Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
Toys or tools
A couple of reports from the technical progress front. Chinese first-tier solar manufacturer Trina has unveiled a tandem silicon-perovskite module tested at 808 watts. https://www.pv-tech.org/industry-updates/trinasolar-develops-worlds-first-800w-tandem-module/ PV cells using various perovskites – the name refrs to a type of crystal structure not a specific mineral – have been researched for 15 years, and have recently attracted serious attention from manufacturers. The key selling point is that perovskite and silicon are sensitive to different wavelengths. The thin perovskite layer on top can be translucent, so you can build a two-layer tandem cell that will convert more of the incident light than either can do separately. In this way you can get round the 32% Shockley-Queisser efficiency limit for a plain silicon cell, marginally beaten recently by researchers at rival Longi.
Eureka, sort of. There is rather less in these announcements than meets the eye. Ttina’s and Longi’s demonstration panels are made from hero cells lovingly assembled in lab clean rooms by teams of engineers. Neither company has announced plans for commercial production of tandem panels, though a few smaller competitors have taken the plunge.
Why not? The performance advantage is now a done deal. To be worthwhile, it has to be large enough to cover the extra manufacturing costs, and nobody is there yet.. According to sceptical Australian pv guru Martin Green, the issue is more likely to be durability. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVB9kEnpI0g Silicon modules come routinely with performance guarantees of 25 or 30 years. Buyers are likely to reject paying more for marginally higher output if it implies a shorter life.
The underlying problem is Darwinian domination in technology by successful incumbents. The bar for rivals is steadily raised. One reading of Elon Musk is that he was mad all along: his creation of Tesla required not just ordinary business talent but a deeply unbalanced vision and hubris.
The other news is much more fun. A blue ribbon British-Swiss startup (Cambridge, EPFL) plans to replace metal conductors like copper and silver with miracle material graphene. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/03/11/replacing-silver-in-pv-manufacturing-with-new-graphene-electrode-technology/
This is a stable molecular form of carbon in a regular hexagonal sheets like chicken wire but one atom thick. The configuration was predicted by Victorian chemists, but not “discovered” till 2004, when two scientists at Manchester University peeled a small sheet off a lump of mined graphite with sticky tape. Geim and Novoselov got a Nobel prize for this in 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene
The background paper by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences includes this delightful example of graphene’s strength, 100 times greater than steel:
“In our 1 m2 [graphene] hammock tied between two trees you could place a weight of approximately 4 kg before it would break. It should thus be possible to make an almost invisible hammock out of graphene that could hold a cat without breaking. The hammock would weigh less than one mg, corresponding to the weight of one of the cat’s whiskers.”
Graphene also has 1.6 times the electrical conductivity of copper, and 10 times the thermal conductivity. You can join up the sheets into ribbons, tubes, and balls. The possibilities are endless. However, 20 years of experiments has so far failed to yield more than a small handful of unimportant applications. Graphene is a nanomaterial, and it’s proven hard to scale up in a controlled way. The invisible cat hammock is just about the largest sheet you can make, and the attachment points are problematic. So far, it’s obstinately stayed in the toy category.
Let’s hope it doesn’t stay that way. If graphene can really replace copper and silver as an electrical conductor, this would end one major constraint that nature imposes on technical civilisation. Copper and silver aren’t rare earths, but they are quite scarce. Graphene is a form of carbon, of which we have far too much. Perhaps intelligence can eliminate other resource scarcities.
Given the advances in science, in knowledge, in thinking, in technology, in expression, in system analysis, in understanding..
..is Donald Trump the most stupid person in all of history?
Who’ll stop the rain?
An excess of real rain and an excess rain (reign) of confusion. CCR nailed it. A simple yet brilliant song that now stands as mythopoeic prophecy. The rains of confusion from neoliberal capitalism, with Trump as its final expression, have brought the drowning rains of the end of the Holocene.
From where I sit, high up in the bleachers, it’s hard to understand how or why the 1%ers allowed this person to be elected. (Also, I’m not sure they did.)
Who would benefit if the dollar weren’t the reserve currency anymore? I hope we aren’t close to that – and, I guess it is selfish of me to say it – or, not? I don’t even know – but I have no idea if we are or aren’t. (Having spent very little time thinking about it, ever.) What a weird time.
Anyhow, common sense seems to indicate to me that Congress, ie, the GOP will stop him before that happens.
But otoh, I thought conservatives would’ve revolted so long ago. I just don’t know what they can be thinking.
And as always, James, you provide what little sunshine there is online!! Thank you.
I guess I’ll go water the plants.
Oh, and also, again – I had nothing to do with it, but I still apologize.
The world didn’t need more turmoil.
Bernie Sanders has got it right.
The American people better do something or it is bye bye democracy, hello authoritarian state. I think Trump’s tariffs and his whole presidency will be such a disaster, the American people will have to do something, be forced to do something. An American led for too long by Trump and his cronies will collapse and disintegrate.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair – Macbeth
You may have seen this now famous piece of gibberish. It’s important not because it makes sense but because it doesn’t. It is the official explanation of Trump’s new tariffs, published by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (OHTR). (If the image does not show up in your browser, consult my source, https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations , or in Krugman’s substack https://paulkrugman.substack.com/ .)
