[Readers trying to avoid sugar for health reasons may want to skip this post.]

My basement recently flooded, and I was forced to knock out some drywall to prevent mold. At one point, I discovered a secret compartment that was completely walled in. It contained several boxes.

Here I should digress and mention that I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of finding treasure. When I was young, I collected old coins. Thus the specific form of treasure I imagined was a box of gold or silver coins that some old rich guy had hidden away, due to the fact that he lost trust in banks after losing his money in the Depression. (I once knew a guy like that.)

As an adult, the few cases where I found treasure involved finding valuable posters and prints in an obscure midwestern antique shop, not hoards of gold coins. It’s thrilling!

For me, the utility derived from treasure vastly exceeds its monetary value. I’d get more pleasure out of finding a box of coins worth $10,000 than I would from seeing my 401k go up by $100,000.

In any case, you cannot imagine how excited I was to see those boxes in that walled-in space. Why would someone hide something there if it were not valuable? I ripped open the first box and discovered . . . 6 rolls of holiday wrapping paper. There was a second box (dimly visible on the right), which was even larger. It contained 10 rolls of wrapping paper. Based on the style, the rolls are from the late 1960s. That means they were brought to this house by the owner who built it in 1979—and then sealed in. Why?

By coincidence, I’ve been reading the short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which are full of parables, allegory and symbolism. What sort of message would Hawthorne find in my anecdote? What sort of message is the universe sending me? A greedy old miser seeks buried gold coins, and discovers that life’s greatest treasure is actually . . .

. . . giving?

Bah humbug.

I saw the following headline in the National Review:

What It Took for Republicans to Break with Trump

The article discussed the overwhelming vote to force a TikTok sale, which Trump “opposes”. This is supposedly in contrast to their kowtowing to Trump in voting against a border control bill, which Trump also “opposes”.

Why do I keep using scare quotes for “opposes”? Because with Trump nothing is as it seems. Obviously, Trump supports forcing China to sell TikTok, indeed he tried to do so back in 2020 when he was president. (The courts preventing the forced sale.) And Trump obviously supports the sort of stricter border controls contained in the bill that failed to clear Congress–he enacted similar policies. So what’s going on here?

In the case of the border control bill, Trump “opposed” it because he wants border chaos in the period leading up to the November election. In his “opposition” to forcing the TikTok sale, he wishes to curry favor with younger TikTok users, who would not like to lose their favorite app. Ideally, Biden would succeed in forcing the sale (something Trump secretly wants) and Trump would get votes for loudly defending free speech rights of younger voters.

So it’s a bit disingenuous to suggest the GOP is courageously “breaking with Trump” over TikTok; they are doing precisely what he wants them to do. When Trump makes a public statement, there is only one criterion that determines it’s content—will it win him votes.

This Matt Yglesias tweet caught my eye:

The truth is, almost every single top Republican official privately opposes Trump. We only see these views surface in cases where people are free to speak their minds, as with former GOP presidential candidates, former Trump officials, former vice presidents, Congressmen who are retiring, etc. We also see it in people before they become involved in politics, as with JD Vance. Or in private email conversations, as with Tucker Carlson. The GOP elite virtually all hold Trump in total contempt. (I say virtually all, as there are a few nutcases like Marjorie (Jewish space laser) Greene and Peter (federal prison inmate) Navarro that are true believers.)

DeSantis has “endorsed” Trump. Does anyone seriously think DeSantis will go into the voting both and pull the lever for Trump? Would you, if Trump had accused you of “grooming” teenage girls? People need to use their common sense. Trump has almost no support in the GOP elite. The endorsements are merely a facade, lapped up by people who believe we should take political statements as if they reflect the actual beliefs of the politicians.

PS. People talk a lot about the “deep state”. This is silly. Almost every single person who has the career accomplishments required for a high level DC job privately hates Trump. So why would you expect anything different? It’s not a deep state—there’s no conspiracy. It’s merely that almost all highly qualified people see Trump for what he is.

