Matt Yglesias

Endgame

I can’t here you any clearer:

— Field rations around the world—Italy, France, and Spain look good, Germany, UK, and Scandinavia looking bad. South Korea seems appealing to me, but it’s not to western tastes.

— Jeffrey Goldberg’s sit-down with Fidel Castro is totally surreal and reads like an April Fool’s prank.

— The climate for incumbent Democrats is so bad that even Mayor Daley isn’t running for re-election.

— Ben Bernanke’s view of the origin of the crisis.

— Income-happiness link maxes out at around $75,000 a year.

— How should the rise of the internet change the way we write history?

— Timothy Noah’s excellent multimedia presentation on inequality.

Wavves, “Super Soaker.

Businessmen Claim Capitalism Requires Government to Stifle Competition

(cc photo by Poldavo)

Lydia DePillis gives us another postcard in the timeless quest of incumbent business owners to use local government to crush competition. The issue this time is the Latino Market located three days a week in Adams-Morgan. People shop at the market, and if the market didn’t exist they might shop elsewhere!

Here’s the problem: Neighboring restaurants that sell similar food say the city-sanctioned market has stolen their lunch traffic on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—the busiest days of the week. And that, the businessowners complained at a contentious ANC IC meeting last night, is plain unfair.

“I put all that I have in this business,” says Juan Loyola, who worked in an Auntie Anne’s Pretzels in Tysons Corner for five years before starting Pollo Granjero in 2008. “If I fail, all that I have is gone. Who’s gonna help us?”

“They pay rent. They pay for trash. They are inspected,” added Adams Morgan Business Association president Pat Patrick, who owns a local commercial real estate agency. “These other vendors don’t have this. The hallmark of capitalism is that you’re starting out on a level playing field. And by god, this is far from a level playing field!“

Kristen Barden from the local Business Improvement District at least went through the trouble of coming up with a public health rationale for shutting the market down, though not actual evidence of the existence of a public health problem. The incumbent restauranteurs seem to me to have a valid complaint that sales tax treatment between vendors and stores should be equalized. But the general notion on display here from Loyola and others is that it’s appropriate for public policy to attempt to protect the investments of incumbent businessmen from competition. That’s nonsense, but it’s people with a large financial stake in obtaining such competition who are likely to show up at meetings.

Politics and Egg-Breaking

Andy Rotherham has a good op-ed on Adrian Fenty, Michelle Rhee, and the mirage of changing things without making anyone upset:

The record on urban education reform makes plain that there is a fundamental choice between harmony among the various adult interests and rapid progress on school improvement. While Fenty certainly could have handled the political side of the reforms more deftly, no one should think that the disruption and tension were unavoidable. Rhee would not have accomplished what she has without making the choices so clear and being so, well, polarizing in the process.

D.C. voters may have plenty of reasons for wanting a new mayor. But hoping that someone can dramatically improve the city’s schools without causing a lot of acrimony shouldn’t be one of them.

I think you can best illustrate this with an unrelated example from the Fenty administration, his reform of the city’s taxi fares. It used to be the case that while in cities that aren’t Washington DC you paid a taxi driver based on a meter, in DC you paid a driver based on the number of “zones” you’d driven through. This created a lot of inefficient discontinuity in the price structure and a lot of wasted time as I quibbled with cab drivers about whether I should be dropped off at the north side or the south side of U Street. But especially since the canonical zone map was oriented so that north didn’t point up, it gave cabbies ample opportunity to rip off confused tourists and/or business travelers.

Consequently, when mayor Fenty proposed we switch to a normal system it led to a lot of controversy and even an attempted strike by cab drivers. There was even a lawsuit. But the Fenty administration plowed ahead, reformed the system, the controversy faded. Nowadays, though, if you talk to any cabbie they bear a deep grudge against Fenty and his divisive ways and are all planning on voting for Gray. And Gray is happy to complain about Fenty’s style and approach. But—critically—Gray doesn’t say we should go back to the zone system.

