Imagine falling sick in a world where half or more of all the good doctors were intentionally kept out of the profession. How confident would you be in the care you received? Or imagine that you needed a lawyer to get you out of a tight legal jam, yet roughly half of the brightest legal minds were intentionally unavailable?

The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled a global health and economic crisis of unprecedented severity. Six months into the pandemic, the death toll in the US is approaching 200,000 and, despite massive fiscal stimulus, the country faces its deepest economic contraction in modern history. Since person-to-person contact is essential for a substantial fraction of the US economy to function, and since such close contact allows the virus to spread easily, both fatalities and economic losses are unavoidable.

When most people think about international trade, they likely imagine large companies trading goods back and forth among many countries, and they likely picture rows and rows of colorful intermodal containers stacked on huge transport ships.