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Welcome back everybody to what really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute and the Hamilton center at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week. America's economic dynamism is grinding to a halt as the nation experiences unprecedented immobility across housing and labor markets. First, only 7.8% Americans moved in 2023, the lowest rate since census records began in 1948. Second, the housing market has essentially frozen with home sales falling to their lowest level in almost 30 years as median income families now spend 40% of earnings on housing costs while those with low mortgage rates refuse to sell, creating severe inventory shortages that trap growing families in too small homes and lock out first time buyers. Third, the job market has stagnated with white collar hiring and mobility hitting its lowest level since 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal. This triple paralysis threatens long term economic consequences in housing, employment, mobility and inequality. Walter, is this news or faux news?
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Well, the prophecy is faux news in the sense that what it comes down to is they're saying, hey, if this continues for the long term, it could be long term problems. Well, that is kind of self evidently true and it's also, I would hope, self evidently true, at least to the sophisticated listeners to this podcast that we cannot possibly know today whether this is a blip on the screen or a long term trend. I think two of those indicators that moving in immobility and the job immobility are somewhat connected. If nobody's getting new jobs, nobody is moving to work their new jobs and no kind of there we are. So you know, I wouldn't, I, I two points determine a line and three points determine a plane, but not if two of the three points are the same point. So I'm, I'm not sure we actually have reached that. You know, I think in journalism you say you need, I need three examples to make a trend. So I think we've got two beyond that. Look, I think if it turns out, and again it is too soon to tell, but if it turns out that AI has something to do with the immobility in the labor market, that is the start of something bigger. But we shall see. On housing, people who've listened to this podcast for a while know that my views are build baby build and that we need to be looking systemically at ways to. I know this is very unfashionable right now, but increase remote working so that people can live a civilized life at a greater distance from their office. We need to look at zoning regulations, we need to look at building codes. We need to look at ways of trying to make the housing market more of a national market than a series of completely isolated local markets. There are a lot of things that we can and should do to reduce the cost of starter homes, especially so that young families can live in a nice house with a nice yard, with a sustainable lifestyle where you can work and shop conveniently from your home. That's what we need to do as a country. There are very few things that matter more than getting this right.
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One thing I have noticed, even just anecdotally with my generation, millennials, and I think especially Gen Z, is that people do seem less willing than they did in the past to move cities or states in search of a better quality of life. And this used to be something that Americans were, I think, you know, kind of uniquely good at. Do you think there's some sort of cultural issue there, some sort of cultural stagnation or something that got lost where people are just less willing to. To leave their parents or their neighborhood, even if it's in search of better economic opportunity or something like that?
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Well, you know, one thing again, people love to say, oh, American living standards have stopped growing. But the fact that you're no longer forced to leave your family in order to eke out a living in some distant land where you don't know anybody, that's not a sign of declining lifestyle, having more choice, where there are enough decent choices for jobs where you live so that you're not compelled to move a thousand miles. We should not read that as a sign of national decline. All right? That's what the good life looks like. And there really are a lot of ways in which we, you know, we sort of. We have a big free floating anxiety about the state of the world, future of the world, many things, and we're always trying to attach it to specific conditions. I think it's easier psychologically to deal with a defined anxiety about X than with a floating anxiety about the singularity. World War Three, so many things. So where can we say something sort of constructive about all of this? Well, I guess I want to come back to this notion of the invisible enhancement in living standards that is not reflected in a greater pile of material goods in your house, but better choices. And so maybe a really big one is, think about pet medicine. How much do Americans today spend on. How many dogs do we know that are in chemotherapy? When I was a kid, I can tell you the answer was zero, zero dogs. You went to the vet basically for three things. Either you were getting shots for your dog, you were getting your dog neutered, or you were killing your dog. Those are the things that you went to the vet for. Right. You didn't go to the vet for a cat, maybe at all. Now we have dialysis machines for dogs. We have a whole pharmacopoeia for dogs now. So you can sit around and say, my standard of living is going down. Life is terrible. The boomers had everything and I have nothing. I live in, I live in a, you know, sort of absolute dystopian hell hole here. Right. But you don't have to move hundreds of miles to find a job. Your dog, if something happens, can get like therapies that John D. Rockefeller could not get in his day. All right? Life is not so bad as it looks. And then you say, well, you know, we're getting our homes to come back earlier at so, so much later than the boomers. Yeah. You staying in, in school longer too. All right. You're, you know, amazingly, when you're still in graduate school at 28 and not married at 30, you're probably not going to be buying your homes as early in your life cycle as people who got out of school at 18 and were married at 20 did. Right. This is not some unnatural thing. And by the way, you will probably spend more years as a homeowner buying your home in your 30s and living into your 80s than you would buying your home in your 20s and living into your 60s, which used to be the pattern life is. We need to, there are things to worry about. There are things that are not going well. There are things that need to be changed. But we do need to get a grip, people. We need to get a grip.
