On the one hand, I’m sure every economics blog on the Internet is already talking about this, including Paul Krugman who knows the subject way better than I ever will (and literally won a Nobel Prize for his work on it). And I have other things I’d rather be writing about, like the Index of Necessary Expenditure. But on the other hand, when something this big happens in economics, it just feels like there’s really no alternative: I have to talk about tariffs right now.
What is a tariff, anyway?
This feels like a really basic question, but it also seems like a lot of people don’t really understand tariffs, or didn’t when they voted for Trump.
A tariff, quite simply, is an import tax. It’s a tax that you impose on imported goods (either a particular kind, or from a particular country, or just across the board). On paper, it is generally paid by the company importing the goods, but as I wrote about in my sequence on tax incidence, that doesn’t matter. What matters is how prices change in response to the tax, and this means that in real terms, prices will go up.
In fact, in some sense that’s the goal of a protectionist tariff, because you’re trying to fix the fact that local producers can’t compete on the global market. So you compensate by making international firms pay higher taxes, so that the local producers can charge higher prices and still compete. So anyone who is saying that tariffs won’t raise prices is either ignorant or lying: Raising prices is what tariffs do.
Why are people so surprised?
The thing that surprises me about all this, (a bit ironically) is how surprised people seem to be. Trump ran his whole campaign promising two things: Deport all the immigrants, and massive tariffs on all trade. Most of his messaging was bizarre and incoherent, but on those two topics he was very consistent. So why in the world are people—including stock traders, who are supposedly savvy on these things—so utterly shocked that he has actually done precisely what he promised he would do?
What did people think Trump meant when he said these things? Did they assume he was bluffing? Did they think cooler heads in his administration would prevail (if so, whose?)?
But I will admit that even I am surprised at just how big the tariffs are. I knew they would be big, but I did not expect them to be this big.
How big?
Well, take a look at this graph:
The average tariff rate on US imports will now be higher than it was at the peak in 1930 with the Smoot-Hawley Act. Moreover, Smoot-Hawley was passed during a time when protectionist tariffs were already in place, while Trump’s tariffs come at a time when tariffs had previously been near zero—so the change is dramatically more sudden.
This is worse than Smoot-Hawley.
For the uninitiated, Smoot-Hawley was a disaster. Several countries retaliated with their own tariffs, and the resulting trade war clearly exacerbated the Great Depression, not only in the US but around the world. World trade dropped by an astonishing 66% over the next few years. It’s still debated as to how much of the depression was caused by the tariffs; most economists believe that the gold standard was the bigger culprit. But it definitely made it worse.
Politically, the aftermath cost the Republicans (including Smoot and Hawley themselves) several seats in Congress. (I guess maybe the silver lining here is we can hope this will do the same?)
And I would now like to remind you that these tariffs are bigger than Smoot-Hawley’s and were implemented more suddenly.
Unlike in 1930, we are not currently in a depression—though nor is our economy as hunky-dory as a lot of pundits seem to think, once we consider things like the Index of Necessary Expenditure. But stock markets do seem to be crashing, and if trade drops as much as it did in the 1930s—and why wouldn’t it?—we may very well end up in another depression.
And it’s not as if we didn’t warn you all. Economists across the political spectrum have been speaking out against Trump’s tariffs from the beginning, and nobody listened to us.
So basically the mood of all economists right now is:
I was only able to find sufficient data to calculate the Index of Necessary Expenditure back to 1990. But I found a fairly consistent pattern that the INE grew at a rate about 20% faster than the CPI over that period, so I decided to take a look at what longer-term income growth looks like if we extrapolate that pattern back further in time.
The result is this graph:
Using the CPI, real per-capita GDP in the US (in 2024 dollars) has grown from $25,760 in 1950 to $85,779 today—increasing by a factor of 3.33. Even accounting for increased inequality and the fact that more families have two income earners, that’s still a substantial increase.
But using the extrapolated INE, real per-capita GDP has only grown from $43,622 in 1950 to $85,779 today—increasing by only a factor of 1.97. This is a much smaller increase, especially when we adjusted for increased inequality and increased employment for women.
Even without the extrapolation, it’s still clear that real INE-adjusted incomes have were basically stagnant in the 2000s, increased rather slowly in the 2020s, and then actually dropped in 2022 after a bunch of government assistance ended. What looked, under the CPI, like steadily increasing real income was actually more like treading water.
This ratio was around 6 in the 1950s, then began to fall until in the 1970s it stabilized around 4. It began to slowly creep back up, but then absolutely skyrocketed in the 2000s before the 2008 crash. Now it has been rising again, and is now above 7, the highest it has been since the Second World War. (Does this mean we’re due for another crash? I’d bet as much.)
