[original post: Against Against Boomers]

Before getting started:

First, I wish I’d been more careful to differentiate the following claims:

1. Boomers had it much easier than later generations.

2. The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations.

3. Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract.

Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions - I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-Boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support - rather than letting them switch among them as convenient - then arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position.

Second, I wish I’d highlighted how much of this discussion centers around disagreements over which policies are natural/unmarked vs. unnatural/marked.

Nobody is passing laws that literally say “confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B”. We’re mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favorable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favorable to young people. If you’re young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare where the old are enriching themselves at young people’s expense. But if you’re old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff. But in fact, they’re just two different tax policies and it’s not obvious which one a fair society with no “intergenerational warfare” would have, even assuming there was such a thing. We’ll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I’ll try to highlight it whenever it comes up.

I’m in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the Boomers (and myself) in these responses more than I would in an ideal world.

Anyway, here are your comments.

Table Of Contents:

1: Top comments I especially want to highlight
2: Comments about housing policy
3: ...about culture
4: ...about social security technicalities
5: What are we even doing here?
6: Other comments

1: Top Comments I Especially Want To Highlight

…

Sokow writes:

[The anti-Boomer] take has been imported in part from the EU + the UK where the pension system is not the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Pension_(United_Kingdom)#Pensions_Act_2007

There is a lot of similar things in France that I could dig up, such as all attempts to tax benefits being defeated.

Many Europeans chimed in to say this, including people whose opinions I trust.

I find this pretty interesting. We all know stories of American opinions infecting Europeans, like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there. I’d never heard anyone argue the opposite - that the European discourse is infecting Americans with ideas that don’t apply to our context - but it makes sense that this should happen. I might write a post on this.

Kevin Munger (Never Met A Science) writes:

Hating Boomers (and talking about hating Boomers) is uninteresting and I agree morally dubious.

But it is *emphatically* false that “Boomers were a perfectly normal American generation”. They have served far more terms in Congress than any generation before or since (and we currently have the oldest average age of elected officials in a legislative body IN THE WORLD other than apparently Cambodia), they have dominated the presidency (look up the birthdate of every major party candidate since the 2000 presidential election...), they controlled the commanding heights of major companies, cultural institutions (especially academica).

They are a historically *unique* generation, for three intersecting reasons: 1. They are a uniquely large generation 2. they came of age as the country and its institutions were maturing 3. they are sticking around because of increased longevity. These are analytical facts, and they produce what I call “Boomer Ballast” -- a concentration of our societies resources in one, older generation that increases the tension we are experiencing from technological innovation. Our demography is pulling us towards the past, the internet is pulling us into the future, and this I think is the major source of the anti-Boomer frustration.

On the specifics of social security and why we might think Boomers have played things to their advantage (not bc they’re specifically evil but bc they have the political power to do so) -- the key thing is that they have prevented forward-thinking politicians from fixing the inevitable hole in social security that comes from our demographic pyramid. It would have been relatively painless to increase the rate or incidence of the social security payroll tax at any point in the past 25 years, the looming demographic cliff was obvious and the increased burden could’ve been shared more equally. Instead, they prevented reforms and all of the fiscal pain from demographic shifts will be borne by younger generations.

I agree this is a strong argument, and part of why I think it’s helpful to separate the three points I mentioned at the beginning.

RH writes:

We [Boomers] did [vote for ourselves to pay higher taxes and get fewer benefits]. My lifetime SS benefits will be 20-25 percent less than they would have been under previous law, and I voted for that. My SS tax rate went up itself, and has been well over 15% since the changes took effect, and the cap on earned income subject to that went up a lot. And I voted to accept all that because it was projected to be sufficient.

Then the immigrant haters decided we needed fewer workers in the country, or at least fewer paying SS taxes, so they slowed legal immigration and pushed illegals into the underground economy, so they don’t pay taxes to support social security. And social security is going to get whacked again, plus the evils the SS system was intended to alleviate -- people too old to work and too poor to live -- will return.

I think this says something profound about politics. The problem is less that there’s some group of people who don’t believe in fairness, but that fairness is very hard to calculate.

Suppose RH is right (I haven’t checked), and that Social Security would be sustainable with lots of immigration. Then whether Boomers are paying “their fair share” or not depends on whether immigration is good or bad (a hard question!), and on whether we think of high vs. low immigration as the natural unmarked state of the universe (such that immigration opponents must “own” closed borders and compensate the losers), and on what kind of compensation the losers from closed borders deserve.

Someone else commented by saying we could solve all of these problems without inconveniencing either the Boomers or the young by just increasing taxes on a few ultra-rich people. The ultra-rich could reasonably say they didn’t create this problem and it’s unfair to tax them for it. But so could the Boomers and the young! So whose “fair share” is it?

2: Comments About Housing Policy

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James (Enriched Jam Sham) writes:

Probably most of this is true, but there is one point I would take issue with, concerning the idea of “sitting on assets not being used for market labor.” This kind of does seem like an issue, or something? And I agree one should not expropriate too many assets from boomers in order to impoverish them, or anything, but if there is a group of people with a large number of assets not being employed productively, there _is_ an issue there, right? (I think this belief is downstream of a lot of leftist anxiety about the superwealthy, though of course in general they are employing those assets productively). More of an issue if those with fewer assets are being taxed in order to provide “what is owed” in some abstract sense to those who are already not employing assets productively.

Were I old, I think it totally would be reasonable to say “You can live in a 5-bedroom house, but since you’re just a married couple these days, probably it’s better if you get by with a 3-bedroom, and probably it doesn’t need to be so central to the city, unless you can afford it. We are going to raise taxes higher.” And to means-test social security payments to some extent (phased in, over time)? Or is that going too far in my demagoguery?

I answered that I agree there’s an argument for forced house downsizing. But I also think we’re the types of people who the Right calls rootless cosmopolitans, and that people with more attachments might not be so amenable.

My grandparents-in-law built significant parts of their house with their own hands, and lived in it for ~50 years. They planted saplings in the garden and lived to see them become trees. They know the neighbors and probably knew the neighbors’ parents before them. Their daughter, my mother-in-law, lives a few blocks away. When I last visited, they could show me their son’s old bedroom, their daughter’s old bedroom, and the bedroom where their granddaughter (my wife) used to stay with them. Until recently, my grandfather-in-law was cognitively about 70% there, to the point where he could live on his own - but only through having a very predictable routine, knowing where everything was, and being in an ultra-friendly and familiar environment. Their area has now skyrocketed in cost.

I can see your side of the argument - but I also can’t blame them for being against some hypothetical policy that would force them to move to a strange apartment in the nearest affordable town 50 miles away far away from their only family/caretakers so that some striver DINK couple could turn their spare bedroom into a gym.

James answered:

Sure, I mean it wouldn’t be some sort of forced movement, it’d be more like higher property taxes. If you can afford it then that’s fine, don’t think we should do some centralized planning boomer hatred. And it should hit everyone equally. It’s just about measuring productive use of houses. But it would end up falling hardest on boomers (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective).

But this is maybe more reasonable as a policy idea than “lynch the boomers” which is perhaps the bailey you’re arguing against. I don’t want to be the motte, just this is (I think?) an actually good policy.

I responded that yeah, I understand it’s just higher property taxes, I’m saying there’s no way my retired and slightly-demented grandfather-in-law could afford normal property taxes on his house he bought in what was basically farmland in 1970 but which has now grown into a desirable California college town. He’s been coasting off whichever California proposition it was that says old people’s property taxes don’t go up while they own the home.

(although age has taken its toll and he now lives in a nursing home, so this is more of a hypothetical example drawing inspiration from a real situation)

James answered:

I don't mean to sound heartless, but like, every policy has bad outcomes and good outcomes. Of course with housing policy the core issue is that bad outcomes for those already there are salient, and for those not already there they are much less so. I mean my grandparents have had similar issues, I agree there would be pain. It's just about finding the right balance on the margin. But individual stories shouldn't necessarily guide policy-making (I mean "plural of anecdote" etc etc, but you see what I mean?). I am sorry about your granddad in law though, dementia sucks.

I said that I agree with this, and it still might be good on net, I just can’t bring myself to hate Boomers for opposing it.

I still think that instead of facing these tough tradeoffs, we should just build more housing, and that every person who we force to make these tradeoffs is in some sense a policy failure, even if we take the right side of them.

And I feel nervous because I’m neutralish on something where there’s basically a unanimous consensus of smart people (they all hate Prop 13), but to me it does seem to make sense that rising house values shouldn’t be able to make your current home unaffordable - both because as someone in a state where house values have pentupled in a generation this seems like a recipe for constant forced upheaval, stress, and destruction of families/community, and because it gives NIMBYs one more reason to oppose density (if someone upzones your area, that increases the value of your land, and therefore your property taxes, and might force you to leave your house - therefore, you should fight upzoning unless you want to be forced out).

Chris writes:

A halfway house solution to this is to increase property taxes but make them payable on death/sale. It has less of an effect of actually forcing people out, so the allocation effect isn’t as strong, but it would encourage people to move at the margin. e.g. those who want to free up equity, without penalising the “asset rich, cash poor.” It’s just about the only wealth tax that works, and those gains are largely CGT exempt.

This is usually discussed in a UK context as we don’t have percentage property taxes, and this is a potential way of introducing them, given in some places nominal values have 10x’d.

Huh, I hadn’t heard this before, and I like it!

Mariana Trench writes:

I genuinely don’t want you to take this personally. When you or someone over on Slow Boring starts speculating about how I, a young boomer, should be forced out of my nice house that I bought with my own money, it truly makes me want to get a gun and shoot you. Scott, I’m not going to do that, so please don’t ban me. I’m explaining how murderously angry it makes me feel. So every other age group gets to have whatever goods and services are available at a market rate, but old people have to move to shitty apartments because we’re worth so much less than young people?