On the one hand, that’s great. Gray’s probably going to win and going back to the zones would be a terrible idea. So on this and on most issues, both candidates have reasonable positions on the issues. But just as we’ve seen with the Obama administration’s leadership on the federal level there’s a tension between safeguarding one’s reputation as a reasonable guy and actually setting about to do things.

PBS Shrugs at Koch/Nova Greenwashing

As best I can tell David H. Koch is genuinely interested in the subject of human evolution, and it’s very difficult to understand his patronage of things like Nova’s “Becoming Human” series or the Smithsonian Institution’s Koch Hall of Human Origins as merely an effort to block comprehensive climate change legislation. Nevertheless, it’s indisputably true that both the Hall of Human Origins and the Nova series spend time dealing with climate change issues and both the museum and the show clearly go to great pains to paint catastrophic climate change in a positive light.

Tragically, the scientists involved seem to have crawled into a cave of denial and persuaded themselves that this stuff is all kosher. Meanwhile, as Joe Romm points out today PBS’ ombudsman is reading from the same script arguing that “As a viewer of what strikes me and a lot of others as a consistently first-rate program, I trust NOVA.”

NOVA is a first-rate program and I enjoyed the “Becoming Human” series. Still, it handles the climate change issue in an inept way that’s favorable to the financial interests and political predilections of one of its major funders. Simply saying “trust us” doesn’t cut it here.

No Pain, No Gain?

Karl Smith speculates on the origins of austerianism:

My current explanation is that this is a transfer of logic from the way certain body tissues operate. Its clearly the case that skin, muscle and connective tissue respond to stress by growing: a process known as hydrotherapy. This might also be the case with nervous tissue and some other, though importantly not all, tissues. This is an interesting and important phenomenon that details the power of highly complex evolutionary systems. Yet, it is a fool’s errand to apply this to the world writ large.

When you stress most things they don’t grow back stronger, they break. When you apply job losses to an economy people don’t become hardier, they become poorer. The idea that tough love will lead to a better economy in the long run is just wrong. Not mean. Not heartless. Not insensitive. Wrong.

I think Paul Krugman’s old account of “Hangover Theory” more likely gets at the source of the problem. Most people are not very interested in the details of public policy disputes, but people recognize that politics is in some sense important. So since politics involves both empirical and ethical issues, people tend to gravitate toward moralistic accounts of what’s going on. The idea that a boom is necessarily followed by a bust that you just have to grit through both contains a little bit of truth* and constitutes an appealingly moralistic argument.

The underlying issue is the pretty general one that people’s intuitive understanding of economic growth is not very good. When faced with trade, or immigration, or technological progress, or improved conditions for a racial or religious minority group, people tend to respond with anxiety that more for someone else means less for them. The idea that these things can actually push the production possibility frontier outwards doesn’t come automatically to people who haven’t received explicit instruction. I think it’s the same with the business cycle and intertemporal tradeoffs. People figure the money has to come from somewhere so if fiscal or monetary stimulus helps anyone, it can only be by hurting some other people or else by somehow stealing resources from the future.

The reality is the reverse. Growing slower than we could in 2010 doesn’t help us grow faster in 2011 or 2012. Instead it semi-permanently reduces our ability to produce future goods and services.

Changing What Counts as “Strategic”

7-11s in Stockholm, like Ikeas and H&Ms in the USA, are signs of a everyday impact of transatlantic ties (my photo available under cc license)

Roger Cohen writes about the clocks on the wall in Dennis McDonough’s office:

What is striking, just two decades after the end of the Cold War, is the absence of a single European city. Europe, for the first time in hundreds of years, has become a strategic backwater. Europe is history.

