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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   32806 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Trump tariffs McDonald's:

BBC article for a more detailed overview.

Highlights or lowlights include:

  1. 32% tariffs on Taiwan, though I'm told that they thankfully exclude semiconductors.
  2. 46% on Vietnam and 49% on Cambodia, so gg to companies encouraged to diversify outside of China.
  3. 10% tariffs (the absolute floor, or Trump's idea of a sweetheart deal) on such interesting nations as Tuvalu (with that sweet sweet .tv license) and the Heard and McDonald islands, which are uninhabited.
  4. Some quite seriously speculating that the entire policy was AI generated. https://x.com/krishnanrohit/status/1907587352157106292 :

This might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics.. 4o, o3 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily.

  1. Others note the resemblance to the common ReLU function in ML, but the gist of it is a hamfisted approach that is setting tariffs off the equation trade deficits/imports, despite denial by the administration (or at least the Deputy White House Press Secretary), who presented an equation that literally says that but prettied up.

I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.

"3. 10% tariffs (the absolute floor, or Trump's idea of a sweetheart deal) on such interesting nations as Tuvalu (with that sweet sweet .tv license) and the Heard and McDonald islands, which are uninhabited."

This has become a hot meme, but the reality is just mundane - as territories, Australian business could just "incorporate" in Heard or McDonald, and completely bypass the tariffs levied against Australia, were this not done.

as territories, Australian business could just "incorporate" in Heard or McDonald, and completely bypass the tariffs levied against Australia, were this not done.

Is this actually true? It's not obvious to me that it is. Presumably American businesses are not able to incorporate in, for example, Midway Atoll or Baker Island, even though these are nominally American territories.

The alternative theory is that whoever drew up this table looked at bogus data that listed millions of dollars of machinery imported from that uninhabited icebox. That seems more likely to me.

according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revealed-how-trump-tariffs-slugged-norfolk-island-and-uninhabited-heard-and-mcdonald-islands

Of possible interest:

/images/17437656867908418.webp

Fucking hell. I knew there was something suspicious about vanilla!

I have recently came across this YouTube video that was the first one I found that provide a plausible explanation for this whole tariffs mess. The gist is that the Trump administration tries to strong arm trading partners into allowing them to trade with US tariffs-free provided that they introduce reciprocal tariffs on US's rivals and sign "Mar-o-Lago Accords" that would 1. weaken dollar that would allow for the manufacturing to return to US but 2. keep the dollar as reserve currency. That's why this is so messy and trade-deficit oriented. The chaos is intentional but temporary.

Needless to say, 1 and 2 are simultaneously impossible. It is the reserve currency status that creates non-trade related demand for dollar and makes it stronger and allows the trade deficits proceeds to be "sterilized". I find it baffling that Scott Bessent cannot see that this plan cannot mathematically work.

The video also present an argument that for the plan to work the partners must agree to this strong-arming tactic and this is another potential point of failure,

I find it baffling that Scott Bessent cannot see that this plan cannot mathematically work.

It's entirely probable that Bessent knows these plans make no sense but doesn't find any value in saying that out loud.

At least it's nice to see that the US leadership realizes that the current position of USD as reserve currency is not sustainable. But yeah this seems more like it would accelerate the downfall than shore it up.

I get why Trump wants both, but the alternative ways of maintaining value all seem incompatible with either his mercantilist policy or some of the core tenets of the current setup. You don't need the US Navy that badly if free trade isn't the order of the day.

BRICS has been telegraphing some Bancor type setup for a while. Could Trump somehow beat them to it and do a controlled demolition of the Dollar into itself?

You don't need the US Navy that badly if free trade isn't the order of the day.

You're mixing up gratis and libre here. Trump doesn't want trade not to exist, he just wants the USG to take a cut.

I'm saying that because the de jure reason the US has the reserve currency (per Bretton-Woods) is in exchange for their defense of trade routes. If the world moves to become more insular and to rely less on international commerce, that undermines the necessity for this protection and for a global currency controlled by the protector.

In practice it's probably already vestigial, but I guess Trump's betting that the world needs the US more than the US needs the world.

I saw this tweet from BAP:

Yes and no. I have no strong opinion on these particular tariffs myself but there are many long time Trump poasters etc who think they’re a mistake and who are either not on X now or are afraid to speak up because they don’t want to bother with attaqs

https://x.com/bronzeagemantis/status/1907871856159272996

Makes me wonder if there's a right-wing equivalent of JournoList that's going to get leaked someday.

There's not just one, there are several.

4o, o3 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily.

Bruh, they're all trained on the same base data.....ofc they give the same answer. It's like seeking the true religion, and then interviewing 5 different people in Saudi Arabia.

The models diverge in post training areas (coding, creating writing, etc), but not on long-tail questions like 'how to implement tarrifs effectively'.

The base training data isn't the same for all the models. We know that there's likely enormous overlap, because of low hanging fruit like the Common Crawl. Yet the different companies fight tooth and nail to either semi-legally scrape more data, or strike deals with entities like Reddit or Bloomberg for access to theirs.

And even then, they have different post-training and fine tuning. There might be overlap between different companies because they at least partially outsource to data-annotators in places like Nigeria, India or Vietnam. Even so, anyone who has used all of these models can tell you that them giving the same answer is unusual, for most non-trivial questions where there isn't a canonical solution.

how to implement tarrifs effectively

Note that the prompt asked about how to implement tariffs easily. Not effectively. This was the maximally easy, non-rigorous solution.

because of low hanging fruit like the Common Crawl

You're underselling the size of Common Crawl. At that pretraining scale, the emergent properties of the model are near identical. Shady data is useful for turning models into experts at narrow tasks. But if the task is generic and isn't gated by access to shady data, then the models will give identical answers.

Broadly speaking: Model_output = function_of(prompt, post trained personality, conditioning information)

I am assuming that the prompts were identical and the post-training personalities don't factor into this exercise. That leaves conditioning information.

Fields like programming (Github) and News (Twitter) have private sources that Openai or Grok can leverage to get an edge over their competitors. Other fields like Physics, gaming & image creation are amenable to simulation and therefore improvement through RL. Lastly, private data collection can help fill in gaps for applied fields where there is a rift between what is written and what is understood. (medicine, law, etc). Macro-economics is none of these 3. There is no simulation, no private corpus, no information that an expert can feed into an LLM that improves its intuition on how markets work. In such cases, the LLM will default to a logical process that emerges from the median knowledge of its public corpus.

This means that models will give identical answers.

Even so, anyone who has used all of these models can tell you that them giving the same answer is unusual, for most non-trivial questions where there isn't a canonical solution.

So most likely there is some canonical solution. Problem is I am not at all familiar with tariff studies, or whatever it's called, and very few people are. So a lot of people's first instinct especially since it's the Trump administration is they came up with it randomly or AI or some kind of stupid way.

I'm no expert, but my understanding of the consensus opinion of most economists is that tariffs are net negative, and negative sum for both partners in trade. There are other relevant concerns, such as geopolitical leverage, but I've yet to be swayed from my belief that these tariffs are fundamentally stupid and not imposed in a reasonable fashion.

I think MattyY has a pretty decently evidenced take on this. https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1907764231484686635#m

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-tariffs-mean-big-opportunities

Tariffs are bad for many industries due to increasing their import costs and trade, so you can use the exemption process to pick economic Winners and Losers which even assuming there's no corruption whatsoever is still prone to mishap. And assuming no corruption in the Trump admin is a pretty hard sell.

This policy essentially forces the Commerce Department to turn itself into a little central planning office for the American economy. And even if you assume perfect good faith on the part of all the political appointees and career staff,2 it’s not reasonable to expect them to do a good job making all of these technical decisions.

One good example goes to Apple in the previous admin.

But it’s a high-profile company, and as Republicans know, middle class people don’t like to pay higher taxes. During Trump’s first term, he initially vowed that Apple would get no exemptions in the spring of 2019, but then in the fall, there were a lot of stories about how prices on Apple products might go up. By September, Apple was winning limited exemptions. Then, in December, Trump reached a “Phase 1” trade deal with China, which was used as a pretext to exempt iPhones, and in March 2020, Apple won an exemption for Apple Watches, too.

Any highly discretionary process becomes political.

Theoretically, the waivers are granted on a technical basis. But there’s only so much capacity to do technical and legal analysis from scratch. In practice, agencies are relying in part on the strength of the cases that are submitted to them by the people making the requests. Some of that is the actual strength on the merits, but some of it is the quality of the lawyers and lobbyists these companies can afford to hire. And, of course, if your company is in a swing state or has close ties to a member of Congress the White House cares about or (like Apple) is salient in the media, other people start getting involved in the meetings to decide what should happen. You can be optimistic that a well-run administration won’t let political considerations run roughshod over everything else. But realistically, you can’t take the politics out of politics. In a discretionary process, the interests of companies with political clout will be weighted more heavily than those of outsiders or startups. And companies will need, at the margin, to shift their time and attention to the process of getting waivers and away from making good products.

Essentially risks standardizing widespread corruption, and becomes what is essentially a planned economy based off personal favors and ties to powerful politicians. Something that already happens to some degree but on overdrive like what happened to ruin Argentina.

Noah Smith has written similarly about a "cryptocurrency reserve" as a means of corruption: reward political favors by raising the value of whatever your loyalists own.

Absolute madness.

It seems strange that the president has arbitrary tariff powers in the first place: deciding what people pay seems like it really should be a Congress thing, shouldn't it?

What a curse it would be if the only thing the Republican majority in the House could accomplish was "protect disastrous tariffs." I would hope that at least some would know better (as the Democrats will oppose Trump no matter what.)

The hilariously absurd thing is that now that congress has given the exec that power, they have to overcome a veto to get it back.

Same thing happened in 2019 when he couldn't get wall funding from congress, so instead raided DoD (proclamation 9844). Congress tried to reassert spending powers with house joint resolution 46. That passed both house and senate but Trump just vetoed it lmao

Congress tried to reassert spending powers with house joint resolution 46. That passed both house and senate but Trump just vetoed it lmao

Because they didn't attach to a must-pass budget bill.

Congress has more power than they actually use.

And because they didn't give it to him for a limited time in the first place. Congress needs to learn the same lessons about power grants that the English Parliament learned about taxes.

Down thread, @UnopenedEnvilope said that this particular power was delegated to the president by an act of Congress. Maybe this will wake people up to the dangers of Congress abdicating their jobs and giving control to the President, but I somehow doubt it.

Several Roman emperors actually tried to restore the Roman Republic. It never worked out because the Senate didn’t want the responsibility. They preferred to be a bickering social club.

The senate was an advisory body, not a legislative one. The roman republic elected magistrates who then put laws to a vote directly by the people.

Currently, it’s Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

I swear to god if we get Chuck Schumer waving a bill over his head and yelling about throwing the TEA into Boston Harbor, or the Potomac, or yass kween spill the TEA, sis-ing, I'm becoming a monk in the desert.

Conversely, I know some 2016-era Bernie Bros, who, because of tribalism, are now upset about this flavor of trade policy that Sanders has always favored.

It wouldn’t take many - I have to imagine a few good men exist in the house and senate who care for country first. The perhaps bigger problem is that the current Democratic leadership is content to watch the world burn to pick up seats in the midterms.

Are you serious?

I think this is the first time I've seem someone suggest that Democrats don't hate Trump enough.

I think this is the first time I've seem someone suggest that Democrats don't hate Trump enough.

This was definitely the meme when the CR passed. "Fight rather than compromise" is the order of the day, apparently.

I think if any republicans try to reign in Trump, Dems know it'd undermine their entire messaging to not join in.

I was going to make this a top-level, but since it’s apparently topical…I was digging through my post history for something and ran into this based on a different @2rafa comment.

Enlisting is an employer of last resort. There were a lot more people at their last resorts in 2008-2012, a lot of people who really needed a competitive paycheck and a comprehensive insurance policy. In 2024, that’s not necessarily the case. We’re coming off a couple years of COVID distortions and zero-interest-rate phenomena. That has a way of making boot camp less appealing.

So, Conspiracy Theory of the Week: Trump is intentionally trying to trigger a recession to bolster U.S. military recruitment.

If the economy crashes, more young American men will choose the military. If it crashes faster than the housing market, even more so. And if it crashes in the midst of a publicized house-cleaning session, well, the new recruits are more likely to endorse the Trump party line.

HHS has already lost more employees than the DoD despite the latter being 10x larger. (Numbers could be off; it’s hard to find coverage that isn’t hysterical about the whole process.) Meanwhile, USMEPCOM is one of the few exemptions to the DoD hiring freeze. Can’t recruit new troops if there’s no one running the stations!

There’s the whole bit where he’s slashing the VA, but this doesn’t actually disprove anything. After all, who hates the VA more than veterans?

This is stupid and I don’t actually believe it. There’s no advantage over simpler theories which don’t assume a 5D mastermind.

To wit, Trump policy is governed almost exclusively by his aesthetic sensibilities, and he’s mashing whichever buttons look like they might steer us in that direction. Military reform is somewhere in the pile. High enough to give the DoD a better deal than DEd or HHS; not nearly enough to intentionally tank the stock market.

We don't more men to join the military, we need a defense industrial and procurement sector that actually works at delivering lethal weaponry.

Would take a massive culture shift. Default response in tech industry spaces to "we need a defense industry" is "die fascist, you don't belong in this world!" Those guys almost never get moderated either. Kids grow up reading this stuff everywhere and take it for social truth.

Palmer Lucky is building AI powered kill drones in Costa Mesa. Seems fine tbqh.

But anyway what's missing isn't the tech industry per-se, it's a journeyman commitment to a a working product. Lockheed, Raytheon and all them are just mooches.

Needs several large defense conglomerates to be broken up. In the 1980s there were hundreds of defense contractors. Now there are a handful.

Oh that sort of thing shifts overnight. In 1940 American leftists were singing songs about how the US entering the war was a capitalist conspiracy to kill surplus American workers, because Germany and the USSR were allied (Pete Seeger's "plow the 4th one under').
A month after Barbarossa their Soviet handlers had them singing about the glory of war and crushing fascism. And days after Pearl Harbor they were doing war bond tours.

Just needs the right mini series on Netflix and you'll have Googlers happily coding automated killbots to identify target ethnicities.

Isn't there a "defense tech bro" scene in some other part of California, though? I think there has been a culture shift occurring, though somewhat slowly and silently.

You're thinking of the scene around Anduril -- down near LA.

And yeah, it's silent. But also loud -- he named the company after a LOTR sword, that's not subtle.

There's another entire tech ecosystem based around defense, mostly not in California but rather in the DC area (though with outposts in a lot of places). A lot of California tech people don't even realize it exists; I don't think there's a huge amount of flow.

'Trump' and '5D chess' go together like... well they don't go together. Not to mention that the NEETs and gig workers not in the conventional labor force are mostly young men the military doesn't want anyways.

People often think Trump is playing 5D chess, but he's usually playing checkers... it's just that he cheats.

I think Trump and Musk would gladly cut the military but Trump has smart political instincts and knows (a) that many red tribe normal Republican voters like the military, have relatives who serve or have served and enjoy a certain feeling of power that comes from American military supremacy and (b) that a lot of Republican senators and representatives feel the same way and/or represent places that rely in part of DoD spending.

I think Trump is on some level afraid of war, and even though he might stumble into it or be baited into it by real or perceived enemies, he doesn’t relish it.

I like that Trump did a lot to stop wokism as a political force but at this point I have no idea what he's doing, lol. I don't know much about economics, but two things seem clear to me:

  1. Tariffs as a partial replacement for taxes might be cool, but keeping the existing US tax system in place and adding tariffs on top of that is basically just a massive tax increase on the average American.

  2. The only ways I can think of for the tariffs to help the US as a whole is to help US companies be competitive and to advance national security. However, I notice that Trump's administration is doing nothing to address housing shortages. And bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US isn't really going to help people if housing is still extremely expensive. As for national security, I'd much rather address it through diplomacy with China, not by falling into the Thucydides trap and mind-fucking yourself, out of a sense of fear of being overtaken as the world's superpower, that a war with China is inevitable, which could unfortunately prove to be a self-fulfilling assumption.

Speaking of helping the US as a whole... of course, I have no reason to believe that this is actually Trump's motivation. He could well just be aiming to help his own supporters. But even then, I don't really see how the tariffs do that. It plays well with some unions and will help consolidate union votes for Trump, but it also seems to have a pretty high chance of economically screwing over a bunch of people, including actual and potential Trump voters.

Edit: After thinking about it some more, I guess the answer that makes sense to me is that Trump is bluffing and trying to get other countries to drop their tariffs on US goods.

Tariffs and trade deficits are the one thing he's been banging on about consistently since the 1980s. Seems pretty inevitable that he was going to try something to do with them.

Smart tarries can help by essentially protecting an industry of national security interests or an industry that the government wants to invest in for eventual export. If I have an industry like chips manufacturing, I want to keep it protected because those chips are also used in military gear, so I might heavily tax imports o& chips so that native chip manufacturers don’t get undercut by cheaper imports and we are then dependent on those imports for vital products or military hardware. Or you might decide that the future is solar panels an$ thus create a huge tariff on solar panels until your own are good enough to compete on the world market.

Or you end up with something like the Jones act and basically destroy the industry by making sure they never compete and they turn into parasites.

This gets to both sides of the tariff problem. If you're going to give domestic producers license to collect rents instead of competing, they're going to do it. And on the flip side, you're not going to maintain global competitiveness by trying to rely on a fenced off domestic market (even a big one like the US) - domestic producers are all too willing to phone it in. You demonstrably can astroturf a competitive export industry, but it relies on pretty much the opposite of trying to bolster domestic markets. You're usually deliberately screwing domestic consumers and domestic workers for the sake of international competitiveness.

(You also have to be realistic about your circumstances. US post-war supremacy in manufacturing exports was in no small part the product of a confluence of events that are not really repeatable)

It plausible as well. It takes someone who knows economic theory well enough to do it right. I don’t think Trump is that kind of an expert. But it’s not insane to do something like that temporarily to protect a nascent industry until it’s strong enough for the global market.

The relevant skill isn't economic theory - it is a deep understanding of supply chains and of potential sources of competitive advantage. Industrial policy is working on the flow of goods (and occasionally services), not the flow of money that pays for them.

But Trump isn't doing infant industry protection - the most important infant industry right now in the US is semiconductors, and they were excluded from the tariffs. There doesn't appear to be any microeconomic justification for the tariffs even from supporters. The main arguments being used to defend the tariffs are "we don't actually mean to do this - it's a negotiating tactic" and "this is a fiscal transfer from foreigners to Americans that will allow us to cut taxes". And if it is a negotiating position, the likely end goal is macroeconomic - the Mar-a-Lago accords will fundamentally be about exchange rate policy.

Off-topic, but: I wonder if the problem with the Jones Act wasn't exactly the restriction itself, but the failure to enforce export discipline. In another timeline, the Jones Act is probably still around, and is much more unassailable because the US went South Korean with shipmakers.

I definitely wonder if a smarter Jones Act (e.g. tariff discounts for goods delivered to US points in US vessels) would work better than the Jones Act as implemented.

Ah, Trump is the American Juan Peron. He’ll try to paper this over with supermassive stimulus packages and subsidies, just you wait.

