UGent PhD candidate researching Demographic Sustainability of Liberal Orders 15 years XP EU affairs 📖History🏛️ 🇪🇺Politics🇺🇸 🧬Evolution👶 #evopolitics
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Joined May 2011
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A picture's worth a thousand words.. so here are the key points from my academic article with @filipefaria on the geopolitics of ultra-low fertility & techno-natalism: Visualized! craigwilly.com/p/the-geopoli…
Craig Willy retweeted
The most successful example of trickle-down economics in the last 10 years might be Romania. Billionaires paid 5% dividend tax and 10% personal income tax. Millionaires paid 1% corporate tax on €1,000,000. The median person saw their salary go up 3x during the decade.
Most of this was delivered under a 'Social Democrat' government, who of course made sure they took a nice juicy 'success fee' too.
Rest of CEE did well too but none outshined Romania: Lithuania +190%, Hungary +187%, Bulgaria +185%, Poland +120% (base effect).
Eastern Europe taxes poor people a higher % than rich people. If you earn €20K in Romania you pay 40% tax. But if you earn €2M, you pay 10%.
Romania's 'Social Democratic Party' is more right wing on tax policy than any Western European conservatives. They pioneered the '1% tax on €1 million' corporate tax system during the 2010s, which saw Romania's median salary grew by 200% during the decade. The EU eventually pushed them to cut the threshold to €100K.
The lower tax rate is because Eastern Europe caps social contributions and has flat rate tax. This has been very useful for retaining job creators and HNWIs in their countries. Whilst the rich pay a lower tax rate, the absolute amount of tax they pay is higher and they tend to consume less public services.
Craig Willy retweeted
Francis Fukuyama on why so much of politics involves cosplaying now: "People feel that they are living in a society that doesn't demand very much from them. No heroism, no risk. And they're uncomfortable with it, and so they play like they're taking risks."
Craig Willy retweeted
New (amazing) cabinet directive:
For every $1 in regulatory costs a new rule adds, regulators must cut $2 elsewhere. 👏
They’ll also have to test new rules for competitiveness, default to national or international standards, and review rules regularly.
Craig Willy retweeted
Francis Fukuyama is arguably our era's most influential intellectual. The End of History got two big things right: the triumph of democratic capitalism, and the kinds of nihilistic politics we would find in a world without any great cause to struggle over.
All of our discourse about topics like democracy, populism, and modernity is filtered through the lens of Fukuyama's thought.
I just got to interview him about his new memoir. It spanned the range of Fukuyama's work, including
-What happened to public intellectuals?
-"Last man problems" like proceduralism
-What to make of the fact that Americans fight all the time online, even though violence, disorder, and resistance to the government remain low
-His brief flirtation with postmodern philosophy, and realizing it was nonsense
-Life extension, embryo selection, and genetic engineering
-Whether trust really explains different societal outcomes, particularly the success of China
-His "intellectual meetings of the mind" with Muammar al-Qaddafi
-What he thinks of the Bukele experiment
There is too much to list it all here. Just read the interview. richardhanania.com/p/cosplay…
Japan highlights for me:
* Eiheiji: forested mountain Zen temple, meditation
* Gandharan Buddha statues at Tokyo National Museum
* Kamakura:
* Staying in a temple-BNB near Dewa Sanzan up norther (deep Japan)
Recent pattern of US politics: side takes power, then abuses power through combination of ideological self-radicalization and love of said power.
Time for citizens and Congress to work to limit presidential power and return powers to the states (governors are usually popular!).
It's magnificent propaganda. And the sentiment is essentially correct.
Yet the communist paradox: How does such emancipatory idealism birth the most oppressively gray & sterile political orders?
Craig Willy retweeted
Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo follows a fictional Latin American country torn apart by corruption and its uneasy dependence on foreign capital. Tyler and Richard Hanania picked it hoping to talk about something other than politics for once — a bit ironic, given Hanania’s new book, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, is all about the stupidity of current politics.
