Navarro 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...
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.
huh? 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)
I'm talking about who can sign the forms that say you fulfilled the requirements of a degree. Random people cannot do that. Emeritus professors usually retain that ability.
I've served on PhD defenses where you had uncredentialed people on the committee, but who could not sign off on the degree.
This probably looks different to you if you're a student, because you typically don't see the paperwork that gets sent around afterward. But a diploma is a legal document. There is no "rubber stamping" of anything. Not if the school would like to maintain its accreditation.
The 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.
If 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
Why 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.
Because 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.
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.
Nobody 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.
> Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income.
At least in the Nordic countries, utterly uncontroversial conventional wisdom says something like:
* In your youth save almost-only in stocks; via some index fund, if you don't feel like being an active investor, following the market every day;
* Start with (funds that specialise in) high-growth (= high-risk) stocks; then, as you near middle age, slowly move over to lower-risk (= lower-growth) stocks (or funds specialised therein);
* In middle age, move over to having some part in state bonds;
* As you near retirement age, eliminate high-growth/risk stocks/funds altogether, and draw down the proportion of stocks/funds as a whole, going to an increasing proportion state bonds.
* As you retire, possibly move all-out of stocks / stock index funds and all-in on bonds... Except put some in an ordinary old bank account.
As 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".
It'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:
I cannot stand to watch, but I am curious how Fox News is presenting the latest events. Without that propaganda piece supporting the administration, how long can support be maintained.
That’s maybe doable as long as the major impact is just the stock market. Most people do not pay much attention to the stock markets, at least not day by day. However, within weeks, price increases from the US tariffs and demand decreases from the Chinese tariffs will start to hit, and those will likely be more difficult to paper over.
A 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.
Respectfully, it's hard to see Trump himself as compelling. My money is on Eric: behind every great man is a great woman. Lara Trump is pretty dang ambitious.
I do agree that saving face would help but his people are still ready revere him while still being angry at Musk or any fallout from a Trump decree.
His cult sees him as he was presented on The Apprentice -- rich, powerful, rich, and wise, and rich. Rich is good and if he's rich he's double plus good.
I think the only end to his cult is his shuffling off this mortal coil.
There’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.
"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.
1) Back then, racists were elected everywhere else too. America didn't much stand out just because of that.
2) Back then, America a) wasn't led by a moroniac[§], and b) didn't intentionally alienate itself from the rest of the world.
And I'm afraid it's really goodbye this time. I mean, 2016-20 was weird enough, but then we thought normalcy had returned... But then you -- or they? -- went and re-elected him. There's just no way of knowing where America will go; looks like a total basket-case.
Seems quite a lot of Americans agree with me on that, BTW. Didn't they ever know America either?
___
[§]: Maniacal moron, or moronic maniac? Can't make up my mind.
Right, 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.
Three 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.
I'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?
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.
Economic 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:
It'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...
I 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.
What 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.
What 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.
This isn't black and white. Economics in many ways is about human behaviour and that will never be a precise science. We shouldn't be anti-intellectual but we also shouldn't be slaves to theory. Economists don't necessarily have a crystal ball here; they have tools that can help decision making but there's a lot more that goes into decisions. There is also uncertainty, the same input can yield very different results.
Losing nuance is what gets you backlash. This is what happened in the pandemic and this is part of why we're paying a price now because nobody trusts anyone. And in the era of social media it's doubly easy to lose nuance.
Sure. But part of that nuance is scientific literacy. Treating the influencers who were once scientists as representative of the field is one of the roots of the problem. An influencer will never be nuanced—the medium doesn’t incentivise it.
It 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.
> It has architectured the inevitable currency collapse.
I'm 61. I've been hearing this about the US national debt since I was a teenager. When do you imagine this "inevitable" currency collapse will occur? Do you consider the recent actions of the current administration to make it more or less likely?
You have been hearing since you were a teenager that people are mortal, that you yourself are mortal, yet you haven't witnessed it yourself. Do you therefore imagine that you are not, that it is not inevitable?