Cohen thinks this is an unfortunate attitude, and I sympathize with what he’s saying. But here’s a different way of putting the point: The fact that the NSC’s chief of staff is primarily focused on backwaters like Kabul and Sana shows that issues falling under the umbrella of “national security” are perhaps not the most important features of the international landscape. The reality is that most contemporary Americans are much more affected by events in major developed world trade partners—Europe, Canada, Japan, Korea, Taiwan—than by counterinsurgency in Yemen. It’s not even close. European Union mishandling of the Greek debt crisis would have been a disaster for the welfare of the American people and I can assure you that neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve was busy that day worrying about Iraq.

You can say “well, these are economic issues rather than strategic ones.” But why should “strategy” just mean “stuff the military does”? We got militarily involved in Europe in the first place largely over concern for the implications of World War One for our commercial relationships, and those relationships are still extremely important. Treating these kind of issues as second-rate seems to me to be a bad habit.

How Norm Coleman Saved America From Socialism

Dave Weigel enters the counterfactual sweepstakes and wonders how different America might be today absent the long delay in seating Al Franken:

If Franken had eked out another 1000 votes in Minnesota, or if Republicans simply decided not to keep suing to overturn the recount he won, the Democratic agenda would have been radically different. In January and February, the 59 — not 58 — Democrats in the Senate would have only needed to grab one Republican to pass the stimulus. That probably would have resulted in a larger stimulus bill, with extra billions of dollars (maybe $110 billion) going to tax cuts or spending. Democrats would have had the votes for card check, and gotten that out of the way quickly, while Ted Kennedy was still healthy. Just having that extra vote to play with when Obama’s popularity was peaking might have shaken up the whole schedule, gotten nominees like Dawn Johnson into their jobs, and led to more action in the Senate that pleased the Democratic base and — possibly — had a marginal impact on the economy. As it was, Democrats only had a functioning “supermajority” from September 2009 (Franken in the Senate, Paul Kirk in Ted Kennedy’s seat) to January 2010, and all they did with it was pass health care.

I think that’s wrong on card check, where resistance inside the Democratic caucus was pretty big. But the larger point is correct—we likely would have had bigger stimulus, more growth, more nominees confirmed, and it’s possible the Rahm Tipping Point Theory of legislating would have worked. At a minimum, we’d have a somewhat more progressive policy status quo, somewhat less joblessness, and probably a somewhat different outlook for the midterms.

Weigel notes that “Here’s something amazing about the Franken mess: Republicans appear to have paid no price for it.” Exactly. I think that this highlights one of the most admirable things about the Republican congressional caucus. Both its leadership and its rank and file show a good deal more commitment to the substance of things and less concern about transient matters of appearance. Senate Republicans clearly understood that legislative outcomes in 2009 were a very important issue and focused their energy pretty decisively on playing an objectively weak hand to influence them. Senate Democrats, dealt a strong hand, spent an amazing amount of time fretting about process and superficial matters and only really buckled down in 2010 by which time their hand was much weaker.

“Hyperpartisan”

Via Thers, Jonah Goldberg gloats about his book sales:

The Atlantic has a review of reviews of the Kos book. It’s chock-a-block with Liberal Fascism bashing, mostly from people who I suspect haven’t read it, plus activist Matt Yglesias who claims to have read it but has A) a very deep personal grudge against me and B) is an admitted fan of lying for political ends. His own hyper-partisan book famously bombed, barely breaking out of triple-digit sales. So maybe he still has some issues related to that as well. But that’s neither here nor there.

I think Goldberg needs to make more enemies if he thinks my grudge against him is all that deep. But to clarify, my book Heads in the Sand was indeed a commercial failure and Goldberg is much, much, much better than I am at coming up with books that sell a lot of copies. I think his tendency to harp on this point tends to demonstrate that he’s an extremely petty person driven to a remarkable degree by well-deserved insecurity about his intellectual abilities.

The main point I’d like to make, however, is that my book’s really not partisan at all and certainly not hyper-partisan. It’s a book that’s primarily critical of Democrats, and of the nexus between “liberal hawk” intellectuals and political opportunists that drove the party leadership’s positioning in the 2002-2006 and continues to exert a substantial-though-diminished influence today.

