Voodoo Maths & LLMs

[toucana]

As economists struggle to make sense of the bizarre list of punitive tariffs announced yesterday by president Trump, some noticed that the listings appear to have been organised by TLDs (top level domain) i.e the internet country code suffix  - which provides one clue (amongst several) that this list was compiled with the help of an LLM (large language model) AI chatbot system such as ChatGPT Vibe Code

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/did-an-llm-help-write-trumps-trade

A surreal list of obscure and largely uninhabited islands that are being punished with trade tariffs was compiled in this report by Rachel Maddow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStWAhGfxn0

It includes:

* Tokelau (.tk) - 3 small Pacific islands mainly famous for their ‘swimming pigs’ - 10% tariff

* Keeling Islands (.cc) - 2 small Indian Ocean islands pop. 593  -10% tariff

* Jan Mayen (.sj) - volcanic island in Arctic Ocean, uninhabited - 10% tariff

* Heard Island & Macdonald Island (.hm) - uninhabited Antarctic islands -10% tariff

*Falkland Islands (.fk) - South Atlantic, pop. 3200 + 1 million penguins -  41% tariff !

Paul Krugman. a Nobel Prize-winning economist had this to say:

Quote

Trump’s tariff announcement was full-on crazy. Not only is he imposing higher tariffs than almost anyone expected, but he’s justifying them with completely false claims about other countries’ tariffs. I don’t know where his numbers are coming from but they have nothing to do with reality.. It’s a really bad day for the US  economy.

When approached for comment, the White House claimed that their new tariffs were calculated using the formula shown below, and gave a link to this webpage:

https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

The problem is that every single academic economist interviewed has denounced this formula as being completely meaningless ‘Voodoo Mathematics' of a type never previously seen in international economic modelling. Critics point out that the selected parameter values for  ε  and  φ  cancel out

According to the BBC Verify this formula actually boils down to:

Quote

 

Take the trade deficit for the US in goods with a particular country, divide that by the total goods imports from that country and then divide that number by two.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93gq72n7y1o

 

 

[zapatos]

From the New York Times. We finally have our number trade enemy in our sights, and as everyone expected, it is Lesotho!

Quote

Which nation, according to the Trump administration, tops the charts of those cheating America on trade? If you guessed the African kingdom of Lesotho, congratulations. You can be the next secretary of commerce.

How this came to be tells us a lot about the incoherence of the new world economic order President Trump brandished this week, writes my colleagueBinyamin Appelbaum. Lesotho imports hardly anything from the United States because it is extremely poor. It exports a large number of diamonds to America because America doesn’t have commercial diamond mines. Ipso facto, a big trade imbalance — and now a tariff rate of 50 percent that will hurt Lesotho and won’t help America. (Good luck encouraging domestic diamond production.)

 

[TheVat]

Well, it is a relief that stores will stop selling those shoddy penguin-assembled cellphones the Falklands were dumping on us.  It's not really fair if your workforce can be paid in sardines.  

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Well, it is a relief that stores will stop selling those shoddy penguin-assembled cellphones the Falklands were dumping on us.  It's not really fair if your workforce can be paid in sardines.  

I think you should take a step back and take a broader view. It is a bit speciest to dismiss the work of a whole group of folks, just because they lack opposable thumbs, or articulating fingers. Also, I assume that sardines are a perfectly culturally appropriate way of compensation, even if not regurgitated.

Listen, the world is global, no to ways around it and it is unfair to dismiss the ability of someone just because of SQUAWK, sorry, I mean cultural differences.

Except leopard seals and orcas. Can't trust those bastards.

[Sensei]

  

5 hours ago, toucana said:

A surreal list of obscure and largely uninhabited islands that are being punished with trade tariffs was compiled in this report by Rachel Maddow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStWAhGfxn0

It includes:

* Tokelau (.tk) - 3 small Pacific islands mainly famous for their ‘swimming pigs’ - 10% tariff

* Keeling Islands (.cc) - 2 small Indian Ocean islands pop. 593  -10% tariff

* Jan Mayen (.sj) - volcanic island in Arctic Ocean, uninhabited - 10% tariff

* Heard Island & Macdonald Island (.hm) - uninhabited Antarctic islands -10% tariff

*Falkland Islands (.fk) - South Atlantic, pop. 3200 + 1 million penguins -  41% tariff !

Russia not on Trump's tariff list:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdjl3k1we8vo

"One country that did not feature on Donald Trump's list of tariffs on US trade partners was Russia."

"However, nations with even less trade with the US - such as Syria, which exported $11m of products last year according to UN data quoted by Trading Economics - were on the list."

 

Edited Friday at 09:04 PM by Sensei

[exchemist]

14 minutes ago, Sensei said:

  

Russia not on Trump's tariff list:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdjl3k1we8vo

"One country that did not feature on Donald Trump's list of tariffs on US trade partners was Russia."

