Luke Ford

The New York Times reports: “A study tracks how the North American Free Trade Agreement and trade competition with Mexico led to earlier deaths for American factory workers.”
Trade arguments usually center on GDP figures or consumer prices. This one focuses on mortality. In communities most exposed to Mexican import competition after 1994, life expectancy dropped sharply. For 45-year-old men in those areas, roughly three percent lost a full year of remaining life.
During the Great Recession, mortality fell in some areas because people drove less, which reduced accidents and cut pollution. The NAFTA shock worked differently. It did not spread pain broadly across the economy. It concentrated destruction in specific geographic communities built around manufacturing, and the damage spread through drug overdoses, alcohol-related illness, suicide, and chronic disease worsened by stress and the collapse of self-reported health. The “China shock” followed the same pattern after Beijing joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
The history of NAFTA shows how powerful alliances shape what counts as economic truth. In the 1990s, a coalition of multinational corporations, trade economists, and centrist politicians from both parties framed free trade as a near-universal good. The narrative stressed aggregate benefits: cheaper electronics, lower clothing costs, stronger North American competitiveness. It treated the destruction of local industries as a manageable transition, the kind of short-term disruption that efficient markets correct over time.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory helps explain why that framing held for so long. Coalitions develop narratives that justify their own interests while presenting those interests as universal moral or economic truths. The pro-NAFTA coalition had every incentive to emphasize diffuse gains and minimize concentrated harms. The concentrated harms happened to fall on communities that lacked the political and institutional power to force the debate. The anti-NAFTA coalition, built from unionized workers and industrial towns, developed a counter-narrative of betrayal and abandonment. For decades, the pro-trade side could answer that critique by pointing to aggregate welfare gains. This study makes that response harder. When the harm includes shortened life spans, cheaper televisions stop functioning as compensation.
The biological decline the study documents also reflects something Ernest Becker described in his work on hero systems. The manufacturing economy gave men without college degrees a coherent path to dignity. A factory worker supported a family, belonged to a union, earned respect through physical competence, and tied his identity to a specific place and community. That system stabilized marriage rates, kept addiction lower, and anchored civic life. When the factories closed, the collapse was not only financial. Men lost the primary pathway through which their culture recognized adult male worth. The professional class, whose own hero system runs on credentials, mobility, and global networks, often failed to see what that loss meant at ground level. From inside their framework, NAFTA looked rational and progressive. From inside the older framework, it looked like an erasure.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton showed that the decline of manufacturing connected to rising opioid addiction and deaths of despair from alcohol, drugs, and suicide. This new paper gives that connection a harder econometric edge. The political staying power of anti-trade sentiment was never primarily about nostalgia or ignorance of economics. It persisted because the damage was biological and irreversible. Populist critics of NAFTA were directionally right that elite economists had been too optimistic, and the mortality data now backs that intuition. The deeper failure was institutional: the pro-trade coalition assumed adjustment would happen automatically, that workers would retrain and regions would diversify. That assumption ignored the social infrastructure of manufacturing towns. Economists measured GDP and consumer prices. They did not measure the erosion of the social order those towns depended on.

