20 ms·

Debunking our narratives of the late 70s and early 80s

190 points by nabla9 5y ago

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
Carter did a good job debunking the notion that wars create booming economies. The post-Vietnam economy he inherited fairly sucked.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  The best way how to make money on a war is to stay neutral and supply both sides for cash.
aniijbod 5y ago
Americans would be utterly baffled as to why so many boomer Brits will see that (originally Carter and Reagan, now changed) headline and automatically think of George and Jack (rather than Jimmy and Ronald) before they click on the link.
- Lio 5y ago
  Not a boomer but I take it that's a Sweeney reference? I don't really remember the show but it brings to mind people drinking scotch out tea mugs and shouting "who's the slag what done the blag?" at some poor "snout". https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071059/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071059/
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    "The Sweeney's doing ninety 'cause they've got the word to go To get a gang of villains in a shed up at Heathrow They're counting out the fivers when the handcuffs lock again In and out of Wandsworth with the numbers on their names It's funny how their missus always looks the bleeding same And meanwhile at the station, there's a couple of likely lads Who swear like how's your father and they're very cool for cats They're cool for cats (Cool for cats)"
- iso1631 5y ago
  Really? I'm not a boomer, but my parents are. I've never heard of a Jack Reagan or a Jack Carter Ronald + Maggie's relationship was legendary though, and defined the era of Boomers in their 20s and 30s.
CalChris 5y ago
In fact, inflation was pretty bad under Nixon (5.8%) and Ford (11.05%) with some up and down. Nixon even instituted price controls in 1970. Carter inherited that economy. He didn't fix it (well, arguably his Fed Chair Paul Volcker did) but he inherited it. Carter and Reagan were polar opposites. Carter was a fiscal conservative and Reagan was a spendthrift. Reagan was when the deficit floodgates opened. We've repeated this fiscally conservative Democrat followed by spendthrift Republican ever since. Carter $70B deficit Reagan $175B Bush $350B Clinton $0B Bush $1.4T Obama $600B
- nickff 5y ago
  Those numbers don't really tell the whole truth; federal spending has increased almost monotonically, and the changes in deficit mostly indicate phases of the business cycle when they left. See this chart:https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-the-federal-government-spend-your-tax-dollars-on-social-insurance-programs-mostly/ft_17-04-03_budget_420px/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-t... Clinton for example, left at the peak of the DotCom bubble, and was bouyed by capital gains tax revenue, whereas Bush left during the Great Recession.
  - CalChris 5y ago
    Reagan cut taxes (supply side). Clinton increased taxes and cut Cold War era defense spending in his 1993 budget proposal. W didn't even put the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on normal budgeting. That emergency spending went straight to debt. When Obama reversed this accounting trick, he was accused of increasing the deficit. Yes, everything is more complicated.
    - cafard 5y ago
      Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's summary of the 1980s: "We borrowed a trillion dollars from foreigners, and threw ourselves a party."
      - CalChris 5y ago
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Whenever I hear about the end of the cold war, I think the Polish contribution to the fall of the USSR is mostly unknown, under appreciated and under valued. Also obviously with the end of the cold war, what most of this articles miss, the US lost Europe. Before e.g. Germanys establishment pushed US nuclear weapons ("Jump!" "How high?") into Germany against a large part of it's polutation, after 1990 no country in Europe jumps anymore when the US says "Jump!", because the Soviet scare is gone.
- vmception 5y ago
  From my perspective we are only at the beginning of a period where Europe doesn't jump for US. Through NATO they follow us along into dubious, pointless, dangerous US conflicts, sparing the US President from asking Congress for authorization, while bearing the brunt of extraterritorial attacks since there arent two gigantic oceans separating them from the conflict. The US uses almost countless Europe located bases for missile shields against Russia and to many hawkish people the cold war is still going on as if it was the 80s still. Europe still depends on Russia for energy so this symbiosis is seen as important. But I think this changes because the UK was the only EU member state vetoing an EU military, and with them gone the EU can arm itself. Dismantling a lot of the need for the US, we can mostly assume it will be to keep out Russia and lessen the burden of NATO but there are a lot of values that differ if we are being honest.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Is the EU going to arm itself with nuclear weapons? France has them, but that's it for EU member nations AFAIK.
    - btilly 5y ago
      You are correct. The complete list of countries known to have nuclear weapons worldwide is The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Now that the UK is no longer in the EU, France is it. In fact France is surprisingly militaristic. For example it is the only EU country in the top 10 on https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Yes, I've had to explain the bit about Volcker to a few people over the years. People older than me that should know better. Another fascinating chapter from that era, if you're interested in the revolution in Iran and resulting US election, is covered in the book "October Surprise," by Gary Sick. While the author states soberly that we don't have all the details, those we do point in an unfortunate direction. That many in the Reagan admin would be behind bars and implicated with the Iran arms scandal less than a decade later has also largely been forgotten. The two events are thought to be unconnected. At the time Reagan often said he "didn't recall…" Back then I thought he was omitting the truth, but then we found he had Alzheimer's a few years later, and turned out it was probably true he didn't remember a thing. Can't make this stuff up, folks. There was also a good Frontline episode on the subject, but I've not been able to find it due to PBS' shenanigans. Maybe they lost the tape.
- tptacek 5y ago
  You kind of can make this stuff up. Reagan's in-office Alzheimers is the same kind of narrative Noah Smith is talking about, more talked about than empirically supported. Reagan was first diagnosed in 1993, long after leaving office; his White House physicians all attest to no evident decline. The closest we get to a serious report is Leslie Stahl claiming that he was vacant during an interview... but who knows what that means? I was vacant last Tuesday after not sleeping the night before. The topic of Reagan's decline in office is debated, but we should be wary of premising conclusions on it. Reagan was probably fully competent while serving as President.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I didn't notice anything at the time. But after watching my father slowly decline from Alzheimers, and then going back and looking at Reagan's conferences, I can see it in the latter part of his presidency. It's the look of panic when he's lost his grip on what's happening around him.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      Sorry about your father. I have a relative in the early stages, and while I know what's coming, I don't.
lindseymysse 5y ago
I grew up deep in Reagan's America in the 1980's and it was a paranoid, wretched time and place to be a child. The absolute worst thing about the Trump years is they reminded me of growing up in Billings, Montana. Trump has nothing as far as destruction of this country compared to Reagan. You want to trace the end of the American Empire -- put that blame on Reagan and his acolytes first.
- DaveExeter 5y ago
  Billings, Montana? I don't care who is the president, growing up in Billings Montana will always suck!
  - lindseymysse 5y ago
    Maybe it was the place. But it was all very wretched
- Diederich 5y ago
  > wretched time and place to be a child I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and can certainly complain about a lot of things about that time. In your mind, what are the top few most wretched aspects of that time? I grew up in south central Los Angeles, and so gang and drug crime would be the top of my list.
  - lindseymysse 5y ago
    I grew up in an ultra-conservative church called the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, that uses techniques like this: https://www.lutheranforum.com/blog/mobbing-systemic-spiritual-abuse-in-the-lcms https://www.lutheranforum.com/blog/mobbing-systemic-spiritua... to enforce it's very narrow, literal interpretation of the bible. Yes, of course they are physically and sexually abusive, and they use mobbing techniques against 5-11 year olds. Of course they idolized Reagan like a god, also. I live in LA now and ride the bus through South Central, and I've lived there and I have found that place far more welcoming to me than I ever did back in Montana. So, YMMV and the grass is always greener. But I'm a lot happier in the poor parts of LA than I ever was in Billings, Montana.
deleted 5y ago
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Jernik 5y ago
Every graph on this page comparing the USA and the USSR needs a legend, they are unreadable unless you pick them apart with context from the surrounding paragraphs.
pezzana 5y ago
