Who is winning and losing in the post-Trump 2.0 economy?
Winning
New York City (tech)
San Francisco (finance and tech)
San Jose (tech)
Losing
Rural America (agriculture)
College towns (higher education)
Manufacturing towns in the South (trade hits to manufacturing)
Las Vegas (tourism)
Washington D.C. (federal government employment)
Disaster hit areas including parts of Florida and Appalachia
Experience tells us which economic theories are right and which are not, often with unexpected results.
* In theory, a higher minimum wage should greatly increase unemployment. In reality, the effect is almost immeasurable at U.S. levels.
* The evidence from Brexit and from Trump 2.0 and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs demonstrate that globalism is very important for a healthy economy and that departing from free trade does great harm, as does discouraging immigration.
* While a shallow microeconomic analysis would suggest that immigration hurts the job market for native born Americans, experience shows that immigration has the opposite effect, improve the job market and prosperity.
* The evidence from Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War era illustrates that securities laws to reduce the likelihood of things like Ponzi schemes are actually very important even when other protections of property laws and contract laws are in place.
* Economic development studies tend to show that economic development is quite localized and culture driven, rather than being primarily driven by national laws, although national laws do matter quite a bit as shown by comparing the economies of communities on either side of a national boundary where the laws are quite different.
* Notably, lots of the litmus tests for economic development: municipal water quality, roads in good repair, regular trash collection, effective legal enforcement of debts, unambiguous real estate ownership, good quality K-12 education, and the availability of trauma center hospitals, are mostly provided at the local government level, rather than at the regional or national level.
* During the Financial Crisis, two different methods of managing the risk of high loan to value residential loans were compared which have very different regulatory regimes.
One approach was to make a conventional mortgage at 80% loan to value, and then to have a second mortgage for the next 10-15% of loan to value that was subordinate to the conventional mortgage. This is subject to securities regulation of mortgage backed securities, with risks assessment mostly delegated to thinly regulated and thinly capitalized bond rating agencies (which are basically just credit reporting agencies for the bond market).
The other approach was to issue a single mortgage for the entire loan and to secure mortgage insurance, paid for by the borrower to protect the lender, which covered the lenders' losses if the value of a foreclosed home resulted in a deficiency judgment. This was subject to state insurance regulation.
In the financial crisis, insurance regulation was decisively proven to be superior, with no mortgage insurance firms going out of business, while essentially all of the subprime lenders, mortgage backed securities firms that packaged second mortgages for investors, and investment banks that organized this activity either ceased business entirely, underwent bankruptcy reorganization, or were saved only by bailouts with purchases of the failed firms by healthy large financial companies.
As interpreted the U.S. Constitution has various problems:
* The insurrection clause was gutted by making it not self-executing.
* Presidential immunity from crimes was a horrible mistake.
* No one has standing to pursue too many violations of the law, such as the emoluments clause, the bar on increasing Congressional compensation, some kinds of religious establishment (e.g. not enforcement the ban on political action by religious groups).
* The pardon power is too easily abused.
* Limiting campaign finance by corporations in a partisan neutral way is prohibited (although Citizens United is less of a problem than it is given credit for being IMHO).
* Term limits for Congress would be good.
* The filibusters has done more harm than good.
* Gerrymandering is an intractable problem and the first past the post system also leads to spoiler effects and a two party system instead of a multiparty system.
* Grounds for impeachment are too feeble and impeachment is too hard to accomplish for genuine crimes.
* The veto power is too strong, undermining Congress.
* The electoral college has proven to be a bad idea.
* The Senate is too distorting.
* The Second Amendment is a bad idea.
* Treaties are too often found to be not self-executing.
* Treaties are not subordinate to domestic laws.
* Given Congress control over election disputes in their own houses was a bad idea. Their roster should be out of their control.
* The unitary executive theory is incredibly harmful and should be actively overruled. The ban on legislative vetos is less of a big deal but also deeply problematic.