What does this mean? It means that a typical family used to be able to afford a typical house with only four years of their total income—and now would require seven. In that sense, homes are now 75% more expensive today than they were in the 1970s.
Similar arguments can be made for the rising costs of education and healthcare; while many prices have not grown much (gasoline) or even fallen (jewelry and technology), these necessities have continued to grow more and more expensive, not simply in nominal terms, but even compared to the median income.
This is further evidence that our standard measures of “inflation” and “real income” are fundamentally inadequate. They simply aren’t accurately reflecting the real cost of living for most American families. Even in many times when it seemed “inflation” was low and “real income” was growing, in fact it was growing harder and harder to afford vital necessities such as housing, education, and healthcare.
This economic malaise may have been what contributed to the widespread low opinion of Biden’s economy. While the official figures looked good, people’s lives weren’t actually getting better.
Yet this is still no excuse for those who voted for Trump; even the policies he proudly announced he would do—like tariffs and deportations—have clearly made these problems worse, and this was not only foreseeable but actually foreseen by the vast majority of the world’s economists. Then there are all the things he didn’t even say he would do but is now doing, like cozying up to Putin, alienating our closest allies, and discussing “methods” for achieving an unconstitutional third term.
Indeed, it honestly feels quite futile to even reflect upon what was wrong with our economy even when things seemed to be running smoothly, because now things are rapidly getting worse, and showing no sign of getting better in any way any time soon.
I’m still reeling from the fact that Donald Trump was re-elected President. He seemed obviously horrible at the time, and he still seems horrible now, for many of the same reasons as before (we all knew the tariffs were coming, and I think deep down we knew he would sell out Ukraine because he loves Putin), as well as some brand new ones (I did not predict DOGE would gain access to all the government payment systems, nor that Trump would want to start a “crypto fund”). Kamala Harris was not an ideal candidate, but she was a good candidate, and the comparison between the two could not have been starker.
Now that the dust has cleared and we have good data on voting patterns, I am now less convinced than I was that racism and sexism were decisive against Harris. I think they probably hurt her some, but given that she actually lost the most ground among men of color, racism seems like it really couldn’t have been a big factor. Sexism seems more likely to be a significant factor, but the fact that Harris greatly underperformed Hillary Clinton among Latina women at least complicates that view.
A lot of voters insisted that they voted on “inflation” or “the economy”. Setting aside for a moment how absurd it was—even at the time—to think that Trump (he of the tariffs and mass deportations!) was going to do anything beneficial for the economy, I would like to better understand how people could be so insistent that the economy was bad even though standard statistical measures said it was doing fine.
Krugman believes it was a “vibecession”, where people thought the economy was bad even though it wasn’t. I think there may be some truth to this.
But today I’d like to evaluate another possibility, that what people were really reacting against was not inflation per se but necessitization.
I first wrote about necessitization in 2020; as far as I know, the term is my own coinage. The basic notion is that while prices overall may not have risen all that much, prices of necessities have risen much faster, and the result is that people feel squeezed by the economy even as CPI growth remains low.
In this post I’d like to more directly evaluate that notion, by constructing an index of necessary expenditure (INE).
The core idea here is this:
What would you continue to buy, in roughly the same amounts, even if it doubled in price, because you simply can’t do without it?
For example, this is clearly true of housing: You can rent or you can own, but can’t not have a house. And nor are most families going to buy multiple houses—and they can’t buy partial houses.
It’s also true of healthcare: You need whatever healthcare you need. Yes, depending on your conditions, you maybe could go without, but not without suffering, potentially greatly. Nor are you going to go out and buy a bunch of extra healthcare just because it’s cheap. You need what you need.
I think it’s largely true of education as well: You want your kids to go to college. If college gets more expensive, you might—of necessity—send them to a worse school or not allow them to complete their degree, but this would feel like a great hardship for your family. And in today’s economy you can’t not send your kids to college.
But this is not true of technology: While there is a case to be made that in today’s society you need a laptop in the house, the fact is that people didn’t used to have those not that long ago, and if they suddenly got a lot cheaper you very well might buy another one.
Well, it just so happens that housing, healthcare, and education have all gotten radically more expensive over time, while technology has gotten radically cheaper. So prima facie, this is looking pretty plausible.
But I wanted to get more precise about it. So here is the index I have constructed. I consider a family of four, two adults, two kids, making the median household income.
To get the median income, I’ll use this FRED series for median household income, then use this table of median federal tax burden to get an after-tax wage. (State taxes vary too much for me to usefully include them.) Since the tax table ends in 2020 which was anomalous, I’m going to extrapolate that 2021-2024 should be about the same as 2019.
