Mailbag: The gender politics of Trumponomics

Plus: Beria's kinder, gentler Cold War and a bunch of abundance stuff

This story about the Consumer Product Safety Commission halting collection of various injury data due to staffing cuts at the CDC doesn’t quite have the “moral punch in the face” quality of some Trump-era outrage stories, but there’s something really shocking about it to me. Collecting and disseminating data is a classic public good (people need to know things!) and there’s no partisan controversy about this that I’m aware of.

Since we do our own data collection here at Slow Boring, I am aware that Jed Kolko’s recent piece for us about the threat Trump poses to the collection and integrity of America’s basic economic data was not a huge hit. But I was very glad to have published it, and I really invite people who skipped it to take the opportunity to read it and to consider sharing. He’s talking about a different kind of data than what the CPSC is collecting, but his piece addresses the ways major agency functions can be wrecked through carelessness or malice. It’s a huge and underrated problem.

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Andrew: Do you agree with the take probably most associated with Cartoons Hate Her that a lot of Trump's economic agenda is an attempt to hurt marginal white collar women? Crush the source of perceived cushy email jobs and force these women to partner with blue collar men? Or that a lot of Trump’s appeal is rooted in a kind of status redistribution away from women with allegedly bullshit laptop jobs towards men doing stuff with their hands.

Here is the CHH take, for reference. A related take, which was shared with me by a woman who is active in the libertarian policy world, is that the political appeal of tariffs is that MAGA types want to raise the relative earnings of men to women, which they think will spur more family formation and higher birthrates. Why would tariffs do that? Well, the idea is that you’re taxing people who work in services to subsidize people who work on goods-production, which is a transfer from a female-skewed population to a male-skewed one.

I am sort of a cold-blooded literalist, so my main take on all of this is that it’s not factually true that federal employment is female-dominated. I’m also very skeptical that Trump’s trade wars are, in fact, going to end up boosting the relative earnings of people working in goods-producing fields. The actual decision-making seems much more flailing and corrupt and incompetent than that.

What is true, though, is that I think a lot of nostalgia economics is about gender rules.

Were people actually richer in 1965 than in 2025? No, of course not. And no amount of torturing the economic data will make that true. It is also not true that men were richer in 1965 than in 2025. Nor is it true that blue collar men were richer in 1965 than in 2025. But what is true is that the majority of the economic gains over the past 60 years have accrued to women rather than to men. This purely relative loss in status turns out to have some implications for men’s absolute well-being. Women are, as a result of economic empowerment, less desperate to date, marry, or stay married to the average man. Now, of course, nobody is going to come out and say, “I favor policies that would make men somewhat poorer and also make women a lot poorer because I think in this poorer society, girls will be desperate to go out with me.” Because if you said that, you’d sound like an evil moron. So it feels better to convince yourself that people were actually richer 60 years ago and that’s why you’re nostalgic for the good old days. But it’s not true!

Dmo: What about the idea of putting mass protests on a regular schedule. The ones that happened a few days ago I didn't know about until the day-of. But if it happened regularly every Tuesday (or whatever) then it could have a chance to snowball week after week.

I do think Tesla Takedown protests are happening regularly, and if you are in the mood to protest, I would recommend going.

Matt M: Beria outmaneuvers Khrushchev, is never deposed and executed, and is able to pursue his desire for closer economic ties with the US. How does the Cold War play out from there?

Lavrentiy Beria was the head of the Soviet secret police under Stalin and initially seemed well-positioned to succeed him as Soviet leader after Stalin’s death.