* The 25th Amendment on Presidential disability was a good idea, but was executed poorly.
* It should not be possible to be President as your first political position. Prior statewide office, a cabinet post, a top generalship, or service in Congress should be required first.
* The franchise should be affirmatively defined.
I've said it before, but it remains true that while there is not one right answer for the policies that democracies should adopt, there are many objectively wrong decisions that democracies can make.
Brexit harmed the British economy more than anticipated. Trade barriers hurt the countries erecting them.
This paper examines the impact of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process.
Comparing these with contemporary forecasts – providing a rare macro example to complement the burgeoning micro-literature of social science predictions – shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.
Ms Sheinbaum’s government says Mexico’s murder rate has come down by 32% in the year since she took office. Analysis by The Economist confirms that the rate has fallen, though by a significantly smaller margin, 14%.Counting homicides alone misses an important part of the picture, namely the thousands of people who disappear in Mexico every year, many of whom are killed and buried in unmarked graves. A broader view of deadly crime that includes manslaughter, femicide and two-thirds of disappearances (the data for disappearances is imperfect), shows a more modest decline of 6%.Still, Mexico is on track for about 24,300 murders this year, horribly high, but well below the recent annual average of slightly over 30,000. Ms Sheinbaum is the first Mexican leader in years to push violent crime in the right direction.
The UC San Diego Senate Report on Admissions documents a sharp decline in students’ math and reading skills . . .At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort.
A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.Moreover, weaknesses in math and language tend to be more related in recent years. In 2024, two out of five students with severe deficiencies in math also required remedial writing instruction. Conversely, one in four students with inadequate writing skills also needed additional math preparation. . . .
The math department created a remedial course, only to be so stunned by how little the students knew that the class had to be redesigned to cover material normally taught in grades 1 through 8. . . .The report attributes the decline to several factors: the pandemic, the elimination of standardized testing—which has forced UCSD to rely on increasingly inflated and therefore useless high school grades—and political pressure from state lawmakers to admit more “low-income students and students from underrepresented minority groups.”…This situation goes to the heart of the present conundrum: in order to holistically admit a diverse and representative class, we need to admit students who may be at a higher risk of not succeeding (e.g. with lower retention rates, higher DFW rates, and longer time-to-degree).
From Marginal Revolution.
The deemphasis on standardized tests in admissions, which provide a means to test these skills in a way not influenced by high school specific grade inflation is probably the primary factor.
Admitting students who aren't academically prepared to college isn't doing them any favors.
My wife and son ran the NYC marathon together (they were just one minute short of getting a mention in the New York Times for it).
It wasn't my first trip to NYC, but each visit stirs up no impressions.
It is amazing how much a tiny hotel room (there was barely room to walk - the bed was almost wall to wall), a suitcase full of clothes, and a credit card with enough money on it to buy food and subway fares makes. We had a kitchenette, so we could have lived there, and led a reasonably dignified life.
While some things in NYC are modern and cutting edge, it is also to a significant extent, an enclave of the past. The engineering behind the subway train operations is ancient, even though the fare system is very modern. The operations of the NYSE are at their core, ancient. Its residential co-ops are historical relicts from the pre-condo era. Its trash collection systems lack alleys or even dumpsters. Its street system doesn't handle car and truck travel well at all, although its bike lanes are modern and work rather well. It has been highly resistant to big grocery store chains found everywhere else. Its rent control system is its own thing found in only a couple of other places in the nation. It is home to the UN which, alas, isn't a modern, functional institution. It tries, but isn't very disability friendly.
We are in the longest government shutdown of all time in U.S. history. The second longest was also under Trump. There is still no end in sight.
The Dodgers won the World Series.
Two words that would seem useful:
* Dila = daughter-in-law (adjacent)
* Sila = son-in-law (adjacent)
These word would cover both engaged people and people who are in a serious long term relationship with a son or daughter to the point where they have met the family and might very well be more or less permanent family members. The need for a compact word to describe someone who has this relationship to you is real.
