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Peter Navarro Invented an Expert for His Books, Based on Himself (2019)
- markhahn 2y agoWhy is this not simply disqualifying?
- localghost3000 2y agoBecause nothing matters. Just wait out the outrage cycle. In a week or two the general public will have moved on. Signalgate, the president being convicted of numerous felonies, etc being a few examples that pop into my head. None of this should be status quo but we live in interesting times as they say.
- dummydummy1234 2y agoMaybe, but it is a lot harder to 'move on' when your retirement is down 20+% One can have the naive hope that people will start to care about competency. Of course, we also have covid with estimated 1M Excess deaths... So, probably not.
- Jtsummers 2y agohttps://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/list/all?strategy=all_in_one https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/list/all?s... Vanguard's lifecycle funds (picking them because they get promoted a lot as a good choice, courtesy of good marketing and lower fees and generally good returns). Their 2030 fund, the one that people are recommended to select if they're retiring around 2028-2032, is down 4.54% YTD, and down 1.42% for the last year. The current market effects have wiped out over a year in gains for a relatively conservative fund. And that's all from the last two trading days, it was slightly up YTD on Wednesday. And all of this is before the effects of the tariffs come into play. We haven't actually seen the effect of higher import costs hitting companies and consumers yet. So people approaching retirement are getting hit and hit hard, but it's not quite 20% for them unless they selected an aggressive investment strategy for some reason. The worst for the Vanguard funds are down about 8% YTD (and likely to get worse) for anyone 25 years or more away from retirement.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoWiping out a year's of gains is significant if you're already retired and counting on steady gains to provide income to live on.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- YZF 2y agoNobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income. The stock market goes up and it goes down. In both the dot com crash and the 2008 financial crisis the market fell significantly more. Even in Covid it fell more. So you should plan for many of these events to happen within your retirement. If you're more conservative (pun?) you should plan for great depression style events within your retirement. EDIT: I don't usually respond to downvotes but it's really important to understand the stock market is a volatile investment. You shouldn't have money you're planning to use in the short or medium term in the stock market. It's a longer term (10 years+) investment.
- bananalychee 2y agoAs much as HN posters like to pretend they're above them, it's not an exaggeration to say that this site is now about as political as Reddit or Bluesky and votes like them. Depending on the thread, your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing partisanship, not because you're wrong or because your post is low-quality. For the record, my vote seems to have removed the low-opacity threshold on your post. I have no doubt that countless intelligent posts have been hidden solely because they do not align with leftist consensus, and comment sections are full of entirely delusional subthreads that fail to comprehend just about anything about politics, economics, or ethics, but are promoted because they align with a simplistic radical framework of "good guys smart, bad guys dumb".
- croes 2y ago>Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income. >your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing The comment is kind of left leaning so I doubt that’s the reason for the down votes
- candiddevmike 2y agoIt's starting to matter. Trump's downfall will be his base seeing him as anything but a successful, smart businessman. He's struggling to control the narrative with how many gaffs and scandals have occurred, and it's starting to hit his base and his brand: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-update-polls-2055281 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-update... The tariffs are probably going to be a historical "turn of the tide" moment.
- brookst 2y agoIt’s definitely a test of whether we’ve got a political problem or a cult problem. I’m not as optimistic as you.
- bnjms 2y agoA cult problem. But cult problems can be solved too. Trumpism might be cult-lite but it’s not something people cannot be led to see as harmful. Find what hooked them. Show that the outcome isn’t as Trump implied. Frame the failure as intentional rather than unintentional — Trumps usual approach to avoiding responsibility. Allow them to save face.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoThe cult also evaporates at the leader’s passing, and we all pass eventually.
- bediger4000 2y agoKim Jung Un is the grandson of Kim Il Sung. Not all cults evaporate at the founder's death.
- rsynnott 2y agoThat doesn’t seem particularly likely in Trump’s case, though; it’s hard to see his kids being compelling.
- rexpop 2y ago"Lighten up and have fun," he says at the end. For what will we actually hold him accountable? It's a smoking gun that he's a bullshitter, but it's not a crime to be a racist.
