The Starfish and the Goose
Trade Complexity, Tariff Nationalism, and the Fragile Leviathan
Sloptraptions is an opt-in section of the Contraptions Newsletter cooked up with AI assistance. Serving up elevated slop 1-2 times a week. Cooking time of this one: 3 hours. Recipe at end. If you only want my hand-crafted writing, you can unsubscribe from this section.
Abstract
This briefing analyzes the structural logic behind the Trump administration’s tariff regime, arguing that it reflects a rejection of the modern interdependent trade system. Using the Durkheim Index to model trade complexity, and the metaphor of the starfish and the goose, we show how punitive decomplexification risks destroying the very systems that generate long-term value. Drawing on insights from sociology, history, and policy, the essay outlines five strategic futures for a post-complexity world. The core thesis: complexity was not the problem — it was the value. Sever it carelessly, and the golden eggs stop coming.
I. Introduction: A Tariff Is Never Just a Tariff
In April 2025, the United States government imposed sweeping tariffs on nearly all imported goods, branding the move a “Declaration of Economic Independence.” The policy was framed in blunt terms: America buys more than it sells, and tariffs would fix that. But beneath the surface of this transactional rhetoric lies a deeper shift — not just in economic strategy, but in the way the world is being imagined.
This essay argues that tariffs are not merely tools of negotiation or market correction; they are structural signals. They express how a nation conceptualizes its place within the global system — whether as an isolated unit in a field of rivals, or as a node in an interdependent whole. The Trump administration’s tariff strategy reveals a worldview that rejects the architecture of global trade as it has evolved over the past seventy years.
To understand this, we introduce the Durkheim Index, a measure of trade system complexity and interdependence, and a biological metaphor at the heart of this analysis: the starfish and the goose. This is a story about what happens when leaders treat a living, high-functioning trade system as if it were something modular and severable — and about what comes next when the golden eggs stop coming.
II. Diagnosing the System: Trade as Social Structure
To understand the current rupture in global trade, we need to move beyond conventional economic indicators and look at the structure of trade itself — how it functions as a social system. For this, we borrow from the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who distinguished between two kinds of social cohesion: mechanical solidarity, which arises from similarity and self-sufficiency, and organic solidarity, which emerges from specialization, interdependence, and functional difference.
Modern global trade is a textbook case of organic solidarity. Countries no longer simply swap surplus goods; they participate in distributed production systems — making components, processing data, refining inputs — each performing differentiated roles in vast value chains. A smartphone assembled in Vietnam might include parts from South Korea, intellectual property from California, and minerals from the Congo. This is not just exchange; it is systemic coordination.
We formalize this insight into what we call the Durkheim Index (DI): a conceptual score that reflects the degree of interdependence, specialization, and structural complexity in a trade regime. High-DI systems resemble living organisms: their parts are non-substitutable and their integrity depends on continuous cooperation. Low-DI systems, by contrast, resemble modular structures: they are simpler, more symmetrical, and resilient to severance — but less capable of generating sophisticated value.
Trump’s tariff logic implicitly rejects the high-DI architecture of modern trade. It imagines a return to mechanical solidarity — a world of bilateral balances, domestic sufficiency, and sovereign autonomy. But this vision misunderstands the system we inhabit. The problem is not just economic. It is ontological: a mismatch between the structure of the world and the story being told about it.
III. The Ideology of Decomplexification: Trump’s Critical Trade Theory
The Trump administration’s tariff strategy is often described as mercantilist or zero-sum, but these labels don’t fully capture the depth of its logic. What distinguishes Trump’s approach is not just its focus on trade surpluses, but the way it frames imbalance itself as injustice. In this view, a trade deficit is not an outcome to be analyzed, but evidence of systemic unfairness — a structural wrong that demands correction.
This worldview was captured with surprising precision in a tweet by @PhoenixWrightA1 on April 2, 2025:
“It’s essentially Critical Trade Theory. Any trade imbalance between two countries is de facto evidence of systemic unfair trade practices.”
This is more than a rhetorical flourish. It consciously echoes the epistemology of Critical Race Theory, where disparities in outcome (e.g. incarceration rates, wealth gaps) are interpreted as symptoms of structural injustice. Applied to trade, this logic means a bilateral trade deficit is not a symptom of structural asymmetry or comparative advantage — it is, in itself, proof of cheating.
As a result, Trump’s tariff regime is built on a flattened moral calculus: symmetry of outcomes is treated as fairness, and asymmetry as exploitation. If the U.S. imports more from a country than it exports, the imbalance is sufficient justification for punitive tariffs. No further inquiry is required.
This ideological move substitutes structural analysis with grievance-driven retaliation. It reimagines trade not as a distributed system of interdependence, but as a contest of account balances — where the goal is not coordination, but restitution. This is not a critique of globalization. It is a refusal of its structure.
