Month: April 2018

Trump is a businessman. He’s not exactly a mental titan on matters outside his penchant for licensing his name onto buildings. The poverty of understanding shows in hastily formed opinions.  Could this be the root when Sarah Jones of The New Republic writes, “Donald Trump has no strategy, no beliefs, and no principles“? (3)  She is mistaken.   Rather than a rudderless moral inner sactum, Trump could simply be a poorly informed autodidact.  Faced with an issue, a combustible crowd, or incident du jour, he resorts to the first thing to come to mind.  It’s government by impulse, till others step forward to whisper the what-ifs.

Yes, A Poorly Informed Autodidact

The examples tumble forth as we get more exposure to Trump on the national stage.  His conception of the Constitution is, to put it delicately … odd.  Shortly after meeting with the aggrieved from last February’s Parkland mayhem, he announced a call for gun seizures first, and then resort to the courts to seek permission. The only problem for Pres. Trump is the Constitution and something called “due process”.   If he knew better, he would have reacted with less bravado.

The run up to the November 2016 election was replete with rhetorical burps.  Remember his earlier foray into birtherism (Obama’s mythical foreign birth), or his abundant “I will”, “I will”, “I will” incantations.  Granted, it’s the normal stuff of modern presidential campaigning ever since TR, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR introduced Caesarism into our structure of government.  Still, the last time I checked, much legislation emanates from elsewhere (Congress) and the courts retain the power to adjudicate.  I would expect some concession to separation of powers, checks and balances, and other rudiments of high school Civics.

And then there is the real stumpers like “triad”, as in “nuclear triad”.  It might help to know, before placing your finger on the nuclear button, that a person is about to unleash mega-bombs from land, air, and sea to obliterate half of humanity.  Rudimentary facts were obviously missing in Trump’s response to a simple debate question.  Please review the following exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Donald Trump during one of the debates — please ignore the clichéd editorial added to the end of the clip.

He had to be schooled by Marco Rubio moments later.

One does not have to be a walking encyclopedia to be president.  Seemingly knowledgeable people have gotten the country into a lot of trouble.  Robert McNamara and the 1930s Federal Reserve Board come to mind.

Yet, some inkling of understanding about basic concepts would indicate a seriousness of mind of someone who expended the effort to know something.  Apparently, not true with Donald Trump.  He has plenty of opinions, and maybe some knowledge here and there, but many of them are not fertilized with much insight.

Don’t think for a moment that the Dems offered a competent alternative, though.  They are proof that a lightly or richly-stuffed brain is inconsequential to the presence of twaddle in the same place.  Attempting to replicate the old radical left’s SDS platform will not produce policy winners.

The choice in 2016 was between a poorly informed autodiact and the darling of fatuous didacts.  Just saying.

Towards Balance-of-Trade Bliss, Or …?

Now we are careening toward the swamp of trade manipulation with our president in the bow of the boat pointing the way.   Right now, he’s enthusiastic for washing machine, solar panel, steel, and aluminum tariffs, with more on the way directed at China, and actually thinks that he’ll usher in an American manufacturing renaissance.  Is it really matter of “foreign goods bad, our stuff good”?  Here’s where he gets into trouble.  The issue is fraught with all sorts of unintended consequences, the bane of all industrial planners from Louis XIV’s Jean Baptiste Colbert to communotopia’s Five-Year Plans.

If a government office magically transforms a government employee into a genius, then the Soviet Union’s Potemkin village would have a reverse meaning.  It would be real.  It would refer to the entire country, instead of a phony tour for visiting western socialists anxious to see Uncle Joe’s (Stalin) “paradise”.

The government’s meat-ax approach to economic control doesn’t fit the multitude of fine arrangements in commerce across borders.    Milton Friedman’s lesson in the production of a pencil would be an excellent starting for our president.  Take a look.