> But it was Jimmy Carter who appointed Volcker as the Fed chair, in 1979. Volcker was appointed specifically to do this job, as he was known as an inflation hawk, and Carter recognized inflation as America’s biggest economic problem. Volcer hiked interest rates all the way up to 17.61% under Carter, causing the first of the two Volcker Recessions in 1980. The process that Volker's Fed set in motion is with us today. Have a gander at the historical constant-maturity 30-year bond: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS30 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS30 Zoom out to the multi-decade view and notice something: a peak in late-1981 and a relentless slide toward zero today. You won't find a multi-decade channel like this in many other places. These ever-lower long-term yields have played a major role in the housing market bubble that ended in 2008 and the one still inflating today. It could also be argued that this trend toward ever-lower long-term yields has been responsible the increasingly outlandish stock market valuations and the never-ending quest for yield (i.e. risk) that we currently see by institutions, individuals, and foreign governments.
- bregma 5y ago
  I have no need to look at historical graphs. I remember my student loans at a 25% per annum interest rate.
- jollybean 5y ago
  " You won't find a multi-decade channel like this in many other places." I see this graph in a number of places, I think it's something 'talked about'. The issue, I believe, is fundamentally demographics combined with decreasing marginal returns to tech and progress. 1970's was when the baby boomers were entering the workplace, and there were a lot of them, now, not so much. For decades after WW2 American industry was 'ahead' of the factories in Europe and Japan which were bombed into nothing. So there was a natural slowdown in growth afterwards. Then every loosening monetary policy with a big bump in 2008 and an even bigger bump in 2021 and you have what you have. "ever-lower long-term yields have played a major role in the housing market bubble that ended in 2008" I think it's better to say they are an indicator of something material, but 'lower bond yields' are not the 'driver of housing inflation'. That said, I agree with a lot of the things said in the article.
bregma 5y ago
I think it's hardly surprising that the untruths spread by propagandists during election campaigns and by biased pundits don't always line up with observed facts or lived experiences. They don't call them spin doctors for nothing. The solution is to dig in to statements of truth for yourself until you uncover verifiable facts. This is true as much for assertions in electoral campaign literature as much as claims of grand conspiracies to subvert privileges through widespread intramuscular injections of 5G microchips. Check the references provided, and if there are no references then check your gullibility.
- mistermann 5y ago
  It should be noted though, supportive evidence (or lack of) for any proposition does not necessarily lead one to the correct answer.
  - bregma 5y ago
    It should also be noted that "supportive evidence" does not include "because someone said so" in a blog post or old book with flowery prose.
    - mistermann 5y ago
      It should also be noted that one can regularly observe people engaging in framing (intentionally or not) those who dissent as doing so only because of propaganda or religion, despite not having knowledge of the true underlying reasons.
lordnacho 5y ago
This actually points at a central problem with modern democracy. People are expected to think when they vote, but most people do not have the base information required to make decisions. And so everything descends into PR: stereotypes of righties being better with money, lefties being in thrall to unions, and so on. When it comes time to vote, the PR machines start up and people are made to pretend they are thinking objectively when actually we are about as prepared as we'd be at a wine tasting. The analogy continues, because whatever we decided we think we were well justified later on, regardless of what actually happened. I'm glad I read this article, it's well presented with sources, and debunks some quite important myths.
- remarkEon 5y ago
  I do not think this is a problem with “modern” democracy, but democracy in general. There’s always been organized mechanisms for convincing people to believe certain things and vote a certain way.
  - ilammy 5y ago
    I'd say the whole premise behind voting and democracy is not so much the people voting for something they “want”, but rather not voting for something they “object”. The voting process makes sure that the government doesn't go into the direction that most people don't want it to. Aside from that, government can do whatever it wants (popularly referred to as not honoring the election promises).
- meragrin_ 5y ago
  > debunks some quite important myths. How so? The chart suggesting Volcker "saved" the US from inflation seems to suggest otherwise. The Fed was already trending towards what the "Volcker Fed" did. The "list of significant deregulations" on Wikipedia is actually listed as "Related legislation". Reagan had a greater number of deregulation legislation listed as directly related to Reagan's administration rather than in the "Related legislation" so there is some game playing going on as far as the significance of each administration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation
mikestew 5y ago
Carter caused inflation in the 70s? How did that narrative get started given that his predecessor was the one handing out "WIP" (Whip Inflation Now) buttons?
- mywittyname 5y ago
  I've heard people blame Obama for stuff that happened under W. Like the bank bailout (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act) / TARP. Those events did not happen that long ago, and it's a 5 second search to find out what president signed those.
  - ibash 5y ago
    Hey mywittyname -- I'd like to find more about the work you mention here, is there a way I can get in touch with you? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28910928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28910928 (hackernews won't let me reply to the previous comment, sorry about that!)
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      sure, I tossed you a linkedin request
- Finnucane 5y ago
  I still have one of those! Yes, an artifact of the Ford administration.
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
  That's easy. He's a Democrat, and QED. I mean, that's the extent of the "logic" as far as it goes. But enough for votes in the ballot box. The world is too damn complicated. I barely can get my tv to operate, and you're supposed to expect me to understand the ins and outs of federal reserve policy, economics, and climate change? Mueller's report was damning. But the story it told was so complicated that only obsessed people could keep the details straight, and most of those people were heavily invested in the outcome one way or the other anyway. Feeling cynical right now i guess.
lordgrenville 5y ago
Paul Sabin has written recently[0] about Carter's passion for deregulation, and how he balanced it with other legislative goals. The idea that people were "choked by regulation" was not exclusive to the right. [0] https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898030615000366 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898030615000366
andrewtbham 5y ago
Regarding the cold war and military spending... Everyone in the 80s thought Reagan was nuts because he wanted to build "Star Wars" a system that would shoot down all the Soviet Nukes. So the Soviets wasted money trying to compete with it. So at least in some cases, it wasn't about us spending more on the military... it was about tricking them into spending more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
- nradov 5y ago
  Was it really a trick? By all accounts, President Reagan was sincerely horrified by the threat of a nuclear war and really did intend to build a working defensive system. But he was clueless about the difficulty of actually building such a system, and then the military industrial complex piled onto the gravy train to get lucrative R&D projects.
mountainb 5y ago
There are tons of spelling errors in this article. I feel compelled to criticize something because I hate Noah Smith on a personal level, but am chagrinned to find that I generally agree with most of the arguments that he makes here along with his interpretation of the history. The only thing deficient here was that he could have improved his argument by extending it backwards a bit to the malignant continuity between JFK (you'll really trigger the boomers with that one), LBJ, and Nixon in terms of creating long-term fiscal problems for the US. To throw a bone to a side that I usually disagree with, Smith could have also productively contrasted that latter century bipartisan fiscal irresponsibility with the relative sobriety of the New Deal just in terms of deficits and long term sustainability. It may seem weird on the face of it given how the New Deal tends to be portrayed in contemporary times by both the left and the right, but FDR might have been the last real fiscal conservative of the 20th century both in terms of rhetoric and policy until Bill Clinton closed out the millennium. Despite what seemed to be bitter acrimony during the Clinton administration, the Reagan-Clinton years were probably the last ones in which there was a productive competitive dynamic between both parties. It was also the last time in my memory that there was serious discussion of entitlement reform: that was really wiped out from public debate after 9/11. Back then, you could credibly argue that the competition between the parties resulted in better policy thinking on both sides. In contemporary times the competition seems more to result in more aggressive stupidity on both sides: they both tend to make each other dumber to own the cons/libs at the expense of the public. Gives me a bad taste in my mouth to have to say something nice about a Noah Smith article.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Why is is it appropriate for one "nobody" to tell me they hate another "nobody" while discussing a decent blog post? Something unsaid?
UncleOxidant 5y ago
