It's Greek to me

All the chat bots say this is how you balance it...
They absolutely asked chatbots, and I'd bet money at some stage someone said "make it look more complicated" and that was then made as a prompt to the AI...
Who made a simple mathmatic equation look complicated by adding shit that cancels out.
The people who actually used the numbers had no idea where they came from, or what it meant.
So they're almost certainly learning today that it both was made by a chatbot, and that it's just that simple.
Like, the people running this clown show literally and figuratively don't know what they're doing. They think real experts are giving them advise on this shit and it's some boomer using chatgpt
- Probably the Formula came from one of those doge Kids, so more likely a Zoomer instead of a boomer.
  And i think, they knew full Well, that their numbers were shit and based Off on nothing substantial at all. They Just wanted to hide IT behind some math Formular in Order to Trick the populace. Because its easier to Argument for "an expert approach" instead of "we just made Up some Numbers"
  
  trump 100% didn't know an AI came up with it, or that the formula was this basic.
  If he did then he would have typed it in himself.
  To be in Trump's orbit you need to make him think you're indispensable, this is going to make him think lots of people are useless, and if you're useless trump doesn't give a shit about you.
- To be fair to the chatbot...what else was the chatbot supposed to do? Not the ai fault he was speaking to a complete imbecile with extremely stupid prompts....
  
  First, do what experts were saying and say this is stupid. But since they seemed primed for bullshit, the most obvious would be to take the explicit tariffs on US products, use any of a number of ways to calculate the impact of non-tariff barriers that actually make sense, and sum both of them. And then set the formula on fire because tariff wars are stupid.
  
  what else was the chatbot supposed to do?
  Huh?
  The only way to make any mathematical calculation appear more complicated is by adding things that cancel out...
  There's zero other way to accomplish that.
  
  I guess the First Thing gone wrong, was to use an AI in the first place. This is why there still needs to be Subject Matter Experts, on fields and applications, otherwise, you only get stupid Things and Users incorrectly applying existing tech.

So you’re saying they named a recession after me? I can do better! I’ll give them the Donpression! It’ll be the greatest Donpression there ever was. It’ll be in the history books, folks. No Donpression will ever be greater!
- You do realize that's all of what he's after, right? He wants to be remembered in such a way that no American will ever be able to forget him. He doesn't care why he's remembered, only that he is. We don't remember the name of the pilot of the Enola Gay, but we remember the plane, Fat Man, Little Boy, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Truman. Recognition and memory, for him, is more important than context.
  
  So the Fat Boy depression, got it. Can he go now?
  
  Wasn’t it Tibbets?
- Let's not refer to trump instead to the fact Thomas Matthew Crooks missed.
  It's the Great Crooks Depression!

The meme is referencing the official US Trade Representative's explanation¹ of the tariffs, where yes, the math really is as stupid as it seems, but it gets worse.
The research that Trump's team used to determine that "calculation" flat out states that when the US tries to tariff other countries:
American importers pay for the US tariff AND
American exporters pay for the foreign retaliatory tariffs.
The source clearly demonstrates that American tariffs are paid directly by Americans in both directions, meaning out of everyone on Earth the tariffs screw the US the most. Trump's administration legitimized the source by citing that research for its calculations on the tariff rates.
The explanation freely admits that the stupid parameters were chosen more or less arbitrarily, and they cited the paper (Cavallo et al 2021)² but conveniently didn't list it in their "References" section.
Our analyses indicate that the price incidence of US import tariffs falls largely on the United States... Our results suggest that retailers are absorbing a significant share of the increase in the cost of affected imports by earning lower profit margins on those goods... [These analyses reveal] that the recent tariffs applied by foreign governments on US exports have affected total foreign import prices far less than was the case for the recent US tariffs
₁ _{https://web.archive.org/web/20250403013314/https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations}
₂ _{https://www.nber.org/papers/w26396}
- Didn’t they also mark EU VAT as a tariff?
- Both links just return errors for me.
  Edit: fixed. For some reason there were additional characters in the links on my end, possibly some formatting issue.
  
  Seems like a formatting thing, thanks. I'll stick to just inline hyperlinks instead of footnotes I think
  
  They work for me.

Quality use of that meme, all I can say.

They forgot to multiply the whole thing by -e^(i*pi)

What offends me most about this is using the convolution operator * for multiplication in a typeset equation
- Any symbol can be chosen for any variable including operations. It depends entirely on context.
  I doubt economists use the convolution operator in this context or probably ever.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk#Usage
  
  Huh I didn't realize that economics have their own version of math /s
- I mean anybody can understand what it's trying to say. Almost anybody who actually does math though would just have no operators between those variables.
- It's been a long time, but isn't this the default for the Graphical Formula Editor in Microsoft Word? (As in you could just use the * operator and word would print it as-is, not replace it with the multiplication sign)
  
  I don't hate myself enough to use microsoft software, so idk

Can someone please provide the context what epsilon and phi suppose to represent and why they are 4 and 1/4?
- Direct from USTR.gov:
  To calculate reciprocal tariffs, import and export data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2024. Parameter values for ε and φ were selected. The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4.
  Recent evidence suggests the elasticity is near 2 in the long run (Boehm et al., 2023), but estimates of the elasticity vary. To be conservative, studies that find higher elasticities near 3-4 (e.g., Broda and Weinstein 2006; Simonovska and Waugh 2014; Soderbery 2018) were drawn on. The elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ, is 0.25. The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).
  
