HaroldWilson
2hr ago
doing ok
And by doing ok, you mean nearing all-time highs?
Let's delve into the cross tabs: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300025
When you take out retirees and students it looks much less dramatic, and even in the 25-54 bracket per some mercatus paper I can't find now even a substantial portion thereof is early retirees. Especially given that the figures for men have been stable post-GFC, it hardly seems like something worth crashing the economy over.
HaroldWilson
2hr ago
Democrats' rhetoric surrounding immigration and wages has always stood out to me as an obvious example of politically-motivated doublethink. "The experts" are asking us to hold two contradictory axioms simultaneously. One is that maintaining a supply of "off the books" labor is essential to the survival of multiple industries (such as roofing and agriculture) and that ideally we should be increasing the supply of labor to reduce costs (ie wages) even further. The other is that the available supply of labor has has little if any effect on wages (ie costs).
These are not contradictory because immigrant (especially illegal immigrant) and native pools of labour are not easy substitutes, they have very different skill mixes - and when I say 'skills', I don't mean that American citizens are all accountants or nuclear engineers, I mean in the most basic sense. Hence because of complementary task specialisation it is possible for new illegal immigrants to, on average, depress the wages of other illegal immigrants but not, on average, natives, and for such influxes to improve native productivity. It's a bit of a waste of a median American to be working in the fields, but in a constricted labour market wages in non-skilled fields get pushed up until people are pulled out into those fields, which is bad for productivity and standards of living in the long run. In a way it's the logic of automation.
Of course, there will be some in the American citizen labour pool (especially, ironically, recent legal immigrants) who are similarly unskilled to the average illegal immigrant, but the way to remedy that is via fiscal policy and redistribution of the native productivity gains which immigration facilitates.
HaroldWilson
2hr ago
Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations
Sorry, is the theory here that inducing a recession will increase labour force participation? That is very observably not what has happened in every previous recession. If the theory is that mass deportations will mean this time is different and the reverse will happen because there will be millions of new vacancies opened up, well there are demand side effects too. Obviously no-one knows precisely, but estimates of illegal immigrant remittances tend not to be above 20% of total earnings, so even before considering any other mechanisms you'd need to deport at the very least four illegal immigrants to create one vacancy in an equivalent role on average, and this is before one even begins to consider things like complementary task specialisation. This means that any increase in unemployment downstream of a recession will be extraordinarily difficult. Given that the US labour force is something like 170 million+ people, if a Trump recession produces just a 1% increase in unemployment, you'd need to deport over 6 millions illegal immigrants just to get back to where you started. This isn't just a question of, as you say, 'he won't deport enough illegals to make a difference'. It's that even a small recession would wipe out any possible labour market improvements from even the most thoroughly pursued program of deportations.
The fact is that being able to coast by on gig economy money, for instance, is a symptom of a society becoming wealthier. It might be bad from a social cohesion and personal fulfilment perspective, but 'make society poorer so people have to work harder' seems like a pretty silly experiment to carry out, and rather unfair on everyone else who doesn't fall into that category and whose lives will become a whole lot harder.
I'm also not convinced this is a major problem. U-6 unemployment is below 8% at the moment, which is only marginally above the lows it reached prior to the early 2000s recession, GFC and Covid.
HaroldWilson
21hr ago
Yeah but there was nothing anyone could do to stop those once it became clear what was happening, whereas if there's a recession now it will be blindingly obvious what is going on.
HaroldWilson
1d ago
stocks could drop 50%+.
As much as I hate the tariffs, this is surely unlikely because if this looked like happening at all enough Congressional Republicans would turn on Trump to step in. I mean that would be 1932 levels of political disaster for the Republican party if this actually happened.
HaroldWilson
1d ago
On this basis literally anything Trump does can be explained as a brilliant negotiating tactic. If your aim is just to induce lower tariffs from foreign nations, why not actually base your tariffs on the real rates of other nations and not this balance of trade nonsense? There are plenty of countries with lower average tariff rates than the US who have nevertheless been hit - what precisely is Trump trying to achieve there if his aim is reciprocal reductions?
HaroldWilson
1d ago
But why should we believe the experts? We know they're ideologically motivated liars. So, fuck it. Let's just start pushing buttons.
Well unless you believe the stock market doesn't follow economic signals but instead is in on an elaborate ruse to discredit tariffs, the disaster predicted by the experts is already underway. You also have to engage with the object-level arguments and evidence against tariffs, especially of this extreme nature - it's utterly pathetic to say, well I don't trust experts so I will merely act at random.
If for no other reason to prove that you can do something different, alternatives are possible, even if you may indeed get burned.
I doubt this will be a persuasive argument to consumers when everything goes up in price. If what you do is a complete fuck-up, surely it will only increase the dominance of the status quo. The tariffs will be a disaster and every economist will rightly say I told you so. Pol Pot proved that 'alternatives are possible' too.