I assume the kids go to public school, but the parents are saving up for college; to make the math simple, I’ll assume the family is saving enough for each kid to graduate from with a four-year degree from a public university, and that saving is spread over 16 years of the child’s life. 2*4/16 = 0.5; this means that each year the family needs to come up with 0.5 years of cost of attendance. (I had to get the last few years from here, but the numbers are comparable.)
I assume the family owns two cars—both working full time, they kinda have to—which I amortize over 10 year lifetimes; 2*1/10 = 0.2, so each year the family pays 0.2 times the value of an average midsize car. (The current average new car price is $33226; I then use the CPI for cars to figure out what it was in previous years.)
I assume they pay a 30-year mortgage on the median home; they would pay interest on this mortgage, so I need to factor that in. I’ll assume they pay the average mortgage rate in that year, but I don’t want to have to do a full mortgage calculation (including PMI, points, down payment etc.) for each year, so I’ll say that they amount they pay is (1/30 + 0.5 (interest rate))*(home value) per year, which seems to be a reasonable approximation over the relevant range.
I assume that both adults have a 15-mile commute (this seems roughly commensurate with the current mean commute time of 26 minutes), both adults work 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year, and their cars get the median level of gas mileage. This means that they consume 2*15*2*5*50/(median MPG) = 15000/(median MPG) gallons of gasoline per year. I’ll use this BTS data for gas mileage. I’m intentionally not using median gasoline consumption, because when gas is cheap, people might take more road trips, which is consumption that could be avoided without great hardship when gas gets expensive. I will also assume that the kids take the bus to school, so that doesn’t contribute to the gasoline cost.
That I will multiply by the average price of gasoline in June of that year, which I have from the EIA since 1993. (I’ll extrapolate 1990-1992 as the same as 1993, which is conservative.)
I will assume that the family owns 2 cell phones, 1 computer, and 1 television. This is tricky, because the quality of these tech items has dramatically increased over time.
If you try to measure with equivalent buying power (e.g. a 1 MHz computer, a 20-inch CRT TV), then you’ll find that these items have gotten radically cheaper; $1000 in 1950 would only buy as much TV as $7 today, and a $50 Raspberry Pi‘s 2.4 GHz processor is 150 times faster than the 16 MHz offered by an Apple Powerbook in 1991—despite the latter selling for $2500 nominally. So in dollars per gigahertz, the price of computers has fallen by an astonishing 7,500 times just since 1990.
But I think that’s an unrealistic comparison. The standards for what was considered necessary have also increased over time. I actually think it’s quite fair to assume that people have spent a roughly constant nominal amount on these items: about $500 for a TV, $1000 for a computer, and $500 for a cell phone. I’ll also assume that the TV and phones are good for 5 years while the computer is good for 2 years, which makes the total annual expenditure for 2 phones, a TV, and a computer equal to 2/5*500 + 1/5*500 + 1/2*1000 = 800. This is about what a family must spend every year to feel like they have an adequate amount of digital technology.
I will assume that the family buys the equivalent of five months of infant care per year; they surely spend more than this (in either time or money) when they have actual infants, but less as the kids grow. This amounts to about $5000 today, but was only $1600 in 1990—a 214% increase, or 3.42% per year.
For food expenditure, I’m going to use the USDA’s thrifty plan for June of that year. I’ll use the figures assuming that one child is 6 and the other is 9. I don’t have data before 1994, so I’ll extrapolate that with the average growth rate of 3.2%.
The figures I had the hardest time getting were for utilities. It’s also difficult to know what to include: Is Internet access a necessity? Probably, nowadays—but not in 1990. Should I separate electric and natural gas, even though they are partial substitutes? But using these figures I estimate that utility costs rise at about 0.8% per year in CPI-adjusted terms, so what I’ll do is benchmark to $3800 in 2016 and assume that utility costs have risen by (0.8% + inflation rate) per year each year.
Healthcare is also a tough one; pardon the heteronormativity, but for simplicity I’m going to use the mean personal healthcare expenditures for one man and woman (aged 19-44) and one boy and one girl (aged 0-18). Unfortunately I was only able to find that for two-year intervals in the range from 2002 to 2020, so I interpolated and extrapolated both directions assuming the same average growth rate of 3.5%.
