Maxwell School News and Commentary

"Trade policy has very little direct impact on the overall trade deficit in the longer run," said Mary Lovely, professor of economics.

Professor of Economics Mary Lovely says negotiators should seek specific policy changes that will address the reason for these tariffs in the first place—U.S. allegations that China treats American firms unfairly with respect to their technology and intellectual property.

"We’ve never seen anything like this," Mary Lovely told the Associated Press. Lovely recently spoke with multiple news outlets about the trade war between the U.S. and China.  

These new tariffs will “almost surely not” cause a recession, says Mary Lovely, professor of economics. “This industry is important but it’s not that important. Costs will rise. We’ll see some job dislocation…but we will not see a recession,” she adds.

"However the Trump administration tried to achieve the goal of reducing the overall trade deficit quickly would come into conflict with other very important Trump administration objectives," says Mary Lovely, professor of economics.

"One problem is the [flood] maps are based on historical data, they're static maps," says Sarah Pralle, associate professor of political science. "They don't take into account future development scenarios and future weather-related scenarios having to do with climate change."

According to Andrew Wender Cohen, professor of history, the current system of training and acclimating young people to the work world has its antecedents in the Middle Ages. “Families couldn’t necessarily afford to feed all the members of the household, so this was a way of getting rid of children who had gotten too old to live in the house and not work,” he says.

Grant Reeher, professor of political science and director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, says without key people pushing the administration’s agenda, "the government is going to have a tendency to kind of trundle along in the same direction it was beforehand."