Brown Argentina, we are coming. Like seriously we can’t restore because there’s no one to work the factories because our blue collar male population has a job if they want one. Those North Dakota oil workers largely got pulled out of factory jobs to begin with; raising wages won’t push gig workers and neets into the labor force. They’d rather smoke pot.

Like seriously we can’t restore because there’s no one to work the factories because our blue collar male population has a job if they want one.

Good news about that, the tariffs have already led to at least one major automation company laying off some employees. If more follow then we'll have lots of jobless men to go around.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/stellantis-says-will-temporarily-lay-off-900-us-workers-following-tariff-2025-04-03/

900 employees in a company of over 200,000 is less than 0.45% of the workforce.

A company the size of Stellantis picks up or lets go a thousand employees a month in the course of normal operations, but Rueters isn't about to let that distract them from the important story of "Orange Man Bad".

They specifically said this was from the tariffs

In a letter sent to employees on Thursday morning, Antonio Filosa, Stellantis' chief operating officer for the Americas, said the company is "continuing to assess the medium- and long-term effects of these tariffs on our operations, but also have decided to take some immediate actions, including temporarily pausing production at some of our Canadian and Mexican assembly plants. Those actions will impact some employees at several of our U.S. powertrain and stamping facilities that support those operations."

And this is only in their immediate actions just with pausing and temporary layoffs since no one even knows if Trump will even stick to the tariffs.

And you believed them when they said this is about specifically about Tariffs and definitely not because of volatility in the stock market or because this Friday is the new quarter?

This is "optics" pure and simple.

Sure, they could be lying but if the tariffs were something they felt were beneficial it would be strange behavior to badmouth it.

Im confused.

Why would you expect the EU-based management of Stellantis to be in favor of US tariffs? (Or Trump for that matter?) I would expect them to be opposed.

Yeah, Stellantis is huge. It's literally a combination of Chrysler, Fiat, and Peugeot.

Granted, those layoffs are probably all on the Chrysler side, so probably still bad optics.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a rules-based versus discretionary tariff policy. Making tariffs more of an a-personal "no hard feelings but this is what the equation says the tariff should be" is probably better than the politics that drive arbitrary levels of protectionism. Of course that relies on having a good rule, and the formula here makes no sense.

US Consumers enjoy an economy driven by both high consumption and high investment and low relative savings. That is enabled by trade deficits. It's going to be a major economic shift to pin tariffs against the trade deficit.

It seems to me a better rule would be "we reciprocate 2x tariffs that are placed on us, you need us more than we need you." Doing it against the trade deficit makes no sense. There is definitely going to be a pivot.

A rule isn't a check against arbitrariness; it just moves the fight one meta-level up, to defining and massaging the inputs that go into the rule's equation.

Of course rules are arbitrary, but when they are set they are predictable and so they can be anticipated and responded to by other actors. So far the US has adopted the "we'll lead by example and promote free trade even if our partners do not" approach. It's understandable why Trump wants to flex more American power, and a rules-based approach is the correct path, but the rule set here is asinine.

Of course rules are arbitrary, but when they are set they are predictable and so they can be anticipated and responded to by other actors.

Maybe sometimes, but practically-speaking this is not true; the public-facing "rule" may be constant, but a significant amount of finagling and variability still goes hon behind the scenes through gerrymandered definitions of exceptions or predicate data, or selective enforcement.

You can't get around the "need good and honest people in government" problem.

On Trump

As @IGI-111 says below, and as I said before and after the election, Trump’s position on tariffs is his only true ideology. On everything else he is malleable. On tariffs he is a zealot.

That is not to say that he might never change course. As the actual tariffs show, his grasp of the math is limited or nonexistent. If a foreign leader flatters him, praises him, and manufactures some no-more-fictive numbers that show that America is not [anymore] “getting ripped off”, then there is a reasonable chance of capitulation.

But this is real ideology in play. The sad thing is that it is this that he truly believes in, and not immigration reform.

On the economic consequences

A major asset price correction is long overdue. These may trigger it, or something else will. In the long term I am more sanguine; the great economic disruption of the next decade will not be tariffs but AI, and if anything front-loading some mass unemployment for more mundane economic reasons might well spur some innovative and forward-thinking planning for the coming (far greater) employment crisis.

Bringing manufacturing back to Western countries is also critical in the age of AI because service exports will decline when professional services are fully automated and software can be developed for tiny fractions of the current cost, which will benefit those with large domestic manufacturing sectors that can be quickly automated and hurt countries reliant on white-collar service sectors.

I could imagine a feedback loop where anything that boosts wages boosts housing prices, as sellers and landlords try to capture that value. So a labor shortage, a minimum wage hike, that kind of thing. Then the labor shortage ends and wages slow down, but housing stays expensive.

What I don’t get is what actually triggers an asset price correction. How does the market stay, apparently, uncorrected, and why does it stop? Why can’t houses depreciate without an apocalyptic event?

If houses depreciate significantly it crushes bank loans and mortgage backed securities basically making them worthless. This caused the 2008 crisis.

If most people put 20% or less on their mortgage, and the price of houses goes down >20%, they own zero equity and will just walk away, not pay loans, and hand the keys to their lender. Now it’s the banks problem and a brewing financial crisis.

If they depreciate significantly, sure, but as @The_Nybbler said they can depreciate in real terms without a collapse as happened many times before (most notably in the first half of the twentieth century, even in countries where housing stock wasn’t physically damaged by war like Sweden, Switzerland, the US and some parts of Canada).

For most people, housing is by far the most important investment they own. So they’ll do anything rather than sell their house at a lower price than they bought it.

A friend inherited a house and selling that house has become the centre of their life for years now. They’re convinced that if they just hold on, the price will return to what it was 5 years ago. Taking out loans to pay inheritance taxes, whatever. Anything to get the price from ‘nice income boost’ back to lottery money.

Is your friend my father? After all the kids left the nest, my father divorced my mother to move in with his aging dad with a large house in Southern California. He took care of my grandpa and the house until my grandpa passed away, and is now trying to keep the house value up and sell it for "what it's really worth." The house is 60+ years old now and most developers just want the land. I worry he's going to pass away before he sees any profit from the investment that robbed him of the last decades of his life.

Is your friend my father?

@OracleOutlook, I am your father

In all seriousness, pretty similar situation. The friend spent 10 years taking care of her father and in her head the (hypothetical) money from her father's very valuable London house became the solution to all of the problems in her life. Now prices have dropped massively, she's on the hook (I think) for inheritance tax based on the old value not the new value, and it would be VERY nice amount of money but it's not going to pay for a divorce and a comfortable retirement.

Prime Central London housing is down at absolute most maybe 20% (10-15% is a more realistic number) in nominal (sterling) terms since 2014, more in dollars although with the strengthening now that’s starting to change. A poor investment especially compared to US equities over the last decade, and a loss in real terms, but if her father lived in a house that was worth, say, £3m in 2015, she’s still doing pretty well today.

If you bought a house in central London any time before 2012 or so, you’ve made good money. If you bought before 2004/2005 you’ve made a lot of money. If you bought before 1998 or so you’ve made insane amounts of money. That’s all still true.

Prime Central London housing is down at absolute most maybe 20% (10-15% is a more realistic number) in nominal (sterling) terms since 2014

How the hell is "prime Central London housing" down, at all??? (And can American blue states be persuaded to do the same?)

Why would it not be down? Salaries in London are flat, crime is rising, illegal immigration is unstoppable, the country is in a state of complete malaise, and most of all there's just not that much to recommend London relative to Vancouver, New York, Seattle, Sydney, Dublin, Zürich or even Berlin or Barcelona if you want to invest some money in property. If American blue states want to get there, well, just raise taxes and reduce quality of life as much as you can -- you'll get there eventually.

It’s down for a couple of reasons:

  1. Between approximately the early 90s and early 2010s it was by far the favorite place for the global rich to park money in residential property, with insane appreciation that drove more inflows (like US tech stocks over the last decade) and a reputation for looking the other way when it came to the source of the money. Over the last 10 years Dubai has increasingly taken that role; it’s closer to Asia for the Indians, the Russians were forced there by sanctions, and the Arabs are from there (or the Gulf, at least). The Chinese are also increasingly more wary of the West and like Vancouver and Australia (closer to China) more anyway. A combination of Sterling’s decline versus the dollar and the outperformance of US equities has made London property less attractive. Consider that if you bought London property in 2008 you might have made a solid return in sterling terms, but lost money in dollars because the pound declined from $1.95 to $1.27 in that time. Plus the UK government yielded to American pressure and started confiscating property from corrupt foreigners.

  2. A stagnated UK economy with high taxes on high earners has kept domestic demand low (by 2009 central London property had reached the point where even the most successful echelons of the domestic PMC couldn’t really afford it anymore with some exceptions). In addition, increases on property purchase taxes, long-rumored (and now finally happening) changes to taxation for international rich people who make most of their money outside of Britain, Brexit and the resulting economic uncertainty all put a cap on prices and then led to a slow decline. Higher interest rates have also made it much less attractive because even though rental yields were very low, so were returns elsewhere and so was inflation, increasing the impetus to sell now that inflation is higher and the rental market can only bear limited increases. Then there are some short term policy things around Labour coming to power and making things more expensive for rich people.

Could America replicate it? Not really. Outside of the very top end of the market in Manhattan, Miami and to some extent certain fashionable parts of Los Angeles (and even then…) the US market is driven almost entirely by domestic demand, the great majority of buyers of high end property are US citizens and always have been. You could crash the American economy, of course…

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Why can’t houses depreciate without an apocalyptic event?

A more cynical commenter than me might suggest it's because it takes an apocalyptic event for the federal government to stop propping up house prices.

Why can’t houses depreciate without an apocalyptic event?

They can, in real terms. In nominal terms, people will tend to stay in one place when the market is bad, reducing supply and providing a lot of resistance to price drops. They do happen of course, as in the GFC.

and the Heard and McDonald islands, which are uninhabited.

But are controlled by Australia. So they get Australia's rate to avoid some enterprising schmuck setting up a nominal presence there to circumvent the tarrifs.

But Norfolk Island (population 2188, also an Australian territory, zero direct trade with the US) gets a higher tariff than the Australian mainland - 29% vs 10%. Apparently it is because NH (for New Hampshire) was miskeyed as NI when processing a shipment of Timberland shoes, leading the computer to think the US had a trade deficit with them. I'm not sure how the computer knew that NI was supposed to be Norfolk Island and not Northern Ireland.

You know, we were just talking a few posts downthread about how the "experts" are willing to blatantly lie in order to advance their ideological agenda.

We have been told repeatedly for years by the experts that making any sort of adjustment, pushing any buttons on the control panel at all, to the global trade system would lead to complete economic collapse, the rise of fascist dictators, the end of civilization, and in general all manner of untold horrors.

But why should we believe the experts? We know they're ideologically motivated liars. So, fuck it. Let's just start pushing buttons. Smash away and let's see what happens. If for no other reason to prove that you can do something different, alternatives are possible, even if you may indeed get burned.

This isn't pushing buttons or making adjustments - this is giving your toddler a pair of drumsticks and telling him that the control panel is his new xylophone.

I don’t know anything about economics. But I do find it odd how tariffs are supposedly a relic of a bygone era, an economy-wrecking direct tax on the consumer that only an economically-illiterate fool would ever think to use.... and yet every single other country on earth seems to use them.

Huh? The US has lots of tariffs and has been hypocritically protectionist for decades.

Well sure, many of the "experts" are ideologically motivated liars, but Trump and many of his people are also ideologically motivated liars. And I think that the tariffs are nonsensical not just from some complex ideological "expert" perspective... to me, they also seem nonsensical just from a common-sense perspective. I understand hating the "experts" and wanting to just push buttons, but that doesn't mean that we should abandon all sense of what buttons might be good or bad to push. I understand being frustrated with mainstream economists' consensus, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Trump's alternatives will be any better.

Why exactly are they non sensical? The first order effect is that tarriffs make it more profitable to produce things in America vs offshore, so there will be more jobs and industry created here. It’s only the secondary and tertiary effects where it starts to get ugly

This is the simple explanation:

Tariffs are a tax on goods entering the country.

Taxing things gives you less of them.

Thus we will have less goods entering the country, and the ones coming in will be at higher prices.

Fewer and more expensive goods and services means we are all poorer.

Yes, and that American/domestic producers will compete to gobble up these new margins on the newly more expensive goods.

It seems to me that is the secondary effect and prices rising is the primary effect.

Why exactly are they non sensical? The first order effect is that tarriffs make it more profitable to produce things in America vs offshore, so there will be more jobs and industry created here. It’s only the secondary and tertiary effects where it starts to get ugly

You can get a car by making a car in Detroit, or by drilling for oil in North Dakota and trading the oil for a Japanese car. Tariffs is to favour the former process over the latter - to first order the increase in cars made in Detroit is exactly offset by the reduction in oil drilled in North Dakota (foreigners who can no longer sell cars to the US can't get the dollars to buy the oil, so they don't).

It is true that an autarchic America would do more manufacturing and less of other things (and would be poorer as a result, because Americans suck at manufacturing and excel at things like software engineering and oil drilling), so if by "produce things" you mean specifically manufacturing then tariffs will lead to America "producing" more "things". But Trump definitely doesn't want to kneecap American natural resource exports, and probably doesn't want to kneecap American tech exports.

There is also a second order effect, which is that chaotically imposed tariffs generate moron risk premium, which reduces foreigners' (and Americans') desire to invest in America, so foreigners with dollars are more likely to spend them on American goods and services than invest them. If this isn't neutralised by monetary or fiscal policy, it increases demand for American goods and services, which would lead to increased production in the short term in a Great Depression, or inflation under normal economic conditions. In either case, in the long term the decrease in investment will lead to a decrease in production. For these tariffs at this time, the fall in USD indicates that financial markets think the second order effect will be bigger than the first order effect.

You’re missing the point here imo. This is economics 101 level analysis. America isn’t drilling for oil and then trading oil for Japanese cars. That’s what a persistent and high trade deficit means.

America is creating dollars ex-nihilo and then trading these dollars for real overseas goods. This is how having the reserve currency is a huge blessing, since we can trade unbacked paper money for real cars, computers, microwaves, etc!

But this blessing turns into a curse. This benefits individuals and orgs which can create dollars out of nothing, who are people with assets who can create money through debt. The government debt being at $37T is an exact symptom of this too, all these paper bonds have been exported overseas and we’ve received real items in return. The issue is that poorer people don’t benefit much from this “print money for overseas goods system” and it increases wealth inequality over time. Also, it hollows out your manufacturing base, for an increasingly financialized economy (dominated by the coastal regions in the US)

Tarriffs attempt to undo this curse, as being the reserve currency is starting to cause major issues at home (wealth inequality, ballooning government debt, no manufacturing is a national security issue). There’s going to be major pain. But it’s better now, than later, when the USG goes ~bankrupt and needs to default on the entire financial system. That’s gonna be some pain…

The issue is that poorer people don’t benefit much from this “print money for overseas goods system” and it increases wealth inequality over time.

This is the bullshit allegation though.

Working class Americans have higher material quality of life than their peers in every other rich country, barring a handful of microstates like Luxembourg, or small countries blessed by geography, resources and good government like Norway and Switzerland.

The problems America has - with crime, drugs, homelessness - are political choices. American plumbers aren’t being financially screwed over.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but American living standards for all but the very bottom are higher than Switzerland Norway UAE etc despite higher nominal GDP.

In terms of disposable income / consumption, certainly. I would consider Switzerland and Norway more civilized, in that I think someone in the 50th percentile of the income distribution does have higher QOL there.

Of course, since we can export “nothing” (ie: fiat money) for something (like real imports). So our material wealth is greater than most other counties (who don’t have this power up).

Things are not all rosy though. Chronic disease is higher here than any western nation, life expectancy is down, and severely lags behind our peers, deaths of despair are up… material wealth is not the only type of wealth. And at what cost?

None of that will be solved by tariffs.

Chronic disease is higher here than any western nation

Yeah, because we're literally fat on all the riches.

The first order effect is that tarriffs make it more profitable to produce things in America vs offshore, so there will be more jobs and industry created here.

This would require that the US economy is at all set up to have manufacturing be a major sector, which it isn't, and that companies believe the current tariff regime is a permanent fixture of the economy rather than the crusade of one president. As it stands, these tariffs will be the first to go on January 21, 2029. And you can't spur investment by taxing, especially in an economy where the blue collar workforce does other things and manufacturing culture is gone, any more than you can turn the ocean into land by taxing Tuvalu.

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.

the disaster predicted by the experts is already underway

Currently SPY is down roughly 3.9% on the day. Which is certainly a bit rough compared to the normal +/- 1% daily churn, but is a roughly 1% type event, so something you would expect to happen more than once a year, but not more than a few times. I am unmoved.

Tariffs have been at least partially priced in for a while, though. And SPY has been sliding since mid February.

I suspect traders are pricing in the possibility Trump will at least partially reverse course.

Yes, our expectation should be a global recession/depression with lots of international supply chain snafus. The market is currently saying surely Trump isn’t that reckless

I do think that's quite possible, but we lived through a bunch of supply chain snafus in the last five years (toilet paper, unloading at Long Beach, the Ever Given fiasco, Houthis, chip shortages) and I will admit those weren't great times but we did make it through them, and systems (capitalism?) were more robust than at least I expected.

Yes. This should seem to me, on consideration, not quite so dangerous as "shut. down. EVERYTHING" of five years ago. I expected Armageddon then, but things surprised me with their resilience. And this time - well, the question is whether the intransigence of Trump or the coherence of his coalition is greater than the public's fear of The Pandemic, but - it might be more easily taken back.

Of course, the cost of "shut down everything" turned out to be - inflation! Inflation sufficient to take down not just the sitting President, but the President after him! I'd rather we just didn't.

I'd rather we just didn't.

I think the problem is that we honestly just can't not. I think destructive nonsense like this has become an inevitability in some way, and it's going to keep happening until enough destruction has passed.

As they say in the biz: post shorts.

I've been out of stocks and in treasuries for a while myself, so I'm not about to paint a rosy picture of the coming recession, but if you believe the market is always right you would have to believe they were right about a whole bunch of rate cuts that didn't happen just in the past few years. And if you believed the experts (rather than the market) you'd have been even more wrong.

Markets aren't magic, they're just the aggregate of what people with skin in the game believe. Them being wrong happens all the time.

As they say in the biz: post shorts.

While I agree with the sentiment here, I think this illustrates why successfully shorting the market is so much harder than it looks. If you looked at Trump’s economic proposals during the campaign, thought “man, this will wreck trade,” and then shorted the market immediately after he got elected, you ate shit. If you shorted the market early February when Trump signed an executive order to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, you didn’t make diddly squat. You would have had to short the market the last 6 weeks specifically in order to be in the money. There was no real way a priori to know that this is when the crash would be.

I second all of this. I have messed with shorting a little (although usually by options rather than naked shorts) and it's a lot harder than being long. You're paying interest the entire time, and when it goes against you, you effectively get more leveraged, increasing your risk even while you think "cmon, this price is totally irrational, when is the bubble going to burst already!?" I know some perma-bears who have been predicting doom for the past 10 years (just from market valuations, nothing to do with Trump) and they keep getting proven wrong.

