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.
Actual "strongman" things Trump has done:

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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More from @Noahpinion

14 Oct
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*.

I pretty strongly disagree.
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.

nobelprize.org/prizes/economi…
3/No one can accuse Hayek of avoiding the big questions.

But did he get any of those big questions right?

One of Hayek's core theses was that countercyclical policy would lead to totalitarianism. This turned out to be completely wrong.
Read 20 tweets
14 Oct
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. Image
Read 16 tweets
13 Oct
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
Read 20 tweets
12 Oct
1/Here's my post on today's Econ Nobel Prize:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/As my colleague @skominers wrote, this prize is well-deserved!

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
3/In fact it was always pretty obvious that Milgrom would win it, and his thesis advisor Wilson is no slouch either!

marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…

marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
Read 13 tweets
8 Oct
It's a little more complicated.

Unobservable structural parameters are fine IF you're willing to reject structural models outright, based on data.

But if (like many economists) you don't reject models, unmeasurable variables can lead to misspecification that never goes away.
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...
Read 5 tweets
7 Oct
1/Today's @bopinion post is about Trump's taxes, and what they show about how America allocates capital.

We appear to have some big problems.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/Trump has a bunch of businesses that lose money. Our financial system has lent him money to throw into unsuccessful golf courses, hotels, and so on.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
3/A lot of these loans are loans that Trump hasn't even paid back yet, using loopholes in the tax system to avoid paying taxes on those unpaid debts.

Why would creditors give money to a guy who wastes the money on bad businesses and doesn't even pay them back?
Read 13 tweets

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