STACEY VANEK SMITH, HOST:
I'm Stacey Vanek Smith.
CARDIFF GARCIA, HOST:
And I'm Cardiff Garcia. And welcome to a very special INDICATOR from Planet Money.
VANEK SMITH: Cardiff, you and I have been covering numbers in the news for literally weeks now. And we've had some big stories - sexual harassment, jobs and taxes. But for today's show, we wanted to do something a little more personal. Both of us looked back over 2017, and we picked one INDICATOR - not necessarily the biggest or the most important but one that stood out to us. We picked our INDICATORS of the year. So first up, Cardiff Garcia...
GARCIA: Yes.
VANEK SMITH: What is your number of the year?
GARCIA: My number of the year is 4.2 percent. That's how much global trade grew this year - at least according to the best estimates we have so far from the IMF.
VANEK SMITH: So global trade, like the amount of stuff countries are trading with each other?
GARCIA: Yeah.
VANEK SMITH: Is that a lot?
GARCIA: That's a lot. It's a big acceleration on last year's number, which was only 2.4 percent. And it's happening in a year in which it seems like all we've heard is that countries are turning inward.
VANEK SMITH: Right, there's like the wall and Brexit. And we pulled out of the TPP and all those things.
GARCIA: And what we've seen is that global trade has not just stayed, you know, at the same pace it has in the last few years. It has actually sped up quite a bit.
VANEK SMITH: So why is that? Why is there this disconnect between talk and walk?
GARCIA: (Laughter) Well, I think you just answered your own question - right? - is that so far it's just been talk. And there's been very little action, OK? So look at the case of the U.S., OK? We've heard that President Trump has threatened to leave NAFTA if it can't be renegotiated according to more favorable terms. But NAFTA is still there. Those negotiations continue. We've heard, for instance, that we might end up imposing tariffs on things like steel or solar energy products. And those tariffs have not yet been implemented. So far at least, in the U.S.'s case, there's been a lot of talk - a lot of heated rhetoric - but thus far not actually that much tangible stuff has been done - not that many concrete steps have been taken.
VANEK SMITH: OK. So that explains maybe why it hasn't slowed down, but it has been speeding up.
GARCIA: That's right.
VANEK SMITH: So what's going on there?
GARCIA: So there's a simple answer, and then there's a more nuanced answer. And both are right.
VANEK SMITH: Oh, OK, excellent.
GARCIA: So the simple answer is just that the global economy has recovered. And so there's just more buying and selling of stuff from each other. OK, that's the simple answer, all right?
VANEK SMITH: OK.
GARCIA: The more nuanced answer has to do with the specific way that globalization has developed in the last couple of decades. This is really fascinating. It used to be that a product would be made entirely in one country. Like, let's say China or Mexico. Then it would get sent to the United States where an American consumer would buy it. But it doesn't work that way anymore. Today, one product - a single product is often put together or assembled from parts manufactured in a whole bunch of different countries. That's called a global value chain, where each country adds its parts or its ideas for how to put that product together. And most trade works that way now.
This makes it really hard to stop globalization. So for instance, if the president of the United States decides to make it harder for American companies to do business with - let's say Mexican factories - those companies don't just suddenly bring production back to the United States. They just shift that one part of the global value chain from Mexico to, say, Vietnam or some other country. And in that sense, attempts at protectionism are just a lot less likely to work now.
VANEK SMITH: Thank you, Cardiff.
GARCIA: My pleasure, that was fun. It also was quite a mouthful, so now I'm looking forward to hearing your INDICATOR the year.
VANEK SMITH: Well, my INDICATOR of the year is 2,401. And that number, Cardiff, takes us from sun god to TMI.
GARCIA: Too much information?
VANEK SMITH: Too much information - I will explain everything in a minute.
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VANEK SMITH: So my number of the year is 2,401. And that is the number of times, as of us walking into this studio, Cardiff, that Trump has tweeted since he became president about a year ago. And obviously, there has been a lot of talk about Trump's tweets. But I think that this number gives us a really extraordinary window into the last almost 100 years of technological change and also the evolution of the relationship between leaders and their people.
