- How history rhymes, about tariffs: Smoot-Hawley and Trump;
- How Musk lives fantasies about expanding the population (of people like him) without a grasp on numbers;
- How DOGE has cost taxpayers $135B, while claiming to have saved $160B — even that is far less than its goal.
The experts understand, and the science fiction writers imagine, realms beyond the conception of the vast majority of ordinary people. Science fiction, I think, is about speculating what lies beyond the most abstruse things the experts understand. That’s a core theme here. Will humanity ever advance? Or are we forever mired in primitive thinking?
LA Times, Veronique de Rugy, 24 Apr 2025: Economic nostalgia woos voters, but it leads to terrible policies
History may not perfectly repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Two protectionist episodes — the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the Trump-era tariffs of today — offer a striking example. Both emerged from economic nostalgia and fear of change. Both were politically attractive. And both were costly, backward-looking mistakes that undermined the economies they were meant to protect.
With details, concluding:
…Between 1929 and 1934, global trade collapsed by 65%.
Today, Smoot-Hawley is widely regarded as a catastrophic error.
Then how Trump is rhyming this history. Concluding…
The two blunders have one more thing in common: cronyism. According to economic historian Douglas A. Irwin, Smoot-Hawley was not primarily about ideology. It was about interest-group politics: an ad hoc scramble driven by constituent demands, sectoral lobbying and legislative bargaining.
In the same way, Trump’s tariffs have revived the lobbying for tariff exemptions we saw in his first term. Apple got an exemption for the iPhone and now, understandably, everyone else wants one. As the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome commented on X, “The cronyism buffet line is now open.” National Review’s Dominic Pino calculated that tariff lobbying spending is up by 277%.
The lesson is clear: Economic nostalgia is a poor guide to sound policy. Smoot-Hawley and Trump’s tariffs represent attempts to re-create a romanticized past — one of small farms or bustling factories — rather than to embrace the reality of a changing world. But economies are dynamic. Trying to freeze them in place with trade barriers doesn’t stop change; it just makes the transition harder, costlier and more painful.
History judged Smoot-Hawley harshly. The final verdict on Trump’s tariffs is not yet written, but the early signs are familiar. If we want prosperity, we must look forward, not backward. The future belongs to those who embrace change and creative destruction, not those who resist it.
Thus the corollary to my opening statement: conservatives are virtually by definition almost always wrong. The things they want to conserve are the vestiges of the most primitive thinking from humanity’s tribal past. At best, give the conservatives their anodyne traditions. The rest of us will move on.
\\\
This is not surprising given that Musk, like many people, is driven by motivated thinking. He’s already decided what he wants to believe, never mind plausibility.
Washington Post, David Von Drehle, 24 Apr 2025: Elon Musk’s lack of math skills is making me nervous, subtitled “Surprisingly, for a high-tech multibillionaire, he appears to not have a solid grasp on numbers.”
The situation, refers to a Wall Street Journal article, which says that
…Musk has fathered at least 14 children with at least four women; that he has created a compound near Austin as a habitat for his progeny; that he hopes to sire many more children with women he finds through social media. And it added the detailed personal testimony of one of Musk’s partners, who shared not only the financial details of life inside Musk’s “harem drama,” but also his growing concern that only an army of paid surrogates can produce enough of his babies to populate the “legion” required to stave off the “apocalypse.”
What apocalypse? As near as I can tell, it’s the fear of whites that they will be diluted by non-whites; it’s not about the global population actually declining.
A person who understands numbers would appreciate that the world’s population is large and rapidly growing. Despite wars, famine, disease and birth control, more than 8 billion humans now occupy Earth on our way to an estimated 10 billion or so half a century from now.
…
In the same article, we learn that Musk operates under the daffy misconception that babies born by Caesarean section have larger brains, as if vaginal births squish the gray matter out of infants’ little ears. He also believes that larger brains mean higher intelligence, which makes you wonder: Why doesn’t he hire more humpback whales and walruses at SpaceX?
Like the cowboy myth (covered yesterday), there’s a myth that big things are accomplished by individual geniuses. This idea is partly due to sloppy history, that reduces complex events to simple stories about single persons. In fact, as you look at the backgrounds of the very wealthy, many of them, like Musk, inherited their wealth, or bought companies built by others. They’re savvy businessmen, perhaps, but not geniuses, or even particularly smart.
\\
Case in point. Did Trump and Musk anticipate this? Of course not. Their thinking is simple-minded. Just fire people whose jobs you don’t understand, never mind the consequences, which other people will have to deal with.
CBS News, Aimee Picchi, 25 Apr 2025: DOGE says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion, one analysis says. (via)
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, says it has saved $160 billion through its push to root out wasteful or fraudulent government spending. But that effort may also have come at a cost for taxpayers, with a new analysis from a nonpartisan research and advocacy group estimating that DOGE’s actions will cost $135 billion this fiscal year.
The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce.
PSP’s estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE’s actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn’t include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE’s actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS.
And so on. Reality is more complex than conservatives understand. Never mind that the claimed savings are far far less than the $2 billion target.
