this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised and they just refer to that because they have nothing else to base the questions about that specific topic on?
I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is. It wouldnt surprise me if it was based only to whatever happened to be going through the madmans mind at the time.
The numbers come from an overly simple way to level out trade deficits.
So if I sell you $100 in goods and you sell me $120 dollars in goods, I'm "losing" money, therefore 20% tariff (tax to sell me something). In reality, you're going to increase your prices and sell me $140 worth of the same stuff.
All the AIs did was expand this to a global scale, what's insane to me is that the math adds up. It doesn't take an AI to do this though, some economics undergrad could come up with the same thing. Understanding the underlying methodology shows how it completely lacks nuance or understanding of how the world really works.
Too bad it's based on wrong assumptions. It's not the arithmetic that's the issue, it's the model.
And if they did it on a test, they'd flunk it.
Yeah, it fails to understand the rationale for comparative advantage (there's a reason Ecuador exports more bananas than Norway does), and it also fails to consider the balance-of-payments effect of things like foreign direct investment (which looks zero-sum when it first takes place but means the profits are outflows from that point on, unless the foreign investors choose to reinvest them).
Also I don't think the idiots who came up with that table know the difference between a current account balance and balance of trade.
Isn't his weird formula the trade defecit percentage + Tariffs from that country divided by two?
Yes, it really is that stupid.
Yeah, this makes sense to me. ChatGPT isn't crunching the numbers, looking at conservative ideology, foreign policy goals and media optics before recommending the ideal number for the trump admin to implement. Instead it's just looking for the most widely publicized set of numbers in relation to that query and regurgitating that.
Then I'd ask who published and where they got their analysis from. Very possible that we've got an AI that's built up a backlog of Harvard Business Studies and CalTech economics models to reach the ideal hypothetical tariff regime. But it's just as likely they're ingesting 4chan reposts of Ron Paul Newsletters and Michael Savage radio transcripts to build up its economic background.
That's sort of the problem with AI. There's no specialist-driven guidance on what data is valuable and what data is crap. No litmus test to separate fact from fiction or serious discussion versus trolling. And these western developed models, in particular, are very bad about including the origins of their graphed logical output (because that would make the process of hashing and graphing more expensive, in a system that's already inelegant and resource intensive).
The problem is less that we don't know how bad the tariff rate is and more that the people designing the policies don't know either. They're fishing for answers in the answer pond, and they don't even know if they've got a fish or a boot at the end of the line.
Possible but vastly improbable. And since when has CalTech been into econometric modeling? Last time I checked, they only did engineering and real science.
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-humanities-schools/california-institute-of-technology-110404
Ranked 14th highest econ department in the country. Math modeling and economics are joined at the hip.
Except, they've actually dropped their lines in the stupidity toilet.
One would have had to ask the ai about it before all this to know where it might be getting its information from