If You Must Fight a Trade War, Fight to Win

So this is a really interesting book to me.

It's a slight, like, 215 pages long.

It reads as part history lesson and part desperate plea in some ways.

Can you just give me the background of when you started writing this book, when you thought to sit down and do it? What was the impetus?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So let me tell you a little bit about me and a little bit about my co-author.

So we're both nerd trade economists.

That's kind of how to think of us.

And we're earnest guides that are, through this book – going to try to bring you uh the prospective trade warrior uh on this journey and kind of teach you what you need to know we don't necessarily want to want to go through this fight ourselves but we've done all the work um to prepare and and so we're going to guide you on that journey okay so how do we convince you that we're uh we're the right guides for you well uh I'm a nerdy Ph.D. trained economist and I have been doing international trade for my entire career.

And that's been a long time now as I'm not young.

I started off as an academic.

So I was a professor for a dozen years at Brandeis University in Boston.

I've had a. couple of different government jobs.

I was in the White House at the Council of Economic Advisors in the Obama administration.

I was at the chief economist at the State Department in the Biden administration.

I've worked for some of these big international organizations that deal with international trade, the World Trade Organization, for one, and now I'm at a think tank.

My co-author, though, she's amazing.

Her name is Samaya Keynes.

She's also a trained economist.

but she is a journalist and a writer.

She's right now a columnist for the Financial Times.

She's on

a ukulele as well.

And she plays an amazing ukulele.