Trade Restrictions Raise Chicken Prices in House of the Dragon

From House of the Dragon (HBO)

Categories:

Run time: 0:59

Clip Description: A blockade drives up the price of food in the city. Fifty-nine seconds in which a political decision made elsewhere turns into a price a household pays.

Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is useful for the domestic politics of trade: who bears the cost of a restriction, who captures the benefit, and why the beneficiaries are usually concentrated and organized while those who pay are diffuse and are not. It connects to the Stolper-Samuelson framework, to sanctions as an instrument of statecraft, and to the question of whether economic pressure produces political concessions or simply hardship.

Possible Uses in Classroom: Use this when introducing trade politics or sanctions. The scene is useful because it shows the consumer side, which is the side that never lobbies and therefore never appears in most accounts of how trade policy gets made.

Discussion Questions

The restriction raises the price, and everybody in the scene can see that it does. Yet trade restrictions are common, popular and remarkably durable. The standard account is about concentration: the losses are small and spread across everyone, while the gains are large and land on a few. Apply that logic here — who are the few, and what would they have to do to keep the restriction in place?
Stolper-Samuelson holds that trade policy creates winners and losers along factor lines, with owners of the scarce factor gaining from protection; Heckscher-Ohlin tells you which factor is scarce where. Using the two together, predict who lobbies for protection in a labor-abundant developing economy and who lobbies for it in a capital-abundant wealthy one — and then say whether real-world coalitions actually match the prediction.
Blockades and embargoes are trade restrictions imposed from outside rather than chosen from within, but the effect on price is much the same. Does the distinction matter for how a population responds? Bring in what the sanctions literature says about whether hardship turns publics against their own government or toward it.

Assignment

The World Bank’s WITS platform gives you applied and bound tariff rates for essentially every country and product, free and without an account for most queries. Pick one agricultural product and three countries at different income levels. Roughly three pages, in three parts. First, report the applied tariff each country charges on that product and note how far it sits below the bound rate each committed to at the WTO — the gap is policy space they have chosen not to use, and it is often very large. Second, for the country with the highest protection, find out who asked for it: producer associations publish submissions, and parliamentary committee records frequently name them. Third, estimate, roughly and with your assumptions stated openly, what the restriction costs domestic consumers each year, and compare that to what it is worth to producers. You will almost certainly find the consumer cost is the larger number. Explain why the policy survives anyway, and then take seriously the best argument for it that is not about producer lobbying — food security, rural employment, price volatility — and say whether it holds up in your case.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons.

For AP Students

AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 5: Political and Economic Changes and Development

Topics: 5.1 Impact of Global Economic and Technological Forces; 5.2 Political Responses to Global Market Forces; 5.3 Challenges from Globalization
Skill: Data Analysis
Big idea: Internal and External Forces
Course countries: Russia, Iran, Nigeria

A blockade decided on by people who will never feel it turns into the price of a chicken in a market. Fifty-nine seconds, and it delivers students to the thing they most often miss about economic policy: it is felt unevenly, and the people who bear it are almost never the people who chose it.

Discussion questions

Trace the chain from the political decision to the household, naming each step along the way.
Sanctions are the real-world version of this. Iran and Russia have both lived under extensive sanctions. Name one intended effect and one effect that lands on people the sanctions were never aimed at.
A government facing rising food prices can subsidize, ration, or absorb the anger. Pick one and say what it costs that government over the following year.

Short activity

Read the price line (15 minutes). Give students a simple chart of a staple food price in a sanctioned country across five years. They describe the trend in one sentence, mark the point of steepest change, and propose one political event that could account for it. Then one final sentence on what the chart cannot tell them. Describe the data, explain the trend, state the limit: that sequence is exactly what the quantitative analysis question asks for, and the third step is the one students leave out.