Variables: mi is total imports from country I, xi total exports to country I, ε the elasticity of imports with respect to import prices, evaluated at 4, and φ the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, evaluated at 0.25. ∆τi is the change in the tariff rate required to return the trade deficit to zero.
Krugman tells us we can ignoreε and φ in the formula since their product is 1.
The proposition boils down to the bare assertion that if the US has a trade deficit of $30 bn with say China and total imports are $100 bn, a tariff of 30% on all imports, yielding $30 bn, will make the deficit disappear if nothing else changes, because 70+30 = 100. Mission accomplished!
To put it mildly, there are problems with this. Indeed, Problems. Where to begin?
While individually computing the trade deficit effects of tens of thousands of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in each country is complex, if not impossible, their combined effects can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.
James,
It is correct that it is nonsense, economically speaking. However, the Trump policies are not about economics. They are about power: oligarchic power and kleptocracy. Trump and his team do have a plan. Let me say up front I think it is a very bad plan and it will not work. Indeed it will go a long way to destroying the USA’s remaining power, economic, diplomatic, soft and military, if it goes through completely.
They do have a plan and it’s not about tariffs or economics but about coercive power. The tariffs are an opening strategy to break the current world trade and economic system. Why do they want to break the current system? What is their real plan, such as it is? Calling it a plan is perhaps too generous. It is more a lunatic Hail Mary or desperation play.
This chap seems to analyse it fairly well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ts5wJ6OfzA
Also, I am not a Peter Zeihan fan, at all, but he does get his analysis of Signalgate right. It is a disaster in security terms and shows very clearly that lunatic incompetents and very possibly outright traitors are in charge in key posts. Warning, P.Z. loses his cool and uses a few very strong swear words. Given the nature and import of Signalgate, this is understandable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7bmBoOWEGY
The only logical explanation for the latest activity is Trump is 1. deluded, 2. demented and a 3. Russian asset
1. “Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented”. Trump has claimed that trade imbalances are theft and tariffs restore balance. The claim that trillions of $ will be flowing into the country as a result of tariffs, which just doesn’t make sense – its the consumer that ultimately pays the tariff.
2. Market reaction to tariffs “I think it’s going very well. It was an operation like when a patient gets operated on.” The market, which was doing OK, is now very unwell.
3. The fact that Russia, N Korea and Iran are to be free of tariffs, despite their significant trade imbalances,
Part 2: where does the nonsense tariff formula come from?
It’s now pretty cleat that the answer is AI LLM chatbots.
From IT trade magazine The Verge https://www.theverge.com/news/642620/trump-tariffs-formula-ai-chatgpt-gemini-claude-grok :
“A number of X users have realized that if you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Grok for an “easy” way to solve trade deficits and put the US on “an even playing field”, they’ll give you a version of this “deficit divided by exports” formula with remarkable consistency. The Verge tested this with the phrasing used in those posts, as well as a question based more closely on the government’s language, asking chatbots for “an easy way for the US to calculate tariffs that should be imposed on other countries to balance bilateral trade deficits between the US and each of its trading partners, with the goal of driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.” All four platforms gave us the same fundamental suggestion. [….] Grok and Claude specifically suggested halving the tariff figure to generate what Grok calls a “reasonable” result, much like Trump’s “discount” idea.”
Wow. The next question is: where did the chatbots get the idea from?
Remember how LLMs work. The owners hopper in vast quantities of text scraped up from the Internet and social media, with perfunctory screening against hate speech and so on. As far as I can see, the new LLMs just predict the most likely next sentence drawn from the whole giant garbage heap.
Human intelligence has the feature of including a process to filter and weigh new information according to credibility. For this we use internal tests of coherence and method, and external ones of reputation, immediacy and consistency with information previously judged reliable. In the old days, AI researchers built “expert systems” designed to replicate these filters, but that’s fuddy-duddy grandpa stuff. The new chatbots rely instead on a philosophically insane democracy of speech, treating Euclid and Dame Edna Everage equally.
That does not explain where the magic formula comes from specifically. LLMs do sometimes generate comical hallucinations, but the concordance of the results rom different chatbots rules this out. Somewhere in the Internet is the source, or rather multiple sources I have no idea where.. They must be numerous to crowd out the citations from reputable sources on trade economics. The cranks must be very busy writers.
There is another possibility, and we should take it seriously. Perhaps it isn’t cranks but cyberspooks. The deliberate poisoning of LLM datasets is a recognised danger, and the absence of serious screening for quality leaves the sector wide open to manipulation. Who might do this? China has the resources but no interest in trashing global trade. A James Bond supervillain cackling away in a palatial cavern, with white cat on his or her lap?`Don’t rule it out – Thiel, Musk, Murdoch and Koch are getting close, and Blofeld’s fictional career is no more improbable than the only too real rise of Donald Trump. But the firsr candidate is obviously Russia. Putin has a long record of sabotaging democracies, and there is nothing wrong with Russian mathematics education.
LLM ≠ AI
I suspected as much for some time. J.W. has demonstrated the case. This is the way the world ends… with automated postmodernism.
Trump’s reign of lunacy can’t last. It is unsustainable. However, he can damage the USA and the West so much in the process, before his fall, that we fall too. That is the danger.
“Trump’s reign of lunacy can’t last.” Yes. Is anyone running a Liz Truss lettuce pool for Trump? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss_lettuce