The scorners and the doomsayers, however, miss the soul of the matter — and also an opportunity.

Intentionally or not, tariffs appear to be making cheap imported stuff more expensive. At least, this is the consensus among the critics. The reciprocal tariff chart may have broken the commentariat with its crudeness as an expression of economic policy, but it had a certain rough elegance in terms of identifying stuff that’s too cheap and making it cost more. It has been weird to watch the resistance to this idea, since stemming the flood of made-for-landfill consumer goods has long been a popular talking point for the Leftists and environmentalists who oppose Trump.

It’s an article of faith for these people — and I’m one of them — that our limitless appetite for disposable consumer goods from China and the developing world shortchanges domestic workers, underwrites brutal labor regimes abroad, and is morally and environmentally reprehensible. A globalized food system is unsustainable and undesirable, and so on. It has been funny to see the about-face as we demand our low-cost Chinese goods and wintertime raspberries.

For example, Rue Saint Paul, a “sustainable collective” clothing boutique in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, near where I live, prides itself on sourcing its garments from brands with ethical labor standards. The “about us” section on the shop’s website claims that “guided by our sustainable values… our mission is to help reduce the fashion industry’s environmental footprint, promote ethical manufacturing, and drive responsible and circular consumption.”

Yet shortly after Liberation Day, Kelly Wang, the Rue Saint Paul owner, took to Instagram to lament the tariffs’ disastrous potential consequences for her business and to say, sarcastically: “But surely you can unwind decades old global supply chains in a week, new US factories will be opening tomorrow, millions of new jobs will be created instantaneously, prices of domestically made goods will be cheaper, and all of our paychecks will double. It will all be GREAT again.” Does Wang really think that the global supply chain is awesome, and that we should get everything we want “tomorrow” or “instantaneously,” or else it’s not worth it? The stance is at odds with the brand’s ethos.

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Wang did not return my calls by deadline, but she spoke to the website Gothamist to further explain the negative effects the tariffs would have on her business. Surprisingly for a sustainable boutique in the white-hot “shop-local” center of Brooklyn, 70% of Rue Saint Paul’s merchandise comes from abroad, including its best-selling item, a pair of “two-toned, color blocked” trousers made in China, that currently sell for $200 and will have to be priced at closer to $400 once Wang has to restock them at a higher price. (This is assuming that the Chinese manufacturers won’t eat the price difference, as Trump promises).

Rue Saint Paul offers meaningful and original sustainability initiatives — it allows shoppers to “rent” clothing for short periods of time, and it offers “buybacks” on its wares once you’re done with them. Yet like almost all high-end, ethical businesses, these values mask its promotion of a fundamentally unchanged consumerism. The obvious most-sustainable option would be for Brooklyn women — not a demographic with small wardrobes — to buy fewer pairs of color-blocked pants. Making them cost $400 instead of $200 doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea.

This idea comes to mind frequently when reading about tariffs and the impossibility of manufacturing in America. The Smarter Scrubber grill brush guy explains his failed quest to entirely source and make a grill brush locally — he tried, and it can’t be done; we don’t have the manufacturing capacity for one of the parts. Elsewhere, a manufacturer explains that he can fabricate the plastic parts for his custom department-store coat hangers locally but can’t get the metal hooks.

One can’t help but think of the vast number of hangers and grill brushes already in existence, all destined for landfills due to the lack of secondary markets. We have enough grill brushes and hangers for 1,000 years, if only we could reuse the ones in existence. Second-hand dealers, incidentally, expect tariffs to be good for them. One such merchant I spoke with, Kevin Walla, co-owner with his father of A Perfect Piece consignment business in Manchester, Vermont, noted uncertainties about the market but was generally expecting an uptick in sales within a six- to 12-month timeframe. “From a green perspective,” he says “buying second hand means less carbon released from the production of new items.” During the 15-year run of his business, Walla has “consistently” seen greater supply of second-hand goods than demand for them. Imagine if that could change.

Sustainability advocates have often made the austerity argument when it comes to animal proteins: meat is resource-intensive, and to produce it ethically is expensive, so the price should reflect reality, and we should eat meat sparingly. Another endangered business mentioned in the Gothamist story is Aqua Best Seafood, which “services 80% of the Michelin-star restaurants in New York City” with items like salmon from Norway, branzino from Turkey, dorade from Greece and red snapper from Japan. Will Michelin diners still be able to get their imported fish at a good price post-tariff? Well, should they be able to?