"Carter’s liberal big-government policies" Yes, this needs to be debunked. I was in high school during the Carter years and I was into politics (seems odd for someone that age). There's a reason that Carter was primaried by Ted Kennedy in 1980: many Democrats found Carter too fiscally conservative. Carter was a deficit hawk. He pushed for a balanced budget and that upset many Democrats at the time because he wasn't proposing the large social spending increases they wanted to see. I think Carter is definitely an underrated president who likely would have been re-elected had the Iranian hostage crisis not happened. He was a visionary especially in terms of the environment and global climate change (which his administration began to address). But he was much more of a centrist than a liberal - though the center has moved to the right since his time.
- pstuart 5y ago
  > I think Carter is definitely an underrated president who likely would have been re-elected had the Iranian hostage crisis not happened Yep. The October Surprise by Team Reagan worked very well.
- loonster 5y ago
  He also killed off Nuclear. For that alone he shouldn't have a 2nd term.
  - lindseymysse 5y ago
    That and funding the mujahideen were big whiffs.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > funding the mujahideen Blowback keeps happening. IIRC, the modern Central American drug gangs were born of US funding and training of anti-Communist forces in the 1980s. Remember it next time someone says, 'let's send arms to those insurgents!' Obama dialed it back, partly for that reason (AFAIK). Biden apparently has embraced a policy of 'restraint', with the idea that outcomes from US intervention often are counter-productive. (I don't support it - instead, accept the challenge and find better interventions. Quitting is a bizarre solution IMHO. People still need freedom, and need help.)
jackcosgrove 5y ago
I think the article buries the lede in the last paragraph, contrasted with the photographs of Carter and Reagan under the headline. I understand the article is about dispelling myths, requiring us to rehash those myths. But the author sometimes lapses into ascribing policies to politicians too much. They are just different policies than are usually ascribed. Deregulation, privatization, cutting taxes, and tight money were all implemented in different developed countries in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It wasn't about personalities or parties, it was about reforming the postwar economic consensus that had run out of steam by the late 1970s. Even Mitterand had his U-turn. The buried lede is that politics doesn't matter that much. Policies are chosen more based on "facts on the ground", which is sobering, can be reassuring to some, and also dispiriting to others if you want to effect radical change. Wonks often use the phrase "moving the needle". That's about all politics can do proactively. Mostly policy changes are forced by external circumstances.
- fleddr 5y ago
  Indeed, the optics of politics suggest to the public that choices are on the line at opposite extreme ends. Good versus bad. In reality, the political bandwidth of actual policy is far smaller. All developed nations swing from center left to right. Norway would be center-left, whilst Hungary would be right. Those are outer ends, most countries navigate a far smaller bandwidth, regardless of who is in charge. In the US that bandwidth is from conservative to very conservative. The democrats are a right wing party.
  - TMWNN 5y ago
    >In the US that bandwidth is from conservative to very conservative. The democrats are a right wing party. Nonsense. Those (both American leftists, and Europeans who listen to them) who say that "Democrats in the US would be right wing in Europe/Canada" have to (for example) then agree that all major political parties in Canada and every European country outside the UK and Ireland are right of US Democrats, because there is no significant opposition to voter ID laws anywhere. Macron's Les Republicains got elected because voters liked his vow to get tough on unions and union pensions, and privatize more infrastructure, neither of which appears in Biden's campaign platform. Speaking of which, several European countries have privatized post offices; not just telecom companies that were parts of PTTs, but entire postal services. It is the rare European country that hasn't sold off at least part of their postal services. The EU explicitly requires postal monopolies to end in member states; whether government-owned or not, EU postal services do not have the USPS's monopoly on first-class mail. Yet no major party in the US seriously talks about privatizing the USPS.[1] Does this mean that American politics is "far to the left" of that of Germany and the UK, both of which have completely sold off their postal services to private investors? PS - For another example, consider the liberality of abortion laws in the US versus Europe. [1] And no, it's not because of the Constitution. Article I Section 8 only gives Congress the authority "To establish Post Offices", as opposed to requiring a government-run one. Certainly nothing in the Constitution mandates the USPS's first-class mail monopoly.
allturtles 5y ago
As a next-level debunking, I'd like to question the frequency with which major trends and events are attributed so strongly to presidents. It can be politically useful, but it's usually historically questionable. The president of the U.S. is a powerful person, but far from an omnipotent one. Just to take one example from the article, the deregulation of airlines in the U.S. Check out the wikipedia article[0]. Carter supported the bill, but its history goes back to the early 1970s, and lots of other parties were involved in making it happen, most notably Congress, which of course had to pass the law. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Deregulation_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Deregulation_Act
bawolff 5y ago
> Militarily, though, it’s worth pointing out that the USSR’s big military defeat came in Afghanistan. And though that war lasted until 1989, the crucial initial decision to arm the Soviets’ mujahideen opponents came from — you guessed it — Jimmy Carter. That worked out well...
- odd_perfect_num 5y ago
  In that the US won the Cold War, yes, it did indeed work out very well. It’s worth mentioning as well that most of the Taliban’s weaponry by the time the US invaded in 2001 was Soviet in origin, e.g. SA-2s, SA-3s, a few MIG-21s. They were also receiving direct military support from Pakistan throughout the late 90’s.
- UIUC_06 5y ago
  Maybe do some reading before you say silly things like this. Even Reagan's defense establishment didn't want to give the muj shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, until the mid-80s. That's what really turned the tide. Carter would never in a million terms have done that.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    You understand, right, that i am quoting the article?
pjdemers 5y ago
Carter was a classic centrist. Both sides hated him. And by today's standards, Reagan was only slightly right of center. Reagan is remembered more fondly than Carter because of attitude. Carter told American: if we all sacrifice and work really hard, things will be pretty good again. Reagan told us: Everything going to be great because we deserve to be great. And yes, cheap oil destroyed the USSR, not the US military build up. The military build up pushed them over the edge, but they were already failing. US military leaders knew this at the time, that's why the build up happened when it did.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Reagan was a master at speaking to the public. It makes sense when you consider that he was an actor. But it's hard to really understand unless you've watch him in action. The dude rolled and 18 for charisma then got a +7 bonus.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I've always found it baffling that 70s inflation was somehow magically blamed on progressive policy and pay rises and not on a far more obvious cause - oil price shocks. In the 1973/4 crisis the price of crude quadrupled. In the 1979 crisis it more than doubled. On both occasions the price hikes were combined with physical shortages which did huge damage to economies which were - and largely still are - dependent on oil for everything from transport to energy to plastics to food production. And yet... these economic cataclysms have been almost sidelined from the official economic narrative in both the UK and the US. Ask a typical British voter about the history of the 70s and they'll tell you the UK was bankrupt because of excessive government spending, and not because the price of crude went through the roof. It's one of the reasons I consider economics a branch of propaganda and not a real science. Clearly the oil shocks were an economic catastrophe and were directly responsible for very severe inflation. But somehow the effects are still blamed on wage growth and (in the UK) unionisation - both of which were far more credibly an effect than a primary cause.
- bambataa 5y ago
  Rather than economics itself being a tool of propaganda (which might be true but I think most economists would say they strive to be evidence-based), I think it demonstrates that the average voter’s views on economics are more or less worthless.
  - cogman10 5y ago
    Economics is so closely tied to politics that I don't really blame the public for seeing it as worthless. I couldn't tell you what modern economic theories look like, but I could certainly talk about Reagan's trickle-down economics.
  - handrous 5y ago
    > I think it demonstrates that the average voter’s views on economics are more or less worthless. Poli-sci research is depressingly consistent in demonstrating that the average voters' views on everything are worthless. It's amazing the system works at all, even for very generous values of "works". Research on voters' understanding of issues, and of the world, largely amounts to a less-funny version of that thing where a late night show has someone go out and get people to give incredibly stupid answers to easy questions.
LongTimeAnon 5y ago
Can we start debunking the 1970s narrative that all genomic sciences are fascist and need to be banned?
