site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   32477 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

He wrote a book on this.

No he didn't. The man who wrote the book has admitted his share of fault in building the myth that the man who bankrupted multiple casinos and has to give personal guarantees on commercial mortgages because his credit is shot is a successful businessman.

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?

He surrendered to the Taliban. The surrender agreement was timed to go into effect after the election, meaning that he got to blame Biden, but it was Trump's deal.

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?

Has North Korea actually taken any steps towards denuclearisation, or did they just offer Trump a photo op? Trump has a demonstrated pattern of kayfabe gunboat diplomacy where he threatens to harm another country and then doesn't do so because they announce something that doesn't cost them anything or deliver any actual benefit to the US - for example the first round of Canada tariffs which were dropped in exchange for Trudeau reannouncing a border security package he had already announced in November, or 1st term Trump relaxing tariffs on China in exchange for a non-binding promise to buy more American soybeans.

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

Did you read your helpfully provided Wiki link? DITF is about making a big ask which you know is going to be rejected in order to anchor the following smaller ask as reasonable. Trump hasn't made an ask - the tariffs are not, in fact, reciprocal, and the countries they are being imposed on know this even if the US public don't. If we are using feet and doors as our preferred metaphor, Trump's tactics here are banging the door down with a battering ram while shouting "Make me an offer, motherfuckers!" There isn't a name for that particular approach to negotiating, because it is retarded.

I don't think they're irrational, so I think the pressure from Trump will get them to the table, at least.

There's nothing to negotiate, though. If he'd cited other countries' actual tariffs and trade barriers, including a bunch of dubious ones, there's be something to discuss. But he's citing the actual balance of trade, and, especially with the poorer countries like Vietnam, there's nothing good to do about that. You can only increase US imports (which the E.U. might be able to do but won't, but e.g. Vietnam practically cannot because they're too poor), or decrease exports to the US (which is the bad outcome)

More comments

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.

I'm about as pro-capitalist as it gets but imo this is the wrong model for zero-sum (for example advertising) and negative sum (for example compliance) industries. Especially large, already successful companies can secure their position by burdening everyone with enough extra costs that only they can shoulder well enough due to scale.

More comments

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats