On tariffs, migrants, machines and the meaning of work

The pearl-clutching and hand-wringing over Trump’s tariff chaos is a thing to behold. The shock, particularly among Europeans, is almost as funny as it is silly: after all, Trump told us he was going to bring in tariffs during his election campaign. He led in the polls, duly won the election and is now following through on his campaign promises. It says much about how the transatlantic elites view political promises themselves, that they appear genuinely surprised to see Trump doing exactly what he promised his voters he would do.

What is even more hilarious are the post hoc condemnations of this transparent effort to redefine the architecture of 20th Century global trade. Suddenly, long-time critics of globalisation are rushing to its defence, using arguments so textbook that they could have been cut and pasted from a 1980s economics textbook: Prices will go up, growth will stall, the uncertainty will kill business, third worlders will suffer, retaliatory tariffs will hit America hard…

Economics 101: trade is good for everyone, dummy

To get behind this debate, it’s useful to go back to the basics of economics. Every student will remember the name David Ricardo, and the conclusions of his basic trade model that show that when two nations trade together, they both get better off. The intuition behind the Ricardian model is simple: the United States specialises in, say, computer engineering and trades the IT to Vietnam, which specialises in tailoring shirts. Because the US has a comparative advantage in computers and the Vietnamese a comparative advantage in making shirts, everyone is strictly better off from the trade.

David Ricardo was a parliamentarian during the heyday of the British industrial revolution.

Let them eat cake from the Googleplex free buffet”

The problem is what happens to the American shirt makers who are put out of work. In Ricardo’s defence, this was less of a problem in the year 1800, because at the time, Britain’s industries were booming and the factories of Manchester, Sheffield and Stoke had a near insatiable demand for unskilled labour. Even so, free trade worked to depress their wages too, but this effect was invisible in the general rising tide of industrialisation. It would take decades before the horrific inequality and exploitation of unfettered capitalism gave rise to a countermovement, in the person of a handsomely bearded German-Jew named Karl.

In 21st Century America, the story is not quite the same. Voters from flyover states see with their own eyes the factories close down and the poverty set in. Barack Obama’s solution for the out-of-work shirt makers was that they must learn to code. I encourage you to watch the video clip, because the political moment proved to be weighty. In 2013 it took Obama and his out-of-touch DC advisors completely by surprise that this message would backfire so badly. They never imagined that it would help elect Donald Trump a few years later.

Looking at it through the lens of 2025, ‘Learn to Code’ seems absurd. A 50 year old forklift driver from small town North Carolina will not be able to start programming apps in California, when the crates of shirts he loads into trucks are outsourced to Vietnam. For despite what Obama claimed, ‘nearly anyone’ can not learn to code.

This is the essential point from the tariffs debate: because inequality is as high as it is, it is not only possible that market contraction and negative GDP growth be consistent with an improvement in the quality of life of the median American, it is almost axiomatic that this will be true. Because the real issue at stake is that as America shifts production into ever higher-valued added output, the labour share of income has been continuously shrinking. Don’t take my word for it, just look at the chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics below.

The steady erosion in how much of the country’s income went to labour, as opposed to capital, began to markedly accelerate in the 2000s as the bipartisan trade liberalisation agenda was rolled out and China emerged as a supplier-superpower to replace US manufacturing. Yes, cheap imports kept prices low. Yes, rock-bottom interest rates meant impoverished workers could borrow cheaply. But with widening income inequality, they were always getting worse off, even as the country got richer in exactly the way Ricardo would have predicted.

Trump’s tariffs are his promise to the ‘Left-Behinds’ to turn this process on its head. And let’s be clear: there is every reason in economics to believe that tariffs – however haphazardly imposed – will succeed in increasing the labour share of income by reshoring labour intensive manufacturing. Some cost will be born by the consumer, but because prices are elastic on many consumer goods with global supply chains, most of the cost will be born out of the rents that accrue to capital. Money will flow inland from Connecticut to Ohio; and from California to Wyoming.

The three-headed hydra choking the American working class

Of course, trade is not the only factor driving a deterioration in labour’s share of income. It’s a hydra with two other heads: mass-migration and technology. Mass-migration is, in fact, perfectly analogous to production outsourcing through trade liberalisation, except that instead of having your blue collar job go to a third worlder overseas, the third worlder crosses the sea to take your blue collar job. He might take your house too.

