Summary: Many Americans instinctively support trade protectionism, often citing job losses, national decline, or loyalty to domestic workers. Those views find little support in economic data. They stem from deep-rooted psychological instincts—such as zero-sum thinking and a bias toward tangible labor. Understanding these evolutionary roots can help explain why bad economics often makes for popular politics.

The American right is obsessed with bringing back manufacturing jobs. Long before Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, free trade was blamed for everything from kids not playing outside anymore to national weakness and the United States being at a strategic disadvantage relative to China.

These perspectives, however, find little support in empirical data, and the ethical arguments underlying protectionism range from underdeveloped to downright odd. The fact that poor arguments against trade persist despite common sense and the overwhelming consensus of economists is a sign that we need to understand support for protecting manufacturing jobs against foreign competition as being rooted in evolutionary psychology. Protectionism is a preference that can be found where two very strong emotions intersect: hostility toward outgroups and an aesthetic preference for work that involves producing tangible objects.

Chris Caldwell has recently criticized trade on the grounds that the idea of the “country as a whole” is a myth. “The same policy could be perceived by one group as a windfall and by the other as a catastrophe. Trade made you the ally of certain foreigners and the rival of certain fellow Americans.” Similarly, in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony argues that free trade leaves workers feeling betrayed by leaders in government and business, thus “bursting the bonds of mutual loyalty.”

These arguments are difficult to justify upon reflection. With regard to Caldwell’s view that trade puts you on the same team as foreigners against Americans, one may ask: Doesn’t restricting trade do the same? If I want to buy a widget from a Chinese manufacturer at a cheaper price, aren’t the protectionists within my own country thwarting me in that goal if they prevent me from doing so? Caldwell’s perspective treats a world without cross-border trade as the natural default, with the movement of goods across borders “creating” a situation in which Americans are pitted against one another. In fact, a world without trade can come about only through heavy-handed government action, with the state intervening on the side of some Americans against others.

Hazony’s argument likewise presents a strange view of ethics. When members of a group sacrifice, it’s usually to help the whole. For instance, a soldier might die in war to keep his nation from being conquered. The “moral” argument against trade flips this idea on its head. The majority, and the well-being of the whole, must be sacrificed for the sake of the few.

Even if we accept the desirability of redistribution, this argument could make sense only if the pro-trade position involved a transfer from the poor to the rich. Those who have a lot might sacrifice to help the poorest among us. The problem with this view is that tariffs function as a regressive tax, especially on goods that make up a larger share of low-income budgets, such as clothing, food, and appliances. A 25 percent duty on imported washing machines raises prices for everyone, but the cost is a greater burden for a minimum-wage household than for a wealthy one. A study of Trump’s 2018 tariffs found an annual cost of $419 per household. High earners might not notice such a cost, but it takes a big chunk out of the disposable income of the working poor.

While protectionists focus on jobs their policies save, they ignore the much larger harms inflicted on the rest of society. Steel tariffs imposed by the Bush administration in 2002–2003 were found to have cost 168,000 jobs in industries that have steel as inputs, more than the total number of jobs in the entire steel industry. The first Trump administration’s washing machine tariffs created 1,800 jobs, at the cost to consumers of $820,000 for each job.

None of that should be surprising given the nature of the American economy. Protectionists seem to imagine that manufacturing makes up a massive portion of the national workforce. Yet only 8 percent of the nonfarm labor force works in manufacturing, half of what it was in the early 1990s. Even if you focus on the less educated, such jobs do not represent anywhere near a majority. As of 2015, only 16 percent of men without a bachelor’s degree worked in manufacturing, down from 37 percent in 1960. Thus, even if you ignore women and everyone in the country who completed higher education, most people do not actually have the kinds of jobs that opponents of free trade seek to protect and cultivate.

On what basis, then, should national policy be geared toward helping a very small minority of the public, and even a minority of the working class, at the expense of everyone else? What is odd about antitrade conservatives is that they rarely focus on other sacrifices the rich could make on behalf of the poor. The most straightforward way for them to do so would be to call for higher taxes on the wealthy and more redistribution. That way, instead of taxing everyone (with a disproportionate effect on the poor) to help a small minority of the population, one could focus on those who can most afford to pay. This is not to argue for redistribution, but rather to say that if that is your goal, putting restrictions on trade is not the way to achieve it.

Given what the empirical data overwhelmingly show about the effects of tariffs, and given the existing structure of the American economy, there must be a psychological reason for the strong attachment many have to protectionist policies. Evolutionary psychology provides an answer. First of all, we evolved in a world of zero-sum competition between individuals and groups. Without developed market economies, outsiders could gain something from your tribe only at your tribe’s expense.

President Trump makes this view explicit when he says that a trade deficit means we are “losing” money to foreign countries. This, of course, makes no sense. When I buy something from a store, it is because both parties decided it was in their interest to engage in a voluntary transaction. It’s telling that conservative intellectuals, and Americans more generally, rarely have opinions nearly this strong in economic domains outside of trade and immigration. Shouldn’t every situation where there’s a buyer and a seller be some sort of scam, according to Trump’s worldview? The fact that almost nobody understands economics this way indicates that the presence of foreigners in an interaction changes the nature of how individuals perceive it.

