This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
feels a little weird to have my very first post here after a decade or whatever of reading scott, subreddit, and then here be a sort of swipy rant, but here goes:
the main "danger" to this whole affair is that trump has managed to unite the left, right and center in every single country that isn't the US in being all-out "fuck those assholes, we're doing it live".
in theory, the rational response to US tariffs would be to enact no tariffs at all and to ask trump to pretty please be so nice as to remove his tariffs too.
in practice, this would be political suicide everywhere.
the only play is to throw up a huge middle finger to the US to widespread public applause and to double down.
whether or not that hurts the country that does it more than the US is completely irrelevant. any politician that doesn't go down the 'tard road won't be a politician for long.
any supposed analysis that doesn't take this pretty obvious reality into account is worthless.
I'd add that, unfortunately for me, if Trump proceeds to wreck the economy it will cause a lasting polarization against his anti-woke efforts.
More options
Context Copy link
It's important game theory to punish defectors; here, the US is the defector. There is certainly a question about how long countries like China, already facing weak growth, can keep up the retaliation, but:
A) The US trade war may prompt a reduction of non-US tariffs globally, which will boost growth for all those countries, especially if it results in a wave of investment to avoid US-related supply chains.
B) It is very unclear how long the Trump tariffs can be sustained given that they do not really seem to have a good legal basis. It does not seem ro me like they would win a legal challenge, and I think that Congress will be forced to step in to end the tariffs if Trump does not cave.
C) The US, by engineering itself a recession for goals that are probably unachieveable, is greatly diluting its supposed leverage - access to the US market is less attractive when our economy sucks.
More options
Context Copy link
the obvious play would be to short US equities, and then implement retaliatory tariffs. the windfall from the short would help offset the economic loss from the tariffs . imagine had Chinese officials shorted S&P 500 futures through intermediaries b4 announcing its retaliatory tariffs.
As soon as Trump announced, their retaliation was already basically locked in. Their announce didn't move the needle because it was highly improbable they were gonna just do nothing.
More options
Context Copy link
that sounds cute but that's all this is.
if america ditches their empire, yes, US equities will suffer. but
a) will that actually happen? currently I still assume trump will be reigned in by smarter people.
b) even if it does happen, the US will most certainly defend stock prices for the benefit of old people who vote. so... what's the timeframe of that short?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But this largely makes sense if those other countries didn’t have tariffs on the US to start with. But they do have tariffs and thus it comes across to me as rather hypocritical (ie fuck you for doing the very thing we do).
The tariffs the US just announced are about 10 to 20 times larger than the tariffs that most other countries have on US goods.
More options
Context Copy link
this is entirely irrelevant unless those other countries (or rather the people in those countries) are aware of those tariffs. which, I assure you, they aren't.
from the perspective of europe, trump is throwing up tariffs out of nowhere.
I’m sure you are right. That seems like a messaging problem.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This seems to be the standard justification for tariffs that I hear. I don't think it's realistic, but then again, I have only a cursory understanding of the subject.
From the numbers I've seen, most western countries have a some small niche industries that they protect, and so they have high tariffs on those. But those niche industries account for a very small percentage of overall trade. Take, for example, the US and Canada (before the current Trump tariffs). Canada puts huge tariffs on US dairy. And the US puts huge tariffs on softwood lumber. But those are only a tiny percentage of total trade. So while there were double digit tariffs in those specific categories, the overall effective tariff rate was very low (1-2%) flowing both ways.
Is that not the case?
Kind of.
'Overall effective tariff' is always a bit of a shell game that depends on how you calculate averages. It is basically always in your interest to present your 'overall average' as low as possible to look better than the opponent / disqualify critiques. This in turn leads to incentivizing constructing a standard that lets you average things in a more favorable way. Note the dispute over formal tariffs and informal trade barriers, which were factored in to the trump tariff claims. Or how media on EU vs US cartariffs emphasize the US pickup truck tariff versus an EU automative tariff. How you gerrymander the boundaries matters. Which numbers you draw attention to matters. As they say, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Because there is no single standard on how to calculate such an 'overall effective tariff,' it is a claim that requires either perfect transparency, or trust. And since governments tend not to be perfectly transparent even at the best of times, let alone when money is at stake, this comes down to trust. Critically, this is both trust in the other side (who you know has an incentive to present their best face), but also a trust in your own side's negotiators to actually meet that 'fairly.'
