Planet Money - Summer School 7: Trade blocks and blockages

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

Tariffs are the favorite tool of our current president, but there are lots of other ways that governments insert themselves into the free exchange of goods and services. Some of these trade barriers are so insidious and have been going on for so long that it may surprise you that they even exist. We bring you the classic story of what happens when you try to protect an American industry and end up hurting another American industry. Well intentioned plans turn into trade barriers that make our lives more expensive. Check out our Summer School video cheat sheet TikTok. Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Always free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts. Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter. The series is hosted by Robert Smith and produced by Eric Mennel. Our project manager is Devin Mellor. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Emily Crawford. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. Welcome back to Planet Money Summer School. The only economics class you can slip under your pillow and listen to as you fall asleep. Just drift away. I'll wake you for the vocabulary words. We are almost done with the summer semester. And what a romp we have had through the world of government, and business. We've had classes on the power of federal taxes and the dangers of federal

spending. We've taught you how a country can make industrial policy work and why sometimes markets fail. But there is one big area we have not touched until today. Trade. Yes, yes, I know, as I'm sure you have noticed, trade policy, specifically tariffs, are in the news every single day. So today on Planet Money Summer School, we're going to step back a little and talk about the bigger picture of trade policy. Tariffs are, of course, the favorite tool of our current president, but there are lots of other ways that governments insert themselves into the free exchange of goods and services. Some of these trade barriers are so insidious and have been going on for so long, it may surprise

you that they even exist. But in fact, we will feature two of them today that are costing you money every single day. Maybe you should wake up for this part. Our guest professor is an expert in all forms of trade shenan. My name is Carolyn Freund, and I'm the dean of the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. Come for the policy, stay for the strategy. Oh, I like that.

Maybe we can use that as a slogan. Thank you. So before we hear our case studies, I want to talk about the word protectionism. This is the policy of protecting a country's industries by keeping out foreign goods and services. And the U.S. has this long history of protectionism. the very beginning of our country, we've had tariffs, tax on imports, and that protects American industries by making other countries goods more expensive. So that's tariffs. But there are other

ways of protecting an industry. Let's just go through them now, Carolyn. There are quotas, which limits the quantity of a good coming in, because if there's only so much of a good, then there's more space for domestic industry. So in the United States, we used to have quotas on Japanese automobiles, for instance, and foreign clothing, not as common a tool anymore. How does the government know exactly how much of a certain item to let into the country? They don't. So they do it typically based on history, which isn't always a good judge because you never know what shocks, especially say in agriculture, are going to hit our own markets. And sometimes the government just makes it a hassle to import items with regulations

and paperwork, even like packaging, it has to be in a certain kind of package, all these things to just make it difficult for another country to send us something, and more expensive. Absolutely. And as, you know, some regulations are really to protect the consumer, but some are completely there to make it harder for other countries to export. Which, again, protects American businesses who are better set up to meet those regulations. So trade is usually between a private country. company in one part of the world and a private company in the United States, they agree on a price, they decide to import that item. What are the dangers when the government gets involved

in this transaction? The fundamental danger is about the use of resources in this world. So by getting involved in that transaction, you are effectively distorting how resources are being used. So let me give a really wild example that's kind of true. Saudi Arabia wants to produce dairy. But as you know, Saudi Arabia is a really hot country. So to have cows in Saudi Arabia, they need to be in air-conditioned barns. Well, that's super expensive and not really the best use of resources around the world. So if goods are produced in the places where the resources are cheaper, so labor-intensive goods and countries with lots of labor, capital-intensive goods and countries with a lot of capital, water-intensive goods and countries with lots of water, et cetera, we use less of the

world's resources for actually more. We can produce more that way, and everybody can be better off. So today in our case studies, we are going to get into the impacts of some of this protectionism on two specific products that we see all the time, but we don't really think about the source of. The first is the sugar in our candy. And the second is the car that might be in your garage right now. After the break.

Okay, okay, class, listen up. This is the classic story. of what happens when you try to protect an American industry and end up hurting another American industry. Professor Freud, you use this story in your classes, I know. What should our students be listening for as this story is played? They should be thinking about the unintended consequences for the users of the product.

