The White House claims tariffs work. Let’s look at each study they cite to see if they’re correct.

Can't unsee it.

The single grossest and costliest failure of modern politics is that you and your ilk have misattributed the effects of innovation (and productivity growth more broadly) on the manufacturing sector to trade. At this point, there's more than a decade's worth of evidence showing that the vast majority of the decline in manufacturing employment is due to technology. Tariffs aren't going to turn this ship around. Thankfully, voters appear to be roundly rejecting your approach.

Alas, if only you could wish away the lump of labor fallacy & demand-side channel with preening insults & self-promotion.

On the other hand, US tariff policy has changed more than 50 times under this administration.

Please correct or delete this, for the love of preserving any remaining scraps of respect people might have for professors or expert authority. Massachusetts doesn’t have a wealth tax.

If you don't understand that the purpose of a tariff is to raise import prices so that domestic producers can compete, then you should just not talk about tariffs.

Responding to some comments and questions on the analysis I wrote with @DiSalvoPhD on "Capital Is Not Taking Half of America’s Income, and Other Myths About the “Labor Share”" ericadyork.substack.com/p/mo…

I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron. Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence. Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons. Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist. After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence. New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today? worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…

The last 18 months saw a lot of tariff "front-running," as importers stockpiled product before new tariffs came into effect. Commerce/CBP are now cracking down on this by threatening to *ban* imports by companies trying to front-run the polysilicon tariffs that start Dec. 4.

For penning her mea culpa, Hannah-Jones has received a good deal of praise. Well, you can count me out of all that. Her actions were morally indefensible and analytically ignorant, and her supposed metamorphosis remains invisible to the naked eye. nationalreview.com/2026/09/w…

I have many thoughts on the Nikole Hannah-Jones story, especially having attended the kind of schools she sent her daughter to, but if we're looking for takeaways, here's a simple one. When an expert in education so thoroughly demonstrates a jarring and near complete lack of expertise in the act of getting an education for her own daughter, we should stop taking advice from her on curriculum, instruction, and all other fads disguised as wisdom she offers. That seems like the least we could do. Her daughter's personal struggle, which is indeed sympathetic, wasn't much of a teachable moment for her, as she doesn't seem to have updated any of her priors (and actually fudges funding facts, so as not to disrupt the narrative of under-resourced schools). But it should be a teachable moment for us, about the outsized influence of a scholar who claims to know better than anyone what her daughter would be up against in the school to which she chose to send her, but was inexplicably surprised and left her daughter completely unprepared for it.

I think it's at least a little bit the unions, guys

Whomever did this to the "Boxcar Children" book covers needs to be arrested.

"If her diagnosis had been correct, her decision would have been laudable." Amazing statement. Hey, if Trump had been right about everything, you'd all agree that he was the best president ever. That "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Hannah-Jones includes some version of the word "unequal" 15 times, "segregation" 25 times, and "resources" 4 times, but not one instance of "accountability," "union," or "standards."

Another thing to remember is that schools are not supposed to be the primary educators of children. Parents properly have that role.

What's most shocking about the Nikole Hannah Jones essay is how comically ignorant one of America's loudest education pundits was about how low-income schools actually operate - and also how ignorant she was of *her own daughter's* progress.

The Kansas State Fair was plastered with AI slop posters and signs.

Have you noticed that we increasingly say things like "lost multiple pregnancies"? Lost multiple *babies* is more like it.

Please teach your kids about investing, compounding, and capitalism, not about me.