8 ms·

Populist backlash against globalization: A meta-analysis of the causal evidence

35 points by mpweiher 3y ago

bell-cot 3y ago
> Abstract > The literature on populism is divided on whether economic factors are significant and robust causes of populism. To clarify this, we performed the first systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence of a causal association between economic insecurity and populism. We combined database searches with searching the citations of eligible studies and recently published reviews. We identified and reviewed thirty-six studies and presented a concise narrative summary and numerical synthesis of the key findings. Although we found significant heterogeneity in several dimensions, all studies reported a significant causal association. A recurrent magnitude was that economic insecurity explained around one-third of recent surges in populism. We tested for publication bias by conducting a funnel-plot asymmetry test and a density discontinuity test of the distribution of t-statistics. We found significant evidence of publication bias; however, the causal association between economic insecurity and populism remains significant after controlling for it. At the risk of dating myself...my memory* is that the #1 lesson of WWII in Europe was that grim economic insecurity ==>> really nasty governments ==>> lots of war and other evil-at-scale. True? *not direct memory, admittedly
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  > grim economic insecurity ==>> really nasty governments ==>> lots of war and other evil-at-scale. my personal view (pinko commie in my birth country but centre-right in my adoptive) is that "societies without grim economic insecurity" are public goods and hence governments should provide them.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Hope is the public good to be provided and defended. Without hope, there is no purpose nor future.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > "societies without grim economic insecurity" are public goods and hence governments should provide them. The question is how to do that. Some people argue that it's by providing competitive free markets. And that's often true, when the markets are actually competitive and free, but you can also have concentrated markets where the incumbents have captured the regulators, and that doesn't work. Some argue that transfer payments can reduce inequality, and that can also be true (e.g. UBI), but then many of the implementations try to provide specific services or limit what you can buy with them instead of providing fungible currency. Especially when those services are provided by a captured industry, and then they just end up as a subsidy for that industry, which can absorb the subsidies by raising prices. The problem is, when you have one of the degenerate situations as the status quo, people know that something is wrong and start clamoring for change without inherently understanding what change is necessary. And then it's easy for the exact forces that create problems and increase concentration of wealth to propose solutions that enrich themselves rather than addressing the issues. Which often makes it worse as those "solutions" accumulate, increasing overhead, inefficiency and the complexity that allows it to remain opaque and intractable.
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      > try to provide specific services or limit what you can buy with them instead of providing fungible currency I like our local safety net: it works by subsidising those who need it at tax time, but they acquire all their goods and services on the open market (avoiding distortion).
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        It's kind of amusing the extent to which nominally opposing factions actually agree. Q: How do you help poor people? A: Make them less poor. The right says lower their taxes, the left says transfer payments, mathematically these are the exact same thing. The only real dispute is whether negative tax rates should be used, and de facto negative rates are the status quo and only a real dispute because attempts to make it explicit get muddied by the factions who don't want the problem solved. If housing is overpriced, instead of policies that would reduce the market price of housing (and so lower rents for landlords), they propose rent subsidies (so they get the money), or income-gated housing projects (so they can point to something nominally being done while the market price stays high). Which eats up the money that could have been used for transfer payments/tax cuts while it continues to flow to landlords. And likewise for healthcare costs -- instead of addressing the regulatory causes of high prices, the incumbents keep pushing government subsidies, so that the prices (i.e. their profits) can stay high at the expense of the customer/taxpayer. The fight isn't a question of tax cuts vs. a safety net. The fight is against industry incumbents who want to keep collecting high rents through regulatory capture.
- jjjjj55555 3y ago
  I didn't see any clear definition of populism anywhere here. At present moment it seems to just be a pejorative against lower class people with right-wing leanings. It's also odd to me that they only look at the post-WWII period. Populism was widespread in Europe during the 1800s
  - rayiner 3y ago
    Using “populism” to describe traditional mindsets is a clever rhetorical trick. You don’t need a label to describe the desire of people to protect local industries and not have foreigners come live in their country. That’s just how most people in the world have felt historically, and how most people in the world still feel. If you look at China, most of the rest of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, etc., those things are no-brainers. What requires a label is the new thing. The new idea that embraces freedom of movement of capital, goods, and labor, across national borders. “Populism” is nothing more than the opposition to this new, unlabeled thing.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      Populism is not neccesarily protectionism. Its less about the specific policies as how they are made. Also its not like populism is a new term or idea. It goes back to Roman times at least.
