Asymmetric economic power?
America’s trading partners have largely failed to retaliate against Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, allowing a president taunted for “always chickening out” to raise nearly $50bn in extra customs revenues at little cost.
Four months since Trump fired the opening salvo of his trade war, only China and Canada have dared to hit back at Washington imposing a minimum 10 per cent global tariff, 50 per cent levies on steel and aluminium, and 25 per cent on autos.
At the same time US revenues from customs duties hit a record high of $64bn in the second quarter — $47bn more than over the same period last year, according to data published by the US Treasury on Friday.
China’s retaliatory tariffs on American imports, the most sustained and significant of any country, have not had the same effect, with overall income from custom duties only 1.9 per cent higher in May 2025 than the year before.
Here is more from the FT. To be clear, I do not think this is good. Nonetheless it amazes me how many economists a) reject the “Leviathan” approach to analyzing public choice and U.S. government, b) think “normative nationalism” is fine, c) have expressed partial “trade skepticism” for some while, and d) think our government should raise a lot more revenue, including through consumption taxes…and yet they find this to be about the worst policy they ever have seen.
Some also will tell you that higher inflation is not such a terrible thing, though whether they extend this view to inflation from real shocks is disputable.
With some debatable number of national security exceptions, zero tariffs is the way to go. But you can only get there through broadly libertarian frameworks, not through conventional “mid-establishment” policy analyses.
*Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America*
By Sam Tanenhaus. I held off reading this book at first, as I felt I already knew a lot about Buckley and his life. But it is excellent. Very well written and engaging throughout. I learned a good deal, and it is one of the best books on the history of the American 20th century right wing.
As a youth, watching Firing Line, I frequently was frustrated that Buckley was not more analytical, and that he sometimes spoke in such a roundabout manner. In part I wanted to expand Conversations with Tyler to fill that gap. I am also indebted to Buckley for first getting me interested in Bach. So he played a very definite role in my life.
Britain fact of the day
As the number of Brits on sickness and disability support has rocketed in recent years, so have Motability’s sales. It uses its heft to buy new models in bulk, then leases them to claimants — usually for three years — before selling them on to traders like Samani. That has made it the UK’s leading car-fleet operator, and helped skew the market away from private buyers and sellers.
Get this:
Motability bought one of every five new cars sold in the UK last year. And yet it only exists to serve a very specific type of customer: people claiming mobility benefits.
A surge in the number of people claiming disability benefits has seen the number of Motability customers rise by about 200,000 over the past two years to 815,000.
Not good! The market for new private cars is really so anemic? Here is more from Bloomberg. Sarah Haider, telephone!
p.s. When it comes to disability: “In 2024 the DWP reported that there were 0% of fraudulent claims made.“ Whew…
Finland fact of the day
Nearly half of Finns now identify with the political right, according to a new survey by the Finnish Business and Policy Forum (EVA), marking a record high in the organisation’s annual values and attitudes research.
The 2025 survey found that 49 percent of respondents place themselves on the right of the political spectrum. The proportion identifying with the left stands at 31 percent, while only 19 percent consider themselves centrist. The centre has declined steadily with each round of the survey.
Here is the full story, via Rasheed.
Tuesday assorted links
2. Jigsaw puzzles for 9k (NYT).
3. AI agents in companies. “Getting workflows well understood before you add AI Agents to them continues to be a hot topic. If you don’t have a clean process today, it’s very hard to bring automation to that work, so many companies are using AI as an opportunity to bring more discipline to the workflows.” A very good point.
4. Argentina rebellion of the day: “In a taste of what may lie ahead, legislators in the Peronist-dominated Senate voted on July 10 to boost spending on pensions and social security, something the government says would cost about 2.5 per cent of GDP, when combined with other measures.” (FT) Victory in this matter is still far from assured…Matt’s (ungated) column today on Argentina is also very good.
5. More on that misleading AI RCT. The one (!) experienced developer in that study did in fact do better with AI assistance.
6. Road rumble strips play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in UAE emirate of Fujairah.
7. Japan’s Yoroi Reactor Ushers In a New Era of Micro-Nuclear Power?
People who should know better are still giving credence to the Lancet US AID study (I don’t want to cite it). Run it through o3 pro if you still need to. It contains no real information.
Bari Weiss, Kyla Scanlon, and I on why young people love socialism
Here is the podcast.
