Scott Lincicome ably defends GDP as a meaningful measure of economic performance. A slice:
As I’ve written before, GDP has real methodological quirks. It’s basically a clunky aggregation of several economic indicators—private consumption, gross private investment, government spending, and net exports—that, even in normal times, can produce misleading snapshots of national economies. Import surges and collapses driven by recent U.S. tariffs, for example, distorted quarterly GDP prints last year—to the upside and down—in ways that had little connection to the country’s underlying economic health. Furthermore, the metric fails to account for important activities like leisure and unpaid household work; it doesn’t consider inequality; and it has difficulty properly valuing environmental goods, government expenditures, and new innovations. As we’ve discussed, GDP can be gamed by authoritarian governments with a strong incentive to fudge the numbers. And it can be particularly distorted in a handful of economies that are driven by one type of economic activity (e.g., petrostates or tax havens).
Populist critiques of GDP, however, go much further than these common methodological concerns. On the right, economic nationalists routinely sneer at “libertarian” policies that “merely” boost GDP at the expense of—in their view—more important measures of well-being: native-born wages, mortality, family formation, culture, national security, and so on. On the left, meanwhile, “degrowth” theorists see GDP growth as an outright bad thing because it necessarily means environmental destruction and mistakes economic activity for human welfare. A truly rich society, they argue, maximizes health, happiness, and sustainability over the monetary value of production.
In theory, these critiques make some sense: An economy that grows only by embracing pollution or selling vice doesn’t make people better off in the long term. In reality, however, the anti-GDP coalition goes much further by mechanistically rejecting policies they don’t like because they “only” boost GDP. This gets things badly wrong in several ways.
For starters, humans do value the stuff that GDP measures, so the metric alone—usually adjusted for inflation and divided by a nation’s population (aka, real GDP per capita, or “RGDPpc”) —nis a good starting point for measuring well-being.
Trumpian tariffs were designed as political theatre. The goal was simple: show the forgotten men and women of America that the President was standing up for them.
The tariffs were meant, as the President said in announcing them, to heal the “once beautiful American dream” that thieving foreigners had “torn apart.” Tariffs were aimed at striking back at the globalist elite that had “stolen our jobs”, and “ransacked our factories.”
Or at least that’s the only way I can make sense of the drama and chaos surrounding the Trumpian tariffs. No planning, or preparation. Lots of grandstanding and spectacle.
…..
One of the lasting legacies of President Trump will be his tariffs, but not in the way he probably thought they would.
Trumpian tariffs were meant to remake world trade around US power.
Instead, they revealed how disruptive tariffs were at home, how limited US trade power was when it acted alone, and how quickly the world could learn to trade around US disorder.
The world did not fragment. America did.
In recent years, observers have closely tracked the rise of pro-union sentiments on the political right. During his reelection campaign, President Donald Trump garnered headlines for skipping a presidential debate to visit United Auto Workers (UAW), who were on strike in Michigan, while officials like Vice President JD Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) have made waves for their pro-union bent. Perhaps most prominently, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien was featured as a speaker at the GOP convention.
But to this point, any actual legislation emanating from the pro-labor right has failed to go anywhere in Congress. That may soon change.
A Hawley-backed bill, known as the Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA), seems to be picking up steam and may soon pass the House of Representatives. Unfortunately, the FLCA is a trifecta of bad public policy: It suffers from constitutional infirmities, revives a corrupt government agency, and takes away the voice of both businesses and workers.
“Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the New York Times’ 1619 Project. “To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.” The New Yorker editor David Remnick agreed. “We don’t have time to finger-wag at protesters about property,” he wrote of the big-box and mom-and-pop stores alike that were put to the torch. “That can be rebuilt. Target will reopen.” Sure, “looting is counterproductive,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher conceded. “But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”
Of course, the property that was subject to vandalism and destruction wasn’t situated in their own backyards. Perhaps these and other permissive figures on the left would revise that outlook now that the vandals are razing their neighborhoods in the name of anti-capitalism.
