I am for trade, but it has to be fair trade with provisions to protect labour and the environment.

In that case, we don’t disagree. I’m glad we settled this.

This in not true. Why won’t you admit this?

It is true. Today, the poor in the developing world primarily live in huge, overcrowded cities in contrast to, a hundred years, they lived in rural areas. In these “modern” cities, they are incredibly overcrowded, in slums with poor sanitation, disease, and intense crime. Their lives are much worse.

Most of you who are arguing with me are just making shit up.

It’s exploitation and robbery of the developing world, with a side-effect of destroying the industrial base and many socio-economic achievements in the developed world.

It isn’t “robbery” of the developing world. Wherever there are exporting industries, there are improving standards of living and capital inflows. Look at the history of China’s special development zones, India’s call centers, and of course the last forty years in Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere. And, yes, the working conditions are “exploitative” compared to developed world condition, but this is in contrast to the alternative with no jobs and, often, even more exploitative conditions.

This is a strawman, and you are deriving accusations of ignorance, insanity, and mendacity from it. Most people on this thread are in fact arguing not that trade is causing net wealth destruction…

Some are; it was those to whom I was responding. It’s not a strawman if someone has been actually arguing this position, and someone has.

The volume of trade (and U.S imports especially) has expanded dramatically since the 1970s, but we haven’t seen a broad distribution of income increases; instead, the ultra-rich have gotten richer, and everyone else has either stagnated or lost income. It may be the case that public policy could theoretically compensate, but it is not accurate to say that expanded trade is a universally beneficial phenomenon.

This is like saying that falling sixty feet isn’t a universally injurious phenomenon because stuntmen in Hollywood do it frequently. All other things equal, trade is a universally beneficial phenomenon.

It’s misleading to say that public policy might compensate for the problems you are associating with trade. They would compensate. But more to the point, the status quo that such changes would change is the real problem. Europeans have more equally enjoyed the benefits of trade because their economic policy isn’t as skewed toward benefiting the wealthy, and they have a much more expansive safety net, financed by taxation on the wealthy and, for example, corporations that benefit from trade.

Your argument is like a dissident in a corrupt country protesting against the existence of prisons instead of protesting against the corruption. The anti-trade argument is blinkered and upside-down. That international trade is allowed to cause injustice is the problem, not that international trade is allowed to exist.

Or, to use a more generous analogy, it’s as if you were the victim of corrupt officials finding a new way to screw you by, for example, building new schools but vastly inflating construction costs and pocketing the difference, and you are protesting this new method of screwing you while tacitly accepting the culture of corruption which makes it possible. Furthermore, in protesting school construction directly, you’re directly hurting the interests of those most benefiting from them, the students.

As should be very clear from every comment I’ve made here, from the first to the last, I’m very sympathetic to the concerns of the developed world’s working class who lose jobs because of trade. I understand and agree with your protests against this injustice. The difference is that I don’t feel constrained to accept the culture of corruption that makes these things possible and, instead, single out one relatively small, means of alleviating them…a small solution which, I believe, has extreme collateral costs to those least able to endure them.

There is absolutely no reason why the problems associated with trade on the developed world side cannot be easily and completely solved with public policy. Public policy which progressives should be working for, anyway.

The much more intractable problems are those associated with trade on the developing world side. Yes, in the long term the developing world benefits enormously from trade. Yes, many or most of those with new jobs are much better off than they would be without them. Nevertheless, it’s often the case that their working conditions are far worse than that of developed world workers, and are very exploitative from our point of view. Furthermore, developing world nations have universally poor or non-existent environmental protections—which decreases manufacturing costs—and increased manufacturing comes with greatly increased environmental cost…and it’s often the most poor who shoulder the worst of it.

Solving the pollution problem is difficult because environmental protection is very economically costly and developing worlds probably cannot—they, themselves claim they simply can’t—shoulder. And they also point out to us that the developing world developed its economies without having to shoulder these costs. Frankly, I think that the developed world should be providing large amounts of aid which directly funds environmental protection.

The alternative, limiting trade, leaves us with Henri’s pollyanna-ish vision of developing world economies building factories and whatnot for themselves. But, of course, in that vision of the future, it would be a long time before they would implement serious environmental protections. So it’s not as if restricting trade solves that problem. Arguably, with aid and other means, with the lever of increasing trade, the developing world can both encourage and partly fund environmental protections in the developing world that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

As for the working conditions and human rights problem, it is similar in that as these economies would develop in the lack of trade, there’s absolutely no reason to think these same human rights problems wouldn’t exist. With trade, the developing world has a lever with which to influence the developing world in this regard. I think it’s unrealistic and counter-productive to expect working conditions to be close to those of the developed world, but I certainly think that through various means we could essentially insist on better conditions than that they otherwise would be. But turning our backs to them, saying we won’t trade with them and they’re on their own, is the most irresponsible of all courses of action.