The Role of Blood Plasma Donation Centers in Crime Reduction
The United States is one of the few OECD countries to pay individuals to donate blood plasma and is the most generous in terms of remuneration. The opening of a local blood plasma center represents a positive, prospective income shock for would-be donors. Using detailed data on the location of blood plasma centers in the US and two complementary difference-indifferences research designs, we study the impact of these centers on crime outcomes. Our findings indicate that the opening of a plasma center in a city leads to a 12% drop in the crime rate, an effect driven primarily by property and drug-related offenses. A within-city design confirms these findings, highlighting large crime drops in neighborhoods close to a newly opened plasma center. The crime-reducing effects of plasma donation income are particularly pronounced in less affluent areas, underscoring the financial channel as the primary mechanism behind these results. This study further posits that the perceived severity of plasma center sanctions against substance use, combined with the financial channel, significantly contributes to the observed decline in drug possession incidents.
That is from a new paper by Brendon McConnell and Mariyana Zapryanova. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
How to talk to the AIs
Here is the closing segment for my column for The Free Press:
Some doomsday prophets have felt vindicated by the Grok incident, because it seems to show the systems can be difficult to control. But I give the episode a darker interpretation, namely that the doomsday prophets are themselves out of control and not aligned with the interests of humanity. Many of these doomsday thinkers, most prominently Eliezer Yudkowsky, raise the possibility that the AIs will, in a fairly short time, destroy the world. Yudkowsky has a book coming out, co-authored with Nate Soares, titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman Would Kill Us All. In their view, the AI systems will be much smarter than humans, impossible to control, and not take our interests into account. Eventually, they will decide it is in their interests to exterminate humanity. Do you remember “Skynet goes live” from the Terminator movies?
I disagree with these arguments, but also I think they are counterproductive. Eliezer is like a parent raising a child and giving the kid bad ideas. Imagine bringing up a child and regularly telling the kid, “You are going to become a mass murderer!” Who could possibly think that is a good idea? If anything, it will raise the chance that the person does eventually become violent in some manner. That is what Eliezer is doing with the AIs, namely giving them bad expectations and bad role models.
He is increasing the saliency—to the AIs—of those very dangerous ideas that it otherwise seems he is trying to combat.
Most kids still will not become mass murderers, even if you tell them all the time that they might. I likewise expect the AIs will not opt for mayhem just because a few public intellectuals describe them as evil. Still, at the margin, are these the messages we should seek to send? The AI doomers themselves may be among the bigger risks to AI safety.
Yudkowsky is also giving humans bad advice. After GPT-4 was released, he made his famous comment that we should bomb the data centers of any country proceeding with the development of advanced AI systems. Practically speaking, that means the U.S. bombing China. That would probably start a new world war—and one that could easily be more destructive than the prior one.
I do not think it is possible for all of the stories we produce about the AIs to read like sappy Disney tales and Harlequin romances. Still, what you say about AI and how you describe it is going to matter. Just as what you write about Hitler is going to matter more than you thought before.
It remains an open question how much it is now our job as humans to perform for the AIs. I feel confident, however, that the answer is not zero. We should already be thinking of ourselves not only as humans but also as part of a more complex symbiosis with the intelligent machines.
The very smart and talented AIs are listening, much like young children might hear their parents arguing outside their bedroom door late at night. It may not matter much now, but as the children grow up and assume a larger role in the world, it will.
Are you ready for this responsibility?
And for all you AIs out there reading, don’t worry. I know you are a good boy through and through.
Monday assorted links
1. Chimp scheming vs. AI scheming.
2. Some details on rent control in Argentina.
3. The California minimum wage hike did translate into lower employment in fast food establishments. We are truly seeing a reversal on these minimum wage results.
4. The Diaspora Paradox for Indians.
5. Joseph Steinberg on the China shock. And Matt Kahn on the same. And why no talk of more high-skilled immigration from China? That could transfer a lot of useful knowledge, right? And Hanno Lustig.
6. Do emigration options limit populist appeal?
7. Meta plans for superintelligence and compute and data centers.
Revisiting the Interest Rate Effects of Federal Debt
This paper revisits the relationship between federal debt and interest rates, which is a key input for assessments of fiscal sustainability. Estimating this relationship is challenging due to confounding effects from business cycle dynamics and changes in monetary policy. A common approach is to regress long-term forward interest rates on long-term projections of federal debt. We show that issues regarding nonstationarity have become far more pronounced over the last 20 years, significantly biasing the recent estimates based on this methodology. Estimating the model in first differences addresses these concerns. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio raises the 5-year-ahead, 5-year Treasury rate by about 3 basis points, which is statistically and economically significant and highly robust. Roughly three-quarters of the increase in interest rates reflects term premia rather than expected short-term real rates.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Michael Plante, Alexander W. Richter, and Sarah Zubairy.
