Gerard Baker

Editor-at-Large & Columnist @WSJ. Telling people what they don’t want to hear.

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

Nice idea but I’m suspicious about your criteria for leaders on the “consensus-out on a limb” axis. In what sense was it “out on a limb” to predict that Covid-19 would be a pandemic in January 2020? Makes me question all those other dots in the top right quadrant.

[Archie Hall @ArchieHall]

IS THE ECONOMIST ALWAYS WRONG?

Scandalously, in some circles @TheEconomist has a reputation as a contrarian indicator. This week we fessed up to getting a big call on oil prices from April wrong.

Obviously our goal is not perfectly-hedged (and perfectly boring) predictive accuracy: often it is to stimulate, provoke, and challenge. But I did want to test that wider allegation, so I ran a series of LLM scorers across our full leader database since 2000 (7,000 leaders in all.)

You can see the results in the chart below: each dot is one of the 1,400 leaders where we identified concrete and falsifiable predictions that were central to the argument. Higher = more accurate, further to the right = more contrarian.

We do well, unsurprisingly, when aligned with conventional wisdom. We often do worse when truly out on a limb. But actually, on average, we are a bit likelier to be right than wrong on our somewhat-out-of-consensus calls. All round, a respectable performance.

And as @ecurrnomics points out an accompanying leader, there is no shame at all in being beaten by the market: as good free-marketers we believe deeply in the aggregated wisdom of prices.

Take a look at my piece here, which includes a canter through our best and worst calls of the last quarter-century: https://t.co/WyKqangFrE

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

This weekend, as Americans celebrate their 250th birthday, the semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the mood is less self-congratulatory than it has probably ever been. #America250 #TheTimes
https://t.co/MmDaGlZpCY

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

This is a good point. In the end only two major countries - Britain and the US - engaged in sustained, high-casualty military action to eradicate slavery. Of course the same two countries are held by modern elites to be the principal slave-trade criminals of history.

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

“And what about our sins? Slavery was the original sin, and I won’t sand it down. The founders knew it. Jefferson knew it, and he owned slaves — the hypocrisy was staring right at them, and they kept kicking the can down the road. But here is what a poisoned telling of our history leaves out: the New England colonies began rejecting slavery before England itself did. And when the reckoning finally came, hundreds of thousands of men died on battlefields to make other men free. “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,” read the original lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. That’s propitiation. One man suffers so others go free. A nation that will bleed that much to right its own wrong is not an evil nation. It is a great one, straining toward becoming a more perfect one. We had a black president. We had a black vice president. Our Secretary of State is the son of Cuban refugees. Anyone telling you the story that nothing here ever gets better is selling you something.”

https://t.co/x00baUJNoo

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

Smart. There we all were, thinking our enemies were going to bomb us, wipe out our power grid, or cyber-sabotage our financial system, when all along Xi Jinping and the ayatollahs have been preparing to launch vast flotillas of pregnant women on hospital ships in our direction.

[Stephen Miller @StephenM]

If you believe a foreign government can sail a hospital ship to the edge of US territorial waters, deliver a hundred babies to foreign moms, then promptly sail back to a foreign port, and that every one of those babies is American for life, you don’t believe in nationhood at all.

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

On this episode of #TheStateofItUSA podcast, @katyballs and I discuss the Supreme Court rejecting Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, the MAGA meltdown and the "USSR" comparison, and #America250: Celebrating a deeply divided nation. #TheTimes

https://t.co/SZ58MsVq78

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

Apparently Maradona once scored a couple of goals there.

[thomas @thomasutrI]

Anyone know if England Mexico will be played at altitude?