So let’s summarize what all is included here:
Estimated payment on a mortgage
0.5 years of college tuition
amortized cost of 2 cars
7500/(median MPG) gallons of gasoline
amortized cost of 2 phones, 1 computer, and 1 television
average spending on clothes
11% of income on food
Estimated utilities spending
Estimated childcare equivalent to five months of infant care
Healthcare for one man, one woman, one boy, one girl
There are obviously many criticisms you could make of these choices. If I were writing a proper paper, I would search harder for better data and run robustness checks over the various estimation and extrapolation assumptions. But for these purposes I really just want a ballpark figure, something that will give me a sense of what rising cost of living feels like to most people.
What I found absolutely floored me. Over the range from 1990 to 2024:
The Index of Necessary Expenditure rose by an average of 3.45% per year, almost a full percentage point higher than the average CPI inflation of 2.62% per year.
Over the same period, after-tax income rose at a rate of 3.31%, faster than CPI inflation, but slightly slower than the growth rate of INE.
The Index of Necessary Expenditure was over 100% of median after-tax household income every year except 2020.
Since 2021, the Index of Necessary Expenditure has risen at an average rate of 5.74%, compared to CPI inflation of only 2.66%. In that same time, after-tax income has only grown at a rate of 4.94%.
Point 3 is the one that really stunned me. The only time in the last 34 years that a family of four has been able to actually pay for all necessities—just necessities—on a typical household income was during the COVID pandemic, and that in turn was only because the federal tax burden had been radically reduced in response to the crisis. This means that every single year, a typical American family has been either going further and further into debt, or scrimping on something really important—like healthcare or education.
No wonder people feel like the economy is failing them! It is!
In fact, I can even make sense now of how Trump could convince people with “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” in 2024 looking back at 2020—while the pandemic was horrific and the disruption to the economy was massive, thanks to the US government finally actually being generous to its citizens for once, people could just about actually make ends meet. That one year. In my entire life.
This is why people felt betrayed by Biden’s economy. For the first time most of us could remember, we actually had this brief moment when we could pay for everything we needed and still have money left over. And then, when things went back to “normal”, it was taken away from us. We were back to no longer making ends meet.
When I went into this, I expected to see that the INE had risen faster than both inflation and income, which was indeed the case. But I expected to find that INE was a large but manageable proportion of household income—maybe 70% or 80%—and slowly growing. Instead, I found that INE was greater than 100% of income in every year but one.
And the truth is, I’m not sure I’ve adequately covered all necessary spending! My figures for childcare and utilities are the most uncertain; those could easily go up or down by quite a bit. But even if I exclude them completely, the reduced INE is still greater than income in most years.
Suddenly the way people feel about the economy makes a lot more sense to me.
This post will go live on my 37th birthday. I’m now at an age where birthdays don’t really feel like a good thing.
This past year has been one of my worst ever.
It started with returning home from the UK, burnt out, depressed, suffering from frequent debilitating migraines. I had no job prospects, and I was too depressed to search for any. I moved in with my mother, who lately has been suffering health problems of her own.
Gradually, far too gradually, some aspects of my situation improved; my migraines are now better controlled, my depression has been reduced. I am now able to search for jobs at least—but I still haven’t found one. I would say that my mother’s health is better than it was—but several of her conditions are chronic, and much of this struggle will continue indefinitely.
I look back on this year feeling shame, despair, failure and defeat. I haven’t published anything—either fiction, nonfiction, or scientific—in years, and after months of searching I still haven’t found a job that would let me and my husband move to a home of our own. My six figures of student debt are now in forbearance, because the SAVE plan was struck down in court. (At least they’re not accruing interest….) I can’t think of anything I’ve done this year that I would count as a meaningful accomplishment. I feel like I’m just treading water, trying not to drown.
I see others my age finding careers, buying homes, starting families. Honestly they’re a little old to be doing these things now—we Millennials have drawn the short straw on homeownership for sure. (The median age of first-time homebuyers is now 38 years old—the highest ever recorded. In 1981, it was only 29.) I don’t see that happening for me any time soon, and I feel a deep grief over that.
I have not had a year go this badly since high school, when I was struggling even more with migraines and depression. Back then I had debilitating migraines multiple times per week, and my depression sometimes kept me from getting out of bed. I even had suicidal thoughts for a time, though I never made any plans or attempts.
Somehow, despite all that, I still managed to maintain straight As in high school and became a kind of de facto valedictorian. (My school technically didn’t have a valedictorian, but I had the best grades, and I successfully petitioned for special dispensation to deliver a much longer graduation speech than any other student.) Some would say this was because I was so brilliant, but I say it was because high school was too easy—and that this set me up for unrealistic expectations later in life. I am a poster child for Gifted Kid Syndrome and Impostor Syndrome. Honestly, maybe I would have gotten better help for my conditions sooner if my grades had slipped.
Will the coming year be better?