I will take every legal means at my disposal to prevent you from doing this. I will block you in the courts, I will vote for evil totalitarian bastards if they support my property rights, I will seriously do anything to keep you from patting me on the head and telling me to move on because I suddenly don’t have a right to my own house, because some younger person suddenly wants it.

Several people made something like this argument, but I think it’s based on a (understandable) misunderstanding.

The policy that most people in James’ camp are proposing is to repeal California Proposition 13 (or other jurisdictions’ local variants) which lock property taxes to the value of a house when it was bought (rather than the value now). This benefits old people, who might have bought their houses 30 years ago when prices were much lower. Repealing it, and making everyone pay property taxes based on the current price of their house, would incentivize (in some cases, force) old people to move to cheaper houses.

If you treat the Proposition 13 regime as natural, then this is an attack on old people’s rights. But Proposition 13 was only passed in 1978, and plenty of states have no local equivalent. If you treat the pre-13 state of affairs as natural, then 13 is an attack on young people’s rights, and repealing it merely restores the proper fair state of the universe. This is another of those marked vs. unmarked things.

I agree that a lot of the talk around this sounds kind of ethnic-cleansing-adjacent, but nobody has the right to artificially-depressed property taxes.

3: Comments About Culture

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WoolyAI writes:

I think this oddly dodges the two big complaints about boomers.

One, not mine but it needs to be addressed, is housing. There’s no end of content online about boomers and housing, no need to reiterate, I’m just surprised not to see it referenced when it (to me) seems such a large part of the discourse.

The second is that the boomers engaged in a lot of...social transformations that were very good for them and had really bad effects on subsequent generations and the boomers refused any limiting factor.

The best example is probably dating and “sexual liberation”. The best of all dating worlds is to grow up in the 1950s, when everyone is strongly habituated to forming stable marriages, then be given the opportunity to defect out and have tons of “free love” in your 20s, then settle down in your late 20s into a stable relationship because, well, all your peers came from stable families with strong marriage norms and 3-7 years of “free love” isn’t going to overcome that cultural background. Once the next generation rolls around and gets raised in a “free love” culture, though, rather than the stable marriage norms of the 50s, marriage starts to break down. It doesn’t take much to notice how horrific modern dating is yet it’s worth noting that even by the 80s it was obvious that something was wrong; divorce was skyrocketing and Gen X got hit hard.

This seems false to me. Divorce rates peaked in 1980. It wasn’t Generation X (people born in after 1970) who were getting divorced in 1980 - it was Boomers themselves.

People tend to imagine the divorce trend as being about hedonist swingers trying lots of free love, but I think this is imaginary. My impression is that it’s more about moving from a regime of naively/romantically marrying your high school sweetheart, discovering later that he was emotionally unavailable and abusive and you hated him, but sticking around anyway “for the children” - to a new regime of unromantically optimizing for a compatible partner no matter how long it takes.

Boomers ended up right in the middle of the regime change - they married their high school sweethearts, then were told it was unacceptable to have an unhappy marriage - and so suffered very high divorce rates during the transition period. Everyone after them got the new regime from the beginning and never married their high school sweetheart in the first place (unless their high school sweetheart was unusually compatible with them).

I think that the people scorning the Boomers for their hedonistic free love ways wouldn’t like being married to an emotionally unavailable and abusive partner who they hated any more than the Boomers did. An alternative framing of this - not exactly correct, but I don’t think the anti-Boomer one is exactly correct either - is that we should be grateful to the Boomers for ripping off the Band-Aid in their generation and suffering the negative consequences, rather than kicking the can down the road and leaving us to be the ones who got the explosion of divorce.

In practice I doubt they had a choice either way - I think it was an artifact of changing economic conditions, especially women joining the workforce and getting more independence.

Hal Johnson (Hal Johnson Books) writes:

It’s probably a bad idea to hate a whole generation, but I will say a couple of things against Boomers.

I once wrote a piece on Stand by Me pointing out that the movie is about a Boomer who went on a grand adventure and yet won’t let his own kid bike to the pool. Anyone growing up under a Boomer hegemony had to have been aware of this, the feeling that Boomers were pulling doors shut behind them and then celebrating the beforetimes, when the doors were open. “When I did drugs it was so cool, but you better not do drugs.” “I hitchhiked across America to see the country, but hitchhiking is bad and fortunately illegal now.” If you went to school at a certain time, or worked at a certain time, you were guaranteed to encounter a teacher or coworker who claimed to have been at Woodstock (ha!) and who expressed contempt at you, the young, for not having been at Woodstock. It was weird and also really grating!

Boomers suffered a tendency to self-mythologize, and it never ends! Remember that Boomer-centered bank ad from a few years ago: “A generation as unique as this deserves a bank etc.”? Boomers were the first generation to have and be an identity (broadly across the whole US at least). This isn’t even their fault, as the identity was invented by marketers to sell pop records, but Boomers fell in love with the idea.

It’s hard to hate the Greatest Generation, not because they were great (whatever) but because someone outside their generation declared them to be the Greatest. When Leonard Steinhorn wrote The GREATER Generation about how amazing Boomers were, he did it because he, a Boomer, wanted more credit. Look at me! Look at me! There have been so many years of Look at me!

I like to watch old sitcoms from the ‘80s, and it is hilarious how much Boomer indulgence goes on. Murphy Brown reminiscing about her time in “The Revolution.” Howard Hesseman on Head of the Class kicking Dan Schneider out fo class for making irreverent jokes about the ’60s. Kate from Kate and Allie forbidding her daughter from dating a boy who didn’t support ’60s peace protesters. Just watch the opening credits of Family Ties—it’s like a nightmare!

But I bet it was fun to be a Boomer.

Vijla Kainu writes:

You forgot to mention another transformation that hurt people who weren’t able to plan for it nor did they have time to pivot: the boomers shipped their parents off to old people’s homes and defected from the compact where your parents take care of you when you’re young and you do the same when they get old and frail. Boomer homes didn’t have olds hanging about. No time for wiping old people’s butts, there are films to see on the telly! My grandparents didn’t know this was coming and didn’t have any idea they’d need to save the money to pay strangers to do what family members had done for every single generation up to the boomers.

I don’t know much about this part of history, so I’ll assume this is true.

So . . . since you’re so against this, you’re going to reverse it by taking great care of your own elderly parents, in your house, attending to their every need, right?

I think most people will wave this off with a “well, since the Boomers destroyed the social contract, now I’m no longer bound by it and this is totally fine, but it was still totally unjustifiable when they did it!”

This is a general worry I have with anti-Boomerism - in many cases, hating the Boomers for doing something is an excuse to do the same thing yourself, because you’re just “trapped in the equilibrium the Boomers created” or whatever. I think the real story is that the Boomers did the thing for the same reason you did.

In this case, that real story is about increasing longevity. It’s fine to care for a 70 year old in your house for a few years until they get felled by the flu, and harder to care for a 95 year old for 30 years until the Alzheimers finally gets them.

Leah Libresco Sargent (Other Feminisms) writes:

I think this Against Against Boomers leaves out a common line of complaint: that boomers benefited from traditions they received and chose not to hand on. I’ve got a bit from Michael Brendan Doughterty’s My Father Left Me Ireland in my review: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/05/16/your-roots-shall-make-ye-free/

“Dougherty writes, “The adult world that I encountered was plainly terrified of having authority over children and tried to exercise as little of it as practicable. […] The constant message of authority figures was that I should be true to myself. I should do what I loved, and I could love whatever I liked. I was the authority.”

He could write to his father, he could order Gaelic books, but there was no clear way to regain what had been given up by the generations that came before.”

This is also, in miniature, Patrick Deneen’s contention in Why Liberalism Failed: that, gradually, people dismantled the traditions they themselves had benefited from, because they saw them as cruft, not realizing they were load bearing.

Leah gets a pass on this one, because she’s one of the tiny handful of people pumping against entropy and trying to rebuild old traditions.

For everyone else, I make the same accusation as above. The Boomers didn’t raise their children properly because they were evil people who hated the social fabric. I raise my children via a collection of nannies, daycares, and smartphone apps because the economy’s so tough these days that it’s unfair to ask me to do otherwise, plus everyone knows childcare is exploitative uncompensated emotional labor, plus the government should tax the ultra-rich to pay me a childcare allowance, and anyhow it’s the Boomers’ fault for reminding me that I had the option!

uugr writes:

It seems like you’re proposing the blame that’s currently directed at boomers is (in part?) the fault of population collapse. It’s not that the boomers are stealing on the wealth; they just have all the power because they’re so populous.

Could it be that this is a legitimate sort of boomer-hate, though? Not that they didn’t leave enough to their kids, but that they didn’t leave *enough kids* to leave things to? I’m not sure how one would check the age distribution for this; maybe Kids These Days should be blaming Gen X for that instead. But the older generations would take some responsibility for the shape of the age distribution.

This is an interesting synthesis: most of people’s problems with “the Boomers” are really problems with an inverted demographic pyramid. Since the old outnumber the young, they have “too much” wealth, jobs, etc compared to people’s natural expectation, and previously-solvent benefits programs are falling apart.

Is this right? I actually wasn’t sure where our population pyramid was - I thought maybe the recent wave of immigrants would have righted it - but no, it looks like it’s getting increasingly top-heavy:

I don’t think it’s especially worth “blaming” the Boomers for this. If you look at the secular trend . . .

…it long predates them, and they’re just reverting to the pre-Baby-Boom mean.

It’s pretty funny that a gigantic boom in robots is about to save us from this right when it starts becoming a noticeable problem.

