The emails started hitting Anson Soderbery’s inbox at about 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday night. An economist at Purdue University, friends and acquaintances were reaching out to let him know that the Trump administration had just cited one of his papers as grounds for the steep tariff rates it would impose on America’s trade partners, which the president had unveiled on giant poster boards during a Rose Garden speech hours earlier.
A few of the notes jokingly congratulated him. But how did he really feel? “Confused,” Soderbery told Yahoo Finance. After all, he said, his study had been written to discourage exactly the kinds of policies Trump was rolling out. Certainly, nobody from the administration had consulted with him.
“I don’t want it to turn into infamy,” Soderbery added, laughing.
Soderbery isn’t the only economist with qualms about how their work was used as part of the White House tariff push. And while the complaints of a few academics might not seem significant compared to, say, the stock market’s panicked stampede this week, they do raise questions about the rigor that went into planning America’s most sweeping import taxes in over a century.
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President Donald Trump speaks during an event to announce new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House, Wednesday, April 2, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
The White House has described its new tariffs as “reciprocal,” meaning they are supposed to match the trade barriers other nations erect against American companies. But in computing them, the administration did not actually match other governments tariff-for-tariff. Instead, it relied on some relatively simple math: It divided each country’s trade surplus in goods with the US by how much we imported from them, then cut that result in half as a “kind” gesture. (It also put in place a minimum 10% rate).
Take Vietnam. It sent $136.6 billion worth of goods to the US in 2024, running a $125.5 billion surplus, so it was hit with a 46% tariff — about half of a full “reciprocal” duty of 90%.
The administration did not explain how it arrived at its method until late Wednesday evening, hours after online sleuths had already begun cracking the code. By then, the reviews were already scathing, with many suggesting the president’s advisers had relied on a crude and arbitrary rule of thumb that had little to do with whether other countries were really putting in place hurdles to American products.
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“What extraordinary nonsense this is,” the economics journalist James Surowiecki tweeted.
Not so, Trump officials claimed. In a blog post complete with a bibliography and footnotes, the US Trade Representative said it had calculated “reciprocal” tariffs at rates that would eliminate the US trade deficit with each country, using a formula that was in fact more sophisticated than met the eye and took into account factors like how much imports would fall as duties rose and how much prices would increase for consumers. It just so happened that some of the key variables canceled each other out, leaving behind the simple long-division exercise that had been widely mocked.
Even with the additional explanation, some economists dismissed the exercise as blatantly amateurish. (Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the conservative American Action Forum called it “malpractice”). Meanwhile, some of the professors who found their own studies cited went public to express their bafflement.
Alberto Cavallo, an economist at Harvard Business School who co-authored one paper included in the administration’s bibliography, tweeted that if Trump officials had applied his research correctly, the tariffs would have “come out about four times smaller.”
Another trio who found themselves unhappily footnoted — the University of Michigan’s Andrei Levchenko and the University of Texas at Austin’s Christoph Boehm and Nitya Pandalai-Nayar — issued a statement to reporters explaining at length why their findings “should not be directly applied in this tariff calculation.”
Meanwhile, McMaster University’s Pau Pujolas, who co-authored a paper on how the US could win a trade war with China, told the Financial Times that, in contrast with the administration’s effort, his work had been “a heavily computational exercise.”
“We use supercomputers to find the optimal tariffs,” he wrote. “The Trump administration seems to have taken a bit of a shortcut there.”
Soderbery told Yahoo Finance that his paper seemed like an especially odd inclusion. The administration appears to have cited it in order to justify the so-called import “elasticity” it used in its calculations — basically, how much imports from a country will go down if tariffs go up. But the point of his findings, he said, is that each industry within a country reacts differently to tariffs.
That means slapping a single, across-the-board tax on a trade partner’s goods, which Trump is doing, won’t necessarily eliminate its surplus with the US.
“Using that paper to motivate a uniform, universal tariff, I was a bit puzzled,” he said.
Not all of the economists cited by the Trump team were as harsh. Ina Simonovska of UC Davis said some of the assumptions underlying the administration’s math, including the way it used her own work on how tariffs influence imports, were reasonable. But she echoed a critique of the Trump team’s approach that many trade economists have shared this week.
That argument, in short, goes something like this: A tariff formula similar to the one the administration used might work if they were trying to calculate how to eliminate the trade deficit with just one other country. But using it to calculate tariffs on the whole world doesn’t make sense, since raising taxes on goods from one country will have knock-on effects that affect trade with others. Taking those variables into account would require a much more complicated model.
“If we want to reduce the trade deficit with Germany only, assuming that nothing else will change in the economy, the formula is perfectly fine,” Simonovska said. “But if we think that our exports will change to Germany or to any other country, we need to account for that.”
Most mainstream economists have argued that, no matter how the White House calculated its tariffs, the bigger problem is that it appears to be trying to eliminate bilateral trade deficits with each and every country in the world. Harvard’s Jason Furman, a prominent Democratic economist, called it a “crazy goal” since even if the US didn’t have a global trade deficit, you’d expect it to have ones with some trade partners and surpluses with others.
“The tariff calculation done by the US Trade Representative is a somewhat wrong answer to the completely wrong question,” he said.
Still, Soderbery told Yahoo Finance he wished the administration were taking a slightly more scientific approach to its trade war.
“There’s not a lot of trained economists I know of, including myself, who would argue that trade imbalances are an important metric for policymaking. Yet the people who are setting policy have decided it’s a really important metric,” he said. “If we’re going to run with that as our goal, at minimum, we should be able to have a conversation about how to do it efficiently, and with some thought and precision.”
Jordan Weissmann is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance.
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