8 Things from the week | 27 Apr 25
News from the past week, and a few other things.
1. How the U.S. Lost Its Place as the World’s Manufacturing Powerhouse
In the postwar years, more Americans joined the middle class, driving jumps in spending on long-lasting durable goods, like the cars and appliances for their newly purchased homes. America was America’s best customer for manufactured goods. Many of these goods were high tech for the time, such as dishwashers, televisions and jets, often brought about by the host of innovations developed during the war. Making them in America, as opposed to some other country, made sense because staying on the leading edge required research and development teams working closely with the factory floor. After the 1950s, manufacturing’s role in the U.S. economy began to slip. Some of this came about merely because Americans were becoming more affluent, and devoting more of their spending to services, such as travel, restaurants and medical care. In the 1980s, things began to change. American manufacturers of nondurable goods had an increasingly difficult time competing with countries where labor costs were lower. That intensified in the 1990s, in part as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement lowering duties on Mexican goods. There were also job losses at steel producers after developing countries such as South Korea built up their steel industries and left the world awash in excess capacity, points out Susan Houseman, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. But what happened in the 1980s and 1990s pales in comparison to what happened after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, opening its country to foreign investment and gaining access to global markets. As China produced more and more stuff, America became even more adept at producing services. Many of these can’t be traded globally: Somebody in London can’t easily go to a dentist in San Diego. But some, like software and other intellectual property items, can. In 2023, the U.S. exported $24 billion in advertising services, for example. The U.S. now exports in excess of $1 trillion-worth of services—far more than any other country.
2. America’s Leather Economy Has Gone Global, and Now It Can’t Escape the Trade War
The U.S. trade imbalance for leather and allied products, including those with faux-leather, is one of the largest among all goods-producing industries. Imports of leather goods by dollar value were more than 10 times as high as exports last year, according to data from the Census Bureau. China accounted for nearly a third of the industry’s imports. Businesses most exposed to the shifts in the trading relationship are those that ship hides across the Pacific or get finished goods from China. The U.S. used to be a haven for leather manufacturing, with scores of tanneries scattered across hubs in the Midwest and New York’s Hudson Valley. When David Mitchell was growing up in Milwaukee in the 1970s and ’80s, he said the area was home to more than 20 tanneries, which processed, cleaned, tanned and finished hides into leather. Now, there are only four.
NOTE: Your next pair of cowboy boots could be a lot more expensive.
3. The Impossible Four-Hour Test You Need to Pass to Become a Tariff Pencil Pusher
Suddenly everyone wants a piece of Nunzio De Filippis. He’s a U.S. licensed customs broker, which means he handles the paperwork to process imports and calculate duties and fees for products brought into the country. It’s a staggeringly tedious job that would be of little interest to anyone in normal times. But amid a flurry of new tariffs by the Trump administration that seem to change by the hour, brokers say they are fielding back-to-back calls from panicked importers who need help deciphering the shifting picture and minimizing the cost of getting their goods into the U.S. When De Filippis and other brokers get overwhelmed, they remind themselves they already overcame a far more torturous ordeal: the customs exam. The 4½ hour, open-book test covers the technicalities of classifying merchandise and entry and valuation procedures. Exam takers, who have to be U.S. citizens 18 years and older, said the 80 multiple-choice questions are deliberately obfuscating. A minimum score of 75% is required to pass, but don’t let the C-grade threshold fool you. The last six exams, which are held twice a year, have an average pass rate of 21% prior to appeal decisions. One exam in 2019 had a pass rate of 4.2%. Most consumers don’t give much thought about the supply chain when ordering online or buying a shirt in a store. But for each item, every stitch, label, fabric, quantity of fabrics, weight, button, whether it is a men’s or women’s shirt, how it was made, where it was made, where it originated, packaging, must be accounted for, said Geiger. On exam day, every minute counts. Candidates are allowed to bring one rolling crate or one suitcase and a shelf or rack into the exam hall to hold their reference material if they need more space than the provided desks. No electronics are allowed.
NOTE: Sample questions:
4. Inside Home Depot’s $20 Billion Secret Garden
The garden business rakes in about $20 billion a year for Home Depot—more than appliances, lumber or paint. It’s one of the biggest departments of the biggest home-improvement retailer, covering everything from live goods like plants, flowers and shrubs to soils, grills and patio furniture. In fact, it’s so big that Home Depot makes more money from its garden divisions than Hermès does from all of its luxury goods. Flowers might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Home Depot, but they have grown to be essential for the company. At the height of the pandemic, Americans splurged on home renovations, driving the company’s stock price upward. Since then, higher interest rates and housing prices have lowered demand for expensive projects. Even before the latest economic uncertainty, sales were flat or slightly down in most Home Depot divisions. Gardening is a bright spot. It also helps explain how Home Depot is different from Walmart and Amazon. For those retail giants, holiday shopping is the most important time of the year. At this one, the most lucrative time of the year comes earlier. “Home Depot’s big holiday is spring,” says Dan Stuppiello, who’s in charge of live goods at the company.
5. Do lonely people have shorter lives?
A study published on February 19th in Nature Medicine, a journal, draws on the UK Biobank, a biomedical database, to see what genetic and environmental factors are most important in helping people age slower, and thus live longer. The UK Biobank contains detailed genetic and medical data from half a million people, as well as information on their income, lifestyle and upbringing. This allowed the authors to disentangle the effects of different factors on disease risk and mortality. Genetics played a surprisingly minor role in overall longevity. Age and sex explained 47% of the variability in mortality, while genetics added just 3% after controlling for these factors. Environmental and lifestyle factors accounted for about 17%. (The remaining variation in mortality cannot be predicted.) The authors then identified the environmental factors with the strongest influence on mortality. Some of the results are obvious: smoking increases a person’s risk of premature death by around 60% compared with a non-smoker of the same age, sex and background. Being educated, employed and wealthy were among the most life-extending factors. Physical activity reduced the risk of mortality by roughly 25%. But the study also found that social connections were a surprisingly powerful predictor of a long life. Living with a partner was roughly as beneficial as exercise. Regular visits with family or having someone to confide in also appeared to lower mortality risks. Loneliness is a known risk factor for an early death—people who are socially isolated tend to have greater levels of cellular inflammation and poorer immune responses.