4: Comments About Social Security Technicalities

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Matthew writes:

> even when their benefits per capita per year are stable or declining

It looks very different if you look at it by the household level instead of individual

A meaningful share of the increase in total costs comes from composition.

As women shifted from spouse-only benefits to worker or dual entitlement, more households now receive two lifetime worker benefits rather than one worker plus a spousal benefit. Average household payouts rise as a result.

This creates bifurcated outcomes. Households with two lifetime earners receive higher total payments, while single earner and spousal benefit households account for a smaller share of distributions (and directly effected by cuts). Individual averages are skewed by survivorship and changing household structure.

The result is a shift in where Social Security dollars go. A larger share of total payouts now flows to higher lifetime earnings households, which also tend to have lower fertility on average, affecting the system wide distribution of a fixed payroll tax base.

Basically the ratio of working to pay not for your own parents but someone else’s parents who are quite possibly richer than your own has gone up quite a bit.

Tunnelguy writes:

Section III missed that the 2025 tax bill literally has a tax deduction for seniors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Big_Beautiful_Bill_Act#Tax_credit_for_seniors (often called “No Tax on Social Security”, but that’s not exactly accurate). Agree with the conclusion overall though

Andy G writes:

“Why do so many believe that old people have discovered a vote-themselves-infinite-benefits hack?”

I’m a tail-end Boomer myself, and I mostly agree with your overall take.

But the above quoted concern is actually valid when it comes to the old-age entitlements.

Congress changed SS in the 1970s to have ever-increasing benefits (going up with average wage growth, not merely with CPI) where they don’t have to vote each year on the benefits.

Medicare was never self-funding.

As the number of retirees has grown and there are ever fewer number of workers to pay into the Ponzi-like scheme that is SS, people correctly fear that the Boomers will get all of theirs, but then the Ponzi-scheme will likely end (Medicare is actually in far worse shape than SS (which could still be saved by eliminating that increase by average wage growth provision - would address 80% of the problem).

This is a good point, but it also frames the problem a little too lucidly for its own good.

The problem with the Boomers is that they selfishly refuse to collapse the Social Security Ponzi scheme on themselves, because they selfishly feel like just because they paid into it, they should get benefits.

Why is it bad that the Boomers won’t collapse the Ponzi? Because then we, the Millennials and Zoomers, will soon be in the unfair position of having paid into it, but not receiving benefits!

5: What Are We Even Doing Here?

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Darwin writes:

Looking at some ‘wealth by generation over time’ graphs, I have an intuition that there’s a stable and repeating pattern in the US of the elderly accumulating all the wealth and power while the young are struggling and disenfranchised. And that this creates a legitimate and perpetual intergenerational conflict where the old people really are hurting the young by keeping wealth away from them and passing policies that benefit themselves and their preferences. Plus probably the gerontocracy genuinely slows down progress and improvement by resisting new ideas and paradigm shifts for as long as physically possible.

(and yes, I’m saying this despite material conditions improving over time in general - this is a separate point about relative positions and interests at a given timepoint)

Assume that pattern is true, you could look at each generation noticing this dynamic with their parents/grandparents generation, blaming that older generation as particularly bad, and failing to notice and address the repeating pattern and the structural factors that cause it, and say they are being foolish and unfair and mistaken.

And you wouldn’t exactly be wrong, but, I still have two basic objections to this take.

The first is that it seems to hold people to a very high standard. At a societal level, I’m glad they even noticed the conflict and tried to take coordinated action to address it at all, a lot of problems never make it that far. And expecting people with no background in history to notice historical trends extending into times they weren’t alive for, especially ones going back before modern digital record-keeping that they can easily Google, is a lot to ask.

The second is that... well, imagine there’s a slave on a southern plantation being whipped. Yes, in a certain sense, the master holding the whip is not unusual from any other master holding any other whip on any other plantation, and the system of slavery implemented across all of those plantations is not unusual from many other systems of slavery that have existed across human history.

In a sense, yes, the slave’s real problem is with the institution of slavery itself, or the facets of human nature and economics that make it a recurring pattern across human societies. That’s the real villain, here.

But I don’t think he’s wrong to also hate, or to blame, the individual person holding the whip.

Even if the societal pattern is the overarching problem here, even if the master in questions wouldn’t even be holding a whip if they were born into a different system with different institutions and different incentives... I still think it’s right to hate and attack that person.

I find this a useful framing too. Don’t hate the player, hate the game - but if the game is bad enough, hating the player is a natural human response.

This does, however, remind me of the following story, which I recently encountered on Twitter (h/t @docneto) and can’t stop thinking about:

Does Little Ephraim Robin John have the right to hate the hand that holds the whip? If he doesn’t, where’s the boundary between literally being him, vs. being the sort of person who would have been him if raised in his exact socioeconomic conditions (probably lots of people)?

habu71 writes:

I don’t think you get to hold the boomers blameless for shutting down nuclear simply because today their opinions have shifted and are more pro nuclear than they used to be.

It was their youthful indiscretion that resulted in the NRC being created and soon after turning into the terrible horrible no good destroyer of all things nuclear.

Yeah, this gets into tough questions around blame and the three different things I asked people to disambiguate at the beginning of the post.

It also runs into the same question that darwin asked above: suppose that in 1970, every generation living at the time thought nuclear was bad. And today, every generation living now thinks nuclear is good. On some level, this isn’t the fault of any particular generation - it seems like the information environment in 1970s just wasn’t conductive to figuring this out (although of course you can question who created that information environment). Unless you’re a very special person, if you lived in 1970 then you would have been anti-nuclear too. So can we blame the real 1970ites for their anti-nuclear opinions? I guess in the same sense that we can blame slaveowners, but that’s not an answer.

Richard Hanania writes:

There’s a lot to quibble with in this piece, but on this part I’ll repost here what I recently told Scott via email:

Is anti-old a particularly terrible form of prejudice? Here’s where I disagree the most. How many genocides and mass killings in history have been penetrated based on age? People seem much more willing to commit atrocities in the name of oppressing a rival class, religion, or race. Oppression based on sex has been almost ubiquitous. But being anti-old people goes against the grain of human nature. That’s a feature, not a bug. We all have old relatives, and we’ll all be old. You seem to worry that this will lead to self-loathing and negative stereotypes that we’ll all suffer from in the future. But I’m concerned more about the immediate problems of housing prices, the coming entitlements crisis, and finding an alternative to right- and left-wing forms of populism, which have the wind at their backs. Criticisms based on age never causes as much psychic damage to people as those based on race, sex, and sexual orientation.

The Boomers themselves I think showed how relatively benign prejudice against the old is. in the 1960s and 1970s, they talked about being oppressed by older generations. It never led to mass killings, or systematic discrimination or anything like that. In fact, the old continued to acquire more money and resources and the welfare state has been expanding with more and more money going to them. My hope is that ageism can be strong and compelling enough to motivate some budgetary and housing reforms, while being too weak to lead to the downsides we see in other forms of identity politics.

I think (based on other things, including Hanania’s email) that he is interested in anti-old-ism as a useful political project that can potentially build a coalition to achieve the things he really wants, like economic dynamism. If he could get those things more easily by making people hate the young, he would recommend hating the young.

I can only plead that I’m still Less Utilitarian Than Thou. My post was meant to argue that Boomers don’t deserve hatred. If your objection is that they may not deserve hatred, but that hating them will have good consequences, and so you recommend it anyway - then this seems like the sort of thing that often goes badly, even if you can’t predict exactly how.

Hanania argues that nobody will genocide the old, and I agree. But it brings to mind some of the arguments around the beginning of wokeness, where people justified anti-white rhetoric by saying it was basically harmless - obviously in a 65% white country where white people hold most positions of power, nobody will genocide the whites. This was true as far as it goes, but making anti-whiteness a state ideology for ten years sure did manage to have lots of hard-to-predict bad consequences (and I count the backlash against it as a consequence).

In any case, I’m not using this blog to design a propaganda project or build a coalition. I just like saying things that I think are true.

6: Other Comments

…

Joe and Seth write:

It’s... simplistic, to say this is about hate. It’s a shifting equilibrium, and while the greatest/boomers built most of what we would call the modern world, it is not difficult to recognize that they’re operating on shorter time frames than most of the rest of us have to, and this drives some of their politics as a bloc.

I see this as the same argument against (overwhelmingly the low-skilled segment of) immigration: WEIRD societies tend to be cooperative and trusting and think in longer time frames. This is a fragile equilibrium and is threatened by a demographic shift towards those who are more opportunistic and think in short time frames. Look at trust studies across countries. Yes, there’s significant impact based on the government and support structures in place, but there’s population-level effects too. Age is just a very obvious indicator of the same kinds of prioritization.

I’ll reiterate the point I made in Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist - although it makes intuitive sense that Boomers, being older, would be more short-termist, these kinds of intuitive stories about how people vote in their self-interest are false.

Federal deficit spending is the clearest possible example of trading off long-term prosperity for short-term gain, but the young are more likely to support it than the old. Climate change is another place where people are being asked to sacrifice now to prevent future disaster, and the generation gap is miniscule.

I don’t blame people for not knowing this, because most polls try really hard to show the opposite - for example, the first thing you’ll find if you look up opinions on deficit spending separated by generation is questions about “should we decrease deficit spending, which will probably involve cutting entitlements to the old?”, and naturally old people are more likely to be against this framing. But you can prove anything by changing poll framing: if you asked “should we decrease deficit spending, which will probably also involve cutting entitlements to the young?”, probably young people would be more against it. When you don’t hold the respondent’s hand and guide them to the answer you want, the young are more pro-deficit-spending.