In some ways, probably. Now that my migraines and depression are better controlled—but by no means gone—I have been able to actively search for jobs, and I should be able to find one that fits me eventually (or so I keep trying to convince myself, when it all feels hopeless and pointless). And once I do have a job, whenever that happens, I might be able to start saving up for a home and finally move forward into feeling like a proper adult in this society.
But I look to the coming year feeling fear and dread, as Trump will soon take office and already looks primed to be far worse the second time around. In all likelihood I personally won’t suffer very much from Trump’s incompetence and malfeasance—but millions of other people will, and I don’t know how I can help them, especially when I seem so ineffectual at helping myself.
In my last several posts I’ve been taking down religion and religious morality. So it might seem strange, or even hypocritical, that I would celebrate Christmas, which is widely regarded as a Christian religious holiday. Allow me to explain.
First of all, Christmas is much older than Christianity.
It had other names before: Solstice celebrations, Saturnalia, Yuletide. But human beings of a wide variety of cultures around the world have been celebrating some kind of winter festival around the solstice since time immemorial.
Indeed, many of the traditions we associate with Christmas, such as decorating trees and having an—ahem—Yule log, are in fact derived from pre-Christian traditions that Christians simply adopted.
The reason different regions have their own unique Christmas traditions, such as Krampus, is most likely that these regions already had such traditions surrounding their winter festivals which likewise got absorbed into Christmas once Christianity took over. (Though oddly enough, Mari Lwyd seems to be much more recent, created in the 1800s.)
In fact, Christmas really has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus.
The date of December 25 was almost certainly chosen in order to coincide—and therefore compete—with the existing Roman holiday of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (literally, “the birthday of the invincible sun”), an ancient solstice celebration. Today the Winter Solstice is slightly earlier, but in the Julian calendar it was December 25.
In the past, Christians have sometimes suppressed Christmas celebration.
Particularly during the 17th century, most Protestant sects, especially the Puritans, regarded Christmas as a Catholic thing, and therefore strongly discouraged their own adherents from celebrating it.
Besides, Christmas is very secularized at this point.
Many have bemoaned its materialistic nature—and even economists have claimed it is “inefficient”—but gift-giving has become a central part of the celebration of Christmas, despite it being a relatively recent addition. Santa Claus has a whole fantasy magic narrative woven around him that is the source of countless movies and has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity.
I celebrate because we celebrate.
When I celebrate Christmas, I’m also celebrating Saturnalia, and Yuletide, and many of the hundreds of other solstice celebrations and winter festivals that human cultures around the world have held for thousands of years. I’m placing myself within a grander context, a unified human behavior that crosses lines of race, religion, and nationality.
Not all cultures celebrate the Winter Solstice, but a huge number do—and those that don’t have their own celebrations which often involve music and feasting and gift-giving too.
So Merry Christmas, and Happy Yuletide, and Io Saturnalia to you all.
After the election results were announced, one of the first things I saw on social media, aside from the shock and panic among most of my friends and acquaintances, was various people trying to explain what happened this election by some flaw in Kamala Harris or her campaign.
They said it was too much identity politics, or else that Black and Latino men felt their interests were being ignored—somehow it was both of those things.
They said it was her support of Israel in its war crimes in Gaza—even though Trump supports them even more.
They said that Harris was wrong to court endorsements by Republicans—even though endorsements form the other side are exactly the sort of thing that usually convinces undecided voters.
None of these explanations actually hold much water.
BUT EVEN IF THEY DID, IT WOULDN’T MATTER.
I could stipulate that Harris and her campaign had all of these failures and more. I could agree that she’s the worst candidate the Democrats have fielded in decades. (She wasn’t.)
THE ALTERNATIVE WAS DONALD TRUMP.
Trump is so terrible that he utterly eclipses any failings that could reasonably be attributed to Harris. He is racist, fascist, authoritarian, bigoted, incompetent, narcissistic, egomaniacal, corrupt, a liar, a cheat, an insurrectionist, a sexual predator, and a convicted criminal. He shows just as much cognitive decline as Biden did, but no one on his side asked him to step down because of it. His proposed tariffs would cause massive economic harm for virtually no benefit, and his planned mass deportations are a human rights violation (and also likely an economic disaster). He will most likely implement some variant of Project 2025, which is absolutely full of terrible, dangerous policies. Historians agree he was one of the worst Presidents we’ve ever had.
Indeed, Trump is so terrible that there really can’t be any good reasons to re-elect him. We are left only with bad reasons.
I know of two, and both of them are horrifying.