In general shorting macro events is extremely dumb. Some people are super geniuses / very lucky (it is not worth litigating which), but there’s a reason most short strategies are the result of relatively diligent research / low key or high key non-public information, narrowly construed, and limited. “Short the market if you think there will be a crash” is always a dumb thing to say. Unless you have non-public information about a market wide trigger (like a major bank about to report a huge increase in mortgage delinquency) the smart move is probably to take money out and wait.

Where is your money atm, if not the market?

Bonds, gold and bitcoin. Mostly bonds.

There is bound to be pain, but long term Bitcoin trades like an option on its own adoption, and the current administration is quite favorable to the industry in general and to it in particular.

The recession outlook entirely depends on whether or not it's seen as a safe haven. If state and financial system adoption continues or hastens, those shocks won't matter and it'll behave like a better gold.

If it doesn't and nobody cares because everyone is buying a gold backed BRICS currency or gold directly, it'll be the worst asset to hold in 2026, even worse than stocks.

I hold it as a hedge, like the rest. But if you want some real alpha, I think that tokenizing stocks and general financial engineering around bridging crypto and the regular financial system is going to be the next big thing for that industry. Exchanges all have products like that rolling behind the scenes, Blackrock has been positioning itself in that area and with a SEC that isn't persecuting the industry anymore, people can start to do things again.

I'm unsure how that particular kind of financialization will interact with a contracting economy, but it will. GameStop trying to shore up value by buying Bitcoin might be a template for others. Or it might not.

I think you might need to watch or read The Big Short.

We have been told repeatedly for years by the experts that making any sort of adjustment, pushing any buttons on the control panel at all, to the global trade system would lead to complete economic collapse

We push the buttons all the time. Joe Biden pushed some buttons; Trump pushed some buttons last time; so did Obama and Bush and Clinton and...

What we generally avoid doing is pushing the Big Red Button.

While I am sure that economists are just as biased as the practitioners of any soft "science", I do think that quite a number of them actually lean libertarian, not woke. Historically, economies which broadly embraced free trade fared better than countries which mostly rejected it.

But sure, just try to make the US build their own supply chains for everything. It will also hurt the rest of the world, but it will hurt you a lot worse.

See, the key word you used that needs some unpacking is economies. Do all players in the economy benefit equally from free trade? Certainly not! That’s the whole point of Trump raising tariffs, and why he had an autoworker introduce him at yesterday’s speech. Blue collar labor has fared poorly since the 1990s when NAFTA really accelerated free trade in the United States. Trump is the first President in my lifetime who actually cares about unskilled American laborers. It’s why the head of the Teamsters spoke at the RNC last year.

I don’t buy the idea that tariffs are a net negative for everyone in an economy. Sure, there’s inefficiencies in domestic production of certain goods. But man shall not live by bread alone. I thought people cared about equity? I guess not when it impacts the price of cheap imports from China or Mexico. Shows how little the PMC class actually cares about Joe Blue Sixpack.

I don’t buy the idea that tariffs are a net negative for everyone in an economy.

This is an exceedingly low bar to clear. 9/11 was not a net negative for everyone in the US economy. The spread of the automobile devastated the horse industry. Lumina might put half the dentists out of work. I am sure that there are a few people who fare better under North Korea's economic regime than they would in a more capitalist society.

Blue collar labor might have a niche in the future, but "unskilled American laborers" will not make a comeback. Even if Trump manages to bring back manufacturing by putting his hands on the scale in favor of more expensive, worse, US-produced products, modern manufacturing relies heavily on automation, and outlawing automation will just turn the US into some third-rate country when everyone does it (instead of just the fucking longshoremen's union).

The good news is that plausibly, AI will threaten the livelihood of the PMC too -- perhaps even more, a lawyer is easier to replace with an LLM than a plumber. So at some point, we might get some kind of UBI. But the days where factories were hiring tons of people to shovel coal into furnaces are not coming back, and good riddance -- these were never jobs which enabled humans to thrive.

Blue collar labor has fared poorly since the 1990s when NAFTA really accelerated free trade in the United States. Trump is the first President in my lifetime who actually cares about unskilled American laborers. It’s why the head of the Teamsters spoke at the RNC last year.

NAFTA is a furphy - the big drop in US manufacturing employment happens after 2000 due to the China shock.

Also the Teamsters aren't a manufacturing union. They get paid to deliver the Chinese imports from the dock to the Walmart Supercentre. So if the Teamsters are supporting Trump it is unlikely to be about tariffs, or indeed economics at all.

It’s true that not everyone benefits equally. But your analysis isn’t that good. Using the auto industry as an example, net jobs are not that different pre- and post-NAFTA. Michigan took a big hit but a significant part of that was that other states have/adopted right to work laws. Michigan’s loss was Kentucky’s gain. What’s the moral calculus on a blue collar job in the former versus the latter?

Also you did not mention automation. Our industrial output has recovered from COVID lockdowns and is back up around all-time highs. The headwinds Joe Sixpack is fighting can’t be fixed by tariffs, and he’s gonna eat the pain of inflation, and inflation means the Fed isn’t going to cut rates.

Further, NAFTA and right to work laws were passed by legislatures. Businesses have more confidence in them than executive orders. On-shoring manufacturing takes years. Who is going to be president in 2029 and will they simply undo these tariffs via executive order if they’re even still in place? I have no idea. Neither do businesses who would need to invest huge sums in building new manufacturing capacity.

Saying that manufacturing jobs haven’t left America, and especially in the middle states is just plain stupid

I half agree. But not all jobs were lost, some were eliminated by technological gains. And some did leave, but to the south and west where right-to-work laws are in place.

Also, the world has changed. Many people have a halcyon reference point of mid-century America. Well, much of the developed world had been bombed to rubble, and our infrastructure was left intact.

Tariffs have costs. And they can’t move auto industry jobs from Kentucky back to Michigan. They can’t usher in an era of neo-Luddism and undo automation and other gains in technological efficiencies. And they can’t recreate a world where Asia and Europe have nowhere near our industrial capacity.

I'm extremely leery about the potential short or medium term impacts here.

Yet, I find myself willing to see what happens, because the revelations of the past 6ish years is that the Experts WERE pushing buttons on the control panel, and were getting paid very handsomely to push the buttons, but weren't particularly motivated to push buttons that would benefit the people they nominally owed allegiance to. I'm not even talking strictly about NGOs and such, but that's a symptom of it. Hell, during Biden's term, we can't even be sure WHO was at the controls while Biden was half-cogent.

Lets push some buttons that will break some things in the short term, and then (hopefully) quickly build some replacements that are generally better for parties other than elites in the political class.

And I'm young enough I can wait to recover from any short or medium term losses before I'm forced to retire. I grew up during and in the aftermath of the '08 crash. Mentally I've been braced this sort of event for like 10 years. I do feel for those who are stuck in a position where their livelihood is reliant on stock prices, but if you're at or near retirement age you should be in safer assets anyway.

The (classical) Liberal World Order was premised on free trade and financial/industrial interconnections between various countries disincentivizing wars and conflicts and fostering greater cooperation. I sincerely believe that they do have this effect, but I can see and admit there are parts of this order that are causing major issues and yet are not being corrected. I'd point to mass immigration as one example, and collapsing global fertility as another. BOTH of these should in theory be addressable without attacking the foundations of the order itself... but we've not been allowed to even have the discussion.

I would suggest that we're in a particularly unfavorable equilibrium that could collapse into an even worse equilibrium in the nearish future. Whether this is due to irrational/malicious actors screwing with things, or due to inexorable historical forces is a good discussion. But taking a gamble that if you start wrenching on the controls now you can steer away from the iceberg and not crash into something else, well, that is not a thing to be done flippantly.

I can certainly understand people who would rather not have Trump and Co. be the ones at the helm, but the system itself wasn't going to let us have anyone better.

These tariffs are being imposed by executive order under a 1960s law where congress ceded this part of its power of the purse to the executive under the guise of vaguely defined national security interests. I’m curious as to how you’re defining long term, and if these tariffs at best survive 2029 when a new president takes office.

Particularly as social media has ushered in an era of anti-incumbency bias.

Ultimately, long term is 10+ years out, for me. But even 5 years is a pretty long time horizon given the massive pace of change going on in many sectors. We could have the beginnings of a Mars colony by then.

The (classical) Liberal World Order was premised on free trade and financial/industrial interconnections between various countries disincentivizing wars and conflicts and fostering greater cooperation. I sincerely believe that they do have this effect, but I can see and admit there are parts of this order that are causing major issues and yet are not being corrected. I'd point to mass immigration as one example, and collapsing global fertility as another.

Not only does immigration have nothing to do with free trade, but it's not even obvious how eliminating free trade reduces immigration. It's "burgers?" all over again.

I can see the argument that 'labor' as a class is somehow fungible and that it is best to allow labor to flow to where it is most needed/most cost effective, even across borders. If there's farm work that needs to be done in the U.S., and ample farm workers in Mexico, then you can acquire mutual gains through trade! So 'free trade' does, to some degree, imply free movement of laborers, which implies some level of immigration.

But the apparent reality is that the benefits of most immigration, particularly lower skilled, accrue primarily to the upper and political classes, while costs are borne by the relatively low classes and strains infrastructure for everyone. That time Desantis flew 50 migrants into Martha's Vineyard and the entire town basically declared a state of emergency to get them out ASAP really drove that home. The Migrant hotels in New York also bolstered the point, we don't even have to get into exaggerated stories of Haitians in Ohio to see the issue.

But this should still be easy-ish to fix within the rules of our system, just be willing to deport troublemakers, and shift some of the burdens/costs to the upper classes too so they internalize the cost of their policies and adjust them to make them more efficient. But like almost every other Liberal Shibboleth, it became a HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE that ISN'T SUBJECT TO DEBATE.

Labor though is by necessity at least somewhat bound to the land simply because you can not easily pick up and move even within a large country like the USA to say nothing of moving from country to country in search of work. The jobs may be more plentiful in Kenya, but there are a lot of reasons I won’t be moving there.

So 'free trade' does, to some degree, imply free movement of laborers

No, it doesn't.

Free trade is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports.

Have you ever seen anyone who used "free trade" to include immigration?

A lot of this is basically because we're not handling economic immigration cynically enough. Especially not blue states and cities. The benefits of lower-skilled farm workers do not in fact accrue primarily to the upper and political classes; it makes food cheaper, which helps basically all consumers, and it helps the farm workers. But blue cities and states don't want to have migrants work; they put them on welfare instead, which is ridiculous. (and of course they work under the table anyway. Or commit crimes). And that there apparently isn't even any attempt to keep out violent criminals makes it worse.

I find it hard to believe Martha's Vinyard couldn't absorb 50 migrants if they were willing to put them to work (probably under the table)... what, the rich don't need gardeners and housekeepers any more? But That's Just Not Done (at least not when it would be seen).

The benefits of lower-skilled farm workers do not in fact accrue primarily to the upper and political classes; it makes food cheaper, which helps basically all consumers, and it helps the farm workers.

I also makes nannies cheaper, house cleaners, delivery drivers, etc. etc., but those services are definitely more keyed for the upper classes.

And it also places upward pressure on housing prices in specifically the areas where lower/middle class homebuyers would be looking. And if its true that migrants get more financial assistance to find housing than average citizens, they can actually outcompete those native citizens!

Migrants aren't buying large mansions in upscale areas, by and large, they're going for the same single-family homes that your average twenty-something couple might want, too. So they place upward pressure specifically on the housing that would be accessible to middle class and down, not the top quarter of the economic stack, who can afford to live in communities far from migrant populations.

Of course, they provide labor to build more housing, so I'm willing to accept that it might be a wash in that regard.

I find it hard to believe Martha's Vinyard couldn't absorb 50 migrants if they were willing to put them to work (probably under the table)

They presumably wanted to avoid any APPEARANCE that migrants would be welcome to move in there, lest it attract a larger crowd. I agree they probably have tons of them employed in the area, maybe some that even live in it, but that state of affairs persists only if they can control the flow.

I also makes nannies cheaper, house cleaners, delivery drivers, etc. etc., but those services are definitely more keyed for the upper classes.

I think there's a lot more farm workers than nannies and house cleaners put together. Delivery drivers, like farm workers, are pretty broad-based in their benefit -- even poor people order stuff nowadays. Cheap day laborers are pretty broad-based in their benefit, though my impression is that group is more likely to contain bad eggs than the others. (or maybe the bad egg farm workers mostly affect other migrants)

Migrants aren't buying large mansions in upscale areas, by and large, they're going for the same single-family homes that your average twenty-something couple might want, too. So they place upward pressure specifically on the housing that would be accessible to middle class and down, not the top quarter of the economic stack,

Housing prices have mostly gotten ridiculous in the upscale areas, though.

I agree they probably have tons of them employed in the area, maybe some that even live in it, but that state of affairs persists only if they can control the flow.

Yeah, that's important. The US can (or could before the tariff crap) make good use of a LOT of migrants, provided you make some attempt to keep criminals and people here to milk the system out, but not an unlimited amount.

but it's not even obvious how eliminating free trade reduces immigration.

If you crash your country's economy, you eliminate economic immigrants.

As 2rafa suggested, you only eliminate the marginally best economic immigrants. If you're swiss, maybe you'll stay in Switzerland if American opportunities aren't what they used to be. If you're from Haiti, well, there's a long way to go until it's better to stay in Haiti.

Even a crashed American economy would be better than life in Guatemala or Haiti.

I know Haiti is Haiti, but how bad are things on the ground in Guatemala?

It's the worst out of Central America except possibly for Nicaragua. 'Roughly on par with India' is possibly quite true.

1/3 of Guatemalans live like Americans in the 90s (in a good way, better than modern America). 2/3 live like rural Appalachia. Prices are very high, 3-5x more than in Central Mexico (central Mexico is about 1/2 old America, 1/2 Texas truck stop) (indeed, higher than LCOL US.) Surprisingly to me, it's rather rainy and cold.

I do feel for those who are stuck in a position where their livelihood is reliant on stock prices, but if you're at or near retirement age you should be in safer assets anyway.

Bad news: there aren't any. Cash-equivalents will get eaten by inflation, everything else is going to get wrecked too.

Is this finally the hour for metals stackers?

No. Less trade means less stuff is available that people want, period. Everything is worth less because there are less things to buy (except food I guess).

Remains to be seen, the one interesting thing is that Tariffs are just paper barriers to trade. A 'social construct,' if you will.

We haven't physically built a wall or blown up any bridges.

If countries are willing to play ball and lower all (their) paper barriers to trade, then goods can 'instantly' start flowing again, and possibly under better overall terms. Like, just last week Trump committed to bombing the Houthis in hopes of restoring safe access to the Suez for global shipping. He clearly WANTS goods to flow smoothly.

I will precommit now, that if other countries actively take steps to reduce tariffs and otherwise appease Trump's demands and Trump is too temperamental to accept these offers in good faith and we still have most of these Tarriffs in place at the same levels come May 2nd 2025 (unless real deals are pending come that date), it is a bad thing and we will be in for some rough times. I will criticize/condemn Trump and Co. in no uncertain terms.

If other countries DON'T take active steps to reduce tariffs or otherwise negotiate, I will have to admit that my model of the world is drastically misinformed.

So my full expectation is that there will be a couple weeks of rapidfire and rough negotiations with some touch-and-go moments, but ultimately other nations will do the needful and come the end of April Trump will make a YUUUGE fanfare about signing Tariff reductions and trade agreements with those countries that capitulated, and markets will 'correct course.'

Trump has given himself a lot of runway to try and land this plane relatively smoothly, but there's going to be a lot of turbulence on the way in, that seems certain.

I'll also grant that this causes substantial uncertainty for American investors and entrepreneurs which is 'bad.' But, uhhh, what other country could they find that is inherently more stable and inviting for investment?

If other countries DON'T take active steps to reduce tariffs or otherwise negotiate, I will have to admit that my model of the world is drastically misinformed.

Say you‘re the median trade partner with the US, you have a trade surplus towards it, and about a 5% tariff on US goods. Out comes trump with a 20% tariff, with a 10 % minimum, and not based on anything you actually do (or whether you are friend or foe), just balance of trade. And you think they will cancel their own tariffs and offer mineral concessions ?

From the POV of the rest of the world, this is extremely high 'trade aggression'. If you answer this with concessions, you are the most spineless weakling that ever noodled.

The only question being debated right now from brussels to peking and tokyo to london is how much to retaliate. The most extreme pro-american, pro-free trade position being to ignore it and wait for his tantrum, or his presidency, to end.

You‘re very lucky empirically because your theory has been tested and disproved within 24 hours. China has retaliated with a 34% tariff on US goods.

But what is it countries are supposed to do? It doesn't seem to be about tariffs themselves but trade deficits. Simply buying large amounts of American goods could be an option for them to get these numbers down but it's not in the power of most of the worst affected countries.

Offer access to your country's natural resources, like was proposed with Ukraine?

Make direct investments into American manufacturing like Taiwan?

I expect that the deals reached by each country will look different, with the outcomes being the result of some creative horse-trading.

Now, I'm also concerned that this will result in an overly complex patchwork of trade deals and potentially contradictory obligations between various countries, when the simplest outcome would just be everyone drops tariffs to some agreed-upon maximum and signs on to a treaty to keep them there.

But this is not some historically unprecedented diplomatic endeavor.

But neither of these deals actually change the trade deficit, which is about goods flow not investment. My point is that the new tariffs should be based on something countries can correct rather than something orthogonal to what the US's problem with them is.

Ya know, I'd actually agree it would be nice to have clarity as to how these countries can respond to quickly get the tariffs dropped, the attempt at opacity seems odd.

But I ascribe that to the mix of goals Trump is pursuing, which is to say he needs flexibility so tying himself to an algorithm means he can't maneuver much.

That's maybe the concerning part, aside from Trump's temperament. He is trying to optimize along a few different dimensions instead of merely seeking one blunt policy outcome.

They don't have the money to do that. About all they can do is stop exporting.

If countries are willing to play ball and lower all (their) paper barriers to trade

The tariffs aren't reciprocal - the "tariffs charged to the USA" column on the poster he held up is a measure of the bilateral trade deficit and has nothing to do with what tariffs are charged on US exports. Vietnam and Israel both cut tariffs on the US, and still got hit. Trump isn't asking Vietnam to cut tariffs, he is asking Vietnam to stop exporting manufactured goods.

Trump may reverse the tariffs in exchange for kayfabe concessions and falsely claim a yuge win (as he did with the first round of Mexico/Canada tariffs), but he hasn't articulated any demands for real concessions that other countries are in a position to make.

At the risk of speculating TOO much, its what you might expect from a "Door in the Face" negotiation tactic.

Which Trump absolutely has employed in the past.

As I said if he's too temperamental to actually negotiate, articulate demands, make some concessions, and reach a deal then yeah, we're in trouble.

We'll probably be getting the first whispers of offers and counteroffers over the weekends. The administration has been much more leak-proof (Issues with Signal chat notwithstanding) and moving much more quickly this time around, indeed the details of the tariffs didn't leak in advance, hence it catching many by surprise! It's absurd to assume there's not a lot of active discussion happening behind closed doors already.