- galaxyLogic 2y agoRight, but it is in large part because of Navarro that Trump thinks universal tarifss are a great idea, since Navarro advocated for them and created credibility for his theories by inventing this fictional "expert". It gave Trump plausible deniability, he can claim he's just doing what great experts from the academia are advocating. And it gave us the market-crash and global trade-war. It's easy for billionaires to lighten up and have fun, but not for most other people. Tariffs are a sales-tax, which means poor people have to relinguish a larger proportion of their income to the government, than rich people. It is great wealth transfer from ordinary people to the rich. And one can only conjecture that THAT is why Trump and Navarro advocate for it.
- CRConrad 2y ago> And one can only conjecture that THAT is why Trump and Navarro advocate for it. I'd guess: Navarro yes; Trump, no. In his case, it's just stupidity.
- CRConrad 2y ago> but it's not a crime to be a racist. That's the problem: It should be, if not legally, at least in terms of electability. But with enough of a proportion of racists in the electorate, it's no wonder racists get elected. Good bye and godspeed, America; it was nice knowing you.
- rexpop 2y ago> it was nice knowing you. Not sure you ever "knew" America if you think this is the first time racists were ever elected.
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- kubb 2y agoThere’s a deeply rooted assumption that both sides are equivalent. This allows one of the sides to do whatever without its validity being disqualified, because any doubt is simply overridden by the assumption.
- Cheer2171 2y agoIt is, but qualifications no longer matter. In fact, they are now seen as liabilities by the current regime.
- StefanBatory 2y agoTo quote from previous Polish govt - "we do not hire experts, because when we hired experts they did not want to implement our program"
- Jtsummers 2y agoI'm unfamiliar with Polish politics, and a quote like that does not surprise me coming from politicians (see "alternative facts" in the first Trump administration to excuse outright lies), but do you have a source for that or at least a source for what you're paraphrasing if it's not a direct quote?
- StefanBatory 2y agoIt's this - it was from vice spokesman of PiS, Jarosław Fogiel. https://x.com/bezprawnik/status/1303967275373015043 https://x.com/bezprawnik/status/1303967275373015043 EDIT: Wait a second, I need to check something. EDIT 2: Huh, I think I fell for this the entire time. It's "Z podobnym problemem mierzyliśmy się, kiedy sprawowaliśmy władzę w latach 2005-2007. Wtedy poszliśmy w kierunku bardzo eksperckim, właśnie otwartych konkursów jeśli chodzi o rady nadzorcze. Trafiali tam eksperci z rynku, trafiały osoby z tytułami naukowymi, z SGH, z innych uczelni. No i problem okazał się taki, że ich sposób myślenia o gospodarce, o zarządzaniu był zupełnie sprzeczny z tym, co Prawo i Sprawiedliwość ma w swoim programie." Which translates to "We faced a similar problem when we were in power in 2005-2007. Then we went in a very expert direction, precisely open competitions when it came to supervisory boards. Experts from the market ended up there, people with academic degrees, from the Warsaw School of Economics, from other universities. Well, and the problem turned out to be that their way of thinking about the economy, about management was completely contrary to what Law and Justice has in its program." ... so that quote was from editiorial summarising it, not that person himself.
- stevenwoo 2y agoThree members from of the cabinet have one or more sexual assault or rape accusations and the president can no longer claim he did not rape Jean in public without committing defamation. And Trump got re elected and only a token handful of GOP senators voted against any of those cabinet nominees. Consequences only matter if one is not in the clique.
- belter 2y agoBecause you live in the age of cognitive dissonance: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4JkA8555hnM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4JkA8555hnM
- georgemcbay 2y agoAll that matters for his continued employment as an adviser is Trump's opinion of him. This behavior is not likely to be seen as a negative by Trump, but rather as a positive "go-getter" trait. Trump has employed this method of inventing people to talk himself up for many decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_used_by_Donald_Trump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_used_by_Donald_Trum... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsYKRUE_D5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsYKRUE_D5g https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/audio-from-may-17-1984-phone-conversation/2018/04/20/bab5f61e-4429-11e8-b2dc-b0a403e4720a_video.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/audio-from-may... Its actually reasonable to believe that Navarro may have got the idea from Trump whether directly or indirectly.
