Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 91

Yglesias Award Nominee

“The current climate of McCarthyism within some segments of feminism and the left is so ingrained and toxic that there are active attempts to outlaw some views because they cause offense. Petitions against individuals appear to be a recent substitute for political action towards the root causes of misogyny and other social ills … The “ban this sick filth” approach is starting to look more like censorship than progressive politics. Political protest and heated debate has been replaced with a witch-hunt mentality …

It is hugely important to hold abusive men to account, but we feminist campaigners have learned that the state allows men to perpetrate individual crimes, and have therefore tended to focus on making root and branch change. Lately we appear to have gone backwards. It is as though we have lost the strength and confidence to effectively challenge institutions.

Moral superiority and “call out” culture has trumped political activism. Feminists have a proud history of taking state institutions and corporations to task. It would seem this is being lost in a sea of vitriol. We built this movement on a desire and willingness to question and challenge old assumptions and truisms. We are in danger of becoming autocrats who would rather organise a pile-on than try to change systems. The life blood of feminism is in danger of becoming bile,” – Julie Bindel, The Guardian.

Those Victorians Weren’t So Prudish

Historian Fern Ridell would have you know that they enjoyed rather spirited sex lives:

A book called The Art to Begetting Handsome Children, published in 1860, contains a detailed passage on foreplay, and shows us that, for the Victorians, sex, pleasure and love were concepts that were universally tied together. In A Guide To Marriage, published in 1865 by the aptly named Albert Sidebottom, the advice to young couples exploring their relationship for the first time is that “All love between the sexes is based upon sexual passion”. This is something I’ve come across time and again in researching Victorian attitudes to sex: sexual pleasure, and especially female sexual pleasure, really mattered. But we seem incapable of seeing women in the Victorian period as anything other than sexually passive, a gender so disconnected from their bodies that they had to be stimulated by the inventions of men. This just isn’t true. From the erotic life of courtesan Cora Pearl, to the romantic female relationships of Mary Benson, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Victorian female sexuality was just as expressive and expansive as it is today.

(Cropped image of Victorian porn via the very NSFW tumblr “Those Naughty Victorians“)

There But For Fortune Go You Or I …

William McPherson describes how he became impoverished and what it’s like:

If you’re poor, what might have been a minor annoyance, or even a major inconvenience, becomes something of a disaster. Your hard drive crashes? Who’s going to pay for the recovery of its data, not to mention the new computer? I’m not playing solitaire on this machine; the hard drive holds my work, virtually my life. It is not a luxury for me but a necessity. I need dental work. Anybody got $10,000? Dentists are not a luxury. Dental disease can make you seriously ill. Lose your cellphone? What may be a luxury to some is a necessity to me. Without that telephone and that computer, my life as I have known it would cease to exist. Not long after, so would I. I am not eager for that to happen. Need to go to a funeral hundreds of miles away? Who pays for the plane ticket? In the case of the funeral, my nephew paid for the plane ticket. My daughter and son-in-law paid for the dental work.

Sometimes, I find it deeply humiliating that I am dependent on such kindnesses when I would prefer that the kindnesses flow the other way. Most of the time, though, I am just extremely grateful for the help of family and friends. It’s not so much humiliating as it is humbling, which is a good thing.

I am ashamed to have gotten myself into this situation. Unlike many who are born, live, and die in poverty, I got where I am today through my own efforts. I can’t blame anyone else. Perhaps, it should be humiliating to reveal myself like this to the eyes of any passing stranger or friend; more humiliating to friends, actually, some of whom knew me in another life. Most of my friends probably don’t realize or would rather not realize just how parlous my situation is. Just as well. We’d both be embarrassed.

Dreher sympathizes:

As McPherson concedes, he didn’t take as seriously as he ought to have done the importance of saving, investing wisely, and living conservatively. Though he was never rich, the key factor here seems to be his inability in the past to imagine what poverty would be like, and that it would be a possibility for someone like him.

I think this is me. I mean, I have been guided by a good financial planner for the past seven or eight years, and through conservative investing and saving, have built up a decent amount of financial security. But I live in fear that I’m missing something, and through my own extravagance — hey, why not buy those expensive pork chops for that French dish you want to cook this weekend? — I will have left the gates of the city open at night, and the enemy will come in. I read that piece by William McPherson and think: yep, that could easily be me one day.

