example of that. An incredible number of children with severe disabilities because they were unwanted and sent into orphanages, where they were raised without love.
Today, in one of my therapy groups, several of my patients talked about how their parents told them they were nothing, losers and unwanted. Even if you're entirely without empathy, this is not how you produce future labor resources.
"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'm definitely not someone who thinks that having children is the most virtuous thing to do. This seems pretty intense so I don't want to push on this and I definitely acknowledge there are many complications involved here. But I would ask a question - I think there are many individuals and couples who are making a good choice NOT to have children. But do you agree that its good for a society to have plenty of children? And if so, can you see that granting benefits to those who provide children is good for society?
People with children already get tax benefits.
My preference is to use tax policy to generate the revenue we need and only infrequently be used to do social engineering.
As with everything, the problem is that this is the bailey and the motte is the “those goddamn freeloaders who are worse than me” attitude that shows up first.
People don’t like being shamed.
Your sister probably makes more money than your SIL, so she already pays more in taxes.
Are you opposed to existing things like the earned income tax credit (or, ya know, public school)? Because these could be construed, if you were maximally uncharitable, as favoring the deadbeat parent of five over the selfless childless person. It turns out that it's quite challenging to have prosocial policies that don't have a counterintuitive effect in some corner case. That doesn't mean we should give up on prosociality.
I'd argue that for roughly the median 80% of the population, who are neither going to be horrible parents on the one hand nor do something amazing for society if freed of the burden of raising kinds on the other, having children is indeed just about the most virtuous thing you can do.
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 can't like this enough. The deep repugnance of not seeing the value of people who don't have children can't be overstated.
To clarify I'd certainly prefer to reform away from that kind of treadmill, just speaking from a (IMO realistic) perspective that its unlikely to happen any time soon.
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.
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.
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.
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
"most American tourists who visit Europe love the experience and come back thanking god for their American comforts."
American tourists are almost by definition affluent and as tourists they are also only seeing the nice parts. If you're having breakfast at the George V and then walking around Paris it's easy to say, "This is the life!" The reality of living in France on half your income like would be the case for a French person with your job would be quite different.
As an example median nurse salaries in Paris are $40-$60k vs $133k to $150k in California. A nurse and accountant visiting Paris with a HHI of $300k are going to have a different experience than a similar French couple with a HHI of $120k actually living in Paris.
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.
That describes where I live and I love it (near UCLA)! And indeed it's an expensive neighborhood because there's only so much room for decently large houses.
This is, ultimately, my complaint with the entire "affordability" discourse in housing. What you said is absolutely workable. But people are convinced you can make these very expensive places affordable. Without getting any tradeoffs.
The point is that people largely want that decently large house that is just perfectly walkable. Is why you will see absurd stories of people looking at luxury townhouses and asking, "why can't we all live in this?" Complete with throwback to a time when the SRO was allowed and ignore how much of the economy that fueled.
I'm convinced that this would be much easier than we think. If light retail was legal everywhere with no parking minimums we would see a lot of 7/11, Starbucks, and Walgreens businesses in SFH neighborhoods.
I'm the problem, it's me. No thank you to small apartments, shitty dryers, and no icemaker. Certain current problems aside (cough cough), America rulez Europe droolz
It still surprises me how bad dryers were in France.
And soccer. Don't forget soccer.
"ohhhhh we're so sophisticated, we have a sport where you can't use your hands"
WE EVOLVED OPPOSABLE THUMBS, YOU FREAKS
Perhaps my favorite sick burn regarding soccer is that in our immensely most popular sport we import a few tiny, under muscled guys to kick the ball with their feet a few meaningless times in the game and yet we mock the rest of the world by calling this sport "football."
If I'm not mistaken, long long ago, field goals were once worth more than touchdowns. Then everyone realized this was stupid and we changed the rulebook.
"Under muscled" https://media.zenfs.com/en/hearst_mens_health_171/19905073a1e67711dfc602c3c123d679
"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.
But, you can personally take this hit by just working less. You will have more leisure time and be a bit poorer, just like a European.
This isn't really true. Even jobs in the US with decent work-life balance rarely provide European levels of vacation time or paid parental leave. In western Europe, 4-6 weeks of vacation time (separate from sick time) is normal and legally required, as is paid parental leave.
And yes, in the US you can find jobs that rarely ask you to work >40 hours a week, but if you want to work less than that you will likely lose all your benefits, including health insurance and PTO. Also ignoring that, "just work less" isn't really an available option in many professions, especially professional jobs. Employers generally prefer one full-time employee who occasionally works overtime to two part-time employees all else equal.
Go to Indeed and try to find professional jobs that only require 20-30 hours a week but still have benefits, you won't find very many of them.
