Contrary to what you read in the paper, trade really did cost millions of manufacturing jobs in the 00s substack.com/home/post/p-...
I had a couple of people ask me what I thought of this NYT piece on trade and manufacturing from last week.
I wanted to test the analogy of short people leaving the room. Maybe I didn't grab the appropriate metrics, but productivity improvements did seem to explain at least some of the employment reductions, at least in durables. (The GDP series only go back to 2005) fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1LarL
China being let into the WTO without reforms was a bigger deal than NAFTA and more negative for the U.S.
NAFTA was never about free trade, it was about maximum corporate profits, minimal cost and Shareholder ROI.
Roger Smith (GM) and Ronald Reagan (R) started this mess in the 80âs.
Now however, people are severely addicted to cheap prices, prior to free trade, a microwave or VCR was $1,000.
I remember 'liberal' pro-outsourcing economists & commentators at the time saying don't worry, we just need social programs to help that 100% would never happen. After, they said any damage to US working people was worth it to develop China--but they weren't saying that openly & upfront at the time.
NAFTA was always going to be a disaster for manufacturing.
Downloading the BLS data, it's clear that no GOP president covered by the data series window has increased manufacturing employment over their tenure. That means that the last likely GOP president to add manufacturing employment was Calvin Coolidge.
I guess manufacturing jobs are not the only kinds of jobs. Do you know the net effect of trade on jobs?
How has the median income changed during that time (taking inflation into account)? Since there has been significant job growth, I assume that growth / trade in services (financial, software) has replaced that manufacturing loss. Is that bad?
My favorite thing from the 2016 primary campaign was a thing titled
"Watch a room full of blue collar Democrats become Bernie and Trump voters as their jobs are outsourced to Mexico"
I fear what that caption reads as white collar workers lose their jobs to AI.
"trade"-->"UNFAIR trade" With ceos & corps pocketing illicit gains thru tax avoidance (euphemism for what is actually tax evasion) No better example than big pharma