Face Of The Day

An Ultra Orthodox Jewish man cries during the funeral of Rabbi Moshe Twersky in Jerusalem, Israel on November 18, 2014. Two Palestinians armed with a gun and axes burst into a Jerusalem synagogue and killed four Israelis before being shot dead. By Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images.

Grubergate Still Going Strong

Fox News continues to cover the ACA architect’s controversial remarks:

Cillizza tries to understand Republicans’ obsession with Gruber:

Nothing makes conservatives more angry than the belief, which they think is widespread among liberals, that they are stupid. That if only conservatives read as much as the left or had the intellectual capacity of the left, they would see things the way the left sees them.

Jonathan Cohn insists that the wool wasn’t pulled over Americans’ eyes:

Did the Obama Administration engage in some creative salesmanship of its own? Of course it did. And in one very regrettable instance, it misled the public about how the plan would work out. Obama repeatedly told people, without qualification, that they could keep their insurance if they liked it. In fact, many people who bought insurance their own and held plans that didn’t live up to the new law’s standards would have to give them up. Most ended up learning this in the worst possible way: When a cancellation notice from an insurance company arrived in the mail last fall, and without a working Obamacare website to check out their new options. These people constituted a small number of people, relative to the whole population, and it’s still not clear how many lost plans because insurers seized the moment to drop less profitable products in the market. Had Obama merely said “most people” could keep their plans, or “if you have a good plan already, you can keep it,” he would have been fine. He didn’t.

But accusations that Obama and his allies systematically misrepresented the law in other important ways—or hid its key features from the public—don’t gibe with the historical record. The official debate over its provisions lasted approximately a year, the unofficial debate stretched back even farther than that, and during that time analysts pored over details and partisans on both sides argued over virtually every aspect.

Ezra adds that Gruber “was really, really frustrated by Washington’s games”:

He was really annoyed at politicians framing things and writing legislative language to support their press releases rather than the final law. As involved as he’s been in the policymaking process, Gruber is, first and foremost, an MIT economist. And he’s got little patience for Washington’s tendency to take clean, straightforward policies and complicate them in the name of politics. ….

But Gruber did something stupid here: he tried to look knowing and clever to his audience by dismissing the intelligence of voters. His actual point there is ridiculous. The idea that most voters were paying close attention to subtle framing decisions around risk pooling or excise taxes or even mandates is absurd. Voters aren’t dumb. They just don’t follow politics closely. When Washington tries to trick people, it’s almost always trying to trick itself.

On the other side of the debate, Peter Suderman uses the administration’s spin against it:

Responding over the weekend to questions about Gruber’s statements, President Obama pushed back on Gruber’s role, labeling him “some adviser who was never on our staff.” Gruber’s remarks, Obama said, were “not a reflection on the actual process that was run” when crafting and passing Obamacare.

These reactions from Obama and others were, for the most part, technically true—but nonetheless misleading about Gruber’s influence on the law. At a minimum, they were not fully transparent about his role. In attempting to downplay Gruber’s remarks, Obamacare’s supporters had instead proved him right.

Earlier Dish on the story here and here.

Drowning In Abuse

Katy Waldman absorbs an exposé by Rachel Sturtz on “the scourge of sexual abuse in competitive swimming”:

Sexual abuse cases in youth sports “happen with much greater frequency than people realize,” Sturtz asserts in the Outside piece, and then goes long on the institutional forces that have allowed the abuse to silently metastasize. Unlike most European countries, the United States has no government agency dedicated to protecting kids from molestation by their youth coaches.

Instead, that responsibility falls to the United States Olympic Committee, which then outsources the task to national governing bodies, or NGBs, like USA Swimming, USA Football, and USA Taekwondo. This decentralized structure ensures that the people dealing with complaints of sexual abuse are those with the closest ties to the athletic community under investigation, officials who are more likely than disinterested third parties to wish to preserve appearances and reputations. With “the fox … guarding the henhouse,” Sturtz writes, “the USOC’s system historically protected the institution and its coaches more than children, dragging out investigations and lawsuits until sexual-assault survivors lost what little fight they had left.” …

The Outside piece is long and powerful. But one of the most affecting parts, for me, was when Sturtz spoke to an expert about “grooming,” the process by which “children are conditioned to believe that inappropriate behavior from an adult is a logical outgrowth of their relationship.” Adults groom kids by gently, imperceptibly nudging boundaries. First, a coach may take a special, friendly interest in a swimmer, then meet with her alone, then touch her hand, then remove her suit. At no point on the slippery slope does a single act register as inappropriate, yet the seemingly natural flow of events deposits the child in an alien, nightmare world.

