vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
I think there's a lot of bad storytelling around the stock market in general.
I sometimes listen to the Wall Street Journal's Minute Briefing, and they always mention how the market did that day, and give an explanation for why it went up or down.
Their explanation is always plausible, but my basic issue is that if the stock market is generally just on a random walk, and you always grasp for the nearest plausible explanation, you're going to be completely wrong about why the market was up or down in a given day a lot of the time. Like, in the world where the market had gone slightly down, instead of slightly up and more or less the same news items had happened that day, how much does that change how they tell the story that day?
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
I definitely agree that this is a reason to not naively hope for raw "number go up." Other factors affect the overall resilience and robustness of the economy, and might go along with slightly worse numbers in the short term.
I'm certainly in favor of bringing production of certain critical infrastructure home, but have we done a good job of doing that over the last few years?
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
I have tried to avoid such fallacies. It was probably more than a decade ago that I first read the president doesn't affect the economy nearly as much as people seem to think, and I've tried to bear that in mind no matter who is in charge.
In most cases, it would be like trying to treat the president like a Fisher King who makes the weather good or bad by their mere presence in office.
I'm always open to specific causal stories that are exceptions to this rule, but I don't naively assume the president has anything to do with the stock market one way or the other. (Liberation Day and the brief stock crash that followed would be part of the exceptions that I allow for.)
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
Couldn't a lot of it be because the average effective tariff rate didn't actually go up that much? I think it might be reasonable to say both that tariffs had less impact than many economists predicted on the economy this year, and also state that this might not have been true if Trump had stayed the course with his Liberation Day tariffs.
Whether we're in a bubble or not, sources are reporting that 40% of the stock market is tied up in tech/AI stocks. If we're in the initial phases of a singularity (a big 'if'), then we might expect the economy to do well in spite of almost any burden we could place on it.
I think I perceived you as trying to claim more than you had warrant to claim. If you're just saying "the stock market did incredibly well, and the tariffs didn't have that much of a negative impact", then I'm fine with that claim. If you're claiming it did well because of Trump and his policies, then I would like to see a causal argument that explains what he did that had such a strong positive impact that another president wouldn't have done. My prior from past reading is that presidents generally don't have much measurable effect on the economy one way or the other (certainly much less than people commonly believe), and while I would expect Trump to be the exception to that (for both good and ill) if anyone was going to, I think his own concern about the stock market creates its own feedback loop that makes the statement true of him as well.
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
I guess I would have two questions here:
- In general, how sure should we be that the stock market today is doing well because of Donald Trump and not in spite of/unrelated to him? Are there any past economic studies that let us estimate the usual impact of presidential policies on stock market behavior, so that we can have priors here about how much effect Donald Trump could reasonably have?
- How does the current era compare to things like the Nifty Fifty asset bubble, and the Dot Com bubble? I thought Zvi Mowshowitz did a good job laying out the bubble-skeptical take, but I still wouldn't completely rule out the possibility that we're in bubble.
My initial intuition is that in the real world you could have genuinely bad policies (say, New York doing rent control) being overwhelmed by all the positive economic trends in a society. Just because the numbers are going up, doesn't mean they wouldn't be even higher without the drag caused by bad policies like minimum wage, rent control, and, potentially, tariffs. Does your analysis account for this? If it does, could you please elaborate more how you distinguished the various possibilities involved? And if it doesn't, could you add analysis to this effect?
vorpa-glavo
8d ago
It might be possible to describe me as a "stalwart norms enjoyer", but I have also quixotically been trying to cultivate a sense of tribalism around my state and regional culture, and and a sense that my "out group" is everyone else.
This is an ongoing process, but it means I am trying to genuinely not care about every outrage that happens in another state on the right or the left. Those are basically foreign countries, and as long as they mostly play by the rules of our constitutional system, they can rot or flourish for all I care about them.
Who cares what the silly foreigners in Dixie or Tidewater or Yankeedom get up to? I don't live in any of those countries, and I'm sure they're better equipped to manage their own affairs than I am. As long as they don't make it my problem if/when things go wrong thanks to their bad policies, why should I care who they elect?