      - rayiner 3y ago
        Populism isn’t new. But the ideas being called “populist” today wouldn’t have warranted that label even a few decades ago. It’s turned into a label for everyone who opposes globalized industries and mass immigration.
    - jjjjj55555 3y ago
      Anti-globalist seems like a more precise term for what you're describing. It also avoids clashing with populist movements of the past, which dealt with issues other than those that you're describing.
    - 3y ago
- huijzer 3y ago
  > grim economic insecurity ==>> really nasty governments ==>> lots of war and other evil-at-scale. I sort of agree, but it’s also a bit more nuanced than that (and of course more nuanced than what I write here. The world is incredibly complex and we simply never know in history where some event must inevitably have been followed by another or that something else could have happened under slightly different circumstances.) Hitler at the peak received only about 40% of the votes, but he got in because the autocracy thought he would not become much anyway and still hamper the autocrats opposition. Also not the whole of Europe was having nasty governments. Most were trying to appease the Nazi regime in the hope to avoid further escalation. Churchill, for example, was considered a war monger at that time since he didn’t trust Hitler and wanted to stop the appeasement politics. Also, in Eastern Europe the first causality arrow should be reversed. Really nasty governments caused economic problems in the Soviet. Not necessarily the other way around. Since there is currently a lot of capitalism hate going around, I’ll defend why the Soviet was nasty regime. The idea of Karl Marx for example was that capitalism is wage slavery and Marxism-Leninism was the only solution. So what they did in their fight against capitalism is to round up everyone who had too much capital. And to still get money into the goverment, farmers were enslaved. Next, factories received weird metrics and incentives, all centrally managed, which caused factories to often produce low quality products. In some cases the sum of the value of the products going into the factory was higher than the products coming out of the factory.
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    > Since there is currently a lot of capitalism hate going around, I’ll defend why the Soviet was nasty regime. Soviet regime is a terrible straw man to attack if you want to go against capitalism hate. Try Northern European social democracies instead.
    - huijzer 3y ago
      I don’t know what you see around you, but I see a lot of complaints about the big capitalists, companies, and the poor labourers who are enslaved by wages; also in Europe (I live in Europe). That’s why I mentioned an earlier ideology which also hammered on the wage slavery and similar points.
082349872349872 3y ago
For people who claim to not wish to be governed by elites, both the current and the mid-last-century "populists" certainly seem eager to follow leaders! cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frogs_Who_Desired_a_King https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frogs_Who_Desired_a_King
- aylmao 3y ago
  Populism doesn't call for the abolition of elites. Populism calls for elites to not disregard the concerns of ordinary people. Perhaps you're thinking about anarchism or communism.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- crooked-v 3y ago
  When using the phrase 'elites', are we talking 'coastal elites' (that is, the actual majority of the US population, who live in coastal cities), 'globalist elites' (that is, imaginary secret evil communists who are actually imaginary secret evil Jews), or something else?
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    I also believe the word has become (except as sibboleth) nearly meaningless in general, but in the context of TFA it'd appear to be "globalist elites"
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > Frogs Who Desired a King That was fun. Not heard that since I was about 5. Seeing it now, Thomas Hobbes spent about two volumes on the same story and gave us the "social contract". The log is the social safety net. The snake is the ever present threat of violence, "at our own request and for our own good".
- skyechurch 3y ago
  Marius and Caesar were populists. Having leaders (who are frequently themselves of the elite class) is almost a prerequisite, or else you've drifted into anarchism.
photochemsyn 3y ago
> "The literature on <democratic governance> is divided on whether economic factors are significant and robust causes of <democratic governance>." Think of what a great country this could be if the only people allowed to vote in national elections were graduates of Ivy League schools. /s Looking forward to a literature meta-analysis of the economic factors leading to the rise of elitism and kleptocratic oligarchic rule in America - pretty sure the outsourcing of manufacturing and resulting reduction in domestic wages and rise in the billionaire count had a lot to do with it, along with the consolidation of ownership of media outlets (which is getting worse and worse) into a unified propaganda borg supporting the interests of the new American aristocracy.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  Limiting suffrage is a surprisingly popular point of view in the US these days. You can find high profile advocates for it with a lot of power/status, like Peter Thiel: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/ https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... I won't dismiss all these arguments offhand, because there's a lot of valid things to be said about how poorly informed the average voter is. But it troubles me that a lot of people seem comfortable openly saying that maybe things would be better if Those People (substitute group of your choice) weren't allowed to vote, and I see those kinds of arguments from various points on the political spectrum, even if they are often just angry venting i.e. 'if retirees stopped voting that would fix things, since they want bad things' A specific example I've seen a lot is that climate change would have been fixed already if only The Olds weren't voting, since they (at least according to this PoV) are actively voting against climate measures since they'll be dead before the sea levels rise. Not going to express an opinion on this one.