I think there’s an effect where media wants to tell an exciting story about selfishness and conflict, so they really play up the stories where polls suggest groups are acting in their own selfish interest. But when you try to cut through this, the effect is miniscule, and swamped by whether the group is more Democrat or Republican. Until recently, old people have been more Republican, so they were more likely to want to cut the deficit.

Daniel Kang writes:

I have no thoughts on Boomers in general, but the Schrodinger’s Immigrant / Schrodinger’s Boomer fall flat to me. A steelman of this argument is:

- There are many immigrants. Some of them are on welfare and others of them are taking jobs

- There are many Boomers. Some Boomers pushed too hard to neoliberalism in some aspects of the economy and others focused on over-regulating the environment in other parts of the economy

I also have no particular thoughts on whether or not this argument is correct, but I think it would be better to present actual steelman arguments.

I responded by saying that when you levy an accusation against a group, you’re arguing not just that some members of the group do X, but that the group has a disproportionate tendency toward X. Daniel and other commenters were not satisfied, and you can read the full discussion here.

Ben Smith writes:

Not to be a punisher reader but this article treats the 1946 generation as if they’re representative of the boomers. In reality boomers are 1946-1964. Only the very oldest of them were sent to Vietnam or were responsible for Woodstock etc. Boomers should be weighed and measured by the youth culture of the late sixties to mid 80s (less so). So Woodstock is fairly theirs, but so is the inward individualist turn on the 1970s.

I appreciate this clarification.

Kamateur writes:

This is also a vibes thing. It’s certainly turned malignant, but most of the millennial contempt I see for boomers at least started out as simple frustration over boomers not recognizing that they had lived in a period where it was relatively easy to accumulate wealth in the form of property and pensions and stable jobs. Essentially its a form of envy, and envy is always the worst when the people you envy act like everything they've achieved is the result of a normal process, as opposed to a confluence of timing and opportunity. The stereotypical boomer, under this model, is your parent who tells you they don't understand why you are still living in a crummy little apartment, not realizing that a mortgage where you live costs four times what you pay in rent.

I kind of want to disagree with this by reiterating the graph showing that Millennials are richer than Boomers (at the same age), but I’m not sure that works. My memories of these sorts of conversations are that even when I’m doing well relative to older people, their advice still grates. Like, yes, I eventually got a great job and am very happy, but no, it was not correct to ask why I didn’t have a job yet at time X, or to ask why I hadn’t solved this problem yet by walking into an office in a nice suit, giving someone a firm handshake, and depositing my resume on their desk.

Mackenzie writes:

There is one aspect of the Boomer generation vis-à-vis institutional power that I don’t see touched upon is this essay that I see as another force driving anit-Boomer sentiment. It’s that Boomers as a cohort have remained in leadership roles for an exceptionally long time in Congress, as executives, etc whereas other generations were faster to transition leadership to others.

This Boomers vs Millennials framing is explained very well in this email exchange between Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, I recommend the whole email exchange but I’ll heavily quote this reply from Thiel.

» “What I would add to Mark’s summary is that, in a healthier society, the handover from the Boomers to the younger generations should have started some time ago (maybe as early as the 1990s for Gen X), and that for a whole variety of reasons, this generational transition has been delayed as the Boomers have maintained an iron grip on many US institutions. When the handover finally happens in the 2020s, it will therefore happen more suddenly and perhaps more dramatically than people expect or than such generational transitions have happened in the past. And that’s why it’s especially important for us to think about these issues and try and get ahead of them.

One example of such an “iron grip” from my colleague Eric Weinstein: Of the 67 top research universities in the US, 62 have Baby Boomer presidents (three are Silent Generation and only two are Generation X). Today, the median age of these 67 university presidents is 65 years-old... And this is very different from the recent past. Only thirty years ago, in 1990, the median age of these same university presidents was a much lower 52-years old; the older generation did not completely refuse to give up power; and therefore much greater generational diversity was to be found in university leadership.”

Given historical trends you would expect to see much more Gen X leaders in Congress, as presidents, or even as business owners than you do today.

So do we want affirmative action for the young? Why is this better than other forms of affirmative action?

It doesn’t seem like a mystery why institutions would hire older leaders: they have more experience. Probably in the past this was kept in check by the tendency of old people to die (or forcibly retire due to poor health) at a young age, plus a shortage of old people since each generation was larger than the last.

People have this sense that Boomers are being evil and selfish by not retiring so that young people can get more of the good jobs. Why is this a more natural way to think of things than white people being evil and selfish by not voluntarily underemploying themselves so black people can get more of the good jobs?

Much of anti-Boomerism seems to be about how Boomers are selfish because they’re taking up resources, and those resources could go to young people instead. But every group is taking up resources that could go to other groups! This only justifies anti-Boomerism if you start with the assumption that old people are less worthy of having good things than young people, and so if you can’t redistribute old people’s resources to young people, then this is prima facie unfair.

I think there are some weak arguments for why it’s better for young people to have resources than old people, but these don’t seem strong enough to justify the level of Boomer hatred, and I’d like to see people make them explicit.

Charles UF writes:

This is weapons grade overthinking, and a byproduct of the constant demands for evidence and sources that are a strong norm in certain discussion circles. For better insight, read the twitter link from the OP again: https://x.com/search?q=%22you%20don%27t%20hate%20boomers%20enough%22&src=typed_query

I didn’t scroll for hours on this link, but I didn’t see any charts or stats like this post focuses on, and only a few references to economics. What I did see was a tremendous amount of Boomer’s own words and behaviors, often directly from the person themselves as a tweet, email, or text. These posts, I think speak for themselves and conform to the personal experiences a lot of people have had with their own boomer parents.

Even if they can be statistically proven to be no different than any subsequent generation from a metrics point of view, that doesn’t mean they aren’t assholes. I apologize for the profanity but it’s the most succinct term I think.

I’m GenX, born in the 70s. My parents were boomers; their parents, my grandparents, were the greatest generation. We in GenX and some of the oldest Millennials had a front row seat for the generational transition from the Greatest to the Boomers. I think a lot of the hatred stems from our experiences during this time, and I honestly think many of the boomers deserve worse.

My greatest grandparents loved their children and went out of their way to help them as adults any way they could: money, childcare, advice, a place to land when you lost your job. I knew that I could go to my grandparents’ house at any time, **which I could walk to**, and I’d be welcomed with love. And fed. They didn’t move away even though they could afford it; their families were too important. They lived for their grandkids. They really were a great generation.

Now, it’s the boomer’s turn to the grandparents. Cool, they had some great role models. How did that turn out? For the most part they not only do they never help their kids as adults, but they also blame them for everything that has turned out less than ideal in their lives. They don’t offer loving or even useful guidance, they are supremely disinterested in their grandchildren beyond new photos every year for their condo in Florida. Did I mention they moved away as fast as they could and absolutely will not return to where they left their kids (who can’t afford to leave) and grandkids, nor are their families welcome to visit them at their home, which is “too nice” for little kids to ever enter. They’re nasty, anti-social parasites. If it is in fact the case that they haven’t hoarded most of our culture’s wealth, it’s not from lack of motivation to do so.

This is not a universal description obviously, but it’s very close to the experience of a large fraction of the children and grandchildren of boomers. It’s not about charts and graphs and economics or even demography.

They’re assholes. And we knew, and deeply loved, their parents. We were there, and we saw it happen.

This hasn’t been my experience; I’m curious whether it’s Charles or I who is the atypical one. I don’t know how you’d even start investigating this though.

Chance Johnson writes:

Any discussion of Boomers will inevitably devolve into a debate about NIMBYism, the Great American Rent Crisis, etc. Indulge me while I bite that bullet through a detour into the Horn of Africa.

Ethiopia was an economic basket case in the early 80s. Thanks to warfare, their economy is again doing poorly. But in between, they had a miraculous recovery. I read that the catalyst for their resurgence was radical land distribution quickly followed by the return of a capitalist government. A government that enforced free markets and relatively strong rule of law, but refused to undo the redistribution of their Marxist forebears.

This combination of redistribution plus free markets was an accident of history, of course. No Marxist ideologue would admit that a one-time redistribution was the only necessary Marxist policy. Nor would a capitalist ideologue initiate even a one-time redistribution, or admit that the benefits of such a program would outweigh its moral hazards.

So recreating the Ethiopian miracle would be a tall order. But dammit, I wish we could try it here. I really believe that if everyone had an affordable place to live where they didn’t have to worry about getting evicted for purely financial reasons, this security would enable them to be more effective in our capitalist system. Didn’t we do something like this more than once in American history, when the Feds issued sweeping amnesties for squatters on public land?

The key concept here is “security of tenure,” or the stability of knowing you will be able keep the roof over your head, come what may. Even if you lose your job with negligible savings, and it takes you a 6-12 months to get back on track. This security is oblique to the question of ownership vs. renting, and it deserves much more consideration.

I realize this is almost totally unrelated to Boomers, but I’m signal-boosting it anyway to make sure Richard Hanania sees it, since it supports my side of an email argument we had a few weeks ago.

specifics writes:

But didn’t the Boomers themselves arguably invent this strain of intergenerational warfare? “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” etc. You could argue that this is just deserts: They created the midcentury cultural conditions in which youth is worshipped, old age and authority are held in contempt, politics are governed by resentment, and money ultimately matters above all else.

I do not see it that way myself. I think every generation is the victim of their progenitors and the perpetrator of crimes upon their descendants, and the Boomers clearly inherited a fallen world themselves.

I’m not sure who invented it. I just think this seems like a good time to stop.

7: Updates / Conclusions

The most important thing I got from these interactions was learning about the proposal to keep property taxes high, but delay them until death/sale of property. This relieves some of my tension around Prop 13 and related issues.