I haven't seen a full set of 2025 election results, but generally, Democrats did well.
The federal government shutdown is on day 26, the second longest of all time, and the record holder for person-days of federal employee furloughs. Trump has accounted for a majority of all days that the government has been shut down for all time.
Trump has literally demolished the East Wing of the White House to put up a ballroom (all contrary to federal law regarding how that is done).
SNAP, a.k.a. food stamps, will be shut off on November 1, 2025, out of Trump's spite because there are contingency funds in place to keep it going longer.
Trump continues to deny everyone federal disaster aid.
Trump continues to illegally murder people in boats in the Caribbean, ostensibly because they are dealing drugs, but that isn't grounds for summary execution, the basis for doing so hasn't been substantiated, and Congress hasn't authorized it.
ICE is ignoring the law and court orders in Chicago. On the bright side, someone stole two National Guard tanks in Memphis.
The No Kings Protest on October 18, 2025 extended to large attendances even in deeply red places. About 8.1 million people nationwide participated.
In a political stunt to celebrate the Marine Corps. birthday, they fired artillery rounds over Interstate Highway I-5, where some rounds exploded prematurely over the highway.
Charlie Kirk's wife appears to be deeply connected to kidnappings of Romanian children for adoptions when she was 17 years old in an activity that Trump apparently played a part in funding.
The National Young Republicans Group's racist, pro-Nazi, pro-rape group chat was exposed. The group also stiffed venues where it held events of tens of thousands of dollars more than once.
More than a third of ICE applicants can't pass basic physical fitness tests. About half of them can't pass a basic, open book test, on the part of immigration law that they need to know and the 4th Amendment.
The Toronto Blue Jays are in the World Series.
Trump increased tariffs on Canadian imports by 10% because he didn't like a truthful TV ad playing recordings of Ronald Reagan explaining how bad tariffs are.
Trump is ramping up dubious criminal prosecutions of his political opponents using illegally appointed attorneys in the Justice Department's U.S. attorneys' office.
Trump appears to have received more than a billion dollars of illegal personal gain from his office already since January 20 when he was sworn in.
Trump illegally tried to conduct layoffs during the government shutdown, which a judge halted.
Republicans are refusing to swear in a newly elected Democrat to the house from Arizona because they don't want to release the Epstein files and don't care about the continuing government shutdown.
All of this just scratches the surface of the horrible news that rains down every day.
A video at this link explains the concept of an "Extinction Burst". People go into a rage when something that they used to be rewarded for isn't working any more, until they give up.
This is the most hopeful thing that I've seen for ages.
The number one trigger for military coups is the military not getting paid, which the U.S. is doing right now. And, when Trump has called up the national guard, he has done so for time periods one day short of what is necessary for them to receive full compensation for being called up. VA spending has also been slashed.
Corruption and incompetence are also major factors. But you have to go back to Andrew Jackson to find a President who rivals Trump 2.0 in those dimensions. It doesn't inspire confidence to talk about conflicts between Albania and Azerbaijan, or a European country and Cambodia. His dementia is apparent and was on full display at his unprecedented speech to all generals and admirals.
Humiliation and disrespect for the military can be factors, and Trump has shown both towards soldiers, and in particular, POWs and military casualties. The meeting of all generals and admirals where Trump, a repeat draft dodger, and a Fox News commentator, calling them out for being fat and woke, didn't help.
The meeting, met by stony eyed silence from the assembled military brass to the last man, also potentially broke down the single biggest barrier to a military coup in the U.S., which is the collective action problem of figuring out which officers are on your side. This is why numerically smaller militaries are much more likely to carry out coups. But by showing unanimity of distaste for Trump, he may have inadvertently overcome some of that barrier.
