Simon Tilford/Foreign Policy:
Britain Is Much Worse Off Than It Understands
Things weren’t nearly this bad in the 1970s—but the country’s leaders haven't grasped that yet.
By any criteria, the United Kingdom faces a serious economic and social crisis, one that will deepen without big shifts in policy. Yet there is little sense of this crisis among the country’s elite, not least its politicians.
The power of narratives helps explain this disconnect. The gap between the U.K.’s reality as portrayed by the dominant narrative of its economy’s performance and real life as experienced by its average citizen has widened to the breaking point. The resulting political distortions are now making the underlying problems even worse.
Narratives and the emotional impulses that drive them play an underappreciated role in our understanding of the way economies work and whether they are perceived to be performing well or not. Sometimes, there is real grounding to those narratives; other times, they are largely fictional constructs. This does not necessarily mean that those who believe them and propagate them are dishonest, only that their personal experience may not be representative of the economy as a whole.
These are important points for those interested in how the economy is portrayed in the U.S., and what that means.
Here’s another example of reality vs. the power of narratives:
The Washington Post:
Koch network to back alternative to Trump after sitting out recent primaries
The return of one of the biggest spenders in American politics to the presidential primary field poses a direct challenge to the former president’s comeback bid
“The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” Emily Seidel, chief executive of the network’s flagship group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), wrote in a memo released publicly on Sunday. The three-page missive repeatedly suggests that AFP is taking on the responsibility of stopping Trump, with Seidel writing: “Lots of people are frustrated. But very few people are in a position to do something about it. AFP is. Now is the time to rise to the occasion.”
Jonathan Weiler/Substack:
The gaping hole in the New York Times' NCAA story: Race
A Glaring Omission
The New York Times Sunday Magazine featured a long article this weekend about the transformation of college sports now that college athletes are allowed to earn money off their name, image and likeness (NIL). In particular, the Times warns of potentially troubling unintended consequences as a result of this change, which I’ll get to in a moment or two. To back up, following years of litigation against and dogged resistance by the NCAA, the latter rather suddenly relented in July 2021, after a Supreme Court ruling a few weeks earlier on a separate NCAA matter convinced the Association that it could no longer deny athletes their NIL rights.
In the subsequent eighteen months, many nervous insiders and observers have been rueing the emergence of a money besotted Wild West. While the NCAA scrambles to create guidelines to help college athletics departments navigate this new terrain, an unruly and unsettling bidding war has ensued for high profile athletes, especially in football and men’s basketball.
[…]
The article notes that, historically, the high revenue generating sports at UNC and elsewhere - football and men’s college basketball - have helped subsidize the scholarships and other expenses on which programs like tennis, field hockey, golf, gymnastics and lacrosse typically rely. But, as I referred to above, it omits any mention of race in this account. In fact, those sports like tennis and golf are overwhelmingly populated by White athletes. And typically, the athletes good enough to play those varsity sports at places like UNC come from affluent families. Therefore, there has long been a stark fact about the nature of wealth transfer in college athletics. As a National Bureau of Economics Research Paper put it a couple of years ago, before the NIL era began - and as countless other analyses have found - “[t}he National Collegiate Athletic Association’s long-standing policy prohibiting profit-sharing with college athletes effectively allows wealthy White students to profit off the labor of poor Black ones.”
Will Bunch/The Philadelphia Inquirer:
AR-15 lapel pin is a perfect symbol for a GOP that’s become a death cult
A GOP celebration of a mass-killing machine on the House floor is on-brand for a nihilistic party that prides deadly individualism over problem-solving.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? The lapel pins — like those Christmas cards of their adorable blond kids armed to the teeth with high-powered weaponry or the right’s new love affair with the toxic fumes of gas stoves — are meant to “trigger the libs” and sustain a career arc that generates prime-time hits on Fox News and fund-raising emails without ever having to get anything done. Yes, you could argue this column, then, is a perfect example of what these cons want. But what a choice: playing along, or remaining silent while America sheds the skin of humanity.
Are you an optimist? Maybe it’s your approach to getting things done. From The New York Times:
When we talk about optimism, it’s often easy to oversimplify it as having a relentlessly upbeat outlook. Optimists, we imagine, spend their time gazing at the bright side of life through rose-colored glasses, sipping glasses half-full of good cheer.
But the science suggests that optimism is best understood not as an unchanging attitude but as a pattern of responses — which taken together dictate how we view our prospects. Being optimistic is more complicated than blithely thinking, “Everything will turn out fine.”
Optimism and pessimism, it turns out, are all about the stories we tell ourselves after both our successes and our failures.
And speaking (again) of narratives:
EJ Dionne, Jr./The Washington Post:
Biden’s State of the Union case for his quiet revolution
Arguing over raising the debt limit is dumb. Arguing over how to make the economy grow for everyone is smart. President Biden hopes to use his State of the Union message on Tuesday to move the debate to the right question and make the case for the quiet revolution he has championed in our nation’s approach to future prosperity.
Peter Wehner/The Atlantic:
The Institutional Arsonist Turns on His Own Party
Donald Trump threatens to use his core skills—peddling conspiracy theories, spreading lies, sowing distrust—against the GOP.
It’s begun to dawn on Republicans that they face a potentially catastrophic political problem: Donald Trump may lose the GOP presidential primary and, out of spite, wreck Republican prospects in 2024.
That unsettling realization broke through with the release of a Bulwark poll earlier this week. The survey found that a large majority of Republicans are ready to move on from Trump—but at the same time, more than a quarter of likely Republican voters are ready to follow Trump to a third-party bid. Two days after the poll results were released, Trump was asked in an interview whether, if he lost the nomination, he would support the GOP nominee. Trump answered, “It would have to depend on who the nominee was.” Translation: no.