“Will it work?”

Along the way, we’ve been pushed to load our decisions with a need for certainty. It’s easier, it seems, to not try than it is to fail.

But the question, “is it worth trying?” unlocks possibility.

A surgeon in the middle of an operation should probably not experiment with an untested technique. But a writer, a leader or a musician can make that question part of their craft.

It’s the only way we learn.

As someone who has spent his life in the noble profession of teaching, I had exactly the same thought as Paul Krugman about the genesis of yesterday’s very special episode of America: Fuck Around and Find Out:

So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess. Here’s their explanation:

Ignore the Greek letters, which cancel each other out. This says that the assumed level of a country’s protectionism is equal to its trade surplus with America divided by its exports to America.

Trump also set minimum tariffs of 10 percent on everyone, which means among other things imposing tariffs on uninhabited islands.

There’s so much wrong with this approach that it’s hard to know where to start. But one easy thing to point out is that the Trump calculation only considers trade in goods, while ignoring trade in services. This is a big omission. Notably, the European Union runs a substantial surplus with us if you only look at trade in goods — but this is largely offset by an EU deficit in services trade:

So if Trump’s people had plugged all trade with the EU, not just trade in physical goods, into their formula they would have concluded that Europe is hardly protectionist at all.

Where is this stuff coming from? One of these days we’ll probably get the full story, but it looks to me like something thrown together by a junior staffer with only a couple of hours’ notice. That USTR note, in particular, reads like something written by a student who hasn’t done the reading and is trying to bullshit their way through an exam.

That’s a bingo!

Krugman is a lot smarter than I am, but I also recognized that this is pretty much exactly what must have happened, as soon as I read the details of the administration’s “analysis.”

The boy who would never do his homework is going to wreck the world’s economy, and give us all a bracing little interlude of FAFO, because of sheer intellectual laziness, and the malignant stupidity that is its inbred cousin:

When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?

Next thing you’ll be telling me that Trump’s people are planning military actions over insecure channels and accidentally sharing those plans with journalists. Oh, wait.

I’d like to imagine that Trump will admit that he messed up, cancel the whole thing, and start over. But he won’t, because that would spoil the dominance display. Ignorant irresponsibility is part of the message.

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