Part of the issue in the current trade war is that the American foreign trade establishment, like much of the rest of the political establishment, has broadly lost trust / credibility. This has been part of the dynamic since the neoliberals were forced to concede major policy negotiating mistakes, such as the deindustrialization of the rust belt due to various trade concessions with, say, NAFTA, or Europe, or letting China into the WTO. Some of these were explicit tradeoffs 'for a greater good', where economic forecasts of 'we know you'll lose these jobs, but we're sure you'll get better jobs' never materialized. The regional-specific dynamics of free trade were somewhere between under-recognized, dismissed, or actively mislead by interests with their own priorities. (See the favored trade policies of city-based service-industry establishments that tend to prioritize, well...)
What this means is that 'niche industries are well protected but relatively small' is a bounding argument whose bounds relies on trust. Trust in those numbers, trust in the people providing the numbers, and trust in the judgement of people who helped create those numbers, i.e. previous institutional elites caught up in the anti-establishment political movement.
I mean, I agree on a bunch of the points about why the establishment has lost credibility in terms of protecting domestic manufacturing interests. In my view, letting China into the WTO was the single largest political blunder of the last 50 years. But that doesn't change the fact that mathematically an overall effective tariff rate should be relatively straight forward to calculate. TOTAL_TARIFFS_PAID / TOTAL_VALUE_OF_GOODS doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room. I suppose you could always add other taxes onto the goods once they've entered the market and not charge them at the border, but that wouldn't exactly be subtle or easy to cover up.
That's meaningless. If Canada puts a 1000000% tariff on US dairy, the US will export 0 dairy to them and there will be 0 tariff paid.
More options
Context Copy link
The reason it's not relatively simple is because states, and more importantly corporations, don't use TOTAL_TARIFFS_PAID / TOTAL_VALUE_OF_GOODS as the basis of evaluating tariffs.
For one thing, that's a retrospective evaluation (how much you did pay) as opposed to the forward-planning factor that comes with things like quota-steps (first X amount receives Y tariff, second X amount receives Z tariff, etc.). Companies are looking at their marginal gains for continuing to ship more product to the location. When the marginal costs exceed the marginal gains, the rational members stop, regardless of if they'd still 'average' a net positive overall.
Even the premise of 'Total Value' is totally gameable. What, specifically, is a particular country using for the value they are using? The cost of the product at time of purchase? At time of entry into the market? Value-added tax at a particular point in assembly? At time of sale to final customer?
Further, how are you combining categories? Are you biasing the data with mean averages, or median averages, or are you- more likely- mixing the two methods?
Yeah, but I don't think the details add much in the context of this conversation.
We're not talking about a specific corporation deciding whether to ship one more container load based on marginal costs hitting a quota step. We're talking about the justification for blanket "reciprocal" tariffs, i.e. zeke's point about hypocrisy "fuck you for doing the very thing we do." It seems to me that the overall effective tariff burden is the relevant stat when discussing whether the existing tariffs justified the kind of blanket tariffs currently being enacted, simply because the burden of the new blanket tariffs will approximate how that stat is calculated. If that stat is actually about 1% then that's a defense against the hypocrisy claim.
Part of the challenge is that you don't see trade that doesn't happen. We don't know the counterfactual of how large trade would be in a heavily tariffed vertical absent the tariffs. Sure the US exports very little milk to Canada so the high tariff there doesn't mean much, but that just assume the conclusion, maybe exports of milk to Canada would be way higher if the tariff was lower.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The MSM seems to think canada's dreaded dairy tariff is effectively 0%.
It's not 0%. It's effectively a (maximum) quota rather than a tariff, though it is written as a tariff with a cliff. It's still a trade barrier.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Doesn't seem to be playing out that way in Canada -- I keep waiting for the egregoire to notice that we are locked in a cage with an 800lb gorilla and are responding to his shitflinging by poking him with a (slim) stick, but even normally levelheaded folks are so wrapped in the flag (the one they were spitting on a couple of years ago when it was being flown by truckers) that I can't see it happening no matter how bad things get.
If you go broke enough you may not become a state, bug I guess the US will accept you as a territory
There is no scenario where Canada becomes part of the US voluntarily. It just isn't politically possible. Canada has a deep-seated anti-Americanism, which doesn't normally manifest as hate towards the US, but it does manifest as a deep conviction to never be part of the US.
