@akkartik you have to meet Darth Vader with a credible threat of punishing his unilateral alterations of the deal. but the point of maintaining that credible threat is to sustain the deal without ever having to resort to violence at all.

@akkartik (even better than punishment, much better than punishment, is to ensure he never has the capacity to unilaterally alter the deal. because even when you can punish, adventurism+effective punishment means an awful catastrophe, while prevention, denial of the capacity to adventure at all, yields a mutually beneficial peace.)

@akkartik he’s a bad motherfucker, for sure! but that’s not what matters. the reason we don’t and shouldn’t cede Ukraine to him is that would set the condition for further military adventurism by him and others. the credible threat of defensive war is almost always an essential condition of a reasonably just peace. 1/

@akkartik but we do not fight Putin to destroy him, even though he’s a bad motherfucker. we resist his adventurism to sustain the preconditions for a reasonably just peace, in particular the condition that territorial borders cannot be revised in favor of an aggressor by military force. 2/

@akkartik the world will always have bad people, including sometimes horrible leaders, and we will be horrible if we make it our task to stand as judge, jury, and executioner of those we (even correctly!) consider bad. some countries we are friendly towards have mass murderers as their leaders too. 3/

@akkartik but we should, and i am glad to say mostly do, draw the line at the lines. it might feel more noble to depose Putin, Netanyahu, Xi, MBS, all of whom in their way are pretty plainly mass murderers and oppressors. but that would set the stage for eternal war, rather than reasonably just peace. 4/

@akkartik enforcing a broadly consensual Westphalian settlement, on the other hand, is something nearly all political communities can live with, a consensus against which violators can be rendered pariahs and met with overwhelming force and likelihood of failure. /fin

@SteveRoth I can't speak for David, but I think the claim is that in a Ricardian regime, there's an equilibrium inflation rate. An increase in the interest rate will temporarily bring the inflation rate lower than that, but it will be transitory — the rate will return to the equilibrium. 1/

@SteveRoth In a non-Ricardian regime, the equilibrium inflation rate is not independent of the interest rate. 2/

@SteveRoth So if the inflation rate starts at an equilibrium of n%, increasing the interest rate will (cet par) lead to a transient decrease in the inflation rate to some rate <n% (same as before, the conventionally anticipated effect), but when the transient effect wears off, the new equilibrium at the new interest rate has inflation now at some rate *higher* than n%, rather than merely revering to n% as under a Ricardian regime. 3/

@SteveRoth So if a naive central bank targets n% by raising interest rates when actual inflation is above n%, they get a "sugar high" (or sugar low) of disinflation, it seems to work, but then inflation reverts to a value even higher than its starting point, then the idiot central bank does it again, etc. each tightening's respite is just a prelude to an even worse catastrophe. 4/

@SteveRoth So even though in the short run, raising interest rates works under both regimes, only under the conventional model of a Ricardian regime is interest rate policy straightforwardly good policy. The effect is transient in both cases, but under the Ricardian regime it does no long-term harm, while in the non-Ricardian (more realistic, at least on face) regime, the transient desired effect is just a prelude for an even worse situation. /fin