In addition to zero-sum thinking, another aspect of evolutionary psychology that is relevant here is how we perceive the nature of work. As alluded to earlier, protectionists tend to value manufacturing jobs higher than other forms of work, while also implicitly overestimating the extent to which our economy depends on them. But why, exactly, does someone going from working in a factory to becoming a hairdresser or driving an Uber seem like a loss, even if their new job might pay more? Why do protectionists in America seem envious of nations like China and Vietnam, which have a higher percentage of their workforces involved in manufacturing but are much poorer than we are?

Once again, the answer must be found in the distant past and how it shaped our contemporary brains. As hunter-gatherers and later farmers, we could see that someone who erected a dwelling or made a fishing spear was clearly contributing to society. Manufacturing workers are the modern equivalents, producing goods that individuals can see and touch.

The rise of the service economy is a recent phenomenon. For most of human history, nearly all labor was tied to survival—hunting, gathering, farming, or crafting tools. Even through the early industrial period, most workers made things. But in the past century, advanced economies have shifted dramatically. Today, the vast majority of workers in countries like the United States are employed in services, including sectors such as health care, education, finance, hospitality, and software development. These roles often involve abstract forms of productivity, making their social value harder for most people to grasp.

Note that like manufacturing, agriculture is often romanticized and protected from foreign competition, likely because it has premodern equivalents. Just like factories, farms evoke images of hard physical labor, sustenance, and independence. To find such work aesthetically appealing is deeply wired into our collective psychology. In truth, however, the structure of modern work has moved on. Manufacturing and farming make up only a fraction of the economies of advanced nations.

Most Americans today do not make things. They provide care, solve problems, create knowledge, or facilitate transactions. These jobs are no less real or valuable than factory work, but they lack the visceral, visible outputs our minds were shaped to recognize as valuable. The nostalgia for manufacturing, then, is rooted not in economic logic or ethical clarity, but in an instinctive bias toward forms of labor that resemble those in our ancestral past.

Of course feelings matter in politics. Nonetheless, it is important to understand when we are being motivated by psychological illusions. One might argue that the path to happiness is to indulge in our natural instincts and have a closed economy in which more people make tangible things, even if it causes our living standards to collapse. Yet protectionists practically never make a case like this—and for good reason. Once you understand the nature of these biases and how irrational they are, the case against trade falls apart.

This is why protectionists instead argue that their preferred policies will make their country better off economically, or at the very least transfer wealth from the rich to the poor. The proper response here is that their assumptions are simply not true. Instead of throwing up barriers to trade or trying to resurrect a long-gone employment landscape, we should ask how best to support workers as they are, not as we imagine them to be. That means supporting things like flexible labor markets, higher-quality training and education, and the removal of arbitrary barriers to making a living such as occupational licensing regimes.

“The automation of Amazon facilities is approaching a new milestone: There will soon be as many robots as humans.

The e-commerce giant, which has spent years automating tasks previously done by humans in its facilities, has deployed more than one million robots in those workplaces, Amazon said. That is the most it has ever had and near the count of human workers at the facilities.

Company warehouses buzz with metallic arms plucking items from shelves and wheeled droids that motor around the floors ferrying the goods for packaging. In other corners, automated systems help sort the items, which other robots assist in packaging for shipment. 

One of Amazon’s newer robots, called Vulcan, has a sense of touch that enables it to pick items from numerous shelves. Amazon has taken recent steps to connect its robots to its order-fulfillment processes, so the machines can work in tandem with each other and with humans…

Now some 75% of Amazon’s global deliveries are assisted in some way by robotics, the company said. The growing automation has helped Amazon improve productivity, while easing pressure on the company to solve problems such as heavy staff turnover at its fulfillment centers.”

From Wall Street Journal.

“Global grain supplies are projected to reach a record 3.6 billion tons in the 2025-26 season, marking a third consecutive year of growth—though at a slower pace than the average annual growth of the preceding two decades. Wheat supply has returned to its long-term average growth rate, while maize supply has rebounded after recent setbacks but remains below its historical trend. In contrast, supplies of rice and soybeans are projected to grow at about their long-term growth averages, building on last season’s significantly elevated levels.”

From World Bank.

Summary: Virginia Postrel’s book weaves a sweeping history of textiles as both drivers of innovation and toil. From ancient women spinning for months to make a single garment to brutal sumptuary laws and dye trades steeped in labor and odor, it is revealed how fabric shaped the foundations of human society.

Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World is the riveting story of how humanity’s quest for thread, cloth, and clothing built modern civilization, by motivating achievements from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution and more. While much of the book contains inspiring tales of innovation, artistry, and entrepreneurship, the parts of the book about the preindustrial era also reveal some dark and disturbing facts about the past.