There are other signs that the military has distaste for Trump. For his birthday Army parade in D.C., he wanted a communist style show of force and got a boring historical display. Morale was brought very low when the National Guard gardened and cleared trash when occupying D.C. The National Guard has not been effective in L.A. or Chicago or Portland or Memphis at reducing crime and multiple judges have held that Trump is illegally deploying the military. But when rule of law is the only thing keeping the military subordinate to the civilian government of the U.S., Trump's flouting of the rule of law undermines that singular force. The military didn't get involved in January 6 and like most law enforcement is probably dismayed by the January 6 pardons. Trump's rogue attacks on "drug dealing" boats in international waters in the Caribbean without legal authority is another example.
The military has spent a lifetime opposing enemies like Russia, and supporting traditional allies, but Trump has turned that on his head, making war with NATO, coddling Russia, envying North Korea, threatening Greenland, Canada, and Panama.
The idea that an armed public discourages tyranny behind the Second Amendment is empirically not true historically, and obviously not true now. Gun owners in the U.S. today, not only aren't resisting tyranny, they're the ones welcoming it.
Is a coup likely? Probably not. But it is more likely now than at any other point in U.S. history.
The demise of the TypePad blog hosting site has obliterated many of the blogs in my sidebar.
This could have been pretty cool.
Around the turn of the 20th century, inexpensive meat, a product of American prosperity that had long been available to even the poorest immigrants, was suddenly in short supply. Louisiana Representative Robert F. Broussard thought he had a solution: embrace hippopotamus ranching. He even outlined the details in his “American Hippo Bill.”
What did his plan have to do with the water hyacinth and what became of the proposed solution?
Full story at the Smithsonian Magazine.
The Ukraine War seems to have reached a turning point. Ukrainian attacks on the Russian oil and gas infrastructure, and on coal and natural gas fired electrical power plants, often deep inside Russia, are having an impact that ordinary Russian citizens can no longer ignore. And, when Russia can not longer supply oil and gas to Western Europe, European resolve to take a firm stand against Russia strengthens.
ICE is rotten to the core. Basically everyone who works for it is a corrupt, racist, bad cop, with no regard for the rule of law who lacks moral character.
Democrats in Congress should sponsor the Fire ICE Act. This would:
1. Immediately terminate the employment of every single employee and contractor working for ICE.
2. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from working for any federal government agency or any federal government contractor in any capacity, even as an unpaid volunteer or as prison labor.
3. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving security clearances.
4. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal financial aid for higher education.
5. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from eligibility for SBA loans.
6. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from serving as a sponsor for any immigrant.
7. Retroactively downgrade every former ICE employee who is a military veteran to dishonorably discharged status.
8. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal farm aid.
9. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal housing or disaster assistance, including FHA and VA loans.
10. Revoke all non-vested employee benefits of the ICE employee from any federal government employment.
11. Extend the statute of limitations for civil liability and criminal liability committed in connection with service as an ICE agent to 50 years.
12. Create a private cause of action, including minimum statutory damages of $50,000 and attorneys' fees, for any violation of federal law committed by an ICE agent while employed by ICE or a contractor for ICE. This would include any wrongful deportation and any detention made without probable cause. And, allow any vested retirement funds or homestead property to be used to satisfy any such judgment even if it would otherwise have been exempt from creditors. Make any such debts non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.
13. Bar all companies that provided deportation transportation services to ICE from all future government contracts.
14. Make all former ICE employees ineligible to serve on the board of any 501(c)(3) organization, or as an officer or paid employee of any such organization.
15. Revoke the visas of any ICE employee who is not a U.S. citizen.
16. Prohibit former ICE agents from owning or possessing firearms.
17. Bar former ICE officers from making new applications for federal disability benefits.
18. Prohibit federal civilian employees and federal government contractors hired in any law enforcement role from wearing masks, or enforcing the law in unmarked cars, subject to very narrow exceptions that are heavily reported upon, required all sorts of red tape, and are limited to circumstances that never include immigration enforcement.