Some of Tyler’s questions for Richard in this episode, starting with a close read of Nostromo before ranging into Latin American crime, Shakespeare, the media, and populism:
· Is Nostromo himself a rotten fraud, or a flawed but decent man?
· Why does Conrad scramble the novel’s timeline instead of telling it straight?
· Why is religion almost entirely absent from Conrad’s fiction?
· Does the “folly and murder” passage reveal Conrad’s real view of liberalism?
· Could a Latin American author have written this novel, as Fredric Jameson claimed?
· Why does Latin America have so much crime despite not being especially poor?
· Was Panama actually a success story, against the odds?
· Is Shakespeare objectively the greatest English-language writer, or just the most prestigious?
· Has the media gotten worse, especially its coverage of AI?
· Who on the populist right is actually worth reading?
· Why do conservative women hug and liberal women shake hands?
· What do you want to write and learn next?
Watch the full conversation with @RichardHanania and @tylercowen here, or search for Conversations with Tyler wherever you get your podcasts.
youtu.be/txDPOpbdK5c?si=ZbZz…
Craig Willy retweeted
Martin Malia on Soviet economies: "Contrary to the declared goals of the regime, it was the opposite of a system of production to create abundance for the eventual satisfaction of the needs of the population; it was a system of general squeeze of the population to produce capital goods for the creation of industrial power, in order to produce ever more capital goods with which to produce still further industrial might, and ultimately to produce armaments."
Craig Willy retweeted
1️⃣ Why does Europe struggle to fund its own startups? Look at where it keeps its retirement money.
Americans hold retirement savings worth 153% of GDP. The Dutch, 151%. The French, 13%. Germans, 6%.
Most of Europe pays pensions out of today's wages. So it never builds the big pools of long-term capital that fund VC in the US.
(I work at Vsquared Ventures, an early-stage deep tech VC firm investing across Europe. Views my own.)
(OECD)
Craig Willy retweeted
High-income workers are fleeing Europe.
Economic theory tells us that the more
mobile a factor of production becomes,
the lower its optimal tax rate. This is why taxes on capital, which is relatively mobile, tend to be lower than taxes on labor, which historically has been less mobile.
However, as the chart below shows, as elite human capital has become more footloose, high taxes have become increasingly counterproductive.
This is a huge existential problem for European welfare states, which have traditionally relied on heavily taxing their most productive workers.
Craig Willy retweeted
Ce qu’enseigne cette élection des midterms c’est aussi que l’idée d’un vol ou détournement des votes par les algorithmes/réseaux sociaux est un fantasme de centristes.
Elon Musk, l’homme le plus riche du monde et propriétaire du réseau social le plus important a mis un demi milliard pour aider les Républicains, notamment dans de la publicité numérique. Résultat: fiasco. Les gens ne votent pas parce qu’ils sont exposés à des discours par des algorithmes mais parce que les discours qu’ils rencontrent font écho à une réalité (guerre, coût de l’essence).
Remarquez que quand les progressistes gagnent on ne dit jamais « c’est de la faute aux réseaux sociaux ».
Craig Willy retweeted
It’s strange how many progressives talk as though the US has implemented some sort of radical austerity program since FDR:
Craig Willy retweeted
Reagan Boomer economics vs Vance-style populism.
"The Republican wreckage left by this defeat doesn’t foretell what will happen in 2028. But it does call for soul-searching. Tariffs and mass deportation are no substitute for rising real incomes. Playing to the bro MAGA base is no substitute for persuading Hispanics, independents and suburban swing voters who abandoned the party on Tuesday.
Note to Vice President JD Vance: The 'working class' coalition that is supposed to be the GOP’s future can’t be bought off with child subsidies, support for the Teamsters, or industrial policy corporatism. They want the broad-based prosperity of the first Trump term.
Going into 2028, the GOP needs a debate about what it stands for after Donald Trump, and let’s hope it starts this week." 🔥
wsj.com/opinion/2026-midterm…
