This is a pretty alarming and intractable political problem that's gonna be super hard to resolve. Primarily because destroying trust in government doing good things is the point for MAGA. They can tell wild lies about very plain vanilla government offices and employees (like... Dr. Fauci), and make it out to the public like the people running things like public health institutions are out there trying to get rich or something, while themselves indulging in wild corruption. And their own corruption is a two-sided benefit to them-- they both get the benefit of corruption and, when someone points it out, it's a self-executing reinforcement of their point (See? You can't trust the corrupt government to do anything!).
And they don't care because what they want the government to do doesn't require any real public trust-- for social security and Medicare/Medicaid to distribute trillions of dollars each year, you have to believe that there's very little of it that gets skimmed off the top. Which, in fact, there is. But Elon Musk and co. have been doing their best to spread lies about that. And they don't really need any measure of public trust to get government out of the way to enable fraud, or to deport people at pretty much random, or to punish their political enemies, which is the sole function of government in their eyes.
But for the rest of us, that has really high costs, both domestically and overseas. It's taken three months for Trump and co. to do pretty profound damage to the notion that the US is a country that honors its commitments. After all, we had a trade boom after NAFTA was signed not because it actually lowered trade barriers (those were already exceptionally low); it was because it provided credible assurance that trade barriers would remain low.
At this point, who's going to trust the US to honor its commitments? And, if you can't be trusted to honor your commitments, any deal you enter into isn't worth the paper it's written on. And that make society endlessly poorer. If you have to enforce obligations at the barrel of a rifle, you're going to waste tons of resources on those rifles.
Good comment. And note that the USMCA that replaced Nafta was signed by Trump, who bragged about how great it was. He tore up his own achievement. He bragged about Operation Warp Speed, and then appointed an anti-vaxxer to HHS. His SALT cap was perhaps the biggest economic achievement of his first administration, and now he wants to get rid of it. He appointed Powell to head the Fed, and now trashes him.
Trump 47 seems to believe that Trump 45 was a horrible president.
I think what that points to is that Trump doesn't have any firm ideological views or commitments (other than his decades-long conviction that black people are criminals and that trade balances reflect "winning" and "losing," and that tariffs are an all-purpose magic solution to fix that.
He spent his first term being rope a doped by a few kinda conventional advisers like Gary Cohn and even Steve Mnuchin who convinced him that renaming NAFTA (which is really what the UMSCA was; you have to squint really hard to identify material substantive differences) was a grand accomplishment and patted him on the back. But those advisors are long gone. Now the approach appears to be convincing himself that those advisors who kept him from actually making any decisions sabotaged his first term, and that his own half baked instincts are great and amazing and brilliant. The results have been stunning in their destructiveness, but also quite predictable. The time when our policy debates were Krugman/Delong passionately debating Sumner over the efficacy of monetary policy in the liquidity trap are quaint and probably long gone.
Great comment. And in some ways it's even worse than you suggest. In a recent post, Angela Shen and Jordan Schneider criticized the arbitrary expulsion of PhD students, and had this to say:
"These concerns should resonate with Trump, who has repeatedly discussed the importance of winning the competition for workers. Just last year, he told the tech-focused “All-In” podcast that the government should automatically offer green cards to foreign graduates of American schools, a proposal he floated in his 2016 campaign as well. In December, he joined tech allies such as Elon Musk in defending the value of H-1B visas from critics inside his coalition. His administration now seems determined to undermine those goals."
Another example of his views mostly being a reflection of whoever spoke to him last. But because he’s an absolute monstrosity of a person, the last person he spoke to is quite likely to be quite literally a Nazi of the Stephen Miller variety.
And that’s the biggest danger. Trump is uniquely stupid, and his advisors unusually incompetent, but there are plenty of advisors who don’t really know what they’re doing. Bernie Sanders surrounded himself with some doozies back when he was running.
But what you can be confident of with a hypothetical president Bernie Sanders is that intentionally inflicting suffering on people would never be a guiding principle of his actions. With this train wreck, it very much is.