At any rate, the book is a little bit dated but still pretty good and thanks to aforementioned commercial failure available at steep discount so make Jonah Goldberg cry and buy a copy.

Adventures in Scare-Quotes

One source of economic dysfunction in the United States is that it appears to be the case that the Wall Street Journal’s audience of well-to-do businessmen prefer to read an editorial page that flatters their egos rather than one that provides credible commentary on economic issues. One side consequence of this is that the WSJ editorial page is always full of puzzling scare-quotes:

Larry Summers, who would later become Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, made the case for such a stimulus to boost domestic “demand” in late 2007.

Is the concept of supply and demand really so controversial?

(h/t)

Circumventing the Banks

Via Scott Sumner, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says “dead-end defeatism” has a grip on America’s elite and monetary policy needs to step up and bypass the banking system:

Blitz the market with bond purchases, but do so outside the banking system by buying from insurers, pension funds, and the public. This would gain traction on the broad M3 money instead of letting it collapse (yes, the “monetary base” has exploded, but that is a red herring), working through the classic Fisher/Friedman mechanisms of the quantity of money theory. This is quite different from the Fed’s QE which buys bonds from the banks and works by trying to drive down borrowing costs. While Bernanke’s ‘creditism’ is certainly better than nothing, it is not gaining full traction. [...]

Dr Bernanke said in November 2002 that Japan had the economic instruments to pull itself out of malaise but failed to do so. “Political deadlock” and a cacophony of views over the right policy had prevented action. He insisted that a central bank had “most definitely” not run out of ammo once rates were zero, and retained “considerable power to expand economic activity”.

Yet eight years later, the US is in such “deadlock“.

Even in terms of “creditism,” however, I don’t fully understand current policy. Banks are required to hold a certain amount of reserves. Currently, however, the banking system is holding a lot of extra reserves over and above what’s required. And currently the Fed is paying interest on those reserves. If the idea is to juice the economy by encouraging lending, you need to stop paying that interest. You could charge a penalty, even.

The Latest from Kabul Bank

No problems here report Afghan authorities:

Abdul Qadir Fitrat, governor of Afghanistan’s Central Bank, told reporters at an afternoon news conference that the country’s largest private bank has been stabilized over the past several days and has been able to meet customers’ withdrawals with its own cash. [...] “The Central Bank and the Finance Ministry have talked and agreed to support Kabul Bank,” Fitrat said. “And, God willing, this problem that was created by the international media can be resolved.”

But of course some might want to know how we got here:

The big picture here is that Kabul Bank seems to have been acting as a conduit for taking as many foreign aid dollars as possible and transmogrifying them into offshore holdings belonging to the president’s cronies. And it did all of this openly, with impunity, knowing that the US government was unwilling or unable to put a stop to it.

I think this is the real issue here. If a huge proportion of the funds foreigners inject into Afghanistan simply end up ferreted out of the country and invested abroad, then we’re not succeeding in building anything over there. And you have to look at this from the perspective of the putative “cronies” as well. Certainly I don’t have any of my savings invested in Afghanistan and the logic is equally compelling, if not more so, to Karzai cronies. It’s all well and good to say “this is bad and we should stop it” but it’s difficult to make water flow uphill.

Listening to the Bond Market

Interest rates on bonds are low, indicating a massive level of demand for bond purchases and weak demand for other financial assets—weak demand that’s driven by weak demand for real goods and services. Stan Collender thinks we should pay attention to the bond market and concern ourselves more with boosting demand than with cutting the deficit. The conventional wisdom, however, disagrees:

The best way to demonstrate the absurdity of this position is to ask what the complainers would be recommending if the mirror image of this situation existed. What would they say, for example, if the bond market were signaling that deficit reductions were called for as unequivocally as it is now demanding more stimulative policies?