But I think that a guy who knows he's only got about 3 years to impose as much of a policy impact as possible (probably less than 2 if the midterms don't go well) is going to be more aggressive up front.

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?

On this basis literally anything Trump does can be explained as a brilliant negotiating tactic.

Gunboat diplomacy is brilliant negotiating tactic if you have gunboats and the other side don't. Now I think it is stupid for trump to try and fight so many economic blocs at once. He should have chosen EU or China for destruction and let Vance finish the other in 4 years. Not both at once.

On this basis literally anything Trump does can be explained as a brilliant negotiating tactic.

Yes.

He wrote a book on this. To the extent you believe the words on the page, you can use it to make insights into his mind and his preferred strategies. He's not some completely mysterious, inscrutable chaos demon, but when people react to his actions with such alarm, its easy for him to build a reputation as one.

We can make judgments based on his behavior during his first term, which so many people seem to treat like ancient forgotten history.

I AGREE that you can't pretend every Trump move is a 4-D chess move that will inevitably result in whatever his desired outcome is. I prefer to model him as a shark, with finely-honed instincts for survival in his cutthroat environment.

But it would be stupid to assume he does things without some goal or strategy in mind, after all he's successfully outmaneuvered many experienced political actors and avoided a multi-pronged attempt to send him to prison to win a national election. Twice. (maybe three times, but that argument isn't worth rehashing). Other than him just being the favorite of the Gods, the best explanation is he is more canny than his opponents want to give him credit for, or his opponents are genuinely that incompetent.

Here's a question: can you point out any actions he took in the foreign relations arena, from his first term, where he straight up 'lost?' i.e. where he capitulated with absolutely nothing to show for it or maybe even gave something up?

Because he racked up some actual wins. People said moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem would trigger chaos and reprisals from the Muslim world. Instead it went smoothly, and many Arab countries lined up shortly thereafter to improve diplomacy with the U.S. and Isreal!

I mean, the Middle East did eventually fall back into increased chaos... during Biden's term.

Oh, and remember when he Went to North Korea, the FIRST President to do so, and got them to at least verbally agree to denuclearization talks?, and NK has been substantially less uppity since then?

Apparently that's still their stated intention!

Look man, I'm trying my best to disentangle my feeling about Trump's persona and actually look at his actions and their outcomes, and end of the day, the guy usually brings home some kind of bacon when he's locked in, no matter how distasteful you find his tactics.

So we could just pretend that THIS time he's acting completely out of pocket and flailing around randomly or see where it actually goes. Yes, there's some cause for concern! Trump can be temperamental! But I'm also modelling the other countries in this situation, and it seems obvious they almost all have good reasons to reach some kind of deal in the very near future, and failure to even try to do so would be irrational on their part! I don't think they're irrational, so I think the pressure from Trump will get them to the table, at least.

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GP said:

should be in safer assets anyway.

Safer not safe. Bonds will continue to grow in nominal dollars, where stocks could drop 50%+.

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.

I sure hope so, but that's about the size of the 2000 and 2008 crashes, so it's not inconceivable.

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.

That sounds reasonable, but the market often isn't. In fairness, my portfolio composition is still the 100% VFFSX it's always been, and I just chunked my whole bonus into it, so \shrug.

Smash away and let's see what happens. If for no other reason to prove that you can do something different, alternatives are possible, even if you may indeed get burned.

Pouring gasoline all over my body and lighting a match because the experts told me not to (and how dare they tell me what to do?) is a completely different type of thing than nuanced risk taking and experimentation.

We can do things differently, improve on our flaws and take healthy risks. We can challenge the orthodox opinions of professionals. We don't need to light ourselves on fire to do this.

Alternate comparison! Nearly every country on the face of the earth has tariffs against US goods. It's working out fantastic for them. I regularly read articles about how protectionism is the secret sauce behind China's economy.

Maybe we were the ones pouring gasoline all over our body and lighting the match because the experts told us we have to.

I regularly read articles about how protectionism is the secret sauce behind China's economy.

Written by whom, Experts?

China and the other successful Asian economics used protectionism to target specific industries for development (often picked through pure cronyism of course, see Japan and Korea.)

The two secret ingredients are a) going for stuff you can get cheap capital and inputs for, and b) imposing the costs on workers who are already poor and won't really notice how much the policy is hurting them.

China started by importing old labor-intensive machine tooling from Europe, and heavily subsidized their light manufacturing exports. The workers were coming straight off of disastrous collective farms and didn't notice or care that much of their output was going towards American consumer surplus and the dead weight loss of the subsidy. They kept this ball rolling one industry at a time all the way to where they are now, at the cost of still being heavily export-dependent with depressed domestic consumption.
(One reason tariffs against China are good policy rn imo: they have overinvested in a ton of export manufacturing, and have little choice but to eat most of the loss themselves or let too many well-connected investors and pension funds lose their shirts/heads. Their whole EV battery industry is hemorrhaging money and so desperate for overseas sales that battery prices kept dropping after the tariffs.)

That doesn't really work in the US when workers would face huge reductions to their current quality of life to make American manufacturing competitive.
Especially trying to do it for everything, all at once.

We could get rid of migrant farm labor by subsidizing/tariff-exempting cheap automated farming equipment from China. Or we could expand immigration to get cheap manufacturing labor, bringing all those Mexican border factories to the US side and taxing competing imports. But doing both at once is impossible.

We could get rid of migrant farm labor by subsidizing/tariff-exempting cheap automated farming equipment from China.

Could we? We're not reaping grain by hand these days. My understanding is that farm labor mostly goes towards harvesting fruits and vegetables and that this largely has not been automated anywhere because it's really hard. I'd be surprised if it's been economically automated in China where labor cost is much lower. I'm sure they have prototype robots, but do they have any in actual use?

Their whole EV battery industry is hemorrhaging money and so desperate for overseas sales that battery prices kept dropping after the tariffs.

Really? Aren't prices falling because of technological development, ruthless competition and economies of scale? They use subsidies to build up industries but Chinese industry is so big it can't possibly be reliant on subsidies in the medium or long-term. You can't just subsidise the whole economy and pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

https://x.com/alojoh/status/1778746545481126308

BYD seemingly got a mere 2.4 billion over 8 years, that's peanuts. It's profitable despite the subsidy.

https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3228224/overcapacity-chinas-ev-battery-industry-reach-four-times-demand-2025-putting-small-players-risk

This is why you can get lithium batteries on Amazon for half the price they were last year, even after biden's new tariffs. Especially now Tesla isn't buying Chinese LFPs any more. They're doing anything they can to sell cells.

Nearly every country on the face of the earth has tariffs against US goods. It's working out fantastic for them.

That's both not true in a meaningful sense, most of our meaningful trade partners have only limited tariffs on a small number of industries or businesses which is not anywhere near equal to large tariffs on everything and not true because the US economy is substantially stronger and better than most other countries in the world.

Maybe we were the ones pouring gasoline all over our body and lighting the match because the experts told us we have to.

Lots of countries have tried autarky before, somehow despite it being incredibly effective apparently, none of them ended up doing well. If we're pouring gas on ourselves, it's strange how rich and powerful America has become doing so.

Also important, free trade is historically the revolutionary idea. Free trade economists like Smith and Ricardo were the ones who pushed back on the mercentalist mindset that dominated the elite class of the time, and the countries that adopted trade grew up strong.

That's both not true in a meaningful sense, most of our meaningful trade partners have only limited tariffs on a small number of industries or businesses which is not anywhere near equal to large tariffs on everything and not true because the US economy is substantially stronger and better than most every other country in the world

So howcome I have never seen a "made in USA" label, and why is the local agribusiness periodically shiitting bricks at the prospect of dropping tariffs on food?

Because service exports don't have stickers on them. Or are you not using netflix, amazon, windows etc? And also you can just check what tariffs currently are, according to WTO the EU has an average tariff of 5%. (11.3% for agriculture, lower for rest)

So howcome I have never seen a "made in USA" label

You haven’t?

So howcome I have never seen a "made in USA" label

Iirc you don't live in the US, right?

Off the top of my head, I recently bought an American made water filter. Klein tools are also American made.

Iirc you don't live in the US, right?

Yeah, and I think this is a necessary condition for the argument to even be relevant.

If he's saying "allied countries put tariffs on only a handful of industries", but I haven't seen any American products, that would imply the industries that are targeted are precisely the ones that are competitive, making the "handful" argument moot.

Do you ever see “Product of USA” at the grocery store? Food is a decently-sized export.

The main exports are refined petroleum products and capital goods. You don’t see these at the general store with “Made In USA” labels on them, but your country’s infrastructure runs on American products.

howcome I have never seen a "made in USA" label

Seriously just go Walmart and look. It's not a majority of items, but there are plenty of things with the label.

You also have to remember that a true "made in usa" label is very strict. An appliance that's otherwise made in usa except with imported knobs or buttons is not even able to be sold as made in usa.

Seriously just go Walmart and look. It's not a majority of items, but there are plenty of things with the label

I'm European, never seen a Wallmart in my life, and this argument makes no sense since we are discussing tariffs.

Things with "Made in USA" labels tend to place it pretty prominently, often with a flag or red/white/blue. And they tend to be at least a bit more expensive than the alternatives: there seems to be a bit of an assumption of some economic nationalism going on where those products are seen as "premium".

Of course, economic nationalism is sometimes blamed for causing trade imbalances: "The Japanese market isn't interested in American electronics" is something I remember hearing back when the Japan Takes Over The World trope was running strong. Similar things are sometimes said about China today, too. And I'm not sure how "buy domestic" preference generally squares with the administration's concern about trade imbalance: are they willing to discourage it here, or is the standard being applied potentially unfairly?

Sometimes you can even buy essentially the same thing but made in the US, with a big 'made in the US label' and it costs more, as with New Balance trainers. There's a 'Made in the UK' version as well. Both the US/UK versions are actually better quality than the made in Vietnam ones, I would say – but also twice the cost (in the UK, £199 vs £99).

So howcome I have never seen a "made in USA" label

American manufacturing is actually really strong https://www.cato.org/blog/united-states-remains-manufacturing-powerhouse

Simply put, the United States remains a manufacturing powerhouse. In 2020 it was the world’s fourth‐largest steel producer and in 2021 was the second-largest automaker and largest aerospace exporter. Accounting for nearly 16 percent of global manufacturing output in 2021—second only to China, which has four times the population of the United States—the US had a greater share than Japan, Germany, and South Korea combined. By itself, the US manufacturing sector would constitute the world’s eighth‐largest economy.

There's not as many jobs in manufacturing because automation. There's absolutely no reason to cuck ourselves employing people to do things that machines have been able to do for decades, and it's freed up labor into other goods and services. And again this has made the US into the economic marvel that it is too.

and why is the local agribusiness periodically shiitting bricks at the prospect of dropping tariffs on food?

Free trade actually benefits a lot of agriculture too. Even the Trump admin knows this given they subsidized farmers during the first trade war and are planning more now https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/us/politics/farmers-bailouts-trump-tariffs.html

American manufacturing is actually really strong

I suppose it's possible we're using a lot of American components and capital goods (if you buy as local flight in Europe, it will almost certainly be on a Boeing, from my experince), but most consumer goods seem to be Chinese.

Free trade actually benefits a lot of agriculture too.

What I'm saying is that Europe has strong tariffs against American agricultural, and our farmers regularly freak out at the prospect of lowering them.

American manufacturing is actually really strong

A relevant point to the "why do I never see 'made in USA' labels" is that US manufacturing strengths are not low-end consumer goods like textiles or plasticrap. The US does a lot of high-value manufacturing, but those products are often sold to other businesses.

Yeah exactly. The US economy by freeing our labor up from much of the basic work other countries can do cheaper has allowed for so much room into high value manufacturing and services.

I often see a complaint about "bullshit jobs" where people don't feel like they're productive, and there certainly is some that exist because of regulations that aren't necessary (like the people who need to make five hundred pages of environmental reviews instead of just a concise 2-5 page paper) or because their employers are not perfectly optimized machines who never make mistakes but in general American wages are so absurdly high on average because our jobs are actually doing a lot of productive work in ways we might not be able to directly appreciate.

The average American office worker gets paid a shit ton of money to file paperwork or do accounting or whatever because the company believes it is worth the expense whether that be direct gains like manufacturing or indirect like optimizations, PR relations, advertising, HR, lobbyists, R&D, IT, etc etc.

And the companies keep succeeding so clearly they must be somewhat right.

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If we see a crash on par with the great depression, the 30% of people that normally tune out politics are going to vote. Last time that happened, we got FDR and then leftist politics for 2 generations. This time it will be worse, since social media, if captured, allows for much tighter control over the narrative. Is that really worth the risk?

The great depression was a monetary depression caused by the Fed and/or the gold standard. It had very little to do with tariffs, and everything to do with deflation.

Considering the dollar has lost something like 98% of its value since then, and we haven't been on the gold standard for over 50 years, I don't think that's going to be a problem.

You are essentially saying that mass disruptions to the economy come only from deflation. In my view, that's a bit of a presumptuous statement to make about a system so large that no human being can really conceive of it in its entirety.

I'm certainly not arguing that I know that tariffs of this scale will collapse the system. What I am arguing is that making rapid changes of that scale has the capacity to cause large, unforeseen consequences. And that such consequences may not be easily reversible. From a political calculus standpoint, it's a very dangerous move.

I'm not essentially saying anything, I'm specifically saying the great depression had a primary cause, and that cause was monetary in nature. Yes, there were tariffs that came after the crash, but they were ancillary to the main cause and not the main story, unless you're telling a fable.

What I am arguing is that making rapid changes of that scale has the capacity to cause large, unforeseen consequences.

The great depression is not the example to make this point.

Okay, fair enough. You're engaging with the specific case, when the point I'm driving at is the generalization; that drastic changes to the rules by which the economy functions can have large and sometimes very negative consequences. If you want to apply that generalization to the case of the great depression, then yes, monetary policy that resulted in an insufficient money supply was a key factor. So was a large asset bubble. We could just as easily look at the case of the Spanish Price Revolution to see what happens when the government drastically increases the money supply without understanding what the effects of that will be.

None of that detracts from the fact that ideological economic changes, imposed literally overnight, are politically risky if the ideology doesn't match reality.

Last time that happened, we got FDR and then leftist politics for 2 generations.

Note that for Europe, the outcome of the great depression was even worse by many metrics.

There is a reason why some worship the economy as a malevolent Outer Deity. When angered, its destructiveness can be on par with Adonai.

I am vaguely in favor of carefully testing the limits of what is offending the economy when there are good humanitarian reasons for it (e.g. in healthcare), but the US -- which historically was the biggest proponent of free trade -- becoming protectionist feels more like directly defiling the its altars and expecting it will continue to grant its blessings.

Agreed. On economics I'm quite conservative in the traditional, Chesterton's fence sense of the word. Re-routing the irrigation ditches with a nuclear explosion and still expecting the crops to get watered is a very risky bet.

What’s traditional about offshoring a nation’s manufacturing base to a foreign (and potentially hostile, like China) country? The EU couldn’t produce a fraction of munitions needed to keep pace with Russia during the beginnings of the Ukraine war. Visit American post-industrial hovels like Youngstown or Detroit and compare those images to the protectionist bogeymen of 100 years ago. And ask yourself why nations dependent on free trade have significantly low fertility levels.

Chesterton’s fence was demolished decades ago, and the rich beneficiaries of free trade policy are finally forced to notice thanks to Trump.

Detroit

The collapse of Detroit proper is a story of conventional urban decay and long precedes the decline of "Detroit" the auto-industry cluster. The factories were in the suburbs (Dearborn for Ford, much more widely distributed for GM because so much of the early growth was by acquisition). Some of the auto suburbs are post-industrial wasteland (e.g. Flint) but most of them aren't - notably including Dearborn.

And ask yourself why nations dependent on free trade have significantly low fertility levels.

Ah yes, notoriously high fertility... East Asia?

It was a dumb idea to let China into the western trade networks in the late 90s. There I agree with you. But that doesn't change the fact that reversing course on a ship this size is not something that can be accomplished overnight. Trying to do so will simply sink the ship.

I think it's easy to loose site of how much we still have to loose. The poor people in Youngstown or Detroit are still better off than their counterparts from 100 years ago. At least nobody is starving on the street in the present day US.

Fertility rate collapses have occurred in countries as diverse as North Korea and Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Iran, Argentina and Zimbabwe. It is unlikely they are the consequence of free trade.

  • Last time that happened, we got FDR and then leftist politics for 2 generations.

We also got Hitler, Franco and Mussolini. So we may be lucky and not get FDR.

They took power while the existing regime was shaking itself apart. Franco most obviously so, but the other two as well.

The 30% vote against whoever is in power. 1929 US was fresh off of a decade of republican rule. So they gave it to the dems. The Wiemar republic was a pretty left wing entity. So the 30% swung it to the right.

It's really unlikely that a right wing party crashing the economy would result in people moving more to the right. If anything, it would kill the biggest electoral advantage that the republicans have traditionally enjoyed, benefit of the doubt on the economy.

While I agree experts tend to "motte" their public statements over the impact of any possible change from the status quo, I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what Trump is trying to accomplish. I'm okay with short term pain for longer term rewards, but I don't know what that reward is and what it would look like when we finally see it.

I'm glad I just bought everything for a computer upgrade for the next few years, though. Time to figure out what other assets and goods I should purchase before prices start waffling around.

but I don't know what that reward is and what it would look like when we finally see it.

Decoupling from global trade leads to antifragility.

Decoupling from electricity leads to antifragility as well.

if you import 100% of your electricity from abroad, having a few candles in your house is not a bad idea. Building a domestic powerplant is even better.

What if you don't import 100% of your electricity from abroad? What if you have quite a lot of domestic electricity production already? Why does it make sense to try and preempt potential future losses by simply forgoing the gains in the first place? As your other respondent noted, poverty is easy to maintain. That's a meager virtue.

Poverty is easy to maintain.

Sure, but to my untrained eye the current system looks like it was used with MAD principles in mind. I don't like how it works, and why it's there, and I even think it's just a question of time before it all goes tits up, but I don't know if it's a great idea to cut random wires on a counting down detonator, before people are evacuated.

I'm personally getting screwed on this one because of some very aggressive options plays that I was doing. Thoughts and prayers for the stock market today, please.(I'm joking but am also seriously nervous right now)

My sheer laziness has saved me. I was asking about financial advice a month back, which largely confirmed my urge to buy the S&P 500 or Vanguard.

Then the previous market crash happened, and I resolved to buy the dip, but ended up procrastinating.

Still am, but look at me, saved from (theoretical) losses by Never Doing Anything.

Buy a Vanguard index fund. Don't worry about dips or peaks. The stock market was lower last September. People are making a very big deal about a small bump.

The bump is small because part of the market is betting that these tarrifs will be reversed, either immediately or following some face-saving negotiation. Obviously it's not very smart to bet against the wisdom of the market, but depending on your local and personal conditions it can be wise to engage in some risk-hedging. For example, There's a pretty decent chance I'll either lose my job in the next two months thanks to contracting stuff, or keep the job and buy a house, so I'm sitting on a fair amount of liquid cash so I can respond to either eventuality.

