Former NFL player Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson shared some of the ways he likes to save money while on "Club Shay Shay" - a podcast hosted by another former NFL athlete, Shannon Sharpe.

After signing his first contract as a rookie for the Cincinnati Bengals in 2001, you might have forgiven Chad 'Ochocinco' Johnson for thinking he'd made it.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson talks with CNN's Wolf Blitzer about the latest developments in the war between Ukraine and Russia.

The ex-PM puts pressure on Rishi Sunak as she urges the UK to "do all we can" to support Ukraine.

Former PM says it is a mistake to scrap NI Protocol bill and Duke of York might lose £30m mansion after grant cut.

What brought down Nicola Sturgeon? The resignation of Scotland’s first minister this morning wasn’t exactly a surprise. Her party’s poll ratings, as well as her own, have been dropping in recent months. The troublesome coziness of the pro-independence Scottish National Party—whose chief executive is her husband, Peter Murrell—was being openly questioned at last. During interviews, reporters had begun to savage Sturgeon with the kind of brutality that suggested she was politically doomed.

But I had expected that she would stay long enough to live down the failure of her Gender Recognition Reform Bill. This proposed law would have reduced the waiting period for adults to change their legal gender from two years to three months and removed the need for a medical diagnosis of dysphoria—meaning that gender would ultimately be a matter of self-identification.

The measure never took effect, but Sturgeon had argued for months that relaxing the existing standards would have no downside. And so she came under extreme pressure when, in January, the Scottish Prison Service sent a rapist to a women’s facility. Sturgeon overturned the agency’s decision, but not before many excruciating interviews where she seemed to imply there were three genders: man, woman, and sex offender. Isla Bryson “regards herself as a woman,” Sturgeon said last week, but “I regard the individual as a rapist.”

Sturgeon had been warned about such a possibility, but had blithely discounted it. Her stance on the issue was an echo of the worst parts of her independence messaging, which implied that politics under the SNP was somehow loftier, purer, and more principled than that practiced elsewhere. Nationalists often implied that those who criticized her record were “talking down Scotland,” while Sturgeon suggested that her opponents on gender were reactionaries and bigots. Political disagreements were recast as matters of patriotism or morality.

Although the Gender Recognition Reform Bill alone did not bring Sturgeon down—“that issue wasn’t the final straw,” she said at her press conference—the controversy is the most prominent and most concrete example of what did: Her political dominance in Scotland led her to disregard critics and ignore obvious problems until they escalated into scandals. “With no possibility of an alternative party reaching government, the SNP is deprived of the democratic check of strong opposition,” I wrote in The Atlantic in 2021. “Charities and lobbyists, dependent on the party and the government for funding and contracts, tell Sturgeon what she wants to hear—even if public opinion is not with her. Inside the SNP, none of her ministers has anything approaching her public profile.”

[Read: The party whose success is a problem]

Sturgeon tiptoed around acknowledging this problem in her resignation speech in Edinburgh. “I’ve always been of the belief that no one individual should be dominant in one system for too long,” she said. “The longer any leader is in office, the more opinions about them become fixed and very hard to change, and that matters.” A new leader would be better able to “reach across the divide,” she argued, advancing the cause of Scottish independence.

Her resignation speech showed some of her best qualities: dignity, seriousness, conscientiousness, and her fierce defense of her beliefs. It also showed humility and self-deprecation. “I’m not expecting violins here,” she said, framing her resignation as “not a reaction to short-term pressures” but “a deeper and longer-term assessment.” The past few months, by contrast, have often shown Sturgeon’s worst qualities: blinkeredness, tribalism, and invocations of feminism to rebuff good-faith questions about her own judgment—most recently about her husband’s financial relationship with the party she leads. Brushing off such questions was bound to fail eventually.

