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James Surowiecki Profile picture
James Surowiecki
@JamesSurowiecki
Author of The Wisdom of Crowds. Contributing writer for Fast Company and The Atlantic. I wrote The Financial Page for The New Yorker.
16 subscribers
Jul 25 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Unsurprisingly, the Financial Times is reporting that Japan does not agree with Lutnick's description of the deal - and that there is no written agreement for the $550 billion. Lutnick has been saying taxpayers will get 90% of the profits from these factories - Japan says profits will be “based on the degree of contribution and risk taken by each party.” If the US contributes nothing, it gets no profits.Image What Japan is describing is a model where the Japanese govt provides financing for investments in American infrastructure, but where the assets would only be owned by the US if the US invests money itself. That's miles away from a "blank check."
Apr 17 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
J. Harvie Wilkinson (a conservative judge) gets it right: Trump's argument that the govt can dump people in foreign prisons and keep them there with no due process "should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans...still hold dear." Image Wilkinson also properly rejects the administration's argument that the Supreme Court said only that the govt needed to accept Garcia back if Bukele returned him: "“Facilitate” is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken, as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear."
Apr 10 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This was my expectation all along. But a universal tariff is blatantly unconstitutional. There's no argument that our trade with, say, Australia (with whom we have a surplus) constitutes an emergency, and Trump has followed none of the legal procedures required to impose tariffs on a country under other laws. Trump has no constitutional authority to impose any tariffs. And he has no statutory authority to impose a universal tariff on the world. This is exactly the kind of thing the Constitution requires Congress to pass into law.
Apr 4 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
For once in his life, Lutnick is right - if factories come back to the U.S., they will be highly automated and will create relatively few good-paying jobs. Which means lots of people will be disappointed. On the one hand, MAGA keeps saying we're re-shoring manufacturing to bring back good-paying, dignified jobs to the heartland. On the other hand, Lutnick is saying (correctly, for once) that robots are going to be doing most of those jobs. So why are we doing it?
Apr 2 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn't actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us.

So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is. Even given that it's Trump, I cannot believe they said "We'll just divide the trade deficit by imports and tell people that's the tariff rate." And then they decided to set our tariffs by just cutting that totally made-up rate in half! This is so dumb and deceptive.
Apr 1 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Trump's lawyers are arguing that because they've dumped this guy in a Salvadoran prison, he can't file a habeas corpus petition, because he's no longer in American custody. They're arguing that once you get to sent to El Salvador, no court can order the govt to bring you back. Image The administration's lawyers are inadvertently explaining why it's illegal for the govt to deport people to El Salvador without a hearing: if the govt can't be forced to bring someone back if they've been sent erroneously, you have to make sure people aren't sent erroneously.
Feb 18 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is absurd, corrosive nonsense. There are not tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security checks, and the only reason Leavitt is out here making these hysterical claims is because Elon Musk misunderstood a table of numbers.(1/n) Image Social Security checks go to five groups of people: retired workers, their dependents, survivors of retired workers who have died, disabled workers, and their dependents. We know how many people in each of these groups get checks.
Nov 7, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The fundamental lesson I hope Dem politicians take from this election is that they should not adopt positions unless they can defend them, honestly, in a one-on-one conversation with the median American voter, who is a white, non-college 50-yr-old living in a small-city suburb. I don't mean that Dems have to adopt the same positions as that median voter. I mean they have to be able to make the case for their positions to that voter in a coherent, honest fashion, rather than trying to obscure the position or pretending they really don't hold it.
Oct 16, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It's tough to interview Trump: he lies so relentlessly, and with such abandon, that you either have to spend half the interview fact-checking him and pushing back on his lies, or else just let him lie to your audience.
cnn.com/2024/10/16/pol… With most politicians, you figure they'll fudge a few facts, gild the lily to make themselves look better, dodge a tough question or two. That's manageable as an interviewer. But Trump will lie about anything and everything, which is hard to deal with.
Sep 30, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Dinesh D'Souza bucking to get sued for defamation again. His tweet is a lie. The people in the ad in question are not actors, and are in fact Republicans and former Trump voters who are supporting Harris. Story here:
savvymainline.com/2024/09/29/far…
The lies in D'Souza's tweet - which he's left up, even though he's been informed that it's false - came from a collection of lies in a tweet by Bad Hombre, who constructed a totally false conspiracy theory based on a mis-identification of the people in the ad. It got 59K likes. Image
Sep 16, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
What Vance says here is v. important - he thinks all Americans should not be in the same insurance risk pool. That would mean that older Americans who aren't yet 65 and Americans with pre-existing conditions would have to pay much more for health insurance than they now do. There were two core principles at the heart of Obamacare: guaranteed issue (everyone should be able to buy insurance) and community rating (adjusted for age, everyone should pay the same price for insurance). Both of those principles are very popular with Americans.
Aug 23, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
🧵The director of Project 2025 was chief of staff of Trump's Office of Personnel Management.

