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 -
I would love to see a Twitter-style poll with the following options:
A) Keep Jones Act, don't implement Trump tariffs
B) Keep Jones Act, implement Trump tariffs
C) Repeal Jones Act, don't implement Trump tariffs
D) Repeal Jones Act, implement Trump tariffs
I'd love to see not only percentages, but some mental models from the people in different categories. This in inspired by seeing both Zvi's latest on the Jones Act and MR linking one estimate related to possible Trump tariffs.
Zvi doesn't sum it up super nicely, but estimates I see of the value of repealing the Jones Act are \approx 3% reduction in cost of goods (just due to the flagging effect) and a claim that a plausible OOM estimate is \approx 3% GDP increase (I lost the thread the other day on how to put approximately signs in without strikeout). The randomly-linked twitter post estimates price increases due to tariffs mostly around 2-3%, with some specific sectors rising up to 13%.
I suspect that most people just don't mentally look at economic estimates and compare them to each other, but I don't know what else goes on in their heads. If they're trying to justify one or the other position, how do they go about it? Is it at all plausible if we apply their justification to the other question?
Finally, heresthetics. Could an 'omnibus' option (D) bill be pushed, saying, "That old, bad, just banning stuff style protectionism clearly failed; we shot ourselves in the foot and didn't even manage to actually protect an industry in the process. Instead, tariffs will be the way; at the very least, taxes are slightly more pleasing to the economist than specific bans, as they still allow price signals to work somewhat and inspire new solutions, while at least collecting some revenue for a debt-strapped gov't"? Obviously, people would horrifically oppose it, but what would they say when they oppose it? What would the reasoning be? How would that reasoning come across to the people who would respond with a different choice from the list?
I'm going to take a very controversial stance and support keeping the Jones Act. If the goal is to develop US shipbuilding for security reasons, there needs to be an actual shipbuilding industry. US shipbuilding is currently so horrendously inefficient that it will be instantly vaporized by Korea, Japan and... China most of all. US shipbuilding is not 50% less competitive, they're 500% less competitive. Instant loss. And if you nuke your shipbuilding sector who is going to build warships? Why would you want to make your warships within the Chinese missile death zone? Real great powers know how to make their own ships.
It makes zero sense to do all this onshoring and neo-mercantilism in microchips, strategic materials and leave out shipbuilding. There are all kinds of things you could do to introduce efficiencies and market discipline without razing the industry to the ground. Shock therapy is not the answer, there needs to be careful, judicious reform. Import technology and best practices from allies, reform regulations, bring in technical experts, break up cartels or cozy price fixers. Nationalize - China State Shipbuilding is the biggest shipbuilder in the world and is profitable too.
How is it that the US can build rockets, jet fighters and cars but ships are beyond them... because they protected their own market? The Chinese protect their own auto industry - lo and behold they produce huge numbers of cheap cars. The Koreans protected their auto industry for decades and turned it into a competitive export industry. The EU protects its agriculture and isn't a famine-stricken wasteland. Americans aren't some alien race that has an inherent -500% to Shipbuilding, there must be other problems than protection.
Jones act came was passed 104 years ago. Clearly it isn't working to make American shipbuilding great again at the moment. How long are you prepared to keep it and wait around for it to cause the golden age of American shipbuilding - 104 years more?
More options
Context Copy link
What do you think about the Trump tariffs? I'm really curious about how these things interact.
More options
Context Copy link
There's a strictly superior solution: repeal the Jones Act and use the resultant economic gains to fund shipbuilding directly. 3% of the US GDP, the top level estimates; $880 billion. This is 27 times the navy's current shipbuilding budget; 22 times the total US shipbuilding market. (Yes, the vast majority of it is already warships.) Oh, and it's 3.4 times the entire budget of the US Navy. Needless to say, this would completely eliminate any issue of decaying capacity. For that kind of money, we could build 60 new aircraft carriers each year (and then sink them all because it'd be impossible to man them) and have enough budget left over to nearly triple our normal construction.
Of course, if such a proposal were put to the public, I believe we'd rapidly find we do not value our shipbuilding capability at $880 billion. The Jones Act is a near-total failure in its stated aims, but even if it were a fantastic success, even if it only cost the US economy a tenth as much as it actually does, it still wouldn't be worth it, and it only survives by hiding its true costs.