Back in 2021, the fissures over Sturgeon’s embrace of transgender issues as the next great civil-rights cause were already apparent. She has always dismissed feminist concerns that predatory men who are not really trans will cynically exploit relaxed gender-recognition rules to gain access to women’s spaces. Last year, the novelist J. K. Rowling, a resident of Scotland, posed in a T-shirt calling the first minister a destroyer of women’s rights.

Reasonable people can disagree on how to deal with sports and single-sex spaces such as prisons, as well as the appropriate treatment of gender-nonconforming children. But what became clear during the passage of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was that Sturgeon had adopted a bullheaded, crusading posture and was not interested in dissent or even scrutiny. People who disagreed with her were “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well,” she suggested in January, offering no evidence and giving no examples.

Throughout the drafting of the bill, Sturgeon ignored women’s groups that warned against eliminating the need for a gender-dysphoria diagnosis in order to legally change gender. She also ignored similar admonishments from the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, and the U.K.-wide Equality and Human Rights Commission. And she ignored opposition lawmakers who tried to amend the bill to remove the ability of those convicted of sex crimes to change their legal gender.

On December 22, the bill passed in the Scottish Parliament, with the support of the other left-wing parties, Labour and the Greens, before British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government blocked it. A slight on Scottish democracy, cried the Scottish National Party. These cries were quickly silenced late last month, when Bryson was convicted of rape against two women. When the crimes occurred, Bryson was using the name Adam Graham. After the verdict, Bryson was sent—on the basis of a female identity declared after charges were filed—to a segregated unit at a women’s prison to await sentencing.

This was exactly what Sturgeon’s opponents had warned about. Bryson’s mother and estranged wife both expressed doubts that the offender’s transgender identification was genuine. “Never once did he say anything to me about feeling he was in the wrong body or anything,” Shonna Graham, Bryson’s wife, told the Daily Mail. “I have a lot of sympathy for real transgender people, it’s a hard thing to live with, but he’s just bullsh*****g the authorities.” Bryson had also just been convicted of rape, the quintessential male crime against women’s bodily autonomy. How could the Scottish government believe that such a person belonged in a female jail? Sturgeon faced days of bruising press interviews and questions in Parliament.

Sturgeon has been in her post for a long eight years, outlasting four British prime ministers, all Conservatives: David Cameron, brought down by the Brexit referendum; Theresa May, felled by her failure to negotiate a satisfactory exit deal with the European Union; Boris Johnson, a victim of his own lies and rule-breaking; and the hopeless Liz Truss, outlived by a lettuce. Sturgeon had also weathered criminal allegations of sexual misconduct against her predecessor and mentor, Alex Salmond, and questions about how much this self-professed feminist knew about them. (He was cleared of all charges.) Then she boosted her popularity during the coronavirus pandemic, taking a more cautious approach than the British government led by Johnson. For all her day-to-day troubles, she could easily have led the party into the general election next year.

[Read: Ignore the chaos. Britain’s system is working.]

But the plain truth might be that Sturgeon was stuck. She wanted another independence referendum, but the request was denied by Westminster. She has proposed treating the next British election as a de facto referendum, but that would be only a symbolic gesture. Dented by the row over the Bryson case, she could not shake off questions about the Scottish National Party’s finances, including a fraud investigation, and the £107,620 loaned to it by Murrell in breach of reporting rules. “My husband is an individual and he will take decisions about what he does with resources that belong to him,” she argued earlier this month—a ludicrous argument from the leader of the party involved.

Sturgeon had also failed in her signature domestic promise, to close the educational-attainment gap between poor and well-off children. And her party, which once displayed near–North Korean levels of internal discipline, was showing signs of discord. One of the SNP’s rising stars, Ash Regan, resigned from government rather than vote for the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Another, the strongly Christian Kate Forbes, was on maternity leave when the law was passed in December, amid whispering that the bill had been fast-tracked to avoid her resignation on conscience grounds too.

Sturgeon’s departure will mark a generational shift in Scottish politics. No one else looms quite as large—not even Salmond, a diminished figure now leading a breakaway pro-independence party. She has articulated a vision of Scotland as a modern, progressive country with great social solidarity, contrasting it favorably with Conservative-voting England.