The old Firestone Textile plant in Gastonia, North Carolina closed in the 1990s. Gastonia voted 61.4% for Trump.

I know, I know. Lot’s of reputable economists will vehemently argue against this, claiming that migrant labour is wage-augmenting etc. But it’s notable that none of those economists actually works in a factory. They have never been told that if they don’t want to work late shifts on a Saturday for no extra pay, there are twenty Mexicans who will be happy to take their place. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, have been told this, which is why they gave their Orange Man a clear mandate to do something about it.

Then there’s technology. Here the economists are a little more attentive to the risks of labour displacement, perhaps because AI software does a better job at forecasting GDP than robots do at stitching together Ralph Lauren shirts. The principle is the same as with trade: every labour-saving innovation shifts more income to capital and away from labour.

And while Secretaries Besset and Noem have shown how they can take care of trade and migration pretty well, it’s not clear to me what, if anything, Trump is prepared to do about the dangers tech poses to the American working class. The President of Mars appears to have a veto over the President of the United States of America, and His Autistic-ness is all for loosening – not tightening – the noose on the Big Tech monopolies that are currently stealing our jobs and our souls.

Cuz man these god damn food stamps don’t buy … self respect

What of the opposition?

Back when Democrats still pretended to care about this problem, their solution was generally some form of fiscal transfer: essentially to tax some of the output gains from capital and give it to labour as welfare benefits. This would compensate them for their share loss in the open borders, trade liberalised, technology-pumped economy. Politically, it’s not hard to see the appeal – you create a system where voters are dependent on hand-outs from government to compensate them for their loss of income created by government policies.

But there are many problems. First, capitalists are insanely good at sneaking past that fourth space on the Monopoly board. This means that in practice, the welfare transfers will have a hard time keeping up with the loss in income share. More importantly, people do not just work in order to have food on the table. They work in order to be part of society, to have a feeling of accomplishment and achievement, something fiscal transfers can never provide. People don’t want hand-outs, they want economic sovereignty.

And to get it, they are prepared to elect an orange-faced egomaniac; they are prepared to see their country’s place in the world economic order decline; they are prepared to endure higher prices; all in order to restore the pride of knowing they are a meaningful part of the economy. They might buy fewer things, but the things they buy will be made by someone whose values they share.

Before you judge them as being short-sighted, do a few shifts in an American factory. If you can find one that is still open, that is.

Lent 2025 – my letter to you

Dear Daniel,

Hello my son! Just wanted to reach out to you in this first week of Lent and send to you my best Lenten wishes.

In our faith, Jesus enters the desert on Ash Wednesday and walks for 40 days. This period is of course symbolic of sacrifice and – in a sense – purification in the face of temptation / trial.

The gospel according to Luke tells us that when J.C. enters the desert, the devil tempts him with three trials. In the first, the devil asks him to turn a stone into bread (then break his fast). J.C.’s iconic answer is: “Man shall not live on bread alone.”

The second trial has the devil taking J.C. to a high place, where the devil offers Him all the lands of the earth, if only He would bow down to the devil. Our hero J.C. shoots back: “Worship your Lord the God and serve only him.”

The final trial has the Bad-Guy-in-Chief telling J.C. to throw himself off a tower and command his legion of angels to catch him before he falls. J.C.’s response? “I answer only to my Dad’s commands. Not yours, pal.”

I was listening to this on Sunday at Mass, and it occurred to me that the three trials in Luke’s account of Lent correspond to three of the seven deadly sins:

The first is gluttony.

The second is greed.

And the third is pride.

And it so perfectly matches the core message of Christianity that the true path out of sin is faith alone in God. So I said a prayer that God forgive me for my own sins. And a little prayer for all the people I love.

Have a wonderful Lent and a delicious and fun Easter.

Love,

Dad

The Dragon’s Many Claws

My latest novel The Dragon’s Many Claws is now out, available on Amazon.

In some ways, I think this is my best book yet. The pacing, as an action thriller, is really good. I know this from the test readers and editors who have been through the text, but more to the point, I know it because I felt it when I was writing it.

The other thing I love about this book is that it is a war story that will appeal to people who don’t usually read war story – the same way The Hydra was a courtroom drama for people who never read courtroom dramas.

Anyway, this is where to go to buy a copy (I guarantee you won’t regret it if you do): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DXD56T4G

The Lost Scholar

What happened to his days
Of wasted cafe stays
Coffees nursed and nursed again
‘Til nothing more remained
But stains of foam and a few stray grains?

