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Business Times
12-06-2025
- Business
- Business Times
Here's why Trump's tariffs won't work
[SINGAPORE] US President Donald Trump's tariffs have been widely panned as reckless, short-sighted and self-defeating. Economists called them 'taxes on Americans' rather than the rest of the world – penguin-majority islands included. Many blame those tariffs – imposed under the banner of 'America First' – for worsening the global trade slowdown. But zoom out, and Trump's actions are not so radical. Throughout history, many leaders have believed that security lies in self-sufficiency. From imperial China to Nazi Germany, ancient Rome to modern-day Brexit Britain, the instinct to turn inward runs deep. The logic: Tighten borders, produce everything at home and cut reliance on other nations to shield against risk. Two new books argue that this instinct, while understandable, is exactly what has led great powers to fall. It is not narrow self-interest that builds empires – it is exchange. Civilisations rise not by going it alone, but by embracing openness – even when it is messy or uncertain. The two timely books are Exile Economics: What Happens If Globalisation Fails by Ben Chu, and Peak Human: What We Can Learn From History's Greatest Civilizations by Johan Norberg. Both were published in May 2025 – shortly after Trump waved around a cardboard chart that sent shockwaves through global markets – though their writing predates the latest phase of his trade war. Chu is the British economics editor at BBC Newsnight; Norberg is a Swedish historian and bestselling author. They have observed the same global trends from very different angles – Chu from the world of policy and supply chains, Norberg through the long arc of history. Yet they arrive at a shared conclusion, which serves as a sobering warning about the deepening divide between China and the US, and the risks it poses to global stability and prosperity. A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU Friday, 2 pm Lifestyle Our picks of the latest dining, travel and leisure options to treat yourself. Sign Up Sign Up When empires close themselves off If you had to pick just one of the two books, I recommend Norberg's Peak Human. His grasp of history is sweeping, but he also knows how to keep things light and entertaining – which helps when you are sprinting through centuries of civilisation in a single chapter. The book explores 'golden ages' such as ancient Athens, Song Dynasty China and Renaissance Italy – moments when humanity flourished economically, intellectually and artistically. What these societies had in common, Norberg argues, was openness. They welcomed outsiders, embraced trade and encouraged innovation. But when they turned inward, they stagnated. Peak Human by Johan Norberg is an entertaining guide through the golden ages of human history. PHOTO: ATLANTIC BOOKS In Song China, trade and cultural exchange drove technologies that Europe would not see for centuries. But when paranoia and conservatism took hold, progress ground to a halt. Similarly, Abbasid Baghdad was once a hub of Islamic learning and diversity. That golden era ended with religious orthodoxy and invasions. If Norberg looks to the past to explain why empires thrive or collapse, Chu turns his gaze to the present. He coins the term 'exile economics' to describe a world turning its back on global trade in favour of national self-reliance. The appeal is obvious – who does not want independence, security and control? But the reality, he argues, is that autonomy comes with steep costs. Want food independence? Expect higher prices and less variety. Want to make your own microchips? That is a decades-long, cross-border supply chain you will need to build from scratch. And good luck finding anyone else eager to handle rare earth metals like China does. Ben Chu's Exile Economics explores anti-globalisation sentiment across economies. PHOTO: BASIC BOOKS Chu offers real-world examples to show just how entangled the world is. Global trade is not just about cheap goods, it is about shared resilience and rising living standards. Break that in the name of sovereignty, and you often get more fragility, not less. He even points to history: Nazi Germany's push for self-sufficiency helped fuel its aggressive expansion. Resource nationalism, in other words, is not just inefficient. It is dangerous. Lessons for today Both Peak Human and Exile Economics warn that today's anti-globalisation sentiment threatens to undo decades of progress. It is not trade, immigration or openness that causes modern problems – it is poor governance and weak systems. The solution is not retreat, but reform. Both authors highlight how interdependence, while complex, is more resilient than we give it credit for. Chu notes how supply chains adapted swiftly to pandemic shocks. Norberg reminds us that empires rarely fall because of enemies abroad – they collapse when they close in on themselves. And the effects are already visible. In response to Trump's tariffs, China did not panic – it pivoted. Supermarkets swapped out US beef for cheaper Australian imports, thanks to the China-Australia free trade agreement. Meanwhile, US consumers are expected to pay more for beef – a tariff own-goal. In April 2025, research and consulting firm Ipsos released a poll which found that the US' reputation had sharply declined in 26 out of 29 countries over the previous six months. For the first time in the survey's decade-long history, more respondents viewed China as a more positive influence on world affairs than the US. What these books make clear is that prosperity is fragile. The systems that brought billions out of poverty and spurred innovation did not emerge by accident. They were built on trust, trade and cooperation. Undoing them is easy. Rebuilding them is not. Exile Economics: What Happens If Globalisation Fails by Ben Chu and Peak Human: What We Can Learn From History's Greatest Civilizations by Johan Norberg are available at Kinokuniya
New Statesman
04-06-2025
- Business
- New Statesman
Have we reached peak humanity?