That’s a fair point that most “professional” jobs require full time and if you drop below 40 hours you will lose your health insurance benefits, so yes I guess there is probably more of a discontinuity at that margin. Nonetheless, I imagine it is still quite possible to find ways to work less and earn less money in the US and still have a comparable standard of living to the average European. In addition, it is easy to over estimate the wealth of the average European: for example, don’t forget that GDP per capita in France is roughly the same as in Alabama. So what we might think of as a huge hit to standard of living to work less might actually put us quite close to a “normal” European.
A problem is offering less work to some employees and not others. How do you handle it when one guy only works 30 hours a week and still gets benefits? You can tell him "he doesn't get paid as much" but pay is very opaque.
There may be a market opportunity for employers to offer to everyone "30 hour work week, 5 weeks PTO, we expect hard work during those 30 hours but then you're offline, pay will be good but not awesome."
I mean, this seems like a non-problem to me? You, as the employee, get to pick which option you want, nobody is forcing you to do anything. The problem version of this is when people want 40+ hours per week but can't get it.
It's hard for one employer to offer mixed benefits to multiple employees because of morale. Every job has a part that sucks and if some people start getting exempted from them the ones remaining get mad. Management is hard.
It's difficult in most fields to exchange shorter hours for more leisure in many, many jobs in the US. Our companies aren't structured that way.
Also, the GDP of France vs. Alabama ignores PPP, income distribution, value of state provided benefits, etc. that make that silly. The middle class Europeans I know don't live in anything approaching poverty. Maybe they have smaller cars and houses, and if that's what you want, well, that's fine, but in terms of stuff that actually impacts quality of life, I don't see much difference.
It is very clear that US living standards have pulled significantly ahead of European living standards. As for substitute wages for leisure, there are plenty of people working hourly jobs who could easily do this. Sure, salarymen working 40 hours can’t do this in their current position, but I have no doubt they could find a way to earn less and have more leisure time.
Are the standard of living impactful, though? We have so much shit that contributes nothing to quality of life. None of my European friends appear to have greater financial difficulties, more financial stress or any other noteworthy hardship relative to my equally educated American friends. To be clear, I'm not saying the GDP gap isn't real, but there are a bunch of factors that make it less significant than the France = Alabama equation suggests. My guess is if you looked at measurements of life satisfaction, health, etc., a median French person will come out ahead of a median Alabamian.
As far as your presumption that it just must be doable, I see no evidence that it is broadly possible in a way that doesn't mean taking much less money per hour for your labor in most fields, to the point where you slide down the wage scale far enough that you need another job to keep going. By and large, outside of gig work, which usually pays poorly relative to other jobs, there isn't much flexibility for US workers.
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.
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
Look, I pay for a SB membership. If you offered me a $20 bet to write a one-paragraph description of a so-called "abundance movement" to which E/D could give a pass/fail grade (i.e., I either win or lose twenty bucks), I wouldn't take the bet.
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.
But 9% of voters is enough that politicians in different races around the country feel the need to name check it!
I would have guessed 75%. That’s remarkable
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.
Correct the book is pretty underwhelming, the only real skill in it is picking examples progressives will like.
Alas voters want big ass truck abundance not high speed train abundance. But people who pay $14.99 or whatever for political Kindle ebooks reeeeeally like high speed trains and net zero.
I can see the case for self-driving big ass truck abundance but having just ridden on a train for six hours, well it sure beats flying and the equivalent road trip would've been less pleasant.
What is the use case for a six hour train ride? HSR dominates between 300ish kilometers (Paris-Rennes 1hr25) and 750km (Paris-Marseille 2hr56). By the time you’ve spent six hours in a train flying would have been faster. One can fly Paris Nice downtown to downtown in under 5 hours, and the train is 6. That’s why Paris Nice is the most flown route within mainland France.
At some point flying definitely make more sense, but HSR can have a few advantages at marginal distances:
-There may be situations where one or both endpoints for HSR are more convenient than the airports.
-HSR seems to have fewer delays than flights.
-HSR is usually less aggravating than flying, especially in terms of security and the boarding process.
other than is spain where there is security and you have to arrive early
Yeah having taken Shinkansen in Japan there’s a considerable margin where I would pay more for a high-quality HSR that takes longer than a plane just because it’s so much easier and more pleasant than a plane.
Europe I can't comment on, but being crammed into a flying beer can within the United States over shorter distances I'll take the leg room/access to the diner car. Much more comfortable (also obviously Shinkansens would be better but we don't have those).
My question is on what planet has America not delivered Big Ass Truck Abundance?
They're not self-driving.
One with $4 gas.
lol sure, so we'd delivered it in 2024 which is why everyone was thrilled with everything?
Pretty good book but when it went deep into science research grants I was wondering if they got good editorial advice. Not the hugest issue in the world.