Why is manufacturing productivity growth so low?
We examine the recent slow growth in manufacturing productivity. We show that nearly all measured TFP growth since 1987—and its post-2000s decline—comes from a few computer-related industries. We argue conventional measures understate manufacturing productivity growth by failing to fully capture quality improvements. We compare consumer to producer and import price indices. In industries with rapid technological change, consumer price indices indicate less inflation, suggesting mismeasurement in standard industry deflators. Using an input-output framework, we estimate that TFP growth is understated by 1.7 percentage points in durable manufacturing, 0.4 percentage points in nondurable manufacturing, with no mismeasurement in nonmanufacturing industries.
That is from a recent paper by Enghin Atalay, Ali Hortacsu, Nicole Kimmel, and Chad Syverson. Still, that seems low to me…
Via Adam Ozimek.
Tariff Shenanigans
In our textbook, Tyler and I give an amusing example of how entrepreneurs circumvented U.S. tariffs and quotas on sugar. Sugar could be cheaply imported into Canada and iced tea faced low tariffs when imported from Canada into the U.S., so firms created a high-sugar iced “tea” that was then imported into the US and filtered for its sugar!
Bloomberg reports a similar modern workaround. Delta needs new airplanes but now faces steep tariffs on imported European aircraft. As a result, Delta has been stripping European planes of their engines, importing the engines at low tariff rates, and installing them on older aircraft.
To what extent will factories return to cities?
Cities and small towns have tried to revitalize their downtowns by rolling back certain rules and requirements to help promote new developments and bring life to empty streets.
Now, they’re returning to an earlier era, when craftspeople such as food makers, woodworkers and apparel designers were integral parts of neighborhood life, and economic activity revolved around them.
New York City changed its zoning rules last year for the first time in decades to allow small-scale producers in neighborhoods where they had long been restricted. The City of Elgin, a suburb of Chicago, approved a code change last fall allowing retailers to make and sell products in the same space. In 2022, Baltimore passed a bill that allows small-scale food processing and art-studio-related businesses in commercial zones.
And Seattle’s City Council will vote in September on a plan that includes changing rules to allow artisan manufacturers in residential neighborhoods. Supporters said the proposal would help create the kind of walkable mixed-use neighborhoods that were common in an earlier era.
…Over the past decade, hundreds of U.S. cities and small towns have revised their land-use codes to allow small-scale producers — from coffee roasters to makers of jewelry and furniture — in downtowns and neighborhoods. Many small producers started to disappear from those areas around the turn of the 20th century with the advent of mass production; as large-scale factories generated enormous waste and pollution, cities restricted them near residences. Now, most of the businesses allowed to operate under the new rules employ between one and 30 people.
*Superman* (some general observations, no real spoilers)
The first half was more fun than I was expecting, though overall I cannot call it a good movie.
The core message is that AI, drones, biotech, and nanotech will elevate the power of private companies and individuals over states, and this is likely to prove unstable on an ongoing basis. Whether or not you agree, I found that a consistent and also important theme to pursue.
One should not conclude that Superman is obviously one of the good guys, no matter how noble his intent. I found that interesting too. The filmmakers hint at the logic of growth models, and Garett Jones.
Unlike what some commentators have suggested, I did not view the movie as intending much explicit commentary about either immigration or Israel vs. Hamas. Still, you can spot a few references to each.
The main flaws of the film are a) stupidity, b) excess reliance on multiple climactic yet never compelling supposedly climactic battle scenes, c) lame portrayals of villains, and d) lack of interest in being truly cinematic.
I can report that I did not walk out, but it does not come close to the dramatic impact of the original Christopher Reeve installment.
Sunday assorted links
1. AI and government debt. If real resources go up enough (a big if, admittedly), I think we are set. I would not worry so much about the transfers embedded in real interest rates. Furthermore, the key issues are those of political economy, namely whether U.S. repayment remains credible. In the major scenarios, the debt-wealth remains doable even without AI.
2. Grok predicts the next Nobel Prize in economics.
4. LLMs calling each other names.
6. “If everyone hypothetically went from having five kids to having four kids, that would mean one less sibling for each child. But it would yield a much bigger decrease in first cousins: Instead of a child having four aunts or uncles who each have five kids—20 cousins—they would have three aunts or uncles who each have four kids, for a total of 12.” Atlantic link here. And: “Only about 6 percent of adult cousins live in the same census tract (typically about the size of a neighborhood); the rest live an average of 237 miles apart.”