Would the same people who responded that we should ignore what Wall Street is saying and start to reduce the deficit in the face of low economic growth be just as adamant that, if the bond market were back in a vigilante mode, we should begin to adopt policies that increase federal spending, reduce taxes and raise Washington’s borrowing because, after all, at some point it will change its mind?

Of course they wouldn’t.

Exactly so. If interest rates were high and rising, indicating low demand for bonds, that would tell us two things. One is that low demand should normally be met by reducing supply—i.e., less debt. The other is that the government, by failing to reduce supply, is making borrowing costs high for creditworthy borrowers and thereby crimping growth prospects. But today interest rates are low and they’ve mostly been falling, indicating high demand for bonds. Meeting the demand by increasing supply and then spending the money to hire people to do stuff should increase output and raise incomes. To argue that the money has to come from somewhere is missing the point that at the moment the markets are begging for more money to put to this purpose—people are into safety and liquidity right now, and are eager to trade cash for bonds and then that cash can be turned into government spending on something useful.

The Coming Landslide

Excellent highlight job by Kevin Drum underscores the curious microfoundations of the coming GOP congressional majority:

I’ll take this as an object lesson in the limits of spin. If I were working with Nancy Pelosi on “message,” I’d be hoping to persuade people that (a) Democrats are better-equipped to handle today’s problems, (b) you share Democrats’ core values, (c) no matter how much you may dislike Democrats you dislike Republicans even more, and (d) therefore you should vote for Democrats. But as we see here (a), (b), and (c) aren’t sufficient to drive conclusion (d). When things are going poorly, the incumbent party takes its licks whether or not people like the opposition.

Meanwhile, whatever you may say about the pros and cons of the Obama administration’s approach to economic recovery they’ve been a good deal more aggressive on this score than have the marginal members of congress whose votes are needed to do anything.

Peretz: Muslims Are Indifferent to Human Life and Therefore Unworthy of First Amendment Protection

New Republic Editor in Chief Martin Peretz:

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

I for one am thrilled that the First Amendment gives Peretz the right to offer his racist views up for public consumption, but it’s unfortunate that a number of very good writers seem to see no problem with the fact that their work goes out under a masthead nominally edited by this character.

Doing My Part

Ezra Klein says cutting his taxes would have little stimulative impact:

I’m a young, single worker. I don’t have many expenses. I’m currently saving money. If given a tax cut, I will save every cent of it. My tax cut will create no new demand in the economy. It will not employ new workers or buy new things. I will, in other words, waste the entire thing. If you want to create jobs and stimulate economic activity, you’d be much better off hiring people to replace the windows in a vacant storefront than giving me a tax cut.

By contrast my commitment to you, the American people, is that if I receive a stimulus tax cut I will Premana Professional 11 inch heavy knife that I saw Mario Batali using on television. No, I don’t really have any use for such a knife, but being familiar with the economic analysis Klein mentions above I would consider it my obligation to the people of the world to go buy one. Admittedly, this made-in-Italy purchase will do more to stimulate the Italian economy than the American economy, but my knife-buying should still help save or create jobs in the transportation field.

More seriously, one question to ask about this traditional marginal propensity to consume analysis is how it interplays with deleveraging. Many Americans are saving at the moment to get out from under debts. If you cut their taxes and they mostly saved the money by paying down credit cards more rapidly, does that bring us closer to recovery even if it doesn’t increase purchases of goods and services in the near-term?

Top Nonscorers in the NBA

Everyone generally acknowledges that lots of things happen on the basketball court that help teams win besides scoring. But in practice, evaluation of players tends to turn heavily on PPG totals. Here’s Dave Berri’s list of players who make the biggest contributions—grabbing rebounds, avoiding turnovers, and using the shots they do take efficiently—without scoring tons of points:

Obviously the Miami Heat’s offseason moves have attracted the most attention. But the Los Angeles Lakers were a great team next year, and in Steve Blake and Matt Barnes they’ve acquires two guys who make big contributions without shooting frequently.