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All right, our second story. More National Guard troops are heading soon to Washington, D.C. and they're preparing to start carrying weapons in the coming days, officials say a major shift that comes days after President Trump said he was deploying them to, quote, take back the Capitol from what he described as violent criminals. Since arriving in Washington last Tuesday, National Guard troops job has been largely to serve as a visible presence in public areas and have been assigned administrative and logistical duties as well as area beautification work. Trump was flanked by Defense Secretary Hegseth on Monday when he announced he was deploying the National Guard to Washington and placing the city's police department under federal control. He said he was taking drastic measures to restore law and order, describing the nation's capital as being, quote, overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals. While local officials acknowledge problems remain. According to the Washington Post, violent crime in D.C. was down 35% last year from 2023, the lowest in more than 30 years. Walter, as a D.C. resident, is this news or phonews?
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First of all, I'm a resident of Florida, Jeremy. We need to get that right. Look, I think it is. I think there's so much Faux news in there, it's hard to point your finger at one. Let's start with, you know, crime statistics going down. I used to, back in the 1970s when I was in college, the criminology professors used to spend a lot of time explaining to us why crime statistics meant nothing. Now because, you know, the reporting issues, they're not really standardized in how they're collected. They. There are a lot of people between you and the raw data who want to make sure that you see what, what they want you to see. His point at the time was that all of this talk about a crime wave in the 70s was totally mythical. Everything was fine, just shut up. It's all a bunch of lying statistics. And my skepticism about crime statistics has not left me to this day. And as far as I can see, the problems that they were talking about in the 70s, from a Liberal point of view, very much still exists today. And so I'm skeptical. I think I have certainly anecdotally from people I know in D.C. not only do, you know, have, has there been a serious increase in crime since COVID there's a serious increase of people taking precautions. So, you know, I remember back in the 70s in New York, you would think before you went out, okay, I need to have enough money on me so that the mugger won't kill me because they're furious that they didn't get enough, but not so much money that I can't afford to lose it. So what's the like, sweet spot of money to carry? And I need to probably have an ID with me so I can get into the club. But I, but, but it shouldn't be one of the IDs. It's a real pain to get back if, if you lose it. So, you know, we're not back there. Although I have heard from people in Washington that they are more affordable, afraid than they used to be of getting mud. Whatever, whatever, whatever. What it really comes down to is that Donald Trump has found a political issue that he can make some hay with. And Democrats who say, ah, we don't need no, we don't need no stinking National Guardsmen in Washington. Everything is fine in Washington. Suddenly find that every carjacking, you know, is getting pinned on them as a political problem. You know, Trump exploits cracks in opposing coalition or with great skill and deftness, his opponents are outraged by this. Okay, Faux News, all of it.
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All right, final story of the week. The percentage of US adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest number in 90 years of polling on the subject. Also, for the first time ever in Gallup's survey, a majority of Americans, 53%, say drinking in moderation or one or two drinks a day is bad for one's health. Health. There has been little difference in recent decades in the percentages of partisans saying they drink alcohol. But that has changed over the past two years, with a sharp drop in reported drinking among Republicans falling 19 points to 46%, but not Democrats holding fairly steady at 61%. Declines in alcohol consumption do not appear to be caused by people shifting to other mood altering substances. Although marijuana use is higher today than a decade ago, it has been fairly steady over the past four years and does not appear to be a factor in people choosing not to drink alcohol. Walter, is this news or Faux News?
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Well, I think we are to some degree in. What are they? Lies, damn lies and statistics territory reported as such an issue. Do you drink? How much do you drink? That what you could see there is people sensitive to a turn in the, in the way drinking is regarded suddenly think it's a good answer to tell a pulser, oh, I never touched the stuff, while a few years ago it might have been, well, you, you seem hopelessly uncool if you never drink. So you might say, oh, well, I drink occasionally, when in fact you didn't drink at all. So you. This means nothing. It's almost as bad as those, you know, sort of. How many times have you had sex in the last, you know, weak or whatever. It's just like, you know, people lie. Or put it another way, there are certain questions that people don't feel an obligation to answer truthfully from strangers in particular. So I'm not very, I think, you know, journalists need stories and polls are always a great story. And here's a poll that said if we're drinking less as a society on the whole, I, I do kind of think that's good. Not because I have some kind of religious or moral opposition to any kind of drinking. Jesus didn't actually turn the water into grape juice. He turned it into wine. All Right. So that's not where it comes from. But I think after Prohibition, American society really sort of reacted very, very hard, and you were kind of an idiot if you didn't drink to getting drunk. And I've certainly been in countries, can I say your name? Uk, where the level of public drunkenness by people in even governmental positions is sort of shocking to my naive Carolinian sensibilities here. But so I'm glad to see any kind of movement toward, you know, what, three martini lunch is not a great idea. Even a couple of glasses of wine at lunch and you go to sleep, you know, it's, you know, it's not, it's not necessarily so bad that people are pulling back a little bit. They can always start drinking more if they think they're not drinking enough.
