Could 'How to Win a Trade War?' be a Class Read?

I’m delighted that Soumaya Keynes has agreed to join us for EconEdChat on 14 September, so if you want to ask her about any of this yourself, come along! Before I say anything else: if you teach Year 13 Macro, read this book. That bit isn’t up for debate and I’ll come back to why further down. Everything else in this post is me thinking out loud about whether it could do a bigger job than CPD, namely whether it could work as a class read, and where else it might earn its place.

How to Win a Trade War is by Soumaya Keynes (FT columnist and podcaster) and Chad Bown (previously Chief Economist at the US State Department, now at the Peterson Institute). The paperback is out on 25 March 2027 at £10.99, which matters if you’re thinking about a class set, and I’ll come back to that too.

Does it survive the first three pages?

I read a lot of economics books with half an eye on whether they’d work as a class read, and most of them are out within the first two pages. This is almost always on accessibility grounds, by which I mean the language rather than the ideas. It’s quite unusual for a book to still be in the running by page three.

This one got there, because the tone is chatty. That sounds like a small thing, but chatty economics books are rare, and the ones that manage it are usually writing about lighter subject matter. A chatty book about trade policy is not something we come across often.

Being readable isn’t enough on its own, though. A class read also has to be close enough to the spec that students get something out of it that we can apply to their lessons, while being richer than a textbook. That became very clear in Chapter 1(which is the second chapter, because of the intro). About halfway through, there’s what I think is the richest discussion of the costs and benefits of trade I’ve read anywhere. It also includes a look at economic methodology and how sure we can actually be about any of it, which is a nice bonus.

If you’ve read my post on considerations for reading recommendations, you’ll know I try to weigh language, technicality, subject matter, narrative and references together, on the basis that students can handle more challenge in one area if the others are gentler. So here’s how it does:

What it covers

The content goes beyond what students strictly need depth wise, but there isn’t a chapter in there that’s irrelevant to the course. It covers pretty much all of trade and a good chunk of globalisation: the benefits of trade, comparative advantage, protectionism, trends in globalisation and trade, causes, all of that. It touches on development, has some nice links into financial economics, and keeps circling back to Year 1 macro like unemployment and inflation.

What it doesn’t do is the formal stuff. You get the intuition of comparative advantage rather than the numbers, and there are no diagrams. For our purposes that’s fine, and it means the whole thing requires no prior knowledge of economics at all, which is the perennial problem with reading lists: students have the most time to read at the start of the course and the least foundation to read with.

The big thing it brings, though, is synopticity. The Year 2 macro topics aren’t tricky, but students really need to be able to link them together, and this does a really good job of pulling those bits together. It’s more than they need for the exam, but if what you’re after is richness and students actually appreciating why any of this matters, it comes pretty close.

Narrative and references

In my post on a couple of years of the class read, the two things I marked Can’t We Just Print More Money? down on were narrative strength and ageing cultural references.

On narrative, How to Win a Trade War leans on a handful of big analogies that are presented as stories and recur through the book. It isn’t a traditional narrative, but it does some of the jobs of one: putting you in a position, walking you through a sequence of events. Where CWJPMM uses lots of small anecdotes, this uses a few bigger analogies, with the occasional very small anecdote dropped in, and this helps to carry the reader through some of the more complex ideas. Overall, I’d therefore say it’s slightly stronger on narrative. However, the recurring analogies come with a catch that I’ll get to in the standalone section.

On references it’s much better than CWJPMM. Where it does reach for something older, it doesn’t lean on it as heavily, and anything that isn’t universally recognised tends to be explained properly. I can’t see myself needing to do as much of the reference explaining work I do with CWJPMM, where part of my job is the vital and noble task of explaining who Del Boy is and explaining the intricacies of the fictious Springfield labour market.

Will students care about trade?

Trade wars are something students are curious about and do ask about in lessons. It’s also currently frequently in the news, which cuts both ways in terms of interest. The more it’s in the news, the more relevant it is but my slight worry is longevity: the more trade dominates the news, the more it risks becoming white noise, just another trade story.

If you asked seventeen-year-olds what they’re interested in, I don’t think many would say trade, in the way some of them would say football or travel or music, so there isn’t quite the hook from the outset that something like ‘Nacronomics’ has. However, the framing of a trade war does help by making it feel high stakes and exciting. That framing could potentially put some students off (maybe some of the girls?) but my hunch is that once you’re past the opening, the gravity of the thing, what there is to lose, becomes its own reason to keep reading.

The problems

Two of them, and they’re related. Fourteen chapters, and they’re long. On top of that, the content is dense. The chatty style doesn’t change the fact that students are being hit with a lot of ideas to process. CWJPMM does roughly one topic per chapter and explains it at a slow pace; this uses light language but gets through loads and loads of concepts, which makes it a harder read than the tone suggests. This is always going to happen with something so rich, but it’s a consideration.

