Tariff Titan: Learning Trade Policy by Wrecking an Economy

There's a genre of opinion you see a lot on Twitter and cable news that goes roughly like this: "We should just put a 25% tariff on Chinese steel. Problem solved." The person saying it is usually very confident. They have a chart. The chart has one variable on it. They are, in the way that matters, wrong — not because tariffs are always bad (they aren't) but because the confident chart-havers are treating a systems problem like an arithmetic problem. Steel tariffs don't exist in isolation. They ripple — into auto manufacturing, construction costs, consumer prices, retaliatory measures from trading partners, and half a dozen political coalitions that suddenly have skin in the game.

The difficulty of teaching this has always been that telling someone "trade policy involves tradeoffs" is about as persuasive as telling a child that the stove is hot. The lesson doesn't land until you touch it. So I built a game.

Tariff Titan is a economit tariff game that puts you in charge of U.S. trade policy for 48 months — a presidential term. Your job is to survive. That's it. Don't get fired by the president. Don't crash the economy. Don't start a trade war so severe that your allies stop returning your calls. If you make it to month 48 with the country still functioning, you win. How well you win depends on how much wreckage you left along the way.

The Game of Angry Constituents

Each turn presents a scenario — "The Steel Question," "The Smartphone Dilemma," "The Farmer's Plea" — and you pick from two or three options. A 25% steel tariff. A 10% targeted tariff. Or negotiate instead. Simple interface. The complexity is in the consequences.

Slap that 25% steel tariff on and your Rust Belt voters love you. Manufacturing ticks up. Your national security advisor nods approvingly. But inflation rises, because steel is an input to everything from cars to refrigerators. Your Coastal Elite voter bloc, which likes cheap imports, starts souring. The EU announces retaliatory tariffs on American bourbon and Harley-Davidsons. Canada files a WTO complaint. Your treasury dips because trade volume contracted. And by month six, a new scenario fires: the auto industry is asking for exemptions because their supply chain just got 15% more expensive.

None of this is exotic theory. It's roughly what happened in 2018. The game compresses it into turns you can feel.

Twenty Spinning Plates

The dashboard tracks about twenty metrics simultaneously. Treasury, GDP growth, and inflation on the economic side. Three voter blocs — Rust Belt workers, Coastal professionals, and Heartland farmers — each with interests that frequently contradict each other. Presidential approval. Congressional support. National security. Relations with six countries. Four industry sectors. And lurking underneath, a Trade Tension gauge that ticks upward every time you do something aggressive and, once it crosses certain thresholds, starts triggering retaliatory scenarios with increasing probability.

You can't optimize for all of them at once. Subsidize farmers and the treasury bleeds. Protect manufacturing and consumer prices rise. Cozy up to China and your national security score drops; antagonize China and your tech sector — which depends on rare earth minerals — starts to suffer. Every scenario is Bastiat's seen and unseen. The steel tariff is the seen. The $200 price increase on every car sold in America is the unseen. Most people stop at the seen.

Feedback Loops and Slow-Motion Disasters

The thing that surprised me most in designing this was how naturally the feedback loops emerged. I didn't have to manufacture them — they fell out of the mechanics the way they fall out of actual economies.

Here's one: inflation climbs past the 50-point mark on the game's index and all three voter blocs start losing support every turn. Panicked, you subsidize to stabilize them. Subsidies cost treasury. Low treasury means GDP growth sags. Sagging GDP drains more treasury. Now you're in a fiscal death spiral that started with one tariff that pushed input costs up 8%. You can watch this happen in real time and still not be able to stop it — a feeling some actual policymakers know intimately.

The Trade Tension escalation ladder works the same way. Below 25 on the gauge, things are calm. At 45, retaliatory scenarios start appearing every few turns. At 65, you're in a trade war. At 85, every single turn brings retaliation. The ratchet effect is the point: it's much easier to escalate trade conflict than to de-escalate it, because every retaliatory tariff creates a domestic constituency that benefits from it and will fight to keep it. Smoot-Hawley didn't get repealed until 1934, three years after it helped deepen the Depression, partly because the protected industries lobbied to keep their tariffs. The game doesn't model 1930s trade policy specifically, but you'll feel the same dynamic — the political lock-in that makes unwinding bad policy so much harder than enacting it.

Three Ways to Fail

At the start you choose an archetype — Dealmaker, Hawk, or Populist — which shifts your starting conditions and determines which choices pay off. These aren't difficulty labels. A Hawk who tries to play diplomatically wastes their advantages. A Populist who ignores their base collapses. Political identity constrains policy options: a hawkish president can't easily pivot to diplomacy because their base won't tolerate it, and the game models exactly that. Dani Rodrik's trilemma — you can't simultaneously have deep international economic integration, national sovereignty, and democratic politics — shows up here as a practical constraint, not a theorem.

Why Games Teach This Better Than Textbooks

There is a long tradition of economic simulations in education, from the classroom market experiments of Vernon Smith to the various Fed chairperson games that central banks put out periodically. Most of them teach one mechanism well but feel sterile. They're problem sets wearing a thin disguise.

What makes an ecnomic tariff game like this work, I think, is that failure is interesting. When your economy collapses in month 22 because you let inflation run hot while trying to protect manufacturing jobs, you don't just see a "Game Over" screen — you understand the causal chain that got you there. You can trace it back to the steel tariff in month 3 and the retaliatory spiral it triggered in month 8 and the subsidy you used to patch over the voter bloc damage in month 14 that drained your treasury reserve. The story of your failure is the lesson.

Compare that to a textbook treatment of the same material. "Tariffs may cause retaliatory measures from trading partners, leading to reduced trade volumes and potential welfare losses." True, correct, and about as likely to change someone's intuitions as a surgeon general's warning is to stop someone from smoking.

The Doctrine System, or: Consistency Has Returns

One of the subtler mechanics is the doctrine system. As you make choices, the game tracks whether you're behaving like a Hawk, a Diplomat, a Populist, or a Reformer. Make enough consistent choices in one direction and you unlock a passive bonus — Hawks get security gains each turn, Diplomats get GDP growth, Populists get voter loyalty, Reformers get GDP growth with reduced inflation.

The interesting design choice is that opposite doctrines conflict: you can't be both a Hawk and a Diplomat. This mirrors something real about policy credibility. Countries and markets respond better to predictable actors. A president who tariffs China on Monday and proposes a free trade deal on Wednesday confuses allies, spooks markets, and loses the compounding benefits of either approach. The doctrine system rewards coherence — you feel the point rather than getting lectured.

What People Get Wrong on the First Playthrough

Almost everyone who plays this for the first time makes the same mistakes, and they're the same mistakes first-time policymakers make.

First: they focus on one metric. Usually Treasury or their favorite voter bloc. They get it nice and high and feel good about themselves, then get blindsided by a metric they weren't watching — inflation creeping past 50, or Canada's relations dropping below the crisis threshold. Trade policy doesn't let you specialize. You're forced to be a generalist.

Second: they overreact to retaliation. China slaps counter-tariffs on your agricultural exports and the instinct is to hit back harder. But every escalatory move pushes Trade Tension higher, which increases the probability of more retaliation, which provokes more escalation. The players who do best are usually the ones who absorb a hit and de-escalate, even when it costs them politically in the short term. Restraint doesn't feel heroic, but it compounds.

Third: they ignore the crisis reserve. Starting at month 13, if your treasury is healthy, you quietly accumulate a reserve fund that can cushion future crises. Players who spend freely in the early game — subsidizing voters, cutting deals — arrive at month 30 with no reserve and no margin for error. The players who hold back early survive late. In economics, as in life, the boring strategy usually wins.