July 20, 2014
Suppose a mob boss has his thugs go around and shake down a bunch of small business people. Imagine he then gives a portion of the haul to poor children. When the business people complain, the mobster then tells them they are being greedy, after all don’t they care about the poor children?
This is esentially the argument that Tyler Cowen gives us in the NYT this morning. There is little doubt that hundreds of millions of people in developing countries like China and India have benefited from the growth in the world economy over the last three decades. To some extent their gains have come from displacing workers in rich countries, especially the United States. However we did not have to structure the world economy this way.
People in developing countries could also have experienced enormous gains if their doctors and other highly educated professionals were allowed to compete on an even footing with their counterparts in the United States and other rich countries. Similarly, there would be enormous gains from allowing India’s generic drug industry to sell low cost drugs like generic Sovaldi in the United States and elsewhere. And, we all would benefit from taxing the financial industry like other sectors of the economy and ending too big to fail subsidies for Wall Street banks. Furthermore, in a period of secular stagnation like the present, everyone could benefit from just handing large amounts of cash to the world’s poor, since it would generate demand.
Just because the world’s poor benefited at the expense of the middle class in rich countries does not mean it had to be this way. We could help poor children without having a mobster shake down small businesses to finance his charitable contributions.
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