“My Scorn Of Feminism” Ctd

Below is a bunch of reader commentary of the Dish’s recent coverage of gender-based debates like gamergate, catcalling, affirmative consent, and others. A dissenter gets the last word on #shirtstorm:

You have a tendency to hate Internet mobs even when they’re right. Matt Taylor’s shirt was staggeringly inappropriate for a professional workplace, particularly when he’s been tasked to be the public face of his organization on the day of its greatest triumph. He deserves the heat for thinking that was acceptable attire – no matter what the woman who made it for him says. Her opinion ought to be secondary to that of the women who had to work with him (and all the colleagues and supervisors who didn’t question that choice of clothing).

But you can prove me wrong: Wear a Tom of Finland shirt the next time you’re on Bill Maher’s show. Don’t let the culture police win!

Another writes:

Thank you for covering Gamergate. I was mostly unaware of the issue until you brought it up. Now I am beginning to understand its significance. Today, some clicking around on Gamergate brought me to two places that I think are telling about all of this. The first was someone disparaging you, and saying “there’s no way to use the phrase ‘creeping misandry’ and not be laughed out of the room.” The second was this screed by Daily Beast columnist and WAM supporter Samantha Allen. It’s opening lines are “i’m a misandrist. that means i hate men.”

Another reader on “why you can’t be a male feminist these days”:

I’m about the same age as you, Andrew. I believe in equal pay for equal work. I believe in women’s reproductive health, to include abortion without interference from the government, and that it should be part of a basic health insurance policy. I believe a woman should be able to do any job a man does (and as a former infantryman, that took some work on my part). I have several bosses who are women (some younger than myself) who deserve to be in their position and would do well moving further up the org chart. I believe women should be free from sexual violence and perpetrators should be punished accordingly. In short, I believe everything classic feminism stood for to the best of my knowledge.

That said, there are so many people out there now (my Facebook feed is all about this) who follow what I consider a form of feminism that is exclusionary.

It is an all-encompassing worldview and everything, no matter how far afield, must fit into that worldview. The only thing I can compare it to is a real Marxist, if you’ve met one. Going to the bathroom to them is an integral part of the workers’ struggle (Marxists are the only people I’ve come across like this, so they are what I most easily compare it to). To hear them talk, I clearly have never had a consensual sexual encounter and must therefore be a rapist. At a minimum, I perpetuate the patriarchy and contribute to rape culture. This is non-stop wail I read everywhere I go online. Even though I’m on their side generally, I just can’t support them verbally because, whether they intend to or not, they are including me in their diatribes. I’m quite sure I’m not alone feeling this way. While you will hear it said that there is ‘always a fringe element’, its not true. This seems to be the majority. I’m reminded of the great Robin Williams movie The World According to Garp. In that movie, there is a group of feminists who are so anti-male, they don’t want Garp (or any male) to attend his mother’s funeral. It doesn’t matter what the content of his heart is, what matters is what’s between his legs. And that is what feminism is supposed to be fighting against.

That is why there is a movement for “why I don’t need feminism”. It’s not that they don’t want equality for women. They don’t want equality for women at the unreasoned expense of all men.

Another:

A couple of quick things you can do to at least keep up the pretense of not having a blind-spot where issues of feminism, gamergate and Twitter are concerned:

1) Not use the term “Social Justice Warrior” as an unironic derogative. (You’ve already taken baby steps in this regard.)

2) Not refer to a few people being banned from a platform created by a private company as a “Gender War.”

3) Really just stay away from warfare rhetoric altogether, particularly as a way to disparage and patronize people on the other side of the argument for you. (I’d say this to any offenders on the feminist side of the coin, as well. It’s just oogie.)

4) Maybe run even just one Dissent round-up post on this issue that doesn’t have your qualifying statements and nudgy asides after every quote. This is the only Dish thread in recent memory in which you haven’t published a single post of unqualified dissent. Even your latest “Dissent of the Day” on the matter has a response from you that’s as long or longer than the text from the person you’re quoting. Usually you’re more than happy to air the voices of the people who disagree with you and let them stand for themselves, in their own dissent posts. For some reason, where this issue is concerned, you’re incapable of even pretending to just sit back and listen for a little while.

