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149: Soumaya Keynes on Tariffs, Trump and Trade Agreements

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149: Soumaya Keynes on Tariffs, Trump and Trade Agreements

 

Soumaya Keynes is the economics and trade correspondent at The Economist. She writes for the print edition and the Free Exchange blog.

Before joining The Economist Soumaya did research on the public finances and pensions at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an economic research institute.

Before that Soumaya worked in the Banking and Credit team at Her Majesty’s Treasury in London. Soumaya has an M.Phil. and B.A. in Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge.

She is co-host of a weekly podcast on trade economics called Trade Talks.

In this episode, Soumaya mentions and discusses:

  • Tariffs and Trade.
  • On the WTO: when they established and for what reason.
  • The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
  • Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
  • NATO.
  • EU blockage of US beef imports due to hormone induction but lacks scientific evidence.
  • Brexit: can Ireland and the UK create their own trade agreement as made permissible within the WTO which was also similar to those countries who created the TPP.
  • About NAFTA.
  • Why did Trump go after reforming or disrupting NAFTA?

Books:

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Mathew Desmond.

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein

On Writing Well by William Zinsser


Writing Tips:

Excerpt from this episode with Soumaya Keynes

“Clear writing has value anywhere would be my first point. As someone who reads a lot of academic articles for my job, I think it has an impression that academic writing has to be wordier or more complicated essentially to demonstrate how clever you are. And as a reader of that I would argue that good writing is good wherever it is and there is huge value to being clear and having short sentences and being understandable. You know, jargon is often something that people hide behind. Do you really need to use the ten-letter version of the word where a five-letter version is available?

One thing that came to me relatively late is that essentially there are two kind of writers. There are the kind who other people think of as natural writers who can write out a first draft and it’s perfect. And for disclosure I am not one of those kind of writers. And then the other kind is the kind that basically needs three drafts to get what they are happy with. And I think before I came to The Economist that I would have thought that maybe because I need three drafts as I wasn’t as good a writer as the person who could do it first time. But that I think is really not the case. Just because it feels like it’s taken a lot of effort that you need to do a lot of re-writing to get it in the shape that you want that doesn’t say anything about the quality of the final product or just how good a writer you are.

The risk is that if you know that you need a few rounds of editing to get something in to the shape that you wanted that you label yourself a bad writer and that makes you worried or anxious about writing anything new.

And so, my words of wisdom would be ‘You’re still a great writer even if it takes you a few tries’, or at least that what I tell myself.”

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