I'm not an economist, and my statistics background is definitely sub-par. But as I read this article, I couldn't help feeling something was off. For something o

I'm not an economist, and my statistics background is definitely sub-par. But as I read this article, I couldn't help feeling something was off. For something of this importance, I would think the author would want to avoid mangling words like this: "To calculate reciprocal tariffs, import and export data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2024." I am also not familiar with the term "censoring" as it is used in statistics, so this sentence really threw me: "The reciprocal tariffs were left-censored at zero." Does that just mean that they didn't set any negative reciprocal tariffs? I thought the reciprocal tariffs were limited to 10% and above. I don't understand. The other thing that tickles my brain is how the author uses an equation to effect change in the real world. The math is a model of the behavior of trade between nations, which is fine, so long as it doesn't assume the reliability of, say, physical laws of kinematics. Arbitrarily manipulating quantities in an equation like this and assuming it will still hold is a bold move. I feel like our entire country is the subject of an undergraduate economics project.