In this case, sugar. In this case, sugar, exactly. Sugar. In 2013, Zoe Chase and Jess Jang traveled to the Midwest to bring back this story about, sugar protectionism. Even though the reporting is more than a decade old, the problem they talk about is still the same. The U.S. pays more than twice as much for sugar as the rest of the world. Take it away, Zoe. Everybody knows dumb-dums. They're those lollipops. You've seen them at

your doctor's office or your bank. Sugar, corn syrup, little wax wrapping, a bunch of different flavors, sticks. But lots of people don't know where they come from. You like orange? Yes. It's a warm orange dumb. We're looking at thousands of these little wrapped lollipops clattering out of this big steel pipe at the Dum Dumfactory factory in northwest Ohio. In a minute and a half he's going to mix savvy blueberry.

Can you wait for that? Dean Spangler is the former CEO of the Spangler Company, and he's showing us around the kitchen at the candy factory. It's a little bit Willy Wonka. Imagine a kitchen made for giants with a couple of busy little chefs running around in aprons and hairnets. They're pouring these big steel pots

of sticky sugar and corn syrup into this kitchen aid that is as tall as a basketball hoop. And there's what looks like paint buckets just standing right next to it. The buckets are filled with flavors and colors. There's blueberry, cream soda, root beer, Watermelon? Dum Dums is the signature product of this place, the Spangler Candy Company. The factory is several football fields big. They need a whole separate building just for the ingredients. Well,

one ingredient in particular. We use about 100,000 pounds of sugar a day. Where's the sugar? In the sugar shack. The room is basically big enough for four huge tanks of liquid sugar, eight Olympic-sized swimming pools worth. We have about enough sugar storage here for about four days. so we're receiving sugar, you know, constantly. All year long, all day long, 24 hours a day. Lots of places replace sugar with corn syrup. And there's corn syrup in these lollipops too.

But Dean says to get the true flavor of your childhood, there is no substitute. Nothing delivers flavor like sugar. The Spangler Company, they actually make this other iconic piece of candy, something even more nostalgia inspiring than a lollipot. Red and white candy canes. They used to make them here at this factory in Ohio, but about 10 years ago, they moved the red and white candy cane operation to Mexico. It had gotten too expensive to make them here.

The places that buy the candy canes to sell the targets in the Walmarts of the world, they don't care about the brand. They don't care where they come from. They want them cheap. Candy canes are treated like a commodity by the big box stores, completely. the red and whites. And when you go to the big box retailers of the world, they leave for a quarter of a cent a cane, a half a cent of cane. I mean, they're going to the lowest price. So this story so far, a factory moving its operations from Ohio to Mexico, where it could

operate more cheaply, that's a typical story. You might think you know the reasons for that. But Kirk Vasha, the current CEO of the Spangler company, he's pretty sure you don't know the reasons. In fact, recently, he was giving a talk at the Kwanis Club in town. It's kind of like a rotary club. And he explained he could expand his operations in a huge way, right here in Ohio, and not send any candy canes to Mexico at all. And I said, I just need one thing. People get excited. And then I asked them to guess, what's the one thing that you need? And people guess, you know, all kinds of things. A lower tax rates. And how about workers comp perform? And Let's get rid of OSHA and let's repeal the Food Safety Modernization Act or pass a rate to work law or let's get some government development money.

Those are some of the things I guess amongst other things. And I said, no, it's not any of those. In fact, it's not all of those put together. If I paid zero taxes and got all those other things, which some of them don't even matter to us, it's not as important as the one thing that I need. and people are still guessing what it is. And I said, let us buy sugar on the free market. And there's this silence. And then this kind of collective, huh?

