I feel like to effectively run as a strongman, you actually have to...be strong?
Trump ran face-first into COVID, failed to protect the nation from a pandemic, failed to get the military to be his enforcers, and presided under an unprecedented decline in American power.
1. Sent federal agents to Portland who accomplished nothing and we're kicked out
2. Mistreated a bunch of helpless asylum seekers who *turned themselves in*
3. Authorized a few ICE sweeps that didn't do much at all
What else is "strong" about Trump?
His tariffs were weak sauce that ended up backfiring.
He had that one Iranian general killed, I guess.
He tweeted a lot of angry tweets about China...
Trump is the weakest "strongman" I've ever seen. Any voter who thinks he's a source of safety and security is smoking something.
Really, I think Trump supporters see him not as a strong protector, but as someone THEY need to protect. A delicate flower of purity, maligned unfairly by the eeeevil media.
He's not a shogun. He's a waifu.
(end)
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1/This thread argues that prizes like the Econ Nobel should be given based on the importance of the questions people *ask*, not on how sure we are that they got good *answers*.
2/We used to award Nobel Prizes to people for thinking long and hard about big issues. For example, Friedrich Hayek, who thought a lot about the causes of economic fluctuations and the political effects of the welfare state, won the prize in 1974.
1/People sometimes ask me how I form my ideas about the world! Well, folks, there are basically two ingredients: Song lyrics, and data.
Just read a bunch of papers and articles and stuff, and try to relate it to song lyrics.
2/Let's go through an example: How the song "Kyoto", by Phoebe Bridgers, illustrates some of the problems with the American development model (infrastructure, education, and health).
3/We start the song in Japan, where the narrator (presumably, Phoebe herself) is utterly uninterested in the country or its culture, but finds bullet trains, pay phones (!!), and chain convenience stores pretty convenient.
1/Buildings in San Francisco that look like sand-colored rectangles: A thread
2/Let's start with Market Center, a tower complex that looks like it was designed by a 6-year-old boy learning to use the rectangle tool in Microsoft Paint:
3/Or 525 Market Street, which looks like the same kid's drawing, but several minutes later
For example: The coefficient of relative risk aversion. If people don't have CRRA preferences, this isn't a structural parameter; it changes when risk changes. So if preferences aren't CRRA and you decide rho=2, you're going to run into problems...
Of course, the example everyone is thinking about is TFP. A certain Nobel-winning business cycle model (which shall remain nameless) famously assumed that the TFP residual is exogenous and follows an AR(1) process. That turned out to be wrong in any number of ways...