What seems most striking is that the
angry working class — dismissed so often as myopic, unable to understand
the economic trade-offs presented by trade
— appears to have understood what the experts are only belatedly finding to be
true: The benefits from trade to the American economy may not always justify its
costs……
(Full text at link below)
Perhaps most important, the new
evidence from trade suggests American policy makers cannot continue to impose
all the pain on the nation’s blue-collar workers if they are not going to
provide a stronger safety net.
That
might have been justified if the distributional costs of trade were indeed
small and short-lived. But now that we know they are big and persistent, it
looks unconscionable.
