

Are the Iranians going to try to cheat on the nuclear deal? I have no idea. But if I were in their shoes, I wouldn't. I would look on the nuclear weapons program as a cul-de-sac the country entered and see the diplomatic breakthrough as a valuable opportunity to change course.

Nuclear weapons are overrated

The key thing is that, as Robert Farley says, nuclear weapons are overrated. Nuclear weapons are great for deterring a foreign nuclear attack, but it's pretty clear that nobody is going to launch a nuclear attack on Iran one way or the other. And they're just not very useful for advancing a regional strategic agenda.

Just look around.

Nuclear weapons haven't helped the USA stabilize either Afghanistan or Iraq. Nuclear weapons didn't persuade the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden before the US invaded. Nuclear weapons aren't beating ISIS. Nuclear weapons haven't let Israel pacify the Gaza Strip or curb Hezbollah's influence in Lebanon. There just aren't that many situations in international relations governed by the principle "we need a much bigger explosion." You're better off spending your money on something else.

Anger is emotion, not politics

I used to be a very angry person. As in, after a bad incident or two too many, I did cognitive behavioral therapy to adjust a rage addiction. I still get that old boiling blood feeling sometimes, but these days I know how to handle it 9 times out of 10 and reconize the angry times as the exception rather than the rule. But when I was angry a lot one thing that happened was I really linked my personal addiction to feeling angry to my political views. My righteous rage wasn't a psychological problem, it was a political stance. And I continued to feel that way even as my political stances changed.

This was, in retrospect, a mistake. A political stance is a political stance. A personal temperament is a personal temperament.

But it's a mistake I see people making all the time on the internet. And I think it's a serious one. It's great, of course, to be outraged by injustice. But a posture of rage and anger is different. When you're angry, you blow up small differences. You take an ungenerous attitude and fail to understand what other people are saying. You don't communicate your own ideas clearly. You find reasons to be in fights with people because that gives you an excuse to be angry.

This is just no way to do any kind of effective politics.

The amazing persistence of Reagan derp

The dialogue between Noah Smith and John Cochrane about Jeb Bush and 4 percent growth is interesting, but in a lot of ways the most telling part of it is when Cochrane veers off topic and starts singing the praises of the Reagan Revolution under which "malaise ended, we won the cold war, and there was an economic boom."

Debating Reagan's foreign policy legacy is fun, but the economic policy points here are just not true.

What happened under Reagan is that there was a severe recession at the start of his term, a rapid recovery from the severe recession that was well-timed for his landslide reelection, and then several years of fine-but-unremarkable growth. It's a perfectly fine record of economic achievement, but the boom and the supply-side revolution just didn't happen. There was no turnaround of the mid-seventies decline in Total Factor Productivity there was no increase in the growth rate of private business investment and there was no turnaround of the long-term decline in male labor force participation.

This is pretty basic stuff. But it's ignored not just by conservative politicians or popular writers, but by PhD-wielding academic economists. And it's just wrong.

Song of the day

I assume one reason conservatives love Reagan so much is that anti-Reagan rhetoric was so over the top. Never more so than on "Reagan Youth".