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American Disruption
A new take on Trump’s tariffs, including using a disruption lens to understand the U.S.’s manufacturing problem, and why a better plan would leverage demand, not kill it.
It’s not as if the Trump administration doesn’t know this: the entire premise of these tariffs is that everyone wants access to the U.S. market, and rightly so given the outsized buying power driven both by our wealth and by the capacity for borrowing afforded us by the dollar being the reserve currency. This does, admittedly, start to sound a lot like central planning, but that is why the gravity argument is an important one: simply moving final assembly somewhere other than China is a win — but not if there are blanket tariffs, at which point you might as well leave the supply chain where it is. I started this essay being solipsistic, so let me conclude with some more navel-gazing: my prevailing emotion over the past week — one I didn’t fully come to grips with until interrogating why Monday’s Article failed to live up to my standards — is sadness over the end of an era in technology, and frustration-bordering-on-disillusionment over the demise of what I thought was a uniquely American spirit.
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