The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump: What the Trade War Means for the World
by
Philip Coggan
Published 1 Jul 2025
Effects of eliminating “Optional Practical Training” in the US’, Peterson Institute for International Economics, 8 April 2025, piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2025/skilled-immigration-chopping-block-effects-eliminating-optional 42 John Coykendall et al., ‘Taking charge: manufacturers support growth with active workforce strategies’, Deloitte, 3 April 2024, deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/manufacturing/supporting-us-manufacturing-growth-amid-workforce-challenges.html 43 Ibid. 44 Parikh, op. cit. 45 ‘Surveys: special questions’, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 28 April 2025, dallasfed.org/research/surveys/tbos/2025/2504q 46 fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP 47 Ibid. 48 Alan Rappeport, ‘Trump win shows political limits of Biden’s industrial policy vision’, The New York Times, 8 November 2024, nytimes.com/2024/11/08/us/politics/trump-biden-economy-manufacturing.html 49 ‘America’s bet on industrial policy starts to pay off for semiconductors’, Economist, 9 January 2025, economist.com/united-states/2025/01/09/americas-bet-on-industrial-policy-starts-to-pay-off-for-semiconductors 50 Coykendall et al., op. cit. 51 Paul Gerke, ‘Trump’s proposed budget cancels billions of dollars in infrastructure investments, environmental programs, research grants, and renewable energy projects’, Factor This, 2 May 2025, renewableenergyworld.com/energy-business/policy-and-regulation/trumps-proposed-budget-cancels-billions-of-dollars-in-infrastructure-investments-environmental-programs-research-grants-and-renewable-energy-projects/ 52 Hannah Ritchie, ‘Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled’, Our World in Data, 13 June 2024, ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-have-fallen-by-around-20-every-time-global-capacity-doubled 53 David Pierson and Berry Wang, ‘DeepSeek is a win for China in the A.I. race. Will the party stifle it?’, The New York Times, 2 February 2025, nytimes.com/2025/02/02/world/asia/deepseek-china-ai-censorship.html 54 Rogier Creemers and Louise Marie Hurel, ‘Limits of economic deterrence in the US–China tech competition’, RUSI, 14 March 2025, rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/limits-economic-deterrence-us-china-tech-competition 55 Tsvetana Paraskova, ‘Harold Hamm: “Drill, baby, drill” needs $80 oil’, Oilprice.com, 17 March 2025, oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Harold-Hamm-Drill-Baby-Drill-Needs-80-Oil.htm 56 ‘Saudi oil production cost up 11% in 2024’, Zawya, 19 March 2025, zawya.com/en/projects/oil-and-gas/saudi-oil-production-cost-up-11-in-2024-bileicwc 5.
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In total, these would have produced 234,000 new manufacturing jobs.50 Many of these planned jobs may now be at risk because the Trump administration has halted a wide range of projects related to renewable energy and electric car charging.51 Mr Trump’s dislike for renewable energy is simply irrational; the costs of solar energy have dropped by 90 per cent over the last ten years, while those of wind energy have fallen 70 per cent.52 But rather than invest in the industries of the future, Mr Trump wants to turn back to the industries of the past, like coal and oil. In the long run, the US should really be worried about the challenge from China, not in low-margin industries like assembling electronic products, but in new areas such as artificial intelligence. China’s development of the Deep-Seek large language model came as a shock to American companies that had previously dominated the field.53 It emerged despite, or perhaps because of, US attempts under both Presidents Trump and Biden to constrain China’s technological development. The Royal United Services Institute, a defence think tank, argues that the sanctions may ‘have been counterproductive, in the sense that they have galvanized an ecosystem of Chinese businesses to finally come on board with policy initiatives to indigenize high-end technology capabilities’.54 The US would do better to focus on ensuring its own scientists and technologists have all the resources they need.
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
by
Cory Doctorow
Published 6 Oct 2025
Putting anyone in a gulag is wrong, of course, but the fact that tech bosses are on Xi’s shit list really undermines Meta and Nick Clegg’s yellow peril–inflected argument that Chinese Big Tech is a stalking horse for the Chinese Communist Party (and that argument’s corollary: that Meta is the main force keeping “European cyberspace” free from nefarious Chinese rule). This is nonsense, but it’s productive nonsense. It gave us the TikTok ban, and it’s giving America’s bloated, overcapitalized AI giants political cover as they attack nimbler Chinese rivals like DeepSeek. Antitrust is global, but it’s especially powerful in the United States, thanks to a mix of both government and private action. While I was writing this book, Google lost three antitrust cases, one brought privately by Epic Systems, the others brought by the DOJ. Having thrice been adjudicated a monopolist by a federal judge, Google has now been ordered to open up its app store and begin distributing rival app stores as apps, so you can switch from getting your apps from Google to getting your apps from anyone else, just by installing an app using the software Google included with your Android device.