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All right, that does it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation. Walter, this week, you, of course, of course covered the Trump Putin summit in Alaska, and you went into some broader history about U.S. russian relations and dynamics in the relationship, and also some parallels to the US Israel relationship. So tell us more about your analysis of this week's Alaska summit in particular, and then some of the history that informs your read on it.
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Okay, well, look, I think when you're writing, you know, it's always kind of interesting when there's a big news event in the sort of zone of events that you're covering as a columnist, because you, you know, you're glad. On the one hand, boy, everybody's interested in my subject. You know, the eyes of the world are riveted on the Alaska summit and then the Zelensky summit and the White House. Everybody's talking about it, everybody's writing about it. On the other hand, you know, what are you going to say that isn't just, oh, my goodness, Putin and Trump are having, you know, having a summit who won? You know, all the stuff that people do. You don't want to just be one more babbling voice in this choir of idiocy. So what can you actually say in the middle of this that adds value? And I must say that this column this week was one of the hardest because, you know, the summit. My deadline to get the piece into the paper is in the late afternoon, and as I'm approaching my deadline, they're still talking. And with Trump particularly, you have no idea. Just because things have been going one way for several hours doesn't mean they're going to go off in a completely different direction. I mean, I could be writing a column on new transatlantic Harmony. And then five minutes later, he bombed France. So it's just, you know, you really, you gotta be on your toes as a columnist. And this was definitely one of the weeks where I earned my pay. And so, you know, thinking about, okay, what is it that people are. Are missing that could actually be useful, I thought there were a couple of things here. One is that while everybody was talking about Putin, Ukraine, Trump, Ukraine, blah, blah, blah, nobody was. People were not sitting back to look at the whole US Russia relationship kind of in, in context, and particularly there was this little thing that, you know, people wrote about it at the time, but there was that White House signing of a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan or kind of another, an agreement between those two countries. And people, you know, it just didn't enter people's coverage at the summit. That, for Putin, that's the, that's a huge and really bad event. That is Armenia and Azerbaijan are just as much of the post Soviet space as Ukraine is. Those are things that were part of the Russian empire under the czars, part of the Soviet Union under the commissars, and Putin wants them back. And here was the United States sort of muscling Russia out of the way as the arbiter in some very sensitive negotiations over the relationship of these ex Soviet states. And Armenia in particular had been very much a client of Russia's at this. So, so just in form alone, that would be kind of a poke in the eye with a sharp stick to Putin. But on top of this, the, the substance of what they were trying to achieve here was, if you look at a map, if Putin gas is going to get from Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan to European and other world markets without passing through Russian territory, it's through a pipeline under the Caspian Sea that comes up in Azerbaijan and then needs a good secure route on into, basically through Georgia and Turkey, into the west one way or another through Georgia and then maybe by undersea, whatever. There are a lot of different things at that point, but preventing that from happening. Putin thinks a lot about the geography of pipelines and the power of pipelines. And by opening this alternative with an American sort of promise of protection or engagement anyway, it's not just a challenge to Putin directly, but it dramatically lessens his influence over the future, say, of a country like Kazakhstan, which now doesn't have to worry that if it offends Putin, it can't export oil and gas. So that is a big deal. And especially because Russia is already facing contestation from China in this former Soviet sphere, in Central Asia, and yet you have all of this coverage of Trump and Putin meeting in Alaska, and it's all about, you know, sort of issues, you know, as if nothing else mattered other than Ukraine and the relationship, and that everything that was said and done was entirely about this. That, to me, was, Was. Was worth mentioning. And again, I suspect some of it is just the result of Trump derangement syndrome among some commentators who basically were leaping to say, ah, Trump is such a failure, he's such an idiot, Putin is kicking him around the floor, he's such a Putin puppet, he's a sycophant and so on. You know, again, as our listeners know, I'm by no means a fan of Donald Trump, but this is not. People seem to be so blinded sometimes by their dislike of him that they're just not able to see what's in front of him. Now, it's possible, I suppose, that Trump didn't even know, you know, wasn't even himself, wasn't aware that Putin would be really seriously annoyed by this intervention, who knows? But in any case, I think knowing that helps you understand why Putin was really not in a very generous mood in Alaska. Beyond that, I think the thing that struck me the most was back in Washington was the sort of sycophancy of the European leaders in their meeting with Trump. It was, again, you read the New York Times, it's like, things are, Everybody's fine, but the Europeans are very courageously and