I'm frequently amazed by how many people, even those I respect, don't see this. They seem to think he's playing 4-D chess. People correctly viewed Biden as being a bit senile, but Trump says much dumber things than Biden.
Can someone be uniquely stupid and uniquely brilliant at the same time? Whatever his flaws (there are many) his campaign strategy in 2016 was either incredibly lucky or incredibly inciteful. I'd say a little of both. And the fact that he has so many devoted followers also shows something that definitely can't be called stupid.
There are plenty of examples of things you and I agreed are stupid yet I personally know lots of seemingly very smart people (intl airline pilot, professional financial planner, engineer, etc ) who see those same things as smart. Personally, I see plenty on the Democrat side I'd argue that is equally stupid yet it even among most people who recognize liberal stupidity, they don't judge it quite the same way.
There has been an absurd amount of sanewashing. It's pretty laughable. I see people on LinkedIn talking about the brilliant 4-D chess strategy of isolating China... and dismissing that slapping indiscriminate tariffs on allies and enemies alike (except, notably, Russia and Belarus) based on an incoherent formula is just (as Brad DeLong would put it) chaos monkeys throwing feces. These same people scorn all those that dismiss it and don't take it seriously.
But... perhaps when there's a professional consensus on an issue, we should accept that the people studying the issue are smart and serious people who know what they're talking about, and that perhaps the former host of Celebrity Apprentice has not discovered some brilliant insight into the true meaning of trade deficits that a bunch of Ph.D economists happened to collectively overlook.
Project 2025 is a rather poor example to make the point that American politicians don’t implement their platforms because:
1. It was never the official platform of the Trump campaign, and it was repeatedly disclaimed, including by Trump himself. So it’s not like he ran on that platform then forgot about it.
2. Trump did end up fairly faithfully implementing Project 2025. Reading it today is incredibly instructive in understanding everything he’s done so far, and what he’s likely to do in the future. So he actually *did* end up implementing his true platform.
I suppose the broader point is that he should both have campaigned on and implemented an actual platform. Instead he campaigned on a smorgasbord of crowd-pandering soundbites and ended up implementing a platform he explicitly disclaimed.
My impression is that Trump and his campaign/administration has always denied and continues to deny Project 2025, e.g. in Nov 2023:
>The Trump campaign tells [Axios] no outside group speaks for him: "The campaign's Agenda47 is the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House”
He originally praised the Heritage Foundation and the plan they were going to make, then later during the campaign basically said it had some good and some bad ideas, but didn't specify which were which.
"And so, much like how the Trump campaign once said “people working on Project 2025 are blacklisted” from working as a staffer in the new administration, only to have several individuals associated with the initiative now in senior roles, Trump is now implementing a number of policy proposals from a manifesto he once shunned.
When it comes to AI the quote that comes to mind is "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed." The impact that it having on high school and college students is profoundly bad. I'm seeing how it erodes critical thinking skills firsthand in a way that undercuts the benefit of having fast answers for nearly every question. Ironically, I think a more "self-aware" AGI would conclude that acting ethically is in its best interests---contra Skynet.
"Apple plans to build most of its iPhones for the US in India by the end of next year, accelerating a shift beyond China."
On the other hand, we are told that, gee, those manufacturing platforms in China just can't be replaced. It's the New World Order fixed in stone, forever. Except it's not.
Really, Indians can build smartphones but Americans can't?
(BTW we have lots of smart Indians (Bharat) in the US who manage plants).
Random thoughts: (1)compare Jane Jacob’s warning (2005) about a future Dark Age - at the date of release I thought it was almost inconceivable (now?) examples include accounting firms and rating agencies
And (2) how condiments have disappeared from many fast food tables where employees cannot monitor their use - I say this because I thought their ubiquity was once a sign of trust (about 1974) but (3) the issues of incentives, and methods of enforcement are complicated in the professions (4) plus - as noted - perhaps periods of rapid economic change disrupt older traditional practices by creating huge economic incentives for cheating. Very thoughtful post. The Japanese example in particular.