Steven, you’re skeptical about whether all these various problems can be solved as I claim they can. That’s fair. I disagree, but it’s a valid argument. Mitchell, Henri, and others are more nearly (or entirely) taking the position that all the problems we’ve discussed are somehow inherent to trade. Some have argued that trade destroys rather than creates wealth, contrary to both theory and empirical fact. They have also claimed various things which are also contrary to fact, such as asserting the the developing world’s poor are not living in extremely horrific conditions, in both the geographical and historical contexts. If we cannot agree on simple matters of fact, there’s no basis for discourse. I think it’s very revealing that these folks have assumed, completely contrary to all indications of my comments, that I’m opposed to taxing the wealthy, that I’m a Republican, etc. It’s sort of like if a small government libertarian-oriented conservative were arguing for leaglization of marijuana and some other conservatives reacted with “drugs ARE BAD” and “of course you’re some unemployed, drug-addled hippie who hates the police”. It’s ideological blindness and prejudice. There’s no way to have reasonable discourse with people like that. You agree with them or you’re both wrong and evil. It’s tiresome.

At any rate, it’s not as if I’m the only progressive who favors trade. It’s clear that the author of this post feels the same. Though a distinct minority, there are progressives who favor trade but don’t favor the interests of big-business or the wealthy. Like Lane—and Steven and Henri and Mitchell and Barry and everyone else here—I strongly oppose the increasing inequality in the US. This is the real problem here, not trade. That the segment of the US economy which has most grown in the last forty years, services, is largely not-unionized, poorly paid, has low job security, and low benefits—that’s the problem, not trade. That the US has some of the worst unemployment benefits in the developed world—that’s the problem, not trade. That the US has the highest education costs with little vocational education—that’s the problem, not trade. That the US is the most economically unjust nation among the large, modern economies—that’s the problem, not trade. I don’t understand why progressives are obsessed with trade when the elephant in the room is public policy which tolerates, in general, the problems that trade exacerbates.

This is a strawman, and you are deriving accusations of ignorance, insanity, and mendacity from it. Most people on this thread are in fact arguing not that trade is causing net wealth destruction, but that the benefits and losses of trade are not equally distributed – the working class is economically losing, even as the middle and upper classes benefit; it might be a net benefit, but that doesn’t mean everyone gets a net benefit.

The volume of trade (and U.S imports especially) has expanded dramatically since the 1970s, but we haven’t seen a broad distribution of income increases; instead, the ultra-rich have gotten richer, and everyone else has either stagnated or lost income. It may be the case that public policy could theoretically compensate, but it is not accurate to say that expanded trade is a universally beneficial phenomenon.

Nope. Serious logorrhea.

Once again, the point I am making is that the phenomenon you describe in moralistic terms as “reparations-based moral imperative” is nothing of the sort. It’s exploitation and robbery of the developing world, with a side-effect of destroying the industrial base and many socio-economic achievements in the developed world.

Yes, it’s true, another (and certainly unintended) side-effect is a minor improvement in the standard of living in poor countries (some of them). But if you want to turn this accidental phenomenon into the centerpiece of your argument, then you could as well argue (and in moral terms also) for the transatlantic slave trade (trade! can’t be bad!), as it’s quite possible that for many of the slaves a North American cotton plantation was a standard-of-living improvement over their war-ridden homeland.

I bet the average Chinese worker (who is likely to be a factory worker) doesn’t consume anything produced outside of China. And the average American worker (who is likely to be a salesperson of some sort) doesn’t exactly consume a lot of stuff produced outside of China either. Some trade. The moral high ground, indeed.

