BY STEWART SLATER

John Calhoun had a problem. His rats kept dying. To most (residents of Birmingham surveying five weeks of uncollected rubbish, for example) this would be a blessing, but Calhoun was different. He was an American scientist studying rodent ecology, his job to construct the perfect environment for rats to thrive. No matter what he did, providing every material comfort he could think of, the same thing happened – the population surged, then became violent, then declined into narcissistic isolation, and finally collapsed. Twenty-five times he tried and twenty-five times he failed.

Rats, he came to realise, do not want all their needs satisfied. They want to struggle, to achieve, to sort themselves into a natural hierarchy. So do, he argued in a rare scientific paper to quote liberally from the Book of Revelation, humans.

A society in which we were given everything we wanted would not be a society which survived. AI utopians take note.

At about the same time Calhoun was watching his rats die, my father was watching his middle stump cartwheel into the distance. A tale of youthful over-exuberance, common then, common now. But my father’s case was of its time, his golden duck achieved for the First XI of a state school in industrial Clydeside, an institution whose current inmates would regard the sport as irredeemably English, that most final condemnation in the Scottish lexicon.

Sport is not all that changed during his three score years and ten. Industrial Clydeside became post-industrial Clydeside, the yards in the main falling silent. They are not alone. County Durham no longer echoes to the miner’s pick, Detroit looks more like the setting for a zombie film than the “Arsenal of Democracy”. Like playing mah-jong, heavy industry has become something Asians do.

If there was a theme to my father’s life (beyond the decline of Scottish cricket), it was globalisation. Born at that time when most Britons think the War was over, and all Asians know it was not, wars, hot and Cold, came and went, but the world continued to link itself up relentlessly, commerce booming across the globe, each year bringing more and cheaper goods to the shelves. What might have been beyond the reach of the rich, was brought into the grasp of the poor.

A Port Glaswegian of the fifties would not have a television (a pedant of my acquaintance points out a few might have bought them to watch the Coronation), his descendant has a flat screen, a phone to provide never-ending information and entertainment, and possibly a tablet and laptop too. A shipbuilder who developed a desire for a strawberry in December would have to wait until early summer, his grandchild would just pop to the supermarket. Glasgow Fair, like a majestic migration of wildebeest, saw a mass movement to the chilly waters of the British coast, now the balmy waters of the Med, warmer than many baths endured in the tenements of Greenock, are just a cut-price flight away.

For people like my father, this was an unalloyed boon. He became a banker and got out and got on. Not only did he benefit from globalisation turning the luxuries of his boyhood into the necessities of his adulthood, but the accompanying liberalisation of capital flows also allowed him to ply his trade across the world, swapping the cold, rainy Scotland of his youth for a second half of his life spent in a warm and pleasant land.

Others were not so lucky. His schoolfriends might, if the cards fell their way, have kept their jobs at the yards for life, their offspring would not. Families, earlier generations of which built warships and mighty liners, now work in call-centres if they are lucky or play video games if they are not. Metal bashers have become button bashers.

Omelettes famously cannot be made without breaking some oeufs. If the price of globalisation is the decline of Western industry, then so be it. The world is a better place, our lives are better, even the lives of those who appear to have lost out are better. Not only do they have material affluence undreamt by their ancestors but they get it without risk. No more dangerous work hanging off the side of half-built ships, just a cosy air-conditioned call centre or a flat provided and maintained by the government. Who wouldn’t want that?

Calhoun’s rats didn’t. For the world we have built for globalisation’s losers is similar to the one he built for his rodents, an environment which caters to their wants, but not their needs; a world which offers them no avenue for struggle and achievement, just the post-religious opium of Netflix and Playstation. A riveter of my father’s youth could watch a warship accelerate down the slipway, look at his scars and know that he was part of a great national project and man’s ongoing attempt to conquer nature, a call-centre worker who has listened to Mrs Smith vent about her electricity bill cannot.

This is the second version of this article, President Trump’s tariff U-Turn prompting a rethink. “Watch the things you gave your afternoon to, broken / And stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools” as one of the poets most likely to be “MAGA-adjacent” might put it… Attempting to predict his next move is a mug’s game. All things are on the table, including probably the table itself.

Instead, we shall gently push back at the narrative popular among those who work with their heads but not their hands that their inferiors or Trump voters (a Venn diagram which is a circle) are idiots who have messed things up for everyone. Didn’t they know, they think between feverish glances at their portfolios, that they would suffer if they elected him? To us rising prices are an inconvenience, to them they must be a crisis. How stupid are they?

Turn that on its head. The knowledge class built a world which works for them but offers (in America) the rest nothing but food stamps and fentanyl. A world in which they are taken care of but not cared for. Trump’s re-shoring reindustrialisation agenda gives them hope, that most valuable of commodities. It might not be easy, it might not be quick, it might not even work, but it offered them a shot at the dignity, achievement and pride their betters take for granted. Why wouldn’t they take it? A risk is only a risk if you have something to lose.

We know this, of course. Those most likely to suffer from leaving the EU were those most likely to vote for Brexit. Economics has told us for decades that Man is not a rational economic actor, that there is more to life than the soulless calculation of profit and loss. But we learn from history that we do not learn from history. Nor, it seems, do we learn from science, expecting our fellows to lead lives Calhoun’s rats rejected. When AI comes for your job, will you still believe that Man can live by out-of-season strawberries alone?

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Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.