(Not a fan of tariffs either, of course.)
More options
Context Copy link
This doesn't really seem like a good argument for keeping the Jones Act. If we're not good enough at making ships, why not just throw in the towel? You wouldn't pooh-pooh the nation of Haiti for importing computer chips instead of trying to make their own, it'd be foolish to expect them to just magically have the physical and human capital needed to do so.
Haiti is a small shithole country that, last I checked, was controlled by a cannibal who barbecued people. They're so incompetent and disorganized that the Presidential Palace still hasn't been repaired after an earthquake struck in 2010.
The US is a huge, highly developed country with aspirations to world hegemony. They produce plenty of advanced technology. Why can't they find the physical or human capital to build ships efficiently? How hard can it be?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ship_exports
The Italians can do it. The Germans can do it. The Finns can do it! White people spent about 500 years clobbering the rest of the world because we had better ships, the US relies on its navy for relevance in world affairs. This planet is 75% water. Shipbuilding is not something that can be sacrificed.
My point is that you can't simply will your way towards robust institutions and the necessary human capital through saying "Be Tough" on the subject. Either you have an actual plan to achieve the thing you want directly, or you admit it's beyond you for lack of time or resources and turn to alternatives. We have allies who presumably do know a thing or two about how to build ships and maintain the industries needed to build those ships, and if needed, we can just rely on them. Hell, why not let the Europeans build us some warships and we can count that towards their contributions towards NATO, assuming that's still a hot subject?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
We currently have the Jones act. We currently do not have a healthy shipbuilding industry. The Jones act appears to have been passed in 1920. The Jones act is not doing anything to get us a domestic shipbuilding industry. I do not see any prospect of state intervention at the scale necessary to get us a healthy shipbuilding industry. Given that, we should repeal the Jones act.
I would gladly consider supporting the reintroduction of the Jones act as a section of a bill that would, in fact, revitalize US shipbuilding. Until then, all this attitude - and it's an attitude that's shared by many people in GOP policy, it's not just you - does is hurt our economy for precisely no benefit. I do not see any harm in repealing it until that happens.
The US had a healthy shipbuilding industry in 1940, such that it could produce the biggest fleet in the world, fight and win huge wars against rival great powers on the other side of the world. 20 years of Jones Act protection didn't do much harm. I think the Jones Act is a symptom, not a cause. High US wages were already making it difficult to man a large US merchant marine back in the 1920s, hence protection. The problem is not enough protection, not smart enough protection, insufficient and inefficient subsidies, insufficient automation.
Why don't companies move into shipbuilding on the basis that there's huge latent demand? Is a wholly protected US domestic market seriously too small to support shipbuilding? The US has the second longest coastline in the world, a bunch of islands and hundreds of millions of consumers! Does the US lack the capital to build shipyards? Is there a shortage of skilled labour? Is there some huge thicket of laws preventing efficient shipbuilding? Unions? Some combination of these?
I doubt the root causes of the problem will be resolved by killing the Jones Act. All that will happen is political backlash from massive job losses and a modest increase to economic efficiency. But without protection, there is no chance of competing against North East Asia (who have the capital, economies of scale, labour and best practices already established). Without protection, there is no chance of ever revitalizing US shipping since there will be nothing to revitalize.
Shooting the patient in the head does reduce medical costs but it's not really a cure.
Okay but I think we should be realistic and note that a massive and unusually competent policy intervention targeting American shipbuilding is really probably just not going to happen. So in the meantime, the Jones act is just unneeded loss. And if it did happen, it'd necessarily be a much larger undertaking than putting the Jones act back in place, such that additionally reimposing the Jones act doesn't make it much harder to do. So I think in the meantime we should repeal the Jones act and gain the 'modest increase to economic efficiency'. And, from what I've read though I haven't checked it, the benefits really aren't that modest relative to other policy interventions. It's really hard to move gdp even by .1%
More options
Context Copy link
As far as I know river and coastal shopping in the US has been in decline for a long time. Particularly the great lakes: we don't move iron ore and coal (and limestone) like we used to. River shipping in the Mississippi is mostly barge these days I think.
We just don't do all the river and coastal hauling of manufactured goods like the Europeans do, not sure whether it's because we have better rail shipping or some other reason.
