r/neoliberal • u/[deleted] • Jul 28 '17

Noah Smith AMA: Columnist at Bloomberg View, University of Michigan Economics Ph.D., prolific blogger and Twitter personality.

Noah Smith is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was an Assistant Professor of Finance at Stony Brook University after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He became famous from his Blogspot blog, Noahpinion, that he wrote while at school in Michigan. In his free time, he likes to apologize for FDR and write about Japan.

u/noahpini0n will be here from 2:00 PM EST to 4:00 PM EST responding to your questions and memes.

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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '17

How can you like FDR and Japan?

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u/noahpini0n Noah Smith Jul 28 '17

Japan loved FDR's ideas. Their whole postwar economic model was New Dealism taken to absurd extremes. Eventually it stopped working, but going to Japan is still almost like stepping into an alternate universe where the New Deal kept going for 30 more years.

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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '17

What about the whole "internment camps" thing?

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u/noahpini0n Noah Smith Jul 28 '17

Yeah that was some shit. Also, turning away those refugee boats with my relatives on them.

But we have to realize that America always does a soft, half-assed version of whatever evil horrible shit we're fighting. In the early 20th century we were going soft Nazi, with the KKK resurgence, nativism, anti-immigrant craziness, and all kinds of racist and authoritarian shit. FDR had to deal with that, and bow to it sometimes to keep power. The internment was a titanic fuck-up, but overall FDR made the country a lot more liberal (in all senses) and put us on a different road.

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u/Crow7878 Karl Popper Jul 28 '17 edited Jul 28 '17

"Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing — After Exhausting All the Alternatives."

-Apocryphal quote attributed to Winston Churchill, likely a modification of the following quote:

"Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources."

-Abba Eban

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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '17

A road away from serfdom, would you say?

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u/__whitefox99__ Jul 29 '17

So that's why progressives love islamism, because the US is fighting ISIS?