It has been hard this past week, of tariffs applied worldwide on April 2 to tariffs suspended except for China on April 9, to avoid reflecting on how much trouble could have been avoided if economists, instead of talking about countries’ trade surpluses and trade deficits, had devised different words — say, “buyer-dominant” countries and “seller-dominant” countries.

Perhaps in that case, President Donald Trump would not have been obsessed for the last 40 years by the notion that the United States is impoverished when it buys more from some country than that country buys from us. How many Americans are hurt by the fact that U.S. firms buy lots of vanilla beans in Madagascar while mostly low-income and geographically distant Madagascar citizens buy very little from the United States?