IN A country in which one adult in five refuses to accept the Darwinian theory of evolution, the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage was never going to be in with much of a chance.

Few Lloyd’s List readers will question the Econ 101 proposition that countries maximise benefit from trade when they specialise in what they produce most efficiently.

Indeed, for those who derive their livelihood from shipping, the concept is tantamount to moral justification.

What we do contributes to common prosperity, alleviating poverty in developing countries in emerging economies that produce raw materials and manufactured goods while bringing down consumer prices in richer countries.

Or so we tell ourselves. But such two-century old received wisdom is sadly counterintuitive, and something of a hard sell in the Other America.

For residents of the housing projects of inner-city Detroit, the trailer parks of Texas and the shacks of rural Appalachia, the giant sucking sound of jobs crossing the borders to Mexico and China has been only too audible since the Clinton years.

Little wonder that Donald Trump’s call to Make America Great Again has this week found renewed resonance with precisely this layer of the electorate.

Limousine liberals and country club Republicans alike — both lambasted by the MAGA movement as detached coastal elites — usually affect genteel aversion to Trump’s social policies.

The prospect of being the biggest beneficiaries of coming tax cuts for the wealthy will presumably suffice to buy their silence.

And if the reaction of financial markets is anything to go by, they are not expecting the next four years to be an era of untrammelled suffering.

News of Trump’s victory saw the dollar clock up its largest rise in a single day for two years. The Dow gained 1,300 points on Wednesday morning on the logic that deregulation will boost returns on equities.

Higher government borrowing is expected to lower bond prices. But even here, the potential hit is unlikely to be catastrophic.

As we have reported over the past few days, the picture for shipping and marine insurance is more mixed.

The commitment to tariffs of 60% or even 100% on imports from China, and 20% on goods from the rest of the world, cannot but prove severely detrimental to container carriers.

The real fear must be that other countries will feel politically compelled to respond with retaliatory tariffs, in a slow motion rerun of the 1930s. You may have family memories of how that one worked out.

That would stand to kill growth in world trade stone dead; indeed, it could even send it into reverse. All that, without the desired impact of bringing manufacturing employment back to Gary, Indiana.

The assumption is that the new administration will give some notice of the changes. That could entail a short-term sugar rush, as lines frontload shipments to move as many boxes as possible into the US before tariffs kick in.

Tankers may fare better. Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” permissive exploration policy is just one aspect of his astonishing refusal to accept the scientific consensus around anthropogenic climate change, which will see the US pull out of the Paris agreement.

But the upside, if you want to call it that, is that it will boost oil and gas output in a country that is already a net energy exporter.

Meanwhile, tighter sanctions on Iran would be an implicit boost to Saudi Arabia and potentially positive for VLCC rates.

Conversely, most analysts are working on the assumption that sanctions on Russia will be loosened, in line with Trump’s boast that he will settle the Russia-Ukraine conflict on his first day in office.

This raises the prospect of Washington sanctions targeting the Kremlin materially diverging from those imposed by the EU and UK, which will probably continue to back Kyiv.

That outcome would be ghastly for marine insurers, as Gard chief executive Rolf Thore Roppestad noted in an interview on Thursday. Indeed, he went so far as to say it would make compliance impossible.

P&I clubs, by the way, are conservatively invested and typically long on T-bills. Falling bond values will damage their balance sheets, on which their S&P ratings depend, even as the increased yields will boost investment income.

There is a lot more that can be said about the Trump 2.0 from a wider perspective, not least the implications for women’s reproductive rights, religious toleration, and the standing of immigrants and the LGBT community.

While those issues are outside our direct purview, we certainly share such concerns.

But to bowdlerise a famous US political aphorism, the people have spoken, the so-and-sos.

There was no reason to think for a moment that America’s heartland would give the fortunes of shipping even a second thought last Tuesday. And guess what? It didn’t.