President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a new round of punishing tariffs, saying the United States will impose a 100% tariff on imported branded drugs, 25% tariff on imports of all heavy-duty trucks and 50% tariffs on kitchen cabinets.
Trump also said he would start charging a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture next week.
Future economists are going to love this time period. It’s basically a goldmine for papers, articles and books about the effects tariffs have. Sure, we have that sort of history already, but this time it’s very well documented. Current online economy has so many new numbers you can track. You should be able to look at the data and tell exactly what went wrong and how it was reflected on everything.
Separating the various fuck ups and disasters will be the hardest part.
Economics is a messy science where you’re constantly dealing with messy data. There are always several variables at play, and their countless interactions make interpretations super tricky. You can’t really make controlled double blind experiments to isolate the effect of a specific variable.
Oh yes this is just extra messy. Like the federal reserve being robbed by several loosely cooperating gangs with differing goals… During a riot caused by yet another group of gangs some of whom overlap.
A forensic nightmare within a clusterfuck.
It’s sort of like when we want to know something, but all experiments to find out would be highly unethical. So we wait for a madman or authoritarian regime to torture someone to find out the limits of human capability. Just with the economy instead.
Basically, in 2025 we are running a simulation to find out how much stress an economy can take before it collapses, and the goal is to actually get there.
Same goes for chemical safety. How do we know what the effects of mercury, lead, ammonia or sulfur dioxide are on humans? Tragic things have happened in the past, and the survivors just documented the results.
Yeah, but you can’t Gauge everything that way…
Or bleach… we should have great information on the maximum amount of ordinary household bleach that a human being can drink at this point.
To google scholar mobile chum!
With observational incident reports you can only get a list of symptoms and a very rough range of exposure. If you want something more detailed than that, you need a proper LD50 study.
Radiation is another great example of this
That is true. The demon core comes to mind as an extreme example. Also, Hisashi Ouchi paid a horrendous price in 1999.