Affirmative Action produced obvious corruption in academia, as less able blacks, etc., were accepted or promoted, while those in charge pretended that the decisions were being made on merit; also, people started claiming somewhat phony or completely phony minority status for themselves. But the Golden Age of integrity in academe, before Affirmative Action, must have been brief, for earlier there had been severe discrimination against blacks and other minority groups.
It is hard to assess the overall level of corruption: one tends to notice some kinds but not others, and there is no ready measurement even of what one notices.
There's always implicit bias, even during a golden age. Academia, like every other place, selects for cultural fit above and even before other kinds of merit. This is particularly pernicious in academia as the selection criteria for professors make them a different subset of the entire population than the student body.
So, right kind of person to be a student, not right kind to be a professor? What kind of lessons are we teaching here?
I say this as a moderately gifted, scientifically interested person, who dropped out of college multiple times, and will never be a professor, much less a PhD. I've met exactly one professor who had also dropped out (though only once). I've also met exactly one who was scientifically studying learning modalities with respect to retention and completion. And I met one (an adjunct) who offered to talk with a student who wanted him to sign course withdrawal papers (he didn't push this offer, but I was happy he offered).
By selecting only the passers, aka so-called merit, those who are selected are relatively, or absolutely, blind to the poisons of the water they are swimming in.
There has been a loss of integrity across almost all domains in America.
States and Cities such as NY and Illinois still display a huge degree of corruption. So, maybe with regard to all 50 states, less, but too many still as corrupt as ever in the political realm.
We need multi-member districts where the voting power of the member is proportionate to the percent (or even absolute number) of the district voters who voted for them (above some minimal threshold). That's the only way to absolutely eliminate any kind of disenfranchisement.
Scott, have you notice the USA has been outpacing European countries like Germany, the UK, France etc by wide margins in economic growth during the 2020's? Maybe the theory that confidence in govt fosters faster economic growth isn't all it's cracked up to be, pace the late Kevin Drum and you.
The US clearly has many advantages, such as our high tech and energy sectors. My concern is that this advantage may gradually erode if we continue down this road.
I would say that connections with government are increasingly important. To a greater extent than in the past, firms spend a lot of money to insure good treatment by the executive branch. The president has profited by various indirect means, such as encouraging private actors to help his businesses.
IMO the best way to restore confidence in the US national government (not that it would necessarily deserve it) would be changing the voting system to approval or STAR (NOT instant runoff, which is only a way to suffocate third parties).
As far as productivity goes, I really like the cherries example. The rest of it is also interesting and I generally agree except I don't think I agree any of it is a question of productivity. What is your definition of productivity?
The consumer deserves much more blame than you give it. 7-11 doesn’t focus on 30-oz soft drinks in the US because of “poor worker quality”, it’s because consumers of corner stores here have bad taste. That bad taste extends to whether they care about the store vibe.
In an area where consumers have good taste, the US is as good as anywhere in the world at meeting it. It’s not a labor supply issue, as much as demand-side.
Fair point, but I can assure you that there is also a vast difference in worker quality. American workers are much more sloppy, whereas Japanese workers tend to be very conscientious.
This is a pretty alarming and intractable political problem that's gonna be super hard to resolve. Primarily because destroying trust in government doing good things is the point for MAGA. They can tell wild lies about very plain vanilla government offices and employees (like... Dr. Fauci), and make it out to the public like the people running things like public health institutions are out there trying to get rich or something, while themselves indulging in wild corruption. And their own corruption is a two-sided benefit to them-- they both get the benefit of corruption and, when someone points it out, it's a self-executing reinforcement of their point (See? You can't trust the corrupt government to do anything!).
And they don't care because what they want the government to do doesn't require any real public trust-- for social security and Medicare/Medicaid to distribute trillions of dollars each year, you have to believe that there's very little of it that gets skimmed off the top. Which, in fact, there is. But Elon Musk and co. have been doing their best to spread lies about that. And they don't really need any measure of public trust to get government out of the way to enable fraud, or to deport people at pretty much random, or to punish their political enemies, which is the sole function of government in their eyes.