But her very success—she still has poll ratings that many leaders “would give their right arm for,” as she said today—became its own problem. Why didn’t she foresee a case like that of Isla Bryson? Why couldn’t Sturgeon see a problem with her husband entangling his own finances with those of the party she leads? Because she and Murrell have dominated Scottish politics for almost a decade, and no one is left to contradict them. Her successor will occupy a far less commanding position, and won’t be able to stifle debate as effectively on policy matters—which might be exactly what Scottish democracy needs.

A committee says Mr Sharp did not give the "full facts" while applying for the job at the BBC.

My memory of the moment, almost a decade ago, is indelible: the sight of a swimmer’s back, both sides equal—each as good and righteous as the other. An ordinary thing, and something I had never had, and still don’t have. To think of that moment is to feel torn—once again—about how I should respond to my condition: whether to own it, which would be the brave response, as well as the proper one, in many people’s eyes; or to regret it, even try to conceal it, which is my natural response.

I have a form of cerebral palsy called hemiplegia, which affects one side of the body. The word has two parts: hemi, meaning “half,” and plegia, connoting stroke or paralysis. I have had a “half stroke,” but I prefer the romance of my high-school Greek teacher’s translation: I was, as he put it, struck on one side. Plus, it’s a more accurate description of what happened to me. At birth, the forceps used to pull me out of the womb pierced my baby-soft skull and damaged my cerebral motor cortex. On my left temple is a tiny scar left by the forceps and shaped, rather unfortunately, I’ve always thought, like an upside-down cross—the anti-Christ symbol.

I look, I’m told, basically normal. I am not in a wheelchair. I have good control of my limbs. I write and I paint. I can do most everyday tasks. Although my symptoms are typical—­muscular tightness, limited movement ability, poor muscle development—­they are mild. For this reason, everyone calls me lucky. And it’s true—compared with other kids in the waiting room of the cerebral-palsy ward, I was lucky, extremely lucky. But still, I never asked to be in that waiting room. I did not look like those kids inside the hospital—would balk at being classed with them, even—but my body didn’t fit in outside the hospital either. Doctors, friends, parents—a platoon of people who have never experienced what I have—commend me on my normalness. This always makes me feel accomplished, until I realize that what they really mean is: Normal, considering …

When I was a child, my symptoms were more pronounced than they are now. I simplified my deformities: I had a Good Side and a Bad Side, even telling kids at primary school that half my penis didn’t work (I had to have some fun). My Good Side, my left, was my superhero; I was actually right-handed, but taught myself to use the superhero side. My Bad Side, my right, was a cave-dwelling creature, a Caliban, a spindly, weak, shameful thing that I’d hit with my left hand when I was angry. I used to scream at my mother, crying, You did this. You gave birth to this.

I had a noticeable limp. My right heel couldn’t get to the floor, which left me on perpetual tiptoe. Unless my foot was strapped into a splint, my ankle couldn’t reach 90 degrees—the doctors’ acid test of normality. I needed shoes of two different sizes to allow for the added width of my daytime splint. My mother would explain the situation to shop assistants as I sat on the little sofa waiting for my mismatched shoes to arrive. Their faces turned to pity, or something like disgust. Did they think I was contagious? My nighttime splint had no give whatsoever. When I’d get up to pee in the night, waddling along in the strange walk that the splint forced on me, I’d pass my bathroom mirror and stare. Despite the crocodile pattern the nurse had let me choose, it all looked so medical, so unnatural—­so, well, disabled. And I would think, I am not this.

