Friday, August 1, 2025

Trump's Trade War: the World-System Perspective

 


The New York Times today posted two interesting graphics about Trump' Trade War (here): The country status (above) and the results ranked by 2024 Imports (below).



From the ranks (above) it seems that he is going after the money, targeting our biggest trading partners. The economic sense of this (if there is any) is Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) for the US, a strategy typically employed by Global South countries. Basically, price imports so high that home-grown industries will develop to fill the gaps. Unfortunately, building factories and developing an ecosystem of suppliers takes times. In the mean time, prices in the home country (US) go up as are result of tariff expenses being added to list prices (remember when tariffs would be listed on automobile sticker prices).

By the time ISI would have any impact, Trump will be out of office.

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Blog Roll: Iran

 


Iran has been in the news lately after US and Israel bombings. However, the problems for Iran are really historically driven and go back to the immediate aftermath of WWII. I have state-space models of the Iranian economy from 1950 to the present and use the models to help understand Iran's historical development 

HINT: the Iranian economy is an historically driven economy not a Neoclassical Economy

Here's a blog roll:


Further reading:

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Why MAGA?

 


Sometimes I think I understand the MAGA Movement, other times I don't. ChatGPT (here) reports that there are a handful of reasons. The best I can say right now is that it is complicated. My favorite explanation, that aligns with historical analysis of the Nazi Movement, is Right-Wing Reactionism. The failure and humiliation of loosing World War I led Germany to Nazism. The failures for the US are not so clear, but let me just explore Economic failures in this post.

Everything seems to have come to a head during the COVID-19 Pandemic which was a strong shock to the US Economy and was handled very poorly by the first Trump I Administration (2017-2021).



MAGA and Big Tech



To me, the alignment of the MAGA movement and Big Tech continues to be surprising. I have worked in Tech all my life because of the intellectual challenges and the ability to get things done (estimating statistical models, specifically) that couldn't reasonably be done on a desktop calculator. I don't find anything about the MAGA movement intellectually challenging but the Tech Bros seem to see MAGA as a way to get things done. What exactly are they trying to get done and, what if anything is the intellectual attraction?
 

Boiler Plate


Notes

The first six indicators in standard scores are taken from the World Development Indicators (WDI). KOF = KOF Index of Globalization, EF = Ecological Footprint, HDI = Human Development Index

See the rest of the Boiler Plate here.