That last point – “you haven’t published a single post of unqualified dissent” – is empirically untrue. Go here to read a strong female dissent, “the last word on the gamergate furore.” And views from bloggers different than my own are here, here, here and here, to list just a handful of recent posts. A reader links to yet another contrasting view:

Please try to find more feminist critics. Here’s an article from Slate that has the exact opposite take as you on Dr. Taylor’s shirt, using evidence the exact opposite of yours.

Another also thinks our coverage is wanting:

When it comes to racial issues you seem to understand that you simply haven’t had the life experiences to speak in a serious way on the topic without that acknowledgement. As a result, you often quote or defer to the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, etc. and take those experiences seriously. You are not a woman, you will never understand what it is like to grow up as a female, work as a female, experience life culturally, interpersonally, electronically as a female. Perhaps it is time you learn to defer a bit on those topics to those that do.

As regular Dish readers know, we are constantly posting content on a wide array of issues related to women, discussed and debated by a range of female voices, including liberal bloggers like Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti, Alyssa Rosenberg, Ann Friedman, Amanda Hess, Rebecca Traister, Jill Filipovic, Jessica Grose, Kat Stoeffel, and Tracy Clark-Flory, to name just the most frequent. Follow those links to see their countless contributions to the Dish. Another dissenter conveys a growing feeling in the in-tray:

“Femi-left”?! Seriously, Andrew, you are one shitty, dismissive catchphrase away from me canceling my subscription (and I paid more than the usual, too). I hate to sound like a cranky subscriber at a theatre, and I hate even more the thought of losing your daily deluge of fascinating content, but your complete and utter inability to respond to women’s issues with even a modicum of respect for the opposition is currently cheese-grating my brain. You sound like a parody of Bill O’Reilly performed by a college sketch comedy group. I’ve never sent two e-mails to a website in one day in my life, but … well, here we are.

A reader who appreciates our coverage:

I just read the dissent post regarding your “scorn of feminism” and it made me remember why I love this site. There are so few people taking a logical, well-argued stand against identity politics without actually arguing FOR racism, sexism or homophobia.

I pissed off some family members this weekend by asking why/when the term “oriental” was considered racist. I was not appropriately satisfied with the explanation, “Hello! White privilege.” Asking for more than that is, apparently, a bridge too far, and asking the question itself is considered insulting and somewhat racist. Yeah, maybe not tightly related to issues around feminism, but it seems like the left, at this moment, is very very concerned with policing speech. Look at the response to Colbert’s comedy routine, or the move to rename the “Washington Redskins.”

As I’ve been mulling this over, I think there are two primary things that bother me about this. The first, is that by creating a set of rules (you are not allowed to say x, or y, or question this in any way), liberals are creating an easy way to identify those who are in the group and those who are out. If you don’t use the right words and follow all the rules, then we can ostracize you and treat you like shit. Which, let’s be honest, is a LOT more fun that listening to people and creating a respectful dialog.

The other thing that bothers me, is that policing language is cheap. The left seems to have found a way to be both self-righteous and not actually do anything hard. We make take a stand against the word “Redskins” but no actual change is going to happen in the lives of said Native Americans. They will still be poor, still live in devastated communities, and still die young. But it’s a lot easier to change the name of a football team than it is to go work for $20K/year at a food bank or homeless shelter out on the reservation.

So, yes, thank you for being a voice of reason in all of this. If we are going to have a free society, then it needs to be able to tolerate open debate.

One that note, the far-left blog Feministing wondered about the above episode, “Is South Park turning feminist?”:

Obviously there are issues with the gendering of this episode, such as the assumption that no girl would ever find farting funny (I sure do), that no guy would ever find queefing funny, and of course the avoidance of the fact that girls do indeed fart ourselves. Not to mention the reduction of the entire feminist movement into queefing rights.

But that’s what South Park does best: Takes an social movement or trend and highlights extreme stereotypes to bring to light the most ridiculous elements of that movement. So I didn’t really find my sexism-alert piqued by this episode and actually found it pretty funny. I felt like it was more the hypocrisy of certain taboo subjects that was more under attack here than anything else. It was certainly brave of the creators to even mention queefing at all, probably the most taboo of all taboo bodily functions.