GARCIA: You're getting all of this from Trump's tweets.
VANEK SMITH: I am. I am. So hear me out. For most of human history, leaders were hidden from their people in a lot of ways. In fact, a lot of times, they were given divine qualities. They were sort of extra human. Leaders were not supposed to be a mess like the rest of us. They were supposed to be special, so a country was more stable. It wasn't just subject to the whims of some random person.
GARCIA: Are you harkening back to the days when like people were gods?
VANEK SMITH: Yes.
GARCIA: Right?
VANEK SMITH: Yes. In fact, the emperor of Japan was supposedly descended from the sun god traditionally. And the idea of seeing him or hearing his voice was just - it was unthinkable for a lot of people. That changed in August of 1945. Emperor Hirohito got on the radio for the first time, and the people of Japan actually heard his voice.
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HIROHITO: (Speaking Japanese)
VANEK SMITH: He was surrendering. It was his country's surrender at the end of World War II. And around the same time, of course, something very similar was happening here in the U.S.
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FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT: My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.
VANEK SMITH: This is President Franklin Roosevelt. And he is delivering one of his famous fireside chats over the radio. And this doesn't seem that surprising to us now. But John McWhorter, who is a professor of linguistics at Columbia and host of the podcast "Lexicon Valley," says the idea of the president talking to Americans directly in kind of a casual, intimate way was really unprecedented.
JOHN MCWHORTER: At the time, to hear the president's voice, using relatively ordinary language, in your living room was technologically such a marvel that that was seen as highly informal - as chatty.
VANEK SMITH: And then a generation later, television happened. So by the time John F. Kennedy ran for president, television was in 90 percent of American homes, which meant our leaders were now in our living rooms. Their faces were in our living rooms. And JFK was very appealing. He was good in that setting. You know, TV made our relationship with our leaders even more intimate.
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UNIDENTIFIED INTERVIEWER: Would it be rude of me if I called you John?
JOHN F KENNEDY: That'd be fine.
VANEK SMITH: Would it be rude of me if I called you John? That'd be fine. I mean, this is a man who's running for president. And for the whole interview, he just calls him John.
MCWHORTER: What we value is he sounds like somebody I could have a beer with. The idea now being that if you can't imagine having the beer with them, then you're not going to vote for them.
VANEK SMITH: So 60 years later, technology, of course, has changed again. The Internet - you might have heard of it, Cardiff - has happened and, of course, social media. So I printed out the last 24 hours of tweets and showed it to John McWhorter.
MCWHORTER: I'm looking now at this eccentric capitalization. Yeah, the truth is...
VANEK SMITH: He does love an all caps like nobody.
MCWHORTER: (Laughter) He is a very enthusiastic gentleman.
VANEK SMITH: Whatever you think about Trump's Twitter feed, he is talking to us in this really unfiltered way - directly. And we have a window into Trump's life that is totally unprecedented. I mean, we are in bed with him at 5 o'clock in the morning, fuming over some New York Times article, or trying to get support for the tax bill after dinner. We have a direct line to our president 24/7. And we can talk back to him - also in a really unfiltered way. I mean, people tweet really harsh stuff to the president. They make fun of his hair. They insult him.
MCWHORTER: So we're jawboning with the leader. And that can seem kind of democratic.
VANEK SMITH: Yeah.
MCWHORTER: And the truth is that with a leader a certain inaccessibility is often considered necessary because this is somebody who, for example, might have to go against the wishes of the republic. And that means that there has to be a certain amount of detachment. You can't be down in the bullpen with the people who you're ruling all the time.
VANEK SMITH: John says Trump's Twitter feed is probably a little too real. And in fact, most people seem to agree with this. There have been a lot of surveys about Trump's tweets. And the majority of Americans, even Trump supporters, say that they kind of wish that he would maybe stop tweeting or at least tweet less. So maybe the sweet spot for a leader is somewhere between sun god and @realdonaldtrump.
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GARCIA: Do you want to send us show ideas? Send us an email to indicator@npr.org. This podcast is produced by Darius Rafieyan and edited by Jacob Goldstein.
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