.
So he doesn't understand why, and I suppose that's because his training never equipped him to understand something like this even with benefit of hindsight.
It's an issue in which figures and calculations are very important, and in abstract ways that are simply not taught in preparation of most professions.
So being a merchant mariner by heart and profession, he thinks the Suez Canal is super important. A "most important lifeline", even. That's quite some prose.
An economist isn't satisfied with such prose. An economist asks "How important?", and expects figures with currency symbols as answer. "How many $ would the average American lose by a closed Suez canal?" "What would be the reduction of U.S. GDP in short term, in long term in %?"
And then an economist would be tempted to do at least a quick & dirty first order approximation calculation (or for the scientifically inclined, a full text search in a scientific paper database).
The result looked like this about a year ago:
/2023/12/the-suez-canal-issue.html
0.03% GDP or a meal at McDonald's was my answer THEN.
WITHOUT the advantage of nearly a year of hindsight.
(To be honest, I wasn't able to do a quick&dirty short term calculation and actually agreed that in short term the blockade would be "troublesome".)
Even today, he does not appear to be inclined to check his assumptions about the Suez Canal's importance. Maybe you can help him and point out the de facto blockade's effect on inflation?
source https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
(The current Red Sea Crisis began on 19 October 2023).
Long story short; those 99.9% of Americans who don't care according to him are correct to not care.
S O
.
