In practice, authoritarian countries that you’re friendly with are treated as honorary democracies, and democracies you have a spat with become honorary dictatorships.

Modi isn’t going to like this. India-China rapprochement probably incoming.

I imagine Russia is like the Star Wars setting, lots of crazy steep drops and they never install railings.

If Trump may abandon NATO, sounds like it wouldn’t be a good deal for Switzerland to join…

That is just learned helplessness. No matter what development pathway you want to aim for, good ports are almost always one of the most important pieces of infrastructure a country can possess. And South America’s weak international and intra-regional connectivity is one of its biggest things holding it back, and has been for decades.

Every major infrastructure project will come with a long list of nimby complaints. Thing is, developing countries actually need these projects to improve people’s livelihoods in the long run.

South Korea’s conservative ruling party, the People Power Party (PPP), is pushing for legislation that would give the semiconductor industry subsidies and an exemption from a national cap on working hours.

Yes, that’s what South Korea needs… longer working hours…

Ukraine drank the kool-aid, and fooled themselves into thinking that if you slap a “freedom and democracy” sticker on and cozy up to the West, they’ll always back you no matter what.

In reality, countries behave as paranoid amoral assholes for a good reason.

Russia already has vastly more resources than Ukraine, it’s not going to make any difference.

An important point that isn’t mentioned in this article is that when the US targets third countries in their efforts to kneecap Chinese companies, it is hurting its own geostrategic interests. The US has been working hard to draw countries like Vietnam and Indonesia into its orbit as part of its containment strategy against China, but when it slaps tariffs on exports from these countries, years of diplomatic goodwill get instantly cancelled out. Especially since the US nowadays has no economic carrots to offer suitors, thanks to its bipartisan anti-trade turn. It’s all sticks.

Economic development isn’t so easy, or more countries would already be rich. Look at peer countries: in 1970, China had around the same GDP per capita as India and lower than Indonesia, now it’s about 50% higher than Indonesia and 170% higher than India. If you view this through the institutions lens (which is the whole point of Robinson’s work), it’s hard to avoid concluding that China’s institutions aren’t particularly extractive, compared to nominally democratic countries at the same stage of development.

Whether this will continue to be the case is an open question. The doomer case for China is pretty fashionable, but again it’s useful to do a comparison. Look at the middle income countries and ask which ones can make it out of the middle income trap, and transition into an advanced economy. China stands a much better chance than almost any other middle income country, just from the fact that it’s already at the technology frontier in many industries.

China’s population has seen some of the greatest improvements in human welfare in history during the past 50 years, including the near elimination of extreme poverty. Comparing this to slavery in the American South is frankly silly. It is like making light of slavery.

deleted by creator

Strangely enough, I think the CCP is a lot more of an inclusive institution than Robinson and his coauthors are happy to admit. A lot of the decisions the Chinese government makes are aimed at increasing national wealth and power. Narrow extractive behavior – siphoning wealth away to benefit the elites – definitely does happen in China, but not significantly more (and maybe less) than nominally democratic countries at a similar stage of development.

There’s plenty of scope to dunk on the CCP, e.g. human rights. But Acemoglu/Robinson political economy framework, based on inclusive/extractive institutions, isn’t the right argument for this.

Whelp… Biden was insistent on running, now the Monkey’s Paw has answered. All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden will be running for the hills, and being the Democratic nominee is gonna be the worst job in politics for the next four months. And at the end of the campaign he gets to be remembered by history as the loser in the worst landslide election since Reagan-Carter.

Also:

• Sonia Sotomayor’s decision not to retire during Biden’s term is looking like yet another D own goal. Very real prospects for a 7-2 Supreme Court.

• We’re going to be seeing an orgy of foreign governments jockeying to cultivate relations with Trump. Official US foreign policy is going to be dead in the water, and NATO and G7 will be leaderless, until next year.

• Trump is going to have an iron grip on the Republican party now, to an even greater extent than before. On various issues where other Republicans held positions contrary to Trump’s, they’re going to be brushed aside.

• For the above two reasons, Ukraine is pretty well fucked.

He’s not wrong. But it’s worth remembering that when China faced a far smaller provocation from their own restive Muslims, in Xinjiang, they responded by locking up a large fraction of the population in vast reeducation camps…