I intend to, but I'm unfortunately quite lazy. When I do, I'll park it and forget it till a rainy day.

Can't have losses if you never put money in the market. taps head

I'm also (somewhat) saved by laziness... was going to buy more (on leverage) yesterday but never got around to doing it. Never Get Up.

It is vaguely funny watching political and economic analysts try to make sense of this and talk about this like it's a serious policy and not Trump accidentally outflanking degrowthers from the left.

Unfortunately, the humor is somewhat attenuated by the reality that an insane octogenarian billionaire is trying to wreck my country and make me poorer to satisfy his autarky fetish.

The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle

In principle, Congress could shut this whole thing down, since his authority to do this is statutory and there is pretty blatantly not an emergency.

In principle, Congress could shut this whole thing down, since his authority to do this is statutory and there is pretty blatantly not an emergency.

That's not for them to say what an emergency is, that's a codified power of the President.

As far as I can tell, they can rescind an emergency as it stands but they need a joint resolution with two thirds of both chambers.

The larger point being they could at any time pass a law removing or modifying this particular presidential power. Every day they chose not to.

This is just so, so much fun to witness. At this point the mere sight of comrade Xi makes me chuckle. Praying they do not undo or delay the tariffs.

I do worry a little that policy this stupid will push the elites in formerly friendly countries more towards waiting Trump out than responding harshly. "This can't possibly go on, let's wait", deadly complacency.

As someone who is an occasional enjoyer of rdrama.net, I get plenty of satisfaction from the opportunity to munch popcorn. Unfortunately, that satisfaction is grossly outweighed by the sheer economic fallout that this will cause if not amended, and the still terrible impact on market stability that such arbitrary and inane policies produce.

DOGE I like - certainly on principle but also many of the criticisms seemed bad-faith and nonsensical to me -, but I've never been a fan of tariffs. If they were actually reciprocal / 2 I'd understand somewhat - a country can hardly complain about a new tariff if it's just half of what they charge - , but automatically classifying all trade deficit as equivalent to a tariff is pretty crazy, and then also giving a 10% tariff floor anyway to countries against which you have trade surplus is hypocritical. Or, as it seemed plausible early in his presidency, if they were used primarily as a threat / leverage.

Sigh. So many people are really, justifiably pissed at the current left/green administrations running most of the western states, but it seems we haven't found what can plausibly replace it.

I'm on board with the idea of a department dedicated to ensuring governmental efficiency. I'm a minarchist, with the caveat that I think there's an optimal size and scope for governments (and little evidence that we're already there).

Even the politically motivated firings, I understand, if not condone. Trump's first term was plagued with malicious compliance, obstruction and outright and blatant ignoring of orders.

The execution? All kinds of programs that most people think are laudable are catching strays. The administration doesn't seem to be particularly on the ball when it comes to rolling back the most obviously negative changes. And the savings figures they tout are frankly speaking, worthless.

I'm a minarchist, with the caveat that I think there's an optimal size and scope for governments (and little evidence that we're already there).

Gotta say I'm interested in talking to a minarchist who isn't sure our government is big enough yet! Although come to think of it maybe that describes the non-anarchist left in general?

Oh dear. I very much didn't mean to imply that the US government isn't big enough, my gut feeling is that it's quite the opposite. At least that's what I feel is directionally correct, even if I don't think I'm qualified to offer an authoritative opinion on how large the ideal government is, and what it does.

If I had to answer:

  1. The military. Espionage. Law enforcement of the kinds of crimes that span state borders or are too large and important to be left to them.
  2. Economic policy.
  3. Ensuring the stability of political structure and tasks like organizing elections.
  4. R&D
  5. Coordinating infrastructure projects that are too large for individual states.

Number 4 captures things like NASA, DARPA, the NIH and the like. Government expenditure has outsized returns here. Some expenses, like the size of the military, depend greatly on what other nations are up to. Even the IRS is, I'm told, extremely cost effective and makes about $10 back from additional revenue for every dollar spent on their budget.

Even the politically motivated firings, I understand, if not condone. Trump's first term was plagued with malicious compliance, obstruction and outright and blatant ignoring of orders.

Yes. It's not nice, but I don't see how they could get anywhere without them.

The execution? All kinds of programs that most people think are laudable are catching strays. The administration doesn't seem to be particularly on the ball when it comes to rolling back the most obviously negative changes. And the savings figures they tout are frankly speaking, worthless.

I still find it very hard to judge whether the allegedly-laudable programs really are strays. All the ones I've personally looked into seemed fishy at best, and they almost universally have pretty bad transparency. When in doubt, cancel spending. Not to mention the multiple cases where the media just pushed blatant lies yet again, which is also one of the prime reasons why they are reluctant to rolling back anything - if they were responsive, they'd end up rolling back almost everything, because the media will always find a convenient sob story. The savings figures is just Elon doing Elon things - wildly overpromising, but even the estimates by critics seem quite OK for such a small team in such a small time. Especially considering how rare it is for a government to meaningfully cut spending at all.

The execution? All kinds of programs that most people think are laudable are catching strays. The administration doesn't seem to be particularly on the ball when it comes to rolling back the most obviously negative changes. And the savings figures they tout are frankly speaking, worthless.

Everyone who is paying attention knows that the worst waste/fraud/inefficiency in the US government is in Medicare and defence. DOGE hasn't touched Medicare and has barely touched defence. Ergo they are not serious about reducing waste/fraud/inefficiency.

My heuristic for figuring out whether DOGE is actually motivated by getting rid of waste involves seeing whether they are willing to cut military spending. Republicans tend to love the military for all sorts of reasons, and are usually very happy to spend a lot of tax money on it, so DOGE being willing to touch the military budget will go a long way to telling us whether or not they actually care about efficiency. My guess is, no.

Looks like we're headed for the second Great Depression. Should make the GFC look like a cakewalk. No matter how many times governments have tried, you can't take tax your way to prosperity.

But there is something else here. USA has shown to be more resilient economically than both EU and China. A policy that hurts USA but devastates Europe and China makes a lot of sense. It is better to rule in hell after all.

But this policy hurts Europe and China by devastating the US. Europe and China can continue trading with each other before - and will do so even more.

But China is basically our factory. I don't see the benefit of devastating one's own factory.

There is this argument that by decoupling from China we can re-shore American manufacturing. However, as long as steps are not taken to address the housing crisis, no realistic increase in American manufacturing jobs will bring substantial quality of life improvements to Americans. The jobs that became available as a result of decoupling from China would, I think, simply not pay enough for that. Correct me if I'm wrong of course. And the Trump administration seems to be doing nothing to tackle the housing crisis. As far as I know, housing is not even a major part of their messaging.

Our factory is trying to behave as our equals[1]. Must be taken down a notch or two.

[1] Not residing or being US citizen. just talking from hegemon point of view

It is better to rule in hell after all.

It is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, the Devil said. It's not better to rule only in Hell when you're already ruling on Earth!

You know how depressions and such almost always have multiple factors with any one causative event just being the last straw? It’ll be something new for historians to point to one that was caused by a single person’s obsession with mercantilism.

Great Man Theory is finally cool again.

Make Men Great Again?

It's pretty clear from his chart the tariff above 10% is a rate equal to half of the other nation's tariff on US goods.

https://akm-img-a-in.tosshub.com/indiatoday/styles/medium_crop_simple/public/2025-04/gnjre_hwsaizsjr_0.jpg?VersionId=r2yTsyK_dshcWpPT95M6kYGzhvsnVwqW&size=750:*

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No, it's based entirely on the ratio of the trade deficit. A hypothetical country with zero tariffs, whose citizens simply had no interest in US goods but produced goods that US consumers wanted, would still end up with an immense tariff rate. A hypothetical country with ruinously high tariffs, whose citizens nonetheless bought more from the USA than they traded to the USA would not get any additional tariffs at all.

Yeah, self_made_human posted the Twitter post from the guy who figured it out (first I think). Why they couldn't label their chart with the calculation, I'll never understand.

It's because they're liars trying to poison the well of public discourse and make as many people as possible think that the chart showed other countries' tariffs.

who cares what Vietnam's and Cambodia's tariffs on the US are? those places are poor AF!

why is that how you decide to set your tariffs? we just going by vibes here?

Their combined GDP is around $550 billion. That is similar level to that of Israel or Ireland or United Arab Emirates or Denmark.

It's pretty clear from his chart the tariff above 10% is a rate equal to half of the other nation's tariff on US goods.

are you seriously missing the point? How does this brazen lie pass the most basic sanity check? Do you think Vietnam tariffs the US to the tune of 92%?

The bit about the implied tariffs including "currency manipulation" and "trade barriers" reeks of making up numbers to me, and. back-calculation from the figures below:

https://x.com/orthonormalist/status/1907545265818751037

It's trade deficit divided by their exports.

EU: exports 531.6, imports 333.4, deficit 198.2. 198.2/531.6 is 37, close to 39.

Israel: exports 22.2, imports 14.8, deficit 7.4. 7.4/22.2 is 33.

I think it's broader than just Trump. American governance generally is a disaster zone, they do bizarre costly blunders like this all the time.

They opportunistically bomb and invade random Middle Eastern countries with made-up reasons, then flail around ineffectually, failing to achieve hazy and undefined campaign objectives.

They invented DEI (and export it), a low-level Cultural Revolution.

De facto drug liberalization/opiate abuse has inflicted vast harms on the US public. A rich and powerful country shouldn't have open air drug markets and crazy homeless people shooting up in public, making public transport a fearful and disturbing experience.

They spurred the development of China with globalization and investment, the strongest competing power to the USA.

Australian governance isn't much better. My country is addicted to bungling everything too, propping up a property ponzi scheme (our biggest city is second only to Hong Kong in unaffordability) and a massive NDIS grift. We're selling iron and coal to China, that's the steel they're building warfleets out of. The EU has successfully technologically sterilized the most dynamic continent in history and is somehow struggling to overcome Russia.

Trump is only an example of a highly dysfunctional political system, late-stage democracy. It should never happen in a properly-run country, you should get dignified, wise statesmen - not demented geriatrics, incoherent drunks, reality TV stars or whatever riff-raff. There's lots of excellence in the US but it doesn't seem to filter through into highly effective government institutions and sustained policy success.

Hey man, you can't learn things unless you are willing to experiment.

Drug decriminalization seemed like a good idea at the time. Portugal had some promising early results and we saw signs of harm that the war on drugs was causing.

China was an experiment in sweet sweet capitalism inducing democracy that appears to have fairly clearly failed.

we saw signs of harm that the war on drugs was causing

Is this specifically meant to be a reference to the incarceration rate of black men?

Anything can seem like a good idea at the time if you're a fool. There are videos of men sticking their hand into a lion cage, clearly they thought it was a good idea at the time.

Instead of fighting a war on drugs and losing, why not win instead? It really isn't that hard to find the drug dealers and get rid of them. If the demented drug zombies can find the drug dealers, so can well-trained and organized police. People often raise civil liberties as a defence here - civil liberties disappear anywhere near an airport, where a giant, expensive and ineffective protection theatre reigns. If the TSA can feel up or browse through the genitals of the general public, surely the police can whisk away the drug dealers and break up distribution networks. America wasn't an unfree police state back when the crazies were locked up in mental institutions.

China policy was taking a huge and unnecessary risk relying on a dubious and unproven idea. Since when has capitalism induced democracy in a large Asian dictatorship? It didn't happen in Japan, capitalist democracy transformed into a military dictatorship aiming for regional hegemony. It kind of happened in South Korea and Taiwan - small US allies. But China is a big, nuclear powered US adversary. They fought against America in the Korean War and Vietnam. They famously conducted a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy students in 1989. They had another Taiwan Straits crisis in the 1990s. I can't imagine why anyone thought they were going to turn into a democracy and this would solve all the US problems faced. Even if they became a democracy they could still be rabidly nationalistic and throw their weight around.

It was total delusion. Nobody should ever need to learn not to stick their hand into a lion cage.

Portugal had some promising early results and we saw signs of harm that the war on drugs was causing.

Singapore has excellent results on controlling drug usage by beating or executing people, but we didn't try that route.

Also being a city with no hinterland, in which virtually every citizen travels abroad regularly.

Singapore's policies aren't going to apply to the USA without accounting for scale.

That said, I'm pro public caning as a punishment rather than incarceration.

Also being a city with no hinterland, in which virtually every citizen travels abroad regularly.

How does any of that matter in this respect?

  1. No drugs will ever be produced in Singapore herself, and the borders are relatively small, densely populated, wet and easy to police.

  2. Wealthy Singaporeans who want to sin travel to other nearby countries to do it.

Whereas in America, there's always going to be drugs coming in because you have huge borders and massive empty areas to police. And there's always going to be $$$ demand for party drugs from rich people, which will trickle down.

It’s worth noting that everyone else who’s tried Singaporean drug policies has succeeded in solving that specific problem- these countries are brutal dictatorships, but the evidence behind ‘send everyone with enough drugs to be a dealer to the chair, and enforce strong penalties against private consumption’ is very strong if your goal is to get rid of drugs.

I don’t think the U.S. is capable of doing this but if we were we wouldn’t have drugs.

There's lots of excellence in the US but it doesn't seem to filter through into highly effective government institutions and sustained policy success.

I’ve been wondering for awhile how this happened. It seems our best, high quality people avoid politics as much as possible. Meanwhile some of the most cynical, power hungry sociopaths are getting elected. This doesn’t seem to be the pattern in early 20th century. What changed? Is politics today just much harder to succeed in without being a cutthroat monster?

Mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (and Ireland) destroyed the social fabric that had previously existed, it was only a matter of time.

Say more?

This doesn’t seem to be the pattern in early 20th century. What changed? Is politics today just much harder to succeed in without being a cutthroat monster?

Respect for property rights in liberal democracies has become a victim of its own success. Back in the day there was no guarantee that the government wouldn’t just have a communist revolution and expropriate all your capital, so becoming a capitalist was a roll of the dice: much like becoming a politician, so neither was much worse than the other of a career path for a smart young man. Today, a career in politics is still a roll of the dice - you might lose the election - whereas a career as a capitalist is a much safer proposition because the politicians have done so good of a job at ensuring property rights are sacrosanct and no-one’s gonna expropriate your business and put you up against a wall.

This means that today all the smart people go into moneymaking, leaving politics the preserve of midwits and pathological narcissists.

Bad property rights create strong politicians, strong politicians create good property rights, good property rights create weak politicians [YOU ARE HERE], weak politicians create bad property rights.

I just found out the other day that after Napoleon was captured by the British (for the second time), and exiled to an Atlantic island under heavy guard for the rest of his life, he kept his personal fortune and distributed it in his will without anyone trying to confiscate it.

I'd say politics has gotten a lot more confiscatory. Courts fining political enemies 500 billion dollars on a whim, government spending making and breaking fortunes entirely through political connections, etc

That's just the normal state of democracy, I think.

When military careers were attractive to able people, they acted as a gateway to government work in general and politics in particular. And of course in the Greatest Generation essentially every male citizen served in WW2. I think something similar happened in the 19th century - the quality of American politicians is higher when Revolutionary War veterans (and War of 1812 veteran Jackson) were in charge and then declines.

Actually only about 16 million Americans served in WW2, out of a total population of about 132 million. So the fraction of able-bodied adult male Americans who served in WW2 is probably about 50%, unless you count working in military-related factories as serving.

Also, about 60% of the Americans who served were drafted, so really less than 25% of able-bodied male Americans served willingly. Of course, that is still enormous compared to the fraction of today's able-bodied population that serves in the military willingly.

That said, in modern war having tens of millions of soldiers would probably be more of a hindrance than a help, given how highly technological it is compared to WW2 standards.

drafted ... served willingly

Too many enrolled early on, overwhelming induction capacity. The US actually ended voluntary enlistment at the end of 1942, to allocate manpower more rationally.

The old-time political history that is common knowledge is like the old-time architecture that's still around; it's survived a hidden but powerful selection pressure for the stuff people want to look at and keep around, plus a loss of contextual knowledge about what was deemed quality at the time and what was common or rejected. All the old dross gets torn down and forgotten, and what's left gets a positive sheen on it because it's so different in appearance from the commonplace habits and styles of the present day.

Indeed, I try to keep "90% of everything is crap and always has been" in the front of my mind whenever talking about history and especially when I feel the creep of nostalgia.

the quality of American politicians is higher when Revolutionary War veterans (and War of 1812 veteran Jackson)

I wouldn’t exactly call Jackson a high-quality politician, especially in the same thread with complaints about Trump’s economic policy. He was historic for sure, but he caused economic damage by vetoing the renewal of the Bank of the United States on populist grounds against all expectations.

I consider politicians who successfully execute on agendas I oppose in the face of powerful opposition to be high quality, particularly if they remain popular while doing it and break fewer things that I expect (or would have expected ex ante in the case of Jackson). Effective/ineffective and good/evil are approximately orthogonal axes.

What changed? Is politics today just much harder to succeed in without being a cutthroat monster?

It all started when Kennedy put on some make-up for his televised debate with Nixon (/s, sort of).

I think you might be falling prey to some sort of rose-tinted lens bias when looking into the past. Americans love to deify the founding fathers and other notable people in our national mythology, but there's not really too much evidence that they were not (and I don't say this lightly) giant pieces of shit - horrible, awful people. Especially for the most charismatic ones you can find accounts of them being duplicitous, deceitful, and all-around lacking in personal morals that betray their virtuous musings in various publications.

I've noticed a tendency in pop history to equate "doing something notable" with "being someone good", whereas within academic history, historians are much better about maintaining an objective distance from the figure being studied. I think it's pretty telling that this objective distancing is often labeled "wokeness", but that's a digression.

Coming back to the present, there's plenty of people who are now "doing something notable", but you're realizing that you have plenty of access to the information that they are not "being someone good". So something must have changed? No, my hypothesis is that notable people have always been giant pieces of shit: back to 1700AD Louis XIV, back to 750AD Charlemagne, back to 30BC Cleopatra, back to 1300BC Ramses I, etc.

I'm not sure how many people I speak for, but I've always dabbled with the thought of personally unseating my local congressperson. But there's nothing really remarkable about me as a person that people would want to rally around. I write well, I speak well, and I rise pretty quickly in whatever companies I happen to jump between. Because of that competence, I guess I would be an ideal bureaucrat in a world where bureaucracy would have to exist.

I want to improve my community, but running for office seems to be even more performative than making sure to pick up litter at rush hour, rather than picking up litter for the sake of picking up litter.

I've noticed a tendency in pop history to equate "doing something notable" with "being someone good", whereas within academic history, historians are much better about maintaining an objective distance from the figure being studied. I think it's pretty telling that this objective distancing is often labeled "wokeness", but that's a digression.

The difference is, "woke" history is "whig" history - trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not). Actual good history doesn't sugarcoat the past; it immerses you in it so you can understand the actual norms and mores of the time and thus figure out for yourself who was being a giant piece of shit given the society they were in.

It's like trying to have a conversation across a language barrier. Woke history assumes that the phonemes " /ˈnɪɡə(ɹ)/" are always and forever a fighting-words-tier slur, because they are in standard contemporary American english...but doesn't bother to figure out whether or not the person they're talking to in fact speaking chinese or korean.