One more reader ends us on a deadly serious note:

Thanks for posting on the Indian sterilization mess. One aspect you left out of your analysis is how there’s a women’s rights angle to this as well. Male sterilization is far less invasive and far safer than female, and yet disproportionately India’s program targets women. There are a lot of reasons for that, but it can’t be denied that the patriarchal nature of India’s society definitely plays a big role. The whole situation is beyond horrifying, not just because of the senseless deaths at the hands of misguided government programs, but because it reveals how little India values one half of its population.

Please please please give this story as much air time as you did the crazy thought-policing of Twitter by “feminist activists” and Gamergate. I hate to see feminism reduced to a bunch of Americans whining about people saying not-so-nice things about them on the Internet when elsewhere women are literally dying of neglect. If women’s rights in this country have descended to the level of suppressing free speech, then clearly it is time to move our attentions elsewhere.

Mental Health Break

Get old, get down:

Obama’s Authority To Act On Immigration

Linker thinks it highly suspect:

What is so galling about the president’s pending circumvention of federal immigration law is that the White House hasn’t even attempted to justify it on grounds of necessity — no doubt because any effort to do so would be risible. The nation obviously faces no immigration emergency that could possibly justify the kind of extralegal action that Obama is contemplating. Cultivating a new constituency for the Democratic Party certainly doesn’t rise to that level, but neither does a big-hearted attempt to stop often cruel deportations of individuals and families residing in this country illegally.

Along the same lines, Douthat hits back at the argument that Obama’s actions don’t matter because they can be reversed by the next president:

As long as the United States elects its chief executives it will always be true that one president’s unilateral policy move can be theoretically reversed by the next one. But that reality doesn’t really tell us much of anything about whether a particular moves claims too much power for the executive branch itself.

Even in the fairly unlikely event that Chris Christie or Marco Rubio cancels an Obama amnesty, that is, the power itself will still have been claimed and exercised, the line rubbed out and crossed; the move will still exist as a precedent, a model, a case study in how a president can push the envelope when Congress doesn’t act as he deems fit.

Which is why it would have unreasonable to expect, say, liberal and libertarian critics of George W. Bush’s expansive claims of wartime authority to be mollified by being told: “Don’t worry, when you elect a president, you can run Guantanamo and the black sites and the N.S.A. the way you want, so stop complaining and just focus on the next election.” Those critics did focus on the next election, and in 2008 they won it, and put a liberal constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office in Bush’s stead. But in the end the Bush administration created precedents and facts on the ground that his notionally civil libertarian successor just accepted, and claimed powers that a liberal president has often (if oh-so-reluctantly) exploited to the hilt

Benjamin Wittes fails to see what laws Obama is breaking:

Republicans are tossing around all sorts of rhetoric about Obama’s decision to proceed unilaterally. John Boehner has floated the idea of litigating the matter. Some Republicans have described such an “amnesty” as a constitutional crisis. Some have even talked about impeachment. All of that assumes, of course, that the coming action is illegal, that the statute itself doesn’t give Obama authority to decide to stay his hand with respect to lots of deportations. Yet I have seen no news story or legal analysis that contains an actual argument to that effect. …

Obama himself has sown doubt about this own authority to effectuate this policy outcome without congressional involvement—stating in the past that he would love to do it, but did not think he had the legal authority. But at least as I read the relevant provisions of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, the statute actually gives him wide discretion to decline to deport non-criminal aliens who are legally deportable. Specifically, it contains no directive requiring the administration to pursue garden variety deportation cases. In fact, it has very little to say at all—except with respect to aliens who have committed crimes—about what happens if the President just doesn’t feel like deporting people. That silence seems to me to convey the authority not to act, both in the case of an individual whose circumstances authorities find compelling and also in the case of five million people whose circumstances authorities find compelling or whose status authorities choose for policy reasons to regularize.

A Setback For Abenomics

Japan slips into recession, with second straight quarter of GDP contraction. (-1.6% in Q3)
http://t.co/CJlnuO1FU2 pic.twitter.com/IYLjmXbPJ0

— Matt Phillips (@MatthewPhillips) November 17, 2014

Japan’s economy is officially in a recession again, after its GDP shrank for two consecutive quarters. An increase in the country’s sales tax in April is believed to have been the tipping point:

“No part of Japan’s economy looks encouraging,” said Yoshiki Shinke, chief economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute, who had the weakest forecast in a Bloomberg News survey, with a 0.8% growth estimate for real GDP. “Today’s data will leave another traumatic memory for Japanese politicians about sales tax hikes.” For Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the report probably guarantees he will put off the tax increase scheduled for October 2015, a move that people familiar with the matter have said will trigger a snap election next month. Japan also tipped into a recession after a 1997 consumption-levy rise, leading to the fall of the government of the day.

