Ezra Klein interviews Paul Krugman to explore this subtle and difficult question. (Gift link).

One under-discussed to this point aspect of what’s going on here is what can be called Artificial Stupidity:

Klein: Did we just have a global economic crisis created by some DOGE interns asking ChatGPT how to calculate tariffs? Two, if that’s what these systems — which I’m guessing are trained on the output of what all economists writing online say you should do — is there something to it? . . .

Krugman: This is part of the problem with what we’re calling A.I., with large language models. They pick up what’s out there without necessarily being able to discriminate what is sensible and what is not.

There’s certainly no paper I would imagine in any economics journal saying: Do this. Maybe some people out there are saying something like this. But it really is not something you would recommend, if you know anything about how trade works — which ChatGPT does not. So it really is weird that it would come up with this.

I mean it’s pretty clear what happened here is that some minions ran some AI queries about different ways to calculate tariff regimes, got back total garbage, because that’s what you get from the LLMs when you ask a difficult technical question, and presented this total garbage to Trump as an option, because the minions are also lazy and stupid and ignorant. The world economy is being wrecked because lazy, stupid, ignorant people “do their own research” in lazy, stupid, and ignorant ways.

Klein: Why do you think they think they are doing it? Or why do you think Donald Trump thinks he is doing it?

Krugman: It’s always a question: What does Donald Trump actually know? Here’s a guy who goes around saying that his approval rating is in the 70s.

So yes, I’m sure that Scott Bessent at the Treasury Department knows that those indicators are all flashing yellow or red. Does Trump know it? Is there anybody who’s brave enough to go in and say: Mr. President, this is really working out badly? It’s not clear.

Klein: But he knows the markets.

Krugman: But he may think that they just don’t understand the brilliance of his policy.

Klein: OK, so what do you think he thinks they don’t understand? What is, to him, the brilliance of his policy?

Krugman: I think he’s got this very crude view that whenever somebody sells more to us than we buy from them, they’re taking advantage, and he’s going to end that. And people will see that he was smarter than everybody else all along.

There’s no indication that there’s any deeper agenda, any deeper thought.

If nothing else, anyone who thought that there was a bigger agenda — that there was some subtle reasoning going on here — the shape of those tariffs that were announced yesterday should tell you: No, it’s just that Donald Trump doesn’t like trade deficits, and he thinks the tariffs can cure them.

That’s it. There isn’t anything else going on here other than that Donald Trump is a complete moron, who thinks that a trade deficit means that one country is ripping off the other country.

Now naturally that is such an incredibly stupid and ignorant and lazy idea that an unlimited number of Trump ass-kissers are out there right now coming up with all sorts of subtle explanations for why no of course it’s not anything that stupid and ignorant and lazy, because that’s an idea you would expect a dull-normal ten-year-old to believe, not somebody who happens to be in a position to wreck the world’s economy because of the massive dysfunctions of the contemporary American electoral and political systems. (Here’s Ross Douthat doing exactly that right next to Krugman’s interview).

But that’s what it is.