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Technological innovation — backed by a carbon tax to make it competitive — is the essential requirement for transition to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. And trade, by stimulating competition, is a catalyst of innovation. 

Three areas of technological transformation stand out. Australia and its Asia Pacific neighbours have a stake in each of them.

A trade war would do enormous damage. It could foster a resentful and aggressive China and lead to the situation foreseen by Mearsheimer (2001), where a declining America decides to halt China’s rise. Decisions for war or peace Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell’s China’s Search for Security (2012) is noteworthy for its systematic inclusion of economic factors in a security oriented analysis. The driver of China’s foreign policy is its search for security, the book claims. Where the offensive realist Mearsheimer sees regional hegemony and global power as means to acquire national security, the defensive realists Nathan and Scobell distinguish between security and hegemony: Beijing wants security but not global power. When Beijing says it wants peace it means stability so it can ‘concentrate on economic development’ (Nathan and Scobell, 2012: 28). A country’s foreign policy is driven by its factual interests, although the causal path from interest to policy may be distorted by misinformation, miscalculation, value commitments, institutional weaknesses or leadership shortcomings. Nathan and Scobell think China will remain a ‘status quo power in a system designed by the West’ but hold it possible that future Chinese leaders may challenge US pre-eminence if Washington does not keep up the economic foundation for US power (Nathan and Scobell, 2012: 13, 346, 357). What could unravel the global system would not be China’s rise but US decline. This is the main risk, as they see it. If ‘the West weakens itself to the point of creating a power vacuum’, then China will acquire bases around the world and replace the dollar with the renminbi in its foreign trade. The US would thus have to decide whether and when to resist, and this could lead to war. The recipe for peace is that the US maintains its strength and conducts a cautious foreign policy. China is likely to act rationally on the basis of its search for security (Nathan and Scobell, 2012: xi, 359). It follows from their reasoning that the risk of war will increase if China can no longer depend on the US for its economic development, while the US retains sufficient military power to believe it can win a war. Again it is seen that a politically motivated reduction in the Sino–US economic interdependence is a likely precursor to any crisis leading to war. If Nathan and Scobell’s reasoning is combined with Roach’s analysis of financial politics and Copeland’s ‘trade expectation’ argument it seems that the key to minimizing the risk of war is to rebalance the global economic system in a way allowing the major powers to remain codependent. A combination of mutual nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence is likely to preserve global peace as long as no major power expects to see a rapid decline in its relative power. Deterrence and inter-dependence are both, however, precarious. One depends on credibility, the other on the expectation that flows are kept open within a mutually beneficial financial and trading system.

The international economic architecture built after 1945 was based on a powerful idea: economic interdependence is crucial, if insufficient, for global peace and prosperity. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the predecessor to the World Trade Organization were founded in response to the three preceding decades of ceaseless instability, when the world had been devastated by two world wars, the Great Depression, and political extremism. It had also been a period of deglobalization, in which countries retreated into increasingly isolated trading blocs. In the rubble of World War II, governments sought to construct a new system that, by linking countries in a dense web of economic ties, would consign such chaos and division to history.

For much of the past 75 years, policymakers from across the world recognized the power of economic interdependence. Countries tore down trade barriers, opening their economies to one another. On balance, their record was impressive. Closer economic integration went hand in hand with rising global prosperity, an unprecedented reduction in poverty, and an unusually long period of great-power peace. Since 1990, the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has fallen by three-quarters. At the center of this great leap in human well-being was a 20-fold increase in international trade volumes, which helped lift per capita incomes by a factor of 27 over the last six decades.

But other countries whose exports get hit with the border taxes might not see it that way. China, for example, the U.S.’s number one trading partner and the world’s largest emitter, could bring complaints to the World Trade Organization, which prohibits protectionist tariffs and could authorize China to retaliate. (After Trump instituted heavy tariffs on foreign steel, China and the European Union launched WTO challenges and retaliatory taxes against many U.S. imports, including soybeans and bourbon.)

That’s the problem with a potential carbon border tax: At best, it could help protect critical industries during a difficult switch to green energy; at worst, it could spark a trade war that would slow efforts to cut emissions.

