#impracticality — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

I am coming around to Brad DeLong’s view that Chaos Monkey is in charge.

I was going to write about the specious reasoning behind the copper tariffs announced earlier this week, but now, having read a little more about it, I hesitate even to call it reasoning. I am tempted to say that the story Howard Lutnick is telling about “the idea” of “[bringing] copper production home” by imposing tariffs on imports is an example of magical thinking, but that would imply that the idea is a serious idea, that it involved actual planning or something that can actually be called thinking, and also that that thinking carries some charm. It shows none, except perhaps as an arbitrage opportunity.

For similar reasons I resist even the Globe and Mail’s characterization of this idea of a concept of a plan as a “pipedream.” Dreams, including those from the pipe, can be illuminating; this is smoke and mirrors. What we’ve got here is at best a travesty of industrial policy, a tout, a vulgar ruse, flattery, hype, and bluster instead of responsible government.

The idea of a concept of a plan is unworkable in the short term for everyone but the commodity traders, confusing and offensive to trading partners like Chile (the source of around 65 percent of US copper), and (I’ll wager) the smart people are just politely hedging — and trying to cover their bets and not draw ire — when they say they are cautiously optimistic or taking a wait-and-see attitude.

I am more and more inclined lately toward the view of Brad DeLong, who, writing about a different subject (armaments to Ukraine), says that what we are seeing on nearly every front is not policy or ideas; it’s chaos monkey:

The absence of even a pale shadow or a bad approximation to a coherent policy process under Trump’s administration renders both allies and adversaries unable to predict American actions. That undermines global stability. In the world of international relations, predictability is not a luxury but a necessity. Nations calibrate their own policies, investments, and security arrangements based on expectations about the behavior of others—particularly when it comes to a superpower like the United States.
…when American foreign policy becomes a function of—I was going to say “presidential whim, as it has under Trump”, but that is wrong, isn’t it? That imposes more structure on the process than it in fact has. Chaos monkey is the only term even half-adequate. And so the result is a kind of international vertigo….
The net effect is a world system where trust erodes and the risk of miscalculation—and thus catastrophe—increases.

Postscript, 13 July 25: Krugman makes a similar point in this post: “I Don’t Disapprove of Trump’s Strategy, Because He Doesn’t Have One.” Correct. I balk a little at the final clauses of his final sentence: “there clearly isn’t a strategy, just the prejudices of an ignorant man and his enablers.” Sure, Trump demonstrates prejudice and ignorance in nearly all that he does, and having grown up in the New York area, I recognize his flavor of prejudice and ignorance; but prejudice alone doesn’t account for the trouble he’s making. After all, Prejudiced Ignoramus would offer a little more predictability and consistency — a little more structure, to use DeLong’s word — than Chaos Monkey.

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#arbitrage #catastrophe #chaosMonkey #commodityMarkets #impracticality #industrialPolicy #kakistocracy #resourceHoarding #risk