The first is that Kamala Harris is a woman of color, and a lot of Americans just weren’t willing to put a woman of color in charge. Indeed, sexism seems to be a stronger effect here than racism, because Barack Obama made it but Hillary Clinton didn’t.
The second is that Trump and other Republicans successfully created a whole propaganda system that allows them to indoctrinate millions of people with disinformation. Part of their strategy involves systematically discrediting all mainstream sources, from journalists to scientists, so that they can replace the truth with whatever lies they want.
It was this disinformation that convinced millions of Americans that the economy was in shambles when it was doing remarkably well, convinced them that crime is rising when it is actually falling, convinced them that illegal immigrants were eating people’s pets. Once Republicans had successfully made people doubt all mainstream sources, they could simply substitute whatever beliefs were most convenient for their goals.
Democrats and Republicans are no longer operating with the same set of facts. I’m not claiming that Democrats are completely without bias, but there is a very clear difference: When scientists and journalists report that a widely-held belief by Democrats is false, most Democrats change their beliefs. When the same happens to Republicans, they just become further convinced that scientists and journalists are liars.
What happens now?
In the worst-case scenario, Trump will successfully surround himself with enough sycophants to undermine the checks and balances in our government and actually become an authoritarian dictator. I still believe that this is unlikely, but I can’t rule it out. I am certain that he would want to do this if he thought he could pull it off. (His own chief of staff has said so!)
Even if that worst-case doesn’t come to pass, things will still be very bad for millions of people. Immigrants will be forcibly removed from their homes. Trans people will face even more discrimination. Abortion may be banned nationwide. We may withdraw our support from Ukraine, and that may allow Russia to win the war. Environmental regulations will be repealed. Much or all of our recent progress at fighting climate change could be reversed. Voter suppression efforts will intensify. Yet more far-right judges will be appointed, and they will make far-right rulings. And tax cuts on the rich will make our already staggering, unsustainable inequality even worse.
Indeed, it’s not clear that this will be good even for the people who voted for Trump. (Of course it will be good for Trump himself and his closest lackeys.) The people who voted based on a conviction that the economy was bad won’t see the economy improve. The people who felt ignored by the Democrats will continue to be even more ignored by the Republicans. The people who were tired of identity politics aren’t going to make us care any less about racism and sexism by electing a racist misogynist. The working-class people who were voting against “liberal elites” will see their taxes raised and their groceries more expensive and their wages reduced.
I guess if people really hate immigrants and want them gone, they may get their wish when millions of immigrants are taken from their homes. And the rich will be largely insulated from the harms, while getting those tax cuts they love so much. So that’s some kind of benefit at least.
But mostly, this was an awful outcome, and the next four years will be progressively more and more awful, until hopefully—hopefully—Trump leaves office and we get another chance at something better. That is, if he hasn’t taken over and become a dictator by then.
What can we do to make things less bad?
I’m seeing a lot of people talking about grassroots organizing and mutual aid. I think these are good things, but honestly I fear they just aren’t going to be enough. The United States government is the most powerful institution in the world, and we have just handed control of it over to a madman.
Maybe we will need to organize mass protests. Maybe we will need to take some kind of radical direct action. I don’t know what to do. This all just feels so overwhelming.
I don’t want to give in to despair. I want to believe that we can still make things better. But right now, things feel awfully bleak.
It should not be this close. It should never have been this close. We have already seen what Trump is like in office, and it should have made absolutely no one happy. He is authoritarian, corrupt, incompetent, and narcissistic, and lately he’s starting to show signs of cognitive decline. He is a convicted felon and was involved in an attempted insurrection. His heavy-handed trade tariffs would surely cause severe economic damage both here and abroad, and above all, he wants to roll back rights for millions of Americans.
Almost anyone would be better than Trump. Harris would be obviously, dramatically better in almost every way. Yet somehow Trump is still doing well in the polls, and could absolutely still win this.
Please, do everything you can to stop that from happening.
Donate. Volunteer. Get out the vote. And above all, vote.
Part of the problem is our two-party system, which comes ultimately from our plurality voting system. As RangeVoting.org has remarked, our current system is basically the worst possible system that can still be considered democratic. Range voting would be clearly the best system, but failing that, at least we could have approval voting, or some kind of ranked-choice system. Only voting for a single candidate causes huge, fundamental flaws in representation, especially when it comes to candidate cloning: Multiple similar candidates that people like can lose to a single candidate that people dislike, because the vote gets split between them.
In fact, that’s almost certainly what happened with Trump: The only reason he won the primary the first time was that he had a small group of ardent supporters, while all the other candidates were similar and so got the mainstream Republican vote split between them. (Though it looks like the second time around he’d still win even if all the other similar candidates were consolidated—which frankly horrifies me.)