Remember, Canada was largely founded by Americans who were loyal to the Crown during the American Revolution and established new settlements in a freezing cold theretofore sparsely populated territory. It is the only country that was founded in explicit opposition to the founding principles of the US. And then followed two hundred and seventy years of selective migration of Canadians who did not care about this out of the country into the more prosperous and warmer US.
Today, the politics are very different, but not being American is still the single core defining feature of our national identity, which we latch onto because we are culturally so similar. Quebec is another story, in that they have a different ethnic origin and a separate national identity, but they only make voluntary annexation more certainly impossible, because a change to the constitution of this kind would require unanimous agreement by all ten provinces. And if English Canada defines itself by not being American, modern Quebec defines itself by its French language and there is no more sacred political principle in Quebec than the belief that the French language must be protected by law. These laws would undoubtedly violate the first amendment. They violate Canada's own constitutionally protected freedom of expression, but Quebec sidesteps that using the notorious notwithstanding clause. Quebec will not join the US and be forced to give them up.
No amount of economic pressure is going to make Canadians want to give up these cherished identities. For most of our country's history, Canadians have been able to increase their incomes substantially by moving to the US. The profesional class in Canada can still do this, and there is still a significant brain drain. As irrational as it may seem, the ones who remain do not care as much about their material well-being as they do about preserving their independence and national identity, even if they associate it with ideas about peacekeeping and free healthcare rather than loyalty to the British Crown.
Annexation is extremely unpopular and there is an absolute determination not to get stuck with what is regarded here as a seriously dysfunctional political culture.
Minor part of your broader point, but could you sketch out the argument here? I'm not sure whether I'm missing some portion of what these laws do or some portion of 1A precedent.
There are law that forbid the use of languages other than French in many situations. For example, businesses must be able to communicate to employees in French. Employees have the right to demand that all communication be in French. Employment offer letters must be in French. Engineers and doctors must speak French.
More options
Context Copy link
Core things like that in Quebec many things must be in French, from store signs to school classes.
I'm not sure what the 1A argument is, though. Moreover, I have a factual question. Do such laws prevent store signs from also having other languages, or do they just mandate that French must be present? If the former, I could perhaps see a 1A challenge that they are restricting speech. If just the latter, it's not so clear to me. There is some compelled nature to the speech, but the standards there are different, especially if it's just commercial regulation or gov't-run schools. So yeah, I'd really appreciate if anyone could put out at least a sketch of the argument.
It's a law that controls what people say and write.
It can have other languages, but French has to be more prominent.
You and I are talking. You are my employee. That means you can demand that I speak French and it is enforced by the government, so the government is controlling what I say. I cannot send an email to you in English if you have asked that I speak in French to you.
I'm a doctor and you're my patient. The government can force me to speak French to you if you want.
I'm an engineer and you're my client. The government can require that I speak to you in French.
I want to hire you for a job. We both speak English. We both want to speak English. The employment offer letter has to be in French.
I have a business and I want the name of the business to contain an English word. The government will force me to translate it to French.
More options
Context Copy link
Quebec has a language police which goes around and makes sure that the French letters on storefronts and signs are bigger than the English.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The real question mark is if the counter-actions are only counter-US, or also include other country-specific grievances. We are already seeing European establishment media consider the quote/unquote 'necessity' of countering Chinese dumping for Chinese goods that redirect from the US to EU.
The more this becomes a global everyone-vs-everyone, rather than US-only trade war, the greater the negative impacts to countries that depend more on foreign trade. And if you rank countries by their trade-to-GDP ratios, i.e. how much of their GDP comes from selling abroad, or even imports-to-GDP ratio...
Well, the United States is ranked 183 of 195 countries in terms of exports as % of GDP (11.6%), and 191 of 195 in terms of imports as % of GDP (15.4%). It is one of the least global-trade economies in the world in terms of %s. There are certainly grounds for not over-stating that statistic alone. Even small %s to the scale of the US economy can be big absolute numbers. But the general point is there are reasons to suspect the US will do relatively well the worse global trade environment gets for everyone even if that matters little for domestic political purposes.
Some asian countries are already signaling an intent to negotiation rather than stick to 'fuck trump,' so the nature of political suicide may be more limited than the anglosphere media generally recognizes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link