Further Reading

Given the war’s scope and its immediate effects on global energy and supply chains, the industrial policy dimension has become urgent in ways that would have seemed abstract just a month ago. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, oil prices have surged past $100 a barrel, and shipping lanes are being rerouted around the world. That changes the calculus on domestic production capacity, energy independence, and defense manufacturing in ways every serious reader should think through.
On Alliance Theory and minority security models, start with Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Olson argues that groups with concentrated interests organize more effectively than diffuse majorities, which helps explain why minority communities often build security infrastructure the broader population never needs. It remains the foundational text for understanding why diaspora communities do what governments cannot.
Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability examines how market-dominant minorities generate both prosperity and resentment in multiethnic societies. Her framework applies directly to Jewish communities in the diaspora and helps explain why the security question is never purely about crime or terrorism but about the structural position of a community within a larger society.
On the broader geopolitics driving the Iran conflict, John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics argues that states pursue security above all else and that conflict between rising and dominant powers is close to inevitable. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the book gives you a rigorous framework for thinking about why the United States and Israel calculated that a weakened Iran represented a window of opportunity rather than a moment for diplomacy.
Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate argues that physical geography shapes strategy more than ideology or intention. With the Strait of Hormuz now closed and Brent crude above $100, his argument about chokepoints and energy geography looks prescient.
On industrial policy, which the war has made the most pressing topic on this list, the essential starting point is Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths. Mazzucato argues that the state has historically driven the most significant technological and industrial breakthroughs, not private capital. She challenges the assumption that markets lead and governments follow, and her framework matters now because the war has exposed how dependent Western economies remain on imported energy and foreign supply chains.
Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind’s Big Is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business makes the case that large industrial firms and deliberate state investment produce better economic outcomes than the small-business romanticism that dominates American political rhetoric. As defense spending accelerates and energy production becomes a strategic priority, their argument about the necessity of industrial scale feels timely.
Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America takes a different angle, arguing that the United States gutted its manufacturing base in pursuit of consumer prices and financial returns, leaving both workers and the country strategically exposed. The Iran war has made that exposure concrete: a conflict in the Gulf now threatens the industrial capacity of countries that no longer make the things they need.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. This book documents how the decline of manufacturing and the weakening of unions led to a surge in suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths among working-class Americans. It argues that the modern economic system has failed those without a college degree, creating a profound sense of hopelessness that translates into a literal loss of life.
The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik. This book argues that we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national self-determination, and full economic globalization. It suggests that by pushing globalization too far, we have undermined the national institutions that provide social stability and democratic legitimacy.
Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries by Marc Fasteau and Ian Fletcher. This book serves as a comprehensive reference for the return of state-guided economics. It surveys the successes and failures of industrial planning in major economies and argues that a strategic government role is necessary for national security and economic resilience in an era of global competition.
Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate by Dani Rodrik. This book offers a vision for a “new economics” that prioritizes the middle class and the green transition. It argues for place-based policies and a revitalized industrial strategy to repair the social fabric torn by decades of hyper-globalization.
Industrial Policy, National Security, and the Perilous Plight of the WTO by Petros C. Mavroidis. This book examines how national security concerns are reshaping international trade law. It argues that the rise of industrial policy is a direct response to a world where economic integration is no longer seen as separate from geopolitical survival.
Industrial policy debates in Washington do not follow a simple left-right divide. Several rival coalitions have formed, and they overlap in complicated ways.
The national security industrialists drive most of the recent policy shifts. Their core argument is that great-power competition has returned and that industrial capacity determines military power. They want the United States to rebuild domestic production in semiconductors, shipbuilding, rare earth minerals, batteries, and defense manufacturing. The National Security Council, the Pentagon, and defense-focused think tanks anchor this group. For them, supply chains are strategic vulnerabilities, and China’s state-driven industrial system represents a direct challenge that markets alone cannot answer.
A second group overlaps with the first but has a different center of gravity. Silicon Valley firms, venture capitalists focused on defense technology, and policymakers involved in the CHIPS Act and AI strategy make up what might be called the techno-industrial coalition. They care less about traditional manufacturing and more about semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and space technology. Their argument is that technological ecosystems, not factory floors, determine geopolitical power.
The traditional free-trade coalition once dominated policy from the 1990s through the early 2010s. Wall Street, multinational corporations, trade economists, and international institutions make up its core. Their argument for open markets and global supply chains has not disappeared, but their influence has declined since the China shock, the pandemic supply-chain crisis, and rising geopolitical tensions forced a reckoning.
The labor and domestic manufacturing coalition has gained ground in that same period. Industrial unions, regional political leaders in manufacturing states, and economic nationalists share a focus that differs from both the security hawks and the tech optimists. They want domestic employment rebuilt and industrial communities restored. Tariffs, domestic content requirements, and regional manufacturing subsidies are their preferred tools, and the political realignment of working-class voters has given them real leverage.
A fifth group has grown up around clean energy. Renewable energy firms, environmental policy groups, and progressive economists support industrial policy as a way to build domestic supply chains for electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and grid infrastructure. The Inflation Reduction Act reflects their priorities more than any other recent legislation.
These coalitions cross traditional lines. National security hawks and labor advocates sometimes agree on reshoring manufacturing. Technology companies and defense planners often find common ground on semiconductor policy. Climate strategists and industrial planners overlap around battery supply chains. But the tensions are real too. Free-trade economists warn about inefficiency and trade wars. Labor groups worry that high-tech industrial policy will not produce enough middle-class jobs. Defense planners worry that climate priorities might distort strategic ones.
American industrial policy is therefore not emerging from a single coherent doctrine. It emerges through a series of overlapping compromises, each coalition framing its preferred policies as serving the national interest while protecting its own. The next decade will likely determine which coalition becomes dominant, and that outcome will shape how the United States organizes its economy.

ChatGPT says: The literature on national security industrial policy has exploded in the last five years. The United States and its allies are rediscovering that wars and geopolitical shocks depend on industrial capacity, supply chains, and energy systems.

Chris Miller: Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology

This is probably the most important book on industrial policy written recently. Miller shows how semiconductor manufacturing became the foundation of military and economic power. Modern weapons, intelligence systems, satellites, and communications all depend on chips. The key lesson is that the semiconductor industry is not a normal market. It is a strategic technology ecosystem shaped by government subsidies, export controls, and security alliances. This is the clearest example of why industrial policy is back.

Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

Doshi explains how China has pursued a long-term strategy to displace American economic and technological leadership. His argument pushed many Washington policymakers to rethink laissez-faire globalization. The book shows how industrial policy can be a tool of geopolitical competition rather than just economic development.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy

Farrell and Newman explain how modern power operates through control of networks such as finance, payment systems, and technology supply chains. Their concept of “weaponized interdependence” is central. Countries that control key nodes in global networks can coerce others without firing a shot. Think SWIFT sanctions, semiconductor export controls, and rare-earth supply chains.

Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

Fishman describes how economic sanctions, export controls, and technology restrictions became central tools of American strategy. The key insight is that economic statecraft has replaced many traditional forms of military confrontation. Energy logistics are the hidden backbone of modern war. The Iran conflict highlights this because oil shipping lanes, refineries, and energy prices shape the global economy.

Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

Yergin explains how energy geopolitics is shifting with shale production, renewables, and great-power competition. The book shows why the Persian Gulf still matters even though the U.S. produces more energy domestically than it did decades ago.

Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History

Smil’s work is slower and more technical, but it explains the physical foundations of industrial economies. Wars are not won only with weapons. They are won with steel, fuel, electricity, fertilizer, and logistics.

The U.S. can design extraordinary weapons but often struggles to manufacture them at wartime volumes. Two books explain this problem well.

Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

This is about the U.S. industrial mobilization during World War II. It shows how government coordination with private industry turned America into the “arsenal of democracy.” The lesson is that wartime production requires institutional coordination that markets alone do not produce.

Alex Vershinin’s essays on industrial warfare

Vershinin writes about how modern wars are becoming “industrial wars” again. Ammunition production, drone manufacturing, and logistics capacity now determine outcomes as much as battlefield tactics.