I think that some moral notions are close enough to being objective that only a genuine psychopath would seriously question them. For example, all else being equal, it is more moral to not torture people for fun than it is to torture people for fun. This was as true 2000 years ago as it is now.

That said, I agree that history is best when it is amoral. It is interesting to study the history of morality, but high-quality history does not base itself on moral arguments. It should be the study of what happened, not whether what happened is right or wrong.

For example, all else being equal, it is more moral to not torture people for fun than it is to torture people for fun. This was as true 2000 years ago as it is now.

Would an aztec have agreed? Would a mongol? An Iroquois? Any random european who went to a public breaking on the wheel?

It does not matter whether they would have agreed or not. Morality is not a democracy.

I think this gets a lot easier when you use virtue ethics. In general, humans have almost always been in favour of courage, wisdom, having an appropriate attitude to one's station in life, religious devotion, and generosity to whatever sized circle is considered appropriate (family, tribe, village, ..., species, universe). They have generally been against cowardice, selfishness, stupidity, arrogance, etc.

What changes between societies is how these things manifest and how they are weighted in the case of trade-offs.

(Sorry, this should really be a much longer and more detailed post but I didn't want to let the point escape).

But wait, you said that "only genuine psychopaths" would question these ideas. Are you claiming that just about everyone was psychopathic back then?

More comments

I think you've assumed that I think that critical theory is the only type of academic history? It's part of this "overcorrection" that I see that whenever a historical figure is pointed out as being not worthy of our praise, it must be "woke".

The difference is, "woke" history is "whig" history - trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not).

This is pretty much explicitly what I did not mean when I said "academic history". Academic history is digging up primary texts, learning obscure languages and scripts, and doing a lot of the dirty work that others may consider unimportant because it represents a fraction of a fraction of the story of human history.

Actual good history doesn't sugarcoat the past; it immerses you in it so you can understand the actual norms and mores of the time and thus figure out for yourself who was being a giant piece of shit given the society they were in.

I find actual "good" history to be incredibly boring. It's basically translating and regurgitating primary texts (as previously mentioned). There's very little immersion. Primary texts are awful - humans were not particularly great at forming narratives before Gutenberg. Some of my shopping lists have more narrative complexity than some of the primary texts I've been exposed to.

I think Columbus would be my pet example of anti-woke overcorrection. His contemporaries found him to be a giant piece of shit. Lots of people around him were saying, "Damn, Columbus, slow the fuck down with the atrocities." But he did something notable - he dug up the funding for a moonshot project for which many sponsors doubted the ROI. So his name got slapped on everything. Pop history (grade school-level history) gave a very uncritical treatment of him for decades. But his shittiness, even for his times, is pretty obvious in the primary texts - one does not need to use critical theory or employ "whig" history to figure that out.

(Tangential hot take: give Italian Americans their own holiday worthy of their community's cultural spirit, and Columbus will disappear.)

trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not)

I appreciate your comment though, because this line did really make me give pause while writing my reply. Personally, I do think there are some universal morals that do transcend time, but at times throughout history it was simply not feasible to act in accordance with those universal morals: there's only enough food for 3 families to survive the winter but there are 4 families in the village. Should we judge people who were otherwise great, except for "universal moral" failings that were simply a product of their time?

I'm totally fine with future generations being appalled at me for continuing to consume factory-farmed meat even though I know the immense suffering that it causes near-human-level intelligence animals, so I guess I will continue judging people of the past because I have a feeling that deep down, they knew better.

(Tangential hot take: give Italian Americans their own holiday worthy of their community's cultural spirit, and Columbus will disappear.)

You gave them the whole continent - it's named after Amerigo Vespucci. It isn't clear whether John Cabot, who was an Italian living in England, or Vespucci, who actually discovered America. But both reached the main continental landmass before Columbus did.

(Tangential hot take: give Italian Americans their own holiday worthy of their community's cultural spirit, and Columbus will disappear.)

Too late. This might have been true in 1900 but it's too late for that.

I think you've assumed that I think that critical theory is the only type of academic history?

I don't know what you think; I gave a proposed definition for how to determine whether academic history is "woke" or not.

It's part of this "overcorrection" that I see that whenever a historical figure is pointed out as being not worthy of our praise, it must be "woke".

The "overcorrection" isn't happening in the academy; it's happening in public, who as I'm sure you know by and large don't really do actual history. Instead, pop history is a sort of secular cultural catechesis and mythopoetics; pulling together a narrative for the in-group to anchor its sense of identity to, and affirming the moral worth of that narrative.

I find actual "good" history to be incredibly boring. It's basically translating and regurgitating primary texts

The really good ones manage to piece together narratives from those primary documents. Like, no-one ever accused Ferdinand Braudel of being compulsively readible, but he manages to take all the grain prices and trader's manifests and censuses of windmills and meld all of it into fascinating insights into every day life in historical Europe. Biography can be similar, getting you in the subject's head and humanizing them across the centuries and gulfs of cultural differences.

(Tangential hot take: give Italian Americans their own holiday worthy of their community's cultural spirit, and Columbus will disappear.)

Agreed, but it needs to be a catholic too.

I'm sure posters here could provide a reasonable steelman for Trump's position if asked, but forget about providing arguments for a second: are there any Trump supporters here who genuinely believe this is a good set of policies, or even a not-disastrous set of policies?

I can't imagine this will be the final thing to break support for Maga types, but I would give strong odds that this goes down as a major black mark on Trump's eventual record, and a potential torpedo for any future Maga candidates

This is a bad idea, but not a disastrous one. It’ll cause a recession but we kinda need that.

The disaster will be in the government responding to the recession.

The "we" is doing a lot of work there. Maybe in some ways the country as a whole would benefit from a recession, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't benefit from one. And if Trump causes one, then despite despising the Democrats I might be compelled to put aside my objections to the Democrats' many many insanities and vote for them in 2026 on the principle that yeah, the Democrats care more about violent criminals than they care about me, but even in Democrat cities the chance of being the victim of a violent crime is pretty low, whereas the chance of being poor if the Republicans destroy the economy is relatively high.

A recession won’t ‘destroy the economy’. The country needs assets repriced at sane levels.

No, the real disaster will be Trump’s fifty trillion dollar stimulus package and ten thousand dollar checks to every American.

They could give steelmans sure, but there's always been one issue with steelmanning as a concept and that it's sometimes equivalent to just making up ideas that don't actually exist in the person's head.

There's a lot of different reasons given by the Trump admin. From fentanyl, to trade deficits, to immigration, to bringing back American manufacturing, to replacing domestic tax with it, to take revenge on other countries with tariffs, to fight China, etc etc.

Some of these are even contradictory. Raising a significant amount of money to fund government with tariffs doesn't work if people stop buying foreign and start buying only those made in America from the ground up. And neither of those work as well if the goal is for them to lower their trade barriers for a bilateral drop in tariffs and protectionism on both sides.

Steelmanning just a single point (like if tariffs can help american manufacturers or if they could be used to punish foreign protectionist policy) has to just straight up ignore everything else being said. It has to be unaware of the rhetoric and reasons given in order to substitute with some "Well imagine if it wasn't actually that?" fanfiction.

There are plenty of benefits.

Makes domestic manufacturing more competitive. The US economy can't be based on finance and a tech. Wall street and silicon valley simply don't employee anywhere near enough workers to satisfy a country with 340 million people. Having a few people make vast fortunes in the medical industry and insurance while a hundred million people sell services won't be sustainable. The US has rising income inequality and the fracture between wall street and average Joe has become way too large. If pollution happened in the same area as the consumers live we would have a far greener world.

Outsourcing increased the distance between owners and workers. American oligarchs have no connection to their workers in Vietnam. If they lived in the same city the connection would be a lot stronger. Boeing workers working at the same complex as the bosses in Seattle will be treated better than workers in Mexico.

Sovereignty: Being dependent on long international supply chains is a major risk. The world risks a bronze age style collapse if global supply chains break down. Imagine a war in Taiwan, a serious pandemic, a tactical nuclear war or a meteor shutting down a few key factories. It could upend our entire civilization. We could quickly find out that farms are dependent on some supply chain for some component we never have heard of but keeps us all fed and this factory has been knocked out. The number of suppliers that supply key components to medical care, the electrical grid, oil and similar is shockingly small. Many companies are dependent on numerous supply chains and if one of them broke down it could cause cascading effects. It may be more efficient to have 1-4 global suppliers of key components than to have dozens. However, it is far more anti fragile.

But then, are these benefits greater than the costs? That was the question, do you believe this will be good or at least not on-net bad?

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.

Makes domestic manufacturing more competitive.

You can't tax your way to prosperity. If you want to make domestic manufacturing more competitive, you need to stop burdening it, not protect it -- protecting it just makes the manufacturing companies and unions rich at the expense of the customers. And if you tariff raw materials too, you don't even get that; you just have what amounts to a massive tax increase.

The world risks a bronze age style collapse if global supply chains break down.

These tariffs are the biggest risk of such a collapse. The rest of it... well, lots of it has happened. We had a serious pandemic (and a disastrous government response) and the system survived. We've had major factories shut down due to natural disasters (e.g. floods in Thailand) and the system survived. Breaking down global trade makes the system less resilient, not more.

If you want to make domestic manufacturing more competitive, you need to stop burdening it, not protect it -- protecting it just makes the manufacturing companies and unions rich at the expense of the customers.

US companies are forced to comply with EPA, OSHA, ACA, ADA, Civil rights act, unions and minimum wage.

Tariffs could be used to make the playing field equal to account for those costs. And probably we don't want more pollution and work accidents. If US company has to buy filters for their chimney - make sure that all the factories that want to import goods into US also have filters. And if they don't tax them the cost of the filter. And that they pay their labor at least as what US do.

And if they do and make a better product - well it is US problem then.

I’m skeptical of this because heavily unionized euro countries with strict environmental protection and safety laws have been able to be manufacturing powerhouses.

European manufacturing is suffering. Also Europe is largely a lot cheaper than the US. Engineers in Milan made on average 35 000 Euro last year. French electricians make around 25000 Euros a year.

The top producers in Europe look to be Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and Ireland. Per capita their output compared to the US is about +38%, -18%, -41%, -43%, ... and +379%??!?!?!

Okay, I was looking up numbers to make a joke about how Germany is carrying the EU, but forget what I was intending to say. What the heck is going on in Ireland? They barely made the European top 5 since they've got such a low population, but they're still outproducing Spain with like a tenth of the population. They're even outdoing Switzerland, which I would have thought would be the world leader in the low-population high-value-manufacture combo. Is this just on paper somehow, some remaining accounting artifact of how they used to be incredibly popular for multinational corporate tax avoidance? I suppose their stats office does say their output is 40% "basic pharmaceuticals", plus around 20% "food products" and 10% "chemicals", but there's still ~20% composed of metal/rubber/plastic/wood/silicon stuff that we might call "stereotypical" manufacturing, and it's not like US output is all steel burnished with blood and sweat either.

It's tax dodging. You want to arrange your EU supply chain and associated transfer pricing so that most of the value added shows up in Ireland and is taxed at Irish rates. So imports of intermediate goods into Ireland are underdeclared and exports of finished goods are overdeclared.

Ireland has the highest ratio of GDP to Actual Individual Consumption of any medium or large country in the world - the Irish people are not seeing this money.

All your suggestions for the utility of tariffs directly attack the basis for international trade -- that some countries have some sort of advantage in producing some goods over others, which makes both sides of the trade better off if it happens compared to it not happening. Tariffing the advantage so instead of the parties getting it, the government gets it, probably means the trade simply doesn't happen.

Cheap labor is not an advantage. Better technology is.

There is nothing that prevents you from making better mixer than Hobart while playing by even stricter rules than USA as Electrolux professional series shows.

Cheap labor is not an advantage.

Cheap labor is certainly an advantage. If I can make something with 8 hours of $5 labor that takes you 8 hours of $50 labor, I've got an advantage in making things. Yes, if you can instead make 100 of them with 8 hours of $50 labor and better manufacturing technology, the advantage shifts again, but ceteris paribus, cheaper labor gives an advantage.

There is nothing that prevents you from making better mixer than Hobart while playing by even stricter rules than USA as Electrolux professional series shows.

Neither one does a bit of good if I just want to make a frozen margarita now and then.

That's the example I always use with libs.
An evil polluting capitalist owns a concrete factory on the US side of the Mexican border. He needs to sell concrete to pay for his real goal of killing as many cute dolphins as possible with pollution. Captain Planet forces Congress to pass a law banning pollution forever, and mandating that only nice green dolphin-safe concrete is made in the US.
But the evil capitalist just moves his factory to the Mexican side of the border, and keeps selling cheap concrete to the US to pay for his dolphin murdering pollution!
If only there was some sort of "trade policy" to restrict the sale of evil concrete from Mexico to stop the capitalist's evil plot!

It doesn't help obviously: they agree wholeheartedly and then just forget the next day. But it's funny to watch it happen.

Agreed. And I’m all for some level of mercantilism, but to do that you have to actually control a manufacturing base — and the US doesn’t have much of one, especially in key sectors. I agree with criticisms of NAFTA and Chinese manufacturing, but that damage was already done, and it’s insane to try and fix it by applying taxes. You have to have the manufacturing base before you can protect it.

Trump’s gambit here is equivalent to setting up an automatic turret to protect your house, but the camera pans out and what you thought was a house is actually just the still-standing facade of a house that was shelled into ruins.

I'm sure posters here could provide a reasonable steelman for Trump's position if asked

I asked this after the election, because the tariffs were on the horizon even back then.

For anyone paying attention to economics and business, 2024 was a single issue election: prevent a worst case Trump tariff scenario. Oops.

If only Harris hadn't been suggesting price controls. Damned either way.

Yeah, both sides were going to fuck up the economy, so I ended up voting on social issues, where Trump was the clear winner.

Yeah, he was doing good stuff, slashing DEI all the way back to the Johnson administration and killing parts of the government which were Democratic patronage and propaganda machines. I could forgive him some fucking of the economy for that. But not a new Great Depression which will be inevitably be followed by the Democrats bringing back all the DEI stuff AND putting in their own brand of terrible economics.

I don't buy that the Dem establishment allows such a destructive policy. The most we should have expected is price gouging investigations into eggs or something. Maybe Harris tries to go for a wealth tax and probably does implement some annoying regulations, but a) Congress would definitely have to sign off on taxes first and b) much less bad than Trump's tariff approach.

Now if we had been talking Sanders vs Trump... I think all bets are off.

I think the best case against Harris doing just incredibly retarded economics is that Trump is, notably, not getting this through congress, and Harris has less imperium.

In Harris's defense, she was just saying populist stuff that she had no real commitment to and would never actually implement.

Though, to be fair, I thought the same of the tariffs...

Harris was always going to implement whatever the DNC converged on believing, and the DNC is currently in a civil war that the adults in the room are losing.

That is to say, it’s entirely possible idiot breadtubers would be writing her economic policies.

Not disastrous for whom?

I want a multipolar world with localized industry and national preference, hell I want it even more local than that if possible. So far it's a home run of everything I've ever dreamed of. Europe is seriously considering its local defense industry and in talks to trade favorably with China against the US, which still sounds unbelievable when I say it out loud.

Yeah businesses that only exist because of free trade are not going to survive, but what did y'all think the collapse of Globalism meant? vibes? papers? essays?

Europe is seriously considering its local defense industry and in talks to trade favorably with China against the US

I get the first half, but why do you think the second half is a good thing?

Anglos in general and Americans in particular are enemies of Europe and its geopolitical interests by necessity because a unified Europe would make their thalassocracy irrelevant. They have to prevent Europe unifying at all costs, the EU, NATO and other such atlanticisms were created specifically and deliberately for this purpose.

In purely geopolitical terms, it is therefore better for Europe to ally with China than America.

I do so love Americans and their Republic and I do so loathe Communism, but if Europe wants to have even the slightest chance to be powerful again, it has to rid itself of American influence and an isolationist America is the only way this can happen realistically.

I see, thanks for explaining.

Even if you want that, the change in tariffs from one day to another is just staggering here. Say what you will about stupid, counterproductive left-wing economics (which I'm certainly not a fan of!), but they almost always make sure that they don't rock the boat too much in the short term at least (Corona aside).

Look I hate shocks as much as anyone. There's some discussion to be had about how gradual things like this can even be done, but my main annoyance is that people are acting like this is insane on the face of it when it's merely a dubious implementation of something that the people in power don't like.

Given a certain level of risk dubious implementations can be insane. Who Trump is and how he acts cannot help but color the whole thing.

I'll try out an experimental new vacuum cleaner from a sketchy salesman. I'd be significantly more skeptical if he offered me a revolutionary new surgery. It would be insane of him to even offer.

"People in power" here being "people who have a 401k and buy things."

I feel it might be useful here to remind you that only 30% of the US population actively participates in a 401k.

I understand that pretty much everyone is a stock holder one way or another these days, but you may be overestimating what the median person directly has to lose in a crash. And how that compares to people who own assets that aren't home equity.

In 2022 nearly 60% of American households had some stock market exposure, with a median of 50k and a mean of 480k invested. Tanking the S&P is well into the territory of materially hurting the median voter.

What do you think the word "directly" means? And why do you think I added it in that sentence?

I'm well aware most US retirement funds are invested in the S&P500.

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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.

Smoot-Hawley was not the problem, the Fed was the problem. Smoot-Hawley didn't even get passed under the year after the great crash, and the slow recovery was due to deflation and monetary policy, not tariffs.

Well that and the fact that central banks have been so laser focused on making sure a depression never happens since the 30s that people don't even think it's possible anymore.

Yeah businesses that only exist because of free trade are not going to survive

That's essentially all of them.

No, it's not. We're talking about businesses with razor-thin profit margins and manufacturing chains spread over three continents - losing these and producing no home-grown alternatives might be a disaster but at worst removing global free trade takes us back to 1940 not 1440.

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.

On the face of it, yes:

Tiny profits -> lowest possible price for consumers -> GOOD

which is why it's been economic dogma for decades. However, 'tiny profit margins' is another way of saying that 'your business will go into the red if a butterfly sneezes'. Your profit margin is slack, it's robustness, it's the ability to invest without leveraging yourself to the hilt, and of course it's the ability to pay your workers more than Chinese peasants. Huge amounts of foundational innovation come from places like Apple, Bell Labs, Xerox where they had the money to try out new things.

I'm not saying that Trumpian economics is definitely a great idea, I'm just not yet convinced it's a bad one.

Your profit margin is slack, it's robustness, it's the ability to invest without leveraging yourself to the hilt, and of course it's the ability to pay your workers more than Chinese peasants.

It is not the last, because the cost of paying your workers comes out before your profit is calculated.

Precisely. If you have a very thin profit margin when you are (indirectly) employing Chinese peasants, you will have a negative profit margin if you start employing people who want higher wages. If you have a larger profit margin, then you can have more costs and still have some profit left over.

Not 1940. 1930. If we get to the modern 1940-equivalent we'll have bigger problems, like global thermonuclear war.

We're talking about businesses with razor-thin profit margins and manufacturing chains spread over three continents

Ah, so pretty much any manufacturing company.

Yes, modern manufacturing is hyper-optimised and very fragile. I think this fact is well understood.

