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Comment by sghiassy | Hacker News Reader

Art of the Deal

His negotiating methods, if one can call them that, are like "single use weapons" that are relationship burning rather than building. If you are doing 100s of one-off deals with counterparties you will never talk to again, and who don't know each other.. it might actually work.

But you burn the ability to make more deals with the same counterparty again.

If you played this game with your neighbor over a fenceline or tree limb dangerously overhanging into your yard.. you would save a few bucks once, and have an antagonistic relationship for the next 10-20 years of living next to them. Good luck getting the benefit of the doubt next time.

Meanwhile mister Trump is doing quite well financially, so he is doing something right; and your theory is not covering the whole story.

There is something to be said about this.

Apparently Machiavelli was onto something

Honestly though, it seems like he would rather have everyone lose than take a chance that anyone but him wins.

Even positive reporting of the man makes him out to have a massively fragile ego.

He fundamentally does not understand non zero sum dynamics.

The business-as-usual multi-international neoliberal supply chain model wasn't benefiting a vast number of Americans with no solution other than "don't complain look at these metrics we made up, you're doing great, don't be upset we are making billions while you struggle to afford to fix your teeth or fix your car". Something had to break and break it did.

If you are so non-zero sum, what would you suggest as the fix for those issues if we kept the old model?

Progressive taxation.

Americans are upset about not having any money while being the richest and most powerful country in the world. They are throwing a temper tantrum about a world order they created and are the main beneficiary of.

There's a class of americans that didn't benefit from that world order. However, they elected someone who pretended he was going to help them, and actually is making it even worse for them and better for those who were already benefiting.

The reality is that people judge their quality of life in relevant terms, not absolute ones.

Better to be absolutely poor in a poor country than relatively poor in a rich country and all that

Some people, others are capable of being grateful for what they have.

I would suggest not going with the dumbest rock you can find and standing behind it against all evidence.

Before engaging, let's get this settled: do you believe that the US economy operates on a zero sum basis?

No it's not zero sum but it can also not be benefiting a ton of people. Which is what I said..

Here's what I don't get about this: Trump's main campaign promise was to raise prices for American consumers (via tariffs) and to harm the lowest wage earners the most (tariffs as sales taxes are regressive).

Going against "business as usual" resulted in higher prices, as predicted and promised.

Nearly everyone here benefited from lower prices afforded by reduced trade barriers. This isn't some obscure hidden fact.

The mistake here is letting the word benefit do all the heavy lifting. You cannot define benefit in a superficial way and expect things to make sense. Notions like "let them eat cake", or trickle-down-economics, also abuse and distort the notion of benefit. "System X benefitted all Americans in a trivial way" smacks of that kind of false reasoning.

Imagine seeing American wealth increase dramatically over the past several decades, see tax burdens drastically reduced on the top 0.1%, and see almost all of that drastic increase in wealth go to that 1%, and not be able to come up with a solution other than “well, against all evidence I think trade is zero sum”.

And worse, your solution then is tariffs, which are little more than a sales tax which are disproportionately paid by the poorest.

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