[Read: A disability film unlike any other]

As if to make it official, my doctor said, “You do not have motor skills.” I’ve never been able to move just one finger on my right hand, for example. If one finger is moving, they’re all dancing some uncoordinated dance. I needed help in class. I found it tricky to cut and paste, to organize myself, or to write for long periods of time, because my hand would cramp. It was humiliating enough to have a personal classroom assistant, but the assistant, Yulia, also had to massage my foot each morning to relax my muscles. She wasn’t popular with the other kids at school. Her foreign accent, tough manner, and short haircut made her a prime target for crude, all-boys-school-style ridicule. I often found it easier to join in than to defend her. I wanted everyone to think I didn’t need her. She never cared about the other kids being rude. But if she overheard me, she’d look at me with eyes that made it clear I was betraying her.

I would meet her in the black box of my primary-school drama studio half an hour before classes began. I’d take off my shoe, splint, and sock. She’d squeeze Johnson’s Baby Oil onto her hands and then take my foot roughly—kneading and pushing and pulling it. I would apologize again and again in my head. I’m sorry you have to do this. I’m sorry I’m like this.

Sometimes another kid would walk in. My body would revolt in panic—­I’d squirm away from Yulia, desperately ashamed of the vision of my naked foot and ankle, moist with oil, poking out of my trouser leg. Something haunted me about the fleshy color of my skin with nowhere to hide in that black, black room. I’d pull my sock back on as quickly as humanly possible and sit there, staring at the floor, until Yulia firmly asked him to leave. When he’d gone, she’d reach an arm out, indicating that I should take my sock off once more.

At age 12, I beat my lifelong best friend—a boy I’d been in diapers with—in a tennis match at his grandfather’s house. He didn’t like losing, and he screamed from the baseline, “You disabled cunt.” I ran inside. In the kitchen, sobbing, I bumped into his grandfather and his mother—incidentally, my mother’s best friend—who asked what was wrong. I began to tell her, a woman I’d known all my life, a woman who’d known about my disability before I could even speak, and she lifted a finger in the air and said, “Ah. Don’t mention names. No one likes snitches.” I turned to his grandfather, hopeful, but he simply said, “No one said that to you, Emil.” I expected kids to be nasty, but had thought adults grew out of it.

As I prepared to leave primary school, I was also preparing for an operation on my Achilles tendon, which would mitigate my limp. The operation was scheduled for the final day of the school year, and so while every other boy in my class piled into a bus headed for a theme park to go on rides with names like Stealth and Nemesis Inferno, I was driven to a hospital in the suburbs of London. My mother spent the day reminding me that I’d never liked roller coasters anyway. I was given a wheelchair until I could walk again, but after one day of being eyed by strangers, I opted for crutches. I longed to hold a sign that read THIS CHAIR IS TEMPORARY. I AM LIKE YOU. My cast eventually came off, my heel now reached the ground, and my strange, clodhopping gait was gone.

Emil Sands, 2022. Three Figures. Oil on paper, collage.

I moved on to secondary school. No more splints, no more personal assistants, no more massages, no more limp. My parents assured me: Normal starts now. But that was not true. I was hit with a new regime—a twice-daily therapy program of swimming, stretching, and working with weights.

Each morning, I arrived in the funky-smelling changing room of my all-boys school sometime between 7:15 and 7:30. I found a space on the bench and a corresponding peg that wasn’t already littered with the chucked-off black-and-maroon ties, white shirts, trousers, sports bags, and boxers of the swim squad, which got there before me. In order to minimize my time spent naked, I was already wearing my regulation Speedo trunks under my uniform. I took off my own tie, shirt, and trousers and dumped them in my black-and-blue Sports Direct bag, which I carefully hung up.

Looking down at my nearly naked body, I longed for a different one. Something about puberty had made me fat, like a baby: My stomach ballooned out so that I could only just find the tips of my toes beyond it. My Good Side looked exactly that—good. But my Bad Side remained a perpetual disappointment. The swimming was meant to mitigate the effects of my disability, but swimming was the last thing I wanted to do.

