Rob Atkinson Serves Up a False Narrative
Here’s a letter to National Review.
Editor:
Rob Atkinson blames Trump’s trade war on “globalists” (“Globalists Brought Trump’s Trade Revolution on Themselves,” April 9). “Globalists,” he asserts, have stubbornly ignored what he alleges are the many problems visited on Americans by free(r) trade over the past few decades. Chief among these alleged problems are “the massive U.S. trade deficit” and the “the loss of manufacturing.”
It’s good that Mr. Atkinson admits that we “globalists” – that is, those of us who believe that Americans should be free to spend their incomes in whatever peaceful ways they choose – offer arguments to calm fears of trade deficits as well as to rebut the claim that U.S. manufacturing has been hollowed out. But he feels no need, in his National Review piece, to bother to explain just why our arguments and evidence are mistaken. Instead, he directs your readers to a lengthy earlier piece of his that, he declares, rebuts the “globalists” claims.
So I read his earlier piece. I was eager to see what evidence he musters to challenge data showing that, after a half-century of annual U.S. trade deficits, America’s industrial capacity and output are today at all-time highs, while the narrower categories of manufacturing output and capacity, which hit their all-time highs at the beginning of the Great Recession (more than three decades after America last ran, in 1975, an annual trade surplus) are today just shy of their all-time highs – the real value of the capital stock in the U.S. is at an all-time high – worker productivity and real wages are at all-time highs – unemployment is low – value-added per-manufacturing worker is at an all-time high and the highest in the world – real per-capita GDP is at an all-time high – the real net worth of nonfinancial corporations is at an all-time high (and 417% higher than it was in 1975) – the real net worth of the average American household is at an all-time high (and 232% higher than it was in 1975).
Alas, though, I found in his earlier piece no such data. Amidst often embarrassingly bad economics, Mr. Atkinson serves up only anecdotes, tales of the travails of particular industries, and vague comparisons the likely meanings of which are irrelevant, such as “U.S. advanced industry output as a share of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) has significantly declined compared with other nations.” Apart from one lone, evidence-free assertion (“But presumably some of that [foreign] investment should have gone into manufacturing and advanced industries and grow it. But it declined instead”), he doesn’t even pretend to offer economy-wide evidence that alone can refute the “globalists’” argument that the international trade over the past half-century has indeed been a blessing for Americans.
He is long on assertion; short on relevant empirical evidence.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
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