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Article Artículo

Why Do the NYT and Economists Feel the Need to Lie to Push Trade Agreements?

The NYT is inadvertently doing a good job convincing people that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a really bad deal. (I'm picking on the TPP because that is the trade deal currently on the agenda.) The reason that the NYT is making readers believe that the TPP is a really bad deal is that it is obviously lying to push the case for trade — and you don't have to lie if you have a real case.

The outright lie in this case is its effort to trivialize the job loss due to trade in the United States. Its editorial, titled "the rage for trade," (okay, I misread it, only the people against trade "rage") told readers:

"Many economists believe that automation has had a much bigger impact. They point out that other industrialized countries like Germany and Japan have also lost manufacturing jobs even though they, unlike the United States, export more than they import. Between 1990 and 2014, the number of manufacturing jobs fell by 34 percent in Japan, 31 percent in the United States and 25 percent in Germany, according to an April report by the Congressional Research Service."

See, everyone is losing jobs in manufacturing, only those racist Trump backers would see it as an issue with trade.

Now let's imagine that the folks at the NYT editorial board are capable of tying their own shoes. Then they would know that the labor force in the United States is growing much more rapidly than the labor force in Japan and Germany. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. labor force was more than 25 percent larger in 2014 than in 1990. According to data from the OECD, Japan's labor force was about 3 percent larger in 2014. Germany's labor force was about 5.0 percent larger.

Other things equal, because of the much more rapid growth in the labor force, we would expect much more rapid growth (or smaller decline) in the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States. The fact we actually lost a larger share of our manufacturing jobs than Germany and almost as large a share as Japan, means that manufacturing fell far more rapidly as a share of total employment in the United States than in these other countries.

Economists who "point out that other industrialized countries like Germany and Japan have also lost manufacturing jobs" understand this basic arithmetic point, as presumably do the editorial writers at the NYT. The only reason to ignore it, and imply that the decline in manufacturing in the three countries has been comparable, and has nothing to do with trade, is to deceive readers.

CEPR / August 07, 2016

Article Artículo

Globalization and Trade

The Washington Post-President Obama TPP-Challenge

It's hard to resist a good challenge and the Washington Post gave us one this morning in an editorial pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The editorial criticized TPP opponents and praised President Obama for continuing to push the deal. It tells readers:

"Mr. Obama refused to back down on the merits of the issues, noting that other countries, not the United States, would do most of the market-opening under the TPP and challenging opponents to explain how 'existing trading rules are better for issues like labor rights and environmental rights than they would be if we got TPP passed.'"

Okay, here's how we are better off with existing trade rules than the largely unenforceable provisions on labor and environmental standards in the TPP.

1) The TPP creates an extra-judicial process (investor-state dispute settlement [ISDS] tribunals) whereby foreign investors can sue governments for imposing environmental, health and safety, and even labor regulations. Under the TPP, these tribunals are supposed to follow the far-right wing doctrine of compensating for regulatory takings. This means, for example, that if a state or county restricts fracking for environmental reasons, they would have to compensate a foreign company for profits that it lost as a result of not being allowed to frack or the additional expense resulting from the standards imposed. The ISDS tribunals are not bound by precedent, nor are their decisions subject to appeal.

2) The TPP imposes stronger and longer patent and copyright protection. These protectionist measures are likely to do far more to raise barriers to trade (patent and copyright monopolies are interventions in the free market, even if the Washington Post likes them) than the other measures in the TPP do to reduce them. In addition to the enormous economic distortions associated with barriers that are often equivalent to tariffs of 1000 percent or even 10,000 percent (e.g. raising the price of a patented drug to 100 times the generic price), TPP rules may make it more difficult for millions of people to get essential medicines.

CEPR / August 04, 2016

Article Artículo

Thomas Friedman Gives Hillary Clinton Economic Advice, Gets Confused

Many folks remember Thomas Friedman as the person who argued that Germany would insist that Greeks work less as a condition of getting new loans. They may also remember him as the person who doesn't know that in a free market, when an item is in short supply, the price is supposed to rise. This is why he can continually complains about shortages of skilled labor even though the pay of skilled workers is not rising.

Economics may not be Friedman's strong suit, but he is back at it again today complaining that Hillary Clinton doesn't have an economic growth strategy. He notes that she is promoting infrastructure investment, both as a way to generate demand and also provide a basis for further growth, but then argues that her pledge to give small businesses easier access to credit will come up short:

"To do that, though, would run smack into the anti-bank sentiment of the Democratic Party, since small community banks provide about half the loans to small businesses, and it is precisely those banks that have been most choked by the post-2008 regulations. We need to prevent recklessness, not risk-taking."

Okay, so Thomas Friedman is arguing that the big problem facing small businesses is that they can't get credit, and the main reason for that is those nasty Dodd-Frank regulations that are handcuffing community bankers. That's an interesting argument. Let's see if that fits what the small businesses themselves say.

The National Federal of Independent Businesses has been surveying small businesses for more than thirty years. Here's the latest statement on credit conditions from its June report:

CEPR / August 03, 2016