"Macroeconomics” purpports to break “economies” down to cities, states, and countries. Remember this as economists react with horror to President Trump’s surface, or actual economic ignorance. They rightly disdain his worship of tariffs, but do so without ever bothering to contemplate their own magic, one that presumes to measure the “economies” of cities, states, countries, and most obnoxious of all, the world.
Most of us not armed with PhDs that allow us to say we’re “trained economists” (“I do want to urge you to not overweight the macroeconomic opinions of private-sector people who are not trained in economics.” – Ben Bernanke) wouldn’t presume to measure the infinite global inputs that form the economy of the house we live in, but PhDs thoroughly revolted by Trump routinely reference “Gross Domestic Product (GDP).” Notable about the most prominent statistic in economics, one that falls if governments spend less, and that rises if things are made and holes are dug no matter the market worth of either, is that it falls assuming what’s impossible, that imports into a country exceed exports. Trump is ghastly in the eyes of economists for professing an aversion to imports, but economists designed a number that supports his own mysticism.
It brings us to a remarkably obtuse defense of Trump’s tariff worship by Ed Conway, economics editor of SkyNews. Plainly schooled in the “macro” of “macroeconomics,” Conway is a fan of the Trump administration’s “much-hyped plan to weaken the U.S. dollar as a way to help reindustrialize America.” Of course, to the sentient such a view is mindless. Since every market good is an effect of remarkably sophisticated global cooperation among humans utilizing inputs sourced around the world, there’s no way to boost industry by shrinking the media (in our case, dollars) that exchange for labor and inputs.
To devalue is to raise the cost of production, all the while reducing the value of returns on investment meant to boost production. Except that “macroeconomics” has long told us devaluation renders the devaluing nation more “competitive.” In a 2023 piece criticizing Trump’s tariffs, macroeconomist Phil Gramm wrote that a rising dollar makes “American exports less attractive.” No, it doesn’t. And a weak dollar doesn’t make American goods more attractive, but this is what macroeconomists believe.
Back to Conway, he shares the Trumpian, rather Keynesian view that “imbalance” is what “plagues the world economy,” and that the “most visible” evidence supporting the previous assertion “is the fact that the U.S. imports cheap goods from around the world and pays for them with an unending stream of IOUs.” Books could be written about all the falsehoods contained in this portion of a short sentence from Conway, one that contained many more as read in full, but the simple truth is that economies aren’t blobs as macroeconomists imagine, they’re just individuals. And with individuals, their “imports” match their “exports,” by definition. More “imports” come into the U.S. not due to imbalance, but because the “export” of shares in the world’s greatest corporations doesn’t count in a “trade balance” dreamed up by economists practicing fraudulent macroeconomics, a redundancy if there ever was one.
What has tripped up Conway on the way to one of the denser explanations of economics in recent memory is what similarly trips up Trump. Economists yet again turn their noses up to the vulgarian in the White House without grasping that Trump is but a literal interpretation of the abject stupidity of macroeconomics. Which is just a comment to the macro types so horrified by Trump that they don’t hate the President, they hate their own profession.