Commerce does not equate with the trans-Alaska pipeline whose operation can be controlled from a single switchboard in Anchorage.  It’s more like the multitudinous fine tentacles of our body’s nervous system.  Alteration of one microscopic area will ripple through the system in sometimes unexpected ways.  However, when government is the physician, crudity and a mess are frequently the result.  If death is excluded as an acceptable cure, back pain will not be cured by Conan the Barbarian – or the Senate-approved director of … – in the operating room.

Tariffs and their kin are the equivalent of Conan’s broadsword.  Literally, the weapon is useful in dispatching those bent on killing us.  Figuratively, it is the yin (no no) of the yin/yang duopoly when employed for managing the delicacies of commerce.

Unsheathing the sword is easy when people get excited.  A good motivator in sports is the scoreboard.  In trade numerology, the score is kept in the “balance of trade” number.  Its quarterly and annual figures are similar to the runs-by-inning at Fenway.  However, the Red Sox score is real; the trade balance figures are … who knows?

One question baffles me: If trade deficits are bad and surpluses good, should every nation strive – and could they succeed – at being on the positive side of the ledger?  I doubt it.  Locked into the deficit/surplus mode of thought, interactions become zero-sum with nations divided into either the “winner”, “balanced”, or “loser” categories.  There’s only the three.  Losers make winners possible according to the logic.  As such, the rationale has no room for all countries to be in surplus nirvana since some have to be losers to make for the winners.

If all nations had the equivalent of a competently staffed MITI (Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry) with god-like powers to manage trade, we would still end up with clusters of “winners”, “balanced”, and “losers”.  A global laser-beam focus on the avoidance of trade deficits can not succeed once surpluses appear anywhere.  The logic will not allow for it.  Could there be a problem with this  balance-of-trade notion?  It certainly appears to have the characteristics of a contrivance.

But some freshman in their Econ 101 class, upon first exposure to GDP, would jump up and say, “Look at the GDP formula.  It shows imports subtracting from our country’s economy. They hurt the economy.”  A precocious 18-year old will not be a stand-in for Adam Smith.   The equation is a stab at measuring all the economic activity of everyone in a country: personal consumption (C) + government spending (G) + private investment (I) + net exports (exports – imports).  “See”, Peter Navarro (Trump’s trade guru) would say as I put words in his mouth, “imports are a millstone around our neck.”

Not so fast, Pete … and our cocky kid.  The calculation removes imports to evade double counting them.  They are embedded in all that other consumption: C, G,  and I.  We buy imports; government buys imports; and businesses buy imports.  I’m sitting in front of my computer with an ASUS monitor, Dell tower, and numerous peripherals.  How much of this stuff is an import or composed of imports?  God knows.  I suspect that the amount is mind-boggling as we course our way down the supply chain.

Besides, the whole computation was meant to measure our economy, not cloud the issue with measures of other nations’ production.  The formula deletes imports to purify GDP of foreign things.  Extracting imports simplifies things if we are to get at some accounting of the state of our ecnomy.

Simplifying things has its advantages, and considered by many to be a hallmark of genius.  Einstein was good at it.  Simplification, though, without recognition of the complexities is foolishness.  It would be like granting PhD’s in nuclear physics after the introduction to Bohr’s model of the atom in 6th grade.  There’s a whole lot missing.

People Trade, Nations Don’t

Some of what is missing stems from the bollixing of the meaning of commerce.  “Commerce” is the word that we use to cover the millions and billions of interactions of individuals as they buy and sell.  They, as distinct persons, are trading.  It is about individuals doing something.

Conversely, we are left with the lump-sum legacy of John Maynard Keynes.  He gave us macroeconomics and thinking in terms of aggregates and unitary blocks, such as GDP.  He reduced the necessity of having to come to grips with the motives and interests of particular buyers and sellers.  All the buying and selling of individuals is cemented into “C”, “G”, and “I”.  The numbers take a life of their own.  No need to worry, we are told, about personal calculations of mutual advantage, just look at the sum totals.

