No way... Is this real? LOL
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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Then having done all the bullshit maths, they found out that Australia was a negative number because we buy more than we sell with the USA. But they slapped a 10% tariff on anyway because we don’t like their beef products because of a little issue of biosecurity.
Pretty sure all of economics is just using greek/roman letters to make the most basic and irrelevant equations seem smart.
I am so glad to see my internal monologue confirmed here on this anonymous forum.
actually this is true… my ex went to college for econ and i helped her study often…
i was a computer science major with a LOT of excessive math (although i do enjoy it).
The entire field of economics is a fraud…
the axis’s on their graphs are backwards, they have their own bullshit calculus for dummies, it’s all based on an idealized fake human called “homo economicus” that is perfectly and predictably motivated by money, and nothing else at all… it’s all such trash….
…
this equation is extra fraudulent though…
Economics is one of the few sciences where if a model prediction is consistently incorrect, we don't discard the model but make a new sub-discipline out of finding excuses for it.
I have a graduate diploma in economics and concur it's mostly bullshit. The lecturers essentially agreed. Didn't bother to continue to masters as I don't think there's anything more to learn from the field once you've confirmed that the world economy is based on lies and dice rolls.
I studied economics and well yeah it's all true
Quality use of that meme, all I can say.
What offends me most about this is using the convolution operator * for multiplication in a typeset equation
I mean anybody can understand what it's trying to say. Almost anybody who actually does math though would just have no operators between those variables.
Any symbol can be chosen for any variable including operations. It depends entirely on context.
I doubt economists use the convolution operator in this context or probably ever.
Huh I didn't realize that economics have their own version of math /s
It's been a long time, but isn't this the default for the Graphical Formula Editor in Microsoft Word? (As in you could just use the * operator and word would print it as-is, not replace it with the multiplication sign)
I don't hate myself enough to use microsoft software, so idk
The meme is referencing the official US Trade Representative's explanation^1^ of the tariffs, where yes, the math really is as stupid as it seems, but it gets worse.
The research that Trump's team used to determine that "calculation" flat out states that when the US tries to tariff other countries:
- American importers pay for the US tariff AND
- American exporters pay for the foreign retaliatory tariffs.
The source clearly demonstrates that American tariffs are paid directly by Americans in both directions, meaning out of everyone on Earth the tariffs screw the US the most. Trump's administration legitimized the source by citing that research for its calculations on the tariff rates.
The explanation freely admits that the stupid parameters were chosen more or less arbitrarily, and they cited the paper (Cavallo et al 2021)^2^ but conveniently didn't list it in their "References" section.
Our analyses indicate that the price incidence of US import tariffs falls largely on the United States... Our results suggest that retailers are absorbing a significant share of the increase in the cost of affected imports by earning lower profit margins on those goods... [These analyses reveal] that the recent tariffs applied by foreign governments on US exports have affected total foreign import prices far less than was the case for the recent US tariffs
Didn’t they also mark EU VAT as a tariff?
Both links just return errors for me.
Edit: fixed. For some reason there were additional characters in the links on my end, possibly some formatting issue.
Seems like a formatting thing, thanks. I'll stick to just inline hyperlinks instead of footnotes I think
They work for me.
🤷
🤷♀️
It happens to me too, but you can tell for some reason the formatting messes with the proper link. As your screenshot shows there is a random 2 after www in one of the links that isn't written out in the original.
That actually fixed it. In the first link there was a ~ added that threw off the archive page.
Might be the Voyager app. Thanks anyway.
They forgot to multiply the whole thing by -e^(i*pi)
I'm surprised that actually had someone with enough math skills to accomplish that.
Their pal gippidy
There is so much in this that is going way, way, WAY over my head, to an extend that I can barely phrase what it is I don't understand. I guess that's why I don't get to decide these things.
What is it that you don't understand? You're probably just put off by the "scary" Greek letters, if you force yourself to look at it, you'll find it's rather simple.
(ε) and (φ) are constants, and since their values are 4 and 0,25, when multiplied together they give 1. Multiply m~i~ by 1 and you simply get m~i~
The Greek letters are not the issue. I can even understand the maths itself, despite sucking at it all my life (which is clear evidence that it's dumb). It's the entire affair, not the formulas.
The emperor is naked
Trump was looking for any number to put ad the tarif number, without any regard z to reality, so that's what we now see.
I don’t understand
Congratulations, you are now qualified to be one of Trump's Cabinet picks
It's not just math, but economic theory. There's a lot of historical context here, going back to mercantalism in the 1600s, where countries were obsessed with trying to maximize exports. You may remember this from history class, and how they figured out it was, ultimately, not the best idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
Anyway, ignore the greek letters. The Trump administration is using trade deficit (how much other countries buy from us vs. how much we buy from them) as the number for how how much to tax those imports, with the idea being to this tax will "punish" and incentivize countries to not have such a big trade deficit with the US. Per mercantalism, buying more than we sell from someone is a "loss," as we are losing money to them. And US manufacturers will take up the slack.
...In practice, that's not how it works, as Europe learned in the 1600s/1700s and the US learned in the great depression, among many other times. There are a lot of fallacies, including:
-
"the popular folly of confusing wealth with money," aka assuming the trade deficit is unprofitable "loss."
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Overestimating the US's importance. It's a big world with a lot of easy shipping, and countries have many other places to ship stuff if the US gives them a big enough middle finger.
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Ramping up manufacturing locally is hard, depending on the industry. Could take years and billions, and in some cases is not practical at all. That's why we buy stuff from other countries, where it's easier to make. It's like the core tenant of free trade.
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Other factors are not static. Slap a gigantic tarrif on something, and the supply/demand/pricing is not going to stay the same.
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It's also ignoring how being the world's #1 consumer cemented the US's power across the world, and arguable stabilized a lot of geopolitics (with some unsavory complications, though). This was largely the idea behind the post-WWII world order.
White House publishes a table of steep percentage fees charged on imports from various countries that make little sense, claiming it's based on a rigorous and complex system of economic calculations
Somebody notices the percentages for all these countries are just the trade deficit divided by imports, which is a formula as simple as it is arbitrary
White House lackey says "Nuh uh, we have a totally complex formula for this" and publishes an imposing equation full of Greek symbols and letters
Turns out the Greek symbols refer to arbitrary values set by the White House that cancel each other out, and the letters just represent... the trade deficit divided by imports.
tl;dr: They used a dead-simple, arbitrary formula for their economy-wrecking trade war and tried using fancy-looking math to cover it up
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