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  What are you talking about here? The human genome is highly studied and prestigious researchers are publishing about it today as they have been for many years. Are you perhaps talking about the various kinds of debunked race "science" that never bothered to look at genomes when it could stop at skin color?
  - LongTimeAnon 5y ago
    Despite being 13% of the studies, race science contributes to 50% of the outrage against genomics.
yyyk 5y ago
Smith has some good arguments and incomplete arguments. Since anyone can read the article for the good arguments, I'll note a few of the dubious and incomplete ones: A) When talking about deregulation, Smith looks at laws, but he should be looking at agencies even more. Agencies after all do most of the day-to-day regulation. How can Smith seriously ignore things like appointing Anne Gorsuch to head the EPA in 1981? At the beginning, Reagan nominations were known for their hostility to regulation, and Smith would have done better to check whether this was actually true. B) Arguing that Soviet military expenditure wasn't a big deal because they spent more in WW2 is crazy. Smith is comparing a peace-time spend to a total war spend! C) Oil's role in USSR's collapse is well-known. Well known enough to have claims by Reagan partisans that he convinced the Saudis to keep prices low to pressure the USSR. Is this right? Very debatable. But it's directly related to the thesis of the article and Smith completely ignores this.
gumby 5y ago
> But another is that successful policy takes a long time to work. I am familiar with a much better expression of this lesson by, of all people, bill gates: > We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.
gumby 5y ago
This seems like a straw man “takedown”. Are there really people who don’t remember Carter the deregulator? Or who think the USSR died this way? I lived through that period and none of it was any secret — quite the opposite, it was current affairs in the newspaper!
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  I’ve been following the “you’re wrong about” podcast, the whole premise is to look back at past well known events mostly based on what was published at the time. It’s fascinating how much the mainstream narrative deviates from “the facts” even with them available to anyone who cares to check. [0] https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/ https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/
  - WhisperingShiba 5y ago
    Reality is highly subjective so I hesitate to make arguments about how media failed to report 'the facts' of situations. However, its pretty clear to me that the media's ability to assert certain opinions by asserting with more force is not conducive to a healthy long-term society.
- reincarnate0x14 5y ago
  > Are there really people who don’t remember Carter the deregulator? Yes. 40 years of propaganda and hagiography of Reagan has left a significant minority of the US population in delusion about nearly anything political, including people who lived through the events in question. Hell, a good subset of people are trapped in such an insanity bubble that people who had siblings die of polio in their youth suddenly decided vaccines are a giant conspiracy in 2021.
mechanical_bear 5y ago
This author really relies on strawmen in order to have anything to argue against.
mikewarot 5y ago
Carter only made one major mistake, in my book. Stopping the reprocessing of nuclear fuel.
jimmyvalmer 5y ago
Reaganland by Rick Perlstein covers this in exquisite detail.
UIUC_06 5y ago
It's so funny to read debates about things that happened 40 years ago. Why not go even farther and tell us Alger Hiss was innocent? Just look at the Dow since then, and sit down. The stock market is a weighing machine, as Benjamin Graham famously said [1]. Here's how the world's money weighed the two Presidencies: Carter: Starting Value: 959.03 Ending Value: 970.99 Performance While in Office: 1.25% increase Reagan: Starting Value: 950.68 Ending Value: 2,239.11 Performance While in Office: 135.53% increase [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/831517-in-the-short-run-the-market-is-a-voting-machine https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/831517-in-the-short-run-the... [2] https://www.gobankingrates.com/investing/stocks/stock-market-performance-by-president/ https://www.gobankingrates.com/investing/stocks/stock-market...
- medvezhenok 5y ago
  Looking at the stock market seems like a strange way to grade a president... Calvin Coolidge: Starting (1923): ~90 (Dow Jones Index) Ending (1929): ~320 (Dow Jones Index) Performance in office: 255% increase. What an amazing president - oh, wait...
  - UIUC_06 5y ago
    What's your point? Coolidge was in fact a very good president.
    - medvezhenok 5y ago
      My main beef was with using the stock market to grade a president. I was giving the example of Coolidge because the 255% increase was followed by a 90% decrease, which should also be attributed to him (if we're using the stock market) I'm highly skeptical of the "very good president" claim too. "Although the public liked and admired Calvin Coolidge during his tenure, the Great Depression that began in 1929 seriously eroded his reputation and changed public opinion about his policies. Many linked the nation's economic collapse to Coolidge's policy decisions. His failure to aid the depressed agricultural sector seems shortsighted, as nearly five thousand rural banks in the Midwest and South shut their doors in bankruptcy while many thousands of farmers lost their lands. His tax cuts contributed to an uneven distribution of wealth and the overproduction of goods. Many Americans were deeply in debt for having purchased consumer goods on easy installment credit terms." "...Nevertheless, scholarly opinion looks upon the Coolidge presidency with skepticism, ranking him relatively low among American chief executives in terms of his administration's positive impact and legacy." https://millercenter.org/president/coolidge/impact-and-legacy https://millercenter.org/president/coolidge/impact-and-legac...
xdfil 5y ago
[flagged]
protomyth 5y ago
Carter's “Malaise” Speech cannot be underestimated in his loss. I was young, but I remember it's affect on my parents, both Democrats at the time. It was just depressing, and you didn't exactly have 500 channels to avoid it or pundits doing 24x7 spin. The only good thing I can say about President Carter was that the peanuts they added to the commodities we were getting were really good. The canned meat not so much.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  This is exactly right. It was the malaise speech that doomed his campaign. The difference between Reagan's hopeful, patriotic campaign and Carter's "Malaise" cannot be underestimated. To try to blame Carter's loss on some October surprise conspiracy theory is to miss the larger issue as to what the two campaigns were about. By the way, I think Carter's malaise speech was spot on. But it's also why he lost.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Carter presenting himself in a sweater did him no favors. He looked like a nice but doddering grampa. Reagan wore a sharp suit and always looked like a President.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      Yes, Carter was frumpy, gloomy compared to the optimistic Reagan always standing in front of a huge flag with perfect hair and a glint in his eyes.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        I've often thought that Sanders' biggest PR problem was his poor posture. Other candidates in the last round wore frumpy suits. Except for Biden. Biden stood up straight, and had a sharp suit. Ditto for Trump. It was fun watching the debates by turning off the sound, and just watching body language and mannerisms. Obama always looked sharp, too. It matters.
- 5y ago
wolverine876 5y ago
For more on Carter as the leader on inflation and deregulation, see Alan Greenspan's biography. He tells a story (I'm probably misremembering it a little) about being a government official (in Treasury?) and needing to approve a mundane charter flight of some college sports team as they waited at the airport[0]. At that point it hit him that there was too much regulation, and the Carter administration undertook to begin reducing it. [0] I could imagine good FAA reasons to approve it, but IIRC in the story it was some commercial issue that sounded way overboard.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
> One lesson, obviously, is that the narratives we tell about history are largely constructed after the fact, by actors who have a stake in painting a certain picture of the recent past. True. There are certainly those who push and pull the narrative. That said, there is also the momentum and expectations of the masses. Once a lens is set it is very very difficult to correct it. As so wisely put by mighty Paul Weller: "The public gets what the public wants." And "The public wants what the public gets." Put another way, aside from nefarious narrative actors, we also often have ourselves to blame.
RickJWagner 5y ago
Old-timer here. I was old enough to vote for Reagan. Truth be told, Jimmy Carter was and is a good man. He leads a straight and modest life. As a president, he did not preside over a happy time and he was defeated soundly by Reagan. Then Ronald Reagan was elected and the national mood was elevated. When Reagan ran for re-election, he won with 49 states. (Lacking only Minnesota, home state of his opponent. It was said that Reagan did not campaign there to avoid being a jerk.) 49 states won. It's historical fact. Don't let anyone re-write history.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Yes, Reagan was wildly popular. He was also not the evil monster that progressives portray. He won primarily because he was a better politician than Carter. Carter of course went on to do a lot of humanitarian work and deserves public respect for that. One can argue that he was a better statesman than he was President.
euroderf 5y ago
Ronald Reagan: genial idiot or calculating cynic? The jury is still out.