IV. Metaphors for Misalignment: The Starfish and the Goose
At the heart of this analysis is a biological metaphor: the starfish and the goose. It captures the structural mismatch between Trump-era tariff policy and the actual nature of the global trade system.
The starfish is a creature of modular resilience. Cut off one of its arms, and it can regrow. Each part is semi-autonomous. In trade terms, this reflects a low Durkheim Index worldview — one in which national economies are self-sufficient units, trading finished goods in bilateral exchanges. If one trade partner is lost, another can take its place. Severability is survivability.
The golden goose, by contrast, is a symbol of high-complexity interdependence. Its value lies not in its parts but in the process — the ongoing, fragile coordination that produces golden eggs. Sever its head, or remove a vital organ, and the system dies. There is no regeneration, no replacement. What is lost is not a component but a capability. This is the reality of global trade today.
Trump’s policies treat the trade system as if it were a starfish: modular, easily pruned, and ultimately expendable. But the modern trade regime — with its just-in-time logistics, global value chains, and standard-setting institutions — is a golden goose. Punitive tariffs, retaliatory breakdowns, and unilateral decoupling do not force evolution. They risk killing the very mechanism that delivers value.
This brings us back to Hobbes’s old metaphor: the Leviathan, a sovereign built from many individuals forming a single political body. In today’s global economy, the Leviathan is no longer the state — it is the trade system itself. Nations, firms, ports, institutions, and currencies form its organs. It breathes through logistics and transacts through trust.
Trump’s tariff logic is not a negotiation with this Leviathan — it is an act of mutilation.
The starfish may grow back. But the goose, once gutted, lays no more golden eggs.
V. Reversibility and Historical Paths: Can Trade Complexity Be Undone?
A key question raised by the Trump-era retreat from trade interdependence is whether complexity is reversible — and if so, whether it must always be catastrophic. Is the current decomplexification a managed retreat, or a stumble into systemic risk?
History suggests that trade complexity has declined before, but rarely without severe collateral damage. The collapse of global trade between 1914 and 1945 — interrupted by war and depression — was a brutal simplification. The world moved from an emerging multilateral system to isolated empires and protectionist blocs. Complexity fell, but so did prosperity.
There are also examples of strategic simplification — cases where states selectively retreated from global entanglement without total collapse. Japan’s post-1990s inward turn, the Nordic countries’ resistance to hyper-globalization, and the United States’ CHIPS Act reshoring efforts in the 2020s all represent targeted decomplexification: narrow, intentional efforts to rebalance risk and sovereignty while preserving broader systemic value.
But Trump’s tariffs are not examples of strategic simplification. They are acts of reactive decomplexification — severances without substitution. As Ben Hunt wrote in Epsilon Theory:
“In three months we have turned the United States into just another country, and it will take three decades – if ever – to get our prior rule-setting primacy back... Honestly, I don’t think we ever get this rule-setting primacy back. Or rather, the global war and depression we’d have to endure before the world capitulated to a new Pax Americana means that I hope we don’t get it back.”
Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark was similarly blunt:
“You can’t just opt out of the global order you created and expect the world to wait patiently for you to come back... Trump blew it all up. Not out of strategy, but out of pique.”
We call this phenomenon crossing the Reversibility Horizon: the point beyond which simplification can no longer be done without systemic trauma. That horizon has now been breached.
The goose, it turns out, cannot be converted into a starfish without killing it first.
VI. What Comes After Complexity? A 2028 Futures Menu
Imagine a global summit convened in 2028. After years of escalating tariffs, retaliatory frictions, decoupling experiments, and declining institutional trust, the world’s major powers face a turning point. The complex, high-integration trade system of the postwar era has fractured, but it has not entirely collapsed. What remains is a messy, partial order: wounded, asymmetric, and in search of new principles.
The leaders around the table — a mix of new administrations and returning veterans — are not debating whether to go back. That world is gone. What they’re debating is what kind of order to build next. Can interdependence be salvaged in a new form? Can trust be reconstituted without naïveté? Can resilience be achieved without pure isolation?
Five strategic futures emerge from this conversation — not as predictions, but as possible design paths:
Neo–Bretton Woods: A return to global institution-building, with updated rules and multipolar coordination.
Spheres & Circles: Regional blocs with internal coherence and negotiated external trade corridors.
Great Powers Club: Bilateral or trilateral trade frameworks among major economies, shaped by power.
Functional Decoupling: Sector-by-sector regimes for trade — chips, food, energy, AI — with separate rules.
Managed Autarky: An embrace of national self-reliance and internal substitution.
These are not technical choices; they are political and moral ones. Each reflects a theory of value — of what is worth preserving, what can be sacrificed, and what risks are worth taking. If the golden goose cannot be revived, then perhaps a new ecosystem of geese must be bred, raised, and carefully protected — together or apart.