  - aylmao 3y ago
    I think this is worrying too, but if I wouldn't say it's something that's happening "these days", I would've say it's something that is happening "still". These ideas have always been present in the USA and around the world. But specifically in the USA, it's one of the reasons states decide their own voting laws. Nowadays it's relatively small rules like early voting and vote by mail, but historically it allowed the states a lot of power to limit suffrage to their linking. Even after women and PoC were given the right to vote, there was poll taxes and literacy tests in some states [1][2]. [1]: https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/voting-rights-timeline/ https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/voting-rights-time... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_States#Article_II_%E2%80%94_The_Executive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Sta...
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Is there some misalignment of HN title and abstract? The title mentions Globalisation and the abstract does not, but instead relates populism to economic conditions. Is a link merely implied? I did not read the full paper yet.
- frank_nitti 3y ago
  Good call-out. The globalization vs nationalization dichotomy is inherently linked to populism in the discussion, at least here in the US. Starting from about ~50 years ago: 1. Owner class outsources manufacturing operations to cut labor costs (i.e. globalization) 2. Working class loses stable full-time union jobs with good pay and benefits, relegated to part-time minimum wage service jobs with no benefits (from the Chrysler factory to the Arby’s drive-thru) 3. Working class voters support leaders who advocate restoring manufacturing job sector, controlling immigration, regulating the “fat cat” owner class 4. Owner class labels working-class advocates as “populist” and their anti-globalization stances as “nationalist” So they’ve always been associated in my mind, and many others who grew up in this era. People may not think of Trump as a working-class advocate (and I would agree). But the truth is that he leveraged the nationalist sentiment tied to the loss of strong employment opportunities for working people, promising to bring manufacturing jobs back and control immigration. On those two fronts, he and Bernie Sanders were more aligned than either were with so-called “corporatist” politicians on either side of the aisle in Washington. Hence both were labeled as populists, along with leaders like AMLO in Mexico and Johnson in the UK
somethoughts 3y ago
Tangentially (and as an armchair/hobby economist), I've always wondered if the proper way to do a protectionist import tariff would be to collect the import duties and instead of just putting it into the general fund - either: 1.) Return the money to the country of origin via a blank check. 2.) Use the money to fund NGOs which help importers like Nike, etc. audit their foreign contract manufacturers for US level environmental regulations and labor regulations. This would reduce foreign countries from enabling arbitrage via lax regulation. 3.) Distribute the money equally to all tax paying US citizens via tax rebate or something. I think the issue with globalization is that CEOs of multinationals are seen as the primary beneficiaries of environmental/labor arbitrage.
- hgomersall 3y ago
  Better is to use it to subsidise other imports for which the import country is a price taker. The classic one would be oil and gas. Import tariffs free up import space which should be used wisely.
  - somethoughts 3y ago
    Would be curious to hear more as I'm not sure I quite understand. I think the proposal seems like a more conventional proposal which seeks to maximize classical measures like overall global economic productivity and ignores the general domestic populace. It seems like that using import tariff duties to subsidize more imports would encourage more importation of goods by lowering the final cost to the end user. It would also likely just directly benefit the domestic importers and the foreign exporters. It would also further exacerbate the differential over domestic producers and domestic alternatives and do nothing to prevent economic/labor regulation arbitrage.
    - hgomersall 3y ago
      It's explicitly about stabilising prices of necessary goods for which a country is a price taker. Using luxury goods to stabilise the prices of necessary goods. Here's an analysis that raises it in the context of the broader problem: https://new-wayland.com/blog/the-uk-energy-crisis-mmt-analysis/ https://new-wayland.com/blog/the-uk-energy-crisis-mmt-analys...
aniftythrifrty 3y ago
I like my iPhone
Glyptodon 3y ago
Does their study define populism somewhere? Skimmed it and I have no idea what it really means. Would Wobblies be considered populist? If you think free trade should be extremely gated by Western style human rights standards (gender equality, free speech, free religion, if not representative government) is that populist? Or is the term just being repurposed as code for isolationism and xenophobia?
narag 3y ago
The thing that voters revolt against is political collusion: parties of supposedly opposite ideologies agree to support some terrible policies, leaving the affected citizens no other option except the fringe candidate with colourful rethoric.

