Is Noah Smith the wrongest pundit online?
His ode to Argentine capitalism just a few months ago is pretty embarrassing today!
There are a lot of wrong pundits in the mainstream and there are a lot of malevolent pundits as well, but few combine being wrong and being malevolvent quite like Noah Smith. On foreign affairs alone it doesn’t get much worse. He’s a belligerent Sinophobe who does things like cite sources on China’s failures that directly contradict him; on Palestine he has become an open apologist for genocide; on Ukraine he’s gone from sighing that it would be nbd if “Russia takes half of Ukraine, reabsorbs Belarus, and slices off a couple pieces of Georgia” to villifying as “tankies” anyone who counsels deferring to the majority of Ukrainians who want the war with Russia to end.
And today, online has rediscovered a profoundly embarrassing post he wrote just a few months ago:
In the harsh light of current events — namely, Argentina’s catastrophic economic collapse and ongoing pleas for bailouts — there isn’t much more that needs to be said about just how wrong this turned out to be. But for the ever-collapsing electronic record, here are some of my favorite highlights from this post:
“I think the purely economic advantages are also too often ignored. Exhibit A is Javier Milei’s track record in Argentina. A year and a half ago, when Milei was elected President of Argentina, a bunch of left-wing economists warned darkly that his radical free-market program would lead to economic devastation… [but] Milei’s austerity shock therapy…seems to be working.”
“Milei’s success so far should make us somewhat more confident about free-market policies — especially when we evaluate them against the new socialist ideas that have been gaining currency in the U.S.”
“In the 2000s, Joe Stigliz was overflowing with praise for Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez… These dramatic failures of judgement have never been called to account.”
Will Noah’s dramatic failures of judgment ever be called to account? Well, yes, that is what I am doing right now. But will it matter? Of course not, because it has been a long time since anyone has paid Noah to be correct. Still, I think it would be unfair to insist that the man has simply sold out and made the cynical decision to launder the politics of Palo Alto tech dweebs as the Democratic mainstream. Noah truly believed that Argentine was legitimizing neoliberal economics; and now that they are failing, he’ll presumably retreat into special pleading or some mealy-mouthed calls for “moderation.”
In any case, I’ve mostly just written this post for myself as I’m sure I’ll be bringing up this fuckup in the future. But in case you missed the original, you’re in for a real treat.