Broadsheet

Chad Bown and Soumaya Keynes have a terrific new book with that title — a breezy survey of our chaotic new world of international economics, couched as advice for nations trying to get the upper hand. The book is here.

I spoke with them last week about their book and the world in general. Fun stuff in a slightly grim way, and I hope we kept the acronym level tolerable. Transcript provided by the Financial Times, lightly edited to remove the ums and ahs. u

TRANSCRIPT

Paul K: Hi everybody. I’m Paul Krugman, professor at the City University of New York, and an independent newsletter writer on Substack. You might have noticed that I’m not Soumaya Keynes, host of The Economics Show podcast. I’m here with Soumaya, as well as her longtime collaborator, Chad Bown, who is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, formerly chief economist at the US State Department. Together, these two have just written a book called ‘How to Win a Trade War’, and today we’re going to be asking just that. How do you win a trade war? Soumaya, Chad, hi.

Chad Bown: Hi, Paul!

Soumaya: Hi!

Paul K: So maybe I can start by asking a slightly funny question, which is, who are you? I know you’re Chad and Soumaya, but when we talk about how to win a trade war, who is this? You know, who’s the audience? Presumably not actually Donald Trump. It’s probably not Xi Jinping. I mean, everybody should read it, but who do you think might, in some sense, read it or at least be briefed on people who’ve read it?

Soumaya: Well look, if Donald Trump wants to read the book, then we are very willing to sign a copy. We’ll hand deliver it however he wants. The conceit of the book is that you, the reader, are really interested in fighting a trade war, right? And we are the two nerdy kind of reluctant guides saying, “Uh, if you really want to do it, then, you know, we’ll give you the evidence that you need. We’ll tell you everything there is to know,” You know, it’s not easy to fight and win a trade war. Um, and so, you know, at least arm yourself with the evidence of what’s happened in the past, what works, what doesn’t work. We kind of acknowledge that most readers may come to this not actually wanting to fight a trade war, right?

Um, so the point is it’s for... You know, it’s to help people understand, how to navigate this world of economic conflict as I feel like, you know, many people have become unwilling participants in these massive, massive geopolitical conflicts. It can be a bit bewildering. So the book is really supposed to be for everyone, right? To understand how we got here and where we go next.

Paul K: Okay. Because yeah, I found myself thinking that it was easier somehow to follow the line of argument is to think of myself yeah, still a little bit of delusions of grandeur, but imagine myself to be Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, or to imagine myself as Ursula von der Leyen, uh, uh, making policy for the EU.

But basically, you’ve got these two powers. We’ve got the United States, which is basically Donald Trump, and we’ve got China, which is a little bit more of an institutional thing. But they are certainly waging something that they consider trade wars.

Let’s talk a little bit about, how did we get here? How did we get to this point? I think, if we were holding this conversation around ten years ago, it mostly would have been, “Well, we’re economists. We understand free trade is great.” Uh, maybe fifteen years ago, even more so.

And, so you know, the answer is just, “Don’t do this, free trade.” So I think all three of us probably have had some visions on the road to Damascus about why that isn’t an adequate approach. Anybody want to start off on that?

Chad Bown: Maybe I’ll take a stab first. Um, so I guess to answer the question, we have to talk about what trade war we could or should be fighting because there are, I think, arguably multiple trade wars happening right now. You’ve got President Trump doing a lot of things. Um, but beneath, behind that, there’s another really big trade war that’s happening, and that’s the one having to do with China.

So let me start there. Um, I would say, and it’s not as if I noticed this at the time, but say in 2015, when China rolled out its Made in China 2025 strategy, industrial policy that said, you know, we’re gonna have these market share targets to dominate certain important sectors of the future, that was kind of a sign that China was thinking about things differently than I think other, other, traditional, the United States and others had been.

And then you fast-forward a couple of years with, Xi Jinping and his “dual circulation” strategy more clearly articulating the idea that China did not want to be interdependent with the rest of the world. It wanted the rest of the world to be dependent on China for their supply chain, so the United States to be dependent on China for sourcing stuff, but China to not have dependencies on the rest of the world.

When you start to think about a functioning trading system, as we’ve lived in for the post-war period since the, the late 1940s, it requires rules, all those things, but it also fundamentally requires a willingness to be interdependent, right? And to trust that I’m gonna export to you, you’re gonna import to me, and, and yeah, there’ll be sometimes some frictions, but by and large, that will be okay.

And China was saying, “No, we wanna have an asymmetric relationship, we wanna do what we wanna do, but we’re not all that interested in what you wanna do.” So for me, it was kind of seeing those things that really made me think that, ah, the world has changed. We’re in some sort of trade war, and really China is the part that’s driving this.

Soumaya: So my journey, I think, um, you know, there was an important moment for me in the first Trump administration, right? And so, you know, Trump, ran onto the scene, during his first term and started throwing tariffs at China predominantly. And you know, Chad and I had this podcast about trade, and we were the loudest voices saying, you know, “What are you doing? You gotta play by the rules, why not try to use the rule book to solve these underlying structural problems that we have with China?” Um, and you know, I was covering trade full-time at that time, and, you know, something that was happening behind the scenes, um, was that there were efforts to try and get some kind of coordinated plan to save the rules-based system, to try and solve some of the structural problems between China and the US by writing new rules.

So you had these trilateral discussions between the US, Japan, and the EU, and the idea was, okay, well why don’t we just write out the way in which we want China to behave, limits on subsidies, um, you know, new, new ways of protecting ourself against China’s subsidies. And the idea was, you know, they would agree on that common plan, then they might go to China and say, “Hey, look, we’ve got some new rules. You sign up to these, and look, President Trump will drop his tariffs.” That was the hope of some involved in that process. It certainly wasn’t Donald Trump’s plan. And I think, you know, a very fundamental way in which I have moved on from that is I just don’t believe that the solution to these problems lies in a new set of common rules that everyone is going to sign up to, right?

In fact, the Trump administration did go to the Chinese government with a list of requirements or requests in terms of, you know, China’s subsidy behavior, and the Chinese, you know, shredded it, right? They weren’t gonna change their system. and that’s really the backdrop to where we are today, which is, you know, the Trump administration, I think, pretty much most everyone else, has given up on the idea that the rules are gonna save us.