35 points by mpweiher 3y ago

> Abstract > The literature on populism is divided on whether economic factors are significant and robust causes of populism. To clarify this, we performed the first systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence of a causal association between economic insecurity and populism. We combined database searches with searching the citations of eligible studies and recently published reviews. We identified and reviewed thirty-six studies and presented a concise narrative summary and numerical synthesis of the key findings. Although we found significant heterogeneity in several dimensions, all studies reported a significant causal association. A recurrent magnitude was that economic insecurity explained around one-third of recent surges in populism. We tested for publication bias by conducting a funnel-plot asymmetry test and a density discontinuity test of the distribution of t-statistics. We found significant evidence of publication bias; however, the causal association between economic insecurity and populism remains significant after controlling for it. At the risk of dating myself...my memory* is that the #1 lesson of WWII in Europe was that grim economic insecurity ==>> really nasty governments ==>> lots of war and other evil-at-scale. True? *not direct memory, admittedly

082349872349872 3y ago
> grim economic insecurity ==>> really nasty governments ==>> lots of war and other evil-at-scale. my personal view (pinko commie in my birth country but centre-right in my adoptive) is that "societies without grim economic insecurity" are public goods and hence governments should provide them.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Hope is the public good to be provided and defended. Without hope, there is no purpose nor future.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > "societies without grim economic insecurity" are public goods and hence governments should provide them. The question is how to do that. Some people argue that it's by providing competitive free markets. And that's often true, when the markets are actually competitive and free, but you can also have concentrated markets where the incumbents have captured the regulators, and that doesn't work. Some argue that transfer payments can reduce inequality, and that can also be true (e.g. UBI), but then many of the implementations try to provide specific services or limit what you can buy with them instead of providing fungible currency. Especially when those services are provided by a captured industry, and then they just end up as a subsidy for that industry, which can absorb the subsidies by raising prices. The problem is, when you have one of the degenerate situations as the status quo, people know that something is wrong and start clamoring for change without inherently understanding what change is necessary. And then it's easy for the exact forces that create problems and increase concentration of wealth to propose solutions that enrich themselves rather than addressing the issues. Which often makes it worse as those "solutions" accumulate, increasing overhead, inefficiency and the complexity that allows it to remain opaque and intractable.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    > try to provide specific services or limit what you can buy with them instead of providing fungible currency I like our local safety net: it works by subsidising those who need it at tax time, but they acquire all their goods and services on the open market (avoiding distortion).
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      It's kind of amusing the extent to which nominally opposing factions actually agree. Q: How do you help poor people? A: Make them less poor. The right says lower their taxes, the left says transfer payments, mathematically these are the exact same thing. The only real dispute is whether negative tax rates should be used, and de facto negative rates are the status quo and only a real dispute because attempts to make it explicit get muddied by the factions who don't want the problem solved. If housing is overpriced, instead of policies that would reduce the market price of housing (and so lower rents for landlords), they propose rent subsidies (so they get the money), or income-gated housing projects (so they can point to something nominally being done while the market price stays high). Which eats up the money that could have been used for transfer payments/tax cuts while it continues to flow to landlords. And likewise for healthcare costs -- instead of addressing the regulatory causes of high prices, the incumbents keep pushing government subsidies, so that the prices (i.e. their profits) can stay high at the expense of the customer/taxpayer. The fight isn't a question of tax cuts vs. a safety net. The fight is against industry incumbents who want to keep collecting high rents through regulatory capture.
jjjjj55555 3y ago
I didn't see any clear definition of populism anywhere here. At present moment it seems to just be a pejorative against lower class people with right-wing leanings. It's also odd to me that they only look at the post-WWII period. Populism was widespread in Europe during the 1800s
- rayiner 3y ago
  Using “populism” to describe traditional mindsets is a clever rhetorical trick. You don’t need a label to describe the desire of people to protect local industries and not have foreigners come live in their country. That’s just how most people in the world have felt historically, and how most people in the world still feel. If you look at China, most of the rest of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, etc., those things are no-brainers. What requires a label is the new thing. The new idea that embraces freedom of movement of capital, goods, and labor, across national borders. “Populism” is nothing more than the opposition to this new, unlabeled thing.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    Populism is not neccesarily protectionism. Its less about the specific policies as how they are made. Also its not like populism is a new term or idea. It goes back to Roman times at least.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      Populism isn’t new. But the ideas being called “populist” today wouldn’t have warranted that label even a few decades ago. It’s turned into a label for everyone who opposes globalized industries and mass immigration.
  - jjjjj55555 3y ago
    Anti-globalist seems like a more precise term for what you're describing. It also avoids clashing with populist movements of the past, which dealt with issues other than those that you're describing.
  - 3y ago
huijzer 3y ago
> grim economic insecurity ==>> really nasty governments ==>> lots of war and other evil-at-scale. I sort of agree, but it’s also a bit more nuanced than that (and of course more nuanced than what I write here. The world is incredibly complex and we simply never know in history where some event must inevitably have been followed by another or that something else could have happened under slightly different circumstances.) Hitler at the peak received only about 40% of the votes, but he got in because the autocracy thought he would not become much anyway and still hamper the autocrats opposition. Also not the whole of Europe was having nasty governments. Most were trying to appease the Nazi regime in the hope to avoid further escalation. Churchill, for example, was considered a war monger at that time since he didn’t trust Hitler and wanted to stop the appeasement politics. Also, in Eastern Europe the first causality arrow should be reversed. Really nasty governments caused economic problems in the Soviet. Not necessarily the other way around. Since there is currently a lot of capitalism hate going around, I’ll defend why the Soviet was nasty regime. The idea of Karl Marx for example was that capitalism is wage slavery and Marxism-Leninism was the only solution. So what they did in their fight against capitalism is to round up everyone who had too much capital. And to still get money into the goverment, farmers were enslaved. Next, factories received weird metrics and incentives, all centrally managed, which caused factories to often produce low quality products. In some cases the sum of the value of the products going into the factory was higher than the products coming out of the factory.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  > Since there is currently a lot of capitalism hate going around, I’ll defend why the Soviet was nasty regime. Soviet regime is a terrible straw man to attack if you want to go against capitalism hate. Try Northern European social democracies instead.
  - huijzer 3y ago
    I don’t know what you see around you, but I see a lot of complaints about the big capitalists, companies, and the poor labourers who are enslaved by wages; also in Europe (I live in Europe). That’s why I mentioned an earlier ideology which also hammered on the wage slavery and similar points.