The fundamental debate is whether this fragility + low cost + slow drain of skill is more or less desirable than trying to keep manufacturing at home, and whether the latter is possible at any decent standard.

It's hyper-optimized but it doesn't seem all that fragile seeing as we have shocks ALL THE TIME and things keep working.

You have a point. The lack of reply is because I'm thinking about it.

I think that's overstating it, but yes most of the West's economy (in value terms) is configured for a free trade world, anybody paying attention during Covid knows this.

This is precisely the state of affairs that Trump wants undone.

Whether he has the balls to crash the American economy for years to make this transition happen remains to be seen, but it's definitely not impossible given that America has a large supply of ressources and energy.

Whether he has the balls to crash the American economy for years to make this transition happen

Isn't it more likely that even if he did have the balls to do this, he is simply liquidated sometime between then and now? I can't imagine all the powers that be and all the money involved just sitting back and letting him burn it all down just for the benefit of his own need to watch things burn.

President Vance is too much of a black box. President Johnson probably really does scare the cathedral for social-issues reasons. I think by the time we have an assassin getting that far as to put Rubio in power(and the cathedral can live with Rubio), it's an unprecedented situation that nobody knows what'll happen, so the cathedral won't do it.

That's the beauty of it: they already tried and that's how he got elected.

Not saying Trump is immune to bullets from well funded assassins, as opposed to the D team we got last time, but don't underestimate the ideological commitment of a second term president. Trump doesn't need to convince anybody anymore except congress insofar as it matters.

That's the beauty of it: they already tried and that's how he got elected.

No, I mean by someone who is actually capable of killing him. Think more the pratorians finally being done with a particularly insane emperor than a random assassin. This is something that is only going to be able to happen once as I imagine the second Trump is dead/out of office, Congress is taking away the president's tariff powers forever.

Edited to clarify.

For whom? Anyone who relies on the global economy for their livelihoods, which is approximately everyone on earth. Trump doesn't need to care about the wellbeing of foreigners of course, but I'm not sure how Juche thought with American characteristics will produce the desired results of Trump and his team

Do you really want me to introduce you to mercantilist economic theory? I know it's grown out of favor in the West but China is so in love with it that major Chinese economists all love to cite Friedrich List.

And no it doesn't really have much to do with Juche. Trump hasn't nationalized the means of production just yet.

Mercantilism as it was pursued - and it did not improve prosperity or any metric you care to measure - relied somewhat on colonialism. The colonial nations could tariff away as long as they could go and directly secure the materials they needed from conquered nations.

I think Trump thinks that the US has enough ressources that he doesn't need the rest of the world, or at least doesn't need them enough to allow unfavorable deals.

I don't know if he's right because modern supply chains are insanely complicated, but for the basics the US is covered: food, energy, raw materials.

Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week.

This makes it even worse. Running world super power on feels, making the fate of the world depend on how well the Imperator slept today, is unsatisfactory.

This shows once again that populism, meant as politics without theory is not a solution.

Answer to bad map is good map, not throwing away all maps and just running around in circles.

politics without theory is not a solution.

In fact it is a solution to the problem which is an enemy ideology that hates our country and wants to destroy it at every level.

politics without theory

There is a theory, you just don't like it.

In fact I find this criticism unsettling because Trump's love of tariffs is about the only position of his that is purely ideological. The man is a mercantilist, campaigned on mercantilism, told everybody of his fondness for McKinley and his policies in multi hour podcasts, has openly held this opinion since long before his first presidential bid and somehow people still think he's a headless chicken running around without an agenda.

At some point I'm going to have to start assuming people just don't listen to him.

I think that many of us thought that he was just saying it to get swing state votes and that he wouldn't actually do it. After all, he has a long track record of saying that he will do things and then not doing those things. Oops. I forgot that he also has a track record of, sometimes, saying that he will do something and then going ahead and actually doing it.

Trump was largely talked out of his worst ideas during his first term, so peoplr were accustomed to the idea of taking him "seriously, not literally". This term, we seem to be getting an unadulterated version that is both ill-conceived and embarrassingly executed, a sharp contrast to, for example, the successful TCJA of first term.

At some point I'm going to have to start assuming people just don't listen to him.

I actually don't think they do, aside from little quips that are (accidentally?) designed to be repeated memetically.

I would imagine most people form their opinions of Trump following marching orders from their news outlet of choice. If Trump has a truly nuanced take, I'm not sure if it will ever make it past the initial polarization filter of Fox News, Reddit, etc.

At some point I'm going to have to start assuming people just don't listen to him.

He's prone to lying (and unserious, unnecessary lying at that) and people feel they have to sort of piece together what they think he means this time.

The things Trump says are sufficiently horrible that SOP for his supporters ever since 2016 has been saying "Take him seriously, not literally" and calling out people who take him literally as TDS sufferers. And now he is in power his opponents who are not doomposters have been using the same approach as cope. The only people for whom "Trump is just as bad as he says he is" is a comfortable thing to believe is the minority of his supporters who are straightforwardly malignant, and professional Blue Tribe doomposters.

Trump said he would blow up the global economy with tariffs. His opponents said he would blow up the global economy with tariffs. His non-retarded supporters said "Lol TDS - of course he won't actually do that." He is now blowing up the global economy with tariffs, and his non-retarded supporters are split between the ones still claiming that he doesn't mean it and this is a madman strategy negotiating move (and repeating his lies about the tariffs other countries impose on the US in order to do so) and the ones trying to reverse ferret into "Actually blowing up the global economy is good."

The model "Trump is as bad as he claims to be, but the damage was limited in the first term because of GOPe moles in the administration" has an increasingly good track record of making correct predictions. But most people don't want to make correct predictions, they want to appeal to readers. And right now everyone who can read wants to believe that Trump is not as bad as he appears to be - so there is a lot of demand for theories where Trump does not mean what he says.

The TDS was 'He's a FASCIST like Hitler who's going to put leftists in concentration camps and he's a Russian agent and he's a christian white nationalist who's going to re-enact A Handmaiden's Tale in real life for giggles'. Trump's view on trade got obscured by all the other stuff, which is a shame because that's a much more interesting conversation.

EDIT: It's true that Trump also genuinely has a habit of saying stuff he doesn't mean seriously, like locking up Hillary Clinton.

EDIT: It's true that Trump also genuinely has a habit of saying stuff he doesn't mean seriously, like locking up Hillary Clinton.

I suspect you was serious about that but that he actually listened when people tossed out the arguments against it (like "we dont do that so they don't do it to you").

Now it seems like they defected anyway... but I do believe in his original intent on that one.

Actually blowing up the global economy is good

The fact that after decades of this being the most important issue for the Western proletariat, left wingers still have no ability to wrap their heads around the fact that yes, they do want to blow up the GLOBAL economy, and have wanted to so do ever since it threw their jobs away to China, is immensely frustrating.

Trump's first win was all on preventing NAFTA and building the Wall. And a decade was spent coping that it was about white rage, actually.

How many times do the proles have to vote for economic nationalism before you understand that they're not going to let themselves be replaced by foreign labor and would rather destroy everything because at least then their enemies also suffer?

preventing NAFTA

Wasn't it more like "preventing the TPP"?

In his debate against Clinton he famously said "NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country."

But good catch, I did misspeak, in that it was preventing the TPP and repealing NAFTA, but the point about his general ideological opposition to free trade still stands.

The problem is that the proles seem to be voting for stupid forms of economic nationalism. Realistically, Trump's tariffs are not going to do much to help the proles. What would help the proles a lot more are things like mass housing construction and cheaper healthcare, which are barely even parts of Trump's program.

I sympathize with people's desire for economic nationalism, but there are probably much more effective ways of doing it than whatever Trump is doing. It's unfortunate that the Democrats and progressives threw away their cachet with the working class by turning into snobby, wimpy elitist scolds and that as a result, there is currently basically no serious and influential political movement that is based around doing economic nationalism in an actually effective way. Right now, Americans more or less just have the choice between the Democrat mainstream, on the one hand, which delivers occasional wins to the working class but is also firmly committed to neoliberalism... and Trumpist economics, on the other, which promises economic nationalism but increasingly seems batshit crazy to me when I look at the actual implementation details.

Remember Occupy Wall Street? Remember Bernie being sidelined?

There's a reason Trump has become the only game in town. And it's not because people organically decided that they liked him better than a large number of other nationalist offerings. Neolibs made quite sure it was either them, or the joke candidate. And didn't really think people would vote for the joke candidate.

As I said, a substantial minority of Trump supporters are straightforwardly malignant. "I don't care any more, I just want to watch the world burn so other people suffer as much as I did" is a perfectly comprehensible response to imagined (or even real) oppression, although not a creditable one, or a platform anyone could win an election on if they were clear about what they were doing.

I do not think "the Western proletariat" is a unitary actor, or that they support right-populist parties by supermajority. To the extent that the views of working-class Trump supporters are visible, they voted for Trump in 2024 to get cheaper eggs, not $20/hr non-union assembly line jobs.

In any case, tariffs are a tool and not a policy. The signals about what policy Trump is trying to achieve with tariffs are, to be polite, confused, but looking at the administration's policies in the round, I do not see any evidence at all for "bring back the type of union manufacturing jobs the 1950's economy was built on". I do not see much evidence for "bring back manufacturing" - we know what a manufacturing-focussed industrial policy looks like and how it uses tariffs because most countries have been pursuing one most of the time from the Age of Exploration through to the Bretton Woods Era. Critically, the tariffs vary by product type (with the highest tariffs on manufactured consumer goods) much more than by country of origin.

Nobody voted for Trump because of eggs, everybody voted for Trump because of 20 million foreigners (probably more), including 10 million let in with close to zero vetting in just the last administration.

Migration is the single most important issue in the US and Europe, and you can tell by watching the French and German election results, where the supposedly different parties reliably line up into anti-migration and everybody else.

Trump is anti-migration, which is what allowed him to bulldoze his way through establishment republicans in 2016, and I have no explanation but providence to explain that the chart that saved his life is the one charting the insane increase of entries during the Biden administration.

Very much agreed - the culture war is about culture, not economics. And immigration is the most important social issue in basically every rich country. But neither the narrative nor the teams has changed on immigration since it first became an issue, which was well before Trump came down the escalator to take advantage of it.

Conventional wisdom is that the reason why Trump got 49.8% of the vote in 2024 instead of the 46.7% he got in 2020 is something to do with economics, and if you ask the minority of voters who care about economics more than culture, they talked about prices and not jobs - unsurprisingly, given that the Biden economy was doing just fine on jobs and low-end wages.

I do not think "the Western proletariat" is a unitary actor, or that they support right-populist parties by supermajority

Then you're simply haven't paid attention to any significant political event in the West for the last two decades and I don't know what to tell you. Who do you think is voting for all those far right parties in Europe? Why do you think Brexit happened?

If your answer to those is thought terminating clichés about either racism, some nebulous social media influence or people being too dumb to figure out what's in their interest, you're actively choosing not to understand what's going on.

they voted for Trump in 2024 to get cheaper eggs, not $20/hr non-union assembly line jobs

See this is exactly what I'm talking about. You are in a bubble so your only experience of those people's discourse is the memes you and they exchange against each other about eggs and the price of gas. But you see, proles don't actually make political decisions solely on the back "I did that" Biden stickers.

What they see is that they live in a country that largely sees them as superfluous non competitive relics and look for any politician that isn't an active enemy of theirs.

Donald Trump may be totally unable to implement his economic views correctly, but he's a friend, not an enemy. And that class of people can count their elite friends on one hand, so naturally they'll fall in behind him.

You're welcome to call that spite if you want, but the fact is you can't buy friendship with slightly cheaper eggs.

See this is exactly what I'm talking about. You are in a bubble so your only experience of those people's discourse is the memes you and they exchange against each other about eggs and the price of gas. But you see, proles don't actually make political decisions solely on the back "I did that" Biden stickers.

What they see is that they live in a country that largely sees them as superfluous non competitive relics and look for any politician that isn't an active enemy of theirs.

Donald Trump may be totally unable to implement his economic views correctly, but he's a friend, not an enemy. And that class of people can count their elite friends on one hand, so naturally they'll fall in behind him.

You're welcome to call that spite if you want, but the fact is you can't buy friendship with slightly cheaper eggs.

My friend, you are huffing WAY too much internet. Trump won because a bunch of normies were tired of everything being too expensive and the incumbent administration looked like a bunch of boobs. If he fucks the economy into the toilet in ways that affect a regular person the GOP will 100% get utterly brutalized in the midterms, and Trump will spend the rest of his presidency dodging impeachment attempts and accomplishing nothing.

You are drastically, drastically, DRASTICALLY overestimating the electoral relevance of based right-wing resentment-mongers. They exist, but they've never been anything but part of the GOP base and they ain't shit without the normies who just vote for the opposition whenever they feel bad about the economy.

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Who do you think is voting for all those far right parties in Europe?

20-25% of the population in most countries - which is not enough votes to include a supermajority of the proletariat for any standard meaning of the term "proletariat".

The right-populist parties that are doing significantly better than that - most obviously PiS in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary - aren't focussed on bringing back manufacturing jobs. PiS is talking about bringing back farm jobs in a country that was 20% agrarian within living memory. Fidesz is conventionally right-wing on economics (as is Reform in the UK and the AfD in Germany). And of course both parties, like other right-populist parties, focus on cultural issues over economic ones in their campaigning.

Why do you think Brexit happened?

Because retired people voted 2:1 in favour of it. Age was a stronger predictor of how people voted in the referendum than social class. If we define "proletariat" in the orthodox Marxist sense of people who have to work for other people in order to eat, the proletariat voted 55-45 for remain.

Given your response to @sohois, we don't disagree that the culture war is primarily about culture, not economics. And we don't disagree that you can carve out a demographic that does show supermajority support for right-populist parties that is in some sense more "proletariat"-like than the demographic of Motteposters. But if you are using the word "proletariat" to exclude working-age women, which you need to do if you want to make "The proletariat supports right-populist parties" a useful generalisation, you are using the word in a non-standard way. But that is an argument about the meaning of words. Where we have a substantive disagreement is about the economic views of right-populist voters.

If you look at:

  • What right-populist voters say in issue polls
  • What right-populist voters say in focus groups
  • What messages successful right-populist politicians run on
  • What right-populist poasters say on social media

then the conclusion you come to is "bring back assembly line jobs" is only a major right-populist cause in the US, and probably only because Trump made it one. The best economic right-populist message in essentially every European country is "we will protect the welfare-state-for-the-old by cutting white-collar government employees and welfare for immigrants" - i.e. it isn't about jobs or the private sector economy at all. The second-best message is "enviro-loonies are destroying your lifestyle", which could be about manufacturing jobs, but in practice turns out to be about domestic energy consumption (including private car use). The main time "enviro-loonies are destroying jobs" was a winning election message was around the Dutch nitrogen crisis, and the jobs were farm jobs.

There are right-populists with libertarianish economic policies. There are right-populists with agrarian economic policies. There are right-populists with what used to be mainstream centre-left economic policies. The common thread is that they promise to preserve the welfare-state-for-the-old and that they blame immigration for the inability of the centre-right to do so - not that they want to bring back manufacturing jobs.

You are in a bubble so your only experience of those people's discourse is the memes you and they exchange against each other about eggs and the price of gas.

I have actually done the work of politics - if you are running for office, or doing field work for someone who is, you can't avoid speaking to the sort of older socially conservative voters who are the traditional core vote of right populist parties. (I am aware that some countries have an new right-populist constituency among male Zoomers, but the UK isn't one of them and I got out of active politics before the Zoomers were old enough to vote). These people also exist in my extended family. And guess what - if you let them talk about policy, they mostly talk about crime and immigration. And when you do hear something about economics, 2/3 of the time it is a variant of "how can we afford X when we can't afford Y" where X is something that is perceived as benefitting foreigners, and most of the other 1/3 is about how much more expensive things are than they used to be. You don't have to take my anecdotes on authority - the point I am making is that I have lived experience of doing politics, and it is consistent with the data.

Donald Trump may be totally unable to implement his economic views correctly, but he's a friend, not an enemy.

"Friend" is what you call someone who is on your side based on shared values - i.e. it's about culture, not economics.

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Who do you think is voting for all those far right parties in Europe?

People that don't like immigration.

Why do you think Brexit happened?

Immigration.

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That’s too bad because proles are the ones who will suffer the most from a trade war. Rich people can afford a car that’s 20 percent more expensive but proles can’t

Since voters typically vote based on pocketbook issues I predict this will be devastating for republicans once reality sets in. Maybe a few midwestern townies that already liked Trump will be happy at least

That's true. And they don't care.

People have been making this argument as if it's convincing since the beginning of globalization. We know the poor always suffer more. But they're also not stupid, so using that fact to extort them into annihilation is not going to work.

No amount of "you're voting against your interest" is going to convince Joe Schmoe that losing his jobs to foreigners at home or abroad is a good thing because his eggs and car payments are marginally cheaper.

PMCs need to take a hard look at themselves and understand that it is they who want cheaper goods at the expense of their compatriots, not their compatriots who stupidly want to hurt themselves, because they're stupid.

Was the price of goods not one of the most important issues in the 2024 election? Proles voted overwhelmingly in favor of lower prices.

But they're also not stupid, so using that fact to extort them into annihilation is not going to work.

They absolutely are stupid. Proles are the people who walk into Best Buy and drop $900 on a brand new laptop with a Celeron and 720p screen, split into 96 monthly payments with 10% interest from Affirm. Proles buy a $70,000 truck that gets 15 mpg and then complain about gas prices. Proles see lower prices as the solution to all their problems, because they can't imagine not consuming every dollar they earn on stupid crap. And the lower prices are, the more crap they can consume. They are attempting to vote in their own interests, they just don't understand what their interests are.

PMCs need to take a hard look at themselves and understand that it is they who want cheaper goods

No, we don't. I want to protect the environment, even if it raises prices. I want $10/gallon gas. As a PMC, I'm willing to pay more because the amount I consume now is already well within my budget.

No amount of "you're voting against your interest" is going to convince Joe Schmoe that losing his jobs to foreigners

Imma have to stop you right there. Wasn’t unemployment at record lows until recently? Who’s lost their jobs and remained unemployed?

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No amount of "you're voting against your interest" is going to convince Joe Schmoe that losing his jobs to foreigners at home or abroad is a good thing because his eggs and car payments are marginally cheaper.

Unemployment, real median (and lower quintile) wages, AND inflation were all good in Trump's first term pre-COVID. This tariff policy is going to wreck all of that, and Joe Schmoe will be convinced that he definitely doesn't want more of THAT.

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That's true. And they don't care.

Or they don't believe it. This is also my struggle with accelerationists on the left : I get the idea, I just doubt that they actually have internalized how bad things can get, and how long they can stay awful.

Even bad times for Americans are better than a lot of places. And, as the most powerful country, Americans have reason to think that if they simply got rid of the suckers and losers the whole thing could just pick up again.

so using that fact to extort them into annihilation is not going to work.

If the Democrats came to them with a total surrender on immigration in exchange for ending this tariff game, do you think they'd take it?

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His opponents said he would blow up the global economy with tariffs.

The amount of time spent on using Trump's trade policy as the reason why he's horrible was approximately zero. Probably because it would make his opponents look schizophrenic or sociopathic.

