I tried to find mainstream economists’ opinions on the tariffs by googling various economists’ names. I’ll list all the articles I ended up looking at below, so there’s no selection bias:
My sense is that the question “do tariffs strengthen or weaken US manufacturing” is pretty straightforward for econ-brained people to grapple with. But the question of how this affects the US as a geopolitical power is not brought up by any of the first three (more mainstream) articles. They do mention China’s “unfair trade practices” but that seems more like a suggestion that tariffs could help us get back to idealized free markets.
Noah, Alex and Tyler do discuss geopolitics and China in the latter two links. At various points, they weigh up whether tariffs strengthen or weaken the US’s position vis-a-vis China. They’re not thinking much in terms of autonomy, though. For example, Noah says “As I keep saying over and over, tariffs also hurt American manufacturing by making imported components more expensive.” But from an autonomy perspective it might be worth hurting manufacturing in order for the manufacturing you do have to be more autonomous. (I don’t think that tradeoff is usually a good idea, to be clear—I’m just pointing at the concepts that seem to be missing.)
Noah also says “The basic fact here is that the U.S. is just a much smaller country than China is. China is much more capable of running a self-contained economy and a self-contained defense-industrial base than America is. The U.S. would only be able to match China by getting together a big gang of allies.” This is gesturing in a relevant direction, but still seems to be grounding out in maximizing for size of manufacturing sector. Yet autonomy is valuable independent of that—there’s a big difference between “we make less stuff than China but we make it ourselves” and “we make as much stuff as China but if China cuts off our imports we can’t make anything”.
I think the best example of sociopolitical thinking is where Tyler says “another argument I hear the Trumpers make for getting investment rather than trade is just you hold a hostage”. That is, Trumpers are arguing that Chinese investment in the US will make China less autonomous and more easily threatenable by the US. I do count that as engagement with the core concept I was trying to gesture at in this post.
Overall I think the results from this investigation were kinda ambiguous—there’s some awareness of the thing I claimed I saw little of, even if it’s a bit muddled. I’m not sure if this is just because people like Noah and Tyler are less “conventional economists” than the people I was implicitly thinking of, but I can’t be bothered to go and check more things. I do also think that the pro-tariff people were not making very coherent arguments in favor of autonomy and so it’s not clear how much anti-tariff economists should have been talking about that.
I tried to find mainstream economists’ opinions on the tariffs by googling various economists’ names. I’ll list all the articles I ended up looking at below, so there’s no selection bias:
Tariffs hurt manufacturing
The macroeconomic effects of tariffs (linked by Tyler Cowen)
Trump’s tariffs are making money. That may make them hard to quit (in the NYT)
All the arguments for Trump’s tariffs are bad and wrong (Noah Smith)
Tyler and Alex podcast
My sense is that the question “do tariffs strengthen or weaken US manufacturing” is pretty straightforward for econ-brained people to grapple with. But the question of how this affects the US as a geopolitical power is not brought up by any of the first three (more mainstream) articles. They do mention China’s “unfair trade practices” but that seems more like a suggestion that tariffs could help us get back to idealized free markets.
Noah, Alex and Tyler do discuss geopolitics and China in the latter two links. At various points, they weigh up whether tariffs strengthen or weaken the US’s position vis-a-vis China. They’re not thinking much in terms of autonomy, though. For example, Noah says “As I keep saying over and over, tariffs also hurt American manufacturing by making imported components more expensive.” But from an autonomy perspective it might be worth hurting manufacturing in order for the manufacturing you do have to be more autonomous. (I don’t think that tradeoff is usually a good idea, to be clear—I’m just pointing at the concepts that seem to be missing.)
Noah also says “The basic fact here is that the U.S. is just a much smaller country than China is. China is much more capable of running a self-contained economy and a self-contained defense-industrial base than America is. The U.S. would only be able to match China by getting together a big gang of allies.” This is gesturing in a relevant direction, but still seems to be grounding out in maximizing for size of manufacturing sector. Yet autonomy is valuable independent of that—there’s a big difference between “we make less stuff than China but we make it ourselves” and “we make as much stuff as China but if China cuts off our imports we can’t make anything”.
I think the best example of sociopolitical thinking is where Tyler says “another argument I hear the Trumpers make for getting investment rather than trade is just you hold a hostage”. That is, Trumpers are arguing that Chinese investment in the US will make China less autonomous and more easily threatenable by the US. I do count that as engagement with the core concept I was trying to gesture at in this post.
Overall I think the results from this investigation were kinda ambiguous—there’s some awareness of the thing I claimed I saw little of, even if it’s a bit muddled. I’m not sure if this is just because people like Noah and Tyler are less “conventional economists” than the people I was implicitly thinking of, but I can’t be bothered to go and check more things. I do also think that the pro-tariff people were not making very coherent arguments in favor of autonomy and so it’s not clear how much anti-tariff economists should have been talking about that.