But Darwin’s comment, and a few others along the same lines, also made me worry that I’m trying to exonerate Boomers through some manuever like “Well, their actions were just the inevitable product of the social/cultural/economic stresses they were under”. Even if this is true, it’s probably true of everyone, including slaveowners and Nazis. It doesn’t seem entirely correct either to blame them or to not blame them under these circumstances, but I should probably think more about whether I’m exonerating Boomers harder than I would exonerate other groups with this same excuse.

That question is taken from a recent Spectator poll.  Their experts offer varied answers, so I thought at the near quarter-century mark I would put together my own list, relying mostly on a seat of the pants perspective rather than comprehensiveness.  Here goes:

Cinema

Uncle Boonmee, In the Mood for Love, Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Four Months Three Weeks Two Days, from Iran A Separation, Oldboy, Silent Light (Reygadas), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Get Back, The Act of Killing, Master and Commander, Apocalypto, and New World would be a few of my picks.  Incendies anyone?

Classical music (a bad term these days, but you know what I mean):

Georg Friedrich Haas, 11,000 Strings, Golijov’s Passion, John Adams Transmigration of Souls, The Dharma at Big Sur, Caroline Shaw, and Stockhausen’s Licht operas perhaps.  Typically such works need to be seen live, as streaming is no substitute.  As for recordings, recorded versions of almost every classic work are better than before, opera being excluded from that generalization.  So the highest realizations of most classical music compositions have come in the last quarter century.

Fiction

Ferrante, the first two volumes of Knausgaard, Submission, Philip Pullman, and The Three-Body Problem.  The Marquez memoir and his kidnapping book, both better than his magic realism.  The Savage Detectives.  Philip Pullman.  Sonia and Sunny maybe?

Visual Arts

Bill Viola’s video art, Twombly’s Lepanto series, Cai Guo-Qiang and Chinese contemporary art more generally (noting it now seems to be in decline), the large Jennifer Bartlett installation that was in MOMA, Robert Gober.  Late Hockney and Richter works.  The best of Kara Walker.  The second floor of MOMA and so much of what has been shown there.

Jazz 

There is so much here, as perhaps the last twenty-five years have been a new peak for jazz, even as it fades in general popularity.  One could mention Craig Taborn, Chris Potter, and Marcus Gilmore, but there are dozens of top tier creators.  Cecile McLorin Salvant on the vocal side.  Is she really worse than Ella Fitzgerald?  I don’t think so.

Popular music (also a bad term)

The best of Wilco, Kanye, D’angelo, Frank Ocean, Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft.  How about Sunn O)))?  No slight intended to those listed, but I had been hoping this category would turn out a bit stronger?

Television

The Sopranos, the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, Srugim, Borgen, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Assorted

Hamilton, and there is plenty more in theater I have not seen.  At the very least one can cite Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia and Leopoldstadt.  There is games and gaming.  People around the world, overall, look much better than ever before.  The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the reoopened Great Egyptian Museum in Cairo.  The new wing at MOMA.  Architecture might need a post of its own, but I’ll start by citing the works of Peter Zumthor.  (Here is one broader list, it strikes me as too derivative in style, in any case it is hard to get around and see all these creations, same problem as with judging theatre.)  I do not follow poetry much, but Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney are two picks, both with many works in the new century.  The top LLMs, starting (but not ending) with GPT-4.  They are indeed things of beauty.

Overall, this list seems pretty amazing to me.  We are hardly a culture in decline.

The post What is the greatest artwork of the century so far? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Adam Tooze is a distinguished, prolific historian — I think I was introduced to him by The Wages of Destruction, about the German economy during World War II — who has also been a leader in the newsletter/Substack revolution. His Chartbook is essential reading. Given some of his recent writing about Germany, plus Trump’s declaration that Europe is effectively our enemy, I thought it would be interesting to talk. Transcript follows.

. . .

TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Adam Tooze

(recorded 12/11/25)

Paul Krugman: Hi, everyone. Paul Krugman here again, enlarging my universe. I’m going to talk today with Adam Tooze, who’s a historian at Columbia. He has a very unique, very influential—I think it was even pre-Substack—but is now on Substack, Chartbook, which has a lot of charts, but also just kinda gives you a lot of information about the world. I know that there are people who are absolutely fanatical about it.

But I also wanted to speak with Adam, because I’ve been writing some about Europe and Adam has a complex background—which we can talk about a little bit—but certainly knows Europe and especially Germany far better than I do. So welcome to my virtual studio.

Adam Tooze: Pleasure to be here Paul, really is.

Krugman: So just quickly, you were born in England, right? But mostly grew up in the former West Germany.

Tooze: That’s right. In Heidelberg.

Krugman: Now you’re at Columbia. Which is just up the road from where I would normally be, although I’m currently someplace a little bit more comfortable.

Tooze: You’re looking a little tan, you’re looking as though you’ve had some sun?

Krugman: Yeah.

I probably spend more time on Europe than the vast majority of U.S. based economists. I’m often more upbeat about Europe than most of the Europeans I know, but it’s in the news now. Trump’s national security strategy sort of is: no problems with Russia, middling on China, and then completely lashes out at Europe. As somebody who has a foot on either side of the Atlantic, which must be quite uncomfortable. How did you feel when seeing this stuff?

Tooze: I mean, I’m glad people are paying so much attention because I remember my shock at reading the national security strategy of the first Trump administration and realizing, “hey everyone, focus! This is extraordinary what’s going on here.” Because that was the one that announced great power competition and really the dawn of a new era with China. It had been sotto voce in the background with Obama and bang, here it was out in the open. Whereas this one we were anticipating for months, because there was all the scuttlebutt about what was going on.

The NSS divides the world into three zones. There’s the Western Hemisphere, over which America just incredibly presumptuously declares the new Monroe Doctrine, Trump corollary. It’s kind of crazy. Then, as you say, there are the other “great powers” with whom one deals peer-to-peer in a way. There’s a mano a mano—rather, a sycophantic kind of relationship between the US and China and Russia. Europe I read essentially as internal, in the sense that Europe is the woke America that MAGA hates worst; it is the secret ally, an extension of coastal America, certainly the East Coast. So in a sense, the culture war agenda that the Trump folks are running in the US can be run in Europe. In some ways, the Islamophobia can even be more explicit in relation to Europe than it is at home. Because you could accuse the Europeans of sacrificing their culture, a great replacement theory—essentially, you can carry on, you can send violence to the Munich Security Conference, and he will already announce this agenda earlier in the year. So that’s what we’re seeing in a strange way, Europe isn’t really distinct from the American political space. It’s the same political space. The conflict is therefore, really uninhibited and overtly partisan. Basically they’re asking for European politics to open the gates to the right. The irony as a European—if you’re a left progressive European—is the idea that somehow it’s a bulk of woke progressive liberals opening the door to Muslim migrants; just go look in the Mediterranean on a bad day, there’s dozens of people drowning, with Frontex blocking the way. The whole thing is a MAGA fantasy, but it is projected onto Europe in a really dramatic way. That’s kind of unique, I think, in the MAGA universe.

Krugman: I was just struck by that one line that said, “some NATO countries may become majority non-European.” Which as they wrote, could have meant Islamic, but also means nonwhite. Although last I heard—although it’s a funny case—Turkey is a member of NATO. (laughs)

Tooze: I mean, I think this is a way of talking about majority-minority America, but not; talking instead about it in Europe. The drama is real, right? The drama in Europe is very extraordinary. If I grew up in West Germany in the early 70s, mine was literally the first cohort of foreign kids to be admitted to German schools. Now, in the big urban areas of Germany, more than half the kids in elementary school have migrant backgrounds. So either they themselves are migrants or one of their parents is a migrant.

Anyone who’s been to Central Europe will know that the transformation is absolutely radical. The old imperial metropolises: Paris, Brussels, London, Dutch cities, have always been very cosmopolitan. But Germany is radically transformed. So there’s a real thing there. There’s a real change that’s extraordinarily dramatic. But MAGA is scaremongering in this grotesque way.

Krugman: So they’re projecting.

Let’s just talk about migrants. There’s really a much larger nonwhite European population pretty much throughout Western Europe than there used to be. I don’t know what the numbers are like, but how many?

Tooze: Germany, if you take the two parts: non-Germans, “Auslander” so-called, non-Germans living in Germany are of a population of 83 million, about 12 million. Then German citizens who themselves weren’t born there but have one German parent, 13 million. So 30% roughly of the German population. In the younger cohorts in elementary school, it’s higher. So it’s like peak-US migration experience. These are numbers comparable with pre-1914 US or the big cities in the US now. It’s very diverse and it comes from a wider range of areas than it does in the US. Because here in the US we have huge flocks from mostly South America, in Europe it’s across a wide territory that the migrants come from; and yes, a larger share of them are Muslim.

Krugman: So, there’s a real transformation. It’s true the only German city I’ve spent any time in—which I know is highly unrepresentative—is Berlin, and Berlin is very clearly not a Deutsche Volk city. It’s a melting pot.

Tooze: No, it truly is. Historically, before Turkish growth really got going and urbanization got growing, I think it was the third largest city in Turkey in the late 70s, or fourth maybe, there was Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and then Berlin. But now it’s a much wider array. A whole sort of melting block of different Arab migrants. You can wholly function in Berlin now in English. So it’s become a truly cosmopolitan place, but it’s not a big city, there’s only about 3.5 million there. So it’s also quite an intimate feeling.

And yes, the German chancellor, who has a knack for tactlessness or some would say thoughtlessness, launched this dog whistle talk about Stadtbild: “how does the city look?” He would be saying, “we’re fixing the migrant problem, we know there is this issue with how the city looks.” So there is even in the dominant center right party quite aggressive problematization of this change.