"However, nations with even less trade with the US - such as Syria, which exported $11m of products last year according to UN data quoted by Trading Economics - were on the list."

 

That's because of the formula. No trade surplus, no tariff. 

5 hours ago, toucana said:

As economists struggle to make sense of the bizarre list of punitive tariffs announced yesterday by president Trump, some noticed that the listings appear to have been organised by TLDs (top level domain) i.e the internet country code suffix  - which provides one clue (amongst several) that this list was compiled with the help of an LLM (large language model) AI chatbot system such as ChatGPT Vibe Code

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/did-an-llm-help-write-trumps-trade

A surreal list of obscure and largely uninhabited islands that are being punished with trade tariffs was compiled in this report by Rachel Maddow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStWAhGfxn0

It includes:

* Tokelau (.tk) - 3 small Pacific islands mainly famous for their ‘swimming pigs’ - 10% tariff

* Keeling Islands (.cc) - 2 small Indian Ocean islands pop. 593  -10% tariff

* Jan Mayen (.sj) - volcanic island in Arctic Ocean, uninhabited - 10% tariff

* Heard Island & Macdonald Island (.hm) - uninhabited Antarctic islands -10% tariff

*Falkland Islands (.fk) - South Atlantic, pop. 3200 + 1 million penguins -  41% tariff !

Paul Krugman. a Nobel Prize-winning economist had this to say:

When approached for comment, the White House claimed that their new tariffs were calculated using the formula shown below, and gave a link to this webpage:

https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

The problem is that every single academic economist interviewed has denounced this formula as being completely meaningless ‘Voodoo Mathematics' of a type never previously seen in international economic modelling. Critics point out that the selected parameter values for  ε  and  φ  cancel out

According to the BBC Verify this formula actually boils down to:

 

So does that means that ε*φ = 2? How pathetic. 

Looks as if these goons are trying to dress up their Mickey Mouse formula to make it look clever.

 

[CharonY]

31 minutes ago, exchemist said:

So does that means that ε*φ = 2? How pathetic. 

Looks as if these goons are trying to dress up their Mickey Mouse formula to make it look clever.

No, even worse, they equal 1. I.e. they are not doing anything. I have criticized that a bit off topic in the other tariff thread (which presumably was not really on tariffs). They had this whole page rambling on and ultimately what they say is that we calculated the trade deficit and multiplied it by 1. But to appear clever they chose add two constants which cancel each other out. I did not pick up on the fact that they might have used LLM to do that, I chose to assume stupidity. But again, it seems that we have to multiply stupid with the laziness factor. And unfortunately they do not cancel each other.

34 minutes ago, exchemist said:

That's because of the formula. No trade surplus, no tariff. 

That is not the case- everyone, including areas with no human populations got a flat 10%.

[TheVat]

Here's a telling bit of survey data:  In a Gallup poll conducted in February, 81 percent of Americans called trade an opportunity, not a threat.  

Seems the gears of representative democracy have seized up.

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

So does that means that ε*φ = 2? How pathetic. 

I was slightly confused by the phi, wondering what the Golden Ratio was doing in there.  😏 

So if it's a pass-through number,  and it's .25, this seems to assume that, what, that importers (and producers) will just eat the other .75?

I'm thinking the TP administration wants to hide the reality that the pass-through will be higher, i.e. consumers get really screwed.

[toucana]

9 minutes ago, TheVat said:

I was slightly confused by the phi, wondering what the Golden Ratio was doing in there.  😏 

So if it's a pass-through number,  and it's .25, this seems to assume that, what, that importers (and producers) will just eat the other .75?

I'm thinking the TP administration wants to hide the reality that the pass-through will be higher, i.e. consumers get really screwed.

They were just cherry-picking input parameter values to get (4 x 0.25) = 1, and then dividing  the final result by 2 in order to look generous. But they don't seem to have understood the significance of a delta symbol Δ which represents a *change* in tariff required, not the value of the actual tariff itself.

https://x.com/i/grok/share/OMmVAUdtAgC88lBfXN1TvYZbA

[npts2020]

10 hours ago, toucana said:

The problem is that every single academic economist interviewed has denounced this formula as being completely meaningless ‘Voodoo Mathematics' of a type never previously seen in international economic modelling. Critics point out that the selected parameter values for  ε  and  φ  cancel out

This is why Trump hates academia...those woke eggheads keep telling him his "stable genius" ravings are fantasy.

[TheVat]

9 minutes ago, toucana said:

But they don't seem to have understood the significance of a delta symbol Δ which represents a *change* in tariff required, not the value of the actual tariff itself.

Good lord, that's even more nonsensical. 

And even worse, is fabricating that countries are charging us enormous tariffs when the number cited is actually the import/export ratio.  Words fail...

