You know, once upon a time — maybe even last year — the WTO ruling that the centerpiece of Trump's trade policy was illegitimate would have been considered major news. As it was, people barely noticed 1/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/business/economy/wto-trade-china-trump.html

Not disagreeing with media organization, btw: with the fate of democracy on the line, even trade specialists have a hard time focusing on other stuff. But this offers an occasion for brief nerdy thread on a problem I'm having with textbook revision 2/

I've been co-author of an intermediate textbook on international economics for many editions — I think we used stone axes to chisel out the first edition — and we've always included a ch on political economy of trade policy, emphasizing the importance of special interests 3/

This chapter includes examples of policies that clearly reduced national income, but were adopted because they served particular well-connected groups. And you'd think it would be easy to update to the Trump era, which is a golden age of crony capitalism 4/

But here's where I'm having trouble: to a first approximation, nobody wants the Trump trade war. A few US companies have benefited, but very little grassroots demand from either workers or corporations. By and large, this whole thing reflects Trump's personal obsessions 5/

So how do I update the stories about catfish farmers or sugar producers? "Peter Navarro is a strange person" wouldn't be teachable material for an econ textbook even if the goal weren't to make it as apolitical as possible. So, struggling with the updates 6/