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Yesterday I wrote about the claim, made by a Trump administration lawyer during oral arguments, that Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were in response to a “spike” in the U.S. trade deficit. As I noted, the closest the “Liberation Day” Executive Order comes to specifying any such spike is when it complains that the U.S. goods trade deficit in 2024 was 40 percent higher than that ‘deficit’ was in 2019. As I also noted, that 40-percent hike was indeed larger than the 15-percent increase in the goods trade deficit in the previous five-year period.

But (and these days this fact cannot be repeated too often) a goods trade deficit is an economically meaningless – indeed, illegitimate – concept. It’s the economic equivalent of people writing about human health and medicine while focusing on the four humors, or of judges determining the likelihood that someone committed a crime by consulting chicken entrails.

Because people produce and consume goods and services – and given that 80 percent of U.S. GDP today is services – to be at all legitimate, analyses and discussions of trade must consider goods and services.

So was there any recent “spike” in the U.S. trade deficit of goods and services that the Trump administration can point to as justification for the “Liberation Day” tariffs? No. In 2024, the inflation-adjusted U.S. trade deficit in goods and services was 68 percent larger than it was in 2019. But in 2019, this inflation-adjusted ‘deficit’ was 77 percent larger than it was in 2014.

In other words, the only time period that the “Liberation Day” Executive Order comes close to identifying as one over which there occurred an emergency spike in the trade deficit (2019-2024) is a time period during which the trade deficit in goods and services rose by a smaller percentage amount than it rose during the previous five-year period.

Of course, in the end – because U.S. trade deficits are largely phenomena for Americans to applaud rather than to oppose – all this administration talk of trade deficits being an economic emergency is utterly misguided. But if anyone insists on quaking in fear over U.S. trade deficits, then that quaking should be over the deficit in goods and services – and that deficit did not spike in any time period over which Trump & Co. can credibly claim to have prompted his April 2nd announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

The post There Was No “Spike” In the U.S. Trade Deficit That Could Legitimately Have Prompted Trump’s “Liberation Day” Punitive Taxes on Americans appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

They could help end the constant conflict on campus.

A rule proposed by the Biden administration threatened to sideline thousands of employees; Trump’s rollback protects their dignity and right to work.

“There goes the man that writt a book that neither he nor any body else understands.”

So declared a Cambridge University student as Isaac Newton passed him on the street. And the book that Newton “writt” was his monumental work on physics, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), better known as Newton’s Principia. Thanks to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg, you can delve into an English translation of this major milestone of science for free.

In a letter to fellow physicist (and bitter rival) Robert Hooke, Newton famously said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The Principia is the work of a giant. In it, Newton expounds, with mathematical proof, what is now the bedrock of modern physics: his groundbreaking laws of motion and universal gravitation, and his explanations of the motion of planets, moons, comets, tides, fluids, and other physical phenomena.

The Principia arose from a dispute among Hooke, the astronomer Edmond Halley, and the architect Christopher Wren about using mathematical derivations to demonstrate Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Halley visited Newton at Cambridge in 1684 to discuss the question and was astonished to learn that Newton had already worked out the derivations. A few months later, Newton sent Halley a nine-page paper on the subject, De motu corporum in gyrum (Of the Movement of Bodies in Orbit). Halley, thunderstruck by what he perceived as a revolution in celestial mechanics, urged the Royal Society to publish it. But Newton wanted to rework it first. For the next two years, Newton obsessively expanded his paper, often forgetting to eat. The nine-page manuscript turned into a three-volume book – in Latin, the scientific language of the day – and was finally published in 1687, under the imprimatur of the great diarist Samuel Pepys, then the President of the Royal Society. (The English version at Project Gutenberg is the first American edition of 1846, using British mathematician Andrew Motte’s 1729 translation; the original Latin version was also prepared for Project Gutenberg by Distributed Proofreaders volunteers.)

The publication of the Principia transformed Newton’s life and career. Though he was a distinguished professor at Cambridge who had spent years in dogged research and experimentation in mathematics, mechanics, dynamics, optics, and even alchemy, he had never actually completed any of this work. Now, in his 40s, he had finally brought forth his highest accomplishment, a work that, though he could not have foreseen it then, ultimately enabled human beings to leave Earth to explore the universe beyond it. It was an instant hit throughout Europe among mathematicians, physicists, and even philosophers like John Locke, who did not understand the math but very much appreciated the scientific principles. Hooke was so impressed that he claimed Newton had stolen the ideas from him, but no one ever believed him.

Preparing the e-book version of the Principia posed quite a few challenges, including dealing with numerous mathematical equations and symbols, diagrams, tables, Greek letters, and astrological symbols. Many Distributed Proofreaders volunteers worked hard on it over the years to make this historic work freely accessible to all.

This blog post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer, and is dedicated to the memory of Chris Curnow and John Welch, beloved Distributed Proofreaders volunteers who helped prepare Newton’s Principia.

New British cars may have to be fitted with breathalyser technology and black box-style recorders under Labour plans to align with EU vehicle safety laws.