  Ah but you see, 0.25 is only the inverse of 4 in base 10 ... Checkmate atheists!
  
  Thanks
- The symbols represent smarts, and they are 4 and 1/4 because that mean multiply by 1.
  It's a made up formula to make trumpsters look smarter than they are.
  
  A comment above provides context for what those symbols actually stand for economically. It's not just made up (to the extent that economics is not made up).

Pretty sure all of economics is just using greek/roman letters to make the most basic and irrelevant equations seem smart.
- actually this is true… my ex went to college for econ and i helped her study often…
  i was a computer science major with a LOT of excessive math (although i do enjoy it).
  The entire field of economics is a fraud…
  the axis’s on their graphs are backwards, they have their own bullshit calculus for dummies, it’s all based on an idealized fake human called “homo economicus” that is perfectly and predictably motivated by money, and nothing else at all… it’s all such trash….
  …
  this equation is extra fraudulent though…
  
  I studied economics and well yeah it's all true
  
  I have a graduate diploma in economics and concur it's mostly bullshit. The lecturers essentially agreed. Didn't bother to continue to masters as I don't think there's anything more to learn from the field once you've confirmed that the world economy is based on lies and dice rolls.
  
  Economics is one of the few sciences where if a model prediction is consistently incorrect, we don't discard the model but make a new sub-discipline out of finding excuses for it.
- https://m.xkcd.com/2566/
- I am so glad to see my internal monologue confirmed here on this anonymous forum.

Then having done all the bullshit maths, they found out that Australia was a negative number because we buy more than we sell with the USA. But they slapped a 10% tariff on anyway because we don’t like their beef products because of a little issue of biosecurity.

I'm surprised that actually had someone with enough math skills to accomplish that.
- Their pal gippidy

No way... Is this real? LOL

There is so much in this that is going way, way, WAY over my head, to an extend that I can barely phrase what it is I don't understand. I guess that's why I don't get to decide these things.
- White House publishes a table of steep percentage fees charged on imports from various countries that make little sense, claiming it's based on a rigorous and complex system of economic calculations
  Somebody notices the percentages for all these countries are just the trade deficit divided by imports, which is a formula as simple as it is arbitrary
  White House lackey says "Nuh uh, we have a totally complex formula for this" and publishes an imposing equation full of Greek symbols and letters
  Turns out the Greek symbols refer to arbitrary values set by the White House that cancel each other out, and the letters just represent... the trade deficit divided by imports.
  tl;dr: They used a dead-simple, arbitrary formula for their economy-wrecking trade war and tried using fancy-looking math to cover it up
- It's not just math, but economic theory. There's a lot of historical context here, going back to mercantalism in the 1600s, where countries were obsessed with trying to maximize exports. You may remember this from history class, and how they figured out it was, ultimately, not the best idea.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
  Anyway, ignore the greek letters. The Trump administration is using trade deficit (how much other countries buy from us vs. how much we buy from them) as the number for how how much to tax those imports, with the idea being to this tax will "punish" and incentivize countries to not have such a big trade deficit with the US. Per mercantalism, buying more than we sell from someone is a "loss," as we are losing money to them. And US manufacturers will take up the slack.
  ...In practice, that's not how it works, as Europe learned in the 1600s/1700s and the US learned in the great depression, among many other times. There are a lot of fallacies, including:
  "the popular folly of confusing wealth with money," aka assuming the trade deficit is unprofitable "loss."
  Overestimating the US's importance. It's a big world with a lot of easy shipping, and countries have many other places to ship stuff if the US gives them a big enough middle finger.
  Ramping up manufacturing locally is hard, depending on the industry. Could take years and billions, and in some cases is not practical at all. That's why we buy stuff from other countries, where it's easier to make. It's like the core tenant of free trade.
  Other factors are not static. Slap a gigantic tarrif on something, and the supply/demand/pricing is not going to stay the same.
  It's also ignoring how being the world's #1 consumer cemented the US's power across the world, and arguable stabilized a lot of geopolitics (with some unsavory complications, though). This was largely the idea behind the post-WWII world order.
- I don’t understand
  Congratulations, you are now qualified to be one of Trump's Cabinet picks
- What is it that you don't understand? You're probably just put off by the "scary" Greek letters, if you force yourself to look at it, you'll find it's rather simple.
  (ε) and (φ) are constants, and since their values are 4 and 0,25, when multiplied together they give 1. Multiply m_i by 1 and you simply get m_i
  
  The Greek letters are not the issue. I can even understand the maths itself, despite sucking at it all my life (which is clear evidence that it's dumb). It's the entire affair, not the formulas.