Trade, Jobs, and Political and Economic Disruption

Two podcasts I listen to often include EconTalk with Russ Roberts, and Masters in Business, with Barry Ritholtz. No one could have called the election based on these episodes, and none of the guests  made any projections about it specifically, but each of the these guests below discuss issues that could have been informative about what's been going on in the minds of the electorate. And why non-conventional candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump had so much appeal. They also question conventional wisdom about the distributional effects of comparative advantage and free trade.

In a past podcast, just over a year ago, Gary Shilling offers some interesting thoughts on trade:(paraphrasing not quoting).

Basically globalization has led to income polarization, with 8 years of zero to no real income growth for a segment of the population and this frustration has been expressed politically through Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. With regard to Trump, when you strip away the blustering, he may actually be more like an old school centrist politician. When you take the impacts of globalization, the recession, and the slow recovery, conventional politicians don't know how to react. 

I think this is the kind of environment in which it was possible for the 'blue wall' on the electoral map to crumble.

More recently, Aswath Damodaran touches on this: (again paraphrasing)

Brexit should be a warning sign that we've lost perspective. In the aggregate, trade and globalization can be good for the country, but the 55 year old steel worker in Pennsylvania gets little consolation out of the fact that free trade is going to create more world wealth when he says where the heck am I going to get my paycheck next month. 

"We are paying a price for almost deliberate blindness in the financial capitals of the world to the kind of costs that are being created sometimes."

Again this echoes Shilling above. In his paper, "The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade", David Autor takes a very detailed look at these issues and investigates them empirically. David was guest this past year on EconTalk with Russ Roberts. Some highlights:

• one of the standard arguments for free trade and globalization is that it makes the pie bigger, and sometimes the story sounds like some people get larger slices than others, but everyone gets a bigger slice, so on the net everyone is better off. 
• Another way of thinking about this is that trade increases aggregate wealth, and this increase more than offsets the losses for those that are displaced in the labor force.
• Autor points out that yes, gains can offset losses, but the gains are going to different people
• Example: sure consumers gain by saving 5 cents on the broom they buy at Wal-Mart, and if you add up all of those nickels its more than the total losses for people whose lives are ruined.
• But this is little consolation to those whose lives are ruined, it takes years to find alternative opportunities and often at a fraction of the salary they earned before
• In the past, maybe these distributional effects were of less concern because trade largely reflected differences in comparative advantage across different types of manufacturing- for example maybe we would lose jobs manufacturing electronics but make up for it with other jobs building tractors-And balanced trade resulted
• In the past, skillsets were much more congruent across different industries with changing comparative advantages- i.e. it was not extremely difficult to move from manufacturing one good to another if your former job was displaced by trade
• More recently, with globalization, things changed. Instead of reallocating across sectors of manufacturing, countries like China just supplanted manufacturing on a much larger scale. And instead of paying for imports with different exports for which we had a comparative advantage we ran trade deficits (of course with surpluses in capital accounts)
• However, the kinds of investments being made with the new wealth created by global trade are in areas and sectors where skills are not congruent for many workers supplanted by the trade outcomes
• Ultimately we have experienced a sharp decline in demand for labor that has been contractionary

Hence this is the 'stagnation' in real wage growth that so many have been talking about. Could it also be why conventional stimulus and monetary policy has not really moved the needle in terms of economic growth? Is this because our comparative advantage is in services, technology, marketing, research, and engineering and these sectors are not soaking up the excess labor freed up when manufacturers shut down or relocate overseas?

The conventional wisdom has always been with trade, labor and resources that were once tied up in lower valued uses are reallocated to higher valued uses creating more wealth making everyone better off. But Autor is arguing that this just isn't happening or is taking too long. Maybe its the next generation or two that reaps the rewards. But not necessarily. If you've got a good gig and lose it, you may end up living in an area with bad schools, or may not have the resources to provide your children or the next generation with the education and training required to take advantage of the new economy jobs where the gains more than offset the losses from globalization. 

This also makes me wonder...supply side policies designed to promote economic growth and  aggregate wealth (under the terrible misnomer 'trickle down economics' ) might not work quite as well as they used to either given the structural environment depicted by Autor in his paper. But that probably goes the same for fiscal stimulus related to infrastructure. It might boost those sectors related to construction, but the traditional multiplier working its way through manufacturing and labor demand just likely won't work the way the Keynesians believed it would 30 years ago. 

So what is the answer? Surely a world with trade is in aggregate better than one without. Does this mean renegotiating NAFTA? Should we put the brakes on future globalization and phase in tariffs and trade restrictions and slowly fade them out so that sectors can readjust over a few generations? (things Donald Trump may seem in favor of) Or more aggressive and progressive policies called for  to provide a soft landing for those future displaced?  Some combination?  This gets to more spending on a number of programs, healthcare, and education. (things Hillary Clinton would have supported)

I'm not sure what the answer is after considering the incentive effects and the impacts for long term economic growth and development. Not to mention government spending. However, it was the lack of policy response to these questions that made this past election what it was. 

References:

"The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade," by David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, January 2016.