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#31

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by DGuller - April 03, 2025, 01:18:37 PM

Meh, this criticism is more silly than the policy.  So what if values happen to cancel out?  Unless one parameter is by definition the inverse of another, omitting the two Greek letters would be the blunder.

#32

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by The Minsky Moment - April 03, 2025, 12:54:21 PM

The fact that the academic cited work is so weak or unsupportive may seem like a geeky-wonky point.  And it is. But it really is significant. On almost any other economic policy issue you could imagine, it is easy as shooting fish in a barrel to find supportive academic studies on virtually any side.  There are studies showing positive employment impact from minimum wage increases for example.

You really have to try hard to find an economic policy so incredibly stupid and damaging that it can't find proper support in a single published journal article.

#33

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by The Minsky Moment - April 03, 2025, 12:47:43 PM

Tariff calcs are there:

https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

This is basically pseudo-social science.

Most of the cited articles are just calculations of price elasticities. None of them support this crazy formula.

The Soderberg article has the following premise:

With heterogeneity in export supply elasticities, we show that
 the optimal non-cooperative tariff set by an importer is no longer the
 inverse of a single elasticity. When varieties of a good are exported
 from countries with heterogeneous export supply elasticities, we
 demonstrate that the optimal non-cooperative tariff weights the
 relative contribution of each variety to terms of trade gains and effi
ciency losses resulting from the tariff. In essence, when the importer
 applies an identical tariff across multiple exporters with different
 export supply elasticities, each exporter yields a different terms of
 trade gain relative to its efficiency loss. The optimal tariff is therefore
 one that optimally weights each exporter's contribution to its total
 terms of trade gains and efficiency losses

A lot of words here but the key implication for the moment is that USTR is doing it completely wrong.

The main paper they rely on is Pujloas/Rossbach, which does not appear to have been published in a peer reviewed journal. They use a simple quantitative model to game out various trade war scenarios and come out with Nash equilibrium tariff numbers, all between 7 to 15%.  But there is no analysis as to what impact this would have on bilateral trade balance.  There is a welfare calculation which claims to show neglible effects in either direction with the largest effects being a small welfare loss from tariffs on the EU and Mexico and a slight gain from tariffs on China.

#34

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by crazy canuck - April 03, 2025, 12:46:05 PM

Yep

#35

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by Valmy - April 03, 2025, 12:40:59 PM

I think we will be seeing a lot of things put on hold as everybody wants to see if these things last.

#36

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by crazy canuck - April 03, 2025, 12:38:07 PM

And American car manufacturing workers are learning quickly what this means for them.  900 workers have been laid off in Indiana in Michigan. They worked in factories supplying parts for Assembly plants in Canada and Mexico and those Assembly plants have been put on pauses of production.

[The real significance of supper, I think, is that it implies the user is familiar with an altogether grander style of meal held in stately halls, the formal dinner with copperplate invitations, waiters, silverware, port and speeches. The word supper, I think, implies a subtle rebuke to the aspirational classes who are gauche enough to hold dinner parties at home.]

#37

Off the Record / Re: The Off Topic Topic

Last post by Sheilbh - April 03, 2025, 12:36:15 PM

"Supper" is posh?

I think I use dinner/supper interchangeably.

As ever it's all context specific - the Southern and posh bit is what makes it posh. For me, supper was something after the evening meal - so something you might get before bed when you were staying with your nan.

Plus ca change - a Guardian article on it form over a decade ago:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/aug/03/tea-with-grayson-perry-supper-dinner

On supper specifically - I recognise the Grayson Perry description of it being used in a way to distinguish from and imply the existence of formal dinner ("we're just having supper") - especially because other contributors like Rachel Johnson (sister of Boris) immediately confirm it

Grayson Perry
[...]
Supper, as in "kitchen" or "country", is upper class. It implies that this is just a casual family meal, maybe with close friends. It may involve a simple starter, wine, and cheese and fruit to follow, but would probably not involve a white tablecloth and starched napkins. Supper is elegant sufficiency. It has overtones of Billy Bunter's midnight feasts, Hogarth prints or officers on campaign. The real significance of supper, I think, is that it implies the user is familiar with an altogether grander style of meal held in stately halls, the formal dinner with copperplate invitations, waiters, silverware, port and speeches. The word supper, I think, implies a subtle rebuke to the aspirational classes who are gauche enough to hold dinner parties at home.