The spectre of decline is a seductive narrative. How easily nostalgic laments find their own straplines: late capitalism; the eclipse of the West; the collapse of public discourse; the atomisation of society; the impoverishment of the public square; and, as a niche addition, I can't resist including the downward trajectory of Test cricket. Perhaps the narrative arc of societal decline is weirdly in step with the individual ageing process, and we find a perverse personal consolation in believing that the world, or our framing of the world, has also peaked. Even allowing for that tendency, we seem particularly convinced about decline today. Every discipline has its theory about why – economists, for example, tell us that a generation will be miserable if it feels poorer than its parents' demographic. But I wonder if there is something here more fundamental than money. The privileges that are supposed to make us fulfilled and happy (such as leisure and choice) can be seen as reversing back into themselves. If modern capitalism gives you the time and freedom to become addicted to vapid and ephemeral digital technology, for example, then humanity becomes further detached from the most important anchor of all: the conviction that something of lasting value will be left behind. Decline takes many forms, and perhaps we are well tuned to understanding the impoverishment of grand ambition. It's an opportune moment for the writer and historian Johan Norberg to choose seven golden ages and interweave their rise and fall into a history of human progress: Athens, Rome, the Abbasid caliphate, Song China, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic, and the Anglosphere. The authorial challenge is bringing it all together. And yet this highlights reel of world history won me over. As with any well-edited montage, we certainly know what side we're on. 'History casts long shadows,' Norberg concludes, 'but also light.' And it is light, in his history, that more often has the last word. The heroic threads are established at the outset and constantly remain in focus: innovation, openness, liberty, commerce, learning, assimilation, enquiry. You always get the point, sometimes a little too bluntly. After introducing classical Greek drama, Norberg adds: 'Netflix would not have been the same without it.' Is he exemplifying or parodying the popular historian's trait of linking everything to the here and now? But if Peak Human is the kind of muscular broad-brush storytelling that academic historians look down on, it is engaging and persuasive. Peak civilisations, of course, are portrayed as constantly in conflict with dark-age duds. First up on the wrong side of history are the Spartans, who Norberg gives such a mauling that you begin to feel sorry for them. Not only did the Spartans leave us 'no literature, no poetry, no art, no architecture and no innovative body of thought', but Norberg then adds the sucker punch that they weren't even any good at fighting. The Spartans, he concludes, 'are the most overrated warriors in ancient history; they just had very good PR'. Step forward the Athenians, who run the first leg in the civilised relay race. 'Only a regime as open, innovative, energetic, pragmatic and meritocratic as democracy,' we are told, 'could have followed the policy that won at Salamis.' The book's pattern is set, with each great golden age explained in the style of a business journalist charting the development of a superstar company. Military victories gave the Athenians 'proof of concept', so they 'doubled down on democracy and trade'. The sleight of hand required by any episodic world history is navigating the leap from one chapter to the next. Getting from ancient Greece to classical Rome, however, probably didn't cost Norberg much sleep, especially as Horace gave him the line 'Greece, the captive, took her savage victor captive'. In Norberg's summary of Rome's 'melting pot of marble', the definitive engine of greatness was the empire's strategic tolerance. 'The Romans did not embrace tolerance because they were enlightened,' Norberg concludes, 'they did it in order to beat everybody else and take their stuff. They wanted to integrate people to benefit from them.