Paul Krugman 恶性愚蠢会毁掉世界经济

恶性愚蠢会毁掉世界经济吗？

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the

特朗普的关税政策是一场灾难。他的政策制定过程更糟糕。

保罗·克鲁格曼的头像 保罗·克鲁格曼 2025年4月3日
快速感谢我的读者们。当我独自创业时，我并不确定是否会有人跟随。但我的订阅者人数刚刚超过30万。我会努力不辜负你们的支持。

美国创建了现代世界贸易体系。管理关税的规则以及逐步降低关税的谈判程序源于罗斯福于1934年制定的《互惠贸易协定法》。在该体系下，国际贸易的增长有一些负面影响，但总体而言，对美国和世界都非常有利。事实上，这是我们最伟大的政策成就之一。

昨天，唐纳德·特朗普彻底摧毁了一切。以下是美国平均关税税率的最新变化：

来源：美国国际贸易委员会和耶鲁大学预算实验室

特朗普宣布的关税几乎超出了所有人的预期。这对经济的冲击远超1930年臭名昭著的斯姆特-霍利关税法案，尤其要记住，如今国际贸易的重要性大约是当时的三倍。

然而，关税的规模并非玫瑰园声明唯一令人震惊之处。可以说，我们了解到特朗普团队是如何制定这些关税税率的——整件事纯粹是恶意的愚蠢——更为糟糕。

你或许会倾向于将对政策制定过程的抱怨斥为精英主义的势利。但可信度是政策制定的关键要素。如果企业不知道下一步会发生什么，就无法制定计划。如果外国政府不期望我们做出理性回应，他们就不会制定对美国有利的政策。

那么，我们对特朗普主义者是如何制定关税计划的了解多少呢？特朗普声称，对不同国家征收的关税反映了这些国家的政策，但詹姆斯·苏洛维茨基很快指出，对每个国家征收的关税似乎是根据美国对该国贸易逆差粗略计算得出的。特朗普政府否认了这一点，与此同时，美国贸易代表办公室发布了一份说明，证实了苏洛维茨基的猜测。他们的解释如下：

来源：美国贸易代表办公室

请忽略希腊字母，它们相互抵消。这意味着，一个国家的保护主义假定水平等于其对美贸易顺差除以其对美出口额。

特朗普还设定了对所有国家的最低关税为10%，这意味着除其他外，还要对无人居住的岛屿征收关税。

这种方法错得离谱，让人不知从何说起。但有一点很容易指出：特朗普的计算只考虑了货物贸易，而忽略了服务贸易。这是一个重大的遗漏。值得注意的是，如果只看货物贸易，欧盟对我们有相当大的顺差——但这很大程度上被欧盟在服务贸易方面的逆差所抵消：

来源：欧盟委员会

所以，如果特朗普的团队把所有与欧盟的贸易，而不仅仅是实物商品贸易，都纳入他们的公式，他们就会得出欧洲几乎根本不是贸易保护主义者的结论。

这些东西是从哪里冒出来的？也许有一天我们会知道全部真相，但在我看来，这就像是一个初级职员在只提前几个小时通知的情况下草草拼凑起来的。尤其是那份美国贸易代表办公室的报告，读起来就像是一个没读过书、想在考试中胡扯的学生写的。

但情况可能比这更糟。如果你让ChatGPT和其他人工智能模型来制定关税政策，你得到的显然就是特朗普的公式：

在特朗普宣布这一消息后，我立即发表了一篇文章，推测埃隆·马斯克的邓宁-克鲁格效应可能是造成这些关税数字的原因。现在看来，这完全有可能。

是谁这样制定政策的？关键在于，特朗普并非真心实意地想要实现经济目标。这一切应该被视为一种霸道的炫耀，旨在震慑民众，让他们卑躬屈膝，而不是通常意义上的政策。

再说一次，我并非故作姿态。当世界经济的命运岌岌可危时，政策制定过程的恶性愚蠢无疑与政策本身同等重要。无论是商界人士还是外国政府，怎么能相信一个如此行事的政府的任何言论呢？

接下来你就会告诉我，特朗普的人正在通过不安全的渠道策划军事行动，并无意中将这些计划透露给了记者。哦，等等。

我倒是希望特朗普承认自己搞砸了，取消所有计划，然后重新开始。但他不会，因为那样会破坏他霸道的炫耀。无知的不负责任正是他所传递信息的一部分。

Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the

Trump’s tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse.

 

 PAUL KRUGMAN  APR 03, 2025

 

A quick thank you to my readers. When I struck out on my own, I wasn’t sure if anyone would follow. But I just passed 300K subscribers. I’ll try to be worthy of your support.

America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.

Yesterday Donald Trump burned it all down. Here’s what just happened to the average U.S. tariff rate:

Source: USITC and Yale Budget Lab

The tariffs Trump announced were higher than almost anyone expected. This is a much bigger shock to the economy than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, especially when you bear in mind that international trade is about three times as important now as it was then.

The size of the tariffs, however, wasn’t the only shocking thing about the Rose Garden announcement. Arguably what we learned about how the Trump team arrived at those tariff rates — the sheer malignant stupidity of the whole thing — was even worse.

You might be tempted to dismiss complaints about the policy process as elitist snobbery. But credibility is a crucial part of policymaking. Businesses can’t plan if they have no idea what to expect next. Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America if they don’t expect us to respond rationally.

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:

Source: USTR

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:

Source: European Commission

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.

But it may be even worse than that. The Trump formula is apparently what you get if you ask ChatGPT and other AI models to make tariff policy:

In my post immediately following the Trump announcement I speculated that Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids might be responsible for those tariff numbers. That now looks like a distinct possibility.

Who makes policy this way? The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.

Again, I’m not being snobbish here. 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.