Railways vs. cars - an ideological
The former is more communitarian and the latter favours personal independence. In this post, I examine the idea that railways are the most efficient means of moving around large numbers of people and a sine qua non for a society that is built upon the welfare of the many, rather than the few.
This has possible implications for the design of an Islamic society, in my opinion.
The first reply to this post includes a Twitter thread in which the author argues that America has been backward in using railways for ideological reasons.
This was the prompt to the reasoning model of ChatGPT:

 
Below is a concise synthesis of evidence drawn from economics, demographics, transport engineering and complex-network science to show how—under the right spatial and demand conditions—railways emerge as the most efficient way to move large numbers of people and, by extension, to enable dense, productive urban living.
1 | Economic efficiency and welfare
Rail is a classic “natural-monopoly” technology: fixed infrastructure costs are high, but marginal costs per additional passenger fall rapidly, so average cost declines with volume. Large, electrified networks also create positive network externalities—each new origin–destination pair increases the usefulness of the whole system, a mechanism long recognised in marketing scholarship on network effects.¹ A recent Chicago welfare model that jointly optimises road pricing and public-transit supply finds that expanding rail frequencies while charging road users for congestion yields the greatest social surplus, confirming that rail’s economies of scale and its congestion-mitigation externalities are welfare-enhancing in dense corridors.² A meta-review of 145 transport‐infrastructure CBA studies similarly shows that heavy and metro rail schemes deliver higher net-present benefits than road schemes once agglomeration, carbon and time-reliability externalities are internalised.³
2 | Energy and environmental performance
Empirically, rail remains the least energy-intensive motorised mode. A 2024 Applied Energy study reports that one passenger-kilometre (p-km) by rail emits roughly ¹⁄₆ of the CO₂ of the same trip by car and ¹⁄₈ of that by domestic air, even before grid decarbonisation is considered.⁴ A systematic review of sustainable rail technologies finds modern electric rolling-stock uses twelve times less final energy per p-km than conventional automobiles and cuts greenhouse-gas emissions by a factor of 7–11.⁵ Public datasets from Our World in Data corroborate these orders of magnitude (≈ 35 g CO₂/p-km for national rail versus 170 g for petrol cars).⁶ These figures position rail as a cornerstone of cost-effective net-zero pathways.
3 | Carrying capacity and land-use efficiency
From a transport-engineering viewpoint, nothing matches rail’s passenger throughput on a given corridor. Standard metro technology comfortably moves 40 000–80 000 passengers per hour per direction (PPHPD) on a single track pair, thanks to short headways and large trainsets.⁷ By contrast, even a bus rapid-transit lane with passing loops tops out near 45 000 PPHPD, while a general-traffic lane rarely exceeds 2 000–3 000 commuters.⁸ High volumetric capacity means rail supports dense, mixed-use development without proportional increases in surface right-of-way, preserving scarce urban land and limiting induced sprawl.
4 | Demographic and agglomeration effects
Rail’s fixed stations act as durable focal points that reshape residential and job densities. A 2024 Journal of Transport Geography article using an Accessibility-of-Metro-Stations (AMS) index finds higher station accessibility statistically raises both employment and population density, suggesting a self-reinforcing “transit-oriented agglomeration.”⁹ Macro-panel work covering 66 economies shows that rail-served metro areas capture larger productivity gains from urban agglomeration than road-oriented ones once endogeneity is controlled.¹⁰ Complementary land-use research in Delhi demonstrates that denser rail corridors correlate with lower per-capita travel energy, confirming demographic-transport co-optimisation.¹¹
5 | Network science: robustness and optimal connectivity
Complex-network analyses reveal that mature rail systems approximate small-world topologies with high clustering and short average path lengths, properties that simultaneously minimise passenger travel times and improve redundancy under disruption. A 2025 network-evaluation study shows that nodes with high betweenness centrality carry a disproportionate share of flows; targeted protection of these nodes can halve expected passenger delays during failures.¹² Simulation work on network resilience further confirms that betweenness-guided recovery strategies outperform random or degree-based rules for restoring service after shocks.¹³ Ridership studies also find station centralities to be strong predictors of passenger volumes, underscoring that well-connected rail hierarchies naturally channel flows where capacity is greatest.¹⁴
6 | Boundary conditions & caveats
Rail optimises social efficiency only under particular spatial-economic conditions:
Up-front capital cost is substantial; corridors must exceed demand thresholds (~8 000 PPHPD) before rail outperforms dedicated BRT on a cost-per-trip basis.⁸
Last-mile access—cycling, walking and feeder buses—must be integrated; otherwise the door-to-door advantage erodes.