First and most obviously, a carbon tariff would impose significant new costs on American consumers, companies, and workers. For example, recent U.S. tariffs on more than $350 billion worth of imports have been found to cost Americans over $50 billion per year. The PROVE IT Act targets over $600 billion worth of imports, suggesting the cost of carbon tariffs could be even higher than the Trump‐​Biden tariffs. Import taxes hurt Americans by increasing prices, particularly those in the lowest income brackets, and U.S. companies’ competitiveness by raising their production costs or insulating protected firms from market competition. For example, President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on imported steel inflicted significant damage on steel‐​consuming U.S. companies (like nail manufacturers)—the new taxes cost their workers directly through layoffs and the companies became less competitive as they were forced to either share the costs with their customers by raising prices, reduce production, or decrease investment. As a result, the tariffs did little to “level the playing field,” instead the President surrendered home‐​field advantage and gave the edge to foreign competition, who faced no such taxes.

Second, the history of U.S. tariff policy raises serious concerns that a carbon tariff would not be administered in a sound and impartial manner. Instead, these tariffs would simply be a vehicle for rote protectionism. A prime example of such protectionism is the steel tariffs imposed or maintained under the Bush II, Trump, and Biden administrations, which had political motivations far exceeding any economic ones. At the same time, U.S. trade remedies (antidumping and countervailing duties (AD/​CVDs)) law utilizes a process to calculate dumping or subsidization of imports that “injures” domestic industry but can be “remedied” by imposing duties (tariffs). Similar calculations are likely to be used for carbon intensity. However, AD/​CVDs law is notorious for being strongly biased against imports and American consumers. Even worse, in reality, the law is used as a way to deliver protectionist rents to a handful of well‐​connected companies (including, again, steel).

What are the impacts of carbon pricing and border adjustment mechanisms?

There are nearly 70  carbon pricing schemes globally – these capture the costs of emissions in terms of climate change-related loss and damage to human health, the environment, property and so on and tie it to their source through a price, e.g. by applying a tax. However, approaches to pricing vary, and methods to compare their equivalence are only beginning to take form. This has prompted some governments to consider carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAMs), which work by imposing a fee on carbon-intensive goods being imported from countries with less stringent climate policy. This can be a way to level the playing field among firms subject to different climate-related regulations and taxes and can disincentivise companies from shifting their production activities to locations where operating costs may be lower due to less stringent climate policies (causing so-called ‘carbon leakage’). However, even if aimed at addressing legitimate environmental concerns such as carbon leakage, such unilateral measures can generate trade tensions and create high administrative costs for firms and governments engaging in international trade. They can further affect trade patterns by incentivising re-shoring (the shifting of production back home to avoid imports) or short-circuiting of supply chains (where less efficient exporters are favoured).

For many economists, however, the trade deficit has been scapegoated, and they argue that the trade deficit is not itself a problem for the U.S. economy. That’s because a larger trade deficit can be the result of a stronger economy, as consumers spend and import more while higher interest rates make foreign investors more eager to place their money in the United States.

CFR Distinguished Fellow Michael Froman, a former U.S. trade representative, pushes back on the Trump administration’s emphasis that “trade deficits mean you lose, and surpluses mean you win.” He says that Trump’s narrow focus on trade in goods, which disregards the services surplus, is particularly unhelpful. “Every legitimate economist states that measuring trade policy by the size of the goods deficit is probably not a passing grade in a basic economics class,” he said at a CFR trade symposium in October 2017.

Most economists do not see the trade gap as money “lost” to other countries, nor do they worry about trade deficits to a large degree. That’s because trade imbalances are affected by a host of macroeconomic factors, including the relative growth rates of countries, the value of their currencies, and their saving and investment rates. For instance, America’s trade deficit narrowed dramatically during the Great Recession, when national consumption faltered.

Mr. Trump has long argued that the trade deficit hinders economic growth, and that reducing it will accelerate American job creation. Even those who agree with that view say there are better ways to reduce the imbalance than through tariffs, which can backfire and further widen the trade deficit if other countries impose reciprocal tariffs.

It’s too early to call the start of deglobalisation, but far from business as usual

Overall, world merchant trade is still digesting the effects of two major shocks seen in recent years. The pandemic extremes caused a lot of problems related to supply being curbed and demand overheating, these issues seem to be easing rapidly at the moment and we don’t expect supply-chain issues on the same scale as that seen in recent years anytime soon.

