Yuval Noah Harari: Trump's world of rival fortresses

Treating trade as a zero-sum game will limit what humans are capable of building.

Consider products that are high-end, niche, and low-volume. These are the prestige products that so many point to as examples of what they wished we could build more of. Whoever builds them takes great pride in doing so.

Such products are typically difficult and expensive to manufacture and frequently require resources and parts from widely separated places. If you're trying to build the best of the best or something that pushes what is possible, you need the very best inputs. Critically, one factory may be capable of meeting global demand for these products.

The manufacture of such products often barely produces a profit. The design, machinery, tooling, labour, and material costs are so high that, if you make the inputs more expensive or limit size of the market that can be freely accessed, they become uneconomic. No equivalent products will pop up in a market smaller than the entire world. Even the U.S, or Chinese markets aren't big enough amortize the costs across.

These are products that we will simply cease to make.