Why can't you do that? And then I say, it's a story. And I'm about to tell it to you. Before we dive in, here's the most important thing you have to know to get into this story. There are two prices for sugar. The price you pay when you're in the United States. States and the price you pay almost everywhere else in the world. On average, over the last decade, the price you pay in the United States, it's about

15 cents more than you pay outside the country. 15 cents more per pound of sugar. 15 cents extra per pound of sugar. If you're in the business of making candy, adds up to a lot of money. We're using 100,000 pounds a day. That's $15,000 a day. That's $75,000. a week. Multiply that by 52 weeks. It's three to four million dollars. Three to four million

dollars a year. That's what these guys call the sugar penalty. Now, who would do this? Who would impose this utterly random tax on U.S. candy makers? The U.S. Congress. The Food Conservation and Energy Act, it is better known as the U.S. Farm Bill. And I'm just going to read this one part that this whole story is really about. Subtitled D, Sugar, Section 1. 156 sugar program, subsection B, sugar beats. It says that the U.S. government will guarantee this minimum price for sugar that is not to drop below, quote, 22.9 cents per pound, end quote. That's the guarantee. No matter how low the price goes in the rest of the world, in the United States, you will be paying at least 22.9 cents per pound.

And it's all in the name of these guys. We're driving into the field where we're going to plant sugar beets in 2013. And the snow is only about three inches deep at the moment right here. Looks like a barren wasteland. Blaine Benedict, he's a sugar beet farmer here in Sabin, Minnesota, and he runs a farm with his two brothers. It's a hard conversation to come out onto someone's fourth generation farm and say, Why do you get this special treatment?

Why do you deserve a special line written in a bill that guarantees a minimum price for your product? There's government involvement in most developed countries at some level of an or another with a price control on sugar. The U.S. sugar guys say, just look at Brazil. The Brazilian government gives a couple billion dollars in subsidies to their sugar industry. They say the Mexican government actually,

owns most of its factories that make sugar? I think our biggest fear is that we're all on a fair playing, you know, competitive field. You know, when, if you're competing against other government policies, you know, and I mean, that's what makes us nervous as a producer. A lot of people told us there is this really big reason that sugar has a price guarantee embedded in the law. And this reason has nothing to do with Brazil.

or actually economics at all. The sugar lobby. It is really powerful, super well organized. Each year, it gives a lot of money to political campaigns, and it spends a lot lobbying for or against bills. A big chunk of that money goes to people like this guy, U.S. Representative Colin Peterson. He is a Democrat from Minnesota.

And until recently, he was chair of the Agriculture Committee in the House. I've been called a communist before. I'm okay with that. That's because Colin Peterson is a big advocate of the central planning of the sugar supply and the guaranteed minimum price. We asked him if the reason he's such a champion of the sugar program is that the sugar companies, like American Crystal, are the biggest contributors to his campaign. If American Crystal gave me zero, I would take the same position. Really? It wouldn't make any difference.

Well, how do you know? This is 25% of the economy in my district. You think I'm not going to fight for this? If you eliminate the sugar program, what will happen is we will not grow sugar in the United States. And why is that such a bad thing? Because it's a huge economic activity in many parts of this country that have created a lot of jobs and a lot of economic activity. Now, the other side of this, the candy manufacturers, they make the same argument, just in reverse. Peterson says jobs might be lost. The candy guys say jobs that might otherwise have been used.

created weren't. That's what's so strange about this whole thing. We're not so different, you and I. They're both these classic American industries, Minnesota farming, Ohio manufacturing. In Minnesota, there's four generations of farmers farming this land. But in Ohio, those guys are fourth generation, too. The Spangler factory has been around since 1906, always run by a Spangler. Jess Jang and Zoe Chase from 2013. In the more than a decade since we've this story, many, many people have tried to get rid of the sugar protections, and they have all failed. We are still paying more than twice as much for sugar as the rest of the world. You're welcome. Let's bring back in our professor, Carolyn Freund, from UC San Diego. Hey, Carolyn. Hi,

glad to be here. This sugar story blows my mind because obviously I'm eating sugar in some form every single day. And I'm paying every single day a little bit more in everything I use than I have to pay, right? Absolutely. And I think we're at a point now where it's roughly twice the price of world sugar. And you know, this isn't just a recent thing. I look back. The first tariff on sugar was in 1789, mostly to raise money at that point. But almost continuously since this nation's founding, we have supported sugar farmers in one way or another through tariffs and quotas and subsidies at one point even mandating that excess sugar has to go to ethanol and the government has to buy it. Why is sugar so important to the government of the United States