Krugman: On how the city looks, I have mixed feelings about the “walking around” test in general, but I do think that it is sometimes useful to just get a sense of cities and of cultures, though I’m not going to do a Tom Friedman and talk to a wise cabdriver who somehow sounds exactly like me. (laughs)

But, I’ve been going to Berlin for quite a while. It’s a complicated connection, but I have been spending time at the Freie University on and off over the years, and it has changed, even in that time. It definitely feels much less German than it did in the early 1990s. Also last time I was there it felt a little shabby, I don’t know why...

Tooze: Germany has federal organization, Berlin is a state. The notorious debt brake politics in Germany, the non-discretionary fiscal rules are in large part about constraining debt burdens of debt prone local government, and Berlin will be in the crosshairs of that; other deindustrializing cities like Bremen would be in that kind of zone.

So Berlin has issues with funding basic public services at the local level, and you feel that on the street. It isn’t New York on a bad day—let alone other American cities on a bad day—but it is no longer a spick and span European city, it’s not like a Zurich or somewhere like that. So you feel it, it has a rough edge. The hard drug market in certain parts of Berlin is extraordinarily open, much more so than you would see in New York. There’s a withdrawal of policing that alarms people, but the levels of violent criminality are lower than the levels in the US, which themselves are easily exaggerated. So it’s on that level, a very safe place.

The basic infrastructure of public services like transport are way better than in any comparable American city. So I always say to the Germans, “it’s like misery at a high level.” It’s not glossy. Berlin perhaps was never really glossy. What Berlin lacks is real wealth. Germany’s economic geography is interesting because once upon a time, pre-1945, the new capital of Germany after 1871 attracted all of the corporate headquarters, Deutsche Bank, Siemens. Everyone was there, not the Ruhr, the big old steel money, but all of the new money was there. Then after World War two, as it became in Ireland in the Cold War, all of the big money went elsewhere to Frankfurt, to Munich, to Hamburg, and it hasn’t come back with reunification. So it’s a really unusual capital city because until about five years ago it lowered average GDP per capita by including it. Paris and London are a large part of the UK and the French economy. Berlin was a net drag on German GDP; not any longer, but that’s a recent development.

Krugman: Completely off topic. But Zipf’s law; on city sizes for the United States, if you rank our metropolitan areas, the population is inversely proportional to the rank. LA is about half the size of greater New York. Chicago is about a third the size. It’s a shockingly exact relationship, and it’s held true for more than a century. Germany doesn’t look like that at all. There’s no real dominant cities.

Tooze: Germany’s economic geography always was diverse and it’s one of the charms of the country and you mentioned earlier on the volk idea, that’s kind of projection always, they have to imagine themselves a unified, homogenous nation, whereas in fact, both in terms of ethnicity, culture, migration, and religion of course, with the Catholic Protestant divide, it’s a very diverse place.

Only I think one time maybe in modern political history has a party achieved 50% of the vote? The Nazis never came close, 37% in a free and fair election. Konrad Adenauer, Christian democratic boom time West Germany with the East lopped off, all the communists gone: they got to 51%. I think in the early ‘50 election, that’s the only time it’s ever happened. So the society is constitutively diverse, plural and regionalized, highly regionalized. It’s not like a London or a Paris kind of situation.

Krugman: So, let’s talk economics, Europe is still—certainly the EU plus the UK as an economic power—is not that much smaller than the United States.

Tooze: Exactly, people always forget this.

Krugman: There was this big report last year by Mario Draghi, former Prime Minister of Italy. Although I love Ben Bernanke, Draghi I think is history’s greatest central banker, he saved the Euro.

Tooze: Yup no question, most consequential.

Krugman: This report is quite bleak about how Europe is falling behind.

I’m a little bit of a contrarian here—but I’m not sure that I believe in my own contrarianism. But regarding the “walking around” test, I spent a fair bit of time in the Netherlands walking around Rotterdam, Leiden. You can’t walk around Amsterdam because there are too many damn tourists, but walking around the Netherlands does not feel backward, does not feel like it’s lagging. But last time I was in Berlin, it kind of did, now again Berlin is kind of unrepresentative, but you just wrote a really long, quite pretty grim piece about the state of the German economy and political scene.

Do you feel that Europe is really doing as badly as the Draghi report suggested?

Tooze: I think we have to distinguish levels, growth rates, long run trends. The levels argument with Europe is, I think, overwhelming. If you’re faced with a Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance and “you don’t know which passport you’re going to end up with,” you just pray it’s the Dutch one, some high performing country. You could also say history ended there and, “it ain’t broke so why fix it?” What higher material standard of living could you aspire to than a comfortable position in the Netherlands? It is on the other hand—it’s the size of New York, and it has the GDP roughly of the same size as New York State. So it’s a small part of a much bigger picture, which is more diverse and more uneven. But I mean, I think the levels point is very well taken. Same even for Italy, which is generally seen as one of the real laggards. But it’s not for nothing that people go on holiday there. It’s a very, very attractive way of life. I think there’s a lot of under measurement of quality of life aspects in those numbers.

The growth rate is the thing that’s been really worrying for Germany. So Germany’s economy has essentially had a lost decade. We’ve kind of gotten used to that with the UK, Italy, but for Germany to stall out the way it has—again, we’re not talking about any real fall, but to see no growth essentially, in real terms: in per capita income and investment levels in a unit the size of Germany, which is so crucial to Europe as a whole—is very unusual and sets the alarm bells ringing. If you then look at the stuff that Draghi was looking at, which was very informed by the new theories of innovation, the Nobel Prize winners that were looking at Schumpeterian logics of, “are you investing in the right sectors that’ll generate the creative destruction that will generate the long run innovation” and you look at where the R&D is concentrated in Europe, what R&D does happen in the private sector, which is lower than either China or the US, where it happens is in what people now call “mid tech.” So 10, 15, 20 years ago, investment was heavily concentrated in R&D in the German automotive sector, and last year it was still heavily concentrated in the German automotive sector, which is now being overtaken by the Chinese EV manufacturers. I think it’s like this strange combination of a Wile E. Coyote kind of moment with regard to standard of living. It’s like, “oh my God.” Like we’re kind of suspended in mid-air as everything is just fine. To the German question about, where’s the growth gone?

To the third layer of question, which is where is it going to come from in future? And how do we feel about placing third in a heavy hitters battle of oligopolies, state capitalist models we’re seeing in the US and China? That’s where I think the anxiety comes from.

Krugman: Europe has really been largely shut out of tech—which is not actually right, there are other kinds of platform economies.

Tooze: Platform economies, the platforms they are totally out.

Krugman: That’s for real, that’s clear there. Stock market valuations and so on. You need to read a little ways into it, but all of the measured productivity differences between Europe and the United States are really tech, and other stuff looks the same. Which raises questions about how well do we even measure productivity in tech? So, are those numbers for real? But, Germany clearly is kind of stuck in the past, right?

Tooze: No, it’s really extraordinary. If you look at the leading German companies, they’re 100 years old. Once upon a time, 120 years old, 150 years old in some cases, we would have once celebrated that; an America not so long ago also did, a GE, a GM, a Ford, AT&T: these were the bastions of the mid 20th century economy. Germany has kind of remained stuck there, really. For a while, of course, this was reinforced by the needs of the Chinese market, because Germany’s strengths in mid-sized mechanical engineering firms and the people that supply the machines that make the machines really suited the Chinese industrialization model to a T. And so Germany had 20 years in which it was actually kind of running export surpluses with China, which takes something. That flipped on them really badly in the last five years.

Krugman: One of the things that everyone talks about now for Germany is deindustrialization, which is kind of wild. It really says that the Trumpian theory of deindustrialization has to be wrong, because Germany still runs large trade surpluses.

Tooze: Exactly. When we say deindustrialization for Germany, we’re only talking convergence to the norm of a UK, France and Italy, a US. Germany has an outsized manufacturing share, even when everyone was industrialized, it did. It was in that Japan-Belgium league of super high industrialized countries, and it has retained that edge. This was one of the benefits of this 20 year period where they really benefited from globalization and deindustrialization in their case means convergence. They’ve lost their surplus with China. So there’s a hint of Trump kind of logic there, or China shock kind of logic, shall we say.

Krugman: But they’re running off surplus with somebody.

Tooze: Yeah. Overall they’re still running a large surplus with almost everyone else.

Krugman: It’s funny, the oddities: it turns out that, looking at bilateral US European trade, you get very confused because some of it is clearly all wrong. The US normally runs a surplus with the Netherlands.

Tooze: Well this is the Brad Setser kind of logic: “there’s stuff going on in the accounting of American corporations.”

Krugman: Some of it is. The leprechaun economics. One of my contributions with Ireland. (laughs)

But no, a lot of it’s just Rotterdam, a lot of U.S exports to Europe are going to Rotterdam and then being transferred into Germany. The thing is, around 15 years ago, Germany was feeling pretty good about itself. They were feeling quite arrogant about their economic performance, right? At the time of the European debt crisis, obviously Germany was lecturing everybody else on how “we are responsible, we know how to do things.” But you see it in the numbers too, right?

Tooze: They did. The thing we haven’t mentioned so far, it’s kind of extraordinary we’ve gotten this far without mentioning it, is the debt brake. So in the 90s you have the reunification boom, which involves about $1 trillion euros worth of spending, which generates a boom, also a bust. Then you get this combination of labor market, Social Security, people call them “reforms”, I prefer to call them a shock or a change because they actually create the low wage labor market. But then there’s considerable boost from export surpluses, and the extension of the German supply chain into Central Europe, where the high tech German manufacturers are building out, and all of that sustains their growth through the 2000s, and they emerge in a relatively strong position during the European crisis. In 2009, they adopted this policy of basically zeroing out deficits at the state level and very tight constriction of federal deficits and that takes a while to work its way through the system. But from the mid 2010s onwards, they’re beginning to run surpluses. But the cost of that of course, is the erosion of public investment.