In recent years, I’ve been bemoaning a new “dark age of macroeconomics”. I know less about current trends in micro, and thus was interested in these comments by Steven Levitt (from an interview by Jon Hartley):

Steve: “Yeah, yeah, sort of everywhere. Every macro department feels a lot like heavily influenced by Chicago. And I think for better or worse that has been a success story for the Chicago way of thinking. I think just really the opposite for Chicago micro; we have not had very many students who’ve gone out and been influential, maybe Ed Glaeser being a clear counter-example to that. And I think in the marketplace for ideas, I gotta say that the Chicago price theory really has lost. And it hasn’t caught people’s imagination. And I remember I was on a call with Milton Friedman as long after he left. He left Chicago in 1978, but this must have been 20-something years later where he was upset that Chicago price theory was not doing well, that it wasn’t being appreciated. And I remember Casey Mulligan saying, “Hey, Milton, I thought you believed in markets. Let’s just face it, price theory is losing in the market for ideas.” And Milton Friedman got so upset about that. He believed in markets until it applied to Chicago price theory where he thought that it was the right way, so markets shouldn’t have any bearing on it. But I think that’s just the truth. That the people who you think of as being the logical heirs to Chicago price theory, the two that come to mind really are Ed Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro, they’re not at Chicago. And with Kevin [Murphy] retiring, there isn’t, when Kevin Murphy retiring, there just isn’t anybody around now really, other than Casey Mulligan, who could really keep the torch going. And the movement in terms of textbooks and what people are taught is just so away from what I think of Chicago price theory, which is not as mathematical, it’s more about how you take the simple tools the very old tools you know tools that go back to people like Marshall and how you use them. It’s really the skill that I see in Chicago price theory (one that I don’t have) is how do you look at a problem and understand it to the lens of the right tool. And it’s not complicated. It’s usually very simple. Once you can see it, it’s usually not much more than intermediate micro is what gets applied. And it’s more artistic. And I really feel like our field has moved towards technicality. Harder proofs. More mathematical. And I don’t see any going back. I think it is essentially lost to posterity at this point.”

I find this very depressing. To me, Chicago price theory is not just a branch of economics, it is economics. It’s the core of what we know about applying economic theory to the real world. When I’m told that Chicago price theory is going out of style, it tells me that economics as a field is going out of style.

And it is. Does anyone doubt that economists have far less influence in the Biden administration than in previous administrations? Or that they would have little influence in a future Trump administration (likely to be dominated by protectionists like Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer)?

PS. I’m not convinced by the “market test”. Political and economic fads go in and out of style. What’s popular at one point in time tells us little or nothing about what will be trendy a few decades into the future. Monetarism lost the market test in the mid-20th century, then won the market test, and then by the end of the century we ended up with a synthesis of monetarist and Keynesian ideas.

There is evidence that nominal wages in Japan are finally starting to rise:

Toyota Motor Corp. met its labor union’s demands for increases in salary and bonuses in full for the fourth straight year, in another sign that a sustainable wage-price cycle may be taking hold in Japan’s economy as the central bank considers the timing of a long-awaited interest rate hike.

The yen rose and government bond futures fell — signs traders were adding to bets on an imminent move by the Bank of Japan . . .

Economists expect the results of negotiations between companies and unions to point to stronger wage growth than last year. That should clear the path for the BOJ to end the world’s last negative interest rate regime by April, according to a majority of economists in a Bloomberg survey.

While the media focuses on price inflation in places like Japan (too low) and the US (too high) the real issue has always been wage inflation. Is Japan’s wage inflation sustainable? I don’t know. If I were the BOJ, I’d be in no rush to tighten policy. (Recall the mistakes of 2001 and 2006.)

The same picture works if you replace wage inflation with NGDP growth.

1. This confused me:

Renewed efforts by Congress to force TikTok to sell or face a ban in the US have the backing of the White House, even as President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has started to use the platform to reach younger voters.

I’m confused. If using Tiktok endangers national security, then why is Biden using TikTok? I get that his specific tweets don’t endanger security, but doesn’t his use make TikTok more popular?

2. I’m confused. Why would Trump try to ban TikTok in 2020, and then suddenly support TikTok after meeting a GOP investor who own’s $21 billion worth of TikTok, right after losing some legal cases that threaten to bankrupt him?

3. A recent Hamilton Project report provides some pretty convincing evidence that recent population growth has been much higher than the Census estimates. Their findings would also explain the large divergence between the payroll jobs numbers and the household survey.

4. I’ve been pretty critical of white nationalists (and still am), which makes this recent Scott Alexander post on our insane identity politics all the more provocative:

In Bizarro-America, the only people who don’t think people’s value as human beings depends on their genetically-determined race are the white nationalists!

Read the whole thing, it’s great.