[Wall Street Journal Opinion @WSJopinion]

Few things could induce me to vote for another four years of the Republicanism we are enduring now. But one is definitely the alternative of Islamist-friendly, open-the-borders, defund-the-police, kill-the-billionaires socialists, writes @gerardtbaker
https://t.co/f4vOpDFR8L

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

On this episode of #TheStateofItUSA podcast, @katyballs and I discuss the Supreme Court rejecting Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, the MAGA meltdown and the "USSR" comparison, and #America250: Celebrating a deeply divided nation. #TheTimes

https://t.co/B6MphHS01P

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

On this episode of #TheStateofItUSA podcast, @katyballs and I discuss the Supreme Court rejecting Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, the MAGA meltdown and the "USSR" comparison, and #America250: Celebrating a deeply divided nation. #TheTimes

https://t.co/SZ58MsVq78

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

A modest proposal: any non-US citizen pregnant woman here seeking medical care should be given an enforced abortion. ICE agents, equipped as necessary, should be empowered to arrest any woman with a suspicious-looking bulge and perform abortions on the spot. Time to get serious.

[John Podhoretz @jpodhoretz]

New category of TSA agent: Ob-Gyn

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

Aside from the usual gratuitous snarkery, surely one of the worst public figures at delivering lines. Timing, cadence, tone: all off by a mile. The poor soldiers look like they’re sitting through a terrible wedding speech by that unfunny family member who insists on speaking.

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

Vance: "I'm trying to be non-partisan…Because I'm speaking to all of you, our great patriots and service members, I've got the angel on my shoulder saying, 'JD, don't be partisan. Make this non-partisan.' And then I've got the devil on my shoulder who wants to talk about every time Joe Biden fell up or down the stairs."

[Wall Street Journal Opinion @WSJopinion]

America is the land of endless choice, except in politics. There’s a case to be made for a two-party system, but what do you do when your party loses its mind? asks @gerardtbaker
https://t.co/PWp6rUm6rv

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

On this episode of #TheStateofItUSA podcast, @katyballs and I discuss the Supreme Court rejecting Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, the MAGA meltdown and the "USSR" comparison, and #America250: Celebrating a deeply divided nation. #TheTimes

https://t.co/B6MphHS01P

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

What? Only if by “dangerous” you mean the player most at risk of costing us the game, maybe…

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

Madueke’s been our most dangerous player.

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

Very true. Someone also needs to finally point out ahead of today’s game that England really struggle against the low block.

[Matt Dannatt @mattdannatt]

Someone should really point out that if England manage to beat Congo tonight, they'll have to face Mexico - at altitude - at the Azteca.

I haven't seen that mentioned anywhere yet.

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

The freakout on the right over this decision is self-indicting. If the future of our civilization really is at risk from births to illegal migrants then enforcing the law and if necessary passing new laws to make illegal immigration vanishingly rare are much better options.

[Conn Carroll @conncarroll]

Stop obsessing over birthright citizenship. We lowered the foreign born population from 15% to 5% after Wong Kim Ark. The problem is the Immigration Act of 1965. That is the policy change that led is to where we are today. https://t.co/pCMEylVrhs

[Wall Street Journal Opinion @WSJopinion]

The victory by “democratic socialists” and their allies in New York Democratic primaries last week is a signal moment in the nation’s descent into political dystopia, writes @gerardtbaker
https://t.co/Qp6Og4WTlE

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

Agree. But left and right don’t want “philosopher kings” on SCOTUS. They want partisan hacks, as they have in congress, to rubber stamp executive branch decisions. They think all three branches of government should fuse into one, all committed to the party will. Like the USSR.

[Ken Gardner @KenGardner11]

I don't know if politics have ever been worse in my lifetime -- or if the Supreme Court, or at least the 6 right of center members, has been any better.

The one major decision that I now think they might have gotten wrong in recent years is the presidential immunity decision, largely for the reasons in Justice Barrett's brilliant concurring opinion in that case.

It is also very revealing how many people who think of themselves as "conservatives" view SCOTUS exactly the same way as progressive leftists do -- as a super legislature of philosopher kings to impose their particular policy preferences on the rest of us. That's not the job. The job is to interpret and apply the law, with the US Constitution being the supreme law of the land -- even when it sometimes means that the result of the case doesn't go your preferred way.

[Gerard Baker @gerardtbaker]

In America, political choice is binary. There is virtue in this. To some extent the idea of diversity in governing choice is an illusion. Ultimately all choices are binary—on the one hand, the choice we make, on the other, all the choices we reject. #WSJ
https://t.co/doSQ4ajpSy