Monday, April 14th, 2025

Time	Event
8:00a	What Was Smoot-Hawley, and Why Are We Doing It Again? Anyone? Anyone? When most Americans think of the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, they think of economic disaster. But if you ask why, most Americans may need a short refresher course. Below, you will find just that. Appearing on Derek Thompson’s Plain History podcast, Douglas Irwin (an economist and historian at Dartmouth) revisits the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs on over 20,000 products imported into the United States. The law was passed despite warnings from executives like Henry Ford (who called the tariff act “an economic stupidity”) and a petition signed by 1,028 American economists, who argued that the tariffs would raise prices and spark a trade war, leaving the United States isolated. Their concerns were ultimately well-founded. The Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, supported by a Republican president and Congress, had the unintended consequence of deepening, not ending, the Great Depression. Mark Twain allegedly said that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” But sometimes history may well repeat itself or come very close, and that’s where we seem to be headed right now. As in 1930, we have Republicans implementing new tariffs, but this time with the hope of re-engineering the world economy and bringing manufacturing back to America. Meanwhile, economists (even conservative ones) warn that these policies risk repeating the mistakes of Smoot-Hawley. Below you can hear the assessment of the economic historian Niall Ferguson, who, in speaking with Bari Weiss, explains why Donald Trump’s tariffs will fail to re-industrialize America. The golden age of manufacturing in America is long gone, and it’s not coming back, partly thanks to automation. (Morgan Housel has more to say on that.) But even worse, the chaotic implementation of these policies risks triggering a trade war, “a major financial crisis comparable in scale to 2008,” or even a military crisis that an isolated America would be ill-equipped to handle. Speaking on Meet the Press this weekend, investor Ray Dalio ominously voiced very similar concerns, saying “something worse than recession” may be on the horizon. For another take, you can hear Preet Bharara’s conversation with Justin Wolfers, where the Australian economist warns that Trump’s tariffs may have few benefits and mostly costs, some quite profound. By launching a trade war, America will trade less and find its global influence diminished, leaving a void that China can fill. Echoing Niall Ferguson, Wolfers also cautions that you can’t turn back the economic clock. He notes: A hundred years ago, we had actually the same debate, but it was because we were moving from the land, from a predominantly agricultural economy, to a manufacturing-based economy. And we moved from an enormous share of the population working in agriculture to working in manufacturing, and that raised the American middle class. There was a lot of nostalgia. Why aren’t we back on the land? And the subsequent stage of economic development is we move out of the factories, and we move and become engineers and computer scientists and software designers. And we’re in a much more cognitive economy. And we are not inhaling black soot in our mines or in our factories during the day. And that’s the future of the American economy. And it’s one that speaks well to the skills that Americans have. We’re the most educated workforce in the world. And so presumably the jobs of the future are those, the jobs we want are those that cater to the extreme productivity and education of American workers. How have we reached the point where we’re running the same failed experiments again, all to reclaim an illusory bygone economic age? It’s a hard question to contemplate, but I ask that question again. Anyone? Anyone? Anyone? Related Content  The Steps a President Would Take to Destroy His Nation, According to Elon Musk’s AI Chatbot, Grok Free Online Economics & Finance Courses Striking Poster Collection from the Great Depression Shows That the US Government Once Supported the Arts in America (Comment on this)
9:00a	What the World Will Look Like in 250 Million Years: Mapping the Distant Future Most of us now accept the idea that all of Earth’s continents were once part of a single, enormous land mass. That wasn’t the case in the early nineteen-tens, when the geologist Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) first publicized his theory of not just the supercontinent Pangea, but also of the phenomenon of continental drift that caused it to break apart into the series of shapes we all know from classroom world maps. But as humorously explained in the Map Men video above, Wegener didn’t live to see these ideas convince the world. Only after his death did other scientists figure out just how the geological churning under the planet’s surface caused the continents to drift apart in the first place. With that information in place, Pangea no longer seemed like the crackpot notion it had when Wegener initially proposed it. Less widely appreciated, even today, is the determination that, as the Map Men put it, “Pangea, far from being the original supercontinent, was actually the eleventh to have formed in Earth’s history.” It seems that the continents have been cyclically breaking apart and coming together again, with no sign of the process stopping. When, then, will we next find ourselves back on a supercontinent? Perhaps in 250 million years or so, according to the “Novopangea” model explained in the video, which has the Pacific ocean closing up as Australia slots into East Asia and North America while Antarctica drifts north. Other models also exist, including Aurica, “where Eurasia splits in half, and both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans close up”; Pangea Ultima, “where Britain gets closer to America”; and Amasia, “where all the continents congregate around the North Pole, except Antarctica” (whose drift patterns make it seem like “the laziest continent”). At this kind of time scale, small changes in the basic assumptions can result in very different-looking supercontinents indeed, not that any of us will be around to see how the next Pangea really takes shape. Nevertheless, in this age when we can hardly go a week without encountering predictions of humanity’s imminent extinction, it’s refreshing to find a subject that lets us even consider looking a quarter-billion years down the road. Related Content: A Billion Years of Tectonic-Plate Movement in 40 Seconds: A Quick Glimpse of How Our World Took Shape The Plate Tectonic Evolution of the Earth Over 500 Million Years: Animated Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Million Years in the Future Map Showing Where Today’s Countries Would Be Located on Pangea Pangea to the Present to the Future: Watch Animations Showing 500 Million Years of Continental Drift Paper Animation Tells Curious Story of How a Meteorologist Theorized Pangaea & Continental Drift (1910) A Web Site That Lets You Find Your Home Address on Pangea Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2025/04/14 [Calendar]

Next Day >>