Complex systems are dominated by feedback curves, but people insist on analyzing them by the forward transmission curves.
The separation between the cause and the effects are way less important than their polarity. High-order effects tend to be smaller, but they are also way more numerous, so things can cancel out or end-up resolved on either way.
I think you're over analyzing to some degree. The distribution and median outcome (1st through N order) was always negative for the course of action this administration has taken. The proponents try to sell people on the notion that this could all turn out great, which is way out on one end of the tail (e.g let's say 1% chance for sake of argument) for this action, and here we sit right around a median realized outcome for this kind of an intervention. I'd bundle all the N order effects up, then look how an aerial bombardment operation affects the liklihood of outcomes like the straight of hormuz being closed and/or controlled by iran, or iran surrendering the nuclear material and raising the white flag, etc...
You could probably do some simulations to see this was almost always going to be a losing strategy. Detailing the N order effects is good accounting, but the picture likely gets murkier the more you try to extrapolate N+1.
Externalities always felt glossed over in economics. So yes this business will ruin the river for everyone but please direct your attention to this chart and look at all that producer surplus!
One of my favorite readings from undergrad and grad school was "The Problem of Social Costs" by R. Coase. I'm sorry you think externalities are glossed over by economics, but Im excited to tell you that this is certainly not the case. Coase won the Nobel Prize in economics in large part for his work on externalities. They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics. It's definitely worth a read of you wish economics paid more attention to externalities:
At a certain point, businesses and the world in general focus way too much on the directly measurable rather than the accountance of the immeasurable (downstream effects)
Although, I am all for a data driven world but somehow it is my opinion that we have ended up with the worse of both as combined with the goodhart's law, this measurable thing just ends up somehow getting manipulated for short term gains over real long term damages.
As is your case in the example, the business will ruin the river for everyone having severe damage both culturally and I think financially as well given downstream effects of all people depending upon that river.
But the business has externalized the losses to the people and the people have externalized the responsibility of the river to the government and the government believes in absolute free capitalism! (or sometimes the businesses give the government some money in the pocket ie. corruption. "Cost of doing business" they said.)
I am not against capitalism itself (that Adam smith proposed) but capitalism in its current form is definitely something... and surely some if not most of us might agree to the fact that system isn't working as intended (well not working if it was intended for us ie.)
I mean a move that will get you checkmated in one is bad, but there are a lot less of those than there are moves that will get you checkmated in 4 that are just as bad of an outcome for you.
and therefor you will not be surprised to find out that there has been a very recent dramatic decline in the asking price for empty containers in areas that are primarily devoted to imports, as the empty can is not worth the cost to ship it back.
In this case it's because of the time it takes to load the empties because its more profitable to use the time sailing. Some ports have rules now forcing them to take back empties so the yards don't fill up.
which then leads to negative values for the cans, and makes it profitable for some trucking outfits to run "tiltload" container trucks, that can autonomously off load an empty can ,somewhere convienient
or other wierdness where filling a can with
an otherwise unprofitable comodity ,like hay, then drives a whole industry driven by water cost and the return value of cans, or scrap metal, and who knows what else, "half cut" cars, etc.
Dropping containers at the consumer end isn't that bad, at least when they're empty they're not that hard to move back on a truck and there are plenty of uses above scrap value for a container in seaworthy condition.
It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed, instead of the current system that essentially mandates unloading the container rapidly as soon as it shows up because an entire truck+driver is waiting for the unloading to complete.
For palletized loads it's easy to unload them into temporary space in the building they're delivered to, but not everything is palletized.
Trump flip-flops numerous times per day. I am beginning to think that "The Art of the Deal" was also always fake - he is unable to make a deal. Everyone sees this now.
Trumps art of the deal is trying to forcefully create win-lose deals instead of win-win or win-neutral deals, which, not very surprisingly, leads to other sides then going for the lose-lose deal.
It was always the Art of the BS, part of which is always to try to hide the fact that it is BS. But people fall for it and his minions often at least initially benefit from the same BS.
Just because somebody tells us they are not lying does not mean they are not. But some people believe it because it makes them feel great again.
Of course it was fake. It was ghostwritten (again, of course it was), and the ghostwriter is wracked with remorse. [1]
The idea that a chump who bankrupted a casino could outmaneuver the country that invented the term "checkmate" was always profoundly stupid... so of course, Trump's supporters lapped it up like antifreeze.
> I am beginning to think that "The Art of the Deal" was also always fake
To me, the interesting part is that people used to believe it in the first place. Anything that I heard of the guy and his agenda 2025 or whatever it was called had some really weird points which America (and for what its worth, the world, who didn't have any say in the American election but is dragged into it as the prices of my gas station rise)
Was it the silos of internet in an ever-polarizing nation that created the perfect conditions for a trump-esque person to take political power?
I should read more American history but Reagan seems like a similar guy but the only difference seems to be the short-term vs long-term consequences in the damage of Reagan's trickle-onomics (note that Trump's damage is pretty irreparable as well)
The funny thing is that we don't need to speculate about many of the effects of this because it's already happened but nobody really paid attention to it. I am talking about the Trump 2020 OPEC deal.