HaroldWilson
1d ago
razor-thin profit margins
Well I never knew 'more excess profits for producers and higher prices for consumers' was high on the list of Trump priorities. Surprised that slogan never made it on the campaign trail.
HaroldWilson
1d ago
you may be overestimating what the median person directly has to lose in a crash.
Their job? Clearly America forgot their lesson from Smoot-Hawley and people will have to endure double digit unemployment again to remember it. If we're lucky this one might put Republicans out of power for twenty years again.
Well that probably won't happen but largely because Trump will probably climb part way down at some stage.
HaroldWilson
1d ago
The US has rising income inequality and the fracture between wall street and average Joe has become way too large
This might be more credible if Trump were not also planning to reinstate his wildly lop-sided tax cuts. Inequality is mostly downstream of fiscal policy, not trade policy - the period of major growth in inequality came in the 80s, then it stagnated in the 90s and 2000s which doesn't really match up with free trade/decline of manufacturing timelines, what it very obviously matches up with is 12 years of Republican control of the Presidency up to 1993. Inequality at the moment is roughly where it was in the early-mid 1990s.
The world risks a bronze age style collapse if global supply chains break down
This makes no sense as rationale for the tariffs when one looks at where and how they have been applied. I think chips have even been exempted from Taiwan's tariff rates!
Makes domestic manufacturing more competitive
As @The_Nybbler said, this makes no sense at all. How could insulating domestic manufacturers from foreign competition make them more efficient and dynamic? The very reverse process is part of what destroyed British industry. Higher tariffs barriers in the post-war period meant that, because they were not exposed to global competitive forces, British companies never kept up with the technologies and efficiencies developing all over the world, and so when firms like British Leyland arrived in the 70s and 80s they were still producing cars at the speed and quality of decades prior and were inevitably destroyed. For a developing country this logic is more reasonable because pure Geschenkron-style copying is enough for domestic industry to grow fast from a very low base, but in the position of a first-world nation this stops working because you're at the forefront of technologies and efficiencies. Hence why Chinese tariffs have come down every year for decades, because they're slowly wearing out the possibilities of copying manufacturing techniques from the rest of the world and the competitive advantage offered by low wages.
At the end of the day you have to believe Trump when he speaks. He is simply an idiot who thinks that the US should not run a trade deficit with literally any country in the world and doesn't understand anything about anything. This is not a piece of masterful grand strategy to reduce inequality and strengthen the resilience of American supply chains, Trump is just thick.
HaroldWilson
1d ago
Why should my state put the interest of someone who has zero right to be here above mine?
The point is that the same logic which is being applied here could be used to deport and abandon citizens. Just ignore due process, do what you want and then, oops, looks like you're in a tinpot dictatorship now so nothing we can do because there's no way to redress your grievance.
'I don't care about due process because this guy was guilty anyway' is not a very coherent position.
HaroldWilson
1d ago
I fail to see how their admin can get even close to balancing the budget.
What makes you think Trump cares at all about this? Nothing he has ever done indicates any kind of concern for the deficit - even the DOGE spree ended up targeting 'woke' spending specifically rather than 'waste' writ large. And of course he's lining up for the usual Republican budget-busting tax cut.
HaroldWilson
9d ago
It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.
For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
I'm not sure this is so much 'believing false things' as 'being unable to intuit the scale of numbers'. In both these cases these numbers are nothing more than shorthand for 'lots'. They haven't deliberately discarded lower or higher numbers, just plumped for something that seems like lots. It's like when there was that poll suggesting that the average American thought 10% of the country was trans and 20% Asian or whatever it was. People aren't 'believing' that figure is true in the sense that they actively don't believe in possible lower figures, they just know it's more than zero and grasp at some likely sounding round number.
HaroldWilson
16d ago
Not a single woke activist judge ever told Biden he must stop welcoming 13 million illegals into our country.
Not sure I understand the logic. Obviously it's easier for the courts to stop you doing something than to stop you doing nothing.
HaroldWilson
16d ago
I think the problem is just elite (or aspirant-upper-middle-class) overproduction. Gen Z'ers could actually have a material life better than their past equivalents by working a menial or unskilled job, the problem is that such a high proportion of the youth would find that insultingly low-status. That's not to assign blame, the decline of towns and cultural messaging has produced this state of affairs, but it's also worth noting that the internet makes discontent more visible and self-sustaining.
HaroldWilson
17d ago
Sure, but these practical problems are actually utterly irrelevant to the question of who is a woman. Trans women are women but shouldn't be allowed in female changing rooms is a perfectly coherent position. So the teacher or whoever doesn't need to take a position on the nature of womanhood at all.
HaroldWilson
17d ago
Yes but I don't think the author of that article would subscribe to the initial assumption that the reason some defend trans-inclusive schemes is because they are 'entirely disconnected from reality'.
HaroldWilson
17d ago
The problem though, especially on a forum as partisan as this one, is that things descend very quickly into Bulverism, and more time is spent psychoanalysing your opponents than engaging with them.
