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.
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.
3) US consumers are reacting very very negatively.
These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began.
4) Well over half of Americans expect the economy to deteriorate over the next year, again the highest figure ever recorded.
5) People are also very very worried about job losses.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
NEW: Is the internet changing our personalities for the worse?
Conscientiousness and extroversion are down, neuroticism up, with young adults leading the charge.
This is a really consequential shift, and there’s a lot going on here, so let’s get into the weeds 🧵
First up, personality analysis can feel vague, and you might well ask why it even matters?
On the first of those, the finding of distinct personality traits is robust. This field of research has been around for decades and holds up pretty well, even across cultures.
On the second, studies consistently find personality shapes life outcomes.
In fact, personality traits — esp conscientiousness and neuroticism — are stronger predictors of career success, divorce and mortality than someone’s socio-economic background or cognitive abilities.
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment.
I dug a little closer and a striking story emerged:
Unemployment is climbing among young graduate *men*, but college-educated young women are generally doing okay.
In fact, young men with a college degree now have the same unemployment rate as young men who didn’t go to college, completely erasing the graduate employment premium.
Whereas a healthy premium remains for young women.
What’s going on?
At first glance, this looks like a case of the growing masses of male computer science graduates being uniquely exposed to the rapid adoption of generative AI in the tech sector, and finding jobs harder to come by than earlier cohorts.
The number of people travelling from Europe to the US in recent weeks has plummeted by as much as 35%, as travellers have cancelled plans in response to Trump’s policies and rhetoric, and horror stories from the border.
Denmark saw one of the steepest declines, in an indication that anger over Trump’s hostility towards Greenland may be contributing to the steep drop-off in visitor numbers.
Corporate quotes are usually pretty dry, but the co-founder of major travel website Kayak wasn’t mincing his words:
NEW đź§µ: 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?
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.
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).
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.
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.