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Roundup #86: Unintended consequences
The MAGA decline; The labor share decline; OPTs and American jobs; AI and Indian outsourcing; Drug users; AI and productivity; Botswana; Interracial Marriage; AI writing
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The rabbit in the picture above is a breed known as a Flemish Giant. Like other giant rabbit breeds, they are especially cuddly, gentle, calm, and good with kids and other animals. Unfortunately, they only live to be about 7 or 8, much like very large dogs have short life spans. Still, I highly recommend them as pets.
Anyway, I looked at the items in today’s roundup, and decided that many of them share the common theme of “unintended consequences”. Making sure that people understand the unintended consequences of their policies is a big part of what economists do. That’s often easier said than done, of course.
1. The MAGA wave is breaking and rolling back
Now here’s some good political news. Audiences for MAGA influencers are falling off a cliff:
Here are some more details from the NYT:
Views for [Benny] Johnson’s YouTube channel are down by millions from the heights of 2024. The surge of attention he received on X has slowed to a trickle. His loyalty to Mr. Trump has become unappealing to some Republicans who are frustrated with the rising cost of living and the president’s decision to start a war with Iran…Other high-profile right-wing influencers are contending with similar shifts of fortune…Views are dropping for many of Mr. Trump’s greatest allies…[Nick Fuentes] saw notable gains in 2025 and early 2026 but is now trending down. “It seems that everyone in the space is experiencing a drop-off in views from 2025,” Mr. Fuentes wrote…[M]any right-wing websites have seen larger declines, including The Blaze and The Federalist.
I’ve long predicted that MAGA is a wave that would ultimately break and recede. The movement has built no lasting institutions — no civic groups, no religious revival, no professional associations, no governmental institutions, nothing. It’s a blast of pure populist rage, and those don’t ever last very long.
Trump’s blunders, of course, have hastened the decline. The Iran war has naturally split a voter base who was told that they were voting against Middle Eastern wars. Trump was elected to do something about inflation, but he hasn’t done anything; in fact, his tariffs have made it worse. The only campaign promise Trump has delivered on was reducing immigration, but it turns out that reducing immigration doesn’t actually make a material difference in the lives of Americans.
To all this, add the typical thermostatic effect, wherein people consume more partisan media when their party is out of power. Trump is no longer the rebellion, so Republicans are less angry, so there’s less reason to sit around listening to media grifters whose whole shtick is to feed you constant ragebait.
Anyway, this just strengthens my long-held view that popular unrest has actually peaked in America and is on the decline. If the GOP can use this moment to throw off the yoke of the Trump personality cult and return to something approximating normalcy, I think we’ll have one more round of crazy (the DSA), an