190 points by nabla9 5y ago

Carter did a good job debunking the notion that wars create booming economies. The post-Vietnam economy he inherited fairly sucked.

inglor_cz 5y ago
The best way how to make money on a war is to stay neutral and supply both sides for cash.

aniijbod 5y ago

Americans would be utterly baffled as to why so many boomer Brits will see that (originally Carter and Reagan, now changed) headline and automatically think of George and Jack (rather than Jimmy and Ronald) before they click on the link.

Lio 5y ago
Not a boomer but I take it that's a Sweeney reference? I don't really remember the show but it brings to mind people drinking scotch out tea mugs and shouting "who's the slag what done the blag?" at some poor "snout". https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071059/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071059/
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  "The Sweeney's doing ninety 'cause they've got the word to go To get a gang of villains in a shed up at Heathrow They're counting out the fivers when the handcuffs lock again In and out of Wandsworth with the numbers on their names It's funny how their missus always looks the bleeding same And meanwhile at the station, there's a couple of likely lads Who swear like how's your father and they're very cool for cats They're cool for cats (Cool for cats)"
iso1631 5y ago
Really? I'm not a boomer, but my parents are. I've never heard of a Jack Reagan or a Jack Carter Ronald + Maggie's relationship was legendary though, and defined the era of Boomers in their 20s and 30s.

CalChris 5y ago

In fact, inflation was pretty bad under Nixon (5.8%) and Ford (11.05%) with some up and down. Nixon even instituted price controls in 1970. Carter inherited that economy. He didn't fix it (well, arguably his Fed Chair Paul Volcker did) but he inherited it. Carter and Reagan were polar opposites. Carter was a fiscal conservative and Reagan was a spendthrift. Reagan was when the deficit floodgates opened. We've repeated this fiscally conservative Democrat followed by spendthrift Republican ever since. Carter $70B deficit Reagan $175B Bush $350B Clinton $0B Bush $1.4T Obama $600B

nickff 5y ago
Those numbers don't really tell the whole truth; federal spending has increased almost monotonically, and the changes in deficit mostly indicate phases of the business cycle when they left. See this chart:https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-the-federal-government-spend-your-tax-dollars-on-social-insurance-programs-mostly/ft_17-04-03_budget_420px/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-t... Clinton for example, left at the peak of the DotCom bubble, and was bouyed by capital gains tax revenue, whereas Bush left during the Great Recession.
- CalChris 5y ago
  Reagan cut taxes (supply side). Clinton increased taxes and cut Cold War era defense spending in his 1993 budget proposal. W didn't even put the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on normal budgeting. That emergency spending went straight to debt. When Obama reversed this accounting trick, he was accused of increasing the deficit. Yes, everything is more complicated.
  - cafard 5y ago
    Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's summary of the 1980s: "We borrowed a trillion dollars from foreigners, and threw ourselves a party."
    - CalChris 5y ago

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Whenever I hear about the end of the cold war, I think the Polish contribution to the fall of the USSR is mostly unknown, under appreciated and under valued. Also obviously with the end of the cold war, what most of this articles miss, the US lost Europe. Before e.g. Germanys establishment pushed US nuclear weapons ("Jump!" "How high?") into Germany against a large part of it's polutation, after 1990 no country in Europe jumps anymore when the US says "Jump!", because the Soviet scare is gone.

vmception 5y ago
From my perspective we are only at the beginning of a period where Europe doesn't jump for US. Through NATO they follow us along into dubious, pointless, dangerous US conflicts, sparing the US President from asking Congress for authorization, while bearing the brunt of extraterritorial attacks since there arent two gigantic oceans separating them from the conflict. The US uses almost countless Europe located bases for missile shields against Russia and to many hawkish people the cold war is still going on as if it was the 80s still. Europe still depends on Russia for energy so this symbiosis is seen as important. But I think this changes because the UK was the only EU member state vetoing an EU military, and with them gone the EU can arm itself. Dismantling a lot of the need for the US, we can mostly assume it will be to keep out Russia and lessen the burden of NATO but there are a lot of values that differ if we are being honest.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Is the EU going to arm itself with nuclear weapons? France has them, but that's it for EU member nations AFAIK.
  - btilly 5y ago
    You are correct. The complete list of countries known to have nuclear weapons worldwide is The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Now that the UK is no longer in the EU, France is it. In fact France is surprisingly militaristic. For example it is the only EU country in the top 10 on https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Yes, I've had to explain the bit about Volcker to a few people over the years. People older than me that should know better. Another fascinating chapter from that era, if you're interested in the revolution in Iran and resulting US election, is covered in the book "October Surprise," by Gary Sick. While the author states soberly that we don't have all the details, those we do point in an unfortunate direction. That many in the Reagan admin would be behind bars and implicated with the Iran arms scandal less than a decade later has also largely been forgotten. The two events are thought to be unconnected. At the time Reagan often said he "didn't recall…" Back then I thought he was omitting the truth, but then we found he had Alzheimer's a few years later, and turned out it was probably true he didn't remember a thing. Can't make this stuff up, folks. There was also a good Frontline episode on the subject, but I've not been able to find it due to PBS' shenanigans. Maybe they lost the tape.

tptacek 5y ago
You kind of can make this stuff up. Reagan's in-office Alzheimers is the same kind of narrative Noah Smith is talking about, more talked about than empirically supported. Reagan was first diagnosed in 1993, long after leaving office; his White House physicians all attest to no evident decline. The closest we get to a serious report is Leslie Stahl claiming that he was vacant during an interview... but who knows what that means? I was vacant last Tuesday after not sleeping the night before. The topic of Reagan's decline in office is debated, but we should be wary of premising conclusions on it. Reagan was probably fully competent while serving as President.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I didn't notice anything at the time. But after watching my father slowly decline from Alzheimers, and then going back and looking at Reagan's conferences, I can see it in the latter part of his presidency. It's the look of panic when he's lost his grip on what's happening around him.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Sorry about your father. I have a relative in the early stages, and while I know what's coming, I don't.

lindseymysse 5y ago

I grew up deep in Reagan's America in the 1980's and it was a paranoid, wretched time and place to be a child. The absolute worst thing about the Trump years is they reminded me of growing up in Billings, Montana. Trump has nothing as far as destruction of this country compared to Reagan. You want to trace the end of the American Empire -- put that blame on Reagan and his acolytes first.

DaveExeter 5y ago
Billings, Montana? I don't care who is the president, growing up in Billings Montana will always suck!
- lindseymysse 5y ago
  Maybe it was the place. But it was all very wretched
Diederich 5y ago
> wretched time and place to be a child I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and can certainly complain about a lot of things about that time. In your mind, what are the top few most wretched aspects of that time? I grew up in south central Los Angeles, and so gang and drug crime would be the top of my list.
- lindseymysse 5y ago
  I grew up in an ultra-conservative church called the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, that uses techniques like this: https://www.lutheranforum.com/blog/mobbing-systemic-spiritual-abuse-in-the-lcms https://www.lutheranforum.com/blog/mobbing-systemic-spiritua... to enforce it's very narrow, literal interpretation of the bible. Yes, of course they are physically and sexually abusive, and they use mobbing techniques against 5-11 year olds. Of course they idolized Reagan like a god, also. I live in LA now and ride the bus through South Central, and I've lived there and I have found that place far more welcoming to me than I ever did back in Montana. So, YMMV and the grass is always greener. But I'm a lot happier in the poor parts of LA than I ever was in Billings, Montana.

deleted 5y ago

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Jernik 5y ago

Every graph on this page comparing the USA and the USSR needs a legend, they are unreadable unless you pick them apart with context from the surrounding paragraphs.

