John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
Apr 4 • 11 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
NEW 🧵

A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far:

1) Trump has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as a global pandemic. Image
2) That was just the US version.

What’s particularly impressive is that he’s managed this on a global scale.

Starting to get the feeling that “Trump” annotation is going to be the chart equivalent of a layer of volcanic ash in the fossil record. Image
3) US consumers are reacting very very negatively.

These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began. Image
4) Well over half of Americans expect the economy to deteriorate over the next year, again the highest figure ever recorded. Image
5) People are also very very worried about job losses. Image
6) Just 25% of US adults say they expect their finances to look better in five years than today.

That’s lower even than at the nadir of the Great Recession. Image
7) This one is fun:

Remember when Trump won the “inflation election”, as voters united behind him because they were p***ed off with rising prices?

Fast forward a few months and Americans’ inflation expectations are now as high as they were at the peak of Biden-era price rises. Image
8) This one is important.

For all the talk about the powerful pro-Trump media ecosystem, the share of Americans who have heard negative business news coverage of the government has exploded.

Even the podcast bros can’t distract Americans from the realities of the stock market. Image
9/9 On the same dynamic:

Trump’s approval is holding up well with Maga, but he’s rapidly losing support among the rest of the coalition who voted for him in November.

Or to put it another way, the view from inside the Maga echo chamber remains rosy. Outside, not so much... Image
More in this week’s column:

Trump’s tariffs are what you get when you put an erratic strongman in charge of the economy

Someone like Trump doesn’t just own the libs, moderates and conservatives take the hit too.

ft.com/content/26d15d…
And worth viewing all this within the context of this previous thread/piece:

This US government is just completely unlike anything else we’ve seen from a major western country in the postwar era.

Different values, different goals, different everything

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More from @jburnmurdoch

Mar 14
NEW 🧵: Is human intelligence starting to decline?

Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s.

What should we make of this? Image
Nobody would argue that the fundamental biology of the human brain has changed in that time span. People’s underlying intellectual capacity is surely undimmed.

But there is growing evidence that the extent to which people can practically apply that capacity has been diminishing.
For such an important topic, there’s remarkably little long-term data on attention spans, focus etc.

But one source that has consistently tracked this is the Monitoring The Future survey, which finds a steep rise in the % of people struggling to concentrate or learn new things. Image
Read 15 tweets
Mar 7
NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.

The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west). Image
In the 2000s, US Republicans thought about the world in similar ways to Britons, Europeans, Canadians.

This made for productive relationships regardless of who was in the White House.

The moderating layers around Trump #1 masked the divergence, but with Trump #2 it’s glaring. Image
In seven weeks Trump’s America has shattered decades-long western norms and blindsided other western leaders with abrupt policy changes.

This is because many of the values of Trump’s America are not the values of western liberal democracies.

My column: ft.com/content/304601…
Read 5 tweets
Feb 24
NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany:

The gender gap continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung very sharply left. Image
Here’s my original analysis from last year: ft.com/content/29fd9b…
The key stats:

Young men’s AfD vote is somewhat higher than the national average (25% vs 21%), but their leftwing vote is also above average (15 vs 9).

Whereas young women’s AfD vote is significantly lower than average (14 vs 21), and leftwing vote far higher (34 vs 9).
Read 4 tweets
Nov 8, 2024
My wish for the next election is that poll trackers look like the one on the right 👉 not the left

This was yet another election where the polling showed it could easily go either way, but most of the charts just showed two nice clean lines, one leading and one trailing. Bad! Image
Pollsters and poll aggregators have gone to great lengths to emphasise the amount of uncertainty in the polls in recent weeks...

But have generally still put out charts and polling toplines that encourage people to ignore the uncertainty and focus on who’s one point ahead. Bad!
The thing about human psychology is, once you give people a nice clean number, it doesn’t matter how many times you say "but there’s an error margin of +/- x points, anything is possible".

People are going to anchor on that central number. We shouldn’t enable this behaviour!
Read 11 tweets
Nov 7, 2024
We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.

Some of those stories may even be true!

But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world 👇 Image
Harris lost votes, Sunak lost votes, Macron lost votes, Modi (!) lost votes, as did the Japanese, Belgian, Croatian, Bulgarian and Lithuanian governments in elections this year.

Any explanation that fails to take account for this is incomplete.

More here ft.com/content/e8ac09…
Did Biden hold on too long?

Has progressive politics alienated some Hispanic and Black men?

Yes and yes, but taking action to address those issues probably wouldn’t have produced a fundamentally different outcome.
Read 7 tweets
Oct 18, 2024
The recent political polarisation of Silicon Valley is really striking.

25 years ago most big tech and VC execs were moderates. Then the whole sector shifted gradually leftwards up until 2020, and now suddenly we have a sharp divide into Democrat-backers and Trump backers. Image
Chart is from my column this week exploring how the politics of corporate bosses have evolved over time ft.com/content/29426c…
Thanks to a brilliant new analysis from @reillysteel, we know the overall shift has been towards the left, but there are lots of other interesting things going on beneath the surface too Image
Read 7 tweets

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