When President Donald Trump mused that 'maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know'' it wasn't a deeply developed critique of late capitalism, or a sly nod to Weberian asceticism. Still, for those of us who'd been hoarding items in a Temu shopping cart, it did raise some important philosophical questions: Is a car vacuum necessary' How many baseball hats can you stack' How many dolls is too many' Once again, Trump reached into our guilty, greedy, modern hearts and dug out the nostalgia for a simpler time when we were content with less. But also, once again, he skipped over the dirty details. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with a doll manufacturer and a policy analyst about tariffs and Americans' relationship with choice. Elenor Mak, the founder of Jilly Bing, talks about her dream of giving Asian American kids the choice of having a doll that looks like them, and how the new tariffs might kill it. Martha Gimbel of the Budget Lab at Yale...
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