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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   35843 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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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

Unfortunately:

  • https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DoKf. Number of weeks of the median US wage to afford a median US house has gone up by, what, 60%, since the 80s.
  • https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DoL3. Number of weeks of the median US wage to afford the mean cost of ground beef (wish I could find median) was lowest in ~1999 and has since risen by, what, 80%?
  • https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DoMe. Number of weeks of the median US wage to afford the mean car loan. Indirectly, unfortunately, so take it with a bit of a grain of salt. I couldn't find a raw 'median cost of a car sale'. Still does nicely show the 2008-2009 spike and return to status quo in about 2012 or so, and then COVID weirdness that hasn't come back down to the prior level since.

CPI's approach to dynamic price-weighting means that if a good becomes unaffordable it ends up downweighted. (As one example: from 2011 to 2023 CPI-U's College tuition and fees weighting dropped from 1.695 to 1.275, even as the relevant CPI went up from 692 to 928.)

There are situations where this behavior is appropriate and useful; this is not one of them.

The housing crisis is bad, but that's a result of (local) government policy and is unlikely to be fixed by tariffs. If anything, increasing the cost of lumber (much of which comes from Canada) will increase the cost of construction even further.

Ground beef is somewhat more expensive these days, but it was pretty cheap in 2010 and I don't recall that being a particularly great economy. It's not hard to cherry pick a commodity that's in an expensive part of the cycle right now. Canada also exports half a million tons of beef, so slapping tariffs on that is not going to move the price in the direction you want.

Car loan price seems broadly stable since 2008 modulo the spikes you mentioned. It also doesn't capture the 40% (estimate based on googling) of cars that aren't financed at all.

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