Flourishing, mimetic desire, & tariffs
RWL#445
Greetings from The University of New Hampshire![i] The daffodils are fading but the irises are blooming at the LHH! It’s so wonderful to see the spring really coming into full bloom. The trees are filling in and the LHH will soon be ensconced in green and barely visible from the road. I love this time of year.
Speaking of the time of year, my students have finished their finals (at least with the courses in my department). We’re done! Well, they’re done – I still have to finish my grading. But we’re super, almost-done!
This week President Trump stated, regarding the pending supply chain issues that are coming as a result of his tariffs, “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.” That might be true of middle-class kids. My kids had so many dolls. But what about kids who would have only received one doll under the pre-tariff regime? My guess is they will get no dolls, and maybe not get lunch, either. Wealthy Americans are hurt a bit by inflation, or in this case, tariff-driven shortages, but poor people who rely on cheap Chinese products at Walmart and other similar retailers will be hurt much worse. This is something Republicans used to seem to know better than Democrats who used to wear protectionist hats, but now no one seems to actually care about poor consumers. The whole tariff scheme is profoundly economically ignorant. There are cargo ships still enroute from China that left before the tariffs were imposed. But with the tariffs, there will be far fewer ships sailing in the future. We’ll see prices really start to rise when that happens. The shame of it is, this is self-imposed pain.
OK – to the links. As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: The Human Flourishing Program, Our Flourishing Measure
https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/measuring-flourishing
Why: A 12-question instrument meant to capture six dimensions of human flourishing. Each dimension has two questions, but it’s not particularly meaningful to add up or average the responses since the dimensions are a bit like apples and oranges. Ideally you want to be high in all of them.
Something to glance at and consider. Does this accurately reflect a good life to you? A life you would want to lead?
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Watch
What: Mimetic Theory: Two Types of Psychological Needs (4 min)
(link)
Why: I wrote about mimetic desire last weekend. This short video does a nice job of explaining the theory.
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Listen
What: Conversations with Bill Kristol, Larry Summers on Trump, Tariffs, and Threats to the Economy (56 min)
(link)
Why: The guest is economist Larry Summers who correctly called the massive inflation triggered by the Biden Administration’s stimulus. His sentiments are what I have been trying to say:
“The issue is becoming, in a meta sense, confidence in the United States. When people go in and out of being confident in you, that is alarming. It’s the kind of thing that in a developing country, you’d ask yourself whether they’re going to have to have an IMF program within a few months. We’re too big for an IMF program, but we're at risk of a major kind of a financial incident.”
Somewhere in the pod, he says something like “There's a big difference if you are unhealthy because you are eating a gallon of chocolate ice cream each day vs doing everything to be healthy and still not.”
The whole thing is worth listening to.
[i] It occurred to me, after nearly 10 years of writing this newsletter, that when I write my “greetings from UNH" that people might think I am speaking on behalf of the institution. That is very funny. I’m not sure that the UNH president could pick me out in a line up. So please understand that all opinions expressed here are my own, and do not represent the institutional positions of UNH. It’s akin to me writing, Greetings from America! And someone saying I am writing on behalf of the US government. As much as I might want it to be so, no one of reasonable judgement is going to believe it to be so.