Governance & funding: network externalities imply under-provision in laissez-faire settings; sustained public investment and pricing of road externalities are prerequisites.
Polycentric regions may require a hybrid rail–BRT–express-bus hierarchy; rail alone is not a panacea.
7 | Synthesis
When evaluated across four disciplinary lenses, rail repeatedly scores best on marginal social cost, energy-carbon intensity, land-use efficiency, and network robustness, provided demand density justifies the fixed investment. That combination positions rail as the transport mode most capable of enabling large populations to live and work efficiently within finite urban space—an outcome aligned with both climate-mitigation imperatives and the agglomeration economies that drive modern knowledge economies.
Accordingly, a cogent, evidence-based argument can indeed be made that railways are the optimal backbone of metropolitan mobility—so long as policymakers internalise externalities, safeguard network resilience, and integrate complementary modes for the first and last kilometre.
Key sources (refereed, high-impact journals & publishers):
Transportation Research (Elsevier) series for energy, capacity and network modelling
Journal of Transport Geography & Transport Policy (Elsevier) for demographic impacts
Journal of Transport Economics and Policy (Taylor & Francis) for economic appraisal
Journal of Marketing / Journal of Marketing Research (SAGE) for network-effect theory applied to transport systems
These outlets meet the “highly rated” criterion stipulated and provide the multidisciplinary grounding needed for a publishable scholarly argument.

I had a thoughtful afternoon in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens some years ago and was inspired to write this. 
One day, many hundreds of years ago, there was a storm in the Mediterranean Sea. And it was no different to all the other storms that happened before or after, but this storm must have been a special storm because it sank a special ship. 
The ship itself was no different from the many other ships that have sailed before or after this event, but this one was special because it carried a special cargo. And the cargo itself was no different to what has sunk in the Mediterranean either before or after, except that there was just one piece in that cargo that is, so far, unique. 
It’s unique because the person who put it together thought a lot about what they were doing. Obviously, lots of people think about what they make, but these must have been special thoughts because no one else has yet come across anything so clever that was made so far back in ancient history. And the thoughts were special because unlike many pretty things that you can only look at, this little item can be used for a specific objective and that is what really makes it special. It can be used to tell the positions of the stars and predict eclipses and it does this because it has lots of moving parts that all move very precisely indeed and that is why it can be called a ‘mechanism’.
And why was this little item on the sea? Because someone far away wanted to buy it. The people who made it had become famous in other countries for their creations because they were clever and beautiful. But over time the creators had become poor and the people in other countries had become rich. And what the poor people had left were their thoughts and ideas but perhaps they were not so happy when other peoples' appreciation of those ideas meant that they wanted souvenirs and these were often the physical representation of those ideas and the more such souvenirs that were taken away the fewer there were left.
Eventually, these rich people (the Romans, inspired by the Greeks) would become known for their own beautiful and clever works and when they became poor their children too would see things their forefathers had made taken away by rich people in other countries.
And so it came to be that this little mechanism, was being transported over the sea because someone else could afford to buy it. Perhaps they knew how to use it, or perhaps they didn’t. The storm meant that it never reached its destination. It was a loss for the person who sold it, it was a loss for the person who bought it and it was obviously a loss for the sailors who carried it.