But for the rest of us, that has really high costs, both domestically and overseas. It's taken three months for Trump and co. to do pretty profound damage to the notion that the US is a country that honors its commitments. After all, we had a trade boom after NAFTA was signed not because it actually lowered trade barriers (those were already exceptionally low); it was because it provided credible assurance that trade barriers would remain low.
At this point, who's going to trust the US to honor its commitments? And, if you can't be trusted to honor your commitments, any deal you enter into isn't worth the paper it's written on. And that make society endlessly poorer. If you have to enforce obligations at the barrel of a rifle, you're going to waste tons of resources on those rifles.
Good comment. And note that the USMCA that replaced Nafta was signed by Trump, who bragged about how great it was. He tore up his own achievement. He bragged about Operation Warp Speed, and then appointed an anti-vaxxer to HHS. His SALT cap was perhaps the biggest economic achievement of his first administration, and now he wants to get rid of it. He appointed Powell to head the Fed, and now trashes him.
Trump 47 seems to believe that Trump 45 was a horrible president.
I think what that points to is that Trump doesn't have any firm ideological views or commitments (other than his decades-long conviction that black people are criminals and that trade balances reflect "winning" and "losing," and that tariffs are an all-purpose magic solution to fix that.
He spent his first term being rope a doped by a few kinda conventional advisers like Gary Cohn and even Steve Mnuchin who convinced him that renaming NAFTA (which is really what the UMSCA was; you have to squint really hard to identify material substantive differences) was a grand accomplishment and patted him on the back. But those advisors are long gone. Now the approach appears to be convincing himself that those advisors who kept him from actually making any decisions sabotaged his first term, and that his own half baked instincts are great and amazing and brilliant. The results have been stunning in their destructiveness, but also quite predictable. The time when our policy debates were Krugman/Delong passionately debating Sumner over the efficacy of monetary policy in the liquidity trap are quaint and probably long gone.
Great comment. And in some ways it's even worse than you suggest. In a recent post, Angela Shen and Jordan Schneider criticized the arbitrary expulsion of PhD students, and had this to say:
"These concerns should resonate with Trump, who has repeatedly discussed the importance of winning the competition for workers. Just last year, he told the tech-focused “All-In” podcast that the government should automatically offer green cards to foreign graduates of American schools, a proposal he floated in his 2016 campaign as well. In December, he joined tech allies such as Elon Musk in defending the value of H-1B visas from critics inside his coalition. His administration now seems determined to undermine those goals."
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-lose-a-tech-war
On immigration, advisors like Stephen Miller are even worse than Trump, and now he's being rope a doped in the wrong direction.
Another example of his views mostly being a reflection of whoever spoke to him last. But because he’s an absolute monstrosity of a person, the last person he spoke to is quite likely to be quite literally a Nazi of the Stephen Miller variety.
And that’s the biggest danger. Trump is uniquely stupid, and his advisors unusually incompetent, but there are plenty of advisors who don’t really know what they’re doing. Bernie Sanders surrounded himself with some doozies back when he was running.
But what you can be confident of with a hypothetical president Bernie Sanders is that intentionally inflicting suffering on people would never be a guiding principle of his actions. With this train wreck, it very much is.
"Trump is uniquely stupid"
I'm frequently amazed by how many people, even those I respect, don't see this. They seem to think he's playing 4-D chess. People correctly viewed Biden as being a bit senile, but Trump says much dumber things than Biden.
Can someone be uniquely stupid and uniquely brilliant at the same time? Whatever his flaws (there are many) his campaign strategy in 2016 was either incredibly lucky or incredibly inciteful. I'd say a little of both. And the fact that he has so many devoted followers also shows something that definitely can't be called stupid.