Modeling Likely House GOP Gains

Joseph Bafumi, Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien take a stab at it and come up with a likely net gain of 50 seats:

How many House seats will the Republicans gain in 2010? To answer this question, we have run 1,000 simulations of the 2010 House elections. The simulations are based on information from past elections going back to 1946. Our methodology replicates that for our ultimately successful forecast of the 2006 midterm. Two weeks before Election Day in 2006, we posted a prediction that the Democrats would gain 32 seats and recapture the House majority. The Democrats gained 30 seats in 2006. Our current forecast for 2010 shows that the Republicans are likely to regain the House majority.

Our preliminary 2010 forecast will appear (with other forecasts by political scientists) in the October issue of PS: Political Science. By our reckoning, the most likely scenario is a Republican majority in the neighborhood of 229 seats versus 206 for the Democrats for a 50-seat loss for the Democrats. Taking into account the uncertainty in our model, the Republicans have a 79% chance of winning the House.

In other words, a Republican majority is very likely and it will probably be a relatively narrow one.

Attitudes and Media Coverage

Does media coverage of economic conditions have a substantial impact on public views of the economy? Maybe if the New York Times started saying the economy was great, consumer confidence would rise and the increased confidence would in fact create better conditions. Daniel Hopkins deems it unlikely:

Follow the blue line: Americans’ concern about the economy reliably grows during recessions and declines during expansions. But the key finding is in the relationship between the various trends. The tone of coverage in the Washington Post and the New York Times does not appear to systematically lead Americans’ economic perceptions, a point that formal statistical tests reinforce. If anything, the relationship is the reverse, with Americans’ economic attitudes shifting before we see similar shifts in print. These are only two newspapers, to be sure, but they are two prominent national newspapers. And they are commonly perceived (or derided) as influential. When viewed over the long-term, Americans appear to be responding to actual economic conditions—and not to the tone of these national newspapers.

It would be very useful to see more research in this area. Things like consumer confidence and expectations of inflation or NGDP growth play important roles in a lot of economic accounts of what’s going on, but I don’t think we know very much about where expectations or confidence comes from. It’s pretty unsatisfactory to just wave in the direction of “animal spirits” or “rational expectations” when there’s probably a real answer. Does network TV news matter in a different way from elite newspapers? Does business news matter?

Caffeine Content of Diet Coke

I’m one of those Diet Coke people, and neither Coke Zero nor even normal Coke really does it for me. Turns out the reason is plausibly just that Diet Coke contains a much higher dose of an addictive substance:

And now you know.

Education in Brazil

Brazil has made substantial economic progress over the past fifteen years, but Alexei Barrionuevo reports that its levels of educational attainment continue to lag:

Brazilian 15-year-olds tied for 49th out of 56 countries on the reading exam of the Program for International Student Assessment, with more than half scoring in the test’s bottom reading level in 2006, the most recent year available. In math and science, they fared even worse.

“We should be ashamed of ourselves,” said Ilona Becskeházy, executive director of the Lemann Foundation, an organization based in São Paulo devoted to improving Brazilian education. “This means that 15-year-olds in Brazil are mastering more or less the same skills as 9-year-olds or 10-year-olds in countries such as Denmark or Finland.”

Of course the Finns have the best-performing students in the world, so the no shame in a poor country lagging behind them. But Brazil does considerable worse than Chile or Mexico. Here’s the math stats:

These kind of things don’t turn around overnight. What you hope for is a mutually reinforcing pattern where growth makes more resources available and then if those resources are invested well educational attainment improves and lays the groundwork for more growth.

More Like This, Please

I don’t think that presidential “messaging” has much power to alter the outcome at the midterms, but that’s all the more reason the White House may as well propose ideas that make sense on the merits and then hope for the best:

President Barack Obama is asking Congress to approve at least $50 billion in long-term investments in the nation’s roads, railways and runways in a pre-election effort to show he’s trying to stimulate the sputtering economy.