- jredwards 2y agoTrump has long done the same thing. His alter ego was John Baron.
- tim333 2y agoIt's really just a literary device in some books he wrote. Navarro's actual ideas being a little crackpot is more of an issue.
- trwhite 2y agohttps://archive.ph/samFv https://archive.ph/samFv
- OutOfHere 2y agoTo give readers some background, Peter Navarro is the person that Trump primarily got the tariff idea from.
- maxerickson 2y agoThat's not really fair to Trump, who has long been a huge fan of tariffs. Navarro is just the idiot sycophant who agreed with him that they are great.
- af78 2y agoIt's worse than that. Navarro has sincerely held these views (that imports are inherently bad for the economy) for a long time. He is to economists what flat earthers are to astronomers. Imagine if an anti-vax activist was hired at the Depart of Health. Oh, wait...
- thimkerbell 2y ago[flagged]
- YZF 2y agoI don't think we want to view HN as competition for karma points or karma points as some sort of validation. It would be nice if we could stop turning HN into a political battleground but I guess that war has been lost.
- belter 2y agoWhich idea exactly?: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KmVBfI4_6a4 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KmVBfI4_6a4
- OutOfHere 2y ago> Mr. Navarro holds a doctorate in economics from Harvard University. When will we accept that economics is a bullcrap degree, even more so at the doctorate level?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> When will we accept that economics is a bullcrap degree, even more so at the doctorate level? America continuing to bet on anti-intellectualism is the problem. Popular railing against economics is what’s getting us into a recession.
- OutOfHere 2y agoIt is however modern economics that has got us into an exponential multi-deca-trillion dollar debt from which there is no coming back. It has architectured the inevitable currency collapse.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pfisch 2y agoEconomics is not forcing the GOP to extend the tax cuts right now. Economics do not override politicians.
- pfisch 2y agoThis is like blaming scientists for global warming because there are a small group of scientists willing to sell their credibility to justify not taking action against climate change.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> modern economics that has got us into an exponential multi-deca-trillion dollar debt Are you referring to MMT [1]? Because it’s not mainstream economics. And it never said you can run deficits without consequence, just that inflation is the limiting result. Which is technically true. But practically useless given the short-term interests of politicians. Mainstream economics has cautioned against the national debt for decades. Idiots got pitched that economists don’t know what they’re talking about, meanwhile, and so that advice was ignored. Now we’ve gone full circle to blaming the field for the outcome it predicted. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory
- pjdesno 2y agoNavarro is still a professor emeritus at UC Irvine. That's just an honorary title, and at most places can be revoked for sufficient damage to the university's reputation. This would seem to be the case, especially because at least one of the books with the fake economics expert seems to have been written while he was still an active faculty member there. His association with Irvine has been mentioned on national news, and although folks in academia may not realize that the general public thinks "professor emeritus" means he's still associated with the university, they're going to learn really quickly. Plus the "fake expert" thing is just so embarrassingly stupid...
- galaxyLogic 2y agoRight, but if they revoke his title then Trump will remove all funding from that university. That is how it goes, everybody knows.
- sramsay 2y ago> That's just an honorary title It's true that it's an honorific, but I think it has a little more teeth than you think. At the institutions I've worked at, it comes with a few perks (like faculty-level library privileges), but it also includes the ability to serve on MA/PhD committees -- which is to say, you can be part of the group of people who certify the completion of an academic degree, which is not a privilege normally extended to retired professors. I've seen it granted when someone is switching institutions, but would like to remain the major advisor for a PhD candidate. But whatever the case, the person is absolutely "still associated with the university;" that is part of the reason they're awarded. It's an award, certainly, but it's also a way for an academic to keep their credentials and for a university to keep their association with a (sometimes famous) academic. But yes: It can be revoked at any time. I would be surprised if this one wasn't.