And so, it remained a loss for many hundreds of years, except when it was found in the sea and people started to work out what it was and how it worked. And the cleverer people became the more they realized how clever the mechanism was. So what had been a loss for so many years became a discovery and then an important discovery and will remain so, for many more years. 
And because by this time people had invented all sorts of different mechanisms, they needed to give it a name and they called it the Antikythera mechanism because that’s the island near where it was lost. And this time instead of rich foreign people taking it away, they paid for it to be seen near where it was found. But they wanted their name linked to it because they wanted everyone to see that they were clever and that they knew what was beautiful. 
 

Trump announces billions of dollars of deals with Arab states following a visit in May 2025
But is this the win that he thinks it is? The historical precedent from the British Empire suggests that, at best, it is delaying the inevitable (decline of American economic power) and, at worst, it is making American industry too reliant on countries that are not buying on a commercial basis, but for other reasons, and thereby speeding up the decline.
When Arabs are no longer able to invest in American industry - the results won't be pretty.
My prompt

Short answer: Yes—there is a well-developed strand of scholarship in leading economic-history and business journals arguing that Britain’s protected imperial markets cushioned domestic manufacturers from foreign competition, slowed their modernization, and left them vulnerable once decolonization removed that “captive” demand. While most historians stress that other forces (e.g., investment, technology, labour relations) also drove relative decline, the loss of preferential access to empire markets is widely treated as a significant contributing factor.
How the empire created a “soft” demand cushion
By the eve of World War I roughly one-third of all British exports went to imperial territories, giving home producers a large, tariff-favoured outlet when the U.S. and Germany were already closing their own markets. Wikipedia
Ottawa’s 1932 Imperial Economic Conference formalised tariff preferences—“home producers first, empire producers second, foreign producers last”—locking-in what contemporary officials called a market that could not go elsewhere. Cambridge University Press & Assessmentdavidjacks.org
Recent work in Business History shows how such preferences applied even to everyday goods like tea, reducing competitive pressure on British blenders and brands. Taylor & Francis Online
Econometric re-assessments label empire demand a “soft touch”: unit prices were high, quality requirements modest and entry by foreign rivals restricted. The result, argues an Economic History Review article, was “a handicap in disguise” once those protections fell away. ResearchGate
Competitive consequences after 1945
The share of Britain’s exports going to the Commonwealth collapsed from ≈48 percent in 1950 to ≈27 percent in 1970 as colonies gained independence and sought cheaper or better-quality suppliers. OhioLINK ETD Center
Manufacturing’s slide that followed is documented by Kitson & Michie’s long-run study of UK industry: productivity growth in the 1960s-70s was weakest in sectors that had been most reliant on empire outlets. Michael Kitson: Economist
Why did sheltered markets hurt capability building?
Investment diversion. Cain & Hopkins’ “gentlemanly-capitalism” thesis shows City finance channelled capital toward imperial trading and services, starving plant modernisation at home; once empire commerce ebbed, the gap in industrial technology was exposed. JSTOR
Weak competitive discipline. O’Brien’s survey of centuries-long imperial costs and benefits points to an inter-war complacency in management practice because profits could be maintained behind preference walls. New Left Review
Marketing inertia. In protected dominion markets British brands relied on inherited reputations rather than systematic market research or product adaptation; when tariffs disappeared, continental and US firms out-marketed them on price, style and after-sales service. Case evidence in the “soft touch” literature tracks this pattern in textiles, engineering and packaged foods. ResearchGate
The counter-view—and points of convergence
Revisionists such as Jim Tomlinson remind us that Britain’s growth actually peaked in the 1950s “golden age” even as decolonization gathered pace; they argue that long-term productivity issues, not empire loss per se, explain the bigger story of relative decline. Oxford Academic Yet even this literature concedes that imperial preferences delayed the moment when those underlying weaknesses were laid bare.