What happened to his pads of note,
Filled with self-important poems?
Thoughts to which he gave a home.
By hand he wrote those dog-eared tomes,
The most precious things he owned.

What happened to that quick and hungry kid
Who slid through life amid
A thousand storms and strife and grit,
In hopes he’d win his long-shot bid
To rid himself of hunger, the need for speed and grit?

Now with coffee cup and belly full
With notepad empty, feelings dull
He’s left to mull
What happens when a vibrant mind –
Through wine and time –
Becomes a sunken skull.

The Dragon’s Many Claws

I’m very excited to announce that my new thriller, The Dragon’s Many Claws, will be released on Amazon in paperback, ebook and audiobook on 1 February! Here’s the book cover and blurb as a teaser. Watch this space for more news!

US Army officer Stephen Chen has uncovered a plot by China to carry out a sneak attack on the United States. He’s got all the receipts and knows how to stop them before they even start. The only problem is, no one believes him.

The fight to bring the plot to light may cost Chen his relationship, his career and even his liberty. But if he is right, the fight to save America might cost the country even more.

My review of Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana”

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Graham Greene is a desperately good writer. He can’t help but write well, even on an off day. Even when attempting a literary loop de loop that goes slightly wrong. And because he has that magic gift to turn even his stumbles into artistry, there is extra deliciousness in the very imperfections we observe.

So it is with Our Man in Havana. Having read other of Greene’s work, you start this one with a comfortable expectation that he will deliver scene and structure. He does not disappoint. Right away, we are plunged into pre-Castro Cuba, and become acquainted with a typical Greeneian underdog protagonist – an impoverished English vacuum cleaner salesman with a limp named Wormold, whose wife, we learn, has already left him for another man.

But as the plot accelerates, we realise this is not The Power and the Glory. Greene is giving us a rather comic tour of the brothels, bars and casinos. As Wormold becomes embroiled in a world of medium-stakes espionage, the novel veers close to farce.

It is here that he misses a step on the balance beam. Without revealing too much, a few of the plot elements fail to land on the fine line between comedy and hyperrealism that he so carefully treads for much of the story. There is also a missed opportunity late in the story to create a dramatic counterpoint around the death of one of the characters.

But for everything else this book achieves – laugh-out-loud comedy, incredible sense of place and masterfully crafted characters – Greene shows in Havana that he is, yet again, one of the 20th Century’s finest.



View all my reviews

My review of Charles Sprawson’s ‘Haunts of the Black Masseur’

Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero by Charles Sprawson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction. I find much of it to be clunky, badly organised and badly written. It favours substance over form, as if there were ever a trade-off between the two! Non-fiction tends to pay little attention to the beauty and flow of words and sentences or the cadence of ideas. Worst of all, it lacks kindness to the reader. As in, ‘if you want to know what happens, mate, you will be forced to suffer through my clunky prose’.
At first glance, Sprawson’s watery account of the literature and history of swimming and all things wet appears to be no exception. By page 100, you realise you have been thrown in at the deep end of a self-indulgent pool of random facts, written by a man whose sole purpose in authorship is to free his head of as much aquatic trivia as he can, so that he might go back to his preferred lake or river and have another dip. Sprawson doesn’t even attempt to adhere to his own loose chapter structure – to wit, a big chunk of the final chapter, which purports to tell us about the decade Japan dominated competitive swimming, veers off into an impossibly long tangent about the effeminate French writer André Gide’s favourite Gallic watering holes. The hook is that writer Yukio Mishima liked Gide’s work.
But beneath this eddied surface, Haunts of the Black Masseur has hidden depths. The very self-indulgence that defines his writing style, is mirrored in the book’s theme – the swimmer is submersed, alone, embraced by nature, without the lifeline that tethers us to bourgeois morality. The point is, he does not have to be coherent, sensible or clear. He is free. This is the Masseur’s common current; the love of swimming as subversive counterculture or escape, which binds Ancient Greece, the English classicists of the 18th and 19th Centuries, the German Romantics, the Americans and finally (if only briefly) the Japanese.
So if you are prepared to forgive Sprawson his contempt for good writing and allow yourself to be swept up in a riptide of delicious, random and sometimes surprising anecdotes, you may just reemerge from the experience refreshed.