of America to make it more expensive for everybody? Well, it's because one, when you have tariffs historically, they're very hard to get rid of. And that's a big danger because companies, farms get used to having that protection and they want to maintain it. That's the way they've built their business. So the history really, really matters. So that's one part of it. Because there is literally no one alive in the sugar industry who has ever competed on a global stance with sugar. Yes. So they've made all their investments and designed their whole farms around assuming they have that protections, you take that protection away and many wouldn't be profitable. So they want to keep it. So they are going to lobby super hard

in Washington. So the only people who will get elected are people who will support them who will then push their interests in Washington. There is a term in political economy called institutional path dependence, which means what? Basically, it means history matters. So if you set up this type of policy historically, everything develops around that policy being in place and it's super hard to reverse. And I think that is one fear around the escalation in protection now is it took us a long time for countries to slowly reduce tariffs, yet they can go up overnight, and that's, I think, one of the things I'm most worried about is the persistence of protection. It's much easier to raise a tariff than it is to lower it because now there's

somebody who probably wants to keep it in place and is going to fight to keep it there. So I feel like we're agreeing too much here. So let me take another point of view. United States of America, greatest economy in the world. I can't imagine a scenario under which you say the United States just can't compete on sugar. We can't have any of our own sugar. So maybe it's worth all of these problems it creates in order to just have a thriving, or at least a surviving American sugar industry. I think one could make that argument for some things that are really critical, like medicines, or I guess the reason for steel is because it goes into weapons, semiconductors, but it's hard to say, given how many countries around the world

make sugar and that sugar's not even good for you, that it matters that we have a thriving sugar industry. And I guess because there's no objective reason why we need to have a sugar industry, that's why there are so many lobbyists and industry associations who work so hard to keep these protections in place. It costs all of us a few extra pennies every day, but it really matters for the sugar beet farmers. May they enjoy our pennies. Coming up, our second case study, and this is a doozy.

What happens when there is a trade barrier that no one really wants? We visit the New York International Auto Show after the break. Okay, everyone, quiet down. guest in the classroom and a second case study. We talked at the beginning of the class about protectionism using regulations. And this is a great example. We in the United States are not getting all the cool cars from around the world. There are regulations in place that make it too expensive to bring some international cars here and that keeps some cool U.S. cars from being affordable in the rest of the world. All of this in the name of safety. Professor Freind, what should the

students be listening for in this story? I think they should think about whether they feel safer in U.S. cars than in cars elsewhere if they've been abroad and rented a car. Great. This next story comes from 2014 when Zoe Chase and I went to the New York International Auto Show. And it was a scene, I tell you. Cars on those big rotating stages, fashion models pointing out the different features of the cars. There was even this place where you could test drive big SUVs right in front of the convention center. We definitely wanted to do that, and we approached the Jeep representative. Would you like to ride in the Cherokee, the Wrangler, or the Grand Cherokee? We'll get into anything. We're getting a test drive. Since this is Manhattan, we can't really take it off road, but Jeep has

built a driving track. A bunch of fake hills and bumps all set up right in the middle of the city. Well, welcome to Camp Jeep, you guys. My name's Steve, and I'll be your own. operator. And we are going to slide around the track here in our Jeep Wrangler. This is the Unlimited, so it has the four door. And all of a sudden, the Jeep takes off, and we are going up this incline, and I swear, I swear, the car is about to tip over. Whoa, this is crazy. This thing's on its side. And then we whip around the corner and we start bouncing up and down over a bunch of stumps in the road. Hey, are you okay? Ah, you're going to destroy this thing.

All right. So, we made it. Could you drive this Jeep off road? You can drive it on dirt roads? Yeah, absolutely. This particular Jeep, this is the iconic Jeep brand, the Wranglet. Could you drive it through a river? You can water ford with it.

