Diego Sánchez de la Cruz reveals “the hidden economic message of Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’.” A slice:
Commerce alone, however, was not enough. These networks depended upon institutions of cooperation. The Amarna Letters reveal rulers addressing one another as “brothers,” exchanging gifts, negotiating alliances, and maintaining permanent diplomatic contacts. Greek society reflected the same logic through xenia—the sacred obligation to offer hospitality to strangers. In a world where long-distance trade depended on trust between people who had never met, such norms were not merely moral ideals; they were essential economic institutions.
Seen in this light, Nolan’s The Odyssey becomes more than an adaptation of Homer. It offers a powerful illustration of what classical liberal thinkers have argued for centuries: war destroys far more than cities. It undermines trust, disrupts commerce, and replaces voluntary cooperation with coercion. David Ricardo demonstrated why trade benefits all participants through comparative advantage, while Frédéric Bastiat captured its political significance in his famous maxim: “When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.” Modern research broadly supports the intuition. Political scientists John Oneal and Bruce Russett have consistently found that countries with stronger commercial ties are, on average, less likely to fight one another. Trade does not eliminate conflict, but it changes incentives by increasing the costs of war.
The historical record points in the same direction. Since the Second World War, international trade has expanded at an unprecedented pace. Over the same period, extreme poverty has fallen dramatically, life expectancy has risen across the globe, and—despite many tragic exceptions—the world has experienced the longest period without direct war between the major powers in modern history. As Steven Pinker argues in The Better Angels of Our Nature, the long-term decline of violence reflects many factors, but the spread of commerce, stronger institutions, and wider networks of cooperation has undoubtedly been one of them.
Nolan’s film also offers an important reminder. Prosperity is not a permanent condition. Markets do not sustain themselves automatically. They depend upon trust, stable institutions, enforceable contracts, and the rule of law. When those foundations begin to crumble, commercial networks can disappear with astonishing speed—as they did more than three thousand years ago. That may be the deepest lesson of Nolan’s The Odyssey: civilisation is not held together by military power alone, but by a fragile web of trust and voluntary exchange that must constantly be preserved. In reminding us of that timeless truth, Nolan has done something increasingly rare: he has turned a Hollywood blockbuster into a compelling defence of the institutions that underpin peace, prosperity, and human flourishing.
When President Donald Trump first slapped tariffs on imported aluminum, the goal was clear: Increase domestic aluminum production for national security purposes.
The executive order Trump signed in March 2018 declared that aluminum was being imported in “such quantities and under such circumstances as to threaten to impair the national security of the United States.” A Commerce Department report laid out the argument in more detail: If the U.S. found itself in a major war, it would need reliable supplies of aluminum (to make weapons, aircraft, and more) and should not depend on imports to meet that need.
Tariffs, the administration insisted, would create the economic circumstances necessary for America to produce more aluminum.
A lot has happened since then. Aluminum prices have increased. A lot. Products made with aluminum—from beer cans to cars — have gotten more expensive as a result. Trump has raised and changed the aluminum tariff several times. The baseline tariff has gone from 10 percent to 25 percent, and there is now an additional 50 percent tariff on products made largely from aluminum.
But one thing hasn’t happened. America is not producing more aluminum.
You don’t have to trust the economic reports. Ask the Trump administration how its aluminum tariffs are working out.
“The domestic production and supply of primary aluminum, which is critical to the U.S. economy and defense industrial base, is still in insufficient supply,” the president declared last month, citing information provided by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Jason Arday, who received media attention for becoming the youngest black professor ever at the University of Cambridge in England, has recently come under scrutiny for allegedly fabricating his professional affiliations and plagiarizing his academic work.
Now, another line on his résumé is in doubt: Arday says on his official faculty website that he is a visiting professor at The Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion — but Ohio State’s DEI office shuttered in 2025, and the school said he was never an employee.
“We have no record of an employee by that name,” Ohio State University spokesman Benjamin Johnson told National Review on Tuesday.
Like most E.U. laws, this one sets out broad “standards” that are meant to be hashed out by courts down the road. “Manipulative and deceptive techniques,” for example, are defined as anything that “materially” distorts behavior by “appreciably” impairing an informed decision, leading people to make choices they “would not have otherwise taken” that are “reasonably likely” to cause “significant harm.”
Which techniques? What counts as significant? The law doesn’t say.
The “vulnerable” are also broadly defined. Alongside age and disability, the protected classes include anyone in “a specific social or economic situation.” Wouldn’t that literally cover anyone?
Such broad language cripples innovation. Large technology companies waste millions on swarms of lawyers to puzzle over such ambiguities. Smaller companies, crushed by compliance costs, never get off the ground.
Embarrassingly for Europe, the continent has maybe one company that would qualify as a frontier AI lab: France’s Mistral. And its best models have fallen behind what the U.S. and China have to offer.
The mainstreaming of socialism also appears in polling, which shows that people furthest to the left tend to be younger. A Cato Institute survey published last year found that 62% of adults under 30 hold a “favorable” view of socialism. Nor is the trend limited to Democrats. The polling firm Echelon reported last month that, while “older Democrats are split on” socialism and “younger Democrats are very much in favor,” it’s “also worth noting that social democracy and socialism elicit less steadfast unfavorable views among younger Republicans compared to their older fellow partisans.”
Young people are by definition less experienced and by nature more idealistic. Hence the appeal of a political system that seeks to manufacture equal outcomes through central planning and government redistribution has a certain logic. Historically, socialism’s appeal has been especially notable among more educated and more affluent young people.
When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848, Marx was 29 and Engels two years his junior. Marx’s father was a successful lawyer. The family owned vineyards and rental properties and employed multiple servants. Marx attended the University of Bonn, where he spent more time drinking than studying. After a year, his father transferred him to the University of Berlin, where he continued to rack up debts for his family to pay off and, according to one biographer, “became a bohemian student who merely regarded the university as his camping ground.”
America’s emphasis should thus be upon developing new technologies – whether military, dual-use, or civilian. Constant innovation is critical for maintaining and extending America’s military technological edge. To facilitate that growth, policymakers should consider what economic conditions are most likely to generate and incentivize such developments. As observed, we have good reason to believe that an economy characterized by liberty, entrepreneurship, competition, and dynamic trade, within the United States and between America and the rest of the world, is far more proficient at delivering this type of innovation consistently. Economic nationalist policies conversely are unlikely to do so.
Freedom for themselves, restrictions for others, such was the essence of the usual program of legislation of the mercantilist tracts of mercantilist authorship.
But strange as it may seem, the best established scientific conclusions, the experience of all ages and nations, and their own progress, failed to convince the legislators of America of the expediency of pursuing that liberal line of policy, from the adoption of which they had already reaped so many advantages. Not satisfied with the progress they had already made, with the enjoyment of free and liberal institutions, and a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, they resolved to call custom-house regulations to their aid! Mistaking the effusions of a few miserable pamphleteers, and the speeches of the Newcastles and Kenyons of the day, for the wisdom of the British nation, they persuaded themselves that those very restrictions which had clogged and impeded our progress, had been the main causes of our advancement. Instead of dwelling on the advantages of free competition, their statesmen deemed it productive only of poverty and ruin…. Selfishness, patriotism, and ignorance, each lent its aid to the introduction of what has been pompously designated by its more ardent supporters, as the ‘American System.’
Trade-offs are not just something thought up by conservative meanies. As long as what we want exceed what we have – and it’s been that way for thousands of years now – we are going to have to make trade-offs. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a carpenter or a CEO, whether you are down in a submarine or up in the dizzying heights of an editorial office in Times Square.