- compsciphd 2y agohuh? Maybe for "internal" committee. For my PHD defense, I had 3 internals and 2 externals and the externals could have been anyone my advisor approved of (in practice for me, I picked my committee and my advisor just rubber stamped it, perhaps because he was content with my choices)
- gbraad 2y ago[flagged]
- thimkerbell 2y ago[flagged]
- af78 2y agoWhat makes the story tragic is that he got a job that gives him such an influence on trade policy. How he got the job would be funny if the consequences weren't so dire: > Navarro was invited to be an advisor after Trump's advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner saw on Amazon that he co-wrote Death by China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Navarro#Trump_campaign_advisor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Navarro#Trump_campaign_a...
- ck2 2y agoFor anyone willing to watch a MSNBC video segment without bias this explains what you are saying exactly in more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJbZCbBLqkk&t=380s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJbZCbBLqkk&t=380s
- ck2 2y agoIf you think the fake-plan tariffs are going to destroy things remember the "de minimus" is going away May 2nd too each little shipment from aliexpress, etc. will have a tariff of 30% of the "value of the postal item containing goods for merchandise" with a minimum fee of $50 FIFTY DOLLARS It purposely kills all overseas shipments of even small items. How many years until all that made in USA? TEN years? Never?
- insane_dreamer 2y agoThis one I mind less than the other tariffs; it'll stem the flood of low-cost crap that has flooded Amazon / Temu etc.
- ck2 2y agoUm, it's going to "stem" ALL stuff on Amazon/Temu etc No DIY person who needs just one little part is going to pay $50 Not just TVs, fans, radios, etc. ie. I wanted to get some $10 PM2.5 sensors but they will be $50 now
- sidvit 2y agoIf you’re a manufacturer how quickly can you even stand up a factory in the US and train that factory of workers to produce your item? 3-4 years? What’s the chances republicans still control congress by that time? The presidents continued ability to enforce this relies on controlling both chambers because the tarrifs are being put up under an emergency declaration that congress has the power to override. If you don’t think that’ll continue to be the case in 2 years time it seems very difficult to justify the investment, and if markets continue to crater I would think it would further reinforce this
- jvm___ 2y agoWhy would you stand up a factory based on humans? When widget-businessman calls up the companies that install widget making machines they'll get the latest and greatest automated production machines in the least human labor intensive ways possible.
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- photochemsyn 2y agoEconomic models need a modern overhaul, but the entrenched nature of academic economic programs - hidebound is not a bad descriptor - makes this fairly unlikely. A central issue is 'aggregate demand' - this needs replacement by individual-level demand analysis. An obvious issue is that if a small wealthy sector of society is consuming heavily, while the vast majority is in a belt-tightening phase, any aggregate demand measure is not going to capture either sector and will have a massive distorting effect on projected outcomes. Yes, individual-level models would be vastly more computationally demanding, but this is now possible. Similarly, consider the effect of lowering interest rates in a system where a small wealthy sector has mechanisms in place to capture all that liquidity, so instead of small business starts increasing, stock buybacks by major corporations are the norm. Again, this is where 'aggregate demand' misses that fine-scale structure that really controls outcomes. Fundamentally, these economic models aren't capturing the effects of gross wealth inequality. One of the most astute economic contrarians who raises this issue is Gary Stevenson: https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics
- steveBK123 2y agoLike orange man’s made up PR and hype man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_used_by_Donald_Trump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_used_by_Donald_Trum...
- jredwards 2y agoThe first time I heard this, it took me about four seconds to realize that it was an anagram of his last name. You'd think anyone reading his books might have pondered that for a minute.
- CRConrad 2y agoYeah, same. Utterly perplexing.
- pmags 2y agoI'm not a big fan of the Cato Institute, but here's an interesting take on Navarro's evolution on trade and tariff's from 2018: https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2018/peter-navarros-conversion https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2018/peter-navarros-con... Lemieux, Pierre. 2018. Peter Navarro's Conversion. Regulation, Volume 41, Issue 3, pp. 36 - 43
- rsynnott 2y agoWhat is with these Trump-world people and making up people who agree with them? Trump himself had John Barron, there was that whole thing with Musk’s weird alts, and so on. It’s really quite odd.