There are plenty of examples of things you and I agreed are stupid yet I personally know lots of seemingly very smart people (intl airline pilot, professional financial planner, engineer, etc ) who see those same things as smart. Personally, I see plenty on the Democrat side I'd argue that is equally stupid yet it even among most people who recognize liberal stupidity, they don't judge it quite the same way.
There has been an absurd amount of sanewashing. It's pretty laughable. I see people on LinkedIn talking about the brilliant 4-D chess strategy of isolating China... and dismissing that slapping indiscriminate tariffs on allies and enemies alike (except, notably, Russia and Belarus) based on an incoherent formula is just (as Brad DeLong would put it) chaos monkeys throwing feces. These same people scorn all those that dismiss it and don't take it seriously.
But... perhaps when there's a professional consensus on an issue, we should accept that the people studying the issue are smart and serious people who know what they're talking about, and that perhaps the former host of Celebrity Apprentice has not discovered some brilliant insight into the true meaning of trade deficits that a bunch of Ph.D economists happened to collectively overlook.
It's all been extremely Emperor's New Clothes.
I thought the "4-D chess" idea was decisively refuted with healthcare in 2017 and COVID in 2020.
What lies have Elon spread about Medicare?
Project 2025 is a rather poor example to make the point that American politicians don’t implement their platforms because:
1. It was never the official platform of the Trump campaign, and it was repeatedly disclaimed, including by Trump himself. So it’s not like he ran on that platform then forgot about it.
2. Trump did end up fairly faithfully implementing Project 2025. Reading it today is incredibly instructive in understanding everything he’s done so far, and what he’s likely to do in the future. So he actually *did* end up implementing his true platform.
I suppose the broader point is that he should both have campaigned on and implemented an actual platform. Instead he campaigned on a smorgasbord of crowd-pandering soundbites and ended up implementing a platform he explicitly disclaimed.
Which is terrible for integrity nevertheless.
My point is that they went back and forth on Project 2025 several times. First endorsing it, then disavowing it, then endorsing it.
My impression is that Trump and his campaign/administration has always denied and continues to deny Project 2025, e.g. in Nov 2023:
>The Trump campaign tells [Axios] no outside group speaks for him: "The campaign's Agenda47 is the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House”
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/09/a-guide-to-project-2025/
Scroll down to "What has Trump said about it?"
He originally praised the Heritage Foundation and the plan they were going to make, then later during the campaign basically said it had some good and some bad ideas, but didn't specify which were which.
Also: https://www.indy100.com/politics/trump/donald-trump-project-2025-heritage-foundation
"And so, much like how the Trump campaign once said “people working on Project 2025 are blacklisted” from working as a staffer in the new administration, only to have several individuals associated with the initiative now in senior roles, Trump is now implementing a number of policy proposals from a manifesto he once shunned.
We’ve provided a list of all of these below."
When it comes to AI the quote that comes to mind is "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed." The impact that it having on high school and college students is profoundly bad. I'm seeing how it erodes critical thinking skills firsthand in a way that undercuts the benefit of having fast answers for nearly every question. Ironically, I think a more "self-aware" AGI would conclude that acting ethically is in its best interests---contra Skynet.
Trump is a nut.
But!
"Apple plans to build most of its iPhones for the US in India by the end of next year, accelerating a shift beyond China."
On the other hand, we are told that, gee, those manufacturing platforms in China just can't be replaced. It's the New World Order fixed in stone, forever. Except it's not.
Really, Indians can build smartphones but Americans can't?
(BTW we have lots of smart Indians (Bharat) in the US who manage plants).
Random thoughts: (1)compare Jane Jacob’s warning (2005) about a future Dark Age - at the date of release I thought it was almost inconceivable (now?) examples include accounting firms and rating agencies
And (2) how condiments have disappeared from many fast food tables where employees cannot monitor their use - I say this because I thought their ubiquity was once a sign of trust (about 1974) but (3) the issues of incentives, and methods of enforcement are complicated in the professions (4) plus - as noted - perhaps periods of rapid economic change disrupt older traditional practices by creating huge economic incentives for cheating. Very thoughtful post. The Japanese example in particular.
