Why Politicians Lie About Trade... and What You Need to Know About It

"Well, I don’t know if you’ve watched the news lately, but there have been a couple of examples you can pretty much just transcribe! Let me start by saying the title is a little bit sensational. It makes the book sound like far more of a polemic than it really is. I became a semi-public figure and commentator during the first Trump term, and especially during Brexit . Those were really the first times in a very long while where trade was consistently in the news, where trade would lead newspapers, and when trade would be one of the first couple of segments on the nightly news. And the debate was frankly appalling in terms of its quality. A lot of very confident people sold things that were complete fabrications and that, for a lot of us watching it, was not only annoying, as it always is when someone is wrong about your field, but actively dangerous. Some of the proposals that were being floated around by very credentialed, well-placed people would have been disastrous. For instance, if the UK had crashed out of the European Union with no deal and no transition period a month after the referendum, as some people were suggesting, it would not only have been disastrous for the UK economy at a level that is difficult to convey, but would almost certainly have had human casualties—farmer suicides and so on, as people just completely lost their livelihoods and supply chains were disrupted. So looking at that, it was hard not to think how I could contribute to the public debate if trade was going to be increasingly a part of the public discourse; if it’s going to be more and more what people campaign on; if it’s going to be something that is debated on panel shows. So, despite what the book is called, all it’s trying to do is to say that the reason politicians lie about trade is often so that they can present a choice as not being a choice. Any policy is a matter of the government choosing between competing interests and priorities. But trade, in some ways, is special, because if you are willing to be duplicitous or not tell the full story, you can pretend that all of the interests that you might harm are overseas. And the reason politicians can get away with that is that trade is pretty counterintuitive. Most people don’t have a lot of sense of either how trade policy works, how the international agreements work, or even what it takes to move a box across a couple of national borders to get it into your hands. It’s this vague, nebulous thing that you can then project deception onto. So, in the first part, I go through a brief history of trade policy. What are the decisions governments make about it? How does trading goods work? How does trade in services work? How do trade negotiations work? What is the World Trade Organization? I do that in as accessible way as I can. The tone I’ve tried to go for is one where you have made the horrible mistake of being seated next to me at a bar and asking me a question about trade, and now I have trapped you for the nine-and-a-half hour audiobook run time and I’m delivering the answers to you. It’s me trying to talk to you like you are an intelligent person who’s almost certainly passionate about things other than trade, but that trade impacts, and you just don’t happen to have a lot of experience with trade itself. In the second half, I try to explain a little bit about how trade impacts or interacts with the things people tend to care about, whether that’s national security, development, women’s economic empowerment, or the environment. What is the policy intersection there? If I had to guess, I would say that at least this initial iteration of the trade war will be dismantled. I believe that the US administration is increasingly looking for an off-ramp, they just haven’t found one that is face-saving enough, or one that they can convince the President to accept. All of the objectives that I spoke about at the start, when we discussed what Trump is aiming to achieve, are things you can make progress against with thoughtful trade policy, whether it’s raising revenue or creating some separation from Chinese supply chains, or addressing barriers abroad. You could use trade policy in a smart way. The US economy is a phenomenally powerful beast. The problem is they’ve not been at all thoughtful in how they apply that power. They have simultaneously started a fight with everyone on Earth and, seemingly without any preparation whatsoever, they picked a fight with China, which has been preparing for exactly this kind of confrontation for more than a decade. I think that at least in the short term, they will look to bounce off this and regroup. What I don’t know is whether they will then re-gather to spend a little bit more time planning and thinking, get a few more ducks in a row, and come back into this arena, swinging again for all of those reasons we talked about at the start. But I think what they’re currently doing isn’t sustainable, and I think, increasingly, they know it."