And that is kind of scary. It’s a bit, you know... It means that we can’t rely on the rule book to predict what’s going to happen next. It’s a much more chaotic power-based world, and we’re kind of feeling our way through.

Paul K: Yeah. Yeah, for what it’s worth, I, I’ve had sort of two moments of revelation about trade. One of them, which seemed terribly relevant but maybe a little less so now, was the work early 2010s on the China shock, where we started to realize that, hey, you know, the problems of adjustment and dislocation that come from rapid globalization are a lot bigger than… you know, economists have always understood that there were distributional issues, but they’re a lot bigger. And that, that was, that was revelatory and a bit of a shock. Um, but I think it’s actually not the core of the story now. And, and for me, the, the revelation was, um... It’s a little odd, but I’m gonna give you this, uh, really offbeat point at which I realized that we’re not getting this back, which was actually when Russia invaded Ukraine, when we realized, hey, this rules-based order, not just about trade, but everything.

We, sort of had taken it for granted that, all of the old stuff, all of the old demons had been banished. That we weren’t gonna have outright war in Europe. We weren’t gonna have countries just plain exploiting their power over trade for geopolitical gain. And, we now realize, I think I realized that, hey, all of that, all the things that we thought were fundamentals about the twenty-first century economy were actually basically dependent upon a benevolent hegemon. Not totally benevolent, not totally hegemonic, but still a lot of it depended upon basically the United States, which enforced the rules and obeyed its own rules for the most part. And, well, we’re not in that world anymore, not in Kansas anymore, among other places.

So it’s-- now it’s a much tougher world out there

Soumaya: Can I just add that I think economists have been on a sort of journey as well, right? Um, you know, and, and, and, you know, starting point, the starting point being, you know, your, your theory, right? We thought that one of the benefits of trade was, you know, agglomeration, right?

You know, huge efficiencies, huge economies of scale, that, you know, created these gains from trade and what we’ve seen now, I think, is that those agglomeration benefits are real, but in a world where we’re not friends with everyone and we don’t trust everything, they come with risk.

Where do you feel like economics has, has, has gone?

Paul K: Well yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. In some ways, the models were already there, and we understood that there are big advantages to agglomeration, although I think they’ve turned out to be bigger than we realized. And they, they really do... You know, I’ve been on my own little journey here about Europe versus the United States, and an astonishing amount is driven by, loosely speaking, the fact that Silicon Valley is on the US side of the Atlantic, right?

It’s just that there are some agglomerations that color all of the numbers. But in a world of open markets, agglomeration rules. Texas doesn’t obsess about the fact that California controls a lot of the IT sector. Why should Europe obsess about the fact that the United States controls a lot of it? But that was not the world that we’re living in now, where these things become very real. So the whole, Everything changes once you stop assuming that it doesn’t fundamtelly matter where stuff is produced. We’re talking a lot about high tech, but, if we talk about Chinese manufacturing ... It’s not just that China is good at a lot of stuff. China has a whole industrial ecosystem that gives them tremendous amounts of leverage in the world. I mean, China isn’t the only place that has rare earth deposits, but it’s the only place that has the industrial ecosystem that can process them at this point. And so that altogether, that creates a world where Section 232 and I think Article XXI of the GATT on national security -- I’m always testing my acronyms and numbers, uh, knowledge. But anyway, I thought if you’d asked me fifteen years ago, I would have said, “Well, all this national security stuff, that’s just an excuse. National security is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” But actually not now.

Soumaya: Yep

Paul K: So okay. Any other sort of revelations beyond the fact that, that it, it’s a scary world with nasty people in it?

Soumaya: So I have one which is, you know, you mentioned the, the China shock literature, right?

Paul K: Yeah

Soumaya: So this is this collection of papers showing the effects of, of, of imports from China.

Paul K: Right

Soumaya: And one paper that I thought was super interesting that came up as we were researching this book was, um, was about what happened in Canada, right?

When, when there was liberalization as part of, um,

Paul K: Oh Yeah,

Soumaya: Was it NAFTA or was it

Chad Bown: CUSFTA.

Soumaya: CUSFTA?

Soumaya: Yeah, so the predecessor, to, to NAFTA. Um, and actually, you know, this, this research found that, that the effects when, were really quite dissimilar from those China shock effects. People were able to adjust. There were export opportunities created by that trade deal.

People moved into those, those other industries. There’s also research looking at, um, you know, uh, liberalization and populism in, in Europe, right? And there seems to be this relationship between places that have stronger social safety nets, um, and the switch to right-wing parties. Um, and so, you know, I think one, one point that, that I would want to make is, you know, it’s important not to go to over-interpret what’s going on now and to kind of see it as this idea that, you know, all trade liberalization, you know, has losers and, and there’s just nothing we can do to, to address those, right?

There are cases where actually import liberalization, you know, we, we could cope okay with it, and economies adjusted and social safety nets worked. So I think it’s, you know, it’s important not to kind of over-correct after some of those instances where there was, you know, real pain in the past.

Paul K: I’m trying to remember how much in the book you really talk about the political economy of these-- the protectionist backlash. ‘Cause that is actually-- not as, you know, there was a simple story, “Oh, trade produces lots of losers, and now the public won’t have it.” And that’s not actually the story as far as I can make out. what did you say? I’m trying to remember the actual way you put it.

Soumaya: Chad do you remember, or shall I?

Chad Bown: No. Yeah. I mean, I-- Well, I mean, the, the story is that it’s complicated,right?

Paul K: Yeah

Chad Bown: And voters don’t, you know, kind of respond as cleanly as, you know, one might expect to what the economic implications are for them, right? And so one of the more recent China shock papers, in fact, has looked at the longer run impacts of the China shock and the reapplication of the tariffs in the first Trump administration, and has found that they didn’t really do the job of, you know, helping workers in those regions, right?

Didn’t improve employment or anything like that. But it did help President Trump’s party, in subsequent elections, right?

So there is maybe something to the idea that, well, okay, he may not be helping me, uh, you know, get a better job or, or my employment process, at least he’s fighting on my behalf, right?

And so what that means is it’s really messy to draw these links between all of this stuff in the political economy context.

