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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   35800 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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AP reporting this hour, 10% duties on all imports from China, 25% from Mexico and Canada, with 10% on Canadian energy imports

Trump’s order also includes a mechanism to escalate the rates if the countries retaliate against the U.S., as they are possibly prepared to do.

Targeted goods:

For decades, auto companies have built supply chains that cross the borders of the United States, Mexico and Canada. More than one in five of the cars and light trucks sold in the United States were built in Canada or Mexico, according to S&P Global Mobility. In 2023, the United States imported $69 billion worth of cars and light trucks from Mexico – more than any other country -- and $37 billion from Canada. Another $78 billion in auto parts came from Mexico and $20 billion from Canada. The engines in Ford F-series pickups and the iconic Mustang sports coupe, for instance, come from Canada.

“You have engines and car seats and other things that cross the border multiple times before going into a finished vehicle,’’ said Cato’s Lincicome. “You have American parts going to Mexico to be put into vehicles that are then shipped back to the United States.

“You throw 25% tariffs into all that, and it’s just a grenade.’’

In a report Tuesday, S&P Global Mobility reckoned that “importers are likely to pass most, if not all, of this (cost) increase to consumers.’’ TD Economics notes that average U.S. car prices could rise by around $3,000 – this at a time when the average new car already goes for $50,000 and the average used car for $26,000, according to Kelley Blue Book.

Over the last several years I've come to believe economics is a more fraudulent field of study than social science. As I'm not an economist, I asked GPT for what economics has contributed to mankind and the best I saw in its list was game theory. Meanwhile car manufacturers are shipping car seats "multiple times" across the border before they're actually put in a vehicle. It all feels so incredibly fake.

As I'm not an economist, I asked GPT for what economics has contributed to mankind and the best I saw in its list was game theory.

If you don't know what to say, you can just not say anything. Don't be a conduit from the weighted random text shoggoth to the comment box.

LLMs are convoluted calculators, not demons. Demons, if they ever roamed the earth, haven't since the Harrowing of Hell.

I doubted economics from simple reasoning. How can there be a debate? There should be a right way, or a comparatively optimal way, some country somewhere would have implemented. There's not. Humans can't solve it, humans can't approach solving it, and in support of this I wondered, what has economics actually done for humanity? There I asked GPT not for arguments or numbers, which would be suspect, but a list of its contributions. The list is either a bunch of things people have known for centuries, or things that just helps bankers, pass, or game theory. But by all means, please correct me if you know an area where economics has profoundly improved humanity.

Mu!

I'm not engaging with your argument, I'm criticizing your process of Notice lack of knowledge -> Consult unvettable bullshit generator -> Present unvettable bullshit generator output. Would you ask a parrot its opinion on the field of economics and place any real weight on its response?

Over the last several years I've come to believe economics is a more fraudulent field of study than social science. As I'm not an economist, I asked GPT for what economics has contributed to mankind and the best I saw in its list was game theory.

Eh, that's not wholly fair. Plenty of things that just about every economist agrees with, such as rent control being bad in the long term, keep being proved to be true.

The main problem with economics is that you can't run nation-wide, years-long controlled experiments to test theories the same way you can with sciences. That doesn't make the field worthless, just harder to draw conclusions from.

Trump’s order also includes a mechanism to escalate the rates if the countries retaliate against the U.S

I hope they do retaliate. This nakedly extortive behavior is supremely off-putting, especially when coupled with Trumps victimhood narrative. "Woe is me, empire expansive, everyone abuses us" is turning me into a Chyna simp.

I'm heavily biased, but I believe this direction is not unique. Back when the Russian invasion on Ukraine was fresh, the 'China or US dominance?' question got me baffled looks across the board from a diverse group of friends/acquaintances (context: Poland). Very different attitudes today, with how Ukraine was treated, with Trump blatantly attempting to cannibalize ally industries, with Chynese hedgies bearing great gifts.

So what's your opinion on the South China Sea?

I know pretty much nothing about it. Chinese claims seem like a bit of a stretch. I hope the sea hosts a US naval humiliation.

I kind of agree. If it was the US vs Russia or the Arab-Islamic world as second major power, I would much rather Europe throw its lot in with America. After all, those are both major expansionist powers who lay claim to large portions of historic Europe.

But in this conflict, I really have no truck with China haters. China is an increasingly civilised place; street spitting is almost entirely eliminated in the tier 1 cities, streets are clean, the food is good, infrastructure and most services work (reasonably well, given it’s still much poorer than most of the West). China doesn’t seek to rule Europe, Chinese like visiting Paris and buying their little Chanel bags and taking pictures in front of Big Ben. Mostly they are nice; they commit very little violent crime. They have a good sense of humor. They are capable of impressive artistic and architectural achievement.

