The post Friday charts: The rise of zero-sum thinking appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read more editions, subscribe. “The importation of gold and silver is not the principal, much less the sole benefit which a nation derives from its foreign trade.”  — Adam Smith Capitalism, it is sometimes said, is how we take care of people we don’t know. People you don’t know grow the food you eat, build the house you live in and sew the clothes you wear. For Americans, many of those people live in Vietnam, although we don’t seem very thankful for them — this week, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, Stephen Miran, said a new trade deal with Vietnam is “fantastic” because it’s “extremely one-sided.” This is a Hunger Games worldview that I wish I could talk him out of. Dear Mr. Miran: Vietnam doesn’t have to suffer for Americans to prosper! Just the opposite, in fact. The entire point of free-market capitalism is that exchanging goods and services is a positive-sum activity. We learned this from Adam Smith, who explained that every voluntary exchange makes both parties better off — or it wouldn’t happen. People have an innate “propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another,” he wrote, and the more we do it, the wealthier we all are. Extracting “extremely one-sided” trade deals, by contrast, makes both sides poorer. The deal Miran touted is so one-sided that it literally has one side; Vietnam hasn’t even agreed to it, Bloomberg reports. The president imposed similarly one-sided deals on Japan and Brazil this week, in letters that revive the 18th-century practice of capitalizing random nouns:  “We invite you to participate in the extraordinary Economy of the United States, the Number One Market in the World, by far.” The letter to Japan complained that the…

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Filed under: News - @ July 11, 2025 9:21 pm