Trade

Tariff Man’s US-China trade war threatens to tank the economy

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While the nation is transfixed with the tragedy of two mass shootings over the weekend, and the failure of our white nationalist president and his enablers in Congress to address white terrorism and gun violence with any serious legislation, you may have missed that Trump’s trade wars took a turn for the worse on Monday. … Read more

Public policy is failing to address the economic disruption from rapidly advancing technology

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Back in December I posted about a New report on automation and AI replacing human labor.

The New York Times editorialized in February that No, Robots Aren’t Killing the American Dream. As evidence, the Times cites “the data indicate that today’s fear of robots is outpacing the actual advance of robots. If automation were rapidly accelerating, labor productivity and capital investment would also be surging as fewer workers and more technology did the work. But labor productivity and capital investment have actually decelerated in the 2000s.”

Sarah Bauerle Danzman, assistant professor of international studies at the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, and Jeff D. Colgan, the Richard Holbrooke associate professor of political science at the Watson Institute of Brown University, respond today at the Washington Post. Robots aren’t killing the American Dream. Neither is trade. This is the problem.

Unfortunately, [the Times‘] argument leads many people to conclude that globalization and liberalized international trade must be what’s hurting U.S. manufacturing. That’s the argument that Alan Tonelson, a campaign adviser to both Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), made in a more recent Times op-ed. According to Tonelson, the U.S. economy needs protectionist policies to revitalize it.

But they’re wrong. Worse, those arguments distract us from implementing the policies that could most help the American worker. Here’s why.

1) Automation is reducing employment in key industries.

The U.S. economy has steadily lost manufacturing jobs since the late 1970s. In 1970, manufacturing employed close to 25 percent of the workforce; but today employs only about 8.5 percent of working Americans. At the same time, the real median household income for people with high school diplomas but not college degrees fell 27.8 percent.

One key piece of evidence is that the United States shed 5 million manufacturing jobs from 2000-2014, even as output over the same period rose. That suggests that automation is the primary reason for the loss. If international trade were the chief culprit, we would also expect U.S. manufacturing output to decline.

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Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is released, the clock is ticking

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Stop-TPPThe biggest complaint people had against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) is that it was negotiated in secret among sovereign states and corporate trade groups. No one could know what was in the agreement until it was completed. Only after the agreement was completed could the American public have ninety (90) days to review the TPP agreement.

Well now is your chance, boys and girls. The White House released the full text of the TPP agreement on Thursday. Here is a link to the U.S. Trade Representative web site, TPP Full Text of 30 chapters and hundreds of pages of detailed and complex provisions.

This format is unwieldy.  The Washington Post‘s WONKBLOG put together this handy feature. We made President Obama’s big TPP trade deal searchable:

On Thursday morning, after months of questions about the contents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal negotiated and championed by President Obama, his administration released the agreement in its complex entirety.

The problem, though, is that it was released as a series of posts on Medium — and, worse, a collection of PDFs — making it hard to search for topics across the entire document.

Allow us.

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