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Loud, salty, and stupid (give em what they want)

Yesterday, I saw Dune 2 in a huge theater (with only one other patron.) Before the feature presentation, I was subjected to 35 minutes of torture. First a series of ads, then one preview after another full of loud explosions and ridiculous CGI monsters. (Remakes of Planet of the Apes, King Kong and Mad Max, among other things.)

It’s fruitless for me to bemoan the state of modern cinema, as these films are not aimed at me. In fact, Hollywood is doing an increasingly effective job at giving viewers what they want. As a film lover I’m appalled, but as an economist I applaud.

During the course of my life, I’ve seen corporate America become better and better at figuring out what people want. Here are a few other examples:

My wife and I often complain that restaurant food is too salty. But why is that? it probably reflects the fact that most people like salty food. The restaurant industry is become more efficient, better at producing giant portions of the sort of salty (and sweet) food that people wish to consume. Hence obesity.

When I was young, the news media consisted of dignified figures like Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley. Now you turn on the cable news and see mindless bimbos screeching out partisan propaganda at the top of their lungs. (Fox is the worst, but many other news sites have also gotten worse.) The TV industry figured out that people don’t want Walter Cronkite; they want wild conspiracy theories promoted by people yelling at the TV screen.

In the film American Splendor, there was this exchange between two characters

Mattress Guy #1: So is the girl smart?

Mattress Guy #2: Well, I guess she’s about average.

Mattress Guy #1: Average! Man, average is dumb!

With a few notable exceptions, the vast majority of readers of this blog have IQs well above 100. It’s tempting to assume that people with IQs of 100 are stupid. But they aren’t—they are average. In the days of Cronkite and Brinkley, TV news was pitched to people with IQs of 115. Now it’s aimed at average people. They only seem stupid, because you and your acquaintances live in a bubble surrounded by people who are above average.

The modern media is getting better at delivering what consumers want. Don’t like it? You are not the target audience.

PS. Even Trump and Biden presumably have IQs above 100. They only seem dumb because we subconsciously expect our presidents to be above average.

PPS. So what does average intelligence look like? This:

Robinson, who is the state’s lieutenant governor, has said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the 1969 moon landing was fake and the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job.” He’s “SERIOUSLY skeptical” of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. He falsely accused David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, of being a paid actor. He’s claimed that climate change is based on “junk science.” . . .

In lesser-noticed social media posts, Robinson has said that news coverage of police shootings is part of a media conspiracy “designed to push US towards their new world order.” He and his wife both liked a since-deleted Facebook comment that stated, “WWG1WGA are my ‘Identity’ letters,” a reference to the QAnon rallying cry “Where we go one, we go all.” In October 2018, on a day when authorities intercepted pipe bombs intended for President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CNN, Robinson suggested on Facebook that they had done it to themselves. “If you can’t beat ’em, bomb yourself,” he wrote.

When Trump finally passes from the scene, Robinson will be the new face of the GOP.

About that 2017 Tesla bubble

There are times when the claims of bubble proponents becomes so far-fetched that you wonder if it’s all just a spoof. Bloomberg provides a recent example:

Nvidia Corp.’s rise is captivating the stock market and driving the S&P 500 Index to new highs. But it also raises cautionary reminders of another investor darling that soared on dreams of a technological transformation, only to tumble back to earth when those hopes turned to disappointment.

That stock belongs to Tesla Inc., which sparked its own mania in 2017 as investors bet that electric vehicles were going to take over the world.

Yes, shed a tear for those foolish investors that bought Tesla during its 2017 stock “mania”.

I’m not sure which is more embarrassing, the fact that most economists believe in bubbles, or the fact that most economists seem to believe that interest rates show the stance of monetary policy.

The wonderful (horrible) economy (economic policy)

This made me laugh out loud:

Biden can’t catch a break. For the past year, Dems have been scheming to run against Trump, arguably the weakest candidate in US history. Now they are finally getting their wish, and Biden’s going to lose. (They don’t read my blog.)

Here are some truths about the current US economy:

1. It’s in very good shape (say between good and excellent.)

2. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was widely believed that it was impossible for the economy to be this good—to have such low inflation during a period of 3.7% unemployment.

3. The foreign media is almost universally drooling over how good the US is doing, and frequently compares the booming US economy to the weak economies of Europe and China. The economy is so strong that there is a huge surge of people desperately trying to get into the US. Is it any surprise that workers in countries paying $2/hour are attracted to a place where McDonalds pays $20/hour? Good luck with that wall Mr. Trump!!

Unfortunately for Biden, the people of the past don’t vote and foreigners don’t vote. Actual living Americans believe the economy sucks.

So am I sad that Biden is getting such bad luck? Not really. While the economy is good to excellent, his economic policies are fair to poor. (The poor part is his fiscal policy and his industrial/trade policies—the rest is fair.) Voters are right about Bidenomics, but for completely bogus reasons. Heck, most voters probably support his stupid policies.

And then there’s the bad karma from the Dems’ cynical attempt to pump up the Trumpian part of the GOP in the hope that it would be easier to defeat.