From there, it is easy to homogenize all human activity within U.S. borders into a single stat.  Thus, the trade of individuals easily becomes the trade of nations.

Voilà!  “Commerce” has been shoe-horned into something nations do, instead of individuals.  Now we are in Peter Navarro and Donald Trump territory.  The thought process makes it easier, for instance, to ignore why an American individual would want to buy something from a Taiwanese individual.  Considerations like this are dismissed.  Yet, how does a foreign seller overcome 7,000 miles and still remain a viable choice for an American buyer?

What does this say about the foreigner’s American competitors?

Honest and hard questions can lead to discomforting answers, which often means that the questions won’t be asked, so we can continue to complain about cheap peasant labor.  It is a common human failing to bypass uncomfortable thoughts and go right to generalization.  We can now avoid self-examination, like taking a look at what we are doing to ourselves.

Our Schools as a Source of Much Aggravation

Much of what we are doing to ourselves could be damaging and contributing to some weakness in the marketplace.  There are many suspects for our shaky condition, but a likely one is our schools.

Are our schools more of a jobs program than a societal effort to raise an enlightened citizenry?  The introduction of collective bargaining to public employment has muddied the waters.  A union sees the interests of the workers as a matter of pay, job security, and perks.  The profession of teaching morphs into something resembling a job in an AF of L-affiliated trade as teachers become unionized.  As a consequence, for many in education today, the position is almost solely seen as a collection of skills, like the skilled trades, rather than beginning, and being infused with, high academic interests.

High academic interests are different from skills.  The interests of the academy are what they have always been since ancient times.  Certain fundamental questions about our existence takes center stage.  What is the nature of our world?  Who are we?  What is our nature?  These questions are shunted aside as the teacher is expected to be the equivalent of a carpenter.

The emphasis on skills attracts a skills-oriented person, and employers increasingly seek such persons.  The assumption is made that, of course, the candidate will possess the high academic training.  After all, he or she has a degree.  The degree, though, may mean no such thing.

The college-for-all mania of recent times has thrown wide open the gates of academia.  In the process, the flinging gates have injured standards.  We have coaxed the marginal student – the student with less interest and aptitude for high academic work – into the student body.  The faculty and course catalog, as a matter of course, must adapt to the situation by altering what the school teaches and how the faculty teaches it.  Expectations take a downward spiral.  But that won’t stop the march to graduation as many get degrees with minimal exposure to the high-minded material that would elevate their understanding.  It is particularly true of the classical humanities (History, Literature, et al), a field grossly plagued with political correctness.

Littered through the course catalog are offerings whose raison d’être (reason for existence) is partisan, ideological passions.  Opinionated fancies now count as credit to graduation.  Identity politics has spawned mutants like the offspring coming out of Women Studies nests.  This is not dispassionate academics, but is the inculcation of highly debatable opinions disguised in arcane hogwash.  It is a great way to train political activists.  It is a poor way to produce competent teachers.

Let’s bring this full circle to the current reality of gigantic and ubiquitous economic ignorance, a kind of ignorance that can make a tariff fetish popular.  As an almost 30-year teaching veteran in high school and college, and Social Science Department chair, I was struck by the dearth of teacher candidates enthused with the prospect of teaching Economics.   All were certified or tested to teach it but few wanted to — in fact, none wanted to.  As it turned out, many avoided the courses in college or took just enough to meet minimal qualification requirements.  The subject is a demanding one because it comes as close to being a hard science as you will find in the broader Social Sciences.

A question occurred to me: What else did these teacher aspirants avoid in their path to a baccalaureate?  I began to examine myself.  My academic preparation was less than stellar, but weaknesses were addressed by protracted study over a lifetime.  Can we expect, though, life-long learners from a talent pool increasingly composed of marginal college matriculates, poorly prepared hopefuls, and people who see the profession as almost solely the mastery of a set of trade skills?

What happens to the scholar in the rush to staff the schools?  If you will notice, true scholarship just became an afterthought.