082349872349872 3y ago

For people who claim to not wish to be governed by elites, both the current and the mid-last-century "populists" certainly seem eager to follow leaders! cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frogs_Who_Desired_a_King https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frogs_Who_Desired_a_King

aylmao 3y ago
Populism doesn't call for the abolition of elites. Populism calls for elites to not disregard the concerns of ordinary people. Perhaps you're thinking about anarchism or communism.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
crooked-v 3y ago
When using the phrase 'elites', are we talking 'coastal elites' (that is, the actual majority of the US population, who live in coastal cities), 'globalist elites' (that is, imaginary secret evil communists who are actually imaginary secret evil Jews), or something else?
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  I also believe the word has become (except as sibboleth) nearly meaningless in general, but in the context of TFA it'd appear to be "globalist elites"
nonrandomstring 3y ago
> Frogs Who Desired a King That was fun. Not heard that since I was about 5. Seeing it now, Thomas Hobbes spent about two volumes on the same story and gave us the "social contract". The log is the social safety net. The snake is the ever present threat of violence, "at our own request and for our own good".
skyechurch 3y ago
Marius and Caesar were populists. Having leaders (who are frequently themselves of the elite class) is almost a prerequisite, or else you've drifted into anarchism.

photochemsyn 3y ago

> "The literature on <democratic governance> is divided on whether economic factors are significant and robust causes of <democratic governance>." Think of what a great country this could be if the only people allowed to vote in national elections were graduates of Ivy League schools. /s Looking forward to a literature meta-analysis of the economic factors leading to the rise of elitism and kleptocratic oligarchic rule in America - pretty sure the outsourcing of manufacturing and resulting reduction in domestic wages and rise in the billionaire count had a lot to do with it, along with the consolidation of ownership of media outlets (which is getting worse and worse) into a unified propaganda borg supporting the interests of the new American aristocracy.

