The Trump administration has clearly made a massive mistake in calculating its so-called “reciprocal” tariff rates, seriously damaging global economic systems in the process.

President Trump has blundered into a major trade war that is reckless and based on gross misreadings of the history of tariffs.

Brent Neiman, Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth School of Business (University of Chicago), analyzes macroeconomics, financial, and trade issues and has previously served in the United States Department of the Treasury.

In an essay entitled “The Trump White House Cited My Research to Justify Tariffs. They Got It All Wrong,” published today in The New York Times, Neiman wonders how exactly the Trump administration came up with its so-called “reciprocal” tariff rates.

“My first question, when the White House unveiled its tariff regime, was, ‘How on earth did they calculate such huge rates?’ Reciprocal tariffs, after all, are supposed to treat other countries the way they treat us, and foreign tariffs on American goods are nowhere near these levels.”

“The next day it got personal,” Neiman relates. “The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released its methodology and cited an academic paper produced by four economists, including me, seemingly in support of their numbers. But they got it wrong. Very wrong. I disagree fundamentally with the government’s trade policy and approach. But even taking it at face value, our findings suggest the calculated tariffs should be dramatically smaller — perhaps one-fourth as large.”

Neiman and his economist colleagues had argued that any new tariffs should be much, much lower—roughly 25 percent of what the Trump administration has already announced.

And, the Trump administration seems poised to jack up tariff rates on China and other nations even higher as the trade war widens.

Where is the “reciprocity” in such skewed tariff rates?

Neiman goes on his essay to examine the false premises and flawed calculations of the Trump administration.

For a deeper history of tariffs, see the work of my friend and historian colleague, John E. Moser, Professor of History (Ashland University). He will be joining the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in Fall 2025.

Moser’s The Global Great Depression and the Coming of World War II (2015) analyzes the ways in which international competition during the Global Great Depression produced the Second World War.

Here is the book description at Routledge’s website:

“The Global Great Depression and the Coming of World War II demonstrates the ways in which the economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s helped to cause and shape the course of the Second World War. Historian John E. Moser points to the essential uniformity in the way in which the world s industrialized and industrializing nations responded to the challenge of the Depression. Among these nations, there was a move away from legislative deliberation and toward executive authority; away from free trade and toward the creation of regional trading blocs; away from the international gold standard and toward managed national currencies; away from chaotic individual liberty and toward rational regimentation; in other words, away from classical liberalism and toward some combination of corporatism, nationalism, and militarism. For all the similarities, however, there was still a great divide between two different general approaches to the economic crisis. Those countries that enjoyed easy, unchallenged access to resources and markets the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France tended to turn inward, erecting tariff walls and promoting domestic recovery at the expense of the international order. On the other hand, those nations that lacked such access Germany and Japan sought to take the necessary resources and markets by force. The interplay of these powers, then, constituted the dynamic of international relations of the 1930s: have-nots attempting to achieve self-sufficiency through aggressive means, challenging haves that were too distrustful of one another, and too preoccupied with their own domestic affairs, to work cooperatively in an effort to stop them.”

See also a number of academic journal articles on tariffs, protectionism, the Great Depression, and the Great Recession in The Economic History Review, The International History Review, The Journal of Economic History, History of Economic Ideas, and the Journal of Modern European History.

Sources

Moser, John E. The Global Great Depression and the Coming of World War II. London: Routledge 2015.

Moser, John E. The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Concise History. Ashbrook Press 2023.

Neiman, Brent. “The Trump White House Cited My Research to Justify Tariffs. They Got It All Wrong.” The New York Times (7 April 2025).