In our 2023 Allianz Trade Global Survey, we decided to check the pulse of companies in seven countries – the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. Over three weeks to mid-April, we surveyed a sample of high-level executives in around 3,000 companies that have export activities and suppliers and production sites located in foreign countries.

Exporters remain cautiously optimistic. Roughly 70% of corporates expect business turnover generated through exports to increase in 2023 (against close to 80% in the 2022 edition and 94% before the start of the war in Ukraine). One in two exporters sees a moderate turnover increase, between +2% and +5%, down from the double-digit turnover growth registered in 2022. This compares with our latest global trade growth forecasts for 2023: +0.7% in volume terms and -0.1% in value terms. Companies in the countries most affected by the energy crisis are the least optimistic, with Germany, Poland and Italy being the most pessimistic.

By analyzing thousands of country pairs over several decades, many researchers have found that increasing trade between two countries lowers the risk of war between them. They have also found that countries that are more dependent on international trade have fewer conflicts than self‐​reliant ones, which provides us all with a security interest in other countries’ global integration as well.

It’s not just trade though; it’s free trade. A series of statistical analyses by the political scientist Patrick McDonald show that the level of free trade between two countries has a larger effect on peace. Countries that engage in free trade are less likely to attack or be attacked than protectionist countries. Free trade removes the barriers and privileges that enhance the domestic power of groups that generally support authoritarian leaders and an aggressive foreign policy.

U.S.-China relations have reached a low point after a Chinese spy balloon was discovered — and shot down — over U.S. territory last week, but trade between the world’s two leading economies just hit an all-time high.

According to numbers released Tuesday by the Commerce Department, two-way trade between the United States and China set a new record in 2022 — $690 billion — part of a surge in U.S. trade with partners around the world last year.

(Dallas and Karen, “Implementing a US Carbon Tax: Challenges and Debates”, pp191-211, Routledge)

This may also explain the coexistence of a carbon price (below its efficient level) and other energy policies even when those other policies are less environmentally effective. Third, as noted above, concerns about impacts on the overall economy or com-petitiveness may be another reason why the tax level might be insufficient from an environmental perspective, or applied unevenly across the economy. One reason might be to lessen the loss of economic activity associated with introducing a new tax on top of already existing taxes. However, these concerns can be at least partly addressed through using some of the carbon tax revenues to lower tax burdens elsewhere in the economy, or use of additional measures to help energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries (see Chapter 9). Fourth, the mental model illustrated in Figure 11.1 also assumes that the carbon price would automatically be adjusted to assimilate new scientific information. However, it is hard to imagine how this would occur, since the tax level and per-haps a time path for automatic annual adjustments is established by congressional action and revisiting the technical basis for this legislative decision might be just as fraught or flawed as the initial implementation of a tax. One approach to assimilat-ing new information might be to delegate authority to adjust the carbon tax to an expert agency such as EPA (Fraas and Richardson 2013; Burtraw 2013). However, the authority to tax is the exclusive domain of Congress, and this is one power the legislative branch guards jealously and rarely delegates. In sum, economic theory tells us that a carbon tax is a relatively efficient instru-ment. However, an efficient instrument does not guarantee an efficient policy. The outcome depends on how the instrument is used, and that depends importantly on the institutional context for policymaking. The implementation of a carbon price seems likely to be imperfect suggesting a potential role for other policies to help mitigate carbon emissions.

Despite its advantages, the U.S. has seen little progress in passing a carbon tax. Some conservatives dislike the imposition of a tax that would likely produce a massive (e.g., trillions of dollars) source of new government revenues that might be used poorly. Conservatives also worry about the harm it would cause to workers in fossil fuel industries and the increased prices faced by consumers. Liberals also object to the higher prices, which could disproportionately harm those with the lowest incomes.

In 2018, a tax designed to fight climate change in France led to weeks of violent “yellow vest” protests against rising fuel prices, among other concerns, causing the French government to back down. A plan for an E.U.-wide carbon tax has never been successful. Recent referenda in Washington State have failed again and again. In fact, no U.S. state has successfully passed a carbon tax (although many U.S. states and the E.U. have passed cap and trade policies).

