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Notes -
More on Trump's tariffs.
I ran into a very interesting comment on reddit last night:
To which I respond... yes. That's exactly right. Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages in farming, roofing, factory work, construction, etc. Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?
The author of this comment would immediately answer with "well, he's so fat and lazy that he ain't gonna, so there". To which my response is, very well! Then we shall all go without roofs. Now of course, people are capable of far more than you expect them to be once their backs are actually up against the wall. People will leap into action if there's no other choice. But, supposing he's right and it does turn out that no one answers the call, then we shall simply go without. A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.
Are we actually going to deport enough illegals to make a difference? Probably not. Is anyone in the administration consciously implementing the program I've described here? It may have occurred to someone in passing, but it's probably not written down in a secret master plan anywhere. But still, you can see here, dimly, the outline of a program that would actually give Trump's base exactly what they wanted, in a very direct way. Which is pretty neat.
Sure. Let us crash the economy so that the PMC will have to work in the fields instead of designing iPhones or being a DEI compliance officer or living from day trading. The basis for a prosperous nation is honest, back-breaking work, not fancy technology.
Sure. If cocoa beans do not grow in a country, its citizens should go without chocolate. If they don't have oil, they shall go forgo petrochemicals and combustion engines. If they can not support a semiconductor production chain, they shall not have computers. The population shall acquire disease resistance the hard way until they can develop a vaccine, just as God intended.
After all, this is kind of the program which turned Cambodia into a superpower when it was implemented by the Khmer Rouge, so it will surely Make America Great Again as well.
In all seriousness, all of these things have extremely dubious and probably negative value to society. Two of these are very directly negative-sum extractive behaviour with sketchy arguments for redeeming value, and the third arguably is plus has staggeringly-negative externalities including the prevalence of one of the other two.
The maze has you, Neo; doing these is not prosocial or something that should be aspired to. The most that can be achieved building a society on those is being a rich city-state like Dubai or Singapore, not a great power.
If this is true for the two non-governmentally related jobs of the three, why do they pay well? Of course, day trading usually doesn't (and for the purposes of the entire economy the number of people who support themselves off of it is a rounding error to zero), and yes maybe the Iphone designer produces value only by harnessing pointless fashion cycles, but a) this is a symptom of a wealthy society that there is enough excess productive value to be poured into what is fashion, and b) the average white collar American is not a DEI officer or Iphone designer, they are in prosaic but necessary fields like logistics or accounts.
Well, "negative-sum" doesn't mean an activity doesn't pay well, or even that it doesn't provide value to an organisation paying you in excess of what they're paying you - it just means that it hurts others by more.
To give an obvious example, fraud is highly profitable, but it's negative-sum; it hurts the fraud victims (and those who have to put in effort to not become victims) more than it benefits the fraudster. A less-obvious example is modern advertising - there is certainly a positive-sum component to advertising (specifically, creating awareness of deals) but there's also a negative-sum component (specifically, manipulating the advertisee into taking deals that do not benefit him) and as marketing psychology has improved that negative-sum component has grown very large (if I were Czar, I'd at least consider requiring advertisements to be as unsophisticated as 1930s ones; 1930s advertising, when it wasn't just straight-up fraud, was clearly overall positive-sum). Zvi makes a case that online gambling is negative-sum, despite it being profitable. There's a case that TikTok and other social media are negative-sum, and while certainly some of these are unprofitable others aren't, which is related to why I think an outright "smartphones were a mistake" is a colourable position (certainly I've specifically avoided getting one for myself).
There are a bunch of profitable negative-sum activities around. Obviously, a lot of them wind up illegal, because this is like the 101-level case for where governmental intervention can benefit everyone, but a lot are legal at any given time due to either novelty or potential collateral damage/political costs of attempting to stamp them out.
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