Trump tweeted We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S. Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with…
Blog Archives
Why tariffs won’t boost the economy like Trump thinks
Posted in Globalization & International, Macro
#Pence2018 vs Trump tariffs
On Friday I was called in for a TV interview with WLIO about Trump’s tariffs so I put together a few notes for myself that I might as well post. Trump says he will impose a 25 percent tariff on…
Posted in Globalization & International, Pence2018
Artificial intelligence will dominate more and more of society. Will it be racist and sexist?
Brian Resnick explains research that our systems of artificial intelligence have learned to perpetuate racism and sexism just like people do. “Many people think machines are not biased,” Princeton computer scientist Aylin Caliskan says. “But machines are trained on human…
Trump “dealt his first blow to China’s economy”?
According to headlines today, Trump finally started to work on his campaign promise to crack down on Chinese imports. But he is just targeting imports of solar panels from China! Although this is an extremely important issue for the solar…
Posted in Globalization & International
The fracking belt?
Last December, the Census Bureau released official maps showing median income growth by county since the Great Recession began in 2007. Too bad we don’t have data for 2016 yet. It might be interesting to use it to analyze voting…
NAFTA not a big deal overall, but huge for a few Americans.
Kevin Drum wrote that NAFTA isn’t a big deal and produced a graph similar to the one below except that he used an inflated measure of trade: gross imports plus exports. Net exports (NX) is a better measure of the…
Posted in Globalization & International
We Pencils
Introduction: This essay is guest authored by a group of pencils. Yes, we are a bunch of ordinary writing instruments. Even though any one of us is very dumb, even a group of idiots can produce something much greater than the…
Medianism 