What’s more, while they consider themselves much better than other third worlders, and dislike the Japanese and to a lesser extent Koreans, the Chinese have no significant ethnic hostility towards white people. Every Chinese child learns that the great Karl Marx invented communism. Chinese don’t even bear a significant grudge toward the British for the opium wars, despite the ‘century of humiliation’ rhetoric.

In sum, the Chinese are capable of operating an advanced civilization in which an increasingly large percentage of citizens have a decent quality of life. I don’t wish to be ruled by them, but I don’t think they want to rule me either. By contrast, Trump’s economic policy seems entirely motivated by capriciousness and greed; Americans of all classes are already richer and have higher QOL than almost anyone else (including all but a handful of European nations, Canada and Mexico); America’s issues with crime, ideology, drug abuse, infrastructure, racial unrest and immigration have little to do with trade policy and almost everything to do with domestic political decision-making by domestic elites.

If it was the US vs Russia

But that’s the thing, it is the US vs Russia. And if Europe wants the US to continue holding off Russia, they have to be semi-hostile towards China in exchange. Objectively Europe doesn’t have any particular reason to be hostile, but if you have friends sometimes you get roped into their weird grudges.

See, I'm opposed to China dominance- because they're dirty commies. I don't, on a fundamental level, trust them. But it needs to be said that Chinese allies mostly get to do whatever the hell they want, without the Chinese interfering too much in their politics. The same cannot be said for the USA.

I can understand the 'what's so bad about a Chinese century' argument. If they weren't communists, I might even agree.

See, I'm opposed to China dominance- because they're dirty commies.

Can you elaborate? Is your problem their lack of a democratic process, the CCP itself and how they govern their territory by degree, or something else?

Because if you're on the streets in Shenzhen and talk to people, if you deal with the average company there, they're all incredibly capitalist. People work for the best salary they can get, switch companies often, and found startups that buy parts and sell product directly on the open market. The average Chinese city dweller isn't a communist at all.

And if a government allows its people to get to that state - is the government communist in any meaningful way?

China is an increasingly civilised place

Chinese people are civilized. The Chinese government isn't.

Trade policy has changed the composition of the domestic elites who make bad political decisions. It's caused (in part) the specialization of the American economy into one of abstract symbol manipulation. Although it turns out that's probably the highest value thing anyone can do, the winners of a symbolic economy create an unmoored society. And the issues you list are all downstream from that: real physical and safety issues have become secondary to the symbol.

I don't think Trump's tariffs are good or will do much to reverse this trend. They are, however, a strong symbolic strike against the ruling elite, which will have unfortunate side effects on the material wellbeing of Americans.

Trump's tariffs are a tax on Americans who consume imported physical goods, and American manufacturers who use imported intermediate inputs. The class who mostly consume expensive real estate and their own sense of moral superiority will be relative winners.

Could you elaborate more on the economy turning into one of abstract symbol manipulation?

You're talking about investment and the stock market, right - and the relation between unmoored, placeless capital and a lack of care for even the localized business environment?

That's a big part of it, yes. Finance is about abstracting away all the messy realities of the real world into a single self consistent symbol--money--so that humans can accurately act on knowledge of the real world without having to know any of its concrete details. Software is also a big part of it, as MadMonzer points out. And we are best in the world at both of them: there's no reason for us to make a lot of widgets when we can manipulate symbols to create information that's worth 100x as much. Trade policy has enabled us to make this tradeoff, and we do.

You can also frame higher education, law, and media as symbol manipulation industries, though I see their successes as more downstream of the symbolification of the US than a cause of it.

America's main source of competitive advantage is software*. Making software is literally symbol manipulation.

Arguably America's second-largest source of competitive advantage is logistics, which is real-world-aligned, but doesn't have the mythopoetic status of manufacturing in real-world-aligned culture, and in any case naturally encourages people towards cosmopolitanism and has done since the Age of Sail, if not earlier. (Walmart and Amazon are the leading examples of American excellence in logistics, as well as notoriously harmful to local communities.)

Compared to resource extraction, manufacturing, or even tourism (where the local sense of place is part of what you are selling), software and logistics are about unmoored, placeless economic activity. This is true both of the doing of the thing, and of the type of financial services that finance the doing of the thing - financialisation is not the problem here. When America was a physical-things country, you had community banks which were as embedded in their community as the general store, and which financed farms and factories and such-like, and you had money-centre banks like JP Morgan which financed railroads and shipping.