Paul K: Okay, I didn’t know that. I somehow missed that. I know you did mention it, but it’s not so much if you look at kind of the vector of, of real wage changes or whatever, of employment changes, that that’s not, not really the story. It’s more about attitudes, sense of whether you’re led by somebody who’s standing up to foreigners.

I think in the end, the protectionism in the U.S. and I think in Europe is not really a, a mass public groundswell. There are parties who exploit it, but it’s not really this sort of simple deterministic, you know, losers fight back, and this is why we have a problem.

A lot of it more has to do with, again, the, the complexities of the political process.

Soumaya: Yeah, and so you can see this in, in, you know, both what’s going on in the US and, and also the EU. So if you think about what Trump did, right, he, he had to do this by using and arguably abusing, um, you know, arcane bits of US law, uh, because he didn’t have the support of Congress to, to apply these tariffs, right?

And so he kind of ran roughshod over the, the democratic process there. Um, uh, you know, in obviously in the case of IEEPA, that turned out to be overturned by the Supreme Court. and, you know, during the first Trump administration, companies were complaining quite a lot. I think during the second, those complaints were a little quieter. That’s probably some combination of, you know, worrying about retribution, but also maybe in some cases they adapted, right? And so I think one lesson of that episode could be that you may not have the constituents for protection at the beginning, um, but you could, you could develop those constituents if that protection is there for long enough. And then the contrast is with, is with what’s going on in Europe right now, right? There’s a huge discussion about whether the EU should essentially do more of what the US is doing and protect itself. And it’s just extraordinarily difficult, even though you’ve got these really acute problems, right?

German exporters being, you know, crushed in, in, in third markets. You know, the car industry really struggling to cope with that Chinese competition. and even then, right, even in the face of these really extreme Chinese export trends, even then it’s really, really difficult to get a consensus, right?

And so, it’s a question of, you know, can Europe ever act as decisively as the Trump administration? Maybe there’s a middle ground between kind of hopeless inaction and kind of maybe overaction? But yeah, that just speaks to that issue.

Paul K: Okay, we could go on. I actually just say quickly, the importance of institutional details, including the details of legislation that people wrote ago, uh, that were not intended for the purposes to which it’s being applied. It’s, it’s amazing. I mean, the fact that, that, uh, that Section 121 is written the way it, it is, and that IEEPA is written the way it is, suddenly turned out to be you know, the fate of the world is hinging on more or less accidental wording of decades-old legislation. It’s kind of amazing.

Soumaya: I was outraged when I, an economist, was the economics correspondent of The Economist magazine, started covering trade. I thought this was gonna be all about, you know, big intellectual battles of which model worked best, and actually, I essentially became a lawyer, um, working out, you know, what, what does the Section 301 statute mean?

What’s 232? How is this compatible with the World Trade Organization rules? You know, it’s, it, you, you get stuck in the legalese quite quickly, but as you say, these, these details really, really matter. Apologies for all of the lawyers. I’m not actually a lawyer.

Paul K: I knew somebody who taught a trade policy course long ago, but she would return term papers with, uh, just right at the top, a Y-H-T-M-A-A-I-Y-P, which was, “You have too many acronyms and abbreviations in your paper.” anyway, So, you know, so if we’re talking about Europe responding, taking the extreme constraints on European action, you know, how would you go to the Berlaymont in Brussels, and, and you’re gonna tell the European Commission, “Here’s, here’s what you should do in response to,” I think you said that America is a pirate and China is a warship, but anyway, they have these two quite different but also, but very seriously threatening, aggressive trade policy partners.

Two of the world’s three economic superpowers are not behaving the way they used to, and the most obvious case is, okay, you’re the, you’re sort of running the third power. What, what should you be doing?

Chad Bown: Well, um, engaging, right? And I think, uh, you know, as Soumaya indicated, Europe has been a little bit slow, uh, to engage in the, you know, are we willing to, “can we fight a trade war?” question. But they do seem to be there now. One of the really interesting lines for Europe at the moment is this issue of electric vehicles and the automotive sector.

Um, and what’s fascinating is, is, is the following: they’re essentially trying to see if they can learn from the Chinese model to encourage Chinese firms to build cars in Europe, right? So what was the Chinese model? The Chinese model was forced technology transfer. What made them successful at the time, or partly what made them successful was, you know, back in the early 2000s, there were a lot of Western automakers the United States, Japan, Korea, Europe, that all wanted access to China’s 1.4 billion potential drivers, right?

And China had high tariffs at the time, so exporting into China was really hard. China said, “We want you to build those cars here, and not only do we want you to build those cars here, but we want you to form joint ventures with local Chinese firms, and then teach them effectively, uh, how to make cars themselves,” right?

And partly, and they were successful. And part of the reason why they were successful, you know, we think, is there were lots and lots of these Western automakers competing against each other, all seeking to get access to that Chinese market. So you fast-forward today, and you say, well, okay, can Europe do the same thing, um, with respect to the Chinese technological leaders today in, in battery electric vehicles?

And while there may be, you know, at the moment, lots and lots and lots of EV manufacturers in China, um, BYD is the dominant one. Um, and behind that is the battery makers, which are BYD and CATL, right? And to, to sort of thwart that possibility, right, the idea that, well, maybe Europe could exploit, you know, divisions amongst Chinese firms and negotiate to get them to come into Europe, partner with German automakers, teach them how to make battery electric vehicles better, locate production here, create lots of jobs, the Chinese government has already set up a system of licensing for its technology and saying, “No, BYD, CATL, you know, these companies, you’re not allowed to just go out and negotiate with the Europeans.

We’re gonna be the one. The Chinese government is gonna be the one controlling access to that technology from foreigners, right?” So on one hand, you have the Europeans maybe seeking to learn from the Chinese model, and the other hand, you know, the, the Chinese already going a step beyond and saying, “Yeah, we’re not gonna let you learn from our model and, and get those jobs there in, in Europe.

Here’s how we’re gonna thwart those kinds of things.”

Paul K: Wow. And that’s really instructive because, you know, all of us spent years learning about why government intervention in trade is almost always a bad thing and how, um, uh, letting people buy wherever they want and not, not, certainly not blocking possible profitable opportunities is, is clearly going to hurt your country.