HaroldWilson
17d ago
and the inability to write definitions of ‘woman’ that are both meaningful and trans-inclusive is the reason why.
This is itself a position. When I said 'scheme' I didn't mean a literal definition of woman, I mean a more expansive view of language as a series of context-dependent games. 'Female' and 'adult' themselves have context dependent clusters of meanings, and are not 0/1 binaries. Efforts to nail it down are always doomed.
HaroldWilson
17d ago
Well personally I think the whole question is a little silly - a la Wittgenstein, policing the boundaries of words is a context-dependent exercise, a language game which is usually directed at some other end. When we say 'woman', sometimes we're gesturing at features which don't include trans women - ability to bear children, say - and sometimes we're gesturing at features that do - norms of personal presentation, for instance.
That is to say, I don't think there's any reason to suggest that it is the criteria of one game in particular that should be held up as the final and definite boundary to 'woman' in the abstract.
HaroldWilson
17d ago
Is the economy good?
This takes the cake for the biggest load of nonsense I have ever read. It blusters a lot with only a few actual points made in defence of the notion that government economic statistics failed to capture true economic conditions post-Covid, all of which are very silly indeed.
My colleagues and I have modeled an alternative indicator, one that excludes many of the items that only the well-off tend to purchase — and tend to have more stable prices over time — and focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities, the goods and services that lower- and middle-income families typically can’t avoid. Here again, the results reveal how the challenges facing those with more modest incomes are obscured by the numbers. Our alternative indicator reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we’ve been led to believe.
In the first place I am disinclined to give this any credence because their calculations are very opaque. Even if you got to their website the 'data' section and 'white paper' for their 'True Living Cost' don't seem to give their actual weights or the changes in weightings (other that impressionistic statements like saying that 'luxuries' have been deweighted). However, even if I could trust their numbers it doesn't at all resolve the 'vibecession' question because based on TLC the Trump years were ones of economic decline too. However, the economic discourse in those years was uniformly positive. So what gives?
If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.
Aside from the fairly preposterous gambit of saying that we can count some people in full-time employment as unemployed if their wage is too low (words have meanings, if you want to talk about wages then just do, don't crowbar it in to unemployment figures). More importantly though, what you will see again is that his 'true' unemployment figure tracks exactly the common U-3 figure over the years. So again it's totally worthless in explaining post-Covid dissatisfaction because the post-Covid 'true' rate was actually the lowest it has ever been since his data series starts in the 90s.
Here, the aggregate measure of GDP has hidden the reality that a more modest societal split has grown into an economic chasm. Since 2013, Americans with bachelor’s or more advanced degrees have, in the aggregate, seen their material well-being improve — by the Federal Reserve’s estimate, an additional tenth of adults have risen to comfort. Those without high school degrees, by contrast, have seen no real improvement. And geographic disparities have widened along similar lines, with places ranging from San Francisco to Boston seeing big jumps in income and prosperity, but places ranging from Youngstown, Ohio, to Port Arthur, Texas, falling further behind. The crucial point, even before digging into the nuances, is clear: America’s GDP has grown, and yet we remain largely blind to these disparities.
This is insultingly dishonest. Why does he say 'since 2013' in an article about the post-Covid economy? Because the trend doesn't hold true - after over a decade of sharply rising inequality, the 2021-23 period was actually saw bottom quintile income rise as a proportion of top quintile income.
This article is utterly irrelevant to post-Covid economic perceptions. What is might prove, if one believes the statistics, is that Americans ought to have been pessimistic about the economy throughout the 90s, 2000s and 2010s as well as post-Covid. But they frequently weren't. It still doesn't answer the question of why Americans get specifically upset in the post-Covid period.
What is a woman?
Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.
This is talk radio 'why are my enemies all so thick' slop. Take it elsewhere.
HaroldWilson
18d ago
The more likely explanation is they are optimizing for time spent on X
Fine, but wasn't Elon's whole motivation for buying X to improve or level in some way the social media information space? With which the link de-boosting works at total cross-purposes.
HaroldWilson
30d ago
I love the attempt to actually contain spending
There is no attempt to contain spending. The savings from DOGE/'efficiency' are trivial and will be destroyed and then some by the inevitable Republican budget-busting tax cut.
HaroldWilson
30d ago
I hate Putin, so I'm perfectly OK with all of you dying to achieve this goal
This is highly uncharitable. It's not just about hating Putin, the point is that the worse the war is for Russia the greater deterrent it stands as against wars of aggression. And of course it's not as if the US is forcing Ukraine to fight, just furnishing them some weapons to do so.
This is simply not true. Under Biden the US only had one quarter of negative real GDP growth, which is not famously less than two quarters, which not only is conventional definition but pre-Covid there is no recession typically considered so which was less than six months. The 'Covid recession' was obviously a special case because of the scale of the decline in a single quarter - 19% decline versus around 0.25% for the single quarter of 2022 contraction. If you consider 2022 a recession then you also have to include patently non-recessionary years a recessions including 2014 and 1956.
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