[FWIW, I’m completely opposed to all forms of “identity”, on both the left and the right. People are people. That’s all that matters. Gender, race, religion, ethnicity . . . who cares? That makes me far left on some issues and far right on others.]

5. Speaking of Scott Alexander, this tweet reminded me of a recent debate we had over whether building more housing reduces housing prices:

The before and after skyline views makes Austin look like a Chinese city.

6. The NYT has an article discussing the strange new left-right coalition in support of YIMBYism:

Take, for instance, the YIMBY mantra of allowing taller buildings and reducing the permitting hurdles to build them. Is this, as many Democrats say, a way to create more affordable housing, reduce neighborhood segregation and give low-income households access to high-amenity areas and schools?

Or is it, as Republicans say, a pro-business means of reducing regulation and enhancing property rights by giving landowners the freedom to develop housing?

Is it, somehow, both?

7. This Cato headline caught my eye:

List of 120+ Biden Actions to Help Try To ‘Shut the Border’

Generally, it’s better to make more modest claims.

8. I see people suggesting that even if Trump wins, he’ll only be in office for 4 years. These people don’t understand that the Republican Party no longer exists. There’s the Democrats and the Trump Party. There is no Republican Party, so things will never go back to normal. Here’s the NYT:

Twenty-six Republican senators voted against the recent aid package for Ukraine, which a pre-Trump Republican Party would have overwhelmingly supported. And of the 17 Republican senators who were elected beginning in 2018 and who are age 55 or younger, 15 voted no.

Those Trumpistas are the future of America.

9. In a normal country like Canada or Australia, candidates debate issues on a roughly level playing field. In a banana republic like Venezuela, the entire election revolves around one larger than life figure, who has a personality cult. Issues don’t matter, other than the issue of what you think about the dominant politician. Which of the two better describes the US? You be the judge (from Edward Luce in the FT):

Here is a checklist of Donald Trump’s recent activity. He promised on day one of his presidency to let January 6 convicts out of jail, close the US-Mexico border and “drill baby drill” for gas and oil. He feted Viktor Orbán in Mar-a-Lago as the best leader in the world and assured Hungary’s strongman that he would not “give a penny” to Ukraine. He took out a $91.6mn surety bond to pay defamation damages to his sexual assault victim, E Jean Carroll.

He purged the Republican National Committee with 60 staff firings — the opening move by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who he handpicked as RNC co-chair. . . . It seems almost trivial to add that new detail emerged about Trump’s apparent soft spot for Adolf Hitler.

All this happened since last Friday. . . . In another time, with a normal candidate, any single one would hijack the news cycle. Trump’s candidacy is so far off the charts it is almost paranormal. That is the essence of his political appeal. It means he is judged by a different standard to Biden, or any other politician, Democratic or Republican.

10. This is from an excellent Tyler Cowen post:

[I]f TikTok truly is breaking laws on a major scale, let us start a legal case with fact-finding and an adversarial process.  Surely such a path would uncover the wrongdoing under consideration, or at least strongly hint at it.  Alternately, how about some research, such as say RCTs, showing the extreme reach and harmful influence of TikTok?  Is that asking for too much?

Now maybe all that has been done and I am just not aware of it.  Alternatively, perhaps this is another of those bipartisan rushes to judgment that we are likely to regret in the longer run.

Funny how these “bipartisan rushes to judgment” so often involve China, not Russia. I wonder why?

11. Many commenters are under the mistaken impression that I’ve called Trump a Nazi. Not so. They are confusing me with Trump’s former aides. You know, the “best people” that Trump said he would hire to staff his administration. Those are the people that claim Trump is a Nazi sympathizer.  Ohio senator JD Vance also suggested that he might be a Nazi. I just think he’s a borderline fascist, so don’t blame me for these wildly excessive accusations by his supporters and subordinates.

12. I always assumed that Trump plans to surrender to Putin, but it’s still sad to see it confirmed by Victor Orban. In the same article, this caught my eye:

JOE KERNEN: Have you changed your, your outlook on how to handle entitlements Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President? Seems like something has to be done, or else we’re going to be stuck at 120 percent of debt to GDP forever.

Or else? That’s the best plausible outcome, the one that occurs if we dramatically cut spending and/or raise taxes. The actual outcome will likely be far worse.

And check out Trump’s garbled response to Kernen’s question, which makes Biden seems like Daniel Webster in comparison.