A cookbook I like very much, One Pot, Pan, Planet, by Anna Jones, instructs its readers to “consider food miles” when making our purchases, and to consider eating fresh, seasonal foods mostly when they’re in season. Higher prices on imported luxury fish would probably turn such products into what they ought to be in the first place: a splurge and an indulgence.

There are many obvious objections to this line of thinking, including that it’s not really what Trump says he’s trying to do, and that the massive recession from less consumption would be so devastating that we’d regret we tried it, no matter what our values. There’s also the argument that higher prices unfairly affect people with lower incomes, who spend a greater proportion of their money on basic goods, and can least afford the increases.

To this, it seems essential to point out that a large share of the Walmart demographic voted for Trump, and has shown considerable loyalty to him. They might — might — be open to undergoing economic pain for a perceived good cause down the road. Low-income people are also the ones disproportionately affected by our addiction to cheap, ill-made goods — they’re the ones with the awful Amazon delivery and DoorDash jobs; they’re the ones who suffer most when the made-in-China backpack breaks the first week.

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The most reasonable consensus seems to be that the American “manufacturing jobs” the Trump voters long for won’t fix these problems — we’ll never beat the likes of China and Vietnam, and much of this labor will be done by robots now anyway. But it also might be true that Trump’s voters don’t really want “manufacturing jobs” in the sense that they have a burning need to mine coal or operate a robot arm. The term might stand in for stable, well-paid, meaningful work and goods that don’t suck. And these goals, actually, align with those of their cultural opponents. Surely this is an opportunity for significant reform of a universally hated system.

Katrina Caspelich, the CEO of Re/Make World, a nonprofit devoted to climate justice and fair pay in the clothing industry believes that tariffs will bring us further from these goals. She believes that large, fast-fashion brands — 100 billion new garments produced each year, most ending up in landfills within a few years — will be able to evade the tariffs by moving their production around quickly, and already-marginalized garment workers abroad will be the ones to bear the real costs. Small businesses like Wang’s, engaged in “thoughtful production and long-term supplier relationships,” won’t survive, Caspelich thinks, while fast fashion will.

Maybe, but Re/Make, among other initiatives, challenges its supporters to do a 90-day #NoNewClothes fast that will “reduce your carbon footprint,” “keep your money out of the pockets of exploitative companies,” and “limit waste you send to a landfill” — basically, just don’t shop for three months. Such initiatives are virtuous in theory, but obviously in practice haven’t changed consumer habits. Tariffs just might.

In most cases ministers have no choice but to do what it takes. If they let, say, Transport for London go down the tubes, there’ll be no return to normality.

But there’s one industry where the question isn’t “how do we save it?”, but “can we save it?” and even “should we save it?”

That industry is the great enabler of the global economy: aviation.

Can we imagine a world without mass air travel? Well, you don’t have to — just look out the window. Or at one of those flight tracker websites. Even around cities like London the skies are almost clear, the airports all but deserted, airlines operating at a tiny fraction of their capacity.

But that’s temporary, right? Aviation might be one of the last industries to recover, but it’s not like the aeroplanes have all crashed. The supporting infrastructure is intact. The industry has everything it needs to get off the ground again — everything but enough money, and that’s something the state can provide.

After all, there’s more than the economy at stake here. Safe and affordable air travel is one of the great signifiers of modernity. More than any other, this is the technological advance that delineates our era from the plodding, earthbound, black-and-white world that preceded it. To turn our backs on all of that, to regress to a less advanced stage in our development, well, that’s a textbook definition of civilisational decline.

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When Radio 4’s In Our Time tackled the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th Century, Melvyn Bragg asked his guests whether the concept of ‘decline’ was still considered valid by contemporary scholars. After some academic umming-and-ahhing, it was Professor Charlotte Roueché who got to the point: hot-and-cold running water. The Romans had it throughout their empire, and then it was lost. For centuries. That’s your decline, right there.

Can we imagine something similar happening in our own day and age — the permanent loss of a ubiquitous technology? Needless to say, we discard technologies all the time — when they’re superseded by something better (or, at least, more convenient). Take recorded music, where we went from wax cylinders to shellac records to vinyl records to CDs to streaming (plus various other steps and detours in between). But occasionally we abandon a technology for which there’s no replacement. Something we used to be able to do just stops.