And now we’re sort of saying, “Oh, you know, this dirigiste, overall control.” And in this case, it’s not just geopolitical. It’s, well, you know, China can preserve effectively its technology advantage, even though it’s not fancy technology. And because, because they can close off the technology transfer.

So but you’re, you’re saying that basically, as I understand, that at least the EU, presumably Mark Carney’s middle powers need to be at least a little bit more like the Chinese.

Chad Bown: I think that’s right. I mean, I think, you know, one of the lessons that we took away from the book is we all need to learn a lot from each other, from the other players. But especially, you know, I think in the Western system we need to learn from China. That does not mean we need to adopt the Chinese model, right?

And so please don’t get me wrong But there are elements of what China does when it does industrial policy, when it does, in that earlier example, the transfer of technology, that if you wanna have those similar kind of outcomes be successful, you really do need to see what it was about the Chinese system that allowed them to be successful in those instances.

You may not be able to replicate it, right? So you need to, you need to learn those kinds of lessons as well. But yes, learn important lessons from China.

Paul K: So, I mean, EVs in Europe, I mean, the United States has decided that we’re going to have coal-burning cars or something. But, um, EVs in Europe, there is a question, should they even be trying? Shouldn’t they, say “Okay, if the Chinese are gonna sell you cheap vehicles, why not just drive cheap electric vehicles and, uh, work on your European, uh, comparative advantage, whatever that may be?”

Soumaya: I mean, this is actually a, a debate in the US, right? You’ve got some saying, you know, “Why won’t you let me buy a cheap EV? These, these things are…

Paul K: Right

Soumaya: …karaoke bars on wheels. I want a, I want a piece of that equipment.” Um, and you know, the arguments against are in-- you know, include one, this is actually an area where Chad and I had quite heated debate as we were writing the book, as Chad was much more in favor of banning things than, than I was. Um, and you know, that relates to some of the security risks around, you know, having Chinese software run some of these vehicles, the risks of surveillance, even being able to turn off the car remotely. Um, Chad was more gung ho about banning vehicles because of that concern than, than I was.

I wanted, you know… Surely it’s possible to come up with some kind of technical test, um, because, if we start banning cars on that basis, then, you know, what about smartphones, right? Last time I checked, there was quite a lot of electronic equipment that was made in China that could, in theory, carry the same risks.

So are we, are we really gonna be inconsistent? So there’s the security piece of that. There’s also just the political economy piece of that, right? Which is that, you know, the, the car industry is massively important in Europe. The political consequences of letting all of those smaller companies just shut down would be potentially devastating. And then third, there’s a kind of bigger argument about industrial capacity. When we don’t trust each other, is it really wise to be cutting manufacturing, or accepting the loss of manufacturing? Could there be some connection to innovation? The evidence on this isn’t as concrete as we’d like. But you know, is there something? Do the folks who worry about manufacturing having some kind of national security advantage, do they have a point, right? In some kind of heated conflict, do you actually need the capacity to scale up quickly? So actually having that industrial might is important.

Now, that doesn’t mean manufacturing jobs, but you know, I’m talking about overall manufacturing.

Paul K: You wrote the book obviously before the Iran war, and, but you do talk about supply chains and the threat of cutoffs, and that now seems immensely more real. I mean, how much does that change the way we think about, about trade wars?

Chad Bown: So I think, Iran and, and Strait of Hormuz, right? Obviously, from Iran’s perspective, the war, the physical war, the military aspects of it have to be absolutely devastating. But at the same time, they have been able to weaponize through their export restrictions, you know, imposed on not allowing things through the Strait of Hormuz, in a way that is, you know, orders of magnitude bigger than the size of their economy would otherwise suggest, right?

And so that’s part of the new world in which we live. Sometimes you have those kinds of supply chain disruptions, um, that can come up, um, by, you know, not recognizing just how serious those choke points are. I think there were a lot of folks that probably did recognize how serious those potential choke points were.

But as we have seen, through what’s happened since February, the world is now, you know, facing the consequences of, of those actions.

Soumaya: So just building on that, I think what we’ve seen so far with the Strait of Hormuz is that some of those disruptions haven’t hit yet, and that’s because companies have been doing, you know, one of the policies we, we discuss in the book, which is stockpiling, right? So we’ve had inventories, and they’ve been running them down. When the crisis first started, uh, you know, folks were asking how bad could this get? And the response was, “Well, as long as it doesn’t last for very long, it’ll be okay,” right? Because there are those buffers. And so, you know, the crisis, I think, highlights the importance of having those buffers, but also I think that, you know, there is a point about substitution. So, so, um, if you think about the drop in oil flowing out of the, the Strait of Hormuz, a third of that has been made up with oil flowing out through other ports, right? And so one of, one of the lessons here is that, you know, when thinking about your vulnerabilities, actually there’s always some slack in the system.

There are always some, some opportunities for substitution. They may not be, you know, fast, it may not be easy, but actually one of the lessons from history in extreme situations is that we tend to be a bit more adaptable than we sometimes fear. That said, obviously if this disruption goes on, there’s pain being felt, right?

We shouldn’t then swing too far in the other direction and say, “Oh, well, there’s no point in applying export controls because we can always adapt away.” That’s not true. As we are seeing now in, in, you know, some of the, the poorer countries who are on the front end of this, and as we will be seeing later these weapons are pretty, are pretty impactful and pretty dangerous.

Paul K: What struck me though, I mean, the Strait of Hormuz is a, it’s a, it’s a physical choke point, which is helpful for illustrating the concept, but it turns out there are all of these de facto choke points like rare earths, like, well, semiconductors. I mean, it’s not that so much stuff passes through the Strait of Taiwan, it’s the fact that basically everything runs on chips made in this island. So yeah. And you do talk about this. I mean, right there, there is definitely a case for policies that even at some cost make sure that critical stuff is made in some quantity in places that are, are less subject to this kind of disruption.

Gosh, for many years I was co-author of the bestselling international economics textbook. I don’t think we mentioned supply chains, export controls, any of that. I probably haven’t yet. I’d probably have to get that in the next edition. But anyway,

Soumaya: No don’t worry, you don’t have to. You can just assign our book as the top-up, and then it’ll be fine.