That's one of the things that makes Jeep a trail-raded vehicle is water-forting. So can you drive this thing anywhere? You drive in a lot of places you can't drive your Cadillac. But you cannot drive this car anywhere. Because Steve doesn't mention one very large place. that will not allow this car on their roads. Europe. This particular Jeep would be illegal in Paris. It would be illegal in Milan.

It would be breaking the law in Berlin because of a technicality. All of the safety features on this Jeep, the airbags, the bumper, they're built to U.S. safety standards. And there is an entirely different set of standards in Europe. And so in order to sell this particular Jeep in Europe, Jeep will have to replace a bunch of parts, redesign other parts. And the Europeans have the same issue. Each country develops their own regulations.

They have their own laws, their own testing standards. And sometimes even the expert car guys, which admittedly is not us, even they cannot figure out some rationale for the standards being different. That's why we met up with Dave Shepardson. He covers cars for the Detroit News. And we met him at the Fiat section of the auto show. And he points to this beautiful car, I think anyway, the Fiat 500. So cute.

And in order to bring this from Italy, where you can drive it all over the place, to America, they had to change a bunch of things, including... The windshield wipers. American regulations require that the windshield wipers capture a larger part of the windshield versus European ones. But, I mean, what is the even logic behind that? You know, I guess Americans might be taller on average, therefore they would be looking at a different part. I mean, I'm struggling here.

I agree with you to come up with a rationalization. Yeah, some of the regulations seem totally arbitrary. Like, the very fact that a rule exists at all for this thing seems kind of crazy, let alone that there are two different rules and different countries. Like, we found these two brand new Porsches on the show floor. One Porsche for the U.S. and one for Europe. And they had two different colored turn signals. This is a Porsche Panamara. Looking at the U.S. version, we have the amber turn signal indicator, whereas here on the German version, we've got the clear.

That is actually a law. That is a rule. We don't care if your car is worth a million dollars, and this car is worth a million dollars. You have to have an amber turn signal in America, and you have to swap out this little piece of plastic if you're in Europe. And this may sound kind of silly, but the rules go from the very small to the very big, because a car can be a very big and very serious thing. Because cars can kill you, which is why the government feels like they have a compelling interest to get all up in how you. you make your car and tell you what you can and cannot do. Cars are one of the leading causes of death in this country.

Yeah, and different countries have different assumptions about exactly how these cars are going to kill you. Take crash tests. In Europe, you have to put crash test dummies into a car and you drive that car into a wall head on. But the U.S. also looks at what it'll be like if the crash happens at a slate angle. A small difference, but a big deal for designers, because this presents. them with a problem. Now, a car company could design a car that will withstand both kinds of tests, a car that would be legal in both United States and Europe. And a lot of, you know, super luxury cars do this, but it can be really expensive to make the frame that way. And so what a lot of other

car companies do is they do the sort of second most expensive thing. They just redesign the car. They say this one's for U.S., this one's for Europe, and then they recrash it and they retest it. And you might think I did first, I just assumed, that Europe is just a safer place to drive. And in the U.S., they are more lax. I figured in Europe, they're more strict. So in Europe, they're probably safer. But this is not the case. No. Everyone tells us, and studies back this up, that in general, when you take all the regulations about Europe and the U.S., both places are pretty safe. They're just different. The U.S. may require a certain test like this at a certain higher speed, and Europe may require more kinds of tests, but it doesn't result in significant

differences in the number of deaths? The difference is almost a philosophical one. What does it mean to make a car safe? Well, here's one big philosophical difference, which is who are the rules designed to protect. So in the U.S., cars are tested to make sure the people inside the car are protected, the driver and the passenger. In Europe, cars are also tested to see if they protect pedestrians, people walking in front of the car. Cities are denser, they drive less. So So European regulators want the front of their cars to be basically softer. And there's this test that Europe requires. The babyhead test.