And it shows in aptitude batteries given to the crowds entering our colleges and universities.  The lowest marks, consistent over many decades, were for “Education” majors.  This field is populated with sufficient numbers of people who score low enough to pull down the down the overall scores.  Remember, as undergrads and graduate students, they will eventually filter into our elementary and secondary schools.

First, the SAT figures for the college bound by intended major (6):

The Graduate Record Examination captures those “Education” majors entering grad school for certification purposes.  Apparently, 4 years of schooling did not improve matters. (6)

How can we expect teachers to elevate students when they weren’t elevated?  Students are not prepared to analyze and critique their world, and neither were many of their teachers.  It is easier for such a population to be yanked in the direction of the popular winds.  It is easier for a poorly informed auto-didact, whether in the White House or media, to pay heed to unrecognized but popular inanities.  There’s not much coursing through the head to force a pause.

The Ripple Effect and Foot Shooting

 

One code line missing from the mental software from the previously mentioned, and neglected, field of Economics is an unawareness of “side-effects” and the “margin”.

Economics is the application of reason and the principles of human nature to the study of our efforts to materially make our way in the world.  The rules are not suspended because we are juiced- up about a news flash or a well-heeled halfwit’s campaign to press his ideological hobby horse.  More commonly, such folk are the town criers for more government, and the sperm donor par excellence of unintended side-effects – many of them of the harmful variety.

Normally, the repercussions (side-effects) ripple through the society leaving people to scramble for silver bullets to save the day, like tariffs.  Unknowingly, tariffs are rife with the potential for driving unseen other people into financial dire straights.  A duty on steel or aluminum will tip over dominoes reaching back to Whirlpool, Hershey’s, and price tags.

Prices will rise thereby introducing to an ill-informed public that other economic concept: the margin.  The action-space in an economy is the “margin”.  It defines whether our personal or national economy is up or down.  The margin is all about the decision to do one more, or less, thing.  If enough people decide to produce or purchase one less thing, we will call the situation a “recession”,  or maybe a “depression”.

The Great Depression was characterized by 75%-85% of the workforce still employed.  Of course, cut hours and stagnant or reduced wages didn’t help.  The sad condition was a result of producers deciding to reduce their payrolls a few positions or hours at a time, and enough consumers putting off that house or coat purchase.  It snowballed from there.

The driver is prices.  Paying more is not a preferred circumstance for businesses or customers.  Tariffs will pry up prices which will set in motion the calculation to produce less stuff and buy fewer things at the margin.  It’s simple: watch anybody at the gas pump or produce counter after a glance at the price.

I’m always tickled by the politician selling us on a new government program.  On cue, they say that it will cost a Big Mac a year.  No big deal, eh?  They are just small cuts to the family budget.  Au contraire, we are cutting ourselves to death as the cuts begin to pile, and some people roll into bankruptcy because they have become the financial equivalent of hemophiliacs.  Marginal cuts to the blood supply can add up to shock.

What the politicians miss, as they misguide us, is the effect on the buyer or producer who is sensitive to the price increase, at the margin.  Not everyone is, though most certainly some are. These are the people who would not have been affected if our politicians had not felt someone’s pain.

The tariff was targeted on a distressed fraction of the population.  Instead, the target became our foot as we damaged the silent, more numerous, but unforeseen others.

They Have Our Paper; We Have Their Stuff

We seem to be loading the pistol and cocking the trigger before somebody has a chance to step forward to tell us that the chair, desk, pistol and ammunition were made in China.  What do the Chinese have in return?  They’ve got loads of our paper, i.e. dollars.  We get their stuff; they get our paper.

Is that such a bad arrangement for us?

In this case, the “we”, of course, are American individuals and organizations.  The “they”, of course, is well-connected Chinese persons and the Chinese government for instance.  Remember, they still have this socialist thing happening in the country so very little doesn’t pass through the fingers of the state’s henchman.

