How do you measure the value of a web of trust? Quoted post expresses a populist complaint that has come to a head in the recent debate about the Trump tariffs, but has actually been building steam since the early 1980s and the first wave of offshoring. I'm a libertarian, I understand economics, I know all of the arguments for free trade and free migration, and for decades it was easy for me to dismiss this sort of complaint as latter-day Luddism. Every previous move towards global free markets has caused temporary discomfort that was later paid off by a huge rise in prosperity and living standards. But these days I find myself in a very awkward position. Because I still think free trade is best, but I also think the populist complaint against free trade has some merit. I'm not really here to write about tariff policy today. I'm here to write about why Trump has popular support for his tariff policy despite the fact that every economist in the universe says it's insane. Here, I think is the problem: economists have focused on what they can see and what they can measure and things that are monetized. And if you measure the consequences of tariffs that way they look like a complete disaster. What the populists are saying is: free trade had a major role in tearing apart our web of social trust. And you, you economists, you elites, you laptop-class intelligentsia...you don't value that web of trust nearly enough. I don't think this critique is wrong. It's not well articulated, because the people making it or not in general intellectuals. And supporting tariffs may be a terrible idea even though the critique is right. But the populists aren't wrong. Bad policy decisions over the last 60 years have done immense damage to social trust. Even some good policy decisions have done that kind of damage, and by good I mean "the gains in other areas probably outweigh the negative effects on social trust". Free trade has done some damage, even if on net it was a good policy - that is even if the gains in prosperity from free trade were so large that it was worth taking some loss of trust to get them. What the populists are yelling is that our elites threw away something they didn't understand the value of. Decline of social trust hurts the poor and the working class more than it hurts the rich, because the rich can mostly buy their way out of the consequences of the decline. How does free trade erode social trust? That's easy. It happens every time somebody's job is offshored, and the investor/manager class says "we value another few cents of gains in our stock price over the health of the communities we live in". Maybe the tradeoff in those circumstances ends up being net positive for people who can buy cheaper goods - but the message is still there. The disruption of trust still happens. I could list lots of causes of the erosion of social trust. Free trade is only one of them. A problem for populists is that most of the others are uncomfortably tied to racial issues - DEI, Section 8 housing, the defunding of urban police. So if you want to talk about the disruption of trust, free trade is about the only thing you can attack that doesn't invite a lot of backlash from racial grievance-peddlers. This is why tariff policy is such a flashpoint - it's safe(r). Populists are actually feeling their way towards the general objection that our elites have undervalued social trust, and one of the most important things we can do as a society is to try and repair that fabric. And yes, I think that's a conversation that needs to happen.