[Read: Doctors are failing patients with disabilities]

The changing room connected directly to the pool, and the stench of chlorine was unavoidable. With nowhere else to go in this windowless part of the gym complex, it found your nose and clogged it. From my seat in the changing room, I could hear the swim squad, which had already been training for 40 minutes—the reverberating splashes, the critical shouts, the coach’s whistle. Their sonic booms stretched up past the viewing gallery to the ceiling and crashed back down again, echoing off the water.

I made my way through the corridor to the pool, holding my arms around my tummy. A mass of indistinguishable squad muscle—­here a lean leg, there a powerful arm, there a goggled head on a bull-muscled neck—filled four of the pool’s five lanes. I approached the fifth—the teachers’ lane—and reluctantly lowered myself in. This was the only place where the school and swim coach could think to put me. My elderly French teacher was usually in there already, breast-stroking at the same pace his lessons went. Of everyone in this pool, it was his team I was somehow put on.

Even underwater, I attempted to cover my wibbling fat, knowing that the squad’s goggles allowed for plain viewing of my body. As I went up and down the pool, doing my customary half-swim, half-walk, their thoughts consumed me. Did they know why I was in their pool? Had their coach told them? Did they care? Scarier still, were they so passionate about their sport that they didn’t even notice me?

After swimming, they filed back into the changing room. They were teammates: not exactly friends, but they shared a closeness. They laughed about races won and lost. They stretched out, leaned over, bent down. Like ancient Greeks in the gymnasium, they had bodies that were a total luxury. I showered in my trunks after them, then hurried to a private cubicle to change into my underwear, all the time careful to avoid the mirrors that lined the walls. I covered my body with towels, hands, arms, anything at all so that no one, myself included, could see it in its entirety.

When one of the swimmers was dressed and ready to leave, the others shouted a goodbye and nodded, lifting their head and their eyebrows together in a way that encompassed the entirety of masculine prowess. But not once in all the years I changed with them did any of the swimmers look my way.

Well, there was one time, actually. Marcus was a boy, two or three years ahead of me, whom everyone either knew or knew of. He was, as far as I could tell, everything anyone could ever want to be. We never spoke—why on earth would we?—but so powerful was his physical presence that I became acutely aware of my lumbering body if he so much as walked past me in the school corridor. He seemed to be taller than anyone else in his year, although that probably wasn’t the case. He was always greeting people, stretching out an arm and a hand for some über-cool, effortless handshake.

The incident occurred when I was 15 or 16. I came out of the pool late, and only Marcus and a friend of his were still getting changed. By this point, my body had morphed slightly. I still felt overweight and cumbersome, and my disability still left half of my body lacking, but the past three years of training had at least made me look more like others my age. After showering, I went back to my bag and began getting dressed.

Marcus was in his underwear with his back facing me. I don’t know quite what happened that day, but some deep-set mixture of jealousy, longing, and desire prevented me from looking away. His back was the mightiest thing I’d ever seen. Everywhere you looked it was packed with muscles. And the symmetry! He turned and Achilles was standing there in the locker room. I traced every contour, every ebb of his body, with my eyes, inventorying every part of him that I was not.

I came to, and realized that both Marcus and his friend were standing there, watching me staring at him. There were codes, and I, a locker-room weirdo, had just broken them.

“Dude,” said the friend to Marcus, cutting the silence with a cruel splutter of laughter, “I think someone likes what he sees.”

Marcus started laughing and mock-­provocatively tensed his body in my direction. “You want a piece of me, Sands?”

And while I did a double take—had he just said my name?—I understood how far away from these boys I was. How, if I answered his question honestly, the truth would be out: No, I don’t want a piece of you. I want all of you. I want to have what you have.

I said nothing. I backed away into a bathroom stall. I didn’t come out again until they had left.