Stop asking these sorts of questions and just making up answers that satisfy obviously entirely unexamined moral predispositions. Many of the questions you’ve asked can be reasoned out from a few, obvious assumptions. Others can be answered by Googling. And if you know global economic history of the last eighty years, you already know that in the long term trade rapidly generates wealth in the developing world and leads to better labor conditions and stronger environmental protection, huge reductions in the numbers of the starving poor, and more modest but significant gains in the developed world. Japan didn’t get wealthy by manufacturing and selling transistor radios and cars to themselves. Japan is a net exporter, but it has always imported to make up gaps in its economy, both with regard to resources and with regard to labor. South Korea is a much more recent example. And China and India even more recent. Actually look at the numbers for trade, GDP, and median household income for these countries during the relevant periods. Look at the corresponding numbers for countries that have grown or remained protectionist. Look at these numbers for Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Poland during EU economic integration. Imagine if England ended trade with the rest of the UK and Europe and elsewhere, or if the Netherlands did the same sort of thing, or Belgium. Or Canada. Or Quebec. In fact, Quebec of the 70s and 80s is a good example of something like this actually happening, but on a limited, though devastating, scale.

Your questions about trade are as uninformed, your answers as driven by prejudicial assumptions, as rightwing arguments that decreased taxation increases tax revenue or that stimulus spending can’t work because one person’s saving is another person’s spending, and vice-versa. These are not hugely complicated matters; those who assert the factually untrue answers are doing so because of an extraordinarily deep ideologically-driven selective blindness or delusion.

For example, it is utterly irrational to assert that tax cuts “always” produce revenue increases. Yet conservatives claim this everyday. If it were true, then eliminating taxation would produce infinite tax revenue. And you could look at historical data and see that past tax cuts have produced revenue increases (they haven’t) and past tax hikes have produced revenue decreases (they haven’t). This is not a difficult question to answer correctly, both theoretically and empirically. Nevertheless, many conservatives continually assert something economically equivalent to “the Earth is flat”.

Similarly, conservatives, even some economists (the Chicago school) have been asserting that stimulus cannot work because it works out to be essentially an accounting identity. Well, you only have to think about economic activity from first principles for a short while before you come up with the idea of the velocity of money. It’s theoretically inevitable. Stimulus spending is not essentially an accounting identity that merely moves money from one column to another. Furthermore, on this point anyway, the empirical evidence is clear. It’s a form of either selective insanity or egregious ignorance for, especially, trained economists to assert the conservative argument. And it’s not difficult for the non-economist to work it out and look it up, either.

And just so with trade. People like you and other here assert that trade reduces rather than increases wealth via the commonsensical notion of “race to the bottom”. But you can figure out from first principles that this isn’t the case if you think about it for awhile. I understood many of the benefits of trade (but not comparative advantage) long before I ever read a single authoritative word asserting it. I just figured it out. It’s not hard. And the empirical data is ubiquitous available proving that trade increases wealth. It’s not an open question, either theoretically or empirically. Yes, in the complex real world, there are exceptions to the rule and certainly in the short term all sorts of perverse and unjust things can, and do, occur. But the left-wing anti-globalist arguments against trade asserting wealth destruction are just as flat-earthist as the two conservative economic arguments I presented before it. You can’t be going around asserting these things confidently without being either ignorant or deluded; and one doesn’t go around confidently asserting these things unless one has a strong partisan allegiance to a certain variety of ideology that requires the answer to these questions be a certain way, regardless of truth. Yeah, the American right in recent years has made this into an art form, creating their own alternate realities, sound reasoning and empirical evidence be damned. Global warming, evolution, Iraqi WMDs, torture, taxation and revenue, recession economics and stimulus spending, FEMA re-education camps, Obama’s citizenship, Democratic reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, Supertrains from LA to Las Vegas, Government panels to control physicians’ choices of treatment, executive orders disallowing any religious activities at any facility that has received federal funding…the list goes on and on and on. These people just create a false reality out of whole cloth. They “know” it. Everyone one they know also “knows” these things are true. It’s only propagandists who claim otherwise.

Arguments of this nature are much more rare on the left. But the broad claims asserting that trade destroys rather than creates wealth are one of the few examples. If you are even remotely interested in the truth, you actually have to work at believing this lie. You’ve no less a responsibility to intellectual integrity and truth in this matter than are conservatives who claim that the financial crisis was caused by Feddie and Fanny being forced to give poor people bad loans. The truth is easily comprehensible and attainable.

Anyway, I think I’ve said all that I can say on this subject.

Eat much? Watch TV, listen to music? Got computer? Got car or bus or train, water, electricity? Look at some of the later posts. The U.S. isn’t as import-dependent as many, and not all of our exports travel in containers.

It’s hard to see how to get from here to a world remolded to our hearts’ desire, but globalization is the path we’re already taking, so we ought to proceed willingly, with our eyes wide open.

The developed countries seem to be doing pretty well so far, even if there is a larger volume of finished goods in the incoming than the outgoing freighters. We’re better off reducing inequality at home than isolating ourselves from the rest of the world.