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe After pointedly lingering on the creative and economic hiatus after the fall of Rome – 'pitch dark' despite 'the heroic efforts of revisionist historians' – Norberg picks up the story in the 9th-century Abbasid caliphate. In AD 892, there were more than a hundred bookshops in Baghdad, which had become the new cradle of learning and free markets. Baghdad emerges as a nexus of social mobility and commerce, with successful businessmen achieving not only wealth but also corresponding status. So this Islamic 'bourgeois revolution' extended beyond the marketplaces of Athens and Rome, where commerce had still been seen as a necessary evil. (You won't be surprised that Norberg follows his Cato Institute colleague Deirdre McCloskey in recasting 'bourgeois' as an explicitly positive concept.) Norberg's next leaping off point for laissez-faire liberalism is Song dynasty China, where a 12th-century poet observed that 'great ships sail only for profit'. Marauding Mongol hordes rudely interrupt the flow of progress by shrinking the Song state. But with a little help from Marco Polo – who described the old Song capital of Hangzhou as 'the greatest city which may be found in the world, where so many pleasures may be found that one fancies oneself in paradise' – the flame is kept alive in a new cultural and trading crossroads: Venice. When the pope complained to the Venetians about their economic relationship with Syria and Egypt, they replied: 'We are Venetians first, only then Christians.' Open, secular, undogmatic: the book's firmly established heroic template. The Netherlands, despite its remarkable military exploits in the Eighty Years' War, is revealed as 'a bourgeois society that wanted to make money not war'. And the same openness is found at the heart of Britain's 18th-century ascent. Norberg cites Voltaire's description: 'Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt.' Finally, Norberg reaches America, completing his distilled histories of elevated cultures, lovingly interleaved into a unified history of enlightened humanity. Although Norberg never hides his strong ideological convictions, he often finds room for the counter-view, while also being unfailingly courteous in crediting other historians. Though it's unclear whether the book is meant as an introduction or a refresher, I ended up thinking it didn't matter either way: one would have to be an incredibly erudite reader not to find anything new and surprising at every turn, no matter how familiar the terrain. Books such as this are feats of engineering, rather than style or originality. Can the narrative structure survive the conceptual weight it is being asked to support? That's where the intelligence of Norberg's book is found. Norberg frequently revisits a familiar objection to his thesis: slavery. To what extent did that inhuman and unpaid debt enable these so-called golden ages? Very significantly. But Norberg argues that slavery was seldom the definitive causal factor in the growth stories he admires. Other societies indulged slavery, Norberg stresses, not only the celebrated and economically successful ones. A similar question has obvious resonance in our own context today. Hyper-globalisation delivers cheap fast-fashion clothing, for example, churned out by child-labour sweatshops in Asia. When growth is driven by wilful blindness, are 'rise' and 'decline' appropriate concepts? The approved stamp 'artisan' might be an overused cliché today, but you can see what the concept is being defined against. I finished Peak Human unsure about something even more fundamental: the influence of mass digital information on our subliminal attitude towards knowledge. In Norberg's sunny enlightenment world-view, the exchange of information is the engine of progress. Assimilators thrive and the curious win. But the digital age – in which information is exchanged without any friction – now overwhelms us. We often feel defeated by information rather than excited by it. TS Eliot's aphorism feels truer than ever: 'Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?' If a part of us wants to switch off – literally and metaphorically – we are not necessarily turning away from the kind of creative human interaction that Norberg celebrates, but instead trying to salvage a more textured human experience. Today's ceaseless exchange of mostly meaningless pixelated 'content' seems to be undermining our higher instincts rather than supporting them. AI and the manipulation of digital information adds an extra layer of underlying disquiet. Our brilliance at manufacturing information is becoming inversely correlated with our confidence that the information is trustworthy. For all our material advances, there's a feeling of being tossed around on digital seas that we don't quite understand. For that reason, Peak Human feels incomplete. Norberg's spectrum charts 'peak-human' relative to 'declining-human'. But aren't we facing an even bigger question today: 'actually human' vs 'non-human'? When the sizeable chunk of human experience is reduced to watching rotating adverts on an iPhone, what Norberg wrote about Sparta leaving 'no literature, no poetry, no art, no architecture' becomes just as applicable to our vacant technological age as it was to Sparta's closed and military one. Norberg might counter: new technology is always unsettling but rarely turns out frightening. I'd say: this time could be different. We'll see. It's only a hunch, but I think this underlying anxiety about our place in the world is seeping into political restiveness. The paradox, of course, is that intellectual loss of confidence and bewilderment manifests itself as a yearning for childlike simplicity. 