Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Why Trump won.
The [Stolper-Samuelson] theorem was set out 20 years earlier in a seminal paper, co-authored by Paul Samuelson, one of the most celebrated thinkers in the discipline. It shed new light on an old subject: the relationship between tariffs and wages. Its fame and influence were pervasive and persistent, preceding Stolper to Nigeria and outlasting his death, in 2002, at the age of 89. Even today, the theorem is shaping debates on trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between America and 11 other Pacific-rim countries.
The paper was “remarkable”, according to Alan Deardorff of the University of Michigan, partly because it proved something seemingly obvious to non-economists: free trade with low-wage nations could hurt workers in a high-wage country. This commonsensical complaint had traditionally cut little ice with economists. They pointed out that poorly paid labour is not necessarily cheap, because low wages often reflect poor productivity—as Kaduna Textile Mills showed. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem, however, found “an iota of possible truth” (as Samuelson put it later) in the hoary argument that workers in rich countries needed protection from “pauper labour” paid a pittance elsewhere.
Comments
I was at first surprised that the Economist would publish something like this with the title and lede you have. So I clicked and found out: they didn't! Their actual title is
An inconvenient iota of truth
with the lede: The third in our series looks at the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, suggesting that in this third article,they find a tiny bit of truth to the theorem after having proven it wrong in the first two?
Then I searched for the name Trump. I didn't find it. I'm not surprised, what would surprise me is if The Economist published a piece claiming they knew why Trump won. What I did find, however. was the use of the word as an adjective, here:
by artappraiser on Sun, 03/11/2018 - 8:06pm
P.S.: Merriam Webster Definition of sophistry:
1: subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation
American Heritage soph·is·try (sŏfĭ-strē)
1. Plausible but fallacious argumentation.
2. A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument.
by artappraiser on Sun, 03/11/2018 - 7:24pm
Oh and the article was published in Aug. 2016. So:
Not really on the topic you claim it to be, and not really news. Just a "brief" primer on one past economic theory of several economic theories which addressed tariffs and wages, from their Aug. 6 2016 issue.
by artappraiser on Sun, 03/11/2018 - 7:31pm
An interesting article, thanks. (Though it doesn't explain or even purport to explain "why Trump won.")
by Michael Wolraich on Sun, 03/11/2018 - 10:13pm
...as AA points out in the comments I just read
by Michael Wolraich on Sun, 03/11/2018 - 10:15pm
Trump campaigned in favor of tariffs, renegotiating NAFTA, and full-on opposition to the TPP. All of these policies are better for a large number of voters in MI, WI, and PA. Clinton is a notorious free trader.
by HSG on Mon, 03/12/2018 - 8:04am
“Notorious” free trader, as though that’s a bad thing. News Flash: not everyone agrees with you.
by CVille Dem on Mon, 03/12/2018 - 10:15am
I get that lots of people disagree with me. But enough voters in MI, WI, and PA, including up to 20% or more of Obama voters probably thought, with reason, that free trade had harmed them to swing the election to Trump.
by HSG on Mon, 03/12/2018 - 10:29am
They may have thought Hillary drank her own urine and ran a pedophilia ring out of a pizza joint. Repeat bullshit long enough, and it takes its toll on the truth.
by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 03/12/2018 - 2:03pm
And after he was president for 10 months, most Americans still didn't agree with him about NAFTA
You realize that in the end, you are making the argument that manipulating the electoral college so that the results of the presidential election end up to the benefit of a small minority of districts is a good thing? Not just that it's a real thing that happened, but that it's a good thing, that you want it to continue to happen until the rest of the country supposedly changes their mind on protectionism.
Furthermore, even if for cynical political reasons alone,I fail to see any wisdom in your advice given that every month more millennials register to vote and more rust belt baby boomers die, and the former are overall strong supporters of free trade. It's like you are continually arguing the 2016 election which in itself was a freaky outlier manipulation thing.
It's one thing to push protectionism ideologically if you believe in it, it's quite another thing to argue that's it's smart politically to push it nationwide. You've got a long row to hoe convincing your fellow citizens. It's not politically smart at all nationwide.
by artappraiser on Mon, 03/12/2018 - 2:06pm
Bernie @ March 2018 rally in AZ: guns, favoring the billionaire class, unfair tax laws, health care, DACA, global warming, college tuition.
Hal @ Dagblog: free trade and Clintonomics: bad.
Millennials: what the heck is Clintonomics? I am not interested in history of economics.
by artappraiser on Mon, 03/12/2018 - 2:49pm
I just watched this video about the United Steelworkers' activity in the PA 18 race, and it's very clear in it that they care almost exclusively about the "right to work" issue and are giving more than full support to Conor Lamb for that reason alone. Tariffs: not so much an issue. Seems like this: forget about tariffs and Trump, not that important, up to each member to decide, Conor Lamb has to win because of "right to work."
by artappraiser on Mon, 03/12/2018 - 1:30pm
Thanks, I'm not interested in going down that rabbit hole with you. If you left Trump and Clinton out of it, it might be interesting to discuss the relationship between tariffs and wages (and prices). The article is actually quiet nuanced in its apolitical assessment.
by Michael Wolraich on Mon, 03/12/2018 - 2:39pm
Actually, just in case you really are interested in finding out why Trump won, these four political experts (self-defined "progressives," I would note) studied up on the topic and data and wrote this essay for the Sunday NYTimes explaining why Trump won:
The Missing Obama Millions
By Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee) a co-founder of Data for Progress, Jesse H. Rhodes and Brian F. Schaffner, political scientists at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Bernard L. Fraga, a political scientist at Indiana University.
Includes nice charts and stuff and analysis of what issues mattered to which groups of those who stayed home and of those who switched from Obama to Trump.
And Philip Bump @ WaPo followed up with some analysis and commentary on their article on Monday: 4.4 million 2012 Obama voters stayed home in 2016 — more than a third of them black
by artappraiser on Tue, 03/13/2018 - 3:20am
The 1 graph seems to say Obamacare was a bigger deal than even immigration. And I'm reminded about some big Obamacare announcement a week before the election that seemed to promise costs would go up - like a natural campaign gift for Trump.
by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 03/13/2018 - 3:36am