I do know that the US coast guard has gotten absolutely retarded about crewing requirements, at the same time as crew recruiting and training is going to pieces in the same way it is for air traffic control.
Europe on the other hand has a lot of cheap hulls and crew from eastern Europe.
No, it's literally the Jones act. Look at how energy gets into the northeastern US. A huge part is provided by Canada, just because that bypasses the Jones act (and because they have legacy pipelines and transmission lines - and the blue states up there keep killing any new projects of that kind). Which, by the way, makes energy prices kind of a problem for the Northwestern states when the tariffs come.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Us shipyards already pretty much only make warships, and only ocassionally pop out a hulk for making trips to hawaii and puerto rico. Maybe the problem is that shipyards only know how to make warships and transfer that waste over into their civilian vessels.
According to google:
That's the total number of vessels in operation, and China builds that many ships in a week.
More options
Context Copy link
I generally agree. Reform is a far better option than repeal. But the Jones Act is a meme and virtually all discussion of it is unproductive signaling. There's about a hundred other things that are equally or even more important for renewed US maritime self-sufficiency, but which are one or more of the following:
There's also a few extremely critical differences in the manufacturing sectors you highlighted where the US is competitive:
Rockets: There was a massive, underserved market that wanted to put payloads in space, but which could only do so at incredible expense, with extremely limited launch frequency. SpaceX commoditized and accelerated payload delivery, granting them near-total monopoly on world demand for space launches, before the competition even got out prototypes. They give high-status nerd jobs to an extremely overproduced market of estranged aerospace engineers, and use their status to pick top talent away from low-pay positions in government that are regularly threatened by cyclical party politics. Most of their flights are uncrewed, and the crewed flights carry literal astronauts - that talent pipeline isn't running dry any time soon, particularly when global demand for astronauts is countable on one hand (provided you count in binary on your hands... which is a normal thing that other people definitely do). The military isn't making demands that SpaceX build their rocket entirely out of US unobtanium, because they tried that with NASA and it went well enough to result in SpaceX existing.
Contrast with shipbuilding: the market has many competitors with decades of experience, most of the market has no comparable binding restrictions on material or labor sourcing, and no one enters the industry for nerd street cred. It's now a massive uphill battle just to gain a foothold in the market, and anyone trying has to face pressures that just don't exist for SpaceX.
Fighter Jets: The US spent decades pouring money and talent into the production of fighter jets and selling them to allied nations, justifying the expense by pointing at the hostile foreign superpower doing the same; then the hostile foreign superpower collapsed. It has taken decades for any credible competition to re-emerge in the market, and arguably we're still not there. Notably, fighter jets are also unambiguously weapons, in fact high-tech weapons, with all purchasers being militaries trying to gain substantial competitive advantages over adversaries - it's not a race to the bottom on cost. Even if the materials and technologies are highly exotic, the cost is currently bearable, the volumes of exotic materials required are relatively small, and the procurement process is at least partly designed around this requirement.
Contrast with shipbuilding: we don't sell aircraft carriers, we might sell a handful of submarines for the first time ever to Australia in a decade as an explicit attempt to block Chinese naval dominance in the Pacific, and we don't even have enough capacity to build or maintain our existing fleet well. Recent military shipbuilding efforts have been somewhere between a total mess and an absolute disaster, with projects running over-budget, over-schedule, and suffering from early cancelation or non-functional key armaments. We just flat out aren't competitive on non-military vessels.
Cars: This one's easy - a big chunk of the manufacturing is done outside of the US. When competitors got better at cars, we forced them to manufacture those cars in the US or face steep import tariffs. Cars are multiple orders of magnitude less expensive than ships, creating economies of scale. They are commodities for domestic transport, and are indispensable for a substantial fraction of the country.
Contrast with shipbuilding: if the US demanded that all ships docking in a US port had to be made in the US or face steep tariffs, I predict exactly zero foreign shipbuilders would set up shop in the US. There's no economy of scale without volume, and there's just not enough US ship volume to justify that expense compared to the global volume of shipping. The tariffs would just be passed on to consumers, either directly at ports or indirectly overland through Canada and Mexico.