Paul K: That’s right No, definitely. Y-H-S-T-M-A-A-I-Y-P. No, you’re actually very good. I’m not doing the acronyms and, and, and the numbers, but it is something. Actually, I’ll give a quick quiz. Uh, do you know the answer? You probably do, but the, um, you know, all these numbered trade things, what act are they numbers from?

Soumaya: 74? 1974?

Paul K: Well, the answer is they’re from several different acts.

Soumaya: Ok well that was a trick question!

Paul K: So it’s really horrible that we, we’ve got a 122 and a 232 and, and they’re not from the same law, so it’s totally obscure. But anyway.

Soumaya: Should we wrap up here?

Paul K: Let me just ask last question, then I’ll let you go. Do you have a view-- how does this pan out? You’ve given some, some good advice to people who are not Donald Trump, effectively. I mean, maybe Trump would benefit from, but he’s not going to read it. And probably not Xi Jinping, but how do you think this shakes out? It’s, you know, it’s possible that, that Mark Carney and his middle powers or Ursula von der Leyen and the EU leadership will in fact think about these issues and, and quite possibly read your book, as they should. Um, what does the world look like in five years?

Soumaya: Okay. well look, I’m gonna be real. Um, I don’t think there’s gonna be some grand bargain, um, in the next five years, right? Which goes back to my point earlier about the rules aren’t gonna save us. And that underpinned the stability that we had for so long, right? That’s really the only outcome that would reduce the chaos, right?

And so without that, we’re kind of in this messy world where everyone is gonna be following this rule book that we’ve laid out. Everyone’s gonna be trying to stockpile, to subsidize, to, to look to see what everyone else is doing, to see what lessons they can learn. that’s gonna be, you know, pretty chaotic, I think, the chances are that there’s gonna be misinterpretation of, of what’s happening.

So just, you know, take an example, stockpiling is one of the main tools that, that countries are now deploying to try to protect themselves against, you know, weaponized shortages. but you know, there was a hearing too long ago where, where one of the US committee was quizzing experts on, on whether stockpiling was a sign that a country was about to attack, right?

You’ve got China building up massive stockpiles. What if that breeds suspicion, um, that there’s some kind of military preparation? And what if Western stockpiling breeds that suspicion on the other side, right? So you have this real risk of these awful self-fulfilling dynamics. so, you know, do all the nice things, right?

Communicate, try to coordinate with your friends, engage, be as transparent as you can, um, put in the effort, spend the money, subsidize, stockpile, do all of the things that are hard. but you know, you’re gonna have to put in, put in the effort and be consistent about it, because the dynamics are such that in a trade war, your adversary is gonna be taking advantage of any moment of weakness to, to try to strengthen their position.

Chad Bown: And I would say for me,, the only things I would add to that is, you know, to build upon the, please work with your partners and allies, right? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to be fighting with them distracting them away from the really hard task at hand of fighting the real trade war that needs to be fought, which is dealing with these challenges with China.

And, every ounce of time that Europe or Canada or Japan or Korea has to deal with American tariffs, demands for, you know, invest here in my energy sector or something like that, instead of focusing on how do we most quickly, at lowest cost possible to deal with the affordability concerns, diversify some of these supply chains away from China while China is actively trying to prevent us from diversifying those supply chains away from us.

We need to do that kind of thing together. So focus on the trade wars that need to be fought, and let’s put the other trade wars to the side.

Paul K: Okay. That’s actually interesting because we’re basically saying that the, if not full on conflict, that trade war with China is basically gonna happen, at least a cold trade war. And that if only the United States would stop doing what it’s doing, that we could actually form an effective or might be able to form an effective precautionary bloc against it, which is optimistic. I guess that means, particularly if we get some better management back on the home front, we might actually be able to resolve this not too badly. That’s, that’s what passes for wild optimism in the year 2026. We’re all optimists now. This is, this great, sunny, uplands await

Paul K: All right. Well, Soumaya, Chad, thanks so much, thanks for the book, which is tremendously enlightening, and thanks for the not totally dire analysis at the end. Let’s, let’s, uh, hope for the best, and the best way to make it work is for everybody to read the book

Chad Bown: Thanks, Paul

Soumaya: Great advice.

Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem. We’ve looked at a variety of construction productivity metrics, both for the US and for countries around the world, and found that construction productivity almost always rises much less in construction than it does in industries like manufacturing; often, it doesn’t improve at all. We’ve analyzed trends in construction costs in the US and around the world, and noted that construction almost never gets any cheaper: construction costs almost always rise at or above the level of overall inflation. And we’ve considered the most obvious strategy for solving this problem — moving the construction process into a factory — and we saw that the cost savings from prefabricated construction are frequently much less than hoped, often never materializing at all.

Now that we’ve mapped the contours of the problem, we can begin to explore its deeper nature to understand why, specifically, construction productivity is so resistant to being improved, and why construction costs stubbornly refuse to fall.

We’ll start by looking at one of the most important mechanisms by which production processes can get cheaper: economies of scale. Many processes have lower unit costs as production volumes rise, thanks to a variety of scaling effects: fixed costs can be spread more thinly, equipment gets cheaper on a per-unit basis due to area-volume relationships, improved production methods are developed as a result of learning-by-doing, and so on. However, in construction these effects are modest at best, even in sectors like homebuilding with very large production volumes.

In homebuilding, we’ll see that the limits to these economies of scale are in large part dictated by the nature of the production process. Economies of scale work by eliminating the difference between the costs of the raw inputs to a process and the final costs of production. In a highly efficient, high-volume production process, the costs of the output will gradually approach the costs of the material inputs. But in conventional homebuilding in the US, this difference is already small, giving scale-based strategies relatively little margin to close.

Economies of scale in homebuilding

We’ll examine economies of scale in construction through the lens of housing construction in the US. For many sectors of construction, difficulty in achieving economies of scale could be attributed to the fact that only a small number of buildings of a particular type get built in the US each year. There were, for instance, only 10 skyscrapers taller than 200 meters built in the US in 2025. Semiconductor fabs, urban subways, and airports are similarly built in very small numbers. It’s hard to achieve economies of scale when there’s no scale to be had. Houses, on the other hand, are built in very large numbers. There were over 1.3 million housing starts in the US last year, including 942,000 single-family homes. This isn’t large compared to other types of manufactured goods — the US consumed over 7 billion cans of vegetables in 2025, for instance — but it’s certainly large enough for economies of scale to appear.