PS. I know, I know, it’s the high grocery store prices. And Trump’s going to fix that problem by . . . . checks notes . . . running massive budget deficits, an easy money policy, high tariffs on imported food and expelling all the illegal farm workers. As usual, Matt Yglesias nails it:

I am the captain now

The day after the 2020 election, I suggested that the results were bad news, as now we’d have 12 years of Trump instead of 8 years of Trump. I immediately realized that the closeness of the race meant that Trump would be back—more fascist than ever and seeking revenge against those who oppose him. Flash forward to 2024, and Trump is already the de facto president of the United States.

For the sake of argument, assume the president were Joe Biden. We know that Biden supports more aid for Ukraine, as do the overwhelming majority of representatives in Congress. But President Trump is opposed, so it won’t happen. Ditto for the border control bill. Indeed nothing substantive will happen without Trump’s OK.

Most of our political pundits are stuck in the 20th century, before America became a banana republic. They no longer know how to make sense of our politics, as they are not willing to accept the fact that we are no longer a serious nation. They keep waiting for some positive trends to show up. It won’t happen. There are now only two political parties—the Democrats and the Trump cult. And the Dems are too weak to put up a serious fight. (Trump recently said that all the non-MAGA Republicans should just leave the GOP–he doesn’t need them.)

Unfortunately, while the US richly deserves to pay a price for our dysfunction, our political implosion will initially impact the rest of the world—with the Ukrainian people being the first to suffer. Life is unfair.

PS. The National Review had a couple nice pieces on Trumpism. Here’s Andrew McCarthy:

It’s time to retire “RINO.”

That means “Republican in name only,” of course. It’s a stale epithet. Mildly clever in its origins, it referred mainly to elected Republicans in Washington who posed as conservatives for their home-state constituents (“severely conservative” as the squishy Mitt Romney described himself), but who, at best, mounted little meaningful resistance to the progressive ascendancy and Leviathan’s expansion.

RINO is inapposite with the Republican Party having become the Trump Party. Indeed, it’s the Republican Party that is now “Republican in name only.” No longer are we talking an entity that is substantively the Republican Party — meaning the politically and ideologically conservative major party in the United States. A party wedded to that orthodoxy no longer exists, so it is irrational to speak of RINOs who feign allegiance to the orthodoxy.

And Jim Geraghty:

 Christian Schneider reminds us that this weekend, Ron DeSantis endorsed the man who’d previously shared a photo of him with the caption, “Here is Ron DeSantimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher.”

Think about what it would take to endorse a man who said something like that about you.

And you people wonder why I’m so cynical about politics.

Ted Cruz:

The Lucas critique cuts both ways

I’m occasionaly asked how NGDP level targeting would have performed in a specific historical case, such as 1981 or 2023. The usual worry is that when NGDP is well above trend, a policy of level targeting might require a highly contractionary monetary policy, triggering a recession.

Here it’s worth recalling the Lucas critique (from Wikipedia):

The Lucas critique argues that it is naïve to try to predict the effects of a change in economic policy entirely on the basis of relationships observed in historical data, especially highly aggregated historical data.

The problem with trying to evaluate how NGDPLT would have done in a specific case is that if the policy had been in effect during that period then the condition of the economy would have been much different. Thus if NGDPLT had been in effect during the 1970s, then it’s unlikely the economy would have become so overheated by 1981. Indeed the whole point of NGDPLT is to prevent the sort of inflationary policy we had during 1965-81.

If NGDPLT had been adopted last year, it’s unlikely that the Fed would have tried to push the economy back to the pre-2020 trend line, as that would have triggered a deep recession. They would have started from a new trend line. On the other hand, if NGDPLT had been adopted in 2020, then monetary policy would have been far tighter in 2021, and the economy never would have become so overheated.

The Lucas critique is often viewed as a cautionary tale—something that makes it likely that policy innovations will disappoint. In the case of NGDPLT, however, the Lucas critique suggests that the policy might be more effective than it appears at first glance. Instead of thinking about how NGDPLT would deal with all of the “shocks” we’ve experienced over time, think about how NGDPLT would have prevented those shocks from occurring in the first place.

Off topic: Conor Sen has a good piece on how the economy seems to be re-accelerating:

Slower inflation was supposed to be a sign that the economy was cooling, all part of the Federal Reserve’s plan for higher interest rates to restore balance to the economy. For a while, things looked on track. But since the middle of January there’s an argument that economic activity is picking up again, despite monetary policy being tighter than at any point in years. . . .

Frequent readers of mine will note that this is a walk-back of a bias I’ve had for the past few months. I started worrying about a labor-market slump in early November as the unemployment rate rose and worker income growth slowed. Earlier this month, I described the recovery in some cyclical parts of the economy as akin to a “dead cat bounce” that would eventually be swamped by high interest rates; it’s not unreasonable for something like existing home sales to climb when transactions were at their lowest level since 2010.

Frequent readers know what I’m about to say. At no time in the past few years has monetary policy been “tight”. Indeed it’s been generally expansionary, which is why NGDP growth remains excessive.