The last time that I checked, the Chinese currency is the “yuan”.  It ain’t “dollars”.  What are they going to do with all that foreign currency (dollars)?  Their choices are obvious: (1) find someone else who’ll take the things in trade; (2) use them to buy our stuff; (3) finance the Democrats’ love of spending by buying our government debt; and (4) just hold onto the things and watch them depreciate from inflation.  Fumbling through the options isn’t Calculus for anyone with boatloads of our paper.

Option #1 requires someone to want the dollars more than the Chinese see any advantage in keeping them.  The Chinese can peddle the paper so long as the U.S. and local governments appear to be economically honorable – granted, an occasionally iffy proposition.  Since most of the global political marketplace consists of poverty-stricken kleptocracies, the U.S. shines in comparison.  Thus our dollars shine and the Chinese can still hock the things.

Furthermore, the rush to the currency markets to get rid of them merely shifts the burden to someone else.  Nothing has changed.  To borrow from our own Jeremiah Wright, the dollars will nevertheless “come home to roost”.

Option #2 means that the foreigners holding our currency will have to do something with them.  I don’t think that piling them up and burning them is a viable alternative.  “Coming home to roost” is quite an apt description.

They will have to buy our “stuff” – either goods and services or assets.  As for assets, that means that they will add to our capital account (the other half of the balance of payments equation) by buying our stocks, bonds, our government debt.  Of course, the investments will spur both more domestic consumption and production.  Once again, those dollars come back in one way or another. (8)

Option #3 is reflected in Option #2.  Those dollars in the possession of foreign producers will be put to use.  A good chunk of those dollars will bankroll the Democrats’ fetish for mommy government.  Our governments’ budget deficits will be sold as government bonds and Treasuries.  They are great place to park the dollars without the importers running the risk of losing their shirt through compound inflation.

Option #4 is a non-starter, period.  One can rest assured that the Chinese trade surplus won’t end up as billions of dollars in tens of thousands of shoe boxes under tens of thousands of Chinese beds.  The idea won’t have resonance with the Chinese, but may seem reasonable to the beneficiaries of American public education.

“But holy Moses”, today’s Cassandras will cry, “all those trade deficits, mostly denominated as our government debt, will place us at the mercy of the ChiComs.”  Calm down and think it through.  They are at our mercy, not the other way around.  The threat to call in the debt is as hollow as the empty threats of a spineless teacher.  Through what court?  Our government could repudiate the debt and piss off some foreigners, play hell with our international respectability, but still walk away without facing a repo man.  In other words, we could be Greece.

The ChiComs could ready the huge People’s Liberation Army as repo man to occupy Wall Street or DC.  Honestly, they could even take DC and U.S. respectability might climb a few notches.  But getting the hordes across 7,000 miles of ocean and through 11 aircraft carrier battle groups and an entire U.S. Air Force with round-the-clock refueling might be a bit daunting, even for the ChiComs.

Sucking thumbs and suicide over destroyed fortunes is a likelier outcome in the Great Hall of the People if we renounce our public debt.

The Social and National Security

The possibility of ruined fortunes will not be limited to foreign kleptocrats.  Also, on the other side of the trade balance ledger, we must be aware of the effects of years of trade imbalances on the ruined personal estates of vast swaths of America. This is the dark underbelly of the libertarians’ free trade dream.  It must be recognized.

The profusion of foreign products has assisted in creating the American “rust belt”.  It’s a happenstance that is hard to ignore.  The social ill-effects are profound, even if their demise makes economic sense.

How would the rise of a rusting belt of America make economic sense, and be not surprising as well?  One obvious contributing factor might be the frenzy of regulation starting around the 1970s.  By legislative and administrative fiat, the old product lines of the American auto companies were placed on a treadmill to obsolescence.  Additionally, energy uses and sources came under increasing suspicion.  Industrial processes producing industrial waste spurred even more dictats like the Clean Water Act of 1972.

Self-inflicted nightmares like the Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1952 was poor PR for American manufacturing.