NOTE: The lesson here: Do stuff with people, in person. See next article.
6. New York City’s Hottest Hangout Is a 500-Person Board Game Night
At Richard Ye’s enormous monthly gatherings, where people play Exploding Kittens, Hues and Cues, and mahjong, New Yorkers find real-life connections and a little free fun. New York can be expensive, overwhelming and intimidating, and sometimes it is hard for people to connect. A martini can cost $25 in a bar that’s too noisy for conversation, and raucous nightclubs aren’t for everyone. So a free, monthly B.Y.O.B. (bring your own board game) night in an office building food court has become a big hit. Board game events and clubs have grown in popularity in recent years — in New York and across the country. This one is organized by Richard Ye, a 24-year-old who works in finance. He bills the event as New York City’s largest board game meet-up, and a video of Mr. Ye celebrating his March gathering — where 500 people were in attendance — was widely shared on social media.
NOTE: My family and I are huge fans of board games—I think we have about 60 different games sitting on shelves around our house (😬) . They’re a great way to unplug and have fun with people, in person!
If your only experience with board games is Sorry! or Monopoly, you should know that things have changed drastically in the past couple of decades. You can go to Board Game Geek to get descriptions and rankings of thousands of games and find ones that are your speed. Or shoot me an email, and I’ll be happy to provide you some recommendations.
If you’re in San Antonio, I recommend stopping by Knight Watch Games to see their medieval-themed store (and Star Wars-themed room); the store has a large selection of games and plenty of space to play games for free. The owners, Paraic and Brenda, are military veterans and great people—Paraic even designed a battle royal game called Gauntlets of Glory!
7. OPINION | An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.
In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete. In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it. And while this description may sound like pessimism, it’s intended as an exhortation, a call to recognize what’s happening and resist it, to fight for a future where human things and human beings survive and flourish. It’s an appeal for intentionality against drift, for purpose against passivity — and ultimately for life itself against extinction. Some of these substitutes have meaningful upsides. There are forms of intellectual and scientific work that were impossible before the internet annihilated distance. Remote work can be a boon to family life even if it limits other forms of social interaction. The online popularity of long podcasts might betoken a retreat from literate to oral culture, but it’s at least counterexample to the general trend of short, shorter, shortest. But in many cases, the virtual substitutes are clearly inferior to what they’re replacing. The streaming algorithm tends to yield artistic mediocrity compared with the movies of the past, or even the golden age television shows of 20 years ago. BookTok is to literature as OnlyFans is to great romantic love. Online sources of local news are generally lousy compared with the vanished ecosystem of print newspapers. Online friendships are thinner than real-world relationships, online dating pairs fewer people off successfully than the dating markets of the prior age. Online porn — well, you get my point. So even though people ultimately get less out of the virtual substitutes, they still tend to come back to them and eventually depend on them. Thus under digital conditions social life attenuates, romance declines, institutions lose support, the fine arts fade and the popular arts are overrun with slop, and the basic skills and habits that our civilization took for granted — how to have an extended conversation, how to approach a woman or man with romantic interest, how to sit undistracted with a movie or a book — are transmitted only weakly to the next generation. Nothing I’ve described is universal: Unless the true A.I. doomsayers are correct, in the year 2100 there will still be nations, families, religions, children, marriages, great books. But how much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices — the choice to date and love and marry and procreate, the choice to fight for particular nations and traditions and art forms and worldviews, the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology but trying every day, in every setting, to make ourselves its master. But perhaps the strongest temptation for everyone will be to imagine that you are engaged in some radical project, some new intentional way of living, but all the while you are being pulled back into the virtual, the performative, the fundamentally unreal. This is one temptation I’m very familiar with, as someone whose professional life is a mostly digital existence, where together with others who share my concerns I am perpetually talking, talking, talking … when the necessary thing is to go out into reality and do. Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read.
NOTE: The above opinion article is a great piece. The above is just a snippet—I recommend you read the entire article.
And, below is another article worth reading in its entirety. It’s written by Bill Belichick, and part of his forthcoming book, “The Art of Winning: Lessons From My Life in Football.” Sustained success, writes former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, requires sticking with what you’ve practiced and being ready to admit your own mistakes. Regardless of how you feel about Belichick, Brady, or the Patriots, it’s a good read.
8. How to Win Six Super Bowls? Don’t Relax After the First One.
One important principle is realizing that a big win isn’t the end of anything. It’s the beginning of trying to win the next one. You cannot think of big tests and triumphs as “final” in any respect if you want to keep winning. When we prepare to win, we prepare to win all the time. Big moments are won by winning all the small moments that come before them. Another thing we need to do consistently is take responsibility for mistakes. There is a four-word phrase that has been in heavy usage in any high-functioning team I’ve been around. It should be a part of your lexicon too. Four words that are essential to a healthy operation that is all about sustained success: “I messed that up” (though I must confess that my usual locker-room version uses a much more vivid verb).
Have a great week!
The Curator
Two resources to help you be a more discerning reader:
AllSides - https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
Media Bias Chart - https://www.adfontesmedia.com/
Caveat: Even these resources/charts are biased. Who says that the system they use to describe news sources is accurate? Still, hopefully you find them useful as a basic guide or for comparison.