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Older readers may remember the shoe-fitting fluoroscope (or, to use a rather unfortunate proprietary name, the Pedoscope). It’s purpose was to take the guess work out of shoe shopping. This is always a pain — and sometimes a permanent one if the shoes that felt fine in the shop turn out to be too tight or too loose.

But what if you could literally see through the shoe leather to see how good the fit is?  What if there were some sort of X-ray device that displayed an image of the shoe around the bones of your foot? Indeed, what if you could wiggle your phalanges and view them moving around inside their new confines? Sales assistants could be trained to make an objective assessment — allowing you to purchase with confidence.

It sounds futuristic, but this technology belongs to the past. Fluoroscopes were once a common sight in our shoe shops. Thousands of the devices were installed in the mid-20th century. Until, that is, people realised that the high street isn’t the best place for a boxful of radioactive isotopes (an X-ray machine needs an X-ray source). It was decided that pinched toes were preferable to radiation burns, and so that was the end of that.

There’s another, much grander, example from the mid-20th century: manned spaceflight beyond Earth orbit. It’s now 47 years since we last visited another world. And I don’t see plans for a return to the moon being a spending priority in the post-Covid era.

So, yes, even in the modern age, we sometimes take a technological step backwards because we can’t sustain the cost of progress.

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Could the same apply to mass air travel? Aviation has had to take a step back before. Between the wars, there was a serious attempt to deliver commercial trans-Atlantic flights by airship. Tragically, it all came to grief with the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.

Yet that was only a temporary reverse. After the Second World War, aeroplane technology would grow into the industry we know today. The world’s airlines now carry over four billion passengers every year (‘now’ meaning the last few years until 2020 happened).

That’s about eight trillion passenger-kilometers. Numbers have basically doubled over the last two decades, and are predicted to more than double again over the next twenty years. Certainly there’s plenty of potential for growth because only a fifth of the world’s population has ever flown. They seem keen to try, however. In Asia alone, it’s estimated that 100 million people fly for the first time time every year.

If you look at the modern technologies that have been set aside without replacement they are either trivial (like the Pedoscope) or experimental (like manned spaceflight). Mass air travel is clearly unlike either of those, which is why its loss seems so unimaginable.

And yet whether a technology is abandoned or not isn’t determined by the extent of its benefit, but by whether the benefits are outweighed by the costs.

Airlines have innovated to increase the affordability, if not the pleasantness, of air travel. They’ve pushed the limits of euclidean geometry (and human anatomy) to fit ever more seats into the same space. We may complain, but the industry knows we’re suckers for a cheap ride.

Covid-19 throws all of that into doubt. 

There’s no social distancing on a packed plane — not even if middle seats are left empty. With a typical seat pitch (the distance between the same point on each row) of about 75cm, keeping a two metre separation is impossible — and that’s without the sociopath in front of you reclining into your face.

The industry claims that there are other ways of keeping passengers safe. For instance, the filtration systems which continually clean the cabin air. Then again, just look at this simulation of how airborne droplets from a single sneeze spread around a plane. Grim.

No matter what adjustments are made on board, the fact is that to fly means spending several hours in a tin can with hundreds of strangers — and you don’t where they’ve been.

To persuade us of the safety of that, airlines will mainly be relying on what happens on the ground. From temperature scans to spit tests, screening procedures are a first line of defence in airports around the world. The already tiresome business of getting through an airport will get several times worse. For instance, read Laurel Chor’s account of what it takes to fly from London to Hong Kong. We’re talking about hours of extra delay — and not in a comfy airport lounge, but in some spartan, socially-distanced warehouse. And, of course, there’s always the risk that you’ll fail a check and be refused entry.

With that rigmarole in place, most trips — whether for business or pleasure — become untenable.

These controls are likely to last a lot longer than other aspects of the lockdown. In respect to international air travel, any relaxation depends on progress being made not just in the country in question, but globally.

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It seems likely that hopes of widespread asymptomatic infection — and thus of achieving herd immunity — have been dashed. Most countries’ strategy for getting out of lockdown will be about suppressing transmission of the disease at home. As they get closer to that goal, efforts to prevent re-infection from abroad are likely to tighten not loosen.

