it's not just the economy, stupid

on tariffs, etc.

Huge week for those of us who haven't consolidated their 401(k)s nor, despite a number of increasingly exasperated conversations with our dads and younger brothers, opened trading accounts. Huge week for checking and high-yield savings accounts.

Masquerade Ball at the Ritz (1909) by Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta. Courtesy of The Met’s Open Access Collection.

As a lore reminder, I was briefly an econ major, but as I mostly cared about developmental econ and economic history (did you know double-entry accounting was invented in Italy? more specifically, the Republic of Florence?), the stock market, as a general concept, is something I actively prefer not to think about.

Something that feels wild to me, though, and it shouldn't because it's not new, is how people who've kept quiet about everything else—speech suppression, deportations, police violence, the end of DEI programs, our taxes financing the bombs that have killed tens of thousands of people over the last year and a half—will suddenly stand up to denounce tariffs. "Here's how my small business and I have been affected," they tell us.¹

I get it: higher tariffs affect us directly and affect us now. Our wallets are one of the few things we're still allowed to uncontroversially care about. To prioritize. And I don't begrudge the concern—I care, too. But it's been interesting seeing people who've been silent about a whole lot of injustices suddenly lean in like, "I can't be silent any longer." Like, okay, damn. So you can speak. Maybe if more of us had spoken out against student protesters getting arrested and trans people being denied their rights and union busting and affirmative action being rolled back and libraries losing funding, the tariffs wouldn't have been allowed enough oxygen to flourish.

The economy, after all, is not an issue separate and apart from all the others, no matter what libertarians and James Carville might argue. Production is affected by the big three, yes, but also: by the appearance of stability, people’s trust in institutions, continued perception of fairness in the legal system, sturdiness of our trading relationships.²

The economy is not a neat little vacuum—wish that it were! But it exists within a societal context, and if you only decide to pay attention to the numbers, you’re only seeing a fraction of the full picture.

Staying quiet until the thing that affects you happens is how we get to where we are. Are we not neighbors? Speaking out against deportations and the inhumane treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers would be a hell of a lot less controversial if more of us did it.

I don't mean to sound chiding. I am subject to its downturns as well, probably even more than I used to be before I quit my corporate job, so believe me: I get that the economy is a pressing concern, and I’m glad people who’ve until now remained silent are finding their voice. Maybe they can keep using it.

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If you missed it, I wrote about my Q1 reads (lol sorry the lingo slipped in when thinking about stocks) earlier this week:

everything i read jan-mar '25

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1. I am supremely aware that tariffs overwhelmingly hurt poor people more than they affect the middle and upper classes; I’m mentioning small business because it seems to be the group being given the mic at this time. It’s understandable—few things are more bathed in Americanah than the small business owner. It’s a group for whom people hold a lot of sympathy and empathy.

2. “The big three,” of course, was Adam Smith’s working title for The Wealth of Nations. (It’s land, labor, and capital.)