Environmentalism was on the march.  The Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act (led to the creation of the EPA), and assorted spinoffs (CAFE, emission standards, etc.) set loose a tidal wave of regulation.  In so many ways, it became more expensive for Americans to produce American goods, justified or not.

Imperial unionism in the industrial sector did not help.  Pay scales, perks, work rules, and job protections ran square into the vise of soaring costs and greater foreign competition.  And I let’s not forget the 70’s tax monstrosity.

Indeed, foreign competition became more of a competitive threat  as many countries no longer found themselves living in the dirt and among rubble.  Many entered the rich nation club, with a more up-to-date production culture, at the same time as America discovered the unaccountable administrative state.

Many of Trump’s, and his protectionist friends’, calls for a manufacturing renaissance are allusions to the 1950s, a time when Europe and Japan were nowhere near their pre-WWII economic zenith.  Berlin was still clearing the debris.  Tokyo’s fires were still smoldering beneath the surface.  As for the third world, many of those nations were hovering around hunter-gatherer status.  America came out of the war unscathed and humming on all eight cylinders.  Of course it was an American golden age, and one lacking of any broad foreign competition.

Today, we no longer have the playing field to ourselves.  Our competitors would benefit from building on a clean slate, one that was either blown to smithereens or didn’t exist.  They were more in a position to adopt the newest, best, brightest, and not be encumbered by processes and habits dating back to the 19th century.

They were free to be like Chicago after the 1871 fire: start over with the latest and best.  The Chicago maelstrom freed the city of its accumulated past.  The fire wiped the slate clean for modern architecture, transport, communication, electricity, a whole new physical urban plant.

The fire:

After the rebuilding:

British and American 1940s bombing did the same thing for Germany.

The aftermath:

After the rebuilding, thanks to Europe’s enterprising culture and the Marshall Plan:

Having a clean canvas to paint on can be an advantage.  For us, our canvas is riddled with the stains of entrenched and permissive corporate cultures, out-of-step industrial processes, and autocratic unions.

Much of American manufacturing conveyed a sense of sclerosis.  Not all, though.  Joseph Schumpeter’s harbinger of innovation, “creative destruction”, was alive and well.  Old-style manufacturing was left to languish as new avenues of enterprise opened up.  High tech and the internet-of-things was invented here.  GM was eclipsed by Microsoft and Microsoft by FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google).

The glittering new tech was something other nations sought to imitate, and if not duplicate, steal.  Many nations developed their own high tech spheres while others sought to overcome their own self-imposed limitations through theft.  I’m thinking of the web of organized terror-killers and the reflexive national adversaries of the US.  Does Russia and the PRC (Red China) come to mind?

It doesn’t take Mensa membership to understand the military applications of silicon chips.  What began as simple data processing has morphed into giving Beijing’s Party Central Committee the capability to precisely target Vandenberg AFB and develop a blue-water navy, thanks to the heist of the proprietary secrets of Americans.  Don’t think that Iran’s mullahs and Kim Jong-un haven’t noticed.

Trade in goods and students opens up the spigot.  The PRC is particularly egregious.  We train; they spy; and they extort tradecraft from America’s lords of high tech who are giddy at the prospect of 1 billion Chinese consumers.  Lenin’s “rope sellers” – as in the rumored pronouncement that the capitalists would sell the revolutionaries the rope to hang them – takes on a modern and pressing relevance.

America shouldn’t take the prospect of dangling from the end of a rope too lightly.  Trade with China is fraught with threats to national security.  China isn’t a normal nation.  It’s a communist one.  If everything in the country isn’t state-controlled, it’s not that they haven’t tried.  Even the “special economic zones” of looser controls has only changed governmental interference, not eliminated it.  Partnerships with Chinese “firms” and sharing of sensitive intellectual property is required of foreign firms in key industries such as telecommunications, autos, and aerospace.  The pattern appears too often for it to be an accidental happenstance.  State policies and powerful Chinese political actors dictate the terms of trade and foreign entry into China’s markets. (12)

The PRC, and countries like it, presents a conundrum for America’s free trade advocates, of which I am one: How are we to trade with adversarial countries?  With an eye to avoiding the rope-seller profession, self-preservation and restraint should be our watchwords.  To put it succinctly, national security trumps (pun intended) Adam Smith.  We need to act like trade has both a yin and yang.