* America's trillion-dollar companies and their core competencies are:

  1. Apple (software, industrial design)
  2. Nvidia (designing and marketing chips which are made in Taiwan, although some insiders say the secret sauce is actually software)
  3. Microsoft (software, being evil and getting away with it)
  4. Amazon (software, logistics)
  5. Alphabet (software)
  6. Meta (software)
  7. Tesla (cars and solar panels, but the current stock market valuation assumes a pivot to software)
  8. Broadcom (designing and marketing chips which are mostly made in Taiwan)
  9. Berkshire Hathaway (insurance, arguably logistics)

None of these are going to promote rooted capitalism, and none of them would promote rooted socialism if State-owned either.

It wouldn't be wrong to say that the entire point of logistics is the abstraction away of place.

nakedly extortive behavior

According to what standard?

The standard would be, extortion is when you abuse your power to benefit at the others expense. I do understand you can frame almost anything as merely hardball negotiations.

The car seats aren’t shipped back and forth over the border because of some theory of economics, but because it’s cheaper.

Trade and banking have always felt fake to people. If you’re not plowing the field behind your house, it must be a fake job, useless shuffling, usury, exploitation.

It's cheaper as the long consequences of economist-influenced policy. They nominally justified this on the idea we could replace millions of outsourced jobs by creating new and "more respectable" jobs, the actual justification, and the reason for its endorsement, was that the very wealthy would become even wealthier. We're about to run headfirst into the consequences of the delusion that we can keep creating more jobs, a delusion that will stand in history as the greatest failure of economics.

Some practices of finance are real and important. Other practices, like billionaires putting in massive shorts on companies before lobbying the government to outlaw the work of those companies, are more fake than those bureaucrats who kept getting paid even when they didn't show up to work for years. I also like banking here; as if because some of what they do has real utility, we have to accept all the lives they destroy and all the times they nearly crash the economy.

Before there was a good (and widespread) understanding of what determined prices, trade seemed very little different from witchcraft.

How is it possible that a merchant will buy your wheat at a given price, but when he takes it to the city he sells it for three times as much??? What magick spells has he conjured?

Before there was a good (and widespread) understanding of what determined prices, trade seemed very little different from witchcraft.

This understanding seems no longer widespread, as evidenced by people in this very forum. Now imagine the general population.

Understanding the theory != agreement with it.

If your theory doesn’t allow you to predict (and preferably control) actual results then it’s dubious by default. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but disagreement is inevitable and appropriate. Micro-economics is mostly non-controversial for this reason. Macroeconomics is much more controversial. What inputs and outputs economic analysis should consider is incredibly controversial.

Over the last several years I've come to believe economics is a more fraudulent field of study than social science. As I'm not an economist, I asked GPT for what economics has contributed to mankind and the best I saw in its list was game theory. Meanwhile car manufacturers are shipping car seats "multiple times" across the border before they're actually put in a vehicle. It all feels so incredibly fake.

Are you saying that the economists who advised politicians to implement NAFTA and USMCA are frauds, and in reality there are no economic benefits to free trade?

Are you saying that the economists who advised politicians to implement NAFTA and USMCA are frauds, and in reality there are no economic benefits to free trade?

I think the steelman is that it hurts domestic production, which hurts a lot of the labor market in countries who are losing local jobs.

Do you think the economists did not consider that?

They handwaved it by conjuring up lots of future jobs and pretending that a few online courses would turn steel makers into software engineers.

Yes to clause one, half-yes to clause two.

If free trade does not produce as necessity holistic benefits, it is not an economic benefit. Policies based on "in benefiting a narrow percent of the population this may incentivize behavior that will yield wide benefits" are not holistic; policies based on "this will yield wide benefits" are holistic. Where FTAs yield the former, yes, where they yield the latter, no.

FTAs do benefit most people. They harm people in industries that are not internationally competitive, but most people don't work in those industries and benefit from e.g. cheaper car prices.

Industries that are not internationally competitive

International competitiveness has only rarely been about a country that can deliver a superior product. In all other cases it has meant corporations can spend less and make more by outsourcing labor. Had, for example, it never been legal for Chinese-made products to be sold in this country, or not without tariffs tailored to make it prohibitive for companies to outsource their labor to China, they would have never been competitive. What was the benefit, Walmart? Some benefit.

If your position is that cheaper goods don't benefit Americans, you should just go ahead and lay your cards on the table.

As it is, I pointed out an industry in which imports were so much better than domestic production that they practically killed the domestic industry (cars) and you're bringing up walmart (who mostly makes money from groceries anyway) as a retort. It's a complete non-sequitur.

Cheaper goods are only a benefit if employment/real wages either remain consistent or rise. Cheaper goods don't do anyone any good if it comes at the cost of income.

Fortunately, real median wages have been going up for the past 28 years.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

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