Okay, all the European cars have to meet this test. The babyhead test. They don't use actual baby heads. But they roll a ball about the size of a baby head all over the car to make sure there are no sharp edges. It's all done by computer. So the cars look smoother than they used to. Now, maybe the baby head test makes sense.

and having smoother cars is a safer thing to do. But isn't amber turn signal really better than a clear one or vice versa? The question is, why haven't at this point all the regulators just come into a room and sort of just voted, looked at all the data, decided what works best, what's the safest thing to do, and then just picked one, and then enforce the same set of standards all over the world. Now, normally when we encounter something like this, a trade barrier, we look for the person who is pushing for it. There's usually some industry or some farmer wants to be protected and they go to their government and they demand a rule, a set of regulations that keeps out

foreign competition. But this difference in car regulations, it is hated by all of the car companies equally. We couldn't find anyone who wants these differences. It protects no one in particular. And the car companies say it actually hurts them all. But it's not up to them. If it were, we would have one simple list for everyone. That's what a global engineer Cadillac told us. Do you think if all the companies in the auto show right now, they're set together, you guys could just come up with what the list would be? We would love to.

Really? Yeah. Everybody feels this way, huh? We could. No, absolutely. It would make life so much simpler, and I could use the same part around the world without all the unique testing and certification requirement and design. And it gets to exhaust systems, and it gets to seatbelts,

and it gets to glass, and it gets to mirrors and tires, and it's millions. It's not thousands, it's millions of dollars that we spend annually to make sure that our vehicles meet the requirements of the global market. We sell Cadillacs in over 40 countries around the world. Just imagine rolling a Cadillac off the production line in the U.S. And just sending it out anywhere in the world, just testing it once and then selling it to whoever wants to buy it. And that could save tens of millions of dollars. Cars might be cheaper for us because complying with these two sets of rules gets baked into the price. there'd be a bigger selection of cars to choose from.

You know, it was hard at first for us to just puzzle out, like, why do these two different sets of rules persist? And we asked everyone at the car show, no one had a good answer. And when it came right down to it, it seemed ridiculous. We have the same human bodies. We have the same size baby heads on both sides of the Atlantic. And we couldn't quite figure it out until this one moment, when we suddenly understood.

Now, we may all be physiologically the same. But culturally, we're different. So in American Europe, we actually drive differently. Take a very basic example. Seat belts. In every car, you're required to wear them in Europe. You are required to wear them in the United States. But in the United States, let's be honest, people do not always wear their seatbelt.

Now, try and run this by a European. I found a German person. Do you wear your seatbelt? Yes, of course. Every time. It's more safety. You don't get that feeling like, I just don't really want to bother. Oh, no, no way.

Never. Can you understand how some of us might feel that way? We have a lot of rules in Germany, and it's kind of mentality, so everybody puts on the seatbelt. The mentality is to follow the rules? Yes, yes. Philip Clannett, who is one of the car cleaners here, he just looked at us like we were crazy. Now, look at this through the outside. of a regulator. They see that Americans sometimes don't wear their seatbelts, that Germans

like Philip always wear theirs. So when they get together, when the Germans get together to design their airbags, they assume everyone's wearing a seatbelt. Their airbags can be smaller, more targeted. They know where the head of a person is going to go in a crash because a German is wearing his seatbelt. In America, we assume that people will break the law and we want those people to live as well. So our airbags are bigger for some idiot who is not. not wearing a seatbelt who goes flying around the car. So you can see the problem here, right? In theory, all regulations should be the same.

But if you have two different kinds of people and you have two different kinds of airbags, that means that car manufacturers have to manufacture a different kind of dashboard for Europe and the U.S. And two different dashboards means essentially two different cars. So it's a trade barrier, but it's an emotional trade barrier, which is possibly why it is taking so long to straighten this out. That was Zoe Chase and I back in the good old days of 2014. It's more than 10 years later. And guess what?

Institutional path dependence, we have still not fixed the regulatory differences in cars between Europe and the United States. We'll be back with our professor in a minute to explain why. We are almost at the end of the time. class, everyone, but I wanted to bring back in Carolyn Freund from UC San Diego for just a moment. Hey, Carolyn. Thank you. So in the auto show story, there was a mystery. The safety regulations act as a trade barrier. They make European cars more expensive in the U.S. and probably keep out some great cheap cars from Europe. But no one in the car industry supports this. It seems like a

collective action problem, but it acts like it is a regular trade barrier. So how did these regulations come about in the first place? Part of it was actually protecting the car industries from having to compete with car companies from abroad, because if there are regulatory differences, it creates increased costs for a foreign producer to produce its type of car and sell it in your market. So back in the old days, a European car manufacturers might have gone to their government and said, you know, we really like our turn signals better. Why don't we put a law in place that says that our turn signals are better?

