Fake Charity Nerd Girl

apparently my mom told my sister that I’m a “Trump apologist apologist”

I have mixed feelings about this article.

On the one hand, I think it is true that “companies have higher expected future profits” is not the same thing as “the economy is better” (whatever that means exactly) and that is good to remember post-election.

But I think the example of Wells Fargo opening fake accounts is a bad one to illustrate this. Wells Fargo made like two million dollars from fake accounts. It was fined 185 million, plus had to fire and replace all the employees who opened fake accounts, plus had to replace its CEO, plus took a huge reputational hit causing new account openings to be down 44%. The fake account thing was not good for Wells Fargo’s profits but bad for consumers, it was terrible for Wells Fargo’s profits.

And actually thinking about this example makes me kind of doubt what I said in the first paragraph, and wonder to what extent “good for companies’ profits” and “good for consumers” converge to the same thing in the long term. If Trump slashes corporate taxes and as a result needs to make huge cuts to social services, in the short term that seems good for companies’ profits and bad for consumers. But in the longer term, you could imagine companies having more money to spend and thus hiring people and stimulating the economy, or consumers having less money to spend and so companies’ profits decrease.

(The epistemic status of the previous paragraph is very uncertain. It just disturbs me that he couldn’t come up with a better example than Wells Fargo.)

Anyway, then the article goes into behavioral finance and gives two examples of people buying the wrong ticker right after news. But like. “People buy the wrong ticker sometimes” is very different from “the entire market is systematically wrong about the fundamentals of the US economy.” 

I kind of think if you want to claim the markets are being irrational in some specific case, you have to give an explanation why, and you have to be willing to bet against them. The article doesn’t give any specific bias, it just says that like, people can be biased. Which is true. But isn’t really a reason to assume that the market is wrong in any specific case.

The wrong ticker going up on news is a thing that happens sometimes, because markets aren’t perfectly efficient. And when it does, I am so happy to sell it. And I have! (Well not literally me. The guy sitting next to me was the one entering the orders.) I agree that the markets’ reaction to Trump’s victory was … weird. But I haven’t sold any of my S&P 500 index fund shares. 

Being in New York, I pass a lot of homeless people. Typically the signs say something sad about their lives: “Laid off and hungry. Please help.” 

Sometimes people will get more creative and you’ll see things like “Need money for weed.” I saw this a few weeks ago and thought it was clever. Sure, some people won’t want to give them money. But it’ll appeal to lots of people’s tribal sympathies, especially in a liberal place like New York, where people are pretty likely to be pro-marijuana legalization and anti-paternalism about how poor people spend their money. But it seemed like the convention where the sign has to refer to the homeless person’s life was kind of unnecessary. I decided that if I were panhandling, I’d just go all out on the tribal sympathies thing and have a sign saying “FUCK TRUMP” in really big letters.

Guess what I saw walking up Third Avenue today.

I was at my graduation last weekend, and the commencement address was basically about twenty minutes of vitriolic insults directed at Trump. And in between burying my head in my friend’s shoulder in discomfort and laughing nervously, I was thinking about the family of this guy in my class.

He’s the first person in his family to go to college. He drove an hour every day to go to a somewhat better high school because there was an epidemic of gang violence at his local school. Against the odds, he did well, and got into college, where he has continued to get good grades and play sports and generally do things that make parents proud.

His family is not well off. They’re Mexican-American. And they’re Trump supporters.

Yeah, I’m kind of confused too. But they honestly are. (Not even reluctant Republicans supporting Trump–they voted for him in the primary. His aunt owns a Make America Great Again cap.) And all I could think about was how happy they must have been to be attending their son’s graduation from one of the best universities in the world [citation needed], only to have that happiness turn to bewilderment and anger as everyone around them cheered a series of caustic attacks against them and their values. The message couldn’t have been clearer: “You don’t belong here.”

My mom thought this speech was So Courageous. When I suggested that it might have been more courageous to say something that not everyone there agreed with, she replied, “the students maybe, but a lot of the parents looked unhappy.”

Seventy percent of the parents there had family incomes over six figures. (More, probably, since low-income parents are less likely to attend graduation.) A lot of them are members of the self-perpetuating intellectual/economic elite. This probably isn’t true of the few Trump supporters among them. 

So if we are going to single them out for judgment, force them to account for their support for an “infantile,” “bullying,” “proto-fascist” “charlatan” … can it not be on the day of their kids’ graduation?