pezzana 5y ago

> But it was Jimmy Carter who appointed Volcker as the Fed chair, in 1979. Volcker was appointed specifically to do this job, as he was known as an inflation hawk, and Carter recognized inflation as America’s biggest economic problem. Volcer hiked interest rates all the way up to 17.61% under Carter, causing the first of the two Volcker Recessions in 1980. The process that Volker's Fed set in motion is with us today. Have a gander at the historical constant-maturity 30-year bond: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS30 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS30 Zoom out to the multi-decade view and notice something: a peak in late-1981 and a relentless slide toward zero today. You won't find a multi-decade channel like this in many other places. These ever-lower long-term yields have played a major role in the housing market bubble that ended in 2008 and the one still inflating today. It could also be argued that this trend toward ever-lower long-term yields has been responsible the increasingly outlandish stock market valuations and the never-ending quest for yield (i.e. risk) that we currently see by institutions, individuals, and foreign governments.

bregma 5y ago
I have no need to look at historical graphs. I remember my student loans at a 25% per annum interest rate.
jollybean 5y ago
" You won't find a multi-decade channel like this in many other places." I see this graph in a number of places, I think it's something 'talked about'. The issue, I believe, is fundamentally demographics combined with decreasing marginal returns to tech and progress. 1970's was when the baby boomers were entering the workplace, and there were a lot of them, now, not so much. For decades after WW2 American industry was 'ahead' of the factories in Europe and Japan which were bombed into nothing. So there was a natural slowdown in growth afterwards. Then every loosening monetary policy with a big bump in 2008 and an even bigger bump in 2021 and you have what you have. "ever-lower long-term yields have played a major role in the housing market bubble that ended in 2008" I think it's better to say they are an indicator of something material, but 'lower bond yields' are not the 'driver of housing inflation'. That said, I agree with a lot of the things said in the article.

bregma 5y ago

I think it's hardly surprising that the untruths spread by propagandists during election campaigns and by biased pundits don't always line up with observed facts or lived experiences. They don't call them spin doctors for nothing. The solution is to dig in to statements of truth for yourself until you uncover verifiable facts. This is true as much for assertions in electoral campaign literature as much as claims of grand conspiracies to subvert privileges through widespread intramuscular injections of 5G microchips. Check the references provided, and if there are no references then check your gullibility.

mistermann 5y ago
It should be noted though, supportive evidence (or lack of) for any proposition does not necessarily lead one to the correct answer.
- bregma 5y ago
  It should also be noted that "supportive evidence" does not include "because someone said so" in a blog post or old book with flowery prose.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    It should also be noted that one can regularly observe people engaging in framing (intentionally or not) those who dissent as doing so only because of propaganda or religion, despite not having knowledge of the true underlying reasons.

lordnacho 5y ago

This actually points at a central problem with modern democracy. People are expected to think when they vote, but most people do not have the base information required to make decisions. And so everything descends into PR: stereotypes of righties being better with money, lefties being in thrall to unions, and so on. When it comes time to vote, the PR machines start up and people are made to pretend they are thinking objectively when actually we are about as prepared as we'd be at a wine tasting. The analogy continues, because whatever we decided we think we were well justified later on, regardless of what actually happened. I'm glad I read this article, it's well presented with sources, and debunks some quite important myths.

remarkEon 5y ago
I do not think this is a problem with “modern” democracy, but democracy in general. There’s always been organized mechanisms for convincing people to believe certain things and vote a certain way.
- ilammy 5y ago
  I'd say the whole premise behind voting and democracy is not so much the people voting for something they “want”, but rather not voting for something they “object”. The voting process makes sure that the government doesn't go into the direction that most people don't want it to. Aside from that, government can do whatever it wants (popularly referred to as not honoring the election promises).
meragrin_ 5y ago
> debunks some quite important myths. How so? The chart suggesting Volcker "saved" the US from inflation seems to suggest otherwise. The Fed was already trending towards what the "Volcker Fed" did. The "list of significant deregulations" on Wikipedia is actually listed as "Related legislation". Reagan had a greater number of deregulation legislation listed as directly related to Reagan's administration rather than in the "Related legislation" so there is some game playing going on as far as the significance of each administration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation

mikestew 5y ago

Carter caused inflation in the 70s? How did that narrative get started given that his predecessor was the one handing out "WIP" (Whip Inflation Now) buttons?

mywittyname 5y ago
I've heard people blame Obama for stuff that happened under W. Like the bank bailout (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act) / TARP. Those events did not happen that long ago, and it's a 5 second search to find out what president signed those.
- ibash 5y ago
  Hey mywittyname -- I'd like to find more about the work you mention here, is there a way I can get in touch with you? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28910928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28910928 (hackernews won't let me reply to the previous comment, sorry about that!)
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    sure, I tossed you a linkedin request
Finnucane 5y ago
I still have one of those! Yes, an artifact of the Ford administration.
jonnycomputer 5y ago
That's easy. He's a Democrat, and QED. I mean, that's the extent of the "logic" as far as it goes. But enough for votes in the ballot box. The world is too damn complicated. I barely can get my tv to operate, and you're supposed to expect me to understand the ins and outs of federal reserve policy, economics, and climate change? Mueller's report was damning. But the story it told was so complicated that only obsessed people could keep the details straight, and most of those people were heavily invested in the outcome one way or the other anyway. Feeling cynical right now i guess.

lordgrenville 5y ago

Paul Sabin has written recently[0] about Carter's passion for deregulation, and how he balanced it with other legislative goals. The idea that people were "choked by regulation" was not exclusive to the right. [0] https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898030615000366 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898030615000366

andrewtbham 5y ago

Regarding the cold war and military spending... Everyone in the 80s thought Reagan was nuts because he wanted to build "Star Wars" a system that would shoot down all the Soviet Nukes. So the Soviets wasted money trying to compete with it. So at least in some cases, it wasn't about us spending more on the military... it was about tricking them into spending more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

nradov 5y ago
Was it really a trick? By all accounts, President Reagan was sincerely horrified by the threat of a nuclear war and really did intend to build a working defensive system. But he was clueless about the difficulty of actually building such a system, and then the military industrial complex piled onto the gravy train to get lucrative R&D projects.

mountainb 5y ago

There are tons of spelling errors in this article. I feel compelled to criticize something because I hate Noah Smith on a personal level, but am chagrinned to find that I generally agree with most of the arguments that he makes here along with his interpretation of the history. The only thing deficient here was that he could have improved his argument by extending it backwards a bit to the malignant continuity between JFK (you'll really trigger the boomers with that one), LBJ, and Nixon in terms of creating long-term fiscal problems for the US. To throw a bone to a side that I usually disagree with, Smith could have also productively contrasted that latter century bipartisan fiscal irresponsibility with the relative sobriety of the New Deal just in terms of deficits and long term sustainability. It may seem weird on the face of it given how the New Deal tends to be portrayed in contemporary times by both the left and the right, but FDR might have been the last real fiscal conservative of the 20th century both in terms of rhetoric and policy until Bill Clinton closed out the millennium. Despite what seemed to be bitter acrimony during the Clinton administration, the Reagan-Clinton years were probably the last ones in which there was a productive competitive dynamic between both parties. It was also the last time in my memory that there was serious discussion of entitlement reform: that was really wiped out from public debate after 9/11. Back then, you could credibly argue that the competition between the parties resulted in better policy thinking on both sides. In contemporary times the competition seems more to result in more aggressive stupidity on both sides: they both tend to make each other dumber to own the cons/libs at the expense of the public. Gives me a bad taste in my mouth to have to say something nice about a Noah Smith article.

mixmastamyk 5y ago
Why is is it appropriate for one "nobody" to tell me they hate another "nobody" while discussing a decent blog post? Something unsaid?

