Tag: Trade

NAFTA and Other Trade Deals Have Not Gutted American Manufacturing—Period: Live at Vox.com

Posted on by Brad DeLong
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Live at Vox.com: NAFTA and Other Trade Deals Have Not Gutted American Manufacturing—Period: Politically speaking, there was no debate on United States international trade agreements in 2016: All politicians seeking to win a national election, or even to create a party-spanning political coalition, agree that our trade agreements are bad things…. From the left… Bernie Sanders…. From the right—I do not think it’s wrong but it’s not quite correct to call it “right,” at least not as Americans have hitherto understood what “right” is—but from somewhere… now-President Donald Trump…. From the center establishment… popular vote–winning (but Electoral College–losing)… Hillary Rodham Clinton…. “I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I oppose it now, I’ll oppose it after the election, and I’ll oppose it as president.…” The rhetoric of all three candidates resonates with the criticism of trade agreements that we heard way back when NAFTA was on the table as a proposal—not, as today, something to blame all our current economic woes on… Read MOAR at http://vox.com

This piece actually does only a third of what I wanted to do:

  1. Lay out how our trade agreements have not decimated manufacturing.
  2. Lay out what a properly-nurturing macroeconomic and industrial policy to increase the health of our important and valuable communities of engineering practice would be–but stress that such policies would not bring back mass manufacturing jobs.
  3. Account for the political mishegas.

But I only got through (1). And it is 8000 words. And I had to drop the extended notes and digressions that will go into the bibliographic essay…

Trumpism on Trade as a Wild Goose Chase

Posted on by Brad DeLong

In the United States 24% of nonfarm workers were manufacturing workers in 1971.

It’s 8.6% today.

Maybe it would be 9% if NAFTA has not been negotiated and if China had not joined the WTO, but maybe it would still be 8.6%–analysts disagree on trade expansion vs. trade diversion here.

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Maybe it would be 12% if the United States had followed Japan’s and Germany’s roads of being high-savings low-currency value countries focused on nurturing their communities of engineering excellence, rather than running the Reagan and Bush 43 deficits and combining that with a focus on financialization and a strong-dollar policy. I certainly think that would have been a better policy road for the United States. But it gets you only to 12% at most–not back to 24%.

The fall from 24% to 12% is the technological tide: increasing labor productivity in manufacturing, large but not infinitely elastic demand for manufactured goods.

Looking forward we can say that by 2060 manufacturing in the United States is likely to be 6% of production workers, in which case whatever you think of what the most important parts of the value chain are, tuning the location of manufacturing labor–the people watching the robots and swapping them out when they go bad and break–is unlikely to be an important part. The thing that had been a major driver of growth in employment worldwide for two centuries–since the cotton masters of Lancashire realized the first automatic spinning machines needed a lot of labor to watch and maintain them because they were fragile–will no longer be salient in our economies. Gone with it for EMs will be the road to development that used labor cost advantage to find a niche making basic manufactures and a national champion firm that could export into that niche, and then relying on learning by doing and osmotic technology transfer to carry you forward. For today’s EMs that are not already well along the road: Strait is the gait. Narrow is the way. Many are called, but few are chosen.

As Pascal Lamy said last week: “There is supposed to be an old Chinese proverb: ‘When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger’. Market capitalism is the moon. Globalization is the finger.”

The problems of market capitalism are broad and deep. They are not solved–they are not event addressed–by trade wars, by “renegotiating” NAFTA, by (falsely today) labeling China as a currency manipulator.

And Trump’s core supporters will not be happy if his trade policies sharply raise the prices of the goods they buy at Walmart.