The author of the Project 2025 chapter on national defense served as acting Defense Secretary under Trump.

The author of the chapter on homeland security was head of DHS under Trump. Image The author of the Project 2025 chapter on the intelligence community worked in national intelligence under under Trump.

The author of the chapter on dismantling the EPA was chief of staff for the EPA under Trump.

The author of the chapter on HHS worked in HHS under Trump.
Aug 15, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The thread of comments to my tweet is hilarious. It's made up almost entirely of people who trust their vague memories of what grocery prices were like in January 2021 over the Bureau of Labor Statistics' systematic monthly data. They're speaking their truth - it's just not true. Image Swann's also correct that lots of people are just lying, mostly because they thibk the doomerist "grocery prices have doubled!" narrative is politically useful. Image
Aug 3, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is Trump unilaterally making up new conditions for a debate with Harris. It's not him agreeing to anything. After Biden withdrew, Trump was under no obligation to debate Harris under the conditions he'd agreed to with Biden. So it's fine that he's proposing new conditions for a debate with Harris. But It's not him announcing he's "agreed to debate" Harris.
Jul 19, 2024 • 9 tweets • 1 min read
This has become a typical Trump ramblefest with the usual "best in the history of the world" nonsense, but much more low energy than normal. He's picked it up a little at the end.

The best line by far has been "Kid Rock, sometimes referred to as ... Bob." I actually thought Trump was winding down, but instead he was just getting going. Actually interesting that he's spending so much time talking about his unpopular policies, like 100% tariffs.
Jul 16, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It was a terrible interview by Lester Holt, but this is what Biden's debate performance did: it ensured that he's going to be asked about his competence over and over. Biden knows that. So he has to be able to shift smoothly from these questions to what he wants to talk about. Dems can complain all they want about the media focusing on Biden's cognitive abilities, but it's not going away. So he needs to get dexterous at answering the questions, and then pivoting to make the case for himself.
Jul 15, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The myth making is out of control. George H.W. Bush flew 58 combat missions as a pilot against the Japanese, and successfully completed a bombing run in a burning plane before having to bail out had to bail into the Pacific Ocean, where he floated for hours before being rescued. Image JFK swam 3 1/2 miles through the Pacific while towing a crewmate after a Japanese destroyer smashed his PT Boat. John McCain spent 5 years in a North Vietnamese POW camp, enduring torture, because he refused to let the NVA release him before men who had been shot down before him.
Jul 9, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Historically inaccurate and ethically repulsive. James Madison, the single most important figure in the writing of the Constitution, said that even having a Congressional chaplain was "a palpable violation of equal rights as well as of Constitutional principles." Christian nationalism is miles more offensive than that.
Aug 13, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If you want to know why Republican primary voters keep nominating guaranteed losers like Doug Mastriano and Don Bolduc in potentially winnable races, it's in part because they think their crazy views are shared by a large majority of Americans. Image If Republican base voters had an even vaguely accurate view of public opinion, they would never have nominated so many hard-right MAGA candidates in winnable swing-state races in 2022. But they have an incredibly inaccurate view of public opinion.
Aug 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
1. One thing that's crucial to remember about Trump's attempt to pressure Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" is when that call happened. It did not happen, as many ppl seem to think, while Georgia was still counting or even re-counting votes.
alternet.org/more-than-a-do… 2. Instead, Trump's call to Raffensperger (during which he threatened him with criminal prosecution) happened on January 2. At that point, Georgia had already re-counted and hand-recounted all its votes, certified the election results, and its electoral votes had been cast.
Jun 25, 2023 • 11 tweets • 1 min read
Pro-appeasement politicians are scrambling to salvage their position, so they've decided to lie about what ppl were saying about Prigozhin. Exactly no one was calling him "a liberal reformer." Other than maybe Ted Cruz, JD Vance is the most cynical demagogue in American politics.