Imagine that someone has committed some offense grievous enough that you are wondering whether you need to give him “a good punch in the nose.” You consult your friend, hoping for guidance as to whether honor demands such an extreme response. But your friend is a physicist, and he answers you by outlining a kinetic model that describes the result of the impact of your fist on your acquaintance’s nose, given the masses and velocities involved. Most people would recognize that your friend is guilty of giving you an irrelevant response and that he has mistaken your practical question for a theoretical problem he might deal with in his lab. Yet when the theoretician calls himself a “social scientist,” instead of a physicist, many people can be taken in by the offering of an abstract model when what is needed is prudential reasoning.

For example, recently over 1,500 economists signed a letter contending that Trump’s tariffs are “terrible” (as Reason characterized the contents of the letter). Well, surely that’s that: who would know more about the impact of tariffs than economists?

But that belief rests on the mistaken idea that expertise at theoretical economic science makes its possessor equally expert in the practical matter of determining good political decisions, at least so long as they involve matters such as business, income, or employment. In other words, it is yet another example of the rationalism in politics so ably critiqued by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott.

Oakeshott’s insights were based upon Aristotle’s fundamental distinction between the realm of theoretical knowledge (theoria) and that of practical wisdom (phronesis). As Leo Strauss put it in The City and Man, for Aristotle, “The sphere ruled by prudence is closed since the principles of prudence—the ends in the light of which prudence guides man—are known independently of theoretical science.”

In his first book, Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott held that any opining of theory upon practical affairs was guilty of complete irrelevance. Later, in the essay “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” he softened that absolute separation somewhat: he had decided that what he called the different “modes” of experience could actually converse with each other, so long as one did not try to dominate all the others. In that regard, he noted that the mode of science had become especially strident in its voice and would often attempt to dictate to all of the other modes (such as practice, history, or art).

In that essay, I believe Oakeshott hit upon the proper relationship of theoretical sciences to practice: the best relationship between them is a conversation, in which science has no authority over practical decisions. So in considering practical economic policies, theoretical economists are quite within their remit to suggest that one or another of their models might have some bearing on what actual policies a government should adopt. But far too often, they assume that their abstract models ought to determine what practical policies should be pursued. That misunderstanding of their own mode of knowledge is a species of scientism, which we can call economism.

So, let’s look at “economism” in the criticism of tariffs. In the Reason article linked above, Duke University economist Michael Munger said: “If another country manipulates its currency, or has trade barriers, that is a harm to THEIR consumers. ‘Wealth’ is the ability to obtain high quality, low cost products.”

Munger’s definition of wealth is not a conclusion of economic science, however, but an assumption that economists make so that they can have numeric inputs for their models. Other definitions are entirely possible; for instance, one might argue that the truly wealthy person is happy with what he has and does not continually strive for more and more (a striving that our classical tradition would have called the vice of pleonexia). Or perhaps living in stable, supportive families and communities is true wealth, while gobbling up consumer goods is a distinctly inferior sort of “riches.” But economists can at least roughly measure whether some demographic is buying more consumption goods, while it is very hard to put a number on being satisfied with what one has or living in a loving family.

Yet even if we accept Munger’s definition of wealth, there is another assumption that he leaves unstated, namely, that the only possible goal of trade policy is to increase a nation’s “wealth” as he has defined it. But what about, for instance, national security? Even if Americans can increase their access to “high quality, low cost products” by buying those goods from Chinese manufacturers, does this automatically trump the fact that in some future conflict China might simply stop supplying such goods? For instance, what will the consequences be if China decides to cut off American access to the three essential medicines that are only manufactured in that country under this trade pattern? Is getting those medicines somewhat cheaper at present worth the risk of this attack? There is no economic model that could yield unequivocal answers to that question.

Flippant economist like to joke about how they run a “trade deficit” with the grocer down the road. But the humor would disappear if the grocer became their only source of food, so that they lost the ability to prepare food for themselves—and then the grocer refused to serve them. Even setting aside a malicious enemy cutting off supplies of some essential good, natural disasters, such as the large-scale effects of COVID-19 virus, can also severely disrupt supply chains. Therefore, there is also a case for protecting some domestic industries to decrease the fragility of our economy.

Furthermore, Munger does not consider how the “ability to obtain high quality, low cost products” is distributed in his ideal “free trade” society. For the sake of argument, let’s grant that under Munger’s free trade regime Americans as a whole can more easily obtain such products. But let us also suppose that it is the high-income residents of Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Austin (Musa al-Gharbi’s symbolic capitalists) who can do so, while the residents of Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland are increasingly immiserated: no economic model can tell us whether it is healthy for the U.S. to pursue a policy with those results.

The free-trade faithful often respond to someone pointing out the devastating effects that U.S. economic policy has had on many industrial cities with “just move to where it’s better.” The factors that make this solution costly for many people—such as leaving behind close family, lifelong friends, faith communities, local history, and a natural environment that feels like their home—are reduced to mere “lifestyle preferences,” as though leaving all these things behind were equivalent to switching deodorant brands or starting to drink bourbon instead of scotch. What does it matter if you have left behind your family, your friends, your church, your history, and your connection to the land, so long as “you can purchase a coffee table on Amazon and have it delivered to your front door in a few days”?

In De Legibus, Cicero famously declared that “Salus populi suprema lex esto”: the health of the people should be the supreme law. And this meant not just the health of their bodies but also their souls. There is just no evidence anywhere that positing consumption as the summum bonum actually makes for a healthier people. There is, however, plenty of evidence that more and more consumption does not make us happier: “further increases in income [beyond a certain threshold] tended to be associated with reduced life satisfaction and a lower level of well-being.” As Curtis Yarvin points out:

Venezuela, which has the most oil in South America by far, is the worst basket case in South America by far. What we realize is that economic activity—humans working and trading—is essential to a society, a civilization and a nation. An economy in which five people stick a pipe in the ground, and everyone else lives on government checks, does not seem to work as a society, a civilization or a nation.

Yet economists’ models of trade do not account for this reality at all; in fact, they boast that by following their policies, we get to consume more and work less. In fact, some may find they work so much less that they turn to drug addiction to occupy their time. Contra some economists who argued that labor always yields “disutility,” in fact, life without meaningful work is a serious mental health hazard.

Now perhaps Cicero was wrong, and the state has no legitimate role in promoting the physical and spiritual health of the people. Perhaps the only justifiable state is the night-watchman state as described by Robert Nozick. But whether that is the case is certainly not something the science of economics can decide, nor is it a subject about which economists have any special expertise.

Economists who believe they have some unique ability to arrive at perfect trade policy have failed to recognize the modal confusion characterizing their discipline and have been blinded by the simple operations of their abstract models from seeing the complexity of the real world.

Of course, none of the above considerations point to any particular concrete trade policy applicable to all situations, nor do they prove that President Trump’s approach to tariffs has been good for Americans. Globalization and specialization have benefits, but also risks. Only with prudential judgment on a case-by-case basis, rather than relying upon abstract models, can we hope to achieve a good balance of the two.