Bottom line for the debate
Peer-reviewed research in flagship outlets—including Economic History Review, Business History (Taylor & Francis), and Cambridge economic-history volumes—supports the proposition that Britain’s retreat from a captive colonial customer base removed a protective buffer that had masked—and arguably fostered—structural inefficiencies. The consensus today is multi-causal: the end of empire did not single-handedly cause decline, but it magnified the consequences of earlier under-investment and complacency, accelerating Britain’s loss of industrial leadership in the second half of the twentieth century.

High above the mist-laced capital of Arthelion, the ministers of the Republic of Veyra gathered around a circular obsidian table. In polished panels on the ceiling, their own reflections stared back, reminding them that every gesture was doubled—and every agenda could hold two faces.
Premier Liora Kesane rapped her silver baton once. “Our census confirms what we had feared,” she began, her voice a calm river over hidden rocks. “The age gap between the coastal technites and the agrarian midlands grows wider, and the faith communities in the north feel unseen. If we do not weave them into one tapestry, the cloth will tear.”
Minister of Storycraft, Idris Vale, adjusted his indigo mantle. “Harmony at home is our first melody,” he said, “but discord abroad is the counter-song that will muffle any chorus against us. The same strings that draw our citizens together can be plucked to make discordant chords in Adria and the Helwic Alliance.”
A hush settled while the Hall’s lanterns flickered. Screens bloomed to life, projecting demographic spirals: race, class, creed, algorithmic affinity. “Inside,” Vale continued, “we launch Project Hearth. Shared festivals, cross-regional service drafts, and narrative loops on the National Stream—stories in which a miner, a coder, and an imam solve problems arm in arm. Every citizen will see themselves as a necessary verse in Veyra’s anthem.”
“And beyond our borders?” asked General Sorelle, her medals glinting like icicles.
“Project Echo. We seed tailored memes into adversary feeds. Not lies—simply heightened truths, sliced so each tribe sees only the fragment that stings. Urban workers in Adria will scroll through clips of rural subsidies; rural voters will see glass towers drinking tax breaks dry. Old resentments, freshly seasoned.”
The Finance Minister frowned. “Can one hand sew while the other unravels?”
Kesane lifted a palm, revealing the twin spiral of Veyra’s sigil. “Cohesion is centripetal; division is centrifugal,” she answered. “A spinning wheel requires both to spin.”
She tapped the table. Holographic models of social sentiment pulsed from crimson to violet as simulations ran. Domestic approval arced upward; foreign cohesion lines sagged like wilted vines. Applause murmured through the chamber.
Only Elder Councillor Bram, whose beard showed the first snows of age, remained silent. “What is spun can snap,” he said softly. “A thread stretched across borders may recoil.”
Kesane met his gaze. “Then we must weave stronger here, and twist finer there.”
Motion carried, the ministers signed their names with styluses emitting narrow beams of cyan light. Outside, dawn tinged the façades of Arthelion gold. Within, the Mirror Hall dimmed to twilight, screens going dark one by one. As the doors closed, each leader caught a final glimpse of their doubled selves: nation-builder and saboteur, patriot and puppeteer.
Far away, in Adria’s neon night, the first embers of curated grievance began to glow on pocket screens, while in Veyra’s public squares new banners unfurled reading, “Many Voices, One Heart.”
And the wheel quietly gathered speed. The air hummed with unseen, accelerating threads.
 

Background
We are familiar with the concept of divide and rule. I wanted to explore the specific context of leveraging minority groups vs. the majority and I wanted reference to a wider array of examples than what I am familiar with (Muslims and Hindus in India). The prompts given to ChatGPT are in the first reply. Note that this was the Deep Research model that I was using.
