Janan Ganesh

It's difficult to know what to make of all this data.

An FT piece this week by Janan Ganesh highlights how politicians can misread public opinion and this can lead to policy decisions that make no sense at all.

In his article he argues that people falsely blamed the rise of populist ideas in the US and the UK in 2016 on their belief that free market economies had been allowed to run wild.

He points out that recent European elections show that there's no relationship between a country's exposure to market forces and its degree of populist anger.

Not really.

My sense of Burnham, and Janan Ganesh has articulated this better than anyone else in the FT, is he basically doesn't actually care about growth.

If you look at what he talks about, you know, Manchesterism, he's really dishonest about it.

He doesn't tell you what actually went on in Manchester, which was private investment, bungs to private companies that started before Burnham and that he happily continued because it benefited him.

So, can all of California's problems just be blamed on progressivism? After all, Californian refugees have been moving to states where there are no state income taxes, to states with lower regulation where it is easier to build, or to places where crime rates are lower than in the Golden State.

Janan Ganesh made an interesting point in a recent FT article on the balance between the right and left, arguing that the governing climate in which urban life flourishes is a blend of progressive ideas such as liberal immigration rules and infrastructure spending with conservative ideas like market incentives and toughness on crime.

He argues that while cities might benefit most from low taxes, less burdensome regulation, and a business-friendly atmosphere, they often vote for policies that would harm them.

California has been a hugely successful economy because of its ability to attract the best and brightest, and if these people are starting to move away for greener pastures, it might be worthwhile mimicking some of the qualities of the states that are attracting them away.

However, I don't want to write about a possible world war in the future any more than you want to read about one.

We are both suffering from what British journalist Janan Ganesh calls pessimism fatigue.

the result of living through the threat of nuclear annihilation, followed by the successive threats of jihadist terrorism, the pandemic, and now AI and World War.

By now, you likely expect me to offer trust in God as the antidote to such fatigue.

But the, the, the point is that, um, uh, as I made in a, uh, uh, in a different context, uh, Manchester is an FT city.

It's the sort of city that Financial Times columnists like Janan Ganesh, uh, uh, would feel entirely at home in because it's, it's followed their prescription.

But, uh, Andy Burnham is not an FT prime minister.

He's a Daily Mirror prime minister.

While Donald Trump is a divisive politician where some people love him and others hate him, his threats to impose tariffs on foreign imports are drawing support from lawmakers of both parties.

Janan Ganesh wrote in the FT a few weeks ago that Trump's biggest success during his first term in office was that he bound the actions of his successors.

saying that Trump moved the consensus on a big issue, foreign trade, such that the next president either couldn't go back or didn't want to.

During Trump's first term in office, the average US tariff on Chinese imports rose from around 3% to nearly 20%.

You can find videos online dating back 40 years of Trump on daytime talk shows being mostly pleasant until the topic of foreign trade comes up.

Back then Japan was his main target, today it is China.

Janan Ganesh wrote a few weeks ago that trade is almost all that Trump cares about, with immigration coming in as a distant second.

He says that over the last 40 years, Trump has had an intense belief that to run a current account deficit with another nation is to lose to it.

I mean, I feel like in a lot of our other reading series, we've learned a lot about how the liberal does not have a theory of power.

And with Janan Ganesh, we're learning how the liberal does not have a theory of mind.

Because...

How dare...