Helen Fielding
[...]
Back in London, I find myself using the word "supper" quite a lot, usually to suggest the sort of informal, just-a-bunch-of-incredibly-cool-friends-round-the-kitchen-table soirée I aspire to, with something I've knocked up from the Ottolenghi cookbook. In reality, I'm more likely to spend the evening eating spoonfuls of odd things out of the fridge while watching telly in pyjamas. But at least you don't have to call that anything.

Rachel Johnson
I remember my parents giving dinner parties in Brussels, in the 1970s, during the tragic Ice Storm period of my childhood. My mother would cook. My father would carve, occasionally with an electric knife, like a baby buzzsaw. They divorced when I was 14. I learned from my mother that the best parties have nothing to do with "fine dining" – I have to this day a horror of hushed tones and chinking cutlery – but lots of wine, rowdy guests, and rough peasant food with plenty of things to pick at even after pudding. It's a model I try to follow myself, although for some reason even "kitchen supper" can take three days, not counting all the time one spends convening exactly the right cast, and clearing up. I still do "kitchen suppers", but have long banned "dinner parties" as both exhausting to give and to attend: they're like taking a four-hour exam in someone you don't know and may never see again. I've noticed a new trend, though: often, the host will ting a glass and want guests to sing for their supper, and get a "general conversation going". Being highly competitive and noisy, I enjoy that (the last dinner I went to, we had Stephen Hester talking about banking). If it's in Notting Hill, "kitchen supper, just locals" can be a £200-a-head catered dinner for which the whole mansion is transformed into a souk and there will be at least two household names present as trophy guests. A "country supper" is eight people, something killingly calorific and crumbly out of the Aga, followed by drunken driving through country lanes. No one gets invited to dinner parties any more: that's déclassé thanks to Come Dine With Me. It's always supper, sometimes even "sups", but only if you're really grand. It's at "sups", of course, that you're most likely to get the Lynch-Bages or the PM.

David Lammy
[...]I was first introduced to "supper" at the inevitable visit-your-new-friends-at-their-homes that follows your first term at university. It was more ritualistic than our dinners ever were. Supper was something you anticipated, that you perhaps got changed for. Inevitably, it was a faux pas minefield: multiple courses, a plethora of cutlery and alcohol (which, until then, was something I had only ever had in a park or a pub, never in front of a consenting adult).

This was all new and novel, but it was mundane and stuffy, too. As I've grown older, friends who have "supper" make their children have "tea" with different food, at a different time and on a different table. I don't see the point. I find it hard enough to see my kids as it is, and even harder to make them aware of their Caribbean roots. That's why we have dinner. The four of us sit down at the table and we eat food their grandmother would approve of.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

There is no such thing as a "country supper" in culinary or sociological terms. Or at least there wasn't, until now. What there is, is "supper", the meal that posh(ish) people eat at home most days in the evening – when they are not going out to or hosting "dinner" – a meal of some formality designed to entertain and impress your social peer group. You can invite someone to "supper" and know they will not expect tablecloths or candles or more than perhaps half a dozen guests. They might expect to chat to you in your kitchen, though, while you prepare the meal in question.

Then there is "the country" – not to be confused with "the nation", but a posh shorthand for what might more generally be described as "the countryside". It means anywhere with more fields and hedges than streets and lamp-posts. It's a word used in such sentences as "I live in the country, but I have a flat in London", or "I live in London, but I have a cottage/farm/stately home in the country."

To me, therefore, the term "country supper" is specific. It can be meaningfully used only by and between people who regularly eat "supper" in each others' houses, and have (at least) two residences, one in a rural location. (Though, being a Devon man, I'd call Chipping Norton suburban. Or at best "home counties".) On that basis, although "country supper" is a hot buzz-phrase right now, I doubt it will permanently enter the lexicon of either gastronomy or class analysis.

I know all this, of course, because I am reasonably posh myself – and if there really was such a thing as a "country supper", I would expect to have been invited to one.

Bee Wilson

In 18th-century London, supper was posh: an insubstantial final snack eaten by the upper classes long after dinner – cold beef and punch, perhaps, nibbled to sate the appetite before bed. But growing up in the 1980s, supper wasn't grand. It was just what we called the seven o'clock meal, whether it was toad in the hole, cottage pie or that exciting new discovery, the M&S ready meal.

