Econ bloggers have really missed the point about Landsburg’s free trade screed. The estimable Dani notwithstanding, the issue isn’t ultimately ethics or even procedural fairness. The problem is that doctrinaire economists understand less about trade than the average person with no academic training in the subject.
Ordinary people in many parts of the world, and not just in the US, worry about trade because they are afraid that jobs lost to imports will not be counterbalanced by jobs gained through exports. They worry that there will be fewer economic opportunities for them and their children. They worry that their wages or working conditions will be pushed downward through competition with even more vulnerable, desperate workers in other countries. They are right to worry about these things. Such miseries are not destined to happen, but they cannot be ruled out either.
Except in standard economic models which begin with the assumption that increases in imports automatically call forth equally valued increases in exports. If trade balances on the margin we live in the happy world of comparative advantage, and it is indeed true, as Landsburg says, that “when American jobs are outsourced, Americans as a group are net winners.” But the assumption that trade balances at the margin is simply a modeling convenience, something that enables Landsburg to regale his students with blackboards full of elegant diagrams and equations. It is not grounded in real experience, and especially not the experience of the US economy since the 1970s.
You have to be very well trained in economics and have high-level skills to make such a brain-dead assumption and not even know you’ve made it. Then you don’t have to give serious consideration to counterarguments because, hey, why pay any attention to the fallacies of economic illiterates and mathphobes?
But let’s get specific. Here’s how Landsburg illustrates his claim that international trade makes us better off: “I doubt there’s a human being on earth who hasn’t benefited from the opportunity to trade freely with his neighbors. Imagine what your life would be like if you had to grow your own food, make your own clothes and rely on your grandmother’s home remedies for health care.”
Notice a problem here? Landsburg assumes that there is no difference between trade within an economy and international trade. (To be more precise, the only difference is that governments interfere more often with trade across national borders.) Worse, he accuses anyone who recognizes the difference of woolly thinking, based of course on his assumption that there is no difference.
This is why the French students complained about autistic economics.
For what it’s worth, my view is that we as a society ought to provide opportunities for as many of us as possible to have a satisfying livelihood. If a community is down and out we should step in and do what we can whether or not trade played a role in creating the problem. We should create rules for international trade that minimize downward pressure on wage, environmental and social standards and that limit dangerous imbalances. These ideas are fairly widespread among the general population, and if economists think really creatively they might just be able to rise to the same level.