19. Create a list of places like hospitals, court houses, churches, and immigration offices, where immigration enforcement is not allowed.
20. Allow any state or city to prohibit federal immigration enforcement from taking place in their jurisdiction, subject to very narrow exceptions for people convicted of serious felonies within the last five years.
21. End all grounds for denaturalization and punish people who secured U.S. citizenship by fraud with criminal penalties that do not revoke their U.S. citizenship.
22. Place former ICE agents at the bottom of the priority list to receive organ transplants, at at the end of the line for any Medicaid, Medicare, or VA medical benefit for which there is a waiting list.
23. Prohibit former ICE agents from receiving any honor or recognition from the federal government and revoke any honor or recognition that the former ICE agent was previously awarded by any federal government entity, military or civilian.
24. Deny former ICE agents any benefit of U.S. international child custody treaties.
25. Prohibit former ICE agents from notarizing any document used in the federal courts or submitted to a federal government agency.
26. Make former ICE agents ineligible for all federal licenses, including but not limited to, patent examiners, SEC licenses, BLM grazing permits, FCC licenses, interpreter qualifications, pilot's licenses, federal firearms dealer's licenses, and federal fishing or hunting licenses.
27. Prohibit former ICE agents from being buried in military cemeteries.
28. Prohibit former ICE agents from being granted patent or trademark applications.
29. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as officers of any federally recognized employee unions.
30. Prohibit former ICE agents from attending any federal educational institutions.
31. Prohibit former ICE agents from making mining claims.
32. Impose a 50% excise tax on any vested, deferred compensation payable to former ICE agents on top of any other applicable taxes.
33. Enact a rebuttable presumption in any federal discrimination case that a former ICE agent intended to engage in illegal discrimination.
34. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving a registered lobbyists.
35. Require former ICE agents to disclose their employment with ICE to all future employers, in any commercial contract, in any campaign for public office, and prior to being issued a marriage license.
36. Make status as a former ICE agent an aggravating factor under the federal sentencing guidelines.
37. Prohibit former ICE agents from entering federal parks and federal landmarks.
38. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as officers or directors of any publicly held company.
39. Prohibit former ICE agents from purchasing cyptocurrencies or selling crypocurrencies that were not owned prior to the enactment of the law.
40. Prohibit former ICE agents from obtaining any federal loan or bailout of any kind.
41. Disclose all internal ICE records and a list of all former ICE agents to the public on a publicly available database that disclosed all internal affairs information, all service information, and all contract information of former agents.
42. Immediately release everyone in ICE detention who isn't an undocumented immigrant convicted of a crime within the last five years that is a felony or worse. Transfer the rest to the federal Department of Corrections.
43. Ban all future private prison contracts of any kind.
44. Deny all de minimis tariff exemptions for former ICE agents.
45. Formally authorize private sector employers and state and local government employers to discriminate against former ICE agents.
46. Give cases in which former ICE agents are plaintiffs, the lowest scheduling priority in federal court.
47. Require disclosure of former ICE agent status in every lawsuit filed by a former ICE agent, and as part of the witness testimony of every former ICE agent in any federal court or federal administrative agency proceeding.
48. Prohibit former ICE agents from participating in clinical trials for new drugs and medical devices.
49. Prohibit former ICE agents from receiving any new federal tax credits.
50. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as employees or unpaid volunteers in federal funded schools at any level.
If this bill is introduced as a bill in Congress, and secured enough co-sponsors in the House and Senate to have some credible chance of being seriously considered, it doesn't even matter if it passes.
It will still powerfully discourage people considering employment with ICE from doing so. Every if some provisions are subsequently invalidated by the courts and are severed from the larger bill, the uncertainty would seriously chill anyway from applying to work for it.
Autism may be related to the human specific evolution of higher intelligence:
Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection. These shifts may have slowed brain development in children while boosting language and cognition. The findings suggest autism is part of the trade-off that made humans so cognitively advanced.
