A reader has just emailed me a link to a Washington Post story about North Carolina workers losing their jobs to foreign competition. Presumably he believes there’s a larger moral here, because his subject line is “Wrong again, Steve”. Here is a slightly edited version of my emailed response:
It would be dishonest for me or anyone else to defend free trade by pointing to its advantages while ignoring its disadvantages.
It is equally dishonest to oppose free trade by pointing to its disadvantages while ignoring its advantages.
What you need is a framework that accounts for all the advantages and disadvantages, together with enough of a logical structure to instill confidence that nothing imporant has been overlooked. Thats what economic theory supplies. You can find that theory in the economics textbooks. You can also find (I think) a pretty good summary of it in The Big Questions.
My correspondent wrote back with a pointer to a website with fifty years of what he calls “extrapolatable stats” that he thinks supply the necessary framework. This misses the point entirely. There is no way a hodgepodge of numbers can settle the question of whether something’s been left out. For that you need a theory.