The Government said copying European rules would drive down costs…

Here is the full Telegraph article.  It seems more complicated than that, instead the car has to allow for the possibility of installation of such a device, without the use of the device, or the device, being required per se.  So the black box is more concerning to me.  It would mean that a complete monitoring of your whereabouts and driving behavior could become possible.  There are Event Data Recorders in most newer US cars, but to date they are not used for very much.  Perhaps the American ethos prevents slippery slope on this one?

These are not just extreme paranoid fears.  When driving with a Spanish rental car this summer, the car issued an annoying, recurring beep every time it was being driven over the speed limit, even by small amounts.  For one thing, the road synchs with the beeping device do not always accurately reflect the posted speed limits.  For another, often the speed limit would suddenly fall by 20km, but of course you should decelerate rather than slamming on the brakes.  For another, it can be dangerous to always drive below or even at the speed limit, especially when overtaking and I do mean sane rather than crazy overtaking.

So on these issues matters could indeed get much worse.

The post Say it ain’t so, Cecil… appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In Massive Rent-Seeking in India’s Government Job Examination System I argued that the high value of government jobs has distorted India’s entire labor market and educational system.

India’s most educated young people—precisely those it needs in the workforce—are devoting years of their life cramming for government exams instead of working productively. These exams cultivate no real-world skills; they are pure sorting mechanisms, not tools of human capital development. But beyond the staggering economic waste, there is a deeper, more corrosive human cost. As Rajagopalan and I have argued, India suffers from premature imitation: In this case, India is producing Western-educated youth without the economic structure to employ them. In one survey, 88% of grade 12 students preferred a government job to a private sector job. But these jobs do not and cannot exist. The result is disillusioned cohorts trained to expect a middle-class, white-collar lifestyle, convinced that only a government job can deliver it. India is thus creating large numbers of educated young people who are inevitably disillusioned–that is not a sustainable equilibrium.

The Economist has an excellent piece on the lives of the students including Kumar who is studying in “Musallahpur Haat, a suburb of Patna where dozens of coaching centers were concentrated, and the rent was cheap.”

…About half a million students are currently preparing for government exams in Musallahpur….For most government departments the initial tests are similar, and have little direct bearing on the job in question. Would-be ticket inspectors and train-drivers must answer multiple-choice questions on current affairs, logic, maths and science. They might be asked who invented JavaScript, or which element is most abundant in the Earth’s crust, or the smallest whole number for a if a456 is divisible by 11. Students have no idea when their preparations might be put to use; exams are not held on a fixed schedule.

…Kumar made his way to the bare, windowless room his friend had arranged for him to rent and started working. Every few days, he’d check the Ministry of Railways website to see if a date had been set for the exams. The days turned into weeks, then months. When the covid pandemic erupted he adjusted his expectations – obviously there would be delays. The syllabus felt infinite and he kept studying, shuttling between libraries, revision tutorials and mock test sessions. Before he knew it he’d been in Musallahpur nearly six years.

As his 30s approached, Kumar began to worry about running out of time. There is an upper age limit for the railway exams – for the ones Kumar was doing it was set at 30. As a lower-caste applicant he was allowed to extend this deadline by three years. His parents urged him to start thinking about alternative careers, but he convinced them to be patient. His father, who was struggling to keep up the allowance, reluctantly sold some of the family’s land to help support him, and Kumar studied harder and longer.

In my post, I emphasized the above-average wages and privileges, which is true enough, but even by Indian standards many of the jobs aren’t great and The Economist puts more focus on respectability and prestige (the sad premature imitation I discussed):

Indian society accords public-sector jobs a special respect. Grooms who have them are able to ask for higher dowries from their brides’ families. “If you are at a wedding and say you have a government job, people will look at you differently,” said Abhishek Singh, an exam tutor in Musallahpur.

Railway jobs in particular still have a vestigial glow of prestige.

…[Kumar] had been preparing for junior engineer and assistant train-driver jobs, but decided to apply for the lowest rung of positions too, the Group D roles, to increase his chance of getting something. An undergraduate degree and six years studying in Patna could lead to him becoming a track-maintenance worker. “I never imagined it would come to this,” he said sadly.

And yet he wouldn’t trade it. A short drive from his room in Musallahpur, a glitzy mall has just been built. There are jobs going there which pay close to what he might earn in a Group D role. But Kumar baulked at the suggestion he might become a barista. “I am educated with a technical degree,” he said. “My family hasn’t sacrificed so much for me to work in a coffee shop. People only work there if they have no other choice.” No one from his parents’ generation would respect a barista. But they admired, or at least understood, a job on the railways.

India’s government job system squanders talent, feeds on obsolete and socially-inefficient prestige hierarchies, and rewards years of sterile preparation with diminishing returns. It’s inefficient, of course, but behind the scenes it’s devastating to the young.

Hat tip: Samir Varma.

The post The Tragedy of India’s Government-Job Prep Towns appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.