Well, I think there are three reasons I think there is a certain hesitancy amongst the Democrats for a carbon tax. And it’s not generally a lack of appreciating the economics because you know, my profession is loud and clear on that. Number one is, President Biden promised not to raise taxes on anyone earning under $400,000 a year. And the economic incidence of a carbon tax would fall on individuals that include people who make less than $400,000 a year. Now, obviously you can use the revenue from a carbon tax to redistribute that in a progressive way, but I guess they’re feeling like that’s not part of their pledge. Second is, there are folks on the progressive left who really think the climate challenge is too big to rely on market forces. And you know that we’ve got to go straight to, you know, keeping it in the ground. Adele Morris (37:18): And then also there are folks in the environmental justice community that don’t support carbon pricing because the belief is that regulatory approaches on carbon are more likely to help air quality in their communities. And I’m sure it’s much more complicated than that, but I think there is a tepid support if any, on the far progressive left for carbon pricing, even if there is some lukewarm support among some Republicans for carbon pricing. I think the challenge though is, okay, you don’t want to do carbon pricing, you want to do regulation, well, what’s the environmental equivalent in the regulatory world and we’re not anywhere near close to that. I mean, even if they come up with a clean electricity standard, what are you doing for the rest of the two thirds of our emissions inventory? Are we going to do standards in every sector? How’s that going to work? And, you know, you might say, okay, well, a clean electricity standard is an easier legislative lift, but it’s not environmentally equivalent. You got to have that plus additional legislation to target the whole rest of the emissions inventory. So I still think a carbon price has a chance. It should be given a chance. I wouldn’t give up without trying, but then I’m not a political advisor. So maybe they’re listening to smarter people than me.

There are good reasons why governments may not want to use carbon taxes, and one of them relates to their welfare impacts. For example, a carbon tax on fossil fuels is often regressive in its impact- hurting poorer people relatively more than richer ones. Even when it might be progressive, poorer people still suffer a welfare loss when prices rise, making their consumption basket more expensive. Devising transfers to compensate them for this loss is not a simple matter. Compensation systems may not be well developed, and it may be difficult to identify those hurt or to get funds to them. Thus, even if governments impose a tax, they may still balk at levying a carbon tax high enough to reduce emissions to the extent they desire. Another reason that governments may hesitate is that adopting new taxes can be politically difficult because there are entrenched business interests that would lose.

The US military is facing a recruitment crisis. It is so severe that in September, Senator Thom Thillis referred to an “inflection point” for the voluntary-force model, threatening over a half century of precedent. In 2022, the Army failed to meet its recruitment goals across the board: active duty, reserves, and National Guard were thousands of personnel below target. The Navy met its recruiting quota for enlisted personnel, but not for officers. The Air Force met its recruiting quota for active duty, but not the reserves or National Guard. The Marine Corps barely hit its targets for active duty and reserves. There are a few theories about the causes of this recruiting predicament, which is at its worse since the post-Vietnam era. Direct causes might be record-low unemployment rates, COVID-era restrictions that limited recruiters’ access to the public, and an increase in both mental and physical health problems among young people. The Public Interest Fellowship’s Garrett Exner, a former Marines special operations officer, points to cultural shifts in American schooling, such as lower standards and refusal to subject students to any kind of adversity. Stuart Scheller, the outspoken Marine veteran and author, blames poor military leadership and misdirected shifts in financial incentives for servicemen. While these hypotheses probably have some degree of truth, they do not explain why some services are better at recruiting than others: the Marine Corps, after all, made all its quotas, while the Army didn’t meet any of its recruiting goals. The Marine Corps’s success is surprising for many reasons: it has the highest physical fitness standards for retention—significantly higher than that of the Navy and Air Force, and a reputation for physical and psychological duress that eclipses the other services. Moreover, the military occupational specialties (career specialties) available to Marine recruits is dwarfed by the Army’s, which casts the widest net for competencies among the services. At a time when obesity alone prohibits a shocking percentage of American young people from serving, the Marine Corps’s recruiting performance is especially puzzling. An explanation for the military’s recruitment challenges (and the Marine Corps’s comparative success) goes deeper than trends in the labor market. Ultimately, the civic honor on which voluntary service depends has quietly been eroding some time, and it is being replaced by an ethos of individual self-fulfillment. Tragically, different parts of the military have absorbed this mentality to different degrees. Recent recruiting ads—one by the Marines and one by the Army—offer glimpses into these broader cultural shifts and the challenges that they pose to the US military.

