March 29, 2018
After all, the economy generates 200,000 jobs a month on net (more than five million gross), so what difference could it make if one million doctors and dentists were displaced through trade. If the idea that losing one million very high paying jobs wouldn’t be any big deal seems strange to you, then you don’t really understand how economists talk about trade.
Of course, the actual column, by Donald Boudreaux, an economics professor at George Mason University, wasn’t talking about doctors and dentists. These occupations are highly protected. It is very difficult for foreign-trained professionals, even those in countries with comparable standards, to practice in the United States. Unlike steelworkers and textile workers, doctors and dentists have enough political power to get politicians to support their protection and to get the “free trade” media outlets to pretend they don’t notice.
But the best part of the story is the economists. Folks like Boudreaux would argue that doctors and dentists are just being silly and don’t understand trade if they think it could hurt them. This is the argument that he and other economists make about the massive loss of manufacturing jobs due to trade in the last two decades. The issue, of course, goes beyond even the job loss, since reduced demand leads to downward pressure on the wages of those who still have jobs. This has been a major source of increased inequality, as manufacturing has historically been a source of relatively high-paying jobs for workers without college degrees. (To be clear, I want free trade in doctors and dentists, but it would reduce their pay and our health care costs.)
Trade can also lead to a major shortfall in demand when we get large trade deficits, as was the case in the last decade. This was a major source of the famed “secular stagnation” that even many mainstream economists acknowledged during the Great Recession. If we had a trade deficit of 1.0 percent of GDP instead of the deficit of 3.0 percent of GDP we had during most of the recession and recovery (or 6.0 percent in 2005–2006), then the economy would have been much closer to full employment. But hey, that was no big deal, only silly people worry about trade.
And yes, free traders should be furious about government granted patent and copyright monopolies. Making them longer and stronger is a central goal of current trade deals. These are extremely costly forms of protectionism, equivalent to tariffs of many thousand percent.
But you don’t hear much about patents and copyrights as protectionism because Pfizer and Microsoft have lots of power. Also, the people who write about trade and control major news outlets are far more likely to have family and friends who benefit from these forms of protection than to be close to the steelworkers and textile workers who lost jobs and/or pay due to international competition.
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