For general American decline there is a recent article by Noah Smith on capital flight away from America. Its quantitative and its a Trump second term phenomenon. There is also the number of meetings between Trump and different traditionally independent agencies like the FBI and the Department of Justice. I believe those numbers have exploded in this term. The number of probes into elected and appointed officials have definitely also exploded this term. There have also been a large number of acquittals at the grand jury level because the charges are so clearly vindictive and false.
I’ve always thought about using LLMs to analyze and compare speeches. You could for example look at the ratio of the most information dense summary to the length of the speech. Also, in the wake of tragedies Presidents have been historically consistent in calling for unity. Most people left or right would agree that’s a good historical precedent that’s still common practice. It’s a practice that Trump has clearly broken. A LLM could simply count the number of times he calls the other side evil and compare that with past responses to tragedies. In his speeches Trump also makes it very clear that he rewards loyalty to Trump and not to abstract ideals like the rule of law. Those are Trump specific norm-erosions.
Capital flight is a great indicator, thank you for the suggestion.
I’m dubious on Smith article though. He claims to be talking about foreign capital investment, then uses a bunch of proxies that aren’t net investment. If you graph actual foreign investment, you see a decline, but it looks like a continuation of a trend from the Biden years, or arguably even Obama. The only time investment went net negative was in 2014, which stems from Vodafone selling Verizon back to itself.
If anyone is feeling ambitious I’d love to see this graph normed for inflation or GDP.
For general American decline there is a recent article by Noah Smith on capital flight away from America. Its quantitative and its a Trump second term phenomenon. There is also the number of meetings between Trump and different traditionally independent agencies like the FBI and the Department of Justice. I believe those numbers have exploded in this term. The number of probes into elected and appointed officials have definitely also exploded this term. There have also been a large number of acquittals at the grand jury level because the charges are so clearly vindictive and false.
I’ve always thought about using LLMs to analyze and compare speeches. You could for example look at the ratio of the most information dense summary to the length of the speech. Also, in the wake of tragedies Presidents have been historically consistent in calling for unity. Most people left or right would agree that’s a good historical precedent that’s still common practice. It’s a practice that Trump has clearly broken. A LLM could simply count the number of times he calls the other side evil and compare that with past responses to tragedies. In his speeches Trump also makes it very clear that he rewards loyalty to Trump and not to abstract ideals like the rule of law. Those are Trump specific norm-erosions.
Capital flight is a great indicator, thank you for the suggestion.
I’m dubious on Smith article though. He claims to be talking about foreign capital investment, then uses a bunch of proxies that aren’t net investment. If you graph actual foreign investment, you see a decline, but it looks like a continuation of a trend from the Biden years, or arguably even Obama. The only time investment went net negative was in 2014, which stems from Vodafone selling Verizon back to itself.
If anyone is feeling ambitious I’d love to see this graph normed for inflation or GDP.
I got a little ambitious and normed the data by value of dollar, relative to 2006Q1. 2025 looks even less exceptional than it did in nominal terms