[Thomas Spoehr, researcher at the Heritage foundation that focuses on national defense issues], 6/26/2023, “The Military Recruiting Crisis Is Getting Worse”, accessed 7/2/2023, https://www.heritage.org/defense/commentary/the-military-recruiting-crisis-getting-worse - JR

Critics should keep in mind that the recruiting crisis has not been caused by just one problem, and it won’t be fixed with just one solution. Indeed, it will require the effort of an entire nation. Government and military leaders, parents, teachers and community role models will all have to engage with young people to help them understand the importance of military service and how their lives can be directly connected to that great purpose.

Recruiters lie about military life and overemphasize the positives aspects of military service to potential enlistees. In a study that aimed to assess military recruitment strategies, researchers questioned high school juniors and seniors in several low-income high schools in Southern Texas about their experiences with recruiters. They found that “[a]mong the more than 800 Texas high school students who told researchers Adam McGlynn and Jessica Lavariega Monforti that they had had contact with military recruiters, 86 percent said they were never told about the possible risks of military service" and reported that service “was never portrayed to them as dangerous” (Monforti and McGlynn 10). In fact, the portrayal of military service as being dangerous was reported the least amongst all other portrayals at only 13.5% (Monforti and McGlynn 10). Instead, it was reported that the educational opportunities (61.7%), career benefits (55%), and general “improving life chances” (46.1%) were the aspects of service most commonly portrayed (Monforti and McGlynn 10). Recruiters are portraying military service as overwhelmingly positive and rewarding instead of making students aware of some of the harsher realities, especially the implicit danger of being sent to war. This is further evident through the study’s finding that “half [of those surveyed] responded that no explanation of the difference between combat and non-combat positions was given,” and “two thirds of respondents were given no information about the number of expected deployments and their duration” (Monforti and McGlynn 10). In the words of McGlynn and Monforti, “High school students are being given rose colored glasses with which to view military service and are not being given accurate or honest information about what their potential service may entail” (10). Intentionally, recruiters are leading those who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds into blindly committing themselves to a life that will certainly turn out to be much harsher than they were told and that will not provide everything they were promised.