They moved to a net negative public investment regime, which is terrible in the long run.

Krugman: So, net negative in this case means that their stuff is depreciating. Public sector stuff. German railroads are shockingly bad, right?

Tooze: Absolutely, yeah. There’s all these stories about how everybody else in Europe’s reliability and punctuality statistics are dragged down by the fact that trains pass through Germany, where they invariably pick up delays. It’s in complete shambles, and it’s an interesting effect of chronic underinvestment. It really isn’t rocket science. It just matters more to Germany because compared to the US, where passenger transport never really was the priority of the system. It was always really freight. In Germany, the passenger transport sector is really a crucial part of the public infrastructure. But education as well, I mean, the school system is dilapidated. The road network is dilapidated. All of this talk now about national security, you can’t actually move heavy military equipment across Germany safely because the bridges aren’t robust enough anymore.

Krugman: Good God.

Tooze: So it’s really it’s pretty it’s pretty astounding. According to the data, America’s public investment is higher, which living in the northeast, it’s a little hard to believe, but that’s what the data show.

Krugman: Again, in Berlin the public transit is really fantastic by US standards. Although New York, it’s ugly and has rats but it’s actually very fast.

Tooze: I know it is, and it’s cheap. New York is, I agree, I was thinking more of the whole corridor.

Krugman: The rest of the rest of America, it’s all cars. The thing that also shocked me is, I’ve basically spent time everywhere but in Germany in Europe and in Italy, it’s always a real shock. The Italian trains are now terrific. Meloni has made the trains run on time, which Mussolini never did, but she kind of has.

Tooze: Yeah. I mean, it’s a modular technology, right? You should be able to just roll it out. As long as you spend properly. The Spanish network is extremely good as well. No, I like your contrarian impulse. Whenever I’m in China a fair amount recently and I’m always trying to get them to take Europe seriously because there is a kind of tendency to dismiss it, to project the collapse of the euro and the EU into the future. That is where Draghi, as you were saying, is just this pivotal figure. This is after all, the significance of the 2012 whatever-it-takes moment is he’s looking skeptical, Euroskeptic, British hedge funds in the City of London in the eyes and saying, “look, we are for real. Do not bet against this. I will make you pay if you bet against it.” There is a kind of a real power to that which is easy to underestimate.

Krugman: By the way, viewers may not know the story. There was this huge crisis of interest rates, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian debts were skyrocketing. Everyone is saying they’re going to go bankrupt. The euro is going to collapse. Paul DeGraue, Belgian economist said, “this is a panic, the numbers don’t really justify this.” Mario Draghi actually agreed and said three words, “whatever it takes,” that the ECB will stand behind that and will make sure the countries don’t run out of cash. The crisis just evaporated like nothing. Most effective central bank statement in the history of humanity, I’m sure.

But now he’s sounding the alarm, and I’m not sure that everyone knows about the Rawls test, but if you had to choose a society to be born into not knowing who in that society you would clearly pick the Netherlands if you had a choice of countries and you probably pick Western Europe over the United States, because to be rich in America is to be really rich, but to be poor is to be really poor. That’s less true in Europe, even in Germany.

Tooze: Yes. No, absolutely. Interestingly, pretax inequality in many of the European countries, because they were exposed to globalization shocks too, that increased very dramatically over the last generation. But the difference is their welfare states, the American welfare state is progressive, it’s just not big enough. Whereas they are both progressive and large welfare states and their tax systems also bite more on the income side.

So the combination means that the post tax, post benefit Ginis in Europe—this is the measure of inequality—it’s just dramatically different. It affects every area of society. It is this constant dilemma of: on one level, this is a uniquely successful social experiment of an egalitarian, relatively egalitarian kind, but how do you guarantee its future? And one of the more alarming things I think about the Draghi report is his prescription, which was basically to say “we need more state capitalism.”

There’s lots of different ways of putting this. Some of them are more polite, some of them are more critical sounding. But essentially we need more productivity growth and profit enhancing collaboration between governments in Europe and the private sector, because that is the formula that we have seen work both in the US and China to generate, as you were saying, these outsized performance gains, notably in the tech sector. It’s not a story just of markets or businesses. It’s not a story just of government. It’s a story of the two collaborating. Essentially he’s saying, “the Europeans have been overzealous when it comes to anti-competition regulation, and they should be tolerating higher oligopolistic profits that will be turned back, we hope, into investment and therefore productivity growth.” That I took to be the message of Draghi. He may very well be the most consequential central banker. You could also read him as the most articulate mouthpiece of European capital, of European business and in the grand sense of architecting strategy for European business. He is the person who articulates that.

Krugman: So he’s basically calling for what the French used to call national champions, except that they’re continental champions.

Tooze: He’s very French. The whole thing. This is one of the debates that is going on. We’ve been talking a lot about Germany. The headlines have been grabbed by political turmoil in France, worries about the bond market. But in one way, you could definitely say that the debate in Europe, in policy terms, has been sliding in the French direction because a way of reading Europe over the last 25 years is they drank the neoliberal Kool-Aid. They really actually took a whole variety of things very seriously. Highly independent central bank, non-discretionary fiscal policy, no picking winners on industrial policy, and really rather effective policing of competition in the interests of consumers barring various types of industrial merger. So not the American sloppy, loosey goosey kind of market monetarist deal, but something much more hard nosed. Essentially Draghi is saying, “maybe we played too much by the rules. Maybe we took all of this far too literally. Maybe actually what was going on was another kind of model.” We need to be realistic about it. The people who have preached that consistently have been the French.

Krugman: Now, it’s interesting. I actually have done zero homework on France. How is France doing?

Tooze: There’re two dimensions to this, the bond market is the thing that gets the headlines. What’s happened is that, during the crisis we were referring to, 15 years ago France joined Germany in the high quality debt club, in part because the Germans weren’t issuing any debt. And if you’re a bond trader, you love debt because you’ve got to actually have something to transact.

So French government debt served as a near substitute for the non-existent German debt. And so OATs, so called, these are with the French government that were very popular. Their price went up, their yield went down. And what’s happened in the last 4 or 5 years is that France has slid back towards the Spain-Italy camp, and that’s come as a huge shock to Paris because its debt level is almost American. It’s not quite American, but it’s almost American. If you’re France and in the eurozone system and you don’t control your own central bank the way that the US potentially does, this is worrying. Not from a macro point of view, there’s no reason to panic. It’s really worrying because the politics of France is deadlocked and the Macron effort to stabilize a centrist, pro-market, liberal policy has failed.

So really, the question is whether or not Marine Le Pen’s far right party doesn’t break through at the next presidential election, because to stop it now would take a coalition of centrist and leftist forces. It’s not clear anyone’s in a position to articulate that. So it’s kind of like a bond market situation that’s a little bit iffy, but not really in any way critical combined with genuine uncertainty about the functioning of French democracy.

Krugman: Germany has low debt. But it also has dreadful demography, right?

Tooze: Yes. Dreadful demography in terms of that, because the bargain for women of childbearing age is really shitty.

Krugman: Yeah.

Tooze: The labor market conditions are not what they should be, and childcare is catching up, but it’s not as good as it should be. So a lot of women have opted out of that kind of bargain. So what you do see is an awful lot of part time working. If more women were employed at full time rates more and more, according to European averages, then the labor market issues would rather disappear.

Yes, there is bad demography in Germany. There’s plenty of people who’d happily be part of the German labor force. It’s just a question of whether German society can absorb that.

Krugman: That’s right. The issue: fertility is well below replacement and the population will shrink. I guess the last projections I saw said not that France is awash in babies, but that still at a certain point, sometime in and a few decades from now, Napoleon wins and France has a larger population than Germany.

Tooze: I just think that’s a matter of migration trends.

Krugman: So we have these European societies and Germany is certainly it’s kind of less cushy, less comprehensive social safety net, but still beyond the wildest dreams of the American left. France, even more so. The economies are not poor. On the whole, it’s sort of everything for a center left American that would be beyond anything that you could reasonably hope to enact. Yet you have the hard right definitely gaining strength. Germany, the AfD, I don’t know if they’re actually worse, really, than Le Pen’s people, probably, but you do have a party that is pretty obviously neo Nazi that is really gaining strength. So what’s going on? What feeds all of this discontent?

Tooze: Well, I mean, I would say the analogy is—let’s just start in the U.S. I mean, let’s start with the GOP that we’re familiar with, right? There’s a neo-Nazi wing, an outright fascist wing, Hitler saluting, the whole works. They aren’t, I would say, the majority of any of the far right parties. All of these parties are not to the right of the GOP. It’s important to emphasize that they just happen to be in Europe, like the AfD is by no means more right wing than Trump’s GOP. They are just German, which is worrying.

Krugman: That’s interesting.

Tooze: The opinion polling on Germany suggests there’s about 1 to 2% of the population which are actually Nazi. Then you have a 5 to 10% who are hardcore, authoritarian, post democratic. Then you have a—currently they’re polling in the mid 20s, they’ve never gone higher than that—who are willing to contemplate voting for a party that wants systemic change, all the MAGA stuff like total change and all that. It’s what’s very familiar and it’s well short of the numbers that the GOP gets. Because there is an alternative, which is that you can vote for a centrist right wing party, which is where the sensible Republicans would be if they had the option. And it wasn’t the first past the post system, which is the CDU, which is Chancellor Merz’s party which is conservative, skeptical towards migration but not actually racist, and doesn’t have a neo-Nazi base.