kevingadd 3y ago
Limiting suffrage is a surprisingly popular point of view in the US these days. You can find high profile advocates for it with a lot of power/status, like Peter Thiel: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/ https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... I won't dismiss all these arguments offhand, because there's a lot of valid things to be said about how poorly informed the average voter is. But it troubles me that a lot of people seem comfortable openly saying that maybe things would be better if Those People (substitute group of your choice) weren't allowed to vote, and I see those kinds of arguments from various points on the political spectrum, even if they are often just angry venting i.e. 'if retirees stopped voting that would fix things, since they want bad things' A specific example I've seen a lot is that climate change would have been fixed already if only The Olds weren't voting, since they (at least according to this PoV) are actively voting against climate measures since they'll be dead before the sea levels rise. Not going to express an opinion on this one.
- aylmao 3y ago
  I think this is worrying too, but if I wouldn't say it's something that's happening "these days", I would've say it's something that is happening "still". These ideas have always been present in the USA and around the world. But specifically in the USA, it's one of the reasons states decide their own voting laws. Nowadays it's relatively small rules like early voting and vote by mail, but historically it allowed the states a lot of power to limit suffrage to their linking. Even after women and PoC were given the right to vote, there was poll taxes and literacy tests in some states [1][2]. [1]: https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/voting-rights-timeline/ https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/voting-rights-time... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_States#Article_II_%E2%80%94_The_Executive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Sta...

nonrandomstring 3y ago

Is there some misalignment of HN title and abstract? The title mentions Globalisation and the abstract does not, but instead relates populism to economic conditions. Is a link merely implied? I did not read the full paper yet.

frank_nitti 3y ago
Good call-out. The globalization vs nationalization dichotomy is inherently linked to populism in the discussion, at least here in the US. Starting from about ~50 years ago: 1. Owner class outsources manufacturing operations to cut labor costs (i.e. globalization) 2. Working class loses stable full-time union jobs with good pay and benefits, relegated to part-time minimum wage service jobs with no benefits (from the Chrysler factory to the Arby’s drive-thru) 3. Working class voters support leaders who advocate restoring manufacturing job sector, controlling immigration, regulating the “fat cat” owner class 4. Owner class labels working-class advocates as “populist” and their anti-globalization stances as “nationalist” So they’ve always been associated in my mind, and many others who grew up in this era. People may not think of Trump as a working-class advocate (and I would agree). But the truth is that he leveraged the nationalist sentiment tied to the loss of strong employment opportunities for working people, promising to bring manufacturing jobs back and control immigration. On those two fronts, he and Bernie Sanders were more aligned than either were with so-called “corporatist” politicians on either side of the aisle in Washington. Hence both were labeled as populists, along with leaders like AMLO in Mexico and Johnson in the UK

somethoughts 3y ago

Tangentially (and as an armchair/hobby economist), I've always wondered if the proper way to do a protectionist import tariff would be to collect the import duties and instead of just putting it into the general fund - either: 1.) Return the money to the country of origin via a blank check. 2.) Use the money to fund NGOs which help importers like Nike, etc. audit their foreign contract manufacturers for US level environmental regulations and labor regulations. This would reduce foreign countries from enabling arbitrage via lax regulation. 3.) Distribute the money equally to all tax paying US citizens via tax rebate or something. I think the issue with globalization is that CEOs of multinationals are seen as the primary beneficiaries of environmental/labor arbitrage.

hgomersall 3y ago
Better is to use it to subsidise other imports for which the import country is a price taker. The classic one would be oil and gas. Import tariffs free up import space which should be used wisely.
- somethoughts 3y ago
  Would be curious to hear more as I'm not sure I quite understand. I think the proposal seems like a more conventional proposal which seeks to maximize classical measures like overall global economic productivity and ignores the general domestic populace. It seems like that using import tariff duties to subsidize more imports would encourage more importation of goods by lowering the final cost to the end user. It would also likely just directly benefit the domestic importers and the foreign exporters. It would also further exacerbate the differential over domestic producers and domestic alternatives and do nothing to prevent economic/labor regulation arbitrage.
  - hgomersall 3y ago
    It's explicitly about stabilising prices of necessary goods for which a country is a price taker. Using luxury goods to stabilise the prices of necessary goods. Here's an analysis that raises it in the context of the broader problem: https://new-wayland.com/blog/the-uk-energy-crisis-mmt-analysis/ https://new-wayland.com/blog/the-uk-energy-crisis-mmt-analys...

aniftythrifrty 3y ago

I like my iPhone

Glyptodon 3y ago

Does their study define populism somewhere? Skimmed it and I have no idea what it really means. Would Wobblies be considered populist? If you think free trade should be extremely gated by Western style human rights standards (gender equality, free speech, free religion, if not representative government) is that populist? Or is the term just being repurposed as code for isolationism and xenophobia?

narag 3y ago

The thing that voters revolt against is political collusion: parties of supposedly opposite ideologies agree to support some terrible policies, leaving the affected citizens no other option except the fringe candidate with colourful rethoric.