My best friend from kindergarten through 8th grade fiercely believed in peace and nonviolence. In class she would always denounce war as stupid and pointless, and while she was always patriotic, she was never very supportive of the military. We parted ways after middle school but reconnected at her high school graduation party. I was shocked to learn that she had joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), a program that offers to partially pay for students’ college education in exchange for at least an eight-year commitment to the military after graduation. I couldn’t believe that the person who I grew up knowing as clearly anti-war was now planning to major in Arabic in preparation for a career in the military. What could be so enticing that one would so drastically change their values or consider doing something they may have never considered before? I must have looked visibly shocked because she tried to reassure me by telling me not to worry as she wouldn’t be shooting anyone. Instead, she said this was her way of making something of herself, and she needed a way to pay for college. My friend’s story isn’t unique. The military attracts the underprivileged, specifically young people from low-income families, since it is presented as a mechanism for gaining privilege and as a way to solve all of their economic problems. The military is not only selling a false promise, but it is also using predatory recruitment strategies that disproportionately target low-income youth. Military recruitment is predatory on a federally mandated level. As Philip Ruben Nava, an attorney and an advocate of counter-military recruitment, pointed out, “buried deep within” President Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act was a “scarcely debated and unrelated provision” that established a new condition that public high schools must provide military recruiters access to the personal information of all enrolled students in order to receive federal funds (Nava 463). This not only granted the military unprecedented access to public high schoolers by way of effectively forcing public schools to give student information to military recruiters, but it also gave recruiters much more access to the high schoolers themselves. The provision required schools to give the military as much access to campuses as is given to any other recruiter, such as college admissions officers and potential employers, for example. Upon the signing of the No Child Left Behind Act, public high schools legally became de facto recruiting stations where high school students are free game for military recruiters. As of 2006, Nava explains that there were “approximately fourteen thousand frontline recruiters nationwide with a quota of two recruits per month, which translates to an annual recruiting goal of over three hundred thousand” (466). These recruiters have such unrestricted access to high school campuses that, in the 51 words of Seth Kershner, freelance writer and researcher, and Scott Harding, associate professor and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work, “many schools allow military recruiters to coach sports, serve as substitute teachers, chaperone school dances, and engage in other activities. In some cases, recruiters are such a regular presence in high schools that students and staff regard them as school employees” (Kershner and Harding). In some schools, the military has become as integrated as academics and other school-related activities. Aside from this ridiculously unrestricted and unquestioned access that the military is allowed in schools, there is a predatory function that this new access entails. Bush’s provision gave equal access to all public schools; however, those that are most visited are low-income schools. Military recruiters disproportionately visit low-income schools over higher income schools. An Education Week study, based on documents about recruiter activities provided by the U.S. Army in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, looked at military recruitment in low-income public schools compared to high-income public schools in Connecticut during the 2011-12 academic year. Based on just the activities of recruiters for one service branch, the Army, the study found a concerning trend. As stated in the report, “Take the example of two similarly sized high schools in two Hartford suburbs: Avon and Bloomfield. Army recruiters visited Avon High, where only 5 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, four times during the 2011-12 school year. Yet at Bloomfield High, where nearly half the students qualify for such assistance, recruiters made more than 10 times as many visits” (Kershner and Harding). The authors concluded that “The data suggests that schools with a high proportion of low-income students serve as a magnet for the military” (Kershner and Harding). Military recruiters are specifically targeting low-income youth, and this recruitment is working. Why wouldn’t it when, as the authors deduced, “some youths see far more khaki and camouflage than college brochures” (Kershner and Harding)? The Seattle Times reported in 2005 that “nearly half” of new recruits came “from lower-middle-class to poor households, according to new Pentagon data based on ZIP codes and census estimates of mean household income” (qtd. in Martin). The same data showed that nearly two-thirds of Army recruits in 2004 “came from counties in which median household income is below the U.S. median” (Martin). Seeing the military recruiters more often is not the only reason that low-income youth are swayed to enlist; it’s how the military presents itself and what it promises that really lures underprivileged youth to join. For the poor, the military is advertised as a way to gain privileges that the rich hold. Historically the poor have been disproportionately part of the military especially since the time of the Vietnam draft, which, as reported by former US Army doctor and author Ronald Glasser, “skewed conscription to the poor and disenfranchised, and away from those in positions of power, prestige, wealth, and privilege” (196). Glasser even compares the US military to the Roman Army where “not one general and… not one ground commander of any legion was from a family of wealth, privilege, or influence” and states that while “we may not be Rome 52 yet… it is beginning to seem that way to the units that we keep deploying again and again, as well as their families and loved ones, while all the rest of us go shopping” (193). But why don’t most upper-middle to upper class citizens feel a need to go to war? And, why do people like Vice President Dick Cheney, who received five deferments during the Vietnam War, feel like they have “other, more important things to do” than serve in the military (qtd. in Glasser 196)? The answer lies with privilege. The rich have privileges that the poor do not—namely, financial stability and the benefits that come with it. Being able to access and afford college, to obtain a respectable job as a college graduate, and to make something of themselves in civilian society is all accessible to the rich. They already have privilege. They don’t need to go to war to feel like they’ve gained it. But for the poor, the military advertises itself as the perfect opportunity to gain these privileges. Nick Martin, staff writer for the New Republic, asserts, “The paths that service members travel to the military are different, but there are base circumstances that often connect them: Being poor means a lack of options; being middleclass often means mounds of debt and instability. The military promises solutions to all of that” (Martin). At home, the military offers “fast-tracked citizenship, relief from the financial pressure of attending college [and] real employment prospects” (especially to those with parents who have lost jobs) in exchange for commitment to the military (Martin). Recruiters entice young, low-income students to join by saying that they will have the same opportunity to prove themselves and to make something of themselves as those who come from wealthier backgrounds. Recruiters also boast that the military is where the disadvantaged can overcome their economic lack of privilege and become American heroes. For low-income youth, becoming a soldier is seen as a way of leaping up the privilege hierarchy and feeling equal to those who are otherwise at a disproportionate advantage. They believe that they will gain the privilege they otherwise would not have by joining the military.