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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Today is a good day for a non-p-hacked evaluation of the stock market under Trump. I had discussed this with someone during the initial tariff chaos, and wanted to return to it at some point. That conversation ended up using euro prices due to worries about dollar inflation; in the following the brackets always show the data based on euros.
The day of the election, the S&P 500 made +2.5(+4.1)%, from which we can impute between -2.5(-4.1)% and -1.1(-1.8)% for a hypothetical Kamala win, depending on what odds we use for he election. Given the spirit of the exercise, I think we should use the prediction market prices for this, giving the second set of numbers. In reaction to the tariffs, it dropped strongly to a low point of -13.8(-15.4)%, on April 8(21), and after various takebacks recovered quickly to +3.1(+0.7)% on May 16(16). Since then it has shown a relatively linear increase, ending the year at +17.5(+11.1)%. Inflation that year was 3.0(2.1)%. Despite these seemingly similar inflation numbers, there is a significant gap in the final return, and its probably better to use the lower number.
Historically, annual returns were +10.5%, or +6.7% after inflation (those are for dollar only, the euro wasnt around that long, but probably irrelevant over those time scales). So going with the more pessimistic euro numbers, this year was slightly above average in total, or moderately below relative to the post-election price. I think we can take this mostly at face value; because expectations are priced in with stocks, there is much less risk that credit goes to anything that happened earlier, and I dont know what windfall looks like a linear increase. It doesnt seem like the market significantly misjudged Trump on election day.
The most interesting point here to me are the tariffs. Essentially since Trump revived this topic, Ive seen a never ending stream of takes about how very bad they are, an entirely new kind of economic terribleness, etc, and not a single one has claimed a numerical effect size. After asking around for one, the only thing Ive gotten is this, estimating GDP to be -0.6% in the long term based on policy in April (the have an update with more current policy to -0.35%). That seemed low, but from a non-trumpy source I figured thats probably a good sign. And it certainly seems in line with the numbers above now. Overall, I still think tariffs are bad for the economy, but it seems the effect size is still small relative to everything else going on, even with the drastic measures weve seen.
I guess I would have two questions here:
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?
To some extent, I think just the fact that tariffs disappear in the "other stuff" is a downward adjustment on their importance compared to how Ive seen people talk, irrespective of what the "other stuff" is. Basically, for this balancing-out to be likely, the true effect of tariffs must be small compared to the yearly variation in growth. And again, all this has to come out of things we newly learned this year. At least to me, the tariffs seem to be the only events here with a visible effect size. Ruling out bubbles is stockmarket-complete, but this problem applies to any other methods you might use to assess politician performance equally.
The take that all of policy is a small part of the development... certainly its possible that the kind of variation in policy that you actually see in a given country over some time period is that small, but broader claims quickly run up against much of conventional development economics.
Thats what I would expect. Rent control is bad, but ultimately a small part of the economy. Im not a housing-theorist-of-everything. Putting tariffs (even order-of-magnitude increases relative to previous variation!) into the same category as that is basically my conclusion.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link