However, evidence suggests that homebuilding in the US exhibits relatively modest economies of scale. For one, the level of concentration in the homebuilding industry is relatively small: housing construction in the US is done by a large number of comparatively small firms. A 2022 study by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) found that the US had over 65,000 firms engaged in homebuilding, and that even the 100 largest firms combined were responsible for less than 50% of the homebuilding market. In homebuilding, the four largest firms held around 18% of the market, compared to 90% in aircraft manufacturing, 86% in wireless telephone service, and 58% in automobile manufacturing. Concentration in the homebuilding industry has been rising over time (primarily due to the growth of the two largest builders, Lennar and D.R. Horton), but it’s still much lower than in many other industries. This level of concentration isn’t what you’d expect to see if economies of scale in homebuilding were substantial.

Another, earlier JCHS study that looked at US homebuilding in the late 1990s and early 2000s found that construction costs were actually higher for the largest US homebuilders than for smaller US homebuilders. It also found that large and small homebuilders had similar gross margins on homebuilding (the difference between the costs to produce a home and what they sold it for). If there were major economies of scale in homebuilding, all else being equal we’d instead expect to see larger firms have lower construction costs and greater gross margins.

More recent data suggest these trends have continued. If we look at the gross margins of public homebuilders, we see virtually no relationship between gross margins and number of homes produced. Lennar, which built over 80,000 homes in 2025, has similar gross margins and average home selling prices to United Homes Group, which sold just 1,192 homes in 2025. LGI Homes and D.R. Horton had nearly identical selling prices and gross margins, but the former sold 4,685 homes in 2025 and the latter sold over 84,000. Looking at different years doesn’t alter the picture much.

This isn’t a smoking gun, as there are other reasons why larger firms might not have higher gross margins than smaller firms. Large firms might be deliberately selling at a lower price to try to capture or maintain market share, as Lennar states it does. But it’s consistent with there being few economies of scale in the homebuilding industry.

In his history of the US homebuilding industry, homebuilder Ned Eichler describes the economies of scale available to homebuilders through the end of the 20th century. While he notes that homebuilders building several hundred homes per year could achieve substantial cost advantages compared to much smaller builders, there appeared to be little advantage in increasing scale beyond that. Writing in the 1980s, Eichler noted that “[n]ot even the largest firm has any of the advantages of dominant companies in other fields… What little technology exists is available to all.”

In the late 1940s and 1950s, as large-scale merchant builders (100 units per year or more) became the dominant suppliers of homes, most of the postwar improvements in production organization and techniques were made. As unit costs began to rise rapidly in the 1960s, because of higher quality, high land and site development costs, and inflation, there was heightened interest in the possibility of another round of increased efficiency from greater scale and technological breakthroughs. Many firms did grow, mostly by geographic expansion. Several broke out of the 100 to 1000 unit range to annual volumes over 5000. By 1980 US Home brought its unit production to 15,000. However, there were no significant changes in technology or even methodology. Nor is there clear evidence that US Home, Ryan, Pulte, or other multicity builders have yet achieved economies of scale.

Today, large homebuilders continue to use the same basic homebuilding methods that much smaller builders do, and builders like Lennar and D.R. Horton effectively subcontract all of their actual homebuilding to local contractors. (Lennar’s 2025 annual report, for instance, notes that “[w]e hire subcontractors for site improvements and virtually all of the work involved in the construction of homes.”) Large homebuilders do note that they’re able to achieve some scale economies by getting volume discounts on material purchases, but evidence suggests that these savings are relatively modest. Group purchasing organizations, such as CBUSA, pool material orders together in order to receive volume discounts from suppliers; CBUSA boasts that it gives independent builders “the purchasing power of a top 10 National Builder.”1 But the savings it offers works out to around $9,500 per house for the builders who use it, or around 6% of the material costs of an average new home.

You sometimes see claims that economies of scale in homebuilding could be achieved with assembly line-style construction, building hundreds or even thousands of homes at once on enormous tracts the way the US did in the 1940s and 50s. But evidence suggests that savings from this style of construction are somewhat modest, and may not materialize at all. Older versions of Craftsman’s National Construction Estimator provide percentage cost deductions for some tasks if they’re done on “tract work,” but these reductions are typically modest (10-20%) and are only available for a small handful of tasks.2 (One exception is carpentry, which does see large labor cost reductions for tract construction in some editions, but this on its own isn’t enough to shift the overall cost of a house substantially.) Likewise, Levitt and Sons famously built thousands of houses in enormous “Levittowns” using a sort of “reverse assembly line”: worker teams would go from house to house, performing a particular set of tasks and then moving on to the next one. But the cost of Levittown houses doesn’t appear to be all that different from those built by other, much smaller homebuilders at the time.

Economies of scale in manufactured homes

We can sharpen our understanding of economies of scale in homebuilding by looking at one particular subset of housing construction: manufactured homes. Manufactured homes, formerly known as mobile homes, are built using largely the same technology as conventional homes, but instead of being built on-site, the homes are produced in a factory, mounted to a steel chassis, and transported to their final location via truck. Roughly 100,000 manufactured homes are produced in the US each year.

Manufactured homes are a useful lens for understanding economies of scale in homebuilding, because they eliminate so many factors that might be expected to restrict them. Economies of scale require repetition — making approximately the same thing over and over again — and such repetition is particularly achievable with manufactured homes:

Conventional homebuilding is subject to different building code requirements in different jurisdictions, depending on what version of the code has been adopted. But manufactured homes are built to one set of national requirements, the federal HUD code.
Conventional homes are constructed on-site, and those sites might have substantial variation between them. But manufactured homes are produced repetitively within controlled factory locations.
Conventional home construction takes place on constantly changing jobsites, with constantly changing construction crews, a constant churn that might disrupt opportunities for learning-by-doing. Manufactured home construction, which takes place within a single location, should be less susceptible to this sort of disruption.

There’s some evidence for greater economies of scale in manufactured home construction compared to conventional homebuilding. Specifically, the manufactured home industry shows substantially higher concentration than the conventional homebuilding industry. The three largest manufactured home producers are Clayton Homes (49,000 units per year), Cavco (about 20,000 units per year), and Champion (roughly 26,000 units per year).3 Together, they make up roughly 90% of the US manufactured home market, similar to the level of concentration we saw in other industries.