Sure enough, Abe called a snap election today to secure a popular mandate for delaying the next planned tax hike. Matt O’Brien faults the prime minister for putting the brakes on fiscal stimulus and turning toward austerity while the economy was still too weak:

The problem … is that the government has started working at cross purposes with the central bank.

See, at first, the government was spending money to jumpstart growth, and the Bank of Japan (BOJ) was buying bonds with newly-printed money to do the same. It was enough to send unemployment down to 3.6 percent now, and inflation finally up into positive territory. But then, six months ago, the government became more worried about its debt of 230 percent of GDP than it was about the recovery. It raised the sales tax from 5 to 8 percent, and the economy promptly tanked. The BOJ has responded by buying even more bonds with even more newly-printed money, but not before domestic prices, as measured by the GDP deflator, began falling again, this time at a -0.3 percent pace.

Abenomics, in other words, has gone from being fiscal and monetary stimulus to fiscal austerity and even more monetary stimulus—and that, at least for now, has brought back deflation.

The Bloomberg View editors also blame a lack of fiscal stimulus … twenty years ago, that is:

[M]ost economists agree it would have been much better if Japan had done two things after its asset-price bubble burst in the early 1990s: pursued a much more ambitious fiscal stimulus program, and moved quickly to force banks to recognize losses and recapitalize.

Instead, Japan’s ill-timed effort to balance its budget with a consumption-tax increase in 1997 sent the economy into recession, and a paralyzed banking sector contributed to an extended period of stagnation that has done much more to worsen the debt burden than well-targeted government spending would have. From 1993 through 2013, gross government debt grew at an average annualized rate of 5.3 percent — a pace that normal economic growth would have largely neutralized. In the absence of that growth, the gross-debt-to-GDP ratio went from 80 percent to more than 240 percent. That’s by far the highest among 179 countries tracked by the International Monetary Fund.

Danny Vinik hopes the US doesn’t make the same mistakes:

[I]it’s very easy for policymakers to cut off the growth if they implement dumb policies, as Japan did with the VAT increase. In particular, this means that the Federal Reserve should not raise interest rates from zero until workers actually see significant wage growth. So far, Fed Chair Janet Yellen has demonstrated a commitment to ignoring inflation hawks inside and outside the central bank. She must continue to do so. It also means that Congress cannot raise taxes on broad swaths of Americans or make significant cuts to government spending

Tyler Cowen is surprised that anyone is surprised:

Unemployment in Japan already had fallen to about three and a half percent. So how much of a miracle could Abenomics accomplish in the first place? Not much, not even for committed Keynesians. Commentators have grown to expect so much of the Phillips curve these days, but still a mechanism for the output boost is required and the Phillips curve (at best) holds only in some contexts. Japan simply hasn’t had that many laborers to put back to work. Getting more women in the workforce, as Abe has tried to do, is a positive development, but that is not mainly about macro policy nor is it mainly about the short run.

In the same vein, McArdle extracts a lesson about the limited powers of policy:

Despite a really good package of reforms, Japan’s economy is still so fragile that a 3 percent hike in the sales tax (even one accompanied by a $51 billion stimulus program) is enough to push it back into recession. …

What this suggests to me is that there may simply be limits on what good economic policy can achieve. This is not a very useful thing for an economics columnist to write, because then what are we supposed to suggest week after week? But there it is: Japan’s economic problems, particularly its long demographic shift, may simply not be very amenable to better policy. Japan’s exports have a lot more competition than they used to, and the country is heading for the demographics of an Assisted Living facility. Better monetary policy won’t change either of those facts.

Ben Casselman adds that Japan’s unexpected slide into recession “should also give pause to economists in the U.S.”:

When the Bureau of Economic Analysis said the U.S. economy contracted at a 2.1 percent rate earlier this year, most economists shrugged it off as a one-off fluke driven by bad weather. They appear to have been correct: The U.S. went on to post its best consecutive quarters of growth since the recession. But that outcome was far from guaranteed. As I noted at the time, negative quarters are rare outside of recessions. Economists are notoriously terrible at forecasting downturns: Most economists failed to “predict” the last U.S. recession even after it had already begun. (They also miss in the other direction, forecasting recessions that never took place.)