I stopped swimming a few months after this, defying my parents, my school, and the medical committee that oversaw my rehabilitation. I had developed psychosomatic symptoms that made it unfeasible for me to carry on. At around the same time in the morning as I would start my swim, I would begin to hear a chorus of voices in my head. They screamed at me in a dark gibberish. Although it wasn’t English, I knew what they were telling me: I was worthless, useless. I would stop mid-stroke and hold my hands to my ears, trying to make them stop. At first, I thought the water had made my ears go funny. But the voices grew louder, darker, and more overwhelming. There were more hospital appointments. More concerned doctors. A specialist wondered if we knew the word schizophrenia.

When I stopped swimming, the voices stopped too, suggesting that the episodes were a result of some severe anxiety connected with the pool. As a deal, I swapped my five swims a week for more time in the gym and more stretching. I preferred this. For one, I could be clothed. But more than that, I could work toward goals that were less about competition and more about personal growth: getting big arms or a six-pack, having a meal plan based on eating lots of proteins. Things that most boys my age wanted.

As I understand now, my disability pushed me harder. Closed doors draw attention to open ones. When I was in my early teens, I competed for my school’s annual reading prize: First place went to the student who was best at delivering a poem or short story aloud. I got through the heats easily. Backstage, at the final, I watched as others nervously ambled about, familiarizing themselves with the Keats or Kipling poems that their parents had perhaps helped them pick out for this round. One by one, they were called up, until eventually it was my turn. I took to the podium. I opened my book. I began with the first line of the first chapter: “In Which We Are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees, and the Stories Begin.” It is the chapter with the line “Then he climbed a little further … and a little further … and then just a little further.”

And I won. It didn’t bother me at all that no one else was particularly interested in winning this made-up prize. What mattered to me was that I’d won it on my own, reading something I loved, words of my choosing. I remember feeling at the time, as silly as it sounds, that somehow, by reading a children’s book when everyone else was pretending to be an adult, I’d beaten the system. What system that was, I still don’t know—this was just a diction competition for adolescents at a private school. But I held the feeling close.

Emil Sands, 2021. Self-Portrait. Oil on plastic.

There were few physical activities I actually could not attempt, but many I could not do well. I am thinking, in particular, of football—­soccer. I tried to play when I was very young. Had I persevered, the necessity of using both legs would have proved helpful in rehabilitating my right side. But a concrete block descended if a ball was ever brought out at a friend’s house or while on holiday. If a stray ball came off someone’s foot in a park and I was expected to kick it back, I froze. I could not play. I did not play. I refused to play.

There was a power in saying no, but saying no also left me out. Every day at school, a lunchtime soccer game stretched across the fields outside. I took a different door—I began to go to the empty art studios. The studios were adjacent to the fields, and from my easel, I could see the game. Muffled shouts came my way. At a certain point, however, I began to look forward to my solitary lunchtime activity. The prospect of making new work and concentrating on something that mattered to me felt important. I started to think about going to art school and used the extra hour a day to create a portfolio.

As we reached the final year or two of school, the studios began to fill up a little. Two younger boys began editing their street photography in the computer suite. An art teacher inspired a group of classmates to come in every day and try screen printing. Although my school was only for boys in the earlier grades, it was coed in the final two years, and girls and boys could work in the studios together. My friend Sarah often sat across from me, drawing tiny floral patterns that, by the end of lunch, had ballooned out to fill the page. In the studios, on busy days, you couldn’t hear the game outside at all.

Today, hardly anyone knows I am disabled. I tell no one, because I believe people will like me less. Maybe just for a split second. Maybe for longer. Or maybe I should rephrase: I believe people will like me more if they think I am like them. So I go out of my way to keep my disability private. When I am tired, a residue of my old limp returns. On the few, but truly excruciating, days that someone notices and asks if I have hurt my leg, I lie and say I twisted my ankle. Oh shit, how? And, demoralizing as it may be, I keep going—­on the stairs; last week in the shop; literally just before I saw you. On the rare occasions when I don’t lie, I always wish that I had. Wait, what? You’re disabled? The chasm opens again.

