Joseph Steinberg (@jbsteinberg) / X

Joseph Steinberg

4,151 posts

Joseph Steinberg

@jbsteinberg

Professor @econuoft. Research Associate @nberpubs. PhD from @umn_econ. Macro, international, public finance. Views my own.

Joined July 2023

Pinned
Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Mar 17
I spend way too much time on social media debunking "economic slop" promulgated by lawyers pretending to be economists, so I built Show Me the Model: a tool that uses AI to check whether the economic reasoning in an essay actually holds up. showmethemodel.io Give it a URL
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Apr 6, 2025
[Warning: this may offend some people!] I think economists have done society a disservice by elevating applied-micro studies that focus exclusively on the relative effects of trade across different groups of workers but are silent about the aggregate effects.
Arpit Gupta
@arpitrage
Apr 6, 2025
A lot of people point at the first plot as it it proves NAFTA had no effect on manufacturing employment; but we have high quality empirical work which argues it had large impacts on employment and politics
nber.org
Re-examining the Effects of Trading with China on Local Labor Markets: A Supply Chain Perspective
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Mar 28, 2025
Lol. I wonder how many macro papers have a modeling section that starts with "Time is discrete" or "The model economy features overlapping generations of households." I guess I'll have to retract several of my recent publications.
Pierre Poilievre
@PierrePoilievre
Mar 28, 2025
"EXCLUSIVE: Mark Carney faces plagiarism accusations for 1995 Oxford doctoral thesis Carney's doctorate in economics from Oxford shows 10 instances of apparent plagiarism, according to academics who reviewed the material" nationalpost.com/news/mark-carn…
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Apr 16, 2025
He's actually wrong. The evidence doesn't say that! Autor et al's "China Shock" paper has colored the debate on trade to such an extent that many economists (not to mention "economists" like @oren_cass) are convinced that trade with China was a net negative for US workers. But
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼
@Noahpinion
Apr 16, 2025
Oren is correct that China's entry into the WTO did huge damage to U.S. manufacturing. Where he goes wrong is in thinking that tariffs will (or can) reverse this damage. In fact, the tariffs are already accelerating deindustrialization.
nber.org
Re-examining the Effects of Trading with China on Local Labor Markets: A Supply Chain Perspective
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Jan 17, 2025
I'm sick of the AEA acting like it has the right to be the arbiter of how our profession should operate. Social media isn't just for interacting with other economists. A big part of why I use it, especially when talking about policy, is to communicate with people outside of
Steve McGuire
@sfmcguire79
Jan 17, 2025
NEW: The American Economic Association is encouraging economists to leave X for BS. A new report cites the decline of hashtag EconTwitter, harassment (especially of women, people of color, and LGBTQ scholars), and policy changes under Elon as reasons to switch. 🧵
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Apr 23, 2025
1. The world has become richer as a result of globalisation. 2. The biggest benefits have been for the poor. 3. Blue-collar workers have not been left behind. 4. Free trade does not destroy jobs. 5. There is nothing special about manufacturing. 6. Imports are good.
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Feb 25, 2025
For the millionth time, you simply don't know what you're talking about. US trade deficit almost entirely driven by saving-investment imbalance. Trade policy has nothing to do with it. Tariffs won't reduce the deficit, just make US consumers poorer.
Michael Pettis
@michaelxpettis
Feb 25, 2025
1/12 Oren Cass makes a very important point here. While most economists agree that trade intervention is always contractionary (i.e. it reduces the total value of goods and services produced by the intervening country), their agreement is based... understandingamerica.co/p/the-one-word…
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Jul 14, 2025
Once again, I'm disappointed to see Autor and co inappropriately extrapolating their DiD results to make conclusions about aggregate effects, and I'm disappointed in the media for giving these unwarranted conclusions space. [1/x]
Opinion | We Warned About the First China Shock. The Next One Will Be Worse.
From nytimes.com
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Mar 4, 2025
SOME UNPLEASANT TARIFF ARITHMETIC It appears that tariffs on Canada and Mexico are on starting tomorrow. So it's time to re-up my analysis from a month ago (published by @TheHubCanada). Key takeaway: More pain for Canada than the US, especially if we retaliate. 1/X
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Oct 1, 2025
I have been playing around with using ChatGPT-5 as a research assistant to write a short paper on Knightian uncertainty and trade (basically, trade-policy ambiguity vs. trade-policy risk in a Handley-Limao sunk cost model). I have asked ChatGPT to verify the proofs it
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Apr 25, 2025
Another day, another thread in which Michael Pettis espouses his made-up "beggar-thy-neighbor" theory of trade to justify protectionism. Let's dig in once again to see why this theory is wrong. [1/x]
Michael Pettis
@michaelxpettis
Apr 25, 2025
1/14 This article by Tim Harford is useful because it shows some of the partial thinking that often distorts discussions about trade. One area of confusion is when he discusses how comparative advantage works. ft.com/content/21a78e… via @FT
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Mar 29, 2025
This stale "trade deficits have deindustrialized America" nonsense doesn't get any less wrong just because you keep repeating it. Manufacturing employment has been shrinking since the end of world war 2, long before the US began trading with China (we had a complete embargo on
Oren Cass
@oren_cass
Mar 28, 2025
What's with the Canada and Mexico tariffs? @commonplc, Nicholas Phillips argues that rebalancing the global trading system turns on renegotiating USMCA. commonplace.org/2025/03/25/no-…
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
May 7, 2025
To anyone who wants to know why I've been criticizing the way our profession has elevated Autor et al's "China shock" paper, look no further than Treasury Secretary Bessent's op-ed in the WSJ on Monday: [1/x]
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Joseph Steinberg
@jbsteinberg
Apr 11, 2025
Back in 2013 when I was in grad school, @TimTkehoe, Kim Ruhl, and I wrote a paper on what would happen if US trade deficits were halted by a "sudden stop" like those that plagued emerging economies in the 1970s. The world didn't find that question very interesting at the time, so
Hanno Lustig
@HannoLustig
Apr 10, 2025
Don't blame the plumbing of Treasury markets, blame Congress and the White House. Not the unwinding of the basis trade in US Treasury markets, but the response to a large, macro shock. March 2020 was the first sign of cracks in the global safe asset supplier armor. April 7 and
minneapolisfed.org
What Will Happen When Foreigners Stop Lending to the United States? | Federal Reserve Bank of...
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