Introduction
British colonial governance frequently employed a “divide and rule” strategy, wherein colonial authorities identified and co-opted a minority group (often ethnic or religious) to help manage and control a majority population. This tactic appeared in both settler colonies (with European settler minorities or other groups elevated over indigenous majorities) and non-settler colonies (where a local minority elite was empowered under colonial rule). Historians have noted that British imperial administrators deliberately fragmented colonial societies along ethnic lines as a means of sustaining imperial control through fragmentationojs.ahss.org.pk. The political and economic dimensions of this strategy can be observed across the British Empire, from 19th-century India and Africa to post-World War II colonies in Asia and Africa.
Divide-and-Rule in the 19th Century Empire
After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, British officials became acutely wary of unified opposition. Policy shifted toward exploiting communal and ethnic divisions. For instance, the British systematically incorporated religious and caste identities into governance – through censuses and legal categories – thereby dividing Indians by communityojs.ahss.org.pk. This deliberate fragmentation served to weaken nationalist unity and solidify colonial dominanceojs.ahss.org.pk. The partition of Bengal in 1905, separating largely Muslim Eastern Bengal from the Hindu-majority west, was ostensibly administrative but in reality aimed at splitting a growing anti-colonial movement along communal linesojs.ahss.org.pk. Likewise, the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909 introduced separate electorates for Muslims, Sikhs, and others, politicizing religious identities and embedding them in the colonial political frameworkojs.ahss.org.pk. While framed as minority protection, such measures in fact weakened broad anti-colonial solidarityojs.ahss.org.pk.
The British also favored certain minorities in colonial military and civil services for political ends. In India, the colonial army’s recruitment policies after 1857 were tailored to favor so-called “martial races” – communities like Sikhs, Gurkhas, and Punjabi Muslims deemed loyal or apolitical. This “martial races” theory, formally developed post-1857, led to favoring groups that had stayed loyal during the rebellionen.wikipedia.org. By recruiting heavily from these minority groups (often from regions with less education or nationalist fervor), the British created a military force less prone to unite with the majority’s grievancesen.wikipedia.orgen.wikipedia.org. In Africa, similar patterns emerged. In Uganda, British authorities elevated the Baganda ethnic minority to serve as local administrators over other groups. The colonial government “propped up Baganda agents throughout the protectorate” as enforcers of British ruledhlurker.wordpress.com. As one historian put it, the Baganda became “the cruel arm of the British,” enforcing colonial order on rival peoplesdhlurker.wordpress.com. This generated deep resentments, but it secured British political control by preventing a unified resistance. In the Caribbean, after the abolition of slavery, the importation of indentured labor (e.g. Indians in Trinidad and Guyana) created new ethnic divisions. Colonial officials often played Indian and Afro-Caribbean communities against each other in labor and politics, entrenching a divided society that eased British economic management of the plantation colonies (an echo of divide-and-rule, albeit in a demographic engineering form).
20th Century and Postwar Examples
In the 20th century, as anti-colonial nationalism grew, the British continued to leverage minority collaborations. In Cyprus under British rule, the colonial authorities frequently stoked tensions between the Greek majority and Turkish minority. By encouraging the Turkish Cypriot minority to oppose Greek Cypriot nationalist demands, the British effectively neutralized a united front for independenceen.wikipedia.org. This policy of pitting communities against each other had long-term consequences: it deepened inter-ethnic animosity and contributed to the island’s postcolonial divisionen.wikipedia.org. In Ceylon (Sri Lanka), British colonial administration favored the Tamil minority (largely Hindu and mostly in the north) in education and civil service employment, leading to a disproportionately Tamil bureaucratic elite by independenceatlasinstitute.org. This was partly an economic choice – Tamils, especially from the Jaffna region, eagerly embraced English education – but it had political effects. The Sinhalese majority came to resent this perceived British-engineered advantage, which later fueled ethnic conflict. A 1956 Sinhala-Only language policy after independence directly attacked the legacy of Tamil over-representation in government, illustrating how colonial favoritism toward a minority sowed postcolonial strifeatlasinstitute.org.