A closer analogy might be nuclear power plants. We used to build lots of those, but the one-way ratchet on the regulatory framework imposed some frankly ludicrous requirements on new and existing projects, making it almost entirely unprofitable to bother in the present time (even after a majority of the national security concerns have evaporated). We subsequently lost all industry knowledge and experience, except for a tiny military niche. A handful of startups have concluded that the only way forward for the technology is to deliberately eschew the major advantage of nuclear power - scale - because it is no longer economically possible to scale. And now a competitor superpower is credibly focusing national effort on generating their own nuclear power industry.
I'm reasonably confident that the legislative gridlock and ephemeral executive alignment of the US has rendered us structurally incapable of ever solving this problem again - by the time we figure out how to set a national agenda that is durable to half-decade pendular political cheap shots, we will have been thoroughly eclipsed by China, and on the way to our own steady decline and stagnation much like most of Europe. My best-case reform package for the Jones Act is too heavily dependent on so many other reforms and re-industrialization efforts that will simply never be.
It's critical to distinguish 'DOA as a result of contingent political arrangements / coalitions in today's politics', and 'DOA under most possible political arrangements / coalitions'. I don't think port automation is the latter!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I also fully support US shipbuilding for security reasons.
I do think we can do a lot better in terms of crafting a policy that does so without the distortionary effects that the Jones Act does and in a way that's fundamentally more fair.
Part of the issue to me is that the Jones Act imposes the cost of maintaining a national shipbuilding industry in a completely non-uniform fashion. And because it applies only to domestic routes, it effectively penalizes domestic trade within the States (especially Alaska, which is ridiculous given its criticality) in factor of foreign trade with other countries.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Option C) is the choice of Elite Human Capital.
Just good classical-liberal economics 101.
This is really unfair. I think the classic-liberal economics view here is:
Sounds like we agree?
Broadly yeah, but I think there's some nuance here. One can flatten the classically-liberal economic view to (C) but I think most (?) would readily acknowledge that if shipbuilding is a genuine matter of national security then we should do something. Just not either of those things.
IOW, the CLE view here is less about ends and more about means.
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
I don't really see how one reasons to the omnibus position. If the drag on prices caused by the Jones Act is not worth the benefits then we should repeal the Jones Act regardless of whether we implement tariffs that have a similar effect on prices. Similarly, if we think the benefits of tariffs would outweigh their costs we should implement them regardless of whether we repeal the Jones Act. I don't see how the two policies are linked except rhetorically.
I would say that we should just repeal the Jones Act and not do tariffs. Indeed, if tariffs would have a similar effect on prices as the Jones Act (potentially worse) they undo all the benefits of repealing the Jones Act! Instead of replacing one drag on US prices with another we should just get rid of the bad drag on prices.
Tariffs would not impact Alaskans trying to export crab to Los Angeles.
More options
Context Copy link
Interestingly, I don't think one actually does reason to this position. Instead, someone makes a declaration and it forces people to reason out of it, but the rhetorical linking of the two issues significantly limits how they can reason out of it... and what that will mean for their preference ordering between all four.
This is where the heresthetian thrives. He finds out how to exploit the different groups, who have different preference orders. There's only a small group of hardcore pro-Jones Act folks, yet we still have it, because enough other folks will hold their nose enough at the economic issues in order to not do anything that might seem anti-union (as Biden is portrayed in Zvi's writeup). By linking the two things, even if only rhetorically, the goal is to split the groups with incompatible preference orders. If you can split the A/B groups enough that you can accomplish C (your stated preference after encountering it in this form), then that's a yuge dubya.
Others might have other rationales that end up with them having different preference orders, but if people like you can find yourself having mildly not caring about the Jones Act before but now being willing to throw it under the bus to stop tarifffs, society benefits immensely.
More options
Context Copy link
What’s so frustrating about this topic is that there is almost Zero chance it’s addressed by the government, even under trump. It’s too niche. Too many incumbents. Someone needs to get this on Elons or Vivek’s radar and hope someone takes interest. It’s the only way.
Why? What would that accomplish? DoGE is a joke, powerless to accomplish anything. Malcom Kyeyune:
David A. Fahrenthold, Alan Rappeport, Theodore Schleifer and Annie Karni in the New York Times (archive link):
…
…
…
…
…
Curtis Yarvin:
…
…
…
Getting something on Elon or Vivek's "radar" will do you no good. It's not "the only way," there's no way at all — at least, not within the system and the confines of the law. DC cannot be fixed, it can only be defeated, destroyed, and replaced.