[Read: On disability and accepting help]

I go to the gym every day of the week. No one makes me do it—not because my cerebral palsy is gone, but because I am an adult. My body is a “good” body: It is strong, muscular in places, and tight-ish. It’s not Marcus’s, but I am not Marcus. In the gym, I am recognized, and men I’ve never spoken to nod their head my way.

Nevertheless, I am wary. Do they see that my right side is less muscular than my left? That I sometimes have trouble picking up the weights in a coordinated fashion? That, when I’m fatigued, I drop them just outside the little ridges I’m meant to leave them in? Do they think I’m weak because the weight I lift is low, to make up for my right side’s deficiency? I want to tell them that all of these things are not my fault, but the fault of a rogue forceps blade 23 years ago. I want to show them my medical records, drag them to my gym bench, and point out everything that’s wrong with my form, or my body, or my brain, because then I could stop second-guessing. I could own my condition. But I am not Achilles.

When my dad first overheard me lie about my limp, he was astonished. Within the family, my disability has become an easy, even joked-about, topic. We had a follow-up conversation in which he asked me why I had done that. Exasperated and embarrassed, I pretty much told him to back off. He did, but his eyes said enough: This is not the son I raised. And he was right. I know more than most that difference must be celebrated, and that each time I hide, the shame builds—for me, for others like me. Somehow, I have become the bully, or at least the bully’s accomplice.

I am not sure I want to hide anymore. I’d rather embrace my disability than fear its fallout. But it would be a lie to say I love every part of my body. I am still grappling with the ways I have been made to feel that my body does not belong—and with the conviction that it is easier for everyone that I be a failing normal rather than a normal disabled.

This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Struck on One Side.”

It comes after the former PM's latest declaration of a £2.5m advance payment for speaking events.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

The free-trade era in America is over. Industrial policy is the new rage. After decades of trade with China and declining manufacturing employment, the U.S. is embracing a new economic theory: Build more, and build it all here.

President Joe Biden has signed historic laws to make more bridges, wind turbines, and computer chips in the U.S. In his State of the Union address yesterday, Biden announced a deeper “Buy American” policy that calls for “American-made lumber, glass, drywall, fiber optic cables.”

Part of me is thrilled by this idea. The U.S. desperately needs sharper focus on the supply side of the economy. It’s not enough to erect signs on our front lawns proclaiming that housing is a human right; we also need policies for our back yards to allow housing that’s ample and affordable. But although I support an abundance agenda, I’m concerned that an all-American abundance agenda might be two alliterations too many.

Before we get to my anxieties about Buy American rules, let me try to make an honest case for it. Fundamentally, the government wants to ensure that the U.S. doesn’t rely on flimsy supply chains for key materials, especially those that pass through our adversaries’ borders—specifically, China’s. In the past decade or so, we’ve awakened to two different “China shocks.” The first shock was economic: the lesson that free trade with China had a devastating and concentrated effect on manufacturing employment. This shock contributed not only to a Great Lakes mini-recession but also, perhaps, to the election of Donald Trump. The second shock was ideological: the realization that economic growth in China did not lead inexorably to cultural liberalism, as it had in the West. The Chinese economy grew alongside the authoritarian behavior and rhetoric of the Communist Party of China.

Buy American provisions can have several advantages. They funnel money to domestic businesses in important industries, theoretically raise the wages of workers in those sectors, and let the government support the development of crucial technology and infrastructure. For example, if the U.S. wants to build an all-electric economy, we probably need to be much more deliberate about creating a stable and thriving market for inputs such as lithium and copper.

But the Buy American philosophy has at least four problems that the White House, Democrats, and all policy makers should think about as they engineer a new industrial policy for the 21st century.

B.A. typically raises costs. The U.S. should be concerned about building more and building faster. To take one example: A disgraceful new report on New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority found that it spent $4.5 billion on the first leg of the Second Avenue subway line. Reducing America’s complex system of construction bottlenecks to high material costs is wildly unfair; in fact, the MTA spent most of those billions on design, engineering, and construction of the tunnel. But building certainly won’t get any cheaper or easier if our policies increase the cost of essential materials by making foreign purchases of them illegal. All things equal, buying American might make building in America more expensive at a time when we should be obsessed with reducing costs rather than raising them.