In the preindustrial era, clothing was often painstakingly produced at home. Postrel estimates that, in Roman times, it took a woman about 909 hours—or 114 days, almost 4 months—to spin enough wool into yarn for a single toga. With the later invention of the spinning wheel, the time needed to produce yarn for a similarly sized garment dropped to around 440 hours, or 50 days. Even in the 18th century, on the eve of industrialization, Yorkshire wool spinners using the most advanced treadle spinning wheels of the time would have needed 14 days to produce enough yarn for a single pair of trousers. Today, by contrast, spinning is almost entirely automated, with a single worker overseeing machines that are able to produce 75,000 pounds of yarn a year—enough to knit 18 million T-shirts.

Most preindustrial women devoted enormous amounts of time to producing thread, which they learned how to make during childhood. It is not an exaggeration to say, as Postrel does, “Most preindustrial women spent their lives spinning.” This was true across much of the world. Consider Mesoamerica:

At only four years old, an Aztec girl was introduced to spinning tools. By age six, she was making her first yarn. If she slacked off or spun poorly, her mother punished her by pricking her wrists with thorns, beating her with a stick, or forcing her to inhale chili smoke.

These girls often multitasked while spinning: “preindustrial spinners could work while minding children or tending flocks, gossiping or shopping, or waiting for a pot to boil.” The near-constant nature of the task meant that prior to the Industrial Revolution, “industry’s visual representation was a woman spinning thread: diligent, productive, and absolutely essential” to the functioning of society, and from antiquity onward cloth-making was viewed as a key feminine virtue. Ancient Greek pottery portrays spinning “as both the signature activity of the good housewife and something prostitutes do between clients,” showing that women of different social classes were bound to spend much of their lives engaged in this task.

Women of every background worked day and night, but still, their efforts were never enough. “Throughout most of human history, producing enough yarn to make cloth was so time-consuming that this essential raw material was always in short supply.”

Having sufficient spun yarn or thread was only the beginning; it still had to be transformed into cloth. “It took three days of steady work to weave a single bolt of silk, about thirteen yards long, enough to outfit two women in blouses and trousers,” although silk-weavers themselves could rarely afford to wear silk. According to Postrel, a Chinese poem from the year 1145, paired with a painting of a modestly dressed, barefoot peasant weaving silk, suggests that “the couple in damask silk . . . should think of the one who wears coarse hemp.”

Subdued colors often defined the clothing of the masses. “‘Any weed can be a dye,’ fifteenth-century Florentine dyers used to say. But that’s only if you want yellows, browns, or grays—the colors yielded by the flavonoids and tannins common in shrubs and trees.” Other dye colors were harder to produce.

In antiquity, Tyrian purple was a dye derived from crushed sea snails, and the notoriously laborious and foul-smelling production process made it expensive. As a result, it became a status symbol, despite the repulsive stench that clung to the fabric it colored. In fact, according to Postrel, the poet Martial included “a fleece twice drenched in Tyrian dye” in a list of offensive odors, with a joke that a wealthy woman wore the reeking color to conceal her own body odor. The fetor became a status symbol. “Even the purple’s notorious stench conveyed prestige, because it proved the shade was the real thing, not an imitation fashioned from cheaper plant dyes.” The color itself was not purple, despite the name, but a dark hue similar to the color of dried blood. Later, during the Renaissance, Italian dyers yielded a bright red from crushed cochineal insects imported from the Americas, as well as other colors that were created by using acidic bran water that was said to smell “like vomit.”

Numerous laws strictly regulated what people were allowed to wear. Italian city-states issued more than 300 sumptuary laws between 1300 and 1500, motivated in part by revenue-hungry governments’ appetite for fines. For example, in the early 1320s, Florence forbade women from owning more than four outfits that were considered presentable enough to wear outside. Postrel quotes the Florentine sumptuary law official Franco Sacchetti as writing that women often ignored the rules and argued with officials until the latter gave up on enforcement; he ends his exasperated account with the saying, “What woman wants the Lord wants, and what the Lord wants comes to pass.” But enough fines were collected to motivate officials to enact ever more restrictions.

In Ming Dynasty China, punishment for dressing above one’s station could include corporal punishment or penal servitude. Yet, as in Florence, and seemingly nearly everywhere that sumptuary laws were imposed, such regulations were routinely flouted, with violators willing to risk punishment or fines. In France in 1726, the authorities harshened the penalty for trafficking certain restricted cotton fabrics, which were made illegal in 1686, to include the death penalty. The French law was not a traditional sumptuary law, but an economic protectionist measure intended to insulate the domestic cloth industry from foreign competition. Postrel quotes the French economist André Morellet lamenting the barbarity of this rule, writing in 1758,

Is it not strange that an otherwise respectable order of citizens solicits terrible punishments such as death and the galleys against Frenchmen, and does so for reasons of commercial interest? Will our descendants be able to believe that our nation was truly as enlightened and civilized as we now like to say when they read that in the middle of the eighteenth century a man in France was hanged for buying [banned cloth] to sell in Grenoble for 58 [coins]?

Despite such disproportionate punishments, the textile-smuggling trade continued.

Postrel’s book exposes the brutal realities woven into the history of textiles; stories not just of uplifting innovation, but of relentless toil, repression, and suffering. Her book fosters a deeper appreciation for the wide range of fabrics and clothes that we now take for granted, and it underscores the human resilience that made such abundance and choice possible.