But it isn’t just our voting system. The really terrifying thing about Trump is how popular he is among Republicans. Democrats hate him, but Republicans love him. I have tried talking with Republican family members about what they like about Trump, and they struggle to give me a sensible answer. It’s not his personality or his competence (how could it be?). For the most part, it wasn’t even particular policies he supports. It was just this weird free-floating belief that he was a good President and would be again.
There was one major exception to that: Single-issue voters who want to ban abortion. For these people, the only thing that matters is that Trump appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. I don’t know what to say to such people, since it seems so obvious to me that (1) a total abortion ban is too extreme, even if you want to reduce the abortion rate, (2) there are so many other issues that matter aside from abortion; you can’t simply ignore them all, (3) several other Republican candidates are equally committed to banning abortion but not nearly as corrupt or incompetent, and (4) the Supreme Court has already been appointed; there’s nothing more for Trump to do in that department that he hasn’t already done. But I guess there is at least something resembling a coherent policy preference here, if a baffling one.
Others also talked about his ideas on trade and immigration, but they didn’t seem to have a coherent idea of what a sensible trade or immigration policy looks like. They imagined that it was a reasonable thing to simply tariff all imports massively or expel all immigrants, despite the former being economically absurd and the latter being a human rights violation (and also an economic disaster). I guess that also counts as a policy preference, but it’s not simply baffling; it’s horrifying. I don’t know what to say to these people either.
But maybe that’s a terror I need to come to terms with: Some people don’t like Trump in spite of his terrible policy ideas; they like him because of them. They want a world where rights are rolled back for minorities and LGBT people and (above all) immigrants. They want a world where global trade is shut down and replaced by autarky. They imagine that these changes will somehow benefit them, even when all the evidence suggests that it would do nothing of the sort.
I have never feared Trump himself nearly so much as I fear the people of a country that could elect him. And should we re-elect him, I will fear the people of this country even more.
There has been unusually high inflation the past few years, mostly attributable to the COVID pandemic and its aftermath. But groceries in particular seem to have gotten especially more expensive. We’ve all felt it: Eggs, milk, and toilet paper especially soared to extreme prices and then, even when they came back down, never came down all the way.
Why would this be?
Did it involve supply chain disruptions? Sure. Was it related to the war in Ukraine? Probably.
But it clearly wasn’t just those things—because, as the FTC recently found, grocery stores have been colluding and price-gouging. Large grocery chains like Walmart and Kroger have a lot of market power, and they used that power to raise prices considerably faster than was necessary to keep up with their increased costs; as a result, they made record profits. Their costs did genuinely increase, but they increased their prices even more, and ended up being better off.
The big chains were also better able to protect their own supply chains than smaller companies, and so the effects of the pandemic further entrenched the market power of a handful of corporations. Some of them also imposed strict delivery requirements on their suppliers, pressuring them to prioritize the big companies over the small ones.
This kind of thing is what happens when we let oligopolies take control. When only a few companies control the market, prices go up, quality goes down, and inequality gets worse.
For far too long, institutions like the FTC have failed to challenge the ever tighter concentration of our markets in the hands of a small number of huge corporations.
And most of these lists used to be longer. Disney recently acquired 21st Century Fox. Viacom recently merged with CBS and then became Paramount. Universal recently acquired EMI. Our markets aren’t simply alarmingly concentrated; they have also been getting more concentrated over time.
Institutions like the FTC are supposed to be protecting us from oligopolies, by ensuring that corporations can’t merge and acquire each other once they reach a certain market share. But decades of underfunding and laissez-faire ideology have weakened these institutions. So many mergers that obviously shouldn’t have been allowed were allowed, because no regulatory agency had the will and the strength to stop them.
Hopefully this is a sign that the FTC has found its teeth again, and will continue to prosecute anti-trust cases against oligopolies. A lot of that may depend on who ends up in the White House this November.
First of all, there’s Trump, who is now on record saying “after this one, you won’t have to vote anymore”. (His own side is trying to downplay this, but does that not sound incredibly authoritarian? Is he not suggesting that there will be no future elections, or that all future elections will be shams? How else are we supposed to interpret this?)
Second, we have had a major candidate for President suddenly step down in the middle of the campaign, leaving his Vice President to take on the nomination. No previous candidate has ever stepped down this late in the race.
But third and perhaps most importantly, we have a woman of color running as a major party candidate for President of the United States. Even if she loses, it will be historic. And if she wins, it will be even more so.