This probably disqualifies HTWATW from being a first class read. However, it could still be the second. It’s the book you give a group who’ve already done one, not the one you start them on.

The other thing is that it gives you less of what turned out to be the biggest benefit of the class read, which is a shared canon of reference points. That wasn’t something I set out to get from CWJPMM, but it’s the bit I’ve come to value most, and because this book is narrower and trade-focused it just does less of it. That’s a difference in purpose rather than a fault. Once you’ve built that common canon in Year 12 it’s probably less useful anyway. That said, I think there space for building a shared set of global references and examples in the second year, and I suspect Extreme Economies would do that job better if that’s what you’re after.

There’s a student workload point too, and it’s the one I keep coming back to. With CWJPMM I was fairly confident it wasn’t beyond anyone: not on length, not on language, not on topic. That meant I could be strict about expectations. Here, a slower reader might manage it but get discouraged, or spend so long on it that they’re not doing essay practice or revision. By Year 13 they really do need to be cracking on. So if you’ve got a very mixed class, or a class that needs a firm hand on homework, this is a tougher sell. If you’ve got students who read anyway, or who would benefit from reading anyway, I think it’s well worth it.

If you did run it

The chapters are even enough in length to pace, which is a bonus. My three-week cycle (vocab, then read, then questions) could need adjusting: the reading stage might need longer, though in a lot of cases the vocab stage could probably be shorter. I might be tempted either to go to a four-week cycle, or to go back to my original model and split the chapters into sections. There are clear sections within each chapter to make that doable, although building reading stamina is rather the point, so I’d want to be careful about chopping it up too much.

I’d also want some of it in place before the summer. Setting it towards the end of Year 12 and having students read a chunk over the holidays takes a lot of the pressure off, and I’m much less worried about the reading-versus-revision trade-off in August than I am in January.

On buying it: a class set of hardbacks at £22 is out of the question for most of us. The paperback in March 2027 at £10.99 is a different conversation, particularly through a specialist school supplier, which realistically makes this a September 2027 proposition rather than something to plan for this year.

Read it for CPD regardless

Even if a class set is never going to happen in your department, I’d recommend this to any economics teacher without hesitation, especially if you teach Year 13 Macro.

It contains the single best explanation of why a current account deficit matters that I have read. That’s a topic I know a lot of teachers find slippery, and this doesn’t just explain it, it makes it interesting, with anecdotes and framing you can lift straight into your international economics lessons. Making a topic feel interesting is half the battle, and this shows you how.

The explanations are excellent in their own right, and the way it links things synoptically is something I think we could all learn a bit from. Even with an economics degree there’s plenty here, particularly on context. Trade moves, and most of us didn’t do our degrees in the last three or four years. Even if you’re already a trade expert, some of the phrasing is worth stealing and would make you better at teaching that unit. If you’re not (yet!) an economics specialist, that’s fine, because it doesn’t assume prior knowledge. If you’re not teaching trade at all, it’s still useful for seeing where the Year 1 macro ideas end up in Year 2.

Chapters as standalone resources

This is where I think a lot of teachers will actually get their value, and it’s the bit I’d do be putting in place for this year, regardless of your decision on Class Read.

Two sections are close to non-negotiable for me:

1.        Chapter one, and particularly the second half, on the benefits and costs of trade, plus the look at what’s going on in the world now and the methodology question of how sure we can be. You can drop students straight into it with no introduction at all, and even starting halfway through the chapter there’s very little that refers back.

2.        The explanation of the current account deficit in chapter six. This one needs about a minute of set-up, because it uses an analogy of different ships and students need to know which ship is which. A couple of bullet points on the board covers it.

Both are better than anything I’ve read in a textbook on those topics. If I were teaching those topics I’d build the lessons around those sections rather than the textbook. If you’re confident in your students’ reading you could set them beforehand, the way you might set a textbook chapter, but reading them together in class is ideal. Together they’re a small fraction of the book, which for most schools should sit inside what your CLA Education Licence allows, but do check what yours covers before you hit print.

There are plenty of other sections that would work brilliantly as standalone and you’ll spot them as you go. The one thing to watch is those recurring analogies: the thing that gives the book its narrative pull is also the thing that makes dropping into chapter nine cold slightly  harder – still doable, but just bear in mind you might need to do that 1-2 min recap.

So, would I recommend?

As teacher CPD, yes, immediately and without caveats. As a source of two or three or ten lessons that are better than the textbook version, also enthusiastic yes. For a second Class Read, I would need to do a second read before deciding, but it’s gone further than any book I’ve read since Extreme Economies to get that far.

And if you want to hear from Soumaya herself, do come to EconEdChat on 14 September.

Suggested tags: Reading, Class book, International Trade, Tariffs, Protectionism, Comparative Advantage, Globalisation, CPD, Context, Textbooks, Vocabulary, Synoptic, Independent Learning, Resources, Blog