A Tense Problem

Mark Thoma begins with a hilarious typo, but eventually gets to the Quote of the Decade (if not century) from Alan Blinder:

If we economists stubbornly insist on chanting ‘free trade is good for you’ to people who know that it is not, we will quickly become irrelevant to the public debate.

As Rusty can (and will, at length) tell you, the thing that is wrong with that sentence is the tense. We have had free trade agreements for decades, China has had MFN status since the 1990s, and permanently since 2000. The pieces of the former Soviet Union, including the current oligarchy that is called Russia, have had that status since 1992. NAFTA, including its abhorrent Chapter 11, has been in force since 1994.

There has been a generation that has lived under “free trade.” While an economist might successfully argue that the overall social benefit has been great—millions of Chinese parents become estranged from their children to make a better life, as it were—the retraining, redevelopment and all of the other assumptions economists make about ameliorating the transition to a new economy have been eschewed.

The example of Boeing (h/t Felix) bodes large: the valuable work was outsourced, the menial work was kept (or spun off into bankruptcy), and the new “higher-value” jobs and opportunities that were expected by idiots economists never materialized, replaced instead by growing income inequality and the retraining money lined the pockets of the CEOs who produced (to borrow a phrase used by the brilliant McGarrysGhost on Twitter) “failure masquerading as vision.”

And any microeconomist worth his paycheck can tell you that increasing inequality leads to suboptimal production.

Blinder is wrong in only one thing: the tense he uses indicates that the results are still, somehow, in doubt. The ability of Chinese peasants to eat a bit more is nice, but the externalities—poisoned toothpaste, dog food,* defective tires—make it rather impossible to claim that the “advantages of free trade” have trickled down in any way except as a ureotelic (mp3 link).**

The first thing we were told by our veterinarian about the new puppy is that we need to make certain that any food she eats was made in either Canada or the United States. Fortunately, pet food—unlike its human equivalent—is required to be labeled with origin information.

**You better believe I’m doing The Snoopy Dance on having discovered this site, which saves me from trying to find a way to transfer my old cassette to a usable format. But that’s fodder for Skippy, not here.