I do think that Biden was right to step down. The narrative had swung too hard against him: People saw him as old, weak, even senile. Whether or not this was really an accurate assessment of his abilities, I honestly don’t know. But I do know that enough people believed it that it was clearly hurting his chances of winning the election—and when the alternative is Trump, that’s just not something we could afford.
But now the big question arises:
Can Kamala Harris succeed where Joe Biden could not?
But will that passion really translate to electoral success where we need it most?
A more objective answer comes from looking at poll numbers: Are hers better than his? Yes, they are, by several percentage points—but it still looks like a tossup with Trump. Depending on which poll you read on which day, Harris may be up by several points—or Trump may be ahead by a few points instead. Basically, we are within margin of error here.
This is scary particularly because of the idiocy of the Electoral College; right now it looks like the most likely scenario is that Harris wins the popular vote, but Trump still becomes President—just like what happened with Hillary Clinton the first time Trump won.
The Electoral College was supposed to prevent “tyranny of the majority” by stopping authoritarian populist demagogues from taking office. Since it literally caused exactly the outcome it was designed to prevent, it has clearly failed, and needs to be destroyed. Seriously, we need to enact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact ASAP. It would only take a few more states—or one big state—to put us over the threshold and render the Electoral College irrelevant.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem very likely to happen in time for November. Which means that in order to win this election, we have to not only get the most votes; we also need to win enough swing states. It’s incredibly stupid and undemocratic that this is the case, but it is the case. (Frankly, it’s stupid and undemocratic that we have a single first-past-the-post vote instead of ranked-choice or range voting; but that’s also something we seem to be stuck with for the time being.)
A lot of this is going to come down to who Harris chooses as her running mate. Fortunately, Trump seems to have chosen a pretty bad choice in J. D. Vance; that’s good news for Democrats, and ultimately good news for America. Harris is a lot more competent than Trump, and will almost certainly choose a better running mate.
And perhaps that, in the end, is the greatest reason to have hope:
I have never understood how this Presidential election is a close one. On the one hand, we have a decent President with many redeeming qualities who has done a great job, but is getting old; on the other hand, we have a narcissistic, authoritarian con man (who is almost as old). It should be obvious who the right choice is here.
And yet, half the country disagrees. I really don’t get it. Other Republican candidates actually have had redeeming qualities, and I could understand why someone might support them; but Trump has basically none.
I have even asked some of my relatives who support Trump why they do, what they see in him, and I could never get a straight answer.
I now think I know why: They don’t want to admit the true answer.
Political scientists have been studying this, and they’ve come to some very unsettling conclusions. The two strongest predictors of support for Trump are authoritarianism and hatred of minorities.
In other words, people support Trump not in spite of what makes him awful, but because of it. They are happy to finally have a political publicly supporting their hateful, bigoted views. And since they believe in authoritarian hierarchy, his desire to become a dictator doesn’t worry them; they may even welcome it, believing that he’ll use that power to hurt the right people. They like him because he promises retribution against social change. He also uses a lot of fear-mongering.
This isn’t the conclusion I was hoping for. I wanted there to be something sympathetic, some alternative view of the world that could be reasoned with. But when bigotry and authoritarianism are the main predictors of a candidate’s support, it seems that reasonableness has pretty much failed.
I wanted there to be something I had missed, something I wasn’t seeing about Trump—or about Biden—that would explain how good, reasonable people could support the former over the latter. But the data just doesn’t seem to show anything. There is an urban/rural divide; there is a generational divide; and there is an educational divide. Maybe there’s something there; certainly I can sympathize with old people in rural areas with low education. But by far the best way to tell whether someone supports Trump is to find out whether they are racist, sexist, xenophobic, and authoritarian. How am I supposed to sympathize with that? Where can we find common ground here?
There seems to be something deep and primal that motivates Trump supporters: Fear of change, tribal identity, or simply anger. It doesn’t seem to be rational. Ask them what policies Trump has done or plans to do that they like, and they often can’t name any. But they are certain in their hearts that he will “Make America Great Again”.
What do we do about this? We can win this election—maybe—but that’s only the beginning. Somehow we need to root out the bigotry that drives support for Trump and his ilk, and I really don’t know how to do that.
I don’t know what else to say here. This all feels so bleak. This election has become a battle for the soul of America: Are we a pluralistic democracy that celebrates diversity, or are we a nation of racist, sexist, xenophobic authoritarians?
Did we push too hard, too fast for social change? Did we leave too many people behind, people who felt coerced into compliance rather than persuaded of our moral correctness? Is this a temporary backlash that we can bear as the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice? Or is this the beginning of a slow and agonizing march toward neo-fascism?
I have never feared Trump himself nearly so much as I fear a nation that could elect him—especially one that could re-elect him.
Human Economics 