The infrastructure investments are part of a package of targeted proposals the White House announced on Monday. With November’s elections for control of Congress approaching, Obama planned to discuss the proposal later Monday at a Labor Day event in Milwaukee.

Given that congress almost certainly won’t agree to anything this sensible, monetary policy remains are best hope in practice. But it’s foolish for the White House to constrain itself to only proposing ideas congress is likely to approve. This new approach is the right way to go.

The Pace of Recovery

Paul Krugman on the current trajectory: “If you ask how long it will take us to return to, say, 5 percent unemployment on the current track, the answer is forever.”

Like him, I don’t think this point is sufficiently understood. Nor are people really wrestling with the long-term damage that’s going to be done as the youngest cohort of Americans continually fails to find labor market opportunities and thus the kind of on-the-job training that turns people into productive workers.

Western Attitudes Toward Afghan Corruption

Dexter Filkins has an excellent piece in the NYT on changing attitudes toward corruption in the Karzai government, but I think this characterization of the CIA’s role doesn’t fully capture what’s been going on:

Since 2001, one of the unquestioned premises of American and NATO policy has been that ordinary Afghans don’t view public corruption in quite the same way that Americans and others do in the West. Diplomats, military officers and senior officials flying in from Washington often say privately that while public graft is pernicious, there is no point in trying to abolish it — and that trying to do so could destroy the very government the West has helped to build.

The Central Intelligence Agency has carried that line of argument even further, putting on its payroll some of the most disputable members of Mr. Karzai’s government. The explanation, offered by agency officials, is that Mother Theresa can’t be found in Afghanistan.

I think a more generous view of the pro-corruption position would be this. From 2002-2008, the war in Afghanistan was an “economy of force” mission. People were given a certain level of resources and told to do the best they could. And improving governance in poorly governed societies is difficult to do. So the calculation was made that given limited resources, simply taking advantage of Afghan officials’ proclivity for corruption by bribing them seemed like a cost-effective alternative to a more ambitious undertaking with higher costs and an uncertain outcome. The problem, as detailed by Filkins, is that this attitude has only exacerbated the underlying governance problems.

98th Senate Bonus Fact

Related to the point below about the past being a different country in political terms, it seems that in the 98th Senate (serving from 1983-84) Richard Lugar was the 77th most conservative senator putting him in the rightwing half of the GOP caucus. In the 111th Senate he’s 69th and the overall size of the Republican caucus is much smaller, so he’s distinctly on the left side.

Moderate Democrats like Howell Heflin have been replaced with very conservative Republicans like Jeff Sessions, while the Robert Staffords has been replaced by Bernie Sanders.

1982

Jim Kessler observes that poor economic conditions don’t per se guarantee gigantic losses for the president’s party in the midterms:

All in all, the president’s party holds some pretty bad cards — but even so, this year needn’t be like 1994. If Democrats take a close look at what happened that year, they can avoid repeating it. And if they look to another election year, 1982, they might even find inspiration in an unlikely place: President Ronald Reagan’s leadership. In the run-up to that year’s midterm elections, Reagan faced 10.8 percent unemployment, 6 percent inflation, a declining GDP, an approval rating barely above freezing and the indignity of having drastically increased the budget deficit over the previous year after running as a fiscal hawk. You can’t get a hand much worse than that, but Reagan nonetheless managed to hold all 54 GOP Senate seats while losing only 26 House races.

When I first read that I was genuinely surprised at the loss of zero Senate seats so I looked it up and, indeed, Democrats made no net Senate gains though seats in Virginia and New Mexico did flip:

What strikes me about this map is how long ago 1982 was in terms of the evolution of the American party system. Democrats held on to seats in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas while the GOP maintained control of seats in California, Vermont, and Connecticut. It strikes me that in today’s more ideologically- and geographically-aligned party system, the fate of congressional candidates is probably more closely tied to assessments of the president than was the case in the past.