The British government is now introducing a quarantine period for air passengers arriving in the UK. This would require them to self-isolate at a private residence for 14 days. Obviously, that rules out most business and holiday travel. The airlines aren’t happy — and they won’t have been consoled by some recent remarks by the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock: “It’s unlikely that big, lavish international holidays are going to be possible this summer.”

Indeed, governments are unlikely to let down their guard or consumers to regain their confidence until we’ve gone through the coming winter without a serious second wave of the disease. So, the big question for the airlines is what happens next summer.

Even if lockdown is lifted and borders re-open, how many of us will have the confidence — or the money — to fly abroad on holiday again? As for business travel, will we see an explosion of pent-up demand (from, say, personnel deployed to rebuild global supply chains) or an accelerated process of deglobalisation? We don’t know yet, because none of this has happened before.

We can be certain that demand will recover, but there’s no telling how rapidly or to what extent. With airlines already fragilised by debt and months of massively reduced revenues, there is a significant chance of an industry-wide meltdown.

In which case, what should governments do about it? Presumably, they won’t allow national flag carriers to collapse, but would it be sensible to bail-out or nationalise every airline? Not in the context of dramatically reduced demand. If there is a need for a general bail-out, then it can’t happen without a restructuring of the whole industry. And by ‘restructuring’, I mean downsizing.

Whatever happens, we need to ask what purpose aviation actually serves. This is a moment in history when we’re rethinking the case for globalisation, wrestling with the challenge of climate change, and reeling from the impact of pandemic disease. The question of whether mass air travel does more harm than good is now open and urgent.

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A world where we radically restrict air travel is no longer unthinkable. The downside of hyper-connectivity, of millions of people hurtling around the planet at every moment, is no longer theoretical. Aviation did not create Covid-19, but it did turn a local outbreak into a global catastrophe. Unrestricted aviation is the great multiplier of pandemic risk — and that can’t be ignored anymore.

Aviation policy cannot go on as if none of this has happened. There’s Heathrow expansion, for instance, the business case for which now lies in tatters. Though a major asset, Heathrow is also a liability, a vast generator of congestion and pollution lodged in the side of our most populous city. The idea that we’d make it bigger is not just absurd, but grotesque.

Boris was right for the wrong reason, we need to move our main airport to a coastal location — but to provide room for containment, not expansion. Protection against future pandemics depends on the ability to close our borders as and when required. Ports, airports and logistical hubs need to be designed around this objective — incorporating the facilities required for advanced border control, mass medical testing and, if necessary, the quarantine of returning travellers.

As devastating as this pandemic has been, we need to remember it could have been worse — and that there’s absolutely no guarantee that the next one won’t be. But I wonder whether we’ve really learned our lesson.

We’ve been taught to despise humility, to disregard our limits. Like Jesus tempted by Satan in the wilderness, we’ve been taken to a high place and shown “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour”. We’ve come to believe that they belong to us, that they must lie within our grasp.

But we live a different world now and for most of us that means a smaller world. Because that’s what happens when we overreach.

The pandemic also illuminates a wider retreat from full-on free trade that has been gaining in support and legitimacy over recent years—everywhere, that is, apart from in the economics profession. Democratic politics and national social contracts are starting to assert themselves against the laws of comparative advantage — which in any case turn out not to be quite as benign as the economics professors claim. This was brought home to me a few days ago when I heard a very senior Tory say that he was, until recently, an orthodox free trader/free marketeer but now regarded himself as an economic nationalist.

He is not alone. World trade fell last year by 0.4%. There has been no multilateral trade agreement since 1993. Donald Trump wants to bring back some of the US supply chain from China. And this is not a Trumpian eccentricity, most of the US political class is behind him on this, acknowledging that allowing China entry to the global market economy in the belief that it would transform politically (and become less mercantilist economically) is a gamble that failed. There has been technological decoupling too, the world will not end up on single global platforms.

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The ascent of climate change anxieties up domestic and international agendas is also making life uncomfortable for unfettered free trade, encouraging a bias towards localism, reduced travel and a degree of self-sufficiency. China’s air quality has improved dramatically in the past few weeks as a result of measures to contain the coronavirus. And more generically, Greta is asking whether you really need strawberries in March.

The truth is that the neat theories of free trade and comparative advantage have been oversold. Free trade, as Keynes pointed out, only works if the people displaced from good jobs by imports get equally good jobs elsewhere in the economy. The election of Donald Trump is one kind of proof that this has not been happening.