First, some context. OPEC/OPEC+ generally set their production to meet demand and to keep oil prices stable. That means they aim for a floor and ceiling on oil prices. Every 3 months they meet and try and anticipate demand. Produce too much and the price is too low. This hurts revenue. Produce not enough and it creates political instabilities, both locally and abroad. It would in particular hurt security guarantees with the US that go back to FDR and King Faisal making an oil-for-security deal in 1945. Now, that doens't mean OPEC members can't and don't cheat. They can and do. But it is generally successful [1].
In January-February 2020 we had the start of the pandemic. A lot of people weren't paying attention or thought it could be contained. That was over by March 2020 and much of the world went into lockdown. A lot of travel just stopped. This had an immediate effect on the oil market. Nobody was buying. Nobody had places to store excess oil. Russia and Saudi Arabia got into an oil price war. And the futures price briefly went negative [2]. This technically was an extreme contango market [3].
So what did the Trump administration do? Well, in my estimation, they panicked. They feared this would be devastating to US oil producers. So then-president Trump went to MBS and cajoled him into getting OPEC to massively cut oil production [4][5]. How much? Initially by 9.7 million barrels per day and then going down over the next 2 years to 6.3 million. That's roughly 10% of global crude oil output.
When I say "panicked", because of the OPEC meetings every 3 months, this would've happened anyway. OPEC would've cut production. The market would've stabilized. Instead, Trump locked OPEC into a 2 year cut and essentially gave them permission to drive up oil prices. And that's exactly what happened. This deal maps pretty much exactly to the pandemic inflation spike.
And nobody talks about it. Republicans were keen to blame Biden. Democrats chose to blame "greedy" oil companies even though no amount of US production could replace what OPEC had cut. Biden even went to Riyadh to beg MBS to increase production and he refused [6]. And nobody talks about any of it.
That was 10%. The Hormuz closure is 15-20% and also impacts natural gas, helium, fertilizer and a bunch of other things not impacted by the OPEC deal. Oil is being kept at a futures price of ~$100/barrel by record withdrawals from strategic reserves. By early July, those strategic reserves will be empty and there'll be no way to inject oil back into the market other than reopening the Strait. And that will lag weeks because oil container ships move as fast as bicycles.
So think back to the pandemic. Shipping containers 6x'ed. Gas prices went way up. It impacted jet fuel and sea freight. All of that is coming in the next month or two and there's honestly little we can do about it now. If the Strait reopened today, these second and third order effects are already baked in.
This is now a structural repricing event and we're going to see crude oil and gas prices near current levels probably for years.
Resuming production is also going to take years. Every bit of oil storage inside the Strait is at maximum capacity. All of the wells have had to stop producing because there is nowhere for the oil to go. When wells stop, it can take a long time to ramp up the production to previous levels -assuming it can ever again resume its prior peak output. Additionally, several key bits of infrastructure (trains, refineries) have been damaged and cannot be easily repaired.
Can't someone take all possessions of Trump, Hegseth etc... and redistribute this to middle and lower class folks? I fail to see why I have to pay for increasing prices due to the actions of those guys. This is literally a racketeering scheme for milking us via increase of prices. A few get very rich, just as Smedley Butler pointed out many decades ago - even he would be shocked at the level of milking going on here.
Not to get all fatalistic, but:
What’s the point in getting revenge on these people in particular? The voters have made it clear that there’s about eight years at most, typically less, before they’ll rally behind some new grifters and need to repeat the complete set of coursework from scratch.
As the saying goes: “The voters know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard”
We all have to pay for the actions of these guys because they were voted into power. Americans had the opportunity to avoid this but decided they wanted more of it, and now they're getting it. Elections have consequences.
Another part of the new price of oil and Trump's tariffs earlier is that they are a regressive tax. Poor people have to pay more in terms of percentage of their income now.
Trump often said "Tariffs is the most beautiful word". I think he said that because he thought his followers were too stupid to realize that he was transferring tax-burden from the rich to the middle-class and poor. That's why he thought they were "beautiful". They enabled him to gaslight people.
American people are not stupid but many of us have to work hard so there's not a lot spare time nor energy to try understand what is actually happening. Fox News is misleading us purposefully playing emotional tricks on patriotic Americanss.
Now import-companies should get back the tariffs they paid. But does it mean they will lower their prices? Probably not.
The separation between the cause and the effects are way less important than their polarity. High-order effects tend to be smaller, but they are also way more numerous, so things can cancel out or end-up resolved on either way.
You could probably do some simulations to see this was almost always going to be a losing strategy. Detailing the N order effects is good accounting, but the picture likely gets murkier the more you try to extrapolate N+1.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file/coase-...
Although, I am all for a data driven world but somehow it is my opinion that we have ended up with the worse of both as combined with the goodhart's law, this measurable thing just ends up somehow getting manipulated for short term gains over real long term damages.
