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Notes -
I think the distinction I would make is between the means being used to prevent automation and the result of preventing automation. That is, for the longshoreman, the means they used to prevent automation was to threaten to shut down some amount of port traffic (I don't actually know how much; I assume a good chunk of it). This would be pretty damaging to the economy. Whereas, as you say, once they've come to a deal that prevents some amount of automation, the result looks more like a drag on productivity. In their case, it would say that their drag on productivity is mostly confined to just their little corner of the economy. Other countries' ports will continue to become more and more efficient than ours. This may impact the trade flowing through them to some extent, but it probably kinda just shows up as a sort of a ransom that has to be paid, which ultimately is not that huge; there's just not that many of them that need paid off in the end.
Tariffs are actually probably a bit of a lesser threat to the economy. I used the strong wording, but I recall that back during Trump I, I had a comment in the old place quoting Krugman making an estimate that a Trumpian trade war might 'only' cost about 3% of GDP.1 IIRC, Krugman was doing a back-of-the-envelope that assumed that Trump would follow some academic paper for "optimal tariffs", and my guess is that what Trump II has now actually done is, uh, probably not that. Of course, in the limit, as tariffs go to the moon, trade grinds to a halt almost entirely, and it sort of more closely resembles longshoremen shutting down the ports.
Now, what's the ransom that has to be paid in order to actually stop automation in manufacturing? My answer would be, "???". Unlike ports, which are very concentrated in space, amenable to discrete deals that stop specific automation from occurring, and not subject to much competition, manufacturing is everywhere and subject to intense competition. Tariffs don't actually have a mechanism to stop automation in all these places. It's just paying a temporary ransom to some existing manufacturers, who might use part of that ransom to keep a few marginal employees around a little bit longer. They're still going to adopt more automation; if they don't, their competitors will (foreign and domestic). Even if tariffs magically stopped all domestic manufacturing automation, the drag on productivity growth will gradually make foreign manufacturers more and more competitive over time, and uh, I guess we'll have to raise even higher tariffs?! The only real limit in sight would be once they're high enough that they've basically killed all US imports. Yes, a nice ransom to some domestic manufacturers, but if all that automation keeps chugging along overseas, that basically plays out as US GDP numbers dragging and dragging and dragging, while foreigner GDPs moon.
Tariffs probably won't actually wreck the economy in one fell swoop, but they won't fundamentally affect the process of automation in manufacturing, either. They'll just cause some folks to get a little ransom and long-term terrible growth. Even the difference between 1-2% GDP growth each year is getting close to a 2x difference over 50 years.
1 - I absolutely know that Krugman is a partisan hack. His article was actually trying to downplay how bad it would be, so I thought on balance it was reasonable to use him as an OOM estimate, given the context; it really did not feel like he was trying to super inflate the estimate, even though that what I would have otherwise expected from him. I recall it well, because I compared that to the estimates of the 'cost' of climate change in terms of GDP (as well as a few other things), and it was hilarious how little of a thing climate change was.
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