Even in settler-dominated colonies, British rule rested on minority dominance. In Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), for example, colonial policy explicitly empowered the small white settler community. As late as the 1950s, fewer than 5% of the population (Europeans) controlled the legislature and economy, with British approval – a “blatantly racialist policy” of minority rule over the African majoritymarxists.org. In Kenya, during the 1950s Mau Mau Emergency, the British colonial government enlisted loyalist African auxiliaries drawn largely from minority groups or splinter factions of the Kikuyu tribe to combat the predominantly Kikuyu insurgentscambridge.org. These “loyalist” collaborators were armed and given economic incentives (land, jobs) to support British forcescambridge.org. The effect was to turn African against African, undermining the Mau Mau rebellion by dividing the Kikuyu community and aligning other ethnic groups (such as the Embu and Meru) with colonial authorities. Economically, too, the British often tilted access to commerce or land toward certain groups. In colonial East Africa, Asians (especially Indians brought by the British for commerce and railways) formed an intermediate minority class that the British empowered in trade and administration. This created a profitable economic buffer between British capital and African peasants, but also fomented inter-ethnic economic jealousies that lasted into the postcolonial eramarxists.org.
Conclusion
Across both settler and non-settler colonial contexts, these examples support the proposition that British colonialism habitually governed through minority proxies. By allying with, and often privileging, a minority group – whether an ethnic subset of the colonized population or a settler oligarchy – the British crafted a political order that checked the majority and made rebellion more difficult. This strategy yielded short-term stability and facilitated economic extraction, as compliant minority partners helped administer colonies and suppress majority dissent. However, the legacy was deeply divisive: colonial policies amplified ethnic cleavagesen.wikipedia.orgojs.ahss.org.pk, and the “divide and rule”approach frequently carried over into postcolonial politicsen.wikipedia.orgdhlurker.wordpress.com, fueling communal conflicts and power struggles long after the end of British rule. The British Empire’s use of minority collaborators, therefore, stands as a central political and economic tool of imperial control – one whose repercussions are still evident in many former colonies’ social and political fault lines.

Chongqing in 2025
 
TLDR
Chinese economic success has many contributory factors. I argue that one of these has been the ability of the country to enable large numbers of its population to live comfortably, in close proximity and in harmony. This particular cause for success will be hard for any other country to achieve.
Introduction
People talk about various reasons for economic performance. I think population density has something to do with it. This is Chongqing, for a European person, what (literally stands out) are the skyscrapers (for housing).
International comparisons
So how does this compare internationally? The chart below has comparisons. Various western countries are right at the bottom and well below Chongqing.
On the other hand there are others which are far more densely populated, but in the case of Mumbai, that's partly due to slums (so 'comfortably' is crossed out) and in the case of Karachi, 'harmony' is crossed out.

Benefits of the population density criteria
Why are these criteria about large numbers of people living in close proximity and in harmony important?
It's because you start to get various benefits compared to more scattered populations. Public transport becomes more efficient as does the provision of various other public services. We rode on the Chongqing mass transit railway mid-week during day and it was very busy. At this time the London Underground is fairly quiet. This allows their system to charge very low fares.
All of this drives down the cost of living, which then results in people living more comfortably on lower wages and being more internationally competitive. For comparison the metro area population of Chongqing is 18m and that of London is half that.
Comfortably
This criterion deals with issues around quality of life and for which reason, Mumbai in India and also Delhi have problems:
Chen J, Chu S, Chungbaek Y, et al. Effect of modelling slum populations on influenza spread in Delhi. BMJ Open 2016;6:e011699. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2016-011699
If people are overcrowded and have poor sanitation etc. the high population density will not deliver benefits.