However, despite this level of concentration, actual production economies of scale in manufactured home building appear relatively modest. We can see this by looking at the operations of four public manufactured home companies. The first two, Champion and Cavco, produce around 26,000 and 20,000 homes per year, respectively. The third, Legacy Housing, makes around 1,700 manufactured homes a year. And the last, Nobility Homes, makes just a few hundred manufactured homes each year.

Each of these homebuilders is catering to broadly similar segments of the market, since manufactured homes tend to be purchased by lower-income buyers. Their annual reports all note that the typical manufactured home buyer has a low household income, though they disagree on the exact number – Cavco thinks it’s less than $40,000, Champion thinks it’s less than $60,000, and Legacy thinks it’s less than $75,000. As we saw with conventional homebuilders, there doesn’t seem to be much relationship between gross margins on factory homebuilding and production volume. Nobility homes (391 shipments in 2025) and Legacy homes (1703 shipments in 2025) actually have better gross margins on home sales (32% and 28% respectively) than the much larger Champion and Cavco (27% and 23%).

More importantly, all four of these manufacturers use essentially identical production methods. Nobility Homes has one factory in Florida, Legacy has two factories in Texas and one in Georgia, and Champion and Cavco each have several dozen factories spread across different states. These factories are similar: each is typically 100 to 200 thousand square feet, employs 100 to 300 people, and produces several hundred homes a year. In other words, there do not appear to be large economies of scale at the factory level. Even relatively modest production volumes (20,000 units annually) get spread among dozens of different factories. By comparison, a single modern car factory will produce several hundred thousand cars a year.

There are some exceptions to this: Clayton Homes recently announced renovations to an existing factory that will allow it to produce 3,000 homes annually. But overall Clayton fits the basic pattern, as production of its 49,000 homes is spread amongst 41 production facilities.

Within the manufactured home facilities, we see the adoption of various efficiency-enhancing strategies compared to how work would be done on a conventional jobsite. As with Ford’s assembly line, work is arranged so that tasks take place at worker height, eliminating extraneous movements like bending or stretching. With conventional home construction, workers first complete the outside shell of the house to create a waterproof environment to work in, but this means the remaining work must be done within the cramped interior of the partially completed house. Manufactured homes, built under a factory roof, aren’t subject to this restriction and can be built from the inside out. Permanent stations can be set up with equipment for various repetitive operations, such as cabinet assembly. (We see this same sort of strategy adopted in large-block ship construction, with as much work as possible done outside the ship on prefabricated blocks, minimizing the amount of work that needs to be done in the cramped conditions of the assembled ship.)

However, the work remains a highly labor-intensive operation. Workers are in large part doing the same tasks that they would be in conventional construction; those tasks have just been made somewhat easier to perform. Equipment use is likewise somewhat modest: we don’t see the huge arrays of robot arms or automated machinery that we see in car manufacturing or other mass production industries. Per their annual reports, the value of the equipment that Nobility Homes, Legacy Housing, and Cavco operate is just one-third to half the value of the actual buildings. At a car manufacturer like Ford, by contrast, the value of the equipment and tooling is over three times as much as the value of the buildings that contain them.

Part of the reason manufactured homebuilders use a large number of low-capacity factories is high transportation costs. Both Nobility Homes and Cavco note in their annual reports that the cost-effective shipping range for their products is around 350 miles (around a day’s drive). This is a result of dollar density — the value of the product divided by the volume or mass of it. Products with high dollar density, like electronics, are very valuable in proportion to the amount of space they take up and can be effectively shipped long distances; iPhones can be made in a factory in China and then shipped all over the world. Products with low dollar density, like toilet paper, have low prices in proportion to the amount of space they take up, and are harder to ship long distances. If it costs $2,000 to ship a container from China to the US, that $2,000 will be a small fraction of the value of the cargo if the container is filled with iPhones, but a large fraction of the value of the cargo if it’s full of lumber or kitty litter. The lower the dollar density of a product, the less cost-effective it is to ship it long distances. Manufactured homes have very low dollar density, and thus can’t be shipped very far cost effectively.

Dollar density of various products, via The Origins of Efficiency.

But transportation costs can only explain part of this distributed manufacturing strategy for manufactured homes. For one, if there were substantial economies of scale at work, it would be worth it for manufacturers to ship longer distances in spite of the higher costs; transportation costs are proportionately high for manufactured homes, but they’re not that high, on the order of a few dollars per mile. Transportation costs thus suggest a sort of ceiling as to the extent of economies of scale that can be achieved for manufactured homes. For another, manufactured home producers often have multiple facilities much closer together than the cost-effective driving distance. Legacy Housing has factories in Commerce, Texas, and Fort Worth, Texas, that are around 100 miles apart. Cavco has three factories in the Phoenix metro area, two factories in North Carolina that are 120 miles apart, and two factories in Georgia that are less than 75 miles apart. If there were substantial economies of scale at the factory level, we’d expect these nearby factories to be combined into larger operations.

Thus even in a homebuilding sector with many tailwinds enabling economies of scale, scaling effects still appear to be relatively minor. Manufactured housing is produced in a controlled factory environment and built to the standards of a single national code, both of which should enable the highly repetitive production necessary for capturing economies of scale. And yet the scale of most production facilities is low, factories employ little in the way of high-volume automated equipment, and very small-scale operators producing a few hundred homes a year appear roughly as competitive as companies producing tens of thousands of homes a year. These patterns suggest that there’s something about the homebuilding process itself that makes capturing economies of scale difficult.

What prevents economies of scale in homebuilding?

The easiest way to understand the difficulties of achieving economies of scale in homebuilding is to look at the relationship between input cost and output cost in various industries.

The graph below shows what’s known as the “crack spread” for gasoline production in the US Gulf Coast between 2014 and 2019. The crack spread is the difference between the price of crude oil and the wholesale price of gasoline. It essentially tells us how much margin oil refineries have to work with — how much they can afford to spend on the various production processes per barrel of oil processed. We can see that the crack spread for gasoline was typically around $15 a barrel for most of this period, compared to a crude oil price of around $50-70. In other words, the ratio of the price of wholesale gasoline to the price of crude oil was around 1.2 to 1.3.

