August 24, 2010
The NYT must be having a tough time getting material in the late days of summer. How else to explain an oped from Joseph Massey and Lee Sands that claims that imports from China, and apparently also imports from Japan, do not depend on their price. That’s right — all of you people who wasted time in economics classes where we taught that higher prices meant less demand, you can just forget everything you learned.
It turns out that if the good is imported from China or Japan, price just doesn’t matter. We would all gladly pay twice as much for the clothes, steel, computers etc. from China or Japan, rather than buy a domestically produced item, even if it is now cheaper. In fact, we would buy the item from China or Japan even if imports from other countries are now cheaper — price doesn’t matter!!!!!
The authors of this piece apparently do not believe in inflation either. They told readers that the trade deficit with Japan “hit an all-time high of $90 billion” in 2006, in spite of the fact that the yen had tripled relative to the dollar since the 70s. Those of us old-fashioned economics types would point out that the 2006 deficit was equal to about 0.6 percent of GDP. By contrast, in 1986, when the value of the yen was much lower relative to the dollar, the trade deficit with Japan was more than 1.2 percent of GDP.
For those who are concerned that the United States should be producing more here and creating jobs, Massey and Sands have the answer: we should follow the Obama administration’s National Export Initiative and focus “on the 99 percent of American companies that do business exclusively within the domestic market.”
That’s a great idea. I can’t wait until my corner gas station and neighborhood barbershop start exporting to China. Of course, these sorts of businesses are the vast majority of that 99 percent that focus exclusively on the domestic market. It will be interesting to see how the Obama administration gets them to shift their focus to exports.
Pieces like this can really make you hope for the end of summer.
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