UncleOxidant 5y ago

"Carter’s liberal big-government policies" Yes, this needs to be debunked. I was in high school during the Carter years and I was into politics (seems odd for someone that age). There's a reason that Carter was primaried by Ted Kennedy in 1980: many Democrats found Carter too fiscally conservative. Carter was a deficit hawk. He pushed for a balanced budget and that upset many Democrats at the time because he wasn't proposing the large social spending increases they wanted to see. I think Carter is definitely an underrated president who likely would have been re-elected had the Iranian hostage crisis not happened. He was a visionary especially in terms of the environment and global climate change (which his administration began to address). But he was much more of a centrist than a liberal - though the center has moved to the right since his time.

pstuart 5y ago
> I think Carter is definitely an underrated president who likely would have been re-elected had the Iranian hostage crisis not happened Yep. The October Surprise by Team Reagan worked very well.
loonster 5y ago
He also killed off Nuclear. For that alone he shouldn't have a 2nd term.
- lindseymysse 5y ago
  That and funding the mujahideen were big whiffs.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > funding the mujahideen Blowback keeps happening. IIRC, the modern Central American drug gangs were born of US funding and training of anti-Communist forces in the 1980s. Remember it next time someone says, 'let's send arms to those insurgents!' Obama dialed it back, partly for that reason (AFAIK). Biden apparently has embraced a policy of 'restraint', with the idea that outcomes from US intervention often are counter-productive. (I don't support it - instead, accept the challenge and find better interventions. Quitting is a bizarre solution IMHO. People still need freedom, and need help.)

jackcosgrove 5y ago

I think the article buries the lede in the last paragraph, contrasted with the photographs of Carter and Reagan under the headline. I understand the article is about dispelling myths, requiring us to rehash those myths. But the author sometimes lapses into ascribing policies to politicians too much. They are just different policies than are usually ascribed. Deregulation, privatization, cutting taxes, and tight money were all implemented in different developed countries in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It wasn't about personalities or parties, it was about reforming the postwar economic consensus that had run out of steam by the late 1970s. Even Mitterand had his U-turn. The buried lede is that politics doesn't matter that much. Policies are chosen more based on "facts on the ground", which is sobering, can be reassuring to some, and also dispiriting to others if you want to effect radical change. Wonks often use the phrase "moving the needle". That's about all politics can do proactively. Mostly policy changes are forced by external circumstances.

fleddr 5y ago
Indeed, the optics of politics suggest to the public that choices are on the line at opposite extreme ends. Good versus bad. In reality, the political bandwidth of actual policy is far smaller. All developed nations swing from center left to right. Norway would be center-left, whilst Hungary would be right. Those are outer ends, most countries navigate a far smaller bandwidth, regardless of who is in charge. In the US that bandwidth is from conservative to very conservative. The democrats are a right wing party.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >In the US that bandwidth is from conservative to very conservative. The democrats are a right wing party. Nonsense. Those (both American leftists, and Europeans who listen to them) who say that "Democrats in the US would be right wing in Europe/Canada" have to (for example) then agree that all major political parties in Canada and every European country outside the UK and Ireland are right of US Democrats, because there is no significant opposition to voter ID laws anywhere. Macron's Les Republicains got elected because voters liked his vow to get tough on unions and union pensions, and privatize more infrastructure, neither of which appears in Biden's campaign platform. Speaking of which, several European countries have privatized post offices; not just telecom companies that were parts of PTTs, but entire postal services. It is the rare European country that hasn't sold off at least part of their postal services. The EU explicitly requires postal monopolies to end in member states; whether government-owned or not, EU postal services do not have the USPS's monopoly on first-class mail. Yet no major party in the US seriously talks about privatizing the USPS.[1] Does this mean that American politics is "far to the left" of that of Germany and the UK, both of which have completely sold off their postal services to private investors? PS - For another example, consider the liberality of abortion laws in the US versus Europe. [1] And no, it's not because of the Constitution. Article I Section 8 only gives Congress the authority "To establish Post Offices", as opposed to requiring a government-run one. Certainly nothing in the Constitution mandates the USPS's first-class mail monopoly.

allturtles 5y ago

As a next-level debunking, I'd like to question the frequency with which major trends and events are attributed so strongly to presidents. It can be politically useful, but it's usually historically questionable. The president of the U.S. is a powerful person, but far from an omnipotent one. Just to take one example from the article, the deregulation of airlines in the U.S. Check out the wikipedia article[0]. Carter supported the bill, but its history goes back to the early 1970s, and lots of other parties were involved in making it happen, most notably Congress, which of course had to pass the law. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Deregulation_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Deregulation_Act

bawolff 5y ago

> Militarily, though, it’s worth pointing out that the USSR’s big military defeat came in Afghanistan. And though that war lasted until 1989, the crucial initial decision to arm the Soviets’ mujahideen opponents came from — you guessed it — Jimmy Carter. That worked out well...

odd_perfect_num 5y ago
In that the US won the Cold War, yes, it did indeed work out very well. It’s worth mentioning as well that most of the Taliban’s weaponry by the time the US invaded in 2001 was Soviet in origin, e.g. SA-2s, SA-3s, a few MIG-21s. They were also receiving direct military support from Pakistan throughout the late 90’s.
UIUC_06 5y ago
Maybe do some reading before you say silly things like this. Even Reagan's defense establishment didn't want to give the muj shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, until the mid-80s. That's what really turned the tide. Carter would never in a million terms have done that.
- bawolff 5y ago
  You understand, right, that i am quoting the article?

pjdemers 5y ago

Carter was a classic centrist. Both sides hated him. And by today's standards, Reagan was only slightly right of center. Reagan is remembered more fondly than Carter because of attitude. Carter told American: if we all sacrifice and work really hard, things will be pretty good again. Reagan told us: Everything going to be great because we deserve to be great. And yes, cheap oil destroyed the USSR, not the US military build up. The military build up pushed them over the edge, but they were already failing. US military leaders knew this at the time, that's why the build up happened when it did.

mywittyname 5y ago
Reagan was a master at speaking to the public. It makes sense when you consider that he was an actor. But it's hard to really understand unless you've watch him in action. The dude rolled and 18 for charisma then got a +7 bonus.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

I've always found it baffling that 70s inflation was somehow magically blamed on progressive policy and pay rises and not on a far more obvious cause - oil price shocks. In the 1973/4 crisis the price of crude quadrupled. In the 1979 crisis it more than doubled. On both occasions the price hikes were combined with physical shortages which did huge damage to economies which were - and largely still are - dependent on oil for everything from transport to energy to plastics to food production. And yet... these economic cataclysms have been almost sidelined from the official economic narrative in both the UK and the US. Ask a typical British voter about the history of the 70s and they'll tell you the UK was bankrupt because of excessive government spending, and not because the price of crude went through the roof. It's one of the reasons I consider economics a branch of propaganda and not a real science. Clearly the oil shocks were an economic catastrophe and were directly responsible for very severe inflation. But somehow the effects are still blamed on wage growth and (in the UK) unionisation - both of which were far more credibly an effect than a primary cause.

bambataa 5y ago
Rather than economics itself being a tool of propaganda (which might be true but I think most economists would say they strive to be evidence-based), I think it demonstrates that the average voter’s views on economics are more or less worthless.
- cogman10 5y ago
  Economics is so closely tied to politics that I don't really blame the public for seeing it as worthless. I couldn't tell you what modern economic theories look like, but I could certainly talk about Reagan's trickle-down economics.
- handrous 5y ago
  > I think it demonstrates that the average voter’s views on economics are more or less worthless. Poli-sci research is depressingly consistent in demonstrating that the average voters' views on everything are worthless. It's amazing the system works at all, even for very generous values of "works". Research on voters' understanding of issues, and of the world, largely amounts to a less-funny version of that thing where a late night show has someone go out and get people to give incredibly stupid answers to easy questions.