An oil refinery is an enormous, expensive process facility that costs billions of dollars to construct. But because refineries produce such a large amount of gasoline and other petrochemicals, this cost can be spread very thinly across the refinery’s output, and the price of the final products is not all that much higher than the costs of the material inputs.

Likewise, consider car manufacturing. A few years ago, car industry analyst Munro & Associates conducted an analysis of the production costs of BMW’s i3 electric car. The report breaks down the various costs of production for different parts of the car, letting you see the cost of the inputs, the number and cost of the various operations performed on it, and the cost of the completed assembly.

We can see that the ratio of output costs to material input costs is higher than with gasoline production, around 1.8 on average. For complex manufactured goods that require a lot of distinct operations (the motor assembly alone has almost 5,000 parts and almost 30,000 assembly steps), it’s hard to achieve an output-to-input ratio as low as can be seen in a scaled continuous chemical production process.

More generally, any factory or production process will take some physical inputs, perform some set of transformations on them, and produce some series of outputs. If those transformations are involved or complex, requiring a lot of expensive machinery or labor-intensive operations, the ratio of the cost of the outputs to the cost of the inputs might be quite high. But even with a large number of complicated steps or very expensive equipment, this ratio can be driven down by taking advantage of economies of scale: spreading the fixed costs of your equipment out over a larger production volume, or using higher-capacity equipment or processes that has lower per-unit costs. As production volumes rise and a process gets more efficient, the ratio of the output costs to the input costs should theoretically approach one.

Elon Musk calls the ratio of the final cost of a product to the cost of its raw materials the “idiot index.” A high idiot index suggests a highly inefficient process with a lot of wasteful operations that could be dramatically improved. A low idiot index suggests a process with much less room for substantial improvements. (It was allegedly the high idiot index of rockets that convinced Musk he could beat existing aerospace companies and that SpaceX was worth pursuing.)4

Armed with this concept, let’s look at the cost breakdown of a typical US single-family home, courtesy of Craftsman’s National Construction Estimator. The chart below shows the hard costs of construction: what it takes to put up the actual, physical building.

The most important takeaway here is that the hard costs of constructing a single-family home are roughly 50% labor and 50% materials. This means that the ratio of the costs of the output to the costs of the physical inputs (drywall, lumber, concrete, etc.) is around 2. This is a very low ratio: it’s only slightly higher than the ratio we saw with various BMW i3 subassemblies.

With car manufacturing, this low ratio is achieved by way of scale, spreading the costs of expensive equipment and hundreds of workers over a very large output. If BMW tried to assemble its i3 cars one at a time, outside of a factory, the output-to-input ratio and the overall costs would be vastly higher, the same way that the craft method of car building was far more expensive than Ford’s mass production methods.

Part of the i3 production line circa 2014, via YouTube.

In home construction, however, this low ratio is a product of the fact that the amount of transformation taking place on the inputs is relatively modest. It takes a relatively small amount of labor and equipment to transform lumber, drywall, concrete, shingles, and other building materials into a finished home.

The fact that the ratio between costs of constructing a home and the costs of the various materials is already so low is fundamentally what makes achieving substantial economies of scale difficult. For complex manufactured goods, when this ratio is high — when there are a lot of labor-intensive operations or transformations required to turn input materials into a final product — the strategy for efficiency improvement is relatively straightforward. Build some machine to perform some particular task, sequence it together with other machines performing different tasks, and then use those machines to produce as much output as possible. The machines might be expensive to develop and build, and you’ll need new, expensive workers to keep the automated systems running. But with high production volumes this trade-off is worth it: all these costs get spread out thinly, and the ratio of output costs to input costs trends downward. This is broadly what Ford did for production of the Model T, and it’s how production for things like lightbulbs evolved in the early 20th century.

But when the ratio between output costs and input costs starts out low, as it does with homebuilding, it’s hard to take advantage of this strategy: the potential savings are just too small. I’ve noted previously that it takes a lot of expensive automation to duplicate the efforts of a small number of construction workers with hand tools, and when I was at Katerra, executives would often bemoan how hard it was for their capital-intensive production to compete with “Bubba and his truck” — low overhead contractors using manual labor and not much else. The ratio of output costs to input costs doesn’t give enough “bite” for production economies of scale to act on, and there’s little to be gained in production economies by dramatically increasing the scale of your homebuilding operation.

Conclusion

Economies of scale are often one of the most powerful forces available for making some process more efficient. But economies of scale operate on the difference between the costs of the raw inputs to some process and the costs of the final product. When this difference is large, there are often substantial economies of scale that can be achieved. You can introduce automated equipment or other large fixed costs that reduce your overhead costs when spread over a large enough production volume. You can use larger-capacity equipment that has lower per-unit costs than smaller-capacity equipment. You can gradually make some process more efficient via learning-by-doing. All these strategies will whittle away the difference between your raw input costs and the costs of your final product.

But when this ratio is already low, economies of scale have little room to operate. Thanks to the relatively modest requirements for transforming construction materials into finished houses, homebuilding has the sort of ratio of output costs to input costs observed in high-volume production operations like car manufacturing. Once the low-hanging fruit is captured, such as more efficiently arranging the work in manufactured home factories, there’s little production efficiency to be gained from further increases in scale.

Thinking about economies of scale in terms of the ratio of output costs to material input costs does suggest strategies for achieving them:

You could find sectors of construction, such as nuclear power, where the ratio of output costs to input costs is very high, and thus have more opportunities for efficiency improvements.
You could vertically integrate backwards into the production of raw materials and components, in the hopes of driving down those costs.
You could find a way to use fewer and/or cheaper raw materials.

We’ll look at the viability of these strategies in future essays.

The combined starts of CBUSA members would make it the fifth largest single-family homebuilder in the US.

Newer versions of the Cost Estimator have no such deductions.

Clayton Homes also produces around 10,000 other types of homes each year.

Note that I’m using this concept slightly differently than Musk. Musk’s idiot index is about the costs of the raw materials, whereas for some of these examples I’m considering the cost of purchased components as well, but the basic idea is the same.

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