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.
Any sort of Top 100 [whatever] lists, because they're entirely subjective, are just a perfect trap for clickbait because everyone loves to argue over how Wrong On The Internet those lists are in so many places. This also means that one can just publish new Top 100 lists and regenerate the arguments in a different valence. I first learned this lesson from being trolled by Rolling Stone's Top 100 Guitarists Of All Time, which of course they've done many iterations of since.
I remember when Time ran a public poll of their Person of the Century around 2000 and the top two vote getters were Jesus and a wrestler.
And for some enterprising commentor there's the "Top 100 Slow Boring Posts" just sitting there waiting to happen.
Oh, and of course, "The Top 100 Slow Boring Comments" and the "Top 100 Slow Boring Sick Burn Comments" and "The Worst 100 Slow Boring Comments" (all won by Barry J. Kaufman DO but maybe we could exclude those).
Great comment. I'm slotting you in at #89
Woo hoo!
>all won by Barry J. Kaufman
This is spiky erasure!
Also, Freddie had some bangers in his day. (I blocked him a while back so I haven't seen his comments since about early 2024)
This is the true function of “Top X” lists
Why are people mad about this one?
I thought it was that it has Jude the Obscure, when The Mayor of Casterbridge is the best book Hardy wrote.
It rates some books by black people highly and therefore, since It Is Known that they can't write well, is therefore Woke and an Attack on Traditional Western Values.
Sigh. I'm not familiar with every book on the list but at a glance it seems like it is mostly well-regarded classics or highly acclaimed more recent literary fiction (or at least they are very well represented). Kindred is awful though--I was super disappointed in that book and I truly do not understand what people see in it. Reads like it was written by a high schooler.
I've never read any Morrison--perhaps I should check out Beloved. Middlemarch was, in fact, extremely good when I read it recently so they picked a solid #1 choice. Just an astonishing feat of characterization and the narration is incredibly engaging given how boring I might have otherwise found the subject matter, and I was surprised at how funny it was.
Not a big Morrison reader but I really liked "Song of Solomon."
I liked it too but I read it in AP Lit so I'm not sure how it would be outside a classroom setting
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.
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.
"Moar police" has been one of my biggest political turnarounds as an adult. The quality-of-life improvements from having even minor stuff addressed quickly are huge, and more police also, ironically, lets us punish softer. If we're clearing a lot of crimes we're inherently identifying repeat offenders, which lets us be very gentle with first-time offenders.
If Stephen Miller's program was deporting homeless people to Rwanda instead of illegals Trump would be significantly more popular.
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.
Few random thoughts:
1. SFBARF? Really? That's what they called it?
2. The TFR collapse is so extreme in some parts of the world that you could plop a few Mennonites in South Korea, and by 2100, a significant number of South Koreans would be Mennonites. I'm not quite as convinced there's NOTHING we can do about it, or that it won't bounce back, but maybe technology is a population bottleneck that selects for people who don't entertain themselves out of the gene pool. In the scenario in which TFR continues to nosedive, only a certain type of person will remain. I have no idea what that will look like.
3. From what I understand, one aspect of Vienna style social housing that makes it less dysfunctional is that they're not income limited, so residents don't lose their housing situation if they get a better job. This has the result of giving well off people free housing, which is not a great use of resources, but eliminates the disincentive to work that exists in American social housing.
I still have fondness for the name concept of the South Lake Union Trolley.
I have not see one of those Ride the SLUT T-shirts in years. Society is different today
I can only imagine someone was super proud to have gotten that through. :D
Could be worse! At least it's not the South Hill Intercity Transit.
The SHIT rolls downhill...
Re: 3- early US public housing supporters understood this dynamic very well, and lots of now-infamous housing projects were *supposed* to be mixed income. Cabrini Green in Chicago, etc. What happened in practice was that all the middle class people immediately moved out when they saw lower income folks move in. Obviously there's a racial angle here too...... That's not really something mid-20th century Sweden or Austria had to deal with
Were they allowed to stay past their income exceeding a certain point?
Really the most functional way to do it would be to give people actual ownership of the units like a condo and only have them be responsible for their share of the property taxes and utilities. But then eventually most of those people would sell their units, and at a certain point it would cease to be public housing (which is fine with me, I'm daydreaming about what I would do with Vancouver’s downtown public housing).
This exists! It’s called a “limited equity [condo/co-op/whatever]”. Prices to initially purchase are affordable, and on sale the permitted price is capped to allow some appreciation (maybe just to keep up with inflation?) but remain affordable.
Ah. That seems like a recipe for subletting. I'm just saying go ahead and give it to the occupants and have them own it. Of course at that point it's not really public housing anymore which I'm also fine with.
The memorable acronym was the point!