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Frida Orupabo
Whenever I see these numbers my mind reels: The Entire globalization shock to the United States is an increase in imports as a share of GDP from 5 percent (!!!!) in 1970 to 15 percent today.
The key number is something known as the Armington elasticity. This asks the question, what happens to the relative demand for imports compared with domestic goods when the price of imports rises? Specifically, if import prices rise by one percent, by how many percent does the relative demand for imports fall? There have been many, many, many attempts to estimate the Armington elasticity. One recent survey found 3,524 reported estimates. The average, which is also the number many estimates seem to cluster around, is about 3. So what do I get if I assume an 18 percent tariff rate and an Armington elasticity of 3? In 2024 U.S. imports of goods were 11.2 percent of GDP. By my estimate, Trump’s tariffs will reduce this to 7.1 percent. That’s a 36 percent decline, roughly comparable to the 40 percent decline in the import share that took place between 1929 and 1932, although the story behind that decline was very different.
Paul Krugman
The Aug. 1 deadline has come and gone, and Donald Trump hasn’t made any trade deals. What some gullible reports call “deals” are at best “frameworks” in which other countries have suggested — without signing anything — that they’ll do things that might help the U.S. economy. For the most part even these understandings are vaporware. For example, the European Union…
19 days ago · 1295 likes · 388 comments · Paul Krugman
In Trump’s first half year in office, Las Vegas tourist flow is sharply down.
Source: Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority
For the Malaysian labour market, it has been a long road back from COVID.
Source: Trading Economics
These are the ten fastest growing cities in the world
Source: Techpoint Africa
As Robert Rotberg has written, sub-Saharan Africa is “experiencing the most rapid population increases anywhere, ever”, such that “half of all the babies born on the planet between now and 2050” will be delivered in the region. African women begin having babies, on average, in their early 20s, meaning that generations compound faster than elsewhere. Thanks to improved medicine, more of those infants, and mothers, now survive. The population statistics are far from reliable, but those collected by the World Bank at least give a sense of scale. On average, women in sub-Saharan Africa have 4.3 children each. In some countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Chad, they have more than six each. Whereas, in 1975, Africa had half as many people as Europe, by the middle of this century it will have three times more, and the median African will still be in their mid-20s. This growth will be concentrated in urban Africa. The continent has 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-growing cities, and in the coming decades many of its urban centres will double or triple in size.
Source: UnHeard
Frida Orupabo
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“To the success of our hopeless cause” – What an extraordinarily self-reflective opening to this review by Sheila Fitzpatrick of Benjamin Nathans Pulizer-prize winning history of Soviet dissidents.
Soviet dissidents saw things differently from those around them and asserted their right to do so. This was a phenomenon of the post-Stalin period, and specifically of the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s: the aftermath of Khrushchev’s Thaw, which happens to be the period in which I first encountered the Soviet Union as a British exchange student in Moscow. Naturally their dissenting opinions tended to be unpopular with their fellow citizens. Equally naturally, given the Cold War, the opposite was true in the West, where they were greatly admired. I had my own dissenting opinion about the dissidents back then: I thought they were an annoying distraction. This was in part a reaction to the uncritical publicity Soviet dissidents received in the Western press, where they were seen as heroes and moral exemplars, and more broadly to the Cold War, which generated both the publicity and the aura of sanctity. As a graduate student in Soviet history at St Antony’s, Oxford’s ‘spy college’, I saw some of the Western myth-making close up. But my attitude was also formed by personal experience. I was brought up in Australia, where my father – a bohemian intellectual who reflexively opposed the government on any issue of free speech – had invented the professional dissident role for himself. In his case that meant shunning paid employment in favour of unpaid freelance ‘civil liberties’ (what we would now call human rights) activity, much of it conducted in the pub. I therefore grew up with a strong feeling that dissidence, morally admirable though it might appear, was basically a lifestyle choice, fun for natural troublemakers but tough on their families. When I first went to Moscow, in 1966, it was with a firm determination to avoid the two categories of locals easiest for a foreigner to meet: dissidents on the one hand, KGB informers on the other. Given these prejudices, it’s lucky that it was not I but the fair-minded Benjamin Nathans who set out to write the history of Soviet dissidents. He likes them, but stays this side of idolatry.
Source: LRB
Source: Portland Museum
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