'Hard times create strongmen,' Norberg warns us near the end of the book, 'and strongmen create even harder times.' He's writing about the decline of the Dutch Republic, and the prince of Orange. But of course the shadow of America's own prince of orange, Donald Trump, falls across the page. The next peak for humanity feels distant. Ed Smith is director of the Institute of Sports Humanities Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages Johan Norberg Atlantic, 512pp, £22 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Dickens's Britain is still with us] Related This article appears in the 04 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Housing Trap
Business Times
09-05-2025
- Business
- Business Times
How golden ages really start
Peak Human By Johan Norberg. Atlantic Books; 400 pages; US$32.99 and £22 THE way to start a 'golden age' is to erect big, beautiful barriers to keep out foreign goods and people. That, at least, is the view of the most powerful man on the planet. Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, makes the opposite case. In Peak Human, Norberg charts the rise and fall of golden ages around the world over the past three millennia, ranging from Athens to the Anglosphere via the Abbasid caliphate. He finds that the polities that outshone their peers did so because they were more open – to trade, to strangers and to ideas that discomfited the mighty. When they closed up again, they lost their shine. Consider the Song dynasty in China, which lasted from 960 to 1279AD. Song emperors were much keener on the rule of law than their predecessors, who tended to rule by whim. To enforce predictable rules, they hired lots of officials via meritocratic exams. The first Song emperor enacted the 'unconventional policy reform' of '(not) killing officials who disagreed with him'. Peasants were granted property rights and allowed to move around, rather than being tied to a lord's land. Farm output more than doubled, and the extra food supported much larger cities. In the 1100s Kaifeng, the capital, had 65 times the population of London. Canals made domestic trade easier. International trade followed. Merchants started issuing paper money, six centuries before Europeans did, and the government embraced this brilliant idea – so much easier than carrying heavy strings of copper coins. 'Crowded cities set the stage for an unparalleled exchange of ideas, goods (and) services,' notes Norberg. Artisans devised new industrial processes, such as burning coal to smelt iron. The invention of movable type in the 1040s allowed the printing of books so cheap that one philosopher griped that people would stop learning the classics by heart. By 1200, Song China had the world's richest economy, a merchant navy with 'the potential to discover the world', and a habit of tinkering that could have brought on an industrial revolution centuries before Europe's. But then the Mongols arrived. The popular image of Genghis Khan and his mounted hordes sweeping across the world slaughtering and burning is accurate as far as it goes. However, the Mongol dynasty took pains to preserve its predecessor's technological marvels – even if it did not add much to them. It was only when the Ming emperors took over in 1368 that China really turned in on itself. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Free movement within the country was ended. Free exchange gave way to forced labour. Foreign trade was made punishable by death, and even the construction of ocean-worthy ships was banned. Pining for the good old days, a Ming emperor brought back the fashions of 500 years before. Men caught with the wrong hairstyle were castrated, along with their barbers. Largely thanks to reactionary Ming policies, Chinese incomes fell by half between 1080 and 1400. The country did not recover its mojo until it opened up again in the late 20th century. Some of the golden ages Norberg describes will be familiar to readers, but he adds fresh details and provocative arguments. Athens was not just the birthplace of democracy; it grew rich because it was, by