LongTimeAnon 5y ago

Can we start debunking the 1970s narrative that all genomic sciences are fascist and need to be banned?

tsimionescu 5y ago
What are you talking about here? The human genome is highly studied and prestigious researchers are publishing about it today as they have been for many years. Are you perhaps talking about the various kinds of debunked race "science" that never bothered to look at genomes when it could stop at skin color?
- LongTimeAnon 5y ago
  Despite being 13% of the studies, race science contributes to 50% of the outrage against genomics.

yyyk 5y ago

Smith has some good arguments and incomplete arguments. Since anyone can read the article for the good arguments, I'll note a few of the dubious and incomplete ones: A) When talking about deregulation, Smith looks at laws, but he should be looking at agencies even more. Agencies after all do most of the day-to-day regulation. How can Smith seriously ignore things like appointing Anne Gorsuch to head the EPA in 1981? At the beginning, Reagan nominations were known for their hostility to regulation, and Smith would have done better to check whether this was actually true. B) Arguing that Soviet military expenditure wasn't a big deal because they spent more in WW2 is crazy. Smith is comparing a peace-time spend to a total war spend! C) Oil's role in USSR's collapse is well-known. Well known enough to have claims by Reagan partisans that he convinced the Saudis to keep prices low to pressure the USSR. Is this right? Very debatable. But it's directly related to the thesis of the article and Smith completely ignores this.

gumby 5y ago

> But another is that successful policy takes a long time to work. I am familiar with a much better expression of this lesson by, of all people, bill gates: > We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.

gumby 5y ago

This seems like a straw man “takedown”. Are there really people who don’t remember Carter the deregulator? Or who think the USSR died this way? I lived through that period and none of it was any secret — quite the opposite, it was current affairs in the newspaper!

makeitdouble 5y ago
I’ve been following the “you’re wrong about” podcast, the whole premise is to look back at past well known events mostly based on what was published at the time. It’s fascinating how much the mainstream narrative deviates from “the facts” even with them available to anyone who cares to check. [0] https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/ https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/
- WhisperingShiba 5y ago
  Reality is highly subjective so I hesitate to make arguments about how media failed to report 'the facts' of situations. However, its pretty clear to me that the media's ability to assert certain opinions by asserting with more force is not conducive to a healthy long-term society.
reincarnate0x14 5y ago
> Are there really people who don’t remember Carter the deregulator? Yes. 40 years of propaganda and hagiography of Reagan has left a significant minority of the US population in delusion about nearly anything political, including people who lived through the events in question. Hell, a good subset of people are trapped in such an insanity bubble that people who had siblings die of polio in their youth suddenly decided vaccines are a giant conspiracy in 2021.

mechanical_bear 5y ago

This author really relies on strawmen in order to have anything to argue against.

mikewarot 5y ago

Carter only made one major mistake, in my book. Stopping the reprocessing of nuclear fuel.

jimmyvalmer 5y ago

Reaganland by Rick Perlstein covers this in exquisite detail.

UIUC_06 5y ago

It's so funny to read debates about things that happened 40 years ago. Why not go even farther and tell us Alger Hiss was innocent? Just look at the Dow since then, and sit down. The stock market is a weighing machine, as Benjamin Graham famously said [1]. Here's how the world's money weighed the two Presidencies: Carter: Starting Value: 959.03 Ending Value: 970.99 Performance While in Office: 1.25% increase Reagan: Starting Value: 950.68 Ending Value: 2,239.11 Performance While in Office: 135.53% increase [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/831517-in-the-short-run-the-market-is-a-voting-machine https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/831517-in-the-short-run-the... [2] https://www.gobankingrates.com/investing/stocks/stock-market-performance-by-president/ https://www.gobankingrates.com/investing/stocks/stock-market...

medvezhenok 5y ago
Looking at the stock market seems like a strange way to grade a president... Calvin Coolidge: Starting (1923): ~90 (Dow Jones Index) Ending (1929): ~320 (Dow Jones Index) Performance in office: 255% increase. What an amazing president - oh, wait...
- UIUC_06 5y ago
  What's your point? Coolidge was in fact a very good president.
  - medvezhenok 5y ago
    My main beef was with using the stock market to grade a president. I was giving the example of Coolidge because the 255% increase was followed by a 90% decrease, which should also be attributed to him (if we're using the stock market) I'm highly skeptical of the "very good president" claim too. "Although the public liked and admired Calvin Coolidge during his tenure, the Great Depression that began in 1929 seriously eroded his reputation and changed public opinion about his policies. Many linked the nation's economic collapse to Coolidge's policy decisions. His failure to aid the depressed agricultural sector seems shortsighted, as nearly five thousand rural banks in the Midwest and South shut their doors in bankruptcy while many thousands of farmers lost their lands. His tax cuts contributed to an uneven distribution of wealth and the overproduction of goods. Many Americans were deeply in debt for having purchased consumer goods on easy installment credit terms." "...Nevertheless, scholarly opinion looks upon the Coolidge presidency with skepticism, ranking him relatively low among American chief executives in terms of his administration's positive impact and legacy." https://millercenter.org/president/coolidge/impact-and-legacy https://millercenter.org/president/coolidge/impact-and-legac...

xdfil 5y ago

[flagged]

protomyth 5y ago

Carter's “Malaise” Speech cannot be underestimated in his loss. I was young, but I remember it's affect on my parents, both Democrats at the time. It was just depressing, and you didn't exactly have 500 channels to avoid it or pundits doing 24x7 spin. The only good thing I can say about President Carter was that the peanuts they added to the commodities we were getting were really good. The canned meat not so much.

rsj_hn 5y ago
This is exactly right. It was the malaise speech that doomed his campaign. The difference between Reagan's hopeful, patriotic campaign and Carter's "Malaise" cannot be underestimated. To try to blame Carter's loss on some October surprise conspiracy theory is to miss the larger issue as to what the two campaigns were about. By the way, I think Carter's malaise speech was spot on. But it's also why he lost.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Carter presenting himself in a sweater did him no favors. He looked like a nice but doddering grampa. Reagan wore a sharp suit and always looked like a President.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    Yes, Carter was frumpy, gloomy compared to the optimistic Reagan always standing in front of a huge flag with perfect hair and a glint in his eyes.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I've often thought that Sanders' biggest PR problem was his poor posture. Other candidates in the last round wore frumpy suits. Except for Biden. Biden stood up straight, and had a sharp suit. Ditto for Trump. It was fun watching the debates by turning off the sound, and just watching body language and mannerisms. Obama always looked sharp, too. It matters.
5y ago

wolverine876 5y ago

For more on Carter as the leader on inflation and deregulation, see Alan Greenspan's biography. He tells a story (I'm probably misremembering it a little) about being a government official (in Treasury?) and needing to approve a mundane charter flight of some college sports team as they waited at the airport[0]. At that point it hit him that there was too much regulation, and the Carter administration undertook to begin reducing it. [0] I could imagine good FAA reasons to approve it, but IIRC in the story it was some commercial issue that sounded way overboard.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

> One lesson, obviously, is that the narratives we tell about history are largely constructed after the fact, by actors who have a stake in painting a certain picture of the recent past. True. There are certainly those who push and pull the narrative. That said, there is also the momentum and expectations of the masses. Once a lens is set it is very very difficult to correct it. As so wisely put by mighty Paul Weller: "The public gets what the public wants." And "The public wants what the public gets." Put another way, aside from nefarious narrative actors, we also often have ourselves to blame.

RickJWagner 5y ago

Old-timer here. I was old enough to vote for Reagan. Truth be told, Jimmy Carter was and is a good man. He leads a straight and modest life. As a president, he did not preside over a happy time and he was defeated soundly by Reagan. Then Ronald Reagan was elected and the national mood was elevated. When Reagan ran for re-election, he won with 49 states. (Lacking only Minnesota, home state of his opponent. It was said that Reagan did not campaign there to avoid being a jerk.) 49 states won. It's historical fact. Don't let anyone re-write history.

rsj_hn 5y ago
Yes, Reagan was wildly popular. He was also not the evil monster that progressives portray. He won primarily because he was a better politician than Carter. Carter of course went on to do a lot of humanitarian work and deserves public respect for that. One can argue that he was a better statesman than he was President.

euroderf 5y ago

Ronald Reagan: genial idiot or calculating cynic? The jury is still out.