And then the United States has to replace the color of their turn signals for us. Yeah, the car companies would work with the regulators to come up with differences. And some of it for sure is safety. And it's just that the regulatory agencies worked independently and did what they thought was right. but some are so clearly absurd that there had to be more than that involved. And maybe even at a higher level just saying we don't want regulatory cooperation so that our regulations are different than we have our market for ourselves. They have their market.

And then we can all go around to the rest of the world saying our regulations are better. And if we get Mexico on our regulations, it's easier for. for us to compete in Mexico than for Europe, because now Mexico is on our regulation. So there was also this race around the world to get countries onto either European regulations or U.S. regulations. Interesting. Now, back when those regulations came in, U.S. cars were mostly in the United States. European cars were mostly in Europe.

But the industry changed now. The car industry is far more global. So when I talk to people at this car show, they threw up their hands. They're just like, why can't we have free trade in cars? Why can't we harmonize these differences? So it's a real interesting case of global supply chains, completely changing the political economy of the industry. And frankly, the U.S. industry becoming more competitive.

Let's remember when I was a kid in the 70s, U.S. cars weren't that great. We'd get in in the morning, and my mom's Dodge DART in Chicago in a cold winter and pray that it would start, whereas the Toyota was starting right away. The competition actually helped U.S. cars become more competitive, which was a good thing. And now that they're more competitive and parts and components are being produced all over the world, and they have factories in different places, they all want to sell everywhere. So now the car industry would actually like to have a single standard, but for all these historical reasons, both protecting the industry and the views of the regulators

and protecting people and how they developed independently, we don't have that. We have these different color little tail lights, these different. windshield thicknesses, different paddings here and there, et cetera, et cetera. But going forward, how do we just get rid of the differences in these regulations so I can drive more cool cars here in the United States of America? Well, there's one really easy way to do it quickly, which is mutual recognition. So we both say, okay, we have different standards, but they're both safe. So I'm going to recognize European standards, Europeans will recognize U.S. standards, and our goods can be traded.

Over time, that would likely lead to one standard because industry would have the incentive over time to just have to produce one car rather than two Ford Fusions and, you know, so forth. That's such a beautiful concept where it essentially says, I trust my trading partner. to make something safe, and they trust us to make something safe. And yes, we're different, but maybe difference is fine. So Carolyn, before you leave, we wanted to do some vocabulary words, some concepts that people can take with them out into the world when they see an unfair price for sugar. Protectionism. What is protectionism?

It's different government interventions to protect our industry, whether tariffs or quotas or such. We should probably define the word, quotas? What's a quota? A quota is a quantity restraint on incoming products. So, say, the number of cars or the pounds of sugar that are allowed in. We talked about how once a tariff is in place, it often stays and the term path dependence. What does path dependence mean? That history matters. So because you put something in the past, it changes how things are in the future. So the sugar example was a perfect example of that, the historical protection has been so hard to get

rid of. Thank you so much, Carolyn, for coming in and doing this. I appreciate it. Thank you. My pleasure. Carolyn Freund is the Dean of the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. Next week on summer school, oh, this is very exciting. Our commencement ceremony recorded live at the Bell House in Brooklyn. If you could not make it in the audience, you can still be involved in the fun. Nothing says you can't listen to the final episode while wearing your own graduation robe.

Do it. Send us a photo. Plus, there will be a final online quiz. And if you pass, a souvenir diploma, suitable for display on LinkedIn and in the back of your Zoom calls. Everyone will love it and respect you. Summer School is produced by Eric Meadow and edited by Alex Goldmark.

It was fact-checked by Emily Crawford. Devin Miller is our project manager. I'm Robert Smith. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.