correctly pushing for ceasefire and sort of trying to come up with some kind of theory in which this was a victory for the Europeans. For me, there was that exchange where Trump is, like, calling on the European leaders by their first name. You know, well, Randy, what do you say? Well, Emmanuel, what do you say? You know, whatever. And then, you know, and they're saying, well, Mr. President, it seems to me that is amazing. Compare, you know, the picture of, say, the summits from his first term, Angela Merkel pointing the finger at a seated Trump. We're not getting that he has beaten the Europeans into submission, or at least the appearance of submission. And I think what's happened is their fear of Putin and their realization they can do essentially nothing without the United States about this has now forced them. I think they loathe Trump as much as they ever have, but they have realized their only hope of influencing events is to persuade him to agree with them and that you're, you know, if you're going to start out by being disagreeable, judgmental and lecturing, you're probably not going to get very far with persuading Trump to help you out of a tight place. So I think people missed that. The Trump administration has been much more challenging to Russian interests than a lot of the conventional coverage would, would lead you to believe. But also that the big difference between the Trump first term and the Trump second term is that he's whipped the Europeans into what he considers their proper shape. You know, he's like the lion tamer. He goes in there with the chair and the whip, and they're sitting there, you know, sitting on their seats with their paws in the air.
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One final question. You also mentioned in the column that, you know, Trump seems like he may be considering some pursuing some sort of thaw in US China relations. Is that because you think he, he sniffs some sort of weakness on, on, on the Russian side between, you know, the bombing of Fordo, you know, Russia exposed as not being much of a useful ally to Iran and not coming to its aid. You mentioned the Azerbaijan, Armenia negotiation that Trump brokered. Putin was in the position in Alaska of basically demanding territories in Ukraine that he has not been able to conquer, regardless of how much Russia is advancing on the ground in Ukraine. Does Trump sniff some sort of weakness on the Russian side that he's looking to exploit?
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Well, I would. You know, what I think we're seeing is if we go back to when Iran was the focus of Trump's attention, what Trump did was he got very threatening toward Iran, but he was quite nice to Russia. So we, you know, we had all of these, oh, you know, I think we're going to work everything out with Putin and I don't have any problems and, you know, sort of, and taking a certain, again, a hit from the media. Russiagate, Russiagate, you know, but then once Iran and this, I think, may have had an impact of decreasing the chances that Russia would be step in to rescue Iran or something like this. And now that Iran is kind of, you know, relatively speaking, flat on its back, although it's certainly not over as a problem, he's sort of saying really nice things to China while turning a little bit more pressure on Russia. So is he hoping that China will think, perhaps correctly, that if they move, they can get a great deal now, which might then make them a little bit less willing to back Putin's play against Trump? Is he trying to do that? Is he trying to make Putin wonder whether China might be doing, you know, what is he trying to do? I don't know. But it does look to me that there's a bit of a pattern that you are, in a sense, isolating the one that you want to put the most pressure on by trying to, like, pacify the bigger brother. And so maybe in Trump's sort of most hopeful anticipation of what happens, okay, he isolates Iran, pacifies Iran, isolates Russia, pacifies Russia, and now turns to China with all of his ducks in a row. The Europeans all lined up in the right position. Iran and China kind of out of the game for a while. All right, China, let's make a deal. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that is sort of in the back of his mind somewhere as an objective.
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All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Walter, you've been to Alaska, I assume? I've never asked, but. All right, give us your favorite Alaska travel time.
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Well, you know, I can't say I know Alaska like I know New Jersey, but it's still easier to give travel chips in, in Alaska, I would say taking, you know, the, the glaciers going, you know, on a nice little boat cruise. I was only out for like a, a day trip. It was a flying visit. But going down and seeing, you know, the sort of sea otters lying on their backs eating an abalone just laughing at you because you would pay some ungodly amount for this abalone that they're just like, you know, they're pretty smug crew, but they're fun to watch. Seeing the glaciers calving and the sea lions and seals sitting around on flows of ice and rock, I mean, it's pretty amazing. Birds, eagles flying overhead, the occasional fin of an orca surfacing. I strongly recommend doing this. And what I would really like to do is be able to go back and spend a lot more time doing exactly those things. So don't miss the coast in Alaska, whatever you do.
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All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers, Josh Cross and Quinn Waller, thanks to Andrew Wilson at Hudson and my co host, Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week. And until then, please go rate and review us. This helps other people amplifying the show.