So that is the configuration. It’s typical of France as well, and it used to be typical of Italy. Why are these parties gaining the support they are? It’s a familiar mix of motives, the cocktail is composed slightly differently. The really big difference is that anti-black racism plays a much smaller role in Europe, and Islamophobia is much more important. So the core of the xenophobic, racist element is Islamophobia. The anti-black element is strictly secondary everywhere, I think including in France, where they overlap incredibly closely because the black migrants tend to be from North Africa. So you get all from the Sahel, so you get a very close overlap. But in Germany, it’s really Islamophobia that’s doing the driving.

So that’s a distinction to the US. Because of this radical change in the composition of the population, especially since 2015 with the Syrian crisis and the refugee crisis and ISIS and all of that, there was that kind of impulse. The other element is an anti elite affect, which is powerful across all of European societies. They are, like us, very unequal places. It’s more discreet than in the US. The average levels of inequality are slightly lower. But, you know, anyone in their right mind can see that all of these European societies are profoundly unequal. And furthermore, in the media, in education, in the professions, there is, as in the US, a strong liberal bias across the board. So it’s very easy to mobilize a populist anti PMC, anti professional managerial class kind of coalition in most of these societies as well.

Then you’ve kind of got the growth story like substantial minorities of the European population are kind of wondering like where they’re promised—it’s not the American dream type thing, but nevertheless—where the promise of affluence and stability that was once theirs, where that’s coming from and where the well-paid, secure, meaningful blue collar jobs are that their dads or granddads used to have, like where that’s coming from and why some Turkish or Arab or Syrian guy has got that and they haven’t. Why is there a huge queue at the hospital and why there’s no spaces for kids at school and why, if your nephew goes to school, he goes to a class which is 60% migrant? They’re asking themselves those kinds of questions. If you add all of that up, you get to this kind of voter potential.

Krugman: There’s a left-behind-regions issue as well. Right?

Tooze: Oh absolutely huge inequality.

Krugman: So the DRR is never…

Tooze: Well depends where you look. I mean, if you go to Leipzig or Dresden, you’d have that same reaction of, “oh my God, if there was a single city in a United States like this, it would be headline news.” But if you go out to the countryside, the back areas of East Germany, I’d hesitate to say that they’re not West Virginia, but they are pretty grim places with few prospects. Large outmigration of young people. So you get residual components. The polarities are very extreme. They are, in fact, most extreme in the UK, which we’re not talking about because it’s not in the EU story, but they are nevertheless very stark. The former industrial areas of northern Europe, northern France, Belgium, are grim.

Krugman: There’s the obliviousness of people of our class occasionally. I was talking a few years back, but, with a very eminent, very smart, British former public official, etc. and he said “well, of course, in England, we don’t have places these blasted left behind regions the way you have the United States.” And I was saying, “have you been to Yorkshire lately.” (laughs)

Tooze: No, seriously.

So then you ask yourself why somebody in one of those regions might be absolutely furious about the assholes in London. Like, they don’t get it right. They don’t. They fundamentally don’t understand, so, that’s the cocktail.

My sense is that it’s more visible in Europe because they generally have PR proportional representation type systems. So they have about six parties in the same way as the US has six parties, it’s just three of them are grouped into each of the two main parties in the US. So they’re not visible. But you know, if you think about the Democratic Party coalition as was Manchin through to AOC and you think of the similar kind: McCain through the far right of MAGA, essentially the spectrum is very similar in Europe. It’s more fragmented, it’s more visible in most countries.

There’s another thing, there’s countervailing tendencies. The Dutch, which both of us agree it’s an amazing society, but they voted for a far right government. They got a far right government, it was a total shambles, so they voted for moderates. In Italy, the Fratelli d’Italia, who really were once upon a time a post fascist party. Post, as in: “We used to be fascist, we’re not fascist anymore,” not like, “goodbye to fascism.” Meloni really was a street activist of a fascist party. Yet in office, she turns into something that’s more recognizable as a mainline conservative, to be honest, with a hard nationalist edge in a hard culture world politics. But she’s not taking Italy back to fascism. That’s not what’s happening. So Germany is a really fascinating case because it’s a little bit like exchange controls, or something like that. They’ve put what they call a firewall, which is that no one will talk to the AfD. The problem is what happens when you kind of have to actually make democracy functional? What is the consequence for democracy of just refusing to talk to them at all? So they’re trying an exclusion strategy, they even actually talked about criminalizing the AfD, because the Germans have what they call “a democracy that defends itself.” So if they’re agencies of constitutional protection judge that the party is anti-constitutional, they can outlaw the party. They came pretty close to doing this for a party that represents 25% of the population.

So that’s different in Italy, what we’re seeing is transformismo, this strategy: you bring them in and then see what happens, and they end up being digested by the logics of Italian society; in Germany right now they’re holding the AfD at bay. The anxiety of those opinion polls is that they do it every Sunday in Germany and the question is essentially, how do the other parties form viable coalitions if they’re not going to talk to the 25%?

Krugman: So the United States may have it worse just because we probably have about the same number of people with hard right inclinations as everybody else. But because of our primary system and two party system, that faction ends up controlling.

Tooze: Exactly, the tail ends up wagging the dog. It’s like the most radical wing ends up dictating politics. And then there’s the gerrymandering. And so they’re quite insulated. We haven’t yet in Western Europe seen that subversion of institutions. Italy, maybe a different story. But the worry in the US, presumably now, is that the institutions themselves—I was thinking of gerrymandering—the entire process is becoming deeply politicized. We’re not seeing that yet in Germany.

Krugman: Okay. It’s worrisome. The theory behind social democracy is in part that if you take care of people, then they will support the constitutional order and all of that. And it kind of doesn’t work? Is that the European lesson?

Tooze: By itself, it’s not enough. And furthermore, people’s standards constantly adjust. And so people in Europe are not benchmarking themselves against West Virginia and saying, “oh my God, I’m so glad I’m not there.” They’re comparing themselves to memories of the past to nicer parts of their own countries. They’re doing all of that relativity stuff where they see foreign neighbors getting things which they think they should have. So I think the bigger lesson is that this A-rated social democracy, a social democracy without politics, without a public sphere that actually does the political education. And I think the left and progressives have to embrace this, like, does the work of explaining what this is about and what the trade offs are not in the kind of, woke sense, but in the sense of: these are the logic of social democracy, this is how economies work, this is how people fit in, these are the mechanisms that we have to uphold and continue to use creatively. That’s what I think has been lost, not just in the US, because of course it’s been lost in the US as well, but has attenuated in Europe. So it’s more kind of a Putnam story of the erosion of the social institutions that went with social democracy and one shouldn’t, in the European case, either underestimate the extent to which those social democratic compromises—these welfare states—were, after all, built on top of societies which had gone through the full on murderous Civil War period of the first half of the 20th century. Italians on Italians, French on French, Germans on everyone, Pole on Pole—really savage. This was the cauldron of revolution, and it was ultraviolent. Tens of millions of people are killed and are killing. And out of that came these very tightly wrought, powerfully constrained Cold War compromises and a lot of that fabric, the guts, the real undergirding of what made those societies what they were has just eroded and attenuated in the last 30 years.

So what you’re left with is kind of high performing welfare states, but without any of the political guts, the German welfare state still works incredibly well in moderating the difference between pre tax and post tax Gini. Like, does it make Germans feel as though they’re part of a functioning social democracy? No it doesn’t.

Krugman: Okay, so just the last question, and of course you don’t know the answer but can Europe get its act together sufficiently to be the competitive player on the world scene that it ought to be, if only to reflect its values?

Tooze: It’s interesting the response to Ukraine, we haven’t spoken about Ukraine, the thing that really hangs over Europe in a way it doesn’t in the US. People interested in foreign policy follow Ukraine in the US, in Europe it’s like really up close. There are millions of Ukrainians living in Western Europe, especially in Germany. The war is really close by and America is absenting itself, NSS makes that very clear. So Europe is facing a huge challenge. And I think the evidence is they will rise to it. Not sufficiently not the way you would hope, not by way of the EU, essentially large expansion of an EU army. None of that’s going to happen. But are they going to assemble a coalition sufficient to deter Russia? Yes, and that’s quite remarkable. America has not faced a challenge like that, right? A proper war with a real antagonist as close as Ukraine is, this is a real challenge. I think Europe will face it.

Europe responded to Covid in many ways, I think more effectively than the US in 2020. The vaccine was America’s great gift, the mRNA vaccines, but also in partly with European science expertise feeding in. I think a lot turns on how we think the AI tech story is going to go. If you really think that is the center of all future development, then Europe is in a weak position unless it can position itself in the AI using AI application kind of space. If you think that is likely going to be a bust, then of course America’s future looks darker and we might, in two years time, be having a very different conversation over the wreckage of excessive American stock market valuations and Europe in a much more relatively strong position.

You’re right, I don’t know the answer. But, there’s this cliche about Europe, Jean Monnet saying that, “Europe is the sum total of answers found to crises.” And it’s still in the business of trying to find answers to crises. One of the things I find interesting about Europe, unlike in the US, is there is actual constitutional change; over the period of our lifetimes, since the 70s, there have been really deep constitutional changes in Europe and at lots of different levels. The Germans got their act together to fight the two thirds majority only earlier this year to get rid of their debt brake. Imagine that happening in the US right now. So there’s a kind of fluid, even in this old continent, like there is a fluidity of politics and institutions and an openness to quite deep change that unfortunately, we don’t have in the US.

Krugman: So that’s an upbeat note. And I will say, I agree that relative to what you might have wanted, Europe’s response to Ukraine has fallen short relative to what you might have expected. I mean, it’s actually astonishingly positive.

Tooze: Yeah, I agree.

Krugman: So there remains hope for Europe and God knows we need some place in the world that still believes in democratic values.

Tooze: Yes.

Krugman: Okay. Thanks so much for talking to me.

Tooze: It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.