VII. Conclusion: Complexity Was the Value
The golden age of global trade was not just about scale or speed — it was about structure. What made the system valuable was its complexity: not as a technical flourish, but as a deeply interwoven architecture of mutual roles, embedded trust, and differentiated capabilities. That complexity was not accidental. It was cultivated, governed, and, for a time, remarkably resilient.
The tragedy of the present moment is not merely that complexity has been wounded, but that it was mistaken for weakness. Severed supply chains, weaponized tariffs, and deficit-based moralism all reflect a profound category error — treating the goose as a starfish, imagining that value can survive dismemberment.
The task now is not to return, but to reckon. To accept that interdependence is fragile, but also foundational. And to understand, before it's too late, that in the long run, it was complexity itself that laid the golden eggs.
Recipe
Edit: This was the most complex sloptraption yet. Here is the entire essay and recipe in markdown format in case you want to fork and develop it further. I wanted to share the whole chat transcript, but ChatGPT won’t allow me to share conversations with uploaded images. It felt like managing a talented intern. Several of the key ideas actually came from ChatGPT 4o. In lieu of sharing the live transcript, I had it generate a more thorough process summary.
Appendix: Process Summary
Creating The Starfish and the Goose
This document outlines the collaborative process used to develop the briefing essay The Starfish and the Goose, structured as a sequence of creative and analytical phases. It also reflects on the interaction style and the relative roles played by each party.
Phase 1: Conceptual Excavation
Goal: Explore first-principles arguments for and against tariffs, using historical and structural lenses.
Activity: Began with high-level economic reasoning, then layered in sociology (Durkheim), commodity vs. differentiated goods analysis, and historical trade regimes.
Interaction Style: Dialogical and recursive — ideas co-evolved through questioning and sharpening.
Roles:
User: Framed the inquiry, introduced thematic anchors (structure of trade, modernity vs tradition).
Assistant: Responsive analyst — expanded, contrasted, and formalized ideas into frameworks.
Phase 2: Frame Construction
Goal: Identify a cohesive metaphor and metric to unify the argument.
Activity:
Developed the Durkheim Index to quantify trade complexity.
Introduced and refined the starfish vs. goose metaphor.
Linked to the Hobbesian Leviathan as a systemic metaphor.
Interaction Style: Constructive synthesis — user refined and clarified; assistant offered model variants.
Roles:
User: Chose metaphorical architecture; clarified that the starfish and goose form a single integrated metaphor.
Assistant: Proposed analogies, formalized distinctions (e.g. reversibility horizon), and linked metaphor to system structure.
Phase 3: Evidence and Positioning
Goal: Ground the argument in real-world discourse.
Activity:
Incorporated opinion pieces (Jonathan Last, Ben Hunt).
Framed a viral tweet as "Critical Trade Theory" to characterize Trump’s logic.
Interaction Style: Curatorial — user sourced, assistant contextualized.
Roles:
User: Identified key external texts and quotes.
Assistant: Embedded citations and gave them analytical weight.
Phase 4: Scenario Design
Goal: Project alternative futures following trade decomplexification.
Activity:
Developed five scenarios:
Neo–Bretton Woods
Spheres & Circles
Great Powers Club
Functional Decoupling
Managed Autarky
Interaction Style: Systems thinking — cooperative sensemaking.
Roles:
User: Directed need for scenario-based reasoning and grounded risk assessments.
Assistant: Structured scenarios and created mnemonic taglines.
Phase 5: Assembly and Composition
Goal: Construct a 2000-word briefing essay.
Activity:
Allocated word budgets.
Drafted each section while preserving thematic coherence.
Interaction Style: Alternating leadership — user shaped tone and logic, assistant wrote structured drafts.
Roles:
User: Editor-in-chief and voice-of-integrity.
Assistant: Lead writer and synthesizer of co-developed content.
Phase 6: Visualization and Presentation
Goal: Create metaphoric and strategic visual supports.
Activity:
Generated two visuals:
Starfish and Goose Leviathans
Circular Futures Menu Infographic
Refined icon choices and spatial design.
Interaction Style: Iterative art direction — user defined constraints and concepts, assistant executed prompts and revisions.
Roles:
User: Visual strategist and creative director.
Assistant: Prompt engineer and concept translator.
Phase 7: Meta-Reflection
Goal: Reflect on how the process embodies the essay’s thesis.
Observation:
The collaboration was itself a high Durkheim Index system:Differentiated roles, mutual trust, and non-redundant interdependence.
Meaning and value emerged through recursive, structured cooperation.
The co-creation of The Starfish and the Goose mirrored its argument:
It was complexity — not just content — that made the value.
Per hanlon's razor — I think there's a lot of malice going on here not just stupidity. Many of the actors are aware that they'll be killing the golden goose and like that.