The model "Trump is as bad as he claims to be, but the damage was limited in the first term because of GOPe moles in the administration" has an increasingly good track record of making correct predictions.

Ok bro, so are you taking that bet about Trump's third term, or not?

Right, it's been mostly about how he's a fascist or how taking down DEI is evil or taking down government organizations that have turned into permanent patronage machines is evil or how he shouldn't expel gang members from the US or a million other things he's doing that either are actually good or at least are normal bad politician things only declared unprecedented because Trump. Some of his dumber economic ideas (like no tax on tips) his opponents instead adopted.

If the Democrats had credibly run on better economic policies, it would have been a very different election, but also a very different Democratic party.

In Trump's first term, he did pretty well economically. Big corporate tax cut, and while his tariffs were still dumb there was usually some sort of reason behind them. Sometimes he even got the concessions he claimed he wanted. This new tariff structure is just ruinous, to everyone.

I'm no sure it's such a hot idea either, but the victory lap was unwarranted, imo.

The things Trump says are sufficiently horrible that SOP for his supporters ever since 2016 has been saying "Take him seriously, not literally" and calling out people who take him literally as TDS sufferers.

All I could think reading @faceh's post here was "so basically the situation is that, if you report on the ridiculous things Trump does or says constantly, you will lose credibility if he's only lying (or constrained), as opposed to him losing credibility for continually saying things that would be alarming under other presidents?"

This doesn't justify lies by media figures, who didn't help themselves. But it is a questionable incentive structure.

Trump benefits from comparison to every other politicians' SOP.

Trump says many things that are false. Other major politicians say many things that are false, and very, VERY often lie by omission. Its generally accepted that they don't have a theory to operate under other than "say whatever I need to in order to get re-elected."

Trump is the one whose statements get treated as critical emergencies and as a practical matter people notice when the media keeps declaring emergencies that never actually materialize.

Your credibility for going after Trump relies on you also going after other politicians, including those on your team, with comparable enthusiasm.

I'll remind people that media credibility was heading to the toilet BEFORE Trump arrived on the scene. It dropped below half in 2005.

So as much as people want to make this a problem about Trump, its a problem that plagues our whole political/media complex and it does seem appropriate to point out that obsession with Trump's behavior is probably the result of dysfunctional thought processes. I don't think I've ever actually used the term "Trump Derangement Syndrome" towards anyone, though.

Its generally accepted that they don't have a theory to operate under other than "say whatever I need to in order to get re-elected."

Politicians are driven by survival. But they can also be idealogues. I don't think it's that simple

Trump is the one whose statements get treated as critical emergencies

Maybe because Trump is a path-breaking president? I mean, wasn't that the appeal? He doesn't follow the rules or do the things people usually do. The reaction should differ.

Would most other politicians start off arguing about the size of the crowds at the inauguration? Especially so directly? Like, you can leak some stuff to friendly journalists . Trump just had his press secretary fighting people over it.

Even if normal politicians didn't give a hoot about things like the markets or the stability of the rules-based liberal international order they either pretend or talk about it a certain way. If we're cynical, they believe election depends on it (presumably because the media will tear them apart and the public will assume that someone so uninhibited and lackadaisical in speech would also be so in deed), so they squeeze their statements through a filter of committees and precedent to not scare the hoes.

Trump deliberately broke with that and added his own particular brand of unhinged behavior. That will be notable and alarming and you can't always tell when a notorious bullshitter is bullshitting or if he's really going to double down and whether he'll actually follow through or be worn down. Take tariffs or trade: the same statement in 2016 and 2025 have different chances of being implemented, but a person who thinks it's an awful idea has reason to be alarmed. How do you cover this guy without that element?

Hell, even this year, his policy bounced between tariffing countries and then pulling back. At least a few reasonable people may have believed he wasn't actually going to fight it to the max and was negotiating against for some new USMCA thing.

Your credibility for going after Trump relies on you also going after other politicians, including those on your team, with comparable enthusiasm.

The media has cut down plenty of figures for dubious reasons. Sometimes it even harms Democrats (why is Al Franken not in politics anymore? It was a silly situation).

I'll remind people that media credibility was heading to the toilet BEFORE Trump arrived on the scene. It dropped below half in 2005.

There's a long-term problem there. But Trump is also a problem of his own.

The media blew a lot of powder on essentially partisan issues, because the mainstream media has a partisan lean. Immigration restrictionism wasn't a threat to the Republic.

Keeping politics within a certain window was conflated with defending the right to have politics as such, a European fascination that everyone would be better off without.

That was an unforced error. Lying about things like "very fine people" was an unforced error.

But Trump legitimately said and said weird, unhinged things for reasons that people still find hard to divine (I don't think we ever settled on a consensus about his master plan for Canada) and it can't all be put on the media. Maybe Trump is just dysfunctional?

It’s been apparent to me for years and years that the vast, vast majority of opponents to Trump & Trumpism have little to no theory of mind when it comes to their political enemies. Sometimes even proudly so, boasting of their ignorance from the rooftops as if it grants them high status.

They fail the intellectual Turing test over and over because of the iron information bubble they’ve built for themselves, and even when they leave the physical bubble to places like this where open Trump support isn’t instantly banned / siloed / throttled / etc, often the bubble still exists in mind. Even now after the walls have come down in social media and the censorship has cooled, even if only relatively.

Many are incapable of simple listening, not even to speak of comprehension. It’s too late, They’re Not Going To Make It, and they have no idea what’s in store for them.

Sad!

This is not much more than a "boo my outgroup" with "vast, vast majority" used as the thinnest of veneers over an absolute generalization.

Undoubtedly there are many people who fit your description, but "My enemies are soooo dumb, and they're all gonna get what's coming to them" isn't adding anything valuable to the discussion. Keep that to your own bubbles.

It’s been apparent to me for years and years that the vast, vast majority of opponents to Trump & Trumpism have little to no theory of mind when it comes to their political enemies.

This is true but Trump also just has a personality cult.

Trump drags the party to where he is, based on his own idiosyncrasies. It's not just Democrats who failed to fully account for this. The entire Bulwark-class of the GOP are outsiders now for a reason. Many Republicans took stances against Trump only for him to double down and forcibly bend the base and party to him (he was attacked for the Access Hollywood tape in a way that seems far less likely today for people who want to stay in the party).

The number of people who think Canada is an enemy has risen...purely amongst Republicans. If you had asked people before the election about it, they would hardly have cared. I've seen even skeptical media figures (who're presumably more invested in politics) suddenly start caring about Canada and a trade deficit they never mentioned as a meaningful Trump priority beforehand.

Trump flips on TikTok? No issue. How exactly do his stated plans for Gaza fit in with the "no wars, no foreign entanglements" thing? We'll figure it out.

Part of it is that your enemies exist in a bubble but part of it is also that the most mercurial man in politics is the only one with a bully pulpit and ability to swing his base apparently.

That may be partly true but tariffs are something he’s literally been talking about since like the 80s. This particular issue should have been the least surprising of anything he’s ever talked about.

I agree, the one thing that businesses and financial system hate is inconsistency and fickle behavior. How exactly are the supposed to plan out new projects in places like Mexico or Vietnam, if tariffs can change on a dime? Even in a domestic context, the price of raw materials or other imports would be anyone's guess.

Look at my economists, dawg, we're NGMI. Well, it probably won't be that bad, but none of this is good.

The lack of rigour is perhaps the most fundamental tenet of Trumpism. If these rates were based on actual facts or informed by expertise, then the policy could be argued with and modified based on reasons and data. This way, each other country has to negotiate its rate based on bargaining, flattery or retaliation.

The defence I hear of Trump/Musk's approach most often is that they just do things without looking too closely at data or potential harms, and that this is good because some action is better than none. Even further, this attitude seems to have become reified into something like 'if you aspire to rigour, you are a cuck and not suitable to be near power'.

I gotta assume that someone seeking to challenge the accuracy of Trump's tariff chart would be thrown out of the White House and not asked to come back, and that this preference for anti-rigour is more deeply ingrained in his circle than any particular policy.

To you and @Raziel, who commented below, I can only ask: What rigor? Who are these experts and what has been the outcome of their advocacy?

From where I am sitting, the 'experts' of the western world have for the past decades managed to run the most peaceful and technologically advanced societies in human history into the ground. Why look at anything they have done with veneration?

And even then we are presupposing that 'rigor' has ever been a relevant thing at all beyond an aesthetic preference where people with power modulate academia and media towards their own wants.

Which experts would you look to if not ones in the western world? Are you saying there is no expertise, no right and wrong, only power? If so, you do you, but in a nominally rationalist setting that has rules of debate, why are you here? You should prefer a forum where posters do not use words but just pipe bellowing noises into other people's homes at a volume set by their net worth.

Ethos is not the same as Logos. And the conceit of this forum is that the latter is more valuable to the pursuit of truth.

This holds practical regardless of the possibility of knowledge.

I don't think I follow your meaning here, do you mind spelling it out slightly more?

In rhetoric, the three modes of persuasion are Ethos, Pathos and Logos.

Ethos, which means "character" is an appeal to the authority or credibility of the speaker. This is typically done by being a notable figure in the field, demonstrating mastery of jargon or being recognized by established authority.

Expertise, insofar as it means anything, relies on Ethos. An expert is someone who can provide such bona fides and reason in forms that give him credibility.

Logos, on the other hand, which means "word", "discourse" or "reason", is a mode of persuasion in which the speaker uses logic, patterns and generally relies on the internal consistency of his claims or thesis.

This forum has been founded in an intellectual tradition that ultimately traces its lineage to Aristotle and Socrates who both held that good thinking comes from a focus on Logos and a avoidance of Pathos and Ethos. Socrates himself is well known to specifically downplay his own authority because he believed that this would enable a better pursuit of Truth.

So when you ask which experts one would look to, it seems the obvious answer in such a space would be none of them. We're here to think by ourselves and discuss that with people who disagree so that we may perhaps approach something close to the truth.

Relying on authority rather than looking at the evidence and making up your own mind would be the antithesis of that.

That's quite interesting, but this line of thinking feels close to Cartesianism. If we can't appeal to authority at all, we have to discount almost all information about the wider world – we don't know what any countries' GDP is, what the tax rate is, whether there's really a war in Ukraine etc, unless we trust in certain authorities whose information we have no reason to strongly doubt. We wouldn't be able to discuss the world economy at all.

I would have thought a more pragmatic version of this philosophy would have us interrogate and challenge the data and views of experts, and hold them lightly, always seeking to check that the experts are abiding by similar evidentiary standards as we would aspire to ourselves, but realising that it is impractical to check everything and therefore being good Bayesians about what we can't be sure of.

I don't find skepticism to be impractical at all. I just find people would feel it more comfortable to know more than they actually do.

All empirical statements are contingent. A pragmatic stance would be to deal with this reality by embracing epistemic humility. The idea we can adopt some framework that negates this problem is in fact the idealism in this scenario.

I know it's a strong temptation to delegate thinking, but it is impossible. Not without giving up autonomy. Feel free to do so, but then I'll want to talk with the people you get your reality from. Not with you.

On that topic, what do you think about Trump's solar tariffs on Vietnam and Thailand?

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Musk, at least prior to DOGE, erred on the side of being overly optimistic and discounting risk, rather than a clear lack of rigour. You can't run moonshot companies like as is literally the case for SpaceX, or Tesla, if you don't make sure you've done your best to account for all relevant factors.

Unfortunately, the move fast and break things approach is a bit harder to endorse when it comes to federal governance, not that I'm an expert.

I do not think Musk could have done what he did at Tesla and SpaceX if he was not orientated towards objective reality. Clearly there was a lot of fake-it-till-you-make-it puffery, particularly at Tesla, but it mostly involved over-optimistic projections, and Musk didn't make obviously false statements about the present.

It is possible Musk at DOGE is still orientated towards reality, but he has taken up lying on an industrial scale. But most people who successfully make a Big Lie part of their public persona end up high on their own supply.

It's possible that his orientation towards reality has broken down through some combination of his mental health worsening, stress, drug abuse and just arising from the fact that politics is often a mind-killer. But as you correctly say, if you wear a mask often enough, it might turn out to stick.

I think the decline of Musk illustrates what makes Trump so impressive.

It is is nearly impossible to function at a high level if everyone fucking hates you, even if you have unlimited money. Musk is not handling it well, the fact that Trump has done so well for so long is amazing!

Both Trump and Musk have enough fanboys that they can surround themselves (including in their social media feeds) with admirers - indeed being surrounded by sycophants is the default if you are that rich and powerful. Both have unusually devoted fandoms - even Reagan didn't have supporters calling for him to be put on Mount Rushmore while he was still in office.

If Musk is exposed to the fact that large numbers of people hate him, it is a choice.

Imo Musk has always been the same kind of person he is now - Make wildly implausible promises of over-delivering, including lying about current capabilities, and then reach beyond what anybody else can do ... while still technically significantly underdelivering compared to the promises. DOGE is the same. I'm not aware of any western government managing to significantly reduce spending in any way whatsoever - at most there is a moratorium on increase of spending. DOGE does not deliver what he is promising, but it still seems above any comparable efforts. Though I admit that his approach just objectively works best on easily-measurable metrics, such as "does the rocket fly", "how much does it cost" etc.

Sweden did in the 90s. The fiscal consolidation during the period of 94-98 amounted to some 7.5% of GDP. This led to a sustainable surplus, growth and sustainable entitlements, including pensions.

For America that would equal about $2.2T and a bit more than Musk promised.

Of course, you're never ever going to get there by firing government employees. You need to cut entitlements.

I'm not aware of any western government managing to significantly reduce spending in any way whatsoever

The 2013 sequester led to a small cut in headline total spending, and the cuts to discretionary spending (which is all that DOGE is looking at) stuck. Discretionary spending on the eve of the pandemic was lower (after adjusting for inflation, but not GDP growth) than in 2012. Sweden and Canada both cut headline spending in the 1990's - again the cuts were small on a headline basis, but large after adjusting for inflation. Trend inflation was higher then so Margaret Thatcher was not able to cut headline spending in the 1980's, but spending consistently grew slower than inflation.

The problem in the current year is that the cost of the welfare-state-for-the-old grows in line with population aging, and it is genuinely impossible to cut the rest of the state faster than that without breaking things. Sustainably cutting spending in an aging society means making the welfare-state-for-the-old less generous over time.

Sweden and Canada both cut headline spending in the 1990's - again the cuts were small on a headline basis, but large after adjusting for inflation.

Dunno how Sweden did it, but in Canada it was more or less an accounting trick -- health care costs were downloaded from the feds to the provinces, which was great for the federal budget but resulted in commensurate impacts on both service levels (down) and provincial budgets (up).

Probably some amount of true cutting obtained through the device of scapegoating the provinces when the health care system became underfunded, but provinces also increased taxes/deficits to make up some of the gap -- it's nowhere near as impactful as the headline numbers might imply.

I don't think those really are comparable - all of them were reactions to concrete fiscal crises/shocks which absolutely needed a short-term budget correction. Our current problems are ballooning costs, and while I think this has significant long-term negative effects, it doesn't have that immediate necessity. But I'll grant that I myself was being hyperbolic - it would be more correct to say that governments rarely manage to limit spending with long-term foresight in mind, but only purely reactively after a crisis has already happened and desperately requires action. DOGE is attempting the former.

On the second point, I completely agree, but in my view this makes reducing welfare spending for the old a foregone conclusion, it's only a question of how long we can kick the can down the road. And mind you, Americans have a comparably rosy situation - here in Germany the old / young ratios are much more grim.

all of them were reactions to concrete fiscal crises/shocks

Canada/Sweden were. Sequestration was a response to an entirely artificial crisis (it was part of a deal to increase the debt ceiling), and Margaret Thatcher could have spent the North Sea oil money on spending increases instead of tax cuts.

DOGE is attempting the former.

Musk has always attempted to justify what he is doing at DOGE on the basis that the deficit and debt are a near-term crisis.

Sequestration was a response to an entirely artificial crisis (it was part of a deal to increase the debt ceiling)

The ceiling may have been a somewhat arbitrary value, but the crisis wasn't artificial. The debt increased in a major jump, reaching the ceiling in 2011, which was a direct result of the 2008 financial crisis and demanded some action, one way or another.

and Musk didn't make obviously false statements about the present.

"We are building it right now" about the Roadster, or some other vehicle that never materialized, back in 2017 or so, sounds pretty false, and pretty about the present to me.

I thought they had a working prototype on stage when they announced the Roadster. That seems consistent with "we are building it right now".

I'm pretty sure prototypes don't count as "it".

I think a prototype in the process of being put into production would count. A mere concept car would not.

You can't run moonshot companies like as is literally the case for SpaceX, or Tesla, if you don't make sure you've done your best to account for all relevant factors.

As someone in the tech industry, I actually have the exact opposite take, to say the least.

The quiet "Mittelstand" of tech is based on domain expertise, driven by B2B sales, and moves slowly but is actively transforming industries as the largest corporations don't want to be "left behind" with new innovations. This, for me, is calculated and matches your pattern of doing the "best to account for all relevant factors".

Moonshot companies and big tech are strategically opposite: operate on hype-cycles and vibes driven by marketing and build enormous moats that will plug the holes of the flaws of the Version 2 of your product (see: enshittification). This is not only "move fast and break things", but also "fuck you got mine".

Edit: This is also my experience as someone who has worked for both types of companies, one which was sold for $3XXm as a portfolio subsidiary, only to later be shuttered as a $3XXm loss once a hike in interest rates exposed it as smoke and mirrors.

That is the crux of the problem. At the end of the day, there's no problem for Elon (really) to run SpaceX or Tesla into bankruptcy. Sure, huge loss in net wealth, but at that level you are not motivated by equity in a company being your comfortable safety net for retirement. So there's no issue in also taking risky bets.

When it comes to government (that is not some banana tier republic), you can't really operate with that mindset.

Same problem actually with Trump and doing deals as if everything is just zero-sum one-period (no long-term co-operation) real estate deal.

He totally did in the past but I think that a combination of success and the company he keeps has lately morphed a Silicon Valley bias towards optimistic action into a bias against thinking or delay of any kind. Also I think he would genuinely care about potential damage to his companies whereas he is not likely to weight e.g. other countries getting mad, or his enemies spluttering, or federal workers losing their jobs, as damage at all, quite the opposite.

Or he might just be bipolar and worsening, with hypomania transitioning into full-blown mania. The evidence I've seen for that claim seems quite robust, man's hardly sleeping and Xeeting all day, when he isn't making other questionable life choices. Not that recent sycophancy or political mind-killing aren't factors, but he's going off the deep end.

I've seen a lot of people make fun of the McDonald islands bit (Along with other smaller islands and Diego Garcia) but it makes sense to close out any potential loopholes regarding relabeling or re-exporting. Same thing with Vietnam and Cambodia, which were realistically just diverted Chinese exports, which is certainly not in the spirit of what American lawmakers meant when they encouraged companies to diversify away from China. The reaction around this is on the whole pretty overblown. A lot of the smaller details will get ironed out, especially since access to the American consumer market is one hell of a leverage.

The 10% is "everyone else" - the spurious detail of which countries it applies to is amusing but not meaningful.

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