I understand my likely longevity to be between 60 and 100 years. When I talk about my inevitable death, I fully expect it to occur sometime in the next 40 years. If it does not happen after another 60 years, I may be forced to re-evaluate my mortal status. Until then, my death is inevitable ... and a completely useless analogy to a national debt driven currency collapse.
During your lifetime the US economic and political status in the world has been on the rise. It was viewed as an island of stability and growth.
I think the current administration isn't helping but we're talking about a multi-decade process here. Some of what we see today goes back to Bush and Obama policies. It also goes to geopolitical changes, China, India, Russia. Globalization. Technological changes. Climate change. etc. etc.
> 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.
"Heterodox" is a term of art in economics, it doesn't mean what "heterodox" means in English.
And the justifications given for most social policies come from MMT. Policy makers love MMT, especially progressive ones and ones who want to give out helicopter money. Economists seem cooler on the idea, but it's a mainstream theory among people making economic decisions.
MMT is mostly just Keynseanism taken to a sort of unintuitive but logical conclusion. It's not nearly as heterodox (using the English word) as something like Austrian economics.
I don't understand how you can come to the understanding that "heterodox" isn't a term of art when there's an entire wikipedia page devoted to explaining the meaning of "heterodox" (and another one about "mainstream") in the context of economics...
An economic theory described as part of "heterodox economics" can, in fact, be relatively mainstream given enough exposure and enough followers (which is where MMT is today). Conversely, parts of "mainstream economics" are relatively controversial and are thus heterodox ways of thinking.
If you think about "orthodox Christianity," the word "orthodox" says nothing about its popularity. The same goes for "heterodox economics."
Pretty much all monetary theories are parts of heterodox economics.
The core of MMT economic policy is the abolition of government bond markets and the state replacing existing unemployment benefits with a "job guarantee" intended to act as an alternative endogenous economic stabiliser, both policies which precisely zero countries have adopted. Policymakers are largely oblivious to MMT and certainly don't use it to justify their social policies, and "helicopter money" came from the opposite side of the political/economic spectrum decades earlier.
In that respect it's exactly as heterodox as Mises-style Austrian economics, which has similarly failed to persuade mainstream conservatives who share similar ideas about small states of its core ideas about gold standards and the futility of economic modelling...
Mathematically valid. Genuinely interesting. An active field of research. But heterodox, and thus coming with a stable of armchair physicists who are drawn to it because it feels rebellious.
This 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.
I don’t think it’s economics that got us into that. It’s primarily been incredible fiscal irresponsibility, mainly from Republicans, that has done so. Congress hasn’t really agreed or followed mainstream economics as long as I’ve been alive.
> Navarro's views on trade are considered outside the mainstream of economic thought. ... According to Politico, Navarro's economic theories are "considered fringe" by his fellow economists. A New Yorker reporter described Navarro's views on trade and China as so radical "that, even with his assistance, I was unable to find another economist who fully agrees with them."
> According to Lee Branstetter, economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University and trade expert with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Navarro "was never a part of the group of economists who ever studied the global free-trade system... He doesn't publish in journals. What he's writing and saying right now has nothing to do with what he got his Harvard Ph.D. in... He doesn't do research that would meet the scientific standards of that community." Marcus Noland, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, described a tax and trade paper written by Navarro and Wilbur Ross for Trump as "a complete misunderstanding of international trade, on their part."
That was also a very long time ago. Plenty of time since them for him to move to fringy-economics. After all, economists and write and publish whatever they like; it's only when they get in serious policy positions that it creates problems for the reason.
Blaming the degree is the Trump narrative for damage control that Elon is floating. Navarro is the candidate for scapegoat. This is a dude who went to jail for Trump’s coup by the way — now he’s gonna be the poster child for woke ivory tower academia.
Tariffs as a tool to pivot towards an export focused economy isn’t a bad thing necessarily. But tools only help build things with a plan to guide them. Cooking up some formula with ChatGPT, printing a chart and taking a sweeping action is just dumb. It’s bad policy, bad implementation, bad leadership.
A smart leader would approach Canada and say “your tariffs and subsidy of onions are hurting our farmers”. A tariff is a tool that could neutralize that issue. The problem is, you need a smart leader and articulated vision.