ancient standards, liberal. Tariffs were only 2 per cent. Foreigners were welcome: a Syrian ex-slave became one of the richest men in town. On a measure devised by the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank, ancient Athenians enjoyed more economic freedom than citizens of any modern nation, narrowly beating Hong Kong and Singapore. (Such freedom did not apply to women or slaves; a caveat that applies to all golden ages until relatively recently.) Rome grew strong by cultivating alliances and granting citizenship to conquered peoples. It learned voraciously from those it vanquished – Greek slaves taught Roman children about logic, philosophy and drama. During Rome's golden age, one set of laws governed a gigantic empire, markets were relatively free, and 400,000 km of roads sped goods from vessel to villa. As a gobsmacked Greek orator put it: to see all the world's products, either travel the world or come to Rome. The emperor Augustus introduced a flat poll tax and a modest wealth tax. Extra income from hard work or innovation suddenly faced a marginal tax rate of zero. Small wonder Augustan Rome grew as rich as Britain and France were 1,500 years later. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of America's House of Representatives, thinks Rome collapsed because of 'rampant homosexual behaviour'. Norberg offers a more convincing explanation. Bad luck – plagues and barbarian attacks – was compounded by policy blunders. Cash-strapped emperors debased the coinage, reducing its silver content. This caused wild inflation. Price controls were then slapped on everything 'from sandals to lions'. Trade atrophied. Intellectual freedom gave way to dogma, with the persecution first of Christians and then by Christians. Finally, Rome was too weak to resist the barbarian onslaught. Revisionists say the Dark Ages that followed were not so bad. Archaeological evidence, such as a sudden fall in the number of cargo-ship wrecks, suggests they were 'the biggest social regression in history'. Norberg deftly punctures popular misconceptions. The zealots of Islamic State revere the Abbasid caliphate, but would have hated its tolerance. The Italian Renaissance, which modern nationalists such as Viktor Orban see as evidence of European and Christian cultural superiority, began as a revolt against Christian orthodoxy and in imitation of pagan cultures. Despite what you read in Blake and Dickens, Britain's Industrial Revolution was not miserable for the workers: a study of diaries shows the only group consistently dissatisfied was poets and writers. Could a history book be more timely? Of all the golden ages, the greatest is here and now. Of all the progress of the past 10,000 years in raising human living standards, half has occurred since 1990. Openness went global after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But now it is in rapid retreat, as a multilateral trade war looms and ever more states suppress free inquiry. Previous golden ages all ended like Rome's did, jinxed by a mix of bad luck and bad leadership. Many thriving societies isolated themselves or suffered a 'Socrates moment', silencing their most rational voices. Peak Human does not mention Donald Trump; it was written before he was re-elected. America's president will not read it, but others should. The current age of globalisation could still, perhaps, be saved. As Norberg argues: 'Failure is not a fate but a choice.' ©2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved
Irish Independent
02-05-2025
- Science
- Irish Independent
Johan Norberg's vital lessons from rise and fall of historic golden ages makes Peak Human a persuasive read
Do we currently live, to repurpose the words of the great philosopher Leibniz, in 'the best of all possible worlds'? Yes, according to Peak Human, an exemplary book which studies world history through the prism of 'what we can learn from the rise and fall of golden ages'.
Economist
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Economist
How golden ages really start—and end
The way to start a 'golden age' is to erect big, beautiful barriers to keep out foreign goods and people. That, at least, is the view of the most powerful man on the planet. Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, makes the opposite case. In 'Peak Human', Mr Norberg charts the rise and fall of golden ages around the world over the past three millennia, ranging from Athens to the Anglosphere via the Abbasid caliphate. He finds that the polities that outshone their peers did so because they were more open: to trade, to strangers and to ideas that discomfited the mighty. When they closed up again, they lost their shine.
