People say it's scoldy here but I use the tools to see what I want to see, be informed how I like. I'm nowhere near smart enough to write speeches for Obama but FFS I managed to figure that out.

Oh, is this the guy who endlessly, earnestly homilizes on the need to independent progressive media ecosystem dropping in for a drive-by on us here before heading back to the eugenics site? (he's a good guy, we'll cut him some slack while he figures it out)

Good point. It was high watermark of relations between elites. Surely our response to 2004 Tsunami was our high watermark of relations between nations and peoples.

You think we'll be mad to see you here? We love it, please stay.

By which I mean, he's right this time!

Tom Friedman goes full @michaelpettis.bsky.social

..if I could write like Fintan O'Toole I'd write them as long as I liked but unfortunately...

Certainly been wrestling with what makes a paragraph. I'm more " if in doubt, break it" so I end up with some very short, 1-2 sentences . Classic advice seems to be "1 idea per para" but "be easy on the reader" is an override for me. Happy to see this discussion evolve.

Great article

Hmmm....there goes about 20-30 years worth of Steven Pinkers's punditry on the subject

7. Conclusion: Pettis principal ideas stand, and remain the best conceptual framework for understanding the global economic structure as it has developed since China's entry into the global system in the 1980s. If he wants to change this, Krugman needs to do better.

6. Sidebar: It puzzles me that left-leaners like Tooze/Krugman who take shots at Pettis seem heedless of the systematic underpayment/exploitation of the Chinese workforce. Are they just invisible? (kind of like the characters in Charles Yu's book "Interior Chinatown"?)

5. But this is only a small and somewhat marginal part of Pettis overall arguments. Krugman does not get to grips with Pettis core points and their consequences, at all (transfers to producers in surplus countries distort global trade, distort economies, and arguably distort societies and politics)

4. And it could be argued the surplus of recent years is not a natural state for Australia, but itself a result of being in the slipstream of the Chinese imbalances Pettis relentlessly draws attention to (and that the 2030s will likely see us revert to a "natural" deficit state)

3. I'm not an expert but I am an Australian - so I live in a country that for most of its recent (and overall) history has had high levels of foreign investment and on average run a current account deficit (=capital account surplus).

2. Krugman's takedown is not of Pettis ideas broadly, but focuses on one area where I agree Pettis could be critiqued. This is the statement that "trade must be broadly balanced..." carnegieendowment.org/research/202...

Amazing!

Plus 💯 that last paragraph