Free trade, like free speech, has limits.  But before we talk about the curbs, we ought to know the reasons for their existence.  Free speech is easy to fathom since most people enjoy and practice the art of blathering.  Economics falls into that category with the clichéd “rocket science”: many make frequent reference to it but few understand it.

Our schools are the chief suspects deserving of a perp walk for their negligence in the teaching of Economics.  The vacuum is filled with a form of idiosyncratic economics.  Each person thinks they know it, but they are limited to the one thing they do know: their immediate experience.  What makes sense in that small cloister is erroneously applied universally.  The situation is rife for the poorly informed autodidact acting in the role of a wannabe Socrates and national savior.

 

RogerG

Bibliography and references:

1. “Trump’s NAFTA Focus Is In The Wrong Place: Trade Deficits Are Irrelevant”, John Brinkley, Forbes, Oct. 10,2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbrinkley/2017/10/10/trade-deficits-are-irrelevant/#750392057d8c
2. “Deficits Are a Flawed Guide to Unfair Trade”, Gregg Ip, Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/deficits-are-a-flawed-guide-to-unfair-trade-1489594137
3. “Minutes: News and Notes”, Sarah Jones, The New Republic, a year ago,   https://newrepublic.com/minutes/141930/donald-trump-no-strategy-no-beliefs-no-principles
4. “The ‘Made in China’ Fallacy: Our trade deficit with China is vastly exaggerated—and it skews how we see the entire economy”, Zachary Karabell, Slate, 3/11/2014,  http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_edgy_optimist/2014/03/u_s_china_trade_deficit_it_s_not_what_you_think_it_is.html
5. “No, the sky is not falling: Interpreting the latest SAT scores”, Tom Loveless, Brookings, 10/1/2015,   https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2015/10/01/no-the-sky-is-not-falling-interpreting-the-latest-sat-scores/
6. “Your college major is a pretty good indication of how smart you are”, Jonathan Wai, Researcher, Duke University, Quartz, 2/3/2015,  https://qz.com/334926/your-college-major-is-a-pretty-good-indication-of-how-smart-you-are/
7. “Here’s The Average SAT Score For Every College Major”, Natasha Bertrand, Business Insider, 10/24/2014,  http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-average-sat-score-for-every-college-major-2014-10
8. Testimony before Subcommittee on International Economic Policy and Trade
   Committee on International Relations, United States House of Representatives, on 7/22/1998:  “America’s Misunderstood Trade Deficit”, Daniel Griswold, CATO Institute, https://www.cato.org/publications/congressional-testimony/americas-misunderstood-trade-deficit
9. “41 Straight Years Of Trade Deficits Yet America Still Stands Strong”, Dan Ikenson, Forbes, 8/23/2016,  https://www.forbes.com/sites/danikenson/2016/08/23/41-straight-years-of-trade-deficits-yet-america-still-stands-strong/#7628a3282d4c
10. “The Recent U.S. Trade Deficit — No Cause for Panic”, GEOFFREY E. WOOD and DOUGLAS R. MUDD, St. Louis Federal Reserve Board, April 1978,   https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/78/04/Trade_Apr1978.pdf
11. “If Trade Surpluses are So Great, the 1930s Should Have Been a Booming Decade”, DON BOUDREAUX, Cafe Hayek, 12/21/2006,   http://cafehayek.com/2006/12/if_trade_surplu.html
12. “China and Technology: Tortoise and Hare Again”, James Andrew Lewis, Senior Vice President, Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 2, 2017,  https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-and-technology-tortoise-and-hare-again