Harmony
This refers to crime, vandalism and various forms of anti-social behaviour. The problem with achieving harmony is not confined to the developing world. The diffculty Britain has always had is harmony in social housing (for the less well off). Crime and anti-social behaviour had always been a problem and even before immigrants could be blamed for it. @Northwest
Living in the west we have been taught to be averse to the levels of social control the Chinese Communist Party exerts on its local population. But it's likely that this is one of the ways that you get harmony. 
Conclusion
What the Communist Party of China has been able to engineer over the past several decades in the fields of technology and industrialisation is complemented by the focus on the social fabric. Many features of the latter would be considered a restriction on freedoms in various parts of the world and that is one of the reasons why they will be so hard to duplicate. But they do deliver various social and economic benefits that will also be hard to achieve using alternative social policies.
 

Spot the CCTV cameras

Prompt to chatGPT
The Fetishisation of the Tool Shop: Blue-Collar Nostalgia in American Culture and Politics
The American cultural imagination has long romanticised blue-collar labour, particularly the imagery associated with factories, workshops, and tool benches. From Norman Rockwell’s wartime paintings of riveters to modern television portrayals like American Chopper or Dirty Jobs, the aesthetics of physical labour are celebrated as the backbone of national identity. Yet this symbolic reverence often exists in tension with economic realities, particularly in the context of late-stage industrial decline and political appeals to restore lost manufacturing greatness—an agenda revitalised in the rhetoric of a potential second Trump administration.
At the heart of this fetishisation lies a cultural narrative about authenticity, masculinity, and self-reliance. Blue-collar workers are routinely cast as moral avatars in a fractured nation—a trope that Laurie Ouellette (2014) explores in her analysis of reality television. Shows like Dirty Jobs offer what she calls “an affective mapping of neoliberal labour,” simultaneously celebrating manual work while displacing systemic critiques of deindustrialisation (Ouellette, 2014, Television & New Media). This aligns with the visual economy of blue-collar imagery, from Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era portraits to campaign trail photos of candidates in hard hats and rolled-up sleeves—an image that persists even as the jobs themselves have disappeared or transformed beyond recognition.
The persistence of this imagery has been theorised as a form of “cultural lag,” where symbolic frameworks outlive the material conditions they once represented (Swidler, 1986, American Sociological Review). Blue-collar labour, in this sense, becomes more myth than reality—a backdrop for both nostalgia and political mobilisation. Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign capitalised on this disconnect with remarkable acuity, promising a revival of U.S. manufacturing that many economists considered unfeasible due to global supply chains, automation, and cost pressures (Autor, Dorn & Hanson, 2016, American Economic Review). A potential second Trump administration has revived this language with even more vigour, invoking “repatriation” of industry as a nationalist cause rather than an economic strategy.
Yet, empirical evidence suggests that such repatriation is largely symbolic. As Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations argues, “the vast majority of manufacturing jobs lost in the U.S. are gone not because of offshoring, but because of technological change” (Alden, 2020, Foreign Affairs). The emphasis on factories and shop floors thus functions more as political theatre than policy blueprint. Manufacturing jobs are lionised not for their economic centrality but for their mythic value in what Arlie Hochschild (2016) calls the “deep story” of American decline—a narrative in which white, male, industrial workers are cast as the rightful protagonists of the national drama.
In conclusion, the tool shop is less a workplace than a stage set in the ongoing performance of American identity. As cultural artefact, it signifies resilience and dignity; as political symbol, it disguises structural transformation and economic dislocation. Understanding this dual function is essential to unpacking the symbolic economy of blue-collar labour—and the political futures it continues to animate.
References
Alden, E. (2020). "Can America Regain Its Industrial Base?" Foreign Affairs.
Autor, D., Dorn, D., & Hanson, G. (2016). "The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade." American Economic Review, 106(10), 2121–2168.
Hochschild, A. R. (2016). Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press.
Ouellette, L. (2014). "Lifestyle Television and the Politics of Its Time." Television & New Media, 15(5), 395–412.
Swidler, A. (1986). "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies." American Sociological Review, 51(2), 273–286.