Hold on, say the free traders, of course there will be downward pressure on wages and job losses in the short run but, in the long run, the additional purchasing power we acquire from cheaper imports means we can buy other goods and services that will create equally good jobs elsewhere in the economy. Moreover, they say, when given the choice between protecting the Mid-West manufacturing plant and enjoying good quality, cheaper stuff in Walmart, people have voted with their wallets for the cheaper stuff.

But they have not been given a proper choice. Of course people would always prefer cheaper goods, but not at any price. If the choice was between slightly more expensive goods and services, and the preservation, or more gradual decline, of a certain agricultural or industrial way of life, they might well support such a deal. Indeed, they do so in the EU through the Common Agricultural Policy.

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According to Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky, most trade doesn’t follow any discernible pattern of comparative advantage, and Cambridge economist Graham Gudgin has shown that, for countries in North America and Western Europe, joining free trade agreements has caused slower — not faster — growth in recent decades. Unlike comparative advantage in natural resources, which is better described as absolute advantage, comparative advantage in manufacturing systems is usually quite marginal.

Much of the comparative advantage of recent decades has been achieved by simply taking advantage of lower labour costs in poorer countries. Apple makes iPhones in China, which does benefit US consumers, and to some extent Chinese workers, but the main beneficiaries are probably Apple executives and shareholders. Bringing some of that production back to the US, even at the cost of slightly higher prices, would not, I suspect, be unpopular.

The theory that free trade engenders a permanent peace has long ago been exposed as an empty dream, which is why national security and the threat of war (and pandemics) continue to provide justification for some degree of national protection. In the 19th century, Britain did completely embrace free trade. It was enormously to our advantage to do so, as the workshop of the world, and we imported most of our food by the end of the 19th century. The result was that we nearly starved in two world wars. After the Second World War, we did not make the same mistake; even with the enormous change in tastes and increase in food imports in recent decades, we still produce more than half of what we eat.

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Nobody sensible is arguing for self-sufficiency or anything like it, though it might be a good idea to retain at least some national capacity in certain strategic areas like steel or nuclear power plants or, indeed, vaccine manufacture. And, after all, isn’t the logic of comparative advantage to produce specialist monocultures in a world that values diversity in all things.

But there are some economists and political economists such as Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, Barry Eichengreen and Robert Skidelsky who are arguing, persuasively, that we need more democratic caveats to free trade. Rodrik argues that where there is a national consensus about preserving some aspect of an economy or culture, for example French restrictions on Hollywood film imports, these should be allowed and not attract sanctions from international trade regulators.

A UK government that is serious about regional and industrial policy, and shifting more high value economic activity towards the North, is implicitly protectionist. It is not going to promote high-tech export industries in Hartlepool and then allow them to be wiped out by imports. It will protect with either subsidies or tariffs. It is true that free trade theory does allow some such protection under the title ‘infant industry protection’, which is far preferable to senile industry protection, but EU state aid policy is not friendly to either.

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The unlikely bedfellows of populism, environmentalism and technology are all pointing in the same direction — the reshoring of some forms of production, a bit more self-sufficiency, more teleconferencing with people in other countries rather than immigration, all in all a retreat from the hyper-globalisation of recent decades.

Free traders will, not unreasonably, point to the costs. It could mean a bit less growth, though neither the populists nor the greens will necessarily object. Global supply chains are, indeed, a force for peace and breaking them up could bring back inflationary pressures. It could also mean that the dramatic fall in poverty in poorer countries will slow or stop. So why not try to mitigate the costs of free trade better? Subsidise the losers more intelligently? Or, the free trade sceptic might reply, why not prevent there being so many losers in the first place?

As Barry Eichengreen says, the problem with the global economy is not a lack of openness, but a sense that “the nation state has fundamentally lost control of its destiny, surrendering to anonymous global forces”. And as Hans Kundnani put it in last week’s Observer: “it is time the UK Government adjusted its rhetoric and stopped its paeans of praise to free trade”. Part of the point of Brexit is to put politics before economics, democratic legitimacy before economic growth.

Of course, we still want lots of trade and sustainable growth but at less cost to other things that people hold dear. A new rhetoric is needed that combines an appropriate level of openness with a sense of national control. An economic nationalism that most liberals can feel comfortable with.

David Goodhart works at Policy Exchange, and is the author of The Road to Somewhere: The new Tribes Shaping British Politics.