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My Christmas letter to you, 2024

Dear Daniel,

Merry Christmas! I hope that through the gloom of the dark winter the joy of Christmas is shining brightly upon you.

I have always loved Christmas, for many reasons. First, because it is the birth of Jesus, a baby who comes into this world to give us new hope and to save us from our sins. I believe that even those who are most sinful can find a path to justice, and Christmas is the start of that path.

But I also love Christmas as a pagan holiday. It is perfectly timed, just after the Winter Solstice (December 21st), to symbolise the time in the year when the days are getting brighter and spring is coming (the ‘Yuletide’). You can’t feel it, but it is coming, and the world will be renewed again!

Finally, I love Christmas because it is a time for family to come together. Of course, in your case, it means I miss you. But it has been nice spending time with your sister Daphne. And I hope you have been loved and have been able to love this Yuletide.

So Happy Christmas, my lovely son. I love you,

Dad

A simple plan to stop the killing in Europe

Donald Trump has won the election, in part on the promise to bring an end to US involvement in foreign conflicts. This includes swiftly bringing an end to the war in Ukraine. But how?

Here I propose a simple and, I think, obvious solution to the conflict that could be acceptable to all sides.

Main elements of the deal

  1. An immediate ceasefire along all lines of contact, and for all missile and drone attacks.
  2. The Russian Federation withdraws its forces from all DMZ territory currently occupied (e.g. the city of Mariupol…), and relinquishes all territorial claims to Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Kharkiv oblasts.
  3. Ukraine withdraws its forces from Kursk and any other territory of the UN-recognised Russian Federation. Ukraine withdraws its forces from those parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts currently occupied by AFU forces. Ukraine relinquishes any legal claim to Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
  4. Ukraine is divided into three regions, as below, (for which all parties agree to seek immediate recognition by the UN):
    1. The first region (in dark blue on the map) is the EU security zone. This comprises all oblasts and parts of oblasts west of the Dnieper River. The only territory east of the Dnieper is the remaining piece of Kiev Oblast. It is understood that this region will fall under the protection of NATO, as it transitions into a permanent security arrangement under a new EU Defense Treaty, which would have a smaller and decreasing role of the United States, but would cover countries like Moldova, (Western) Ukraine, the UK, the EU itself and other areas vital to Europe’s security interests.
    2. The second region (in light blue on the map) is the DMZ. This region comprises the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Poltava, Sumy and Chernihiv oblasts, as well as those portions of the Cherkasy and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts that are east of the Dnieper River. It remains under the administration and jurisdiction of Ukraine, but is not covered by the EU Defense Treaty. Ukrainian police can operate, but no weapons systems, artillery, combat units, military aircraft or missiles are allowed. Russian military advisors have permanent, unfettered access to all parts of this zone. All civilian and economic infrastructure remains fully Ukrainian, with no obligations to supply or facilitate the supply of power, water or other utilities to the Russian Federation.
    3. The third region (in red) is Crimea including Sevastopol, as well as Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. This territory becomes part of the Russian Federation.
  5. The Russian Federation grants freedom to navigate in the Sea of Azov for all civilian and commercial purposes and allows unfettered access through the Kerch Straits.
  6. Ukraine commits to passing, in law, denazification rules, in particular in relation to the Azov Brigade and a full repudiation of historical associations with the Nazi German SS.

If karma’s a bitch, coincidence is a rabid she-wolf in heat

Our brains are programmed to seek patterns, even in the wildest storms of chaos. Imagine the universe spitting stars across galaxies, in a physical process that literally bends time, as close to perfectly random as possible. Now imagine standing on a rock in the middle of all this and looking up at it. What do we see? A connect-the-dots picture of a hunter with a club and a belt; a saucepan; and a giant bear.

Assuming the universe truly is random, why then do we indulge in this kind of silliness? It must serve some evolutionary purpose for us to believe in patterns, in fate, in a hidden intelligent design behind the apparently random.

Maybe ideas like karma evolved because they can help us to curtail psychopathic tendencies, by fostering in us the belief in some external enforcer of socially desirable behaviours. Once comforted by such a belief, the very idea of pure coincidence, of random outcomes behind which there is no deeper meaning at all, can provoke an almost existential level of angst – that moment when atheists stare into the abyss of their own belief systems and recoil in horror.

If God truly does exist, I am sure He create the concept of randomness and its bastard child coincidence with a very specific purpose – to scare the shit out of anyone foolhardy enough not to believe in karma.