What else is there to say except "we shall see"? I would note that everything you quoted before Yarvin is well known to Musk and Trump and has been discussed at length, and was a large part of project 2025 - they do have plans to deal with an entrenched and uncooperative bureaucracy.
As for what Yarvin said, I just think it's premature to laugh off Trump's plans before he's even in office, mainly because he won the election, secured funding for the border, escaped impeachment, pulled out of the Paris accords, met with North Korea, put an embassy in Jerusalem - my most consistent recurring memory of the 2016 cycle is "Hahahaha Trump is such a fucking moron, can you believe this chump? He can't just... Oh holy shit he did it!"
Only sections of the wall were built, most of the Mexico border wasn't secured.
The goal was to get them to give up nukes and that didn't happen. Hanging out with Kim Jong Un isn't a big achievement in and of itself.
Both were claimed entirely impossible. I'm not saying Trump can do no wrong, I'm saying actions that are impossible for the blue tribe are not necessarily impossible for the red tribe and vice versa. Also activist media claim the possible is impossible when it impedes their agenda.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He didn't escape impeachment, he was impeached twice.
Apologies, please bear with me while I readjust to the motte's language norms. He was acquitted following his first impeachment is what I meant.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Relatedly, these people also probably said you can’t build a rocket ship company or an electric car company. Doesn’t mean Elon will succeed but…I try not to bet against him.
Hope you didn't lay money on twitter!
I’m not sure the Twitter purchase was always a financial one by Elon. In any event, most people predicted Twitter would fail after Elon cut a bunch of people. It didn’t. Elon was right on the business aspects. Assuming advertisers come back (which it seems they will) it actually wouldn’t surprise me if he makes a little money off of it.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know if this is what you meant, but there was actually a lot of money to be made by betting against Musk during the Twitter acquisition saga: What seemed like an open-and-case of "you have to buy the company you committed to buying" was trading at a steep discount, seemingly only because "It's Elon, anything can happen".
I'm referring to the entire twitter saga, but probably mainly the additional value lost under Musk's ownership.
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
I don't quite understand why the Jones act failed, I'll admit. It seems like there should have sprang up in response lots of American owned short haul freighters.
I guess what I'm saying is, is the root causes of the Jones act failing one of those things that can be addressed?
What /u/gillitrut said, but also the interstate system in the US is pretty good and it turns out to be cheaper[1] in a lot of cases to put stuff on a truck.
[1] Cheaper than a Jones Act vessel, more expensive than a notional free-market vessel.
More options
Context Copy link
It turns out that it's cheaper to hire whatever vessel to do a journey like domestic port -> international port -> domestic port than it is to hire (or build) a Jones Act vessel to do domestic port -> domestic port.
That would be cabotage and is illegal under the jones act. Fortunately goods are fungible and we can just import a foreign produced equivalent of whatever we just exported.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have the belief that there is a limited amount of ambition and engineering expertise per capita that ultimately caps the technology level. I think a bunch of industrial tech levels have only been maintained by the ascendancy of China. No ambition or real engineering talent has been directed towards building ships in the US since the 1940s.
So basically we have a bunch of people focused on the world of bits instead of atoms?
China still can't build a jet engine the way CFM, P&W, GE or Rolls can.
More options
Context Copy link
Generally, yes. There are areas where America does do well enough at physical manufacturing to be an exporter. Weapons, medical devices, cars, planes, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But why can't we own ships that were built in China or Japan or Germany or wherever? The USA has money and shipping companies.
On top of being American built, the ships must also be crewed by Americans.
More options
Context Copy link
The Jones Act requires the ships be built in the United States.
What is the actual definition of 'built in the United States'? Does it actually prohibit towing in a ship from a Chinese or Japanese shipyard and installing the transponder in LA or wherever and calling it 'American Made'?
Yes, Zvi's post links to an article that discusses it some. There's a certain (large) percentage of the ships parts that have to be fabricated in America. It also discusses a court case where a shipping company tried to buy a pre-fab "ship kit" from South Korea and just assemble it in America. A court ruled that was not Jones Act compliant.
More options
Context Copy link
There are detailed and specific rules. Their way around it usually involves assembling a kit of stuff made in other countries.
More options
Context Copy link
Apparently, the law does not provide a definition, so the Coast Guard's regulations control.
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