Don't get me wrong, the coresidents of my state can look out at the foreign nations that are part of our federal league and try to learn what to do and what not to do based on the practical experience those foreign nations get up to, but I'm not a busybody. What can an attorney general in Virginia do to my kith and kin in my state? Does he have any real power to harm me, being away in the far off foreign nation of Tidewater?
As long as the dirty Tidewaterers don't start moving to where I live and make things go to shit with their inferior cultural values, I feel safe and secure in my own city.
I do care what the leader of our military league does, because it affects people in the region I actually care about as well. I don't think that makes me a hypocrite.
vorpa-glavo
29d ago
Regarding the origins of wokeism, recently I chanced upon the concept of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD), it also has a Wikipedia entry. Basically there are people who argue that general wokification of institutions is an internal development of some of the American elite's religion, via Unitarianism and then Unitarian Universalism, and the general "be nice, don't judge, don't harm" morality of Oprah with a deistic God you can occasionally call upon for some encouragement but doesn't demand much, just to be kind, there are many equally valid paths etc. This is of course not the same as the mandatory activism required by woke, not merely a lack of judging etc. But it is the basis for the willingness of simply nice decent people to obey such demands.
I've encountered the concept before, but while I think it captures something about the secularization of society and the rise of "spiritual but not religious types", I don't think it is very explanatory.
I actually think the Guilt-shame distinction (which you partially touched upon in your third paragraph) probably goes further to explain much of the shape of contemporary life. I honestly think guilt culture is just another angle of approaching Western individualism. In shame-honor culture, what is important is your place in the collective. This is the source of your pride and honor. In a guilt culture, various social technologies are used to make it so that the rules are inside peoples heads, and are pre-enforced by the knowledge of the self-flagellating guilt that will result from stepping a toe out of line.
While Christianity is one path towards a guilt culture, given its emphasis on individual repentance and salvation, I think in modernity things like Wokeism show one way this kind of culture can be maintained in a secular way. However, I think Wokeism is a lot more prone to what I see as a likely failure state of guilt culture: anxiety. If all the social structures of a guilt culture are oriented towards making human animals feel guilt, a basic problem emerges. How do you know when a person has "cooked enough", and feels enough guilt that they won't do bad things anymore? You don't.
So some people get "overcooked" or "burnt" by guilt culture, and do indeed develop a psychology that won't do bad things or break the rules at the cost of crippling anxiety. And I think because Wokeism is an amorphous mass movement, without the supernaturalism or the 2000 years of practical wisdom of Christianity to deal with it, it is a lot more prone to such "overcooking."
Relatedly, I suspect that a lot of dysfunction in pluralistic, liberal democracies is due to clashes between a wider guilt culture, and pockets of shame culture that still exist in various parts of society. For example, in America, I would put forward African American ghetto/gang culture as more of a shame culture. (I know I'm not the first person to suggest this. Thomas Sowell hints at this in his "Black Rednecks and White Liberals", and I'm sure I've read similar things around here, though I am currently unable to properly credit who here might have said something like this.) I think there's always going to be a bit of a clash between the two, especially if elements of the shame culture end up including a rejection of elements of the guilt culture's hierarchies and values.
While I think it is possible that the Kumbaya, "Let's all get along" aesthetic of Moralist Therapeutic Deism (MDT) is one foundation for Western guilt culture, I actually think it is precisely backwards. In the West, people don't decide to act nice and decent because of MDT. Instead, people adopt MDT because their brains have been programmed into guilt machines, and they thus already have a great propensity to act nice and decent most of the time.
I don't doubt that there might be single-day effects attributable to presidential actions. I'm sure the stock market also reacts when we announce a new war or whatever.
I'm more interested in long-run effects, that don't wash out over time. I'd be interested in seeing stock market data going back as far as we have it, along with presidential election day bumps and whether they washed out over time, and whether they tended to be "retroactively justified" by the conditions of that presidency. A one day bump means basically nothing. I'll agree it is people trying to anticipate the effects of the presidency, but there's plenty of cases where markets do silly and unjustifiable things, it's just that other people end up making money when people do that.
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