I'm not sure why we called it supper rather than dinner or tea. Our Oxford household was thoroughly middle class, but also eccentric, very bookish and Anglican; the Last Supper was much discussed. My mother was a Shakespeare scholar, so she may have been talking in Elizabethan English when she called us in for supper: "Men sit down to that Nourishment which is called Supper", as it says in Love's Labour's Lost. Or it could have been an affectation from my grandmother, who tried hard to shrug off her roots in a Devon post office, referring to "the drawing room" and going so far as to ennoble Marmite with a French pronunciation: to her it was always "Mar-meet". She would never have dreamed of calling the evening meal "tea", which meant small cakes and china cups at four.

Personally, I don't find "supper" snooty. It is only when you add an adjective that it becomes pretentious: country supper and kitchen supper are both phrases used by people like David Cameron, who normally eat dinner, but are slumming it. My husband's family, much posher than mine, always eats dinner, implying candles and several delicious courses at 8pm. The joy of supper, by contrast, is that it carries no particular expectations besides nourishment. It could be anything from fillet steak to poached eggs and Mar-meet toast. Supper is simply the comforting end point to which the whole day has been leading.

Jeanette Winterson
[...]
I love suppers with friends. Is there a class thing? Yes, for sure, but if you are a writer or an artist of any kind, you can avoid class. You can mix wherever you want to and say what you like. That helps. I have to say, though, that the best dinner party I ever went to was thrown by an eccentric member of the Guinness family in a crumbling house in Dublin. The dining room hadn't been decorated since 1840 and, as the room was colder than the fridge, we left the champagne out to chill. Food was cooked on a burner of the kind road-menders use to melt tarmac. I was sitting next to Neil Jordan and we both ate in silence until we had eaten enough to be able to speak.

(Rather dubious on the idea that writers and artists can avoid class too )

#38

Off the Record / Re: The Off Topic Topic

Last post by Josquius - April 03, 2025, 12:24:16 PM

"Have a cuppa" or something like that.

I've been exposed to Southern people so posh they use "supper" for their evening meals and every time I hear it I'm suddenly Arthur Scargill.

Some of my rougher Durham relatives had supper as their main meal on occasion. At about 9pm. I think it depended on shift patterns, one of the traditional NCB shifts (backshift) had you working between about 11am to 7pm, so 8 or 9pm was a good time for the biggest meal of the day.

My family does that if we have tea especially late for some reason, it's not a regular thing.
More normally we did have supper but it's just a snack before bed.

#39

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by The Minsky Moment - April 03, 2025, 12:19:14 PM

Yes, but are other countries fighting back with those other tools?

Australia a top example, they can't be antagonistic towards the US cause then they'll be at the mercy of China. So the Americans can put up tariffs, demand no tariffs in return and the Aussies will fold.

The US is not that significant an export partner for Australia and lot of Australian exports are fungible commodities that can trade elsewhere.  Australia imports quite a bit from the US - some of this is military equipment and I wouldn't expect those flows to diminish at least for now.  But as to commercial products imported from the US, I would expect that for industrial and electronics, the Australians will seek to do preferential deals with countries like Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

#40

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by crazy canuck - April 03, 2025, 12:10:45 PM

There's also the matter of longevity. Tariffs on Canada costing 200k jobs on each side of the border affects Canada disproportionately more than the US. How long can Canada sustain a trade war?

Why do you think it will affect 200k workers in Canada?

I should have been clearer, it's a (badly explained) thought experiment meant to showcase that while both sides will be affected equally the smaller part will be affected proportionally harder. 200k is just a number I pulled from thin air. Make it 800k or 20k if you want.

I know that is why I am wondering why you picked equal affects in your thought experiment.  There definitely will not be equal effects.  The primary impact on Americans will be price increases (although they will also suffer job loses as the cost of their inputs also goes up). The primary impact on Canadians will be job losses, although at this point it is not clear how many job losses there will actually be.

For example, the Americans need Quebec's Aluminum, so Quebec workers are still going to produce that Aluminum and Americans buying it are just going to pay more for it. Same with lumber.

The one effect everyone is watching is the car manufacturing sector, but Carney's announcement about how to deal with that this morning will likely mean a diminished effect on Canadian workers, even then.

So the bottom line is the Americans are going to suffer much higher prices for pretty much everything they buy, while there may be not much of a negative effect on Canadians.