B.A. can make key supply chains less resilient. Last spring, a bacteria outbreak at a Michigan plant that makes infant formula created a scary shortage. It also offered a lesson on the downsides of protectionism. The U.S. government makes the legal importation of otherwise-safe European formula almost impossible, going so far as to seize shipments at the border. The government also awards contracts to only a small number of approved formula makers, which means three companies account for practically all U.S. formula sales. These restrictions make us more vulnerable to emergencies, such as a bacteria-infested plant in Michigan. Compare this story with one about the COVID shots: When a Baltimore facility that made Johnson & Johnson vaccines reported a catastrophic failure, the company could rely on a global network of factories that picked up the slack. The U.S. should consider “friend-shoring” the production of certain materials—that is, working with our allies to create many nodes around the world so that if one fails, no catastrophe ensues.

B.A. policies can hurt innovation, even if just by accident. If your local transit authority takes federal money, odds are it’s historically been required to buy public buses from domestic bus makers. What’s wrong with that? A 2014 study from economists at Cornell University and UCLA found that these transit authorities tended to buy more expensive buses that were less fuel efficient because they cared more about securing a subsidy than about the bottom line or even performance. One lesson of this paper is that Buy American provisions might send a strong signal to buyers—whatever you do, just buy from one of these few domestic suppliers!—that overwhelms other signals, such as price and quality. As a result, domestic suppliers don’t have to keep up with any innovative wave, and Buy American policies lock parts of the economy into being less innovative.B.A. hurts global alliances that we should be nurturing. If the U.S. really is on the cusp of a second cold war with China, we should be focused on building alliances rather than frustrating our allies and trading partners. “In the first Cold War, we wisely realized that when allies like South Korea and Japan and France got rich, it made the U.S. and the world more secure,” said the economics writer Noah Smith. “We realized that every dollar of goods manufactured in South Korea and Japan and France represented a win for the free world. We should realize that again now.”

Protectionism pushes us in the other direction. When the U.S. imposes Buy American rules, other countries may copy us and impose their own restrictions on global trade. This is why too much protectionism can punish the very people it’s meant to help. Under President Trump, the U.S. imposed import tariffs to protect manufacturing workers who built washing machines and made steel and aluminum. These jobs happened to be disproportionately located in GOP counties. But the policy backfired, triggering retaliatory tariffs in other countries. Suddenly our washing machines weren’t priced competitively for foreign buyers, leading to a sharp decline in U.S. exports. A 2019 analysis by several economists found that the U.S. companies that lost the most business were heavily concentrated in the very same GOP-leaning counties that Trump was theoretically trying to assist.

I don’t want to suggest that any attempt to onshore production will doom America to runaway costs, supply-chain catastrophes, and frayed global alliances. In many cases, I’m sure there are brilliant reasons to bring back more advanced manufacturing, clean-energy construction, and resource production. But in this molten moment for economic policy, as we’re sliding from a neoliberal era into something else, we should be explicit about the trade-offs that come from explicitly protectionist policies. We already know the downsides of a laissez-faire, “build wherever it’s cheapest” regime. Twenty years from now, I don’t want to have to write that the U.S. overreacted to the China shocks by forcibly onshoring the production of goods in a way that made those goods less resilient and ample.

What do we actually want from our economic regime? What are the political and human outcomes that our policy makers should be trying to deliver? If, for example, we’re aiming for plentiful, cheap, low-emission electricity produced by more clean-energy infrastructure in an economy with full unemployment and rising real wages, we don’t need harsh rules against importing affordable solar-energy parts from a resilient network of trading partners who are also our political allies. On the contrary, we need a political message that welcomes our allies: To win an abundance of well-being, America needs abundant help.