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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
, 14 tweets, 5 min read Read on Twitter
Today's @bopinion post is about Trump's trade war with China.

He appears to be losing.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
It does look like Trump's tariffs hit Chinese business confidence a bit, and contributed to a mild slowdown in 2018.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
And it did spur some companies to think about diversifying their supply chains out of China.

asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade-…
But the trade war also hurt Americans. Most of the cost of our own tariffs was borne by American consumers and businesses.

econ.ucla.edu/pfajgelbaum/RT…

princeton.edu/~reddings/pape…
In addition to our own tariffs hurting us, China's retaliation against American farmers was focused and devastating.

bloomberg.com/news/features/…
Trump resorted to bailing farmers out. But that's not a sustainable business model, and the farmers knew it.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
You see, Trump lacked perspective and foresight. He didn't realize that trade wars against large autocratic countries undergoing rapid growth are actually NOT easy to win.
So now Trump is beating a hasty, ignominious retreat. He's basically going to beg China to start buying our farm products again.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Trump's trade war is starting to look like when Napoleon III thought he could take on Prussia in 1870.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Meanwhile, China is recovering from its mild slowdown, as investors realize that China defeated Trump in the trade war.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
But what about the *other* trade war? The high-tech struggle to control the next generation of information technology?

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Well that doesn't look to be going incredibly well either.

cnbc.com/2019/04/15/ger…
U.S. export controls might crush a few Chinese tech companies in the short term. But in the long term they could just push China to compete more directly with U.S. companies, and knock us out of our commanding perch atop the supply chain.
Trump's statement that "trade wars are good, and easy to win" should go down in history alongside Bush's "mission accomplished" and other statements of premature hubris.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
Strategy for happiness: Figure out whatever Twitter people are raging about this week, and if you don't have anything original to contribute, mute all the keywords associated with the Rage.
For example, right now I'm going to mute "Notre Dame", "Western civilization", and "Judeo-Christian".
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
One of my favorite history books is "Lost Enlightenment": amazon.com/Lost-Enlighten…

It's about science in the medieval Islamic world, but it's also about Central Asia, which was a flourishing, world-leading civilization that was mostly destroyed by war and conquest.
Lots of the people we know as "Arabic" scientists and mathematicians, like Al-Khwarizmi and Ibn Sina, were actually Persian Central Asians who wrote in Arabic...
Central Asia had these amazing, huge, rich cities that were centers of trade, art, and science. But they were largely isolated, not supported by large dense distributed agricultural populations. So they couldn't defend themselves against successive waves of conquerors.
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
People with top credit scores are still buying houses. Other people, not so much.
newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/m…
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In 2012, Tim Cook announced Apple would make a Mac computer in the US.

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