As is your case in the example, the business will ruin the river for everyone having severe damage both culturally and I think financially as well given downstream effects of all people depending upon that river.
But the business has externalized the losses to the people and the people have externalized the responsibility of the river to the government and the government believes in absolute free capitalism! (or sometimes the businesses give the government some money in the pocket ie. corruption. "Cost of doing business" they said.)
I am not against capitalism itself (that Adam smith proposed) but capitalism in its current form is definitely something... and surely some if not most of us might agree to the fact that system isn't working as intended (well not working if it was intended for us ie.)
It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed, instead of the current system that essentially mandates unloading the container rapidly as soon as it shows up because an entire truck+driver is waiting for the unloading to complete.
For palletized loads it's easy to unload them into temporary space in the building they're delivered to, but not everything is palletized.
$611 for 2x 5 gallon buckets just to do my garage.
Just because somebody tells us they are not lying does not mean they are not. But some people believe it because it makes them feel great again.
The idea that a chump who bankrupted a casino could outmaneuver the country that invented the term "checkmate" was always profoundly stupid... so of course, Trump's supporters lapped it up like antifreeze.
1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-schwartz-trumps-ghostwrite...
To me, the interesting part is that people used to believe it in the first place. Anything that I heard of the guy and his agenda 2025 or whatever it was called had some really weird points which America (and for what its worth, the world, who didn't have any say in the American election but is dragged into it as the prices of my gas station rise)
Was it the silos of internet in an ever-polarizing nation that created the perfect conditions for a trump-esque person to take political power?
I should read more American history but Reagan seems like a similar guy but the only difference seems to be the short-term vs long-term consequences in the damage of Reagan's trickle-onomics (note that Trump's damage is pretty irreparable as well)
First, some context. OPEC/OPEC+ generally set their production to meet demand and to keep oil prices stable. That means they aim for a floor and ceiling on oil prices. Every 3 months they meet and try and anticipate demand. Produce too much and the price is too low. This hurts revenue. Produce not enough and it creates political instabilities, both locally and abroad. It would in particular hurt security guarantees with the US that go back to FDR and King Faisal making an oil-for-security deal in 1945. Now, that doens't mean OPEC members can't and don't cheat. They can and do. But it is generally successful [1].
In January-February 2020 we had the start of the pandemic. A lot of people weren't paying attention or thought it could be contained. That was over by March 2020 and much of the world went into lockdown. A lot of travel just stopped. This had an immediate effect on the oil market. Nobody was buying. Nobody had places to store excess oil. Russia and Saudi Arabia got into an oil price war. And the futures price briefly went negative [2]. This technically was an extreme contango market [3].
So what did the Trump administration do? Well, in my estimation, they panicked. They feared this would be devastating to US oil producers. So then-president Trump went to MBS and cajoled him into getting OPEC to massively cut oil production [4][5]. How much? Initially by 9.7 million barrels per day and then going down over the next 2 years to 6.3 million. That's roughly 10% of global crude oil output.
When I say "panicked", because of the OPEC meetings every 3 months, this would've happened anyway. OPEC would've cut production. The market would've stabilized. Instead, Trump locked OPEC into a 2 year cut and essentially gave them permission to drive up oil prices. And that's exactly what happened. This deal maps pretty much exactly to the pandemic inflation spike.
And nobody talks about it. Republicans were keen to blame Biden. Democrats chose to blame "greedy" oil companies even though no amount of US production could replace what OPEC had cut. Biden even went to Riyadh to beg MBS to increase production and he refused [6]. And nobody talks about any of it.
That was 10%. The Hormuz closure is 15-20% and also impacts natural gas, helium, fertilizer and a bunch of other things not impacted by the OPEC deal. Oil is being kept at a futures price of ~$100/barrel by record withdrawals from strategic reserves. By early July, those strategic reserves will be empty and there'll be no way to inject oil back into the market other than reopening the Strait. And that will lag weeks because oil container ships move as fast as bicycles.
So think back to the pandemic. Shipping containers 6x'ed. Gas prices went way up. It impacted jet fuel and sea freight. All of that is coming in the next month or two and there's honestly little we can do about it now. If the Strait reopened today, these second and third order effects are already baked in.
This is now a structural repricing event and we're going to see crude oil and gas prices near current levels probably for years.
[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
[2]: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/PDF/IN1135...
[3]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/contango.asp
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...
[5]: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-touts-great-saud...
[6]: https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114185/documents/...
IIRC there’s also major long-term supply destruction happening, because wells have to be capped around the Persian Gulf since the tanks are full.
As the saying goes: “The voters know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard”
Trump often said "Tariffs is the most beautiful word". I think he said that because he thought his followers were too stupid to realize that he was transferring tax-burden from the rich to the middle-class and poor. That's why he thought they were "beautiful". They enabled him to gaslight people.
American people are not stupid but many of us have to work hard so there's not a lot spare time nor energy to try understand what is actually happening. Fox News is misleading us purposefully playing emotional tricks on patriotic Americanss.
Now import-companies should get back the tariffs they paid. But does it mean they will lower their prices? Probably not.