How does evolutionary psychology explain opposition to trade?
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How does evolutionary psychology explain opposition to trade?
We evolved in a world of zero-sum competition between individuals and groups.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Richard Hanania
Translation: Block unicorn
American right-wingers are passionate about restoring manufacturing jobs. Long before Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs, free trade was blamed for everything from children no longer playing outdoors to national weakness and America’s strategic disadvantage relative to China.
Yet these views find almost no support in empirical data, and the moral arguments behind protectionism range from underdeveloped to outright absurd. Despite the overwhelming consensus among economists and common sense, the persistence of flawed anti-trade arguments suggests we need to understand that the desire to protect manufacturing jobs from foreign competition has its roots in evolutionary psychology. Protectionism is a preference situated at the intersection of two very strong emotions: hostility toward outgroups and an aesthetic preference for work that produces tangible goods.
Chris Caldwell recently criticized trade on the grounds that the idea of “a nation as a whole” is a fiction. “The same policy may be seen as a windfall by one group and a disaster by another. Trade makes you an ally of certain foreigners and an adversary of certain American compatriots.” Similarly, in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony argues that free trade “undermines bonds of mutual loyalty” by making workers feel betrayed by government and business leaders.
These arguments, upon reflection, are difficult to sustain. Regarding Caldwell’s claim that trade aligns you with foreigners against Americans, one might ask: doesn’t restricting trade produce the same effect? If I want to buy a component more cheaply from a Chinese manufacturer, and domestic protectionists prevent me from doing so, aren't they the ones obstructing my goal? Caldwell treats a world without cross-border trade as the natural default state, in which cross-border flows of goods “create” situations where Americans oppose each other. In fact, a world without trade could only exist through heavy-handed government intervention, with the state intervening on behalf of some Americans against others.
Hazony’s argument presents an equally strange moral vision. When members of a group make sacrifices, it is usually to benefit the whole. For example, a soldier may die in war to protect the nation from conquest. The “moral” argument against trade inverts this logic: the well-being of the majority and the whole must be sacrificed for the sake of a minority.
Even if we accept the necessity of redistribution, this argument only holds if support for trade involves transfers from the poor to the rich. It could be argued that those who have much should sacrifice to help the poorest among us. The problem with this view is that tariffs are regressive taxes, especially affecting goods that take up a larger share of low-income household budgets—such as clothing, food, and appliances. A 25% tariff on imported washing machines raises prices for everyone, but burdens minimum-wage households far more than wealthy ones. Research found that Trump’s 2018 tariffs cost each household $419 per year. High-income households may not notice such costs, but they significantly reduce disposable income for low-income workers.
While protectionists focus on the jobs their policies save, they ignore the greater harm inflicted on the rest of society. Steel tariffs imposed by the Bush administration in 2002–2003 were found to have cost users of steel as an input 168,000 jobs—more than the total employment in the entire steel industry. Trump’s washer tariffs created 1,800 jobs, but each job came at a cost of up to $820,000 in losses to consumers.
Given the nature of the American economy, none of this is surprising. Protectionists seem to assume that manufacturing accounts for a large share of the national workforce. Yet only 8% of non-farm labor is in manufacturing, far below the roughly half in the early 1990s. Even focusing on less-educated populations, such jobs are far from the norm. As of 2015, only 16% of men without bachelor’s degrees worked in manufacturing, down from 37% in 1960. Thus, even ignoring women and all those with higher education, most people do not actually hold the kind of jobs that opponents of free trade seek to protect and expand.
Then on what basis should national policy help an extremely small segment of the public—and even fewer working-class individuals—at the expense of everyone else? The oddity of anti-trade conservatives is that they rarely consider other sacrifices the wealthy could make for the poor. For them, the most direct approach would be to advocate higher taxes on the rich and stronger redistribution. That way, they could target those most able to pay, rather than taxing everyone (which disproportionately hurts the poor) to assist a tiny minority. I am not advocating redistribution here, but merely pointing out that if that is your goal, restricting trade is not the way to achieve it.
Given the overwhelming empirical evidence on the effects of tariffs and the existing structure of the American economy, the strong attachment many people have to protectionist policies must have psychological roots. Evolutionary psychology provides the answer. First, we evolved in a world of zero-sum competition between individuals and groups. Without developed market economies, outsiders could only benefit at the expense of your tribe.
President Trump clearly expressed this view when he claimed that trade deficits mean we are “losing” money to foreign countries. This, of course, makes no sense. I buy things in stores because both parties believe voluntary exchange serves their interests. Notably, conservative intellectuals—and Americans more broadly—rarely hold such strong views about economics outside of trade and immigration. According to Trump’s worldview, wouldn’t every transaction involving a buyer and seller be some kind of scam? Almost no one understands economics this way, suggesting that the presence of foreigners changes how people perceive interactions.
Beyond zero-sum thinking, another relevant aspect of evolutionary psychology lies in how we perceive the nature of work. As noted, protectionists tend to overvalue manufacturing jobs and overestimate our economy’s dependence on them. But why is it seen as a loss when someone moves from factory work to being a barber or rideshare driver—even if the new job pays more? Why do American protectionists appear to admire countries like China and Vietnam, where a higher proportion of the workforce is in manufacturing, yet which remain far poorer than us?
The answer again must trace back to the distant past and how it shaped our modern brains. As hunter-gatherers and later farmers, we could clearly see how someone building a house or crafting a fishing spear contributed to society. Manufacturing workers are the modern equivalent, producing goods people can see and touch.
The rise of the service economy is a recent phenomenon. For most of human history, nearly all labor was tied to survival—hunting, gathering, farming, or tool-making. Even during early industrialization, most workers made physical things. But over the past century, advanced economies have undergone massive shifts. Today, the vast majority of workers in countries like the United States are in services—healthcare, education, finance, hospitality, software development. The productivity of these roles is often abstract, making their social value harder for most people to grasp.
Notably, like manufacturing, agriculture is often romanticized and protected, likely because it has a premodern counterpart. Like factories, farms evoke images of hard physical labor, subsistence, and independence. An aesthetic preference for such work is deeply embedded in our collective psyche. Yet the structure of modern work has changed. Manufacturing and agriculture now constitute only a small fraction of advanced economies.
Today, most Americans do not produce physical goods. They provide care, solve problems, create knowledge, or facilitate transactions. These jobs are just as real and valuable as factory work, but lack the intuitive, visible output that our brains are wired to perceive as valuable. Thus, nostalgia for manufacturing is not based on economic logic or moral clarity, but on an instinctive bias toward ancestral forms of labor.
Of course, emotions matter in politics. Still, it is important to recognize when we are driven by psychological illusions. One might argue that the path to happiness is indulging our natural instincts—building a closed economy, getting more people to make tangible things—even if it collapses our standard of living. Yet protectionists almost never make this argument—and for good reason. Once you understand the nature of these biases and their irrationality, the case against trade falls apart.
This is why protectionists instead argue that their policies will make the country economically better off, or at least shift wealth from the rich to the poor. The correct response is that their assumptions are simply wrong. Rather than erecting trade barriers or trying to resurrect long-vanished job landscapes, we should consider how best to support actual workers—not the workers we imagine. This means supporting flexible labor markets, higher-quality training and education, and removing unreasonable barriers to earning a living, such as occupational licensing regimes.
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