Yes, this is something one really notices when you visit a country like Japan.
Affirmative Action produced obvious corruption in academia, as less able blacks, etc., were accepted or promoted, while those in charge pretended that the decisions were being made on merit; also, people started claiming somewhat phony or completely phony minority status for themselves. But the Golden Age of integrity in academe, before Affirmative Action, must have been brief, for earlier there had been severe discrimination against blacks and other minority groups.
It is hard to assess the overall level of corruption: one tends to notice some kinds but not others, and there is no ready measurement even of what one notices.
There's always implicit bias, even during a golden age. Academia, like every other place, selects for cultural fit above and even before other kinds of merit. This is particularly pernicious in academia as the selection criteria for professors make them a different subset of the entire population than the student body.
So, right kind of person to be a student, not right kind to be a professor? What kind of lessons are we teaching here?
I say this as a moderately gifted, scientifically interested person, who dropped out of college multiple times, and will never be a professor, much less a PhD. I've met exactly one professor who had also dropped out (though only once). I've also met exactly one who was scientifically studying learning modalities with respect to retention and completion. And I met one (an adjunct) who offered to talk with a student who wanted him to sign course withdrawal papers (he didn't push this offer, but I was happy he offered).
By selecting only the passers, aka so-called merit, those who are selected are relatively, or absolutely, blind to the poisons of the water they are swimming in.
There has been a loss of integrity across almost all domains in America.
States and Cities such as NY and Illinois still display a huge degree of corruption. So, maybe with regard to all 50 states, less, but too many still as corrupt as ever in the political realm.
Besides criminal cases, gerrymandering of voting districts is on the rise to corrupt the election process itself by limiting choices for the voters.
We need multi-member districts where the voting power of the member is proportionate to the percent (or even absolute number) of the district voters who voted for them (above some minimal threshold). That's the only way to absolutely eliminate any kind of disenfranchisement.
Scott, have you notice the USA has been outpacing European countries like Germany, the UK, France etc by wide margins in economic growth during the 2020's? Maybe the theory that confidence in govt fosters faster economic growth isn't all it's cracked up to be, pace the late Kevin Drum and you.
The US clearly has many advantages, such as our high tech and energy sectors. My concern is that this advantage may gradually erode if we continue down this road.
He pointed out in the opening that it might not be evident in measures like GDP or total sales.
What about business? Do you think it’s becoming more corrupt too?
I would say that connections with government are increasingly important. To a greater extent than in the past, firms spend a lot of money to insure good treatment by the executive branch. The president has profited by various indirect means, such as encouraging private actors to help his businesses.
IMO the best way to restore confidence in the US national government (not that it would necessarily deserve it) would be changing the voting system to approval or STAR (NOT instant runoff, which is only a way to suffocate third parties).
Arnold Kling is correct AI is a misnomer. LLM’s are pattern aggregators. If the patterns they are using have a bias, they will reflect that bias.
On the Venezuela comparison, it is an outlier even by Latin American standards. But yes, it does look like the US is becoming less like Europe and more like Latin America. https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/the-latin-americanisation-of-the
As far as productivity goes, I really like the cherries example. The rest of it is also interesting and I generally agree except I don't think I agree any of it is a question of productivity. What is your definition of productivity?
Surely you can’t attribute the difference between onigiri and rolling hot dogs to lazy Americans workers!
No, but there are plenty of other differences.
The consumer deserves much more blame than you give it. 7-11 doesn’t focus on 30-oz soft drinks in the US because of “poor worker quality”, it’s because consumers of corner stores here have bad taste. That bad taste extends to whether they care about the store vibe.
In an area where consumers have good taste, the US is as good as anywhere in the world at meeting it. It’s not a labor supply issue, as much as demand-side.
Fair point, but I can assure you that there is also a vast difference in worker quality. American workers are much more sloppy, whereas Japanese workers tend to be very conscientious.