[Sensei]

6 hours ago, exchemist said:

That's because of the formula. No trade surplus, no tariff. 

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4621.html

[J.C.MacSwell]

There's the minimum 10% though, applied even when trade is in surplus territory. No explanation why Russia and North Korea managed to avoid it.

[CharonY]

21 minutes ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

There's the minimum 10% though, applied even when trade is in surplus territory. No explanation why Russia and North Korea managed to avoid it.

They wrote a beautiful letter....

[exchemist]

8 hours ago, CharonY said:

No, even worse, they equal 1. I.e. they are not doing anything. I have criticized that a bit off topic in the other tariff thread (which presumably was not really on tariffs). They had this whole page rambling on and ultimately what they say is that we calculated the trade deficit and multiplied it by 1. But to appear clever they chose add two constants which cancel each other out. I did not pick up on the fact that they might have used LLM to do that, I chose to assume stupidity. But again, it seems that we have to multiply stupid with the laziness factor. And unfortunately they do not cancel each other.

That is not the case- everyone, including areas with no human populations got a flat 10%.

Good point about the 10% base tariff. No explanation then, as to why Russia was exempted? Looks as if the pissing story may be true after all.

So from what you say the halving of the result is done separately, after application of the formula, as an act of “generosity”. Is that it? So they break just one kneecap and not both, to show how tender-hearted they are?

Edited 20 hours ago by exchemist

[exchemist]

By Trump’s logic, when I buy a bag of apples from the market stall, the trader is ripping me off, because he doesn’t buy anything from me in exchange. 🤪

[MSC]

7 hours ago, CharonY said:

They wrote a beautiful letter....

Oh I thought it was because the wanker doesn't want to charge his boss or fellow Putin employees?

[toucana]

The intellectual author of this pseudo-economic gibberish and voodoo maths appears to be a Trump advisor and cabinet member called Peter Navarro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJbZCbBLqkk

A Rachel Maddow MSNBC segment (above) tells the story of how he was originally recruited by Jared Kushner during Trump’s first term campaign on the strength of an Amazon book review of Death By China - one of a series of books by Navarro who is a fierce pro-tariff hawk, and a self promoting charlatan who frequently refers in his writings to a fictional economic genius called ‘Ron Vara’, which is an anagram of his own surname Navarro.

Peter Navarro was convicted and jailed for 4 months in 2023 on two charges of contempt of Congress after refusing to answer subpoenas from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on Congress. After being released in July 2024 he subsequently rejoined Trump’s second term campaign and was reappointed as senior counsel for trade and manufacturing in December 2024 after Trump won the election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Navarro

Navarro is likely to be thrown head-first under the bus as this crisis develops, and will probably go down in legend - along with ♫ ♫ “The Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” ♫ ♫ - as the presidential advisor who singlehandedly wiped $6.6 trillion off the US stock markets in just two days.

[iNow]

4 minutes ago, toucana said:

Peter Navarro was convicted and jailed for 4 months in 2023 on two charges of contempt of Congress after refusing to answer subpoenas from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on Congress. After being released in July 2024 he subsequently rejoined Trump’s second term campaign and was reappointed as senior counsel for trade and manufacturing in December 2024 after Trump won the election.

In other words, he’s a solid loyalist within Trump’s inner circle, thus making this:

5 minutes ago, toucana said:

Navarro is likely to be thrown head-first under the bus as this crisis develops

…FAR less likely, IMO. 

[toucana]

Lawrence Summers —> 71st Secretary of Treasury(1999 - 2001). Professor of Economics Harvard University (1983 - 1991). Currently a board member of Open AI.

[swansont]

7 hours ago, toucana said:

The intellectual author of this pseudo-economic gibberish and voodoo maths appears to be a Trump advisor and cabinet member called Peter Navarro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJbZCbBLqkk

A Rachel Maddow MSNBC segment (above) tells the story of how he was originally recruited by Jared Kushner during Trump’s first term campaign on the strength of an Amazon book review of Death By China - one of a series of books by Navarro who is a fierce pro-tariff hawk, and a self promoting charlatan who frequently refers in his writings to a fictional economic genius called ‘Ron Vara’, which is an anagram of his own surname Navarro.

Peter Navarro was convicted and jailed for 4 months in 2023 on two charges of contempt of Congress after refusing to answer subpoenas from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on Congress. After being released in July 2024 he subsequently rejoined Trump’s second term campaign and was reappointed as senior counsel for trade and manufacturing in December 2024 after Trump won the election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Navarro

Navarro is likely to be thrown head-first under the bus as this crisis develops, and will probably go down in legend - along with ♫ ♫ “The Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” ♫ ♫ - as the presidential advisor who singlehandedly wiped $6.6 trillion off the US stock markets in just two days.

I wonder what John Barron, John Miller and David Dennison think about this.