October 16, 2011
Wall Street financier Steve Rattner gets just about everything wrong on globalization in a column in the NYT yesterday. He argues that the country will continue to lose manufacturing jobs, since we can’t compete with low paid workers in the developing world. He argues that instead we should focus on highly-paid service sectors like software, entertainment and finance. Remarkably, he never once mentions either the trade deficit or the value of the dollar.
The reason why the United States has lost so many manufacturing jobs to trade is because that has been an explicit goal of U.S. trade policy. Trade agreements like NAFTA were deliberately designed to place U.S. manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. In these circumstances the predicted and actual result is a loss of manufacturing jobs and a drop in wages for the jobs that remain.
This was not a pre-determined outcome. Trade agreements could have been structured to put doctors and lawyers and other highly paid professionals into competition with their counterparts in the developing world. There is no shortage of intelligent people in countries like Mexico, India, and China who would be happy to train to U.S. standards and learn English, if this would give them an opportunity to work as professionals in the United States.
However, we did not design our trade deals to facilitate the flow of foreign professionals into the United States, we designed them to put downward pressure on the wages of U.S. manufacturing workers. In this story the difference between autoworkers and doctors is that autoworkers were smart enough to know that they needed protection, but not powerful enough to get it. Doctors were too dumb to know that they needed protection, but powerful enough to get it.
The trade deficit and the value of the dollar are central parts of this story because the U.S. is currently running a trade deficit that is equal to 4 percent of GDP and would rise to closer to 6 percent of GDP if the economy were at full employment. This is not sustainable unless we think that countries will give us their products for nothing indefinitely. Since that is difficult to envision, the dollar will have to drop at some point (this is the adjustment mechanism for a trade deficit in a system of floating exchange rates) and we will then export more and import less.
While Rattner envisions that we will actually import even more manufactured goods and presumably pay for this with increased exports of services, any look at the data would show this view to be absurd. The volume of trade in these services is swamped by our trade deficit in manufactured goods. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that we will be any more able to overcome the enormous gap in wages for our service workers compared to the rest of the world than we could overcome our gap in manufacturing sector wages. The United States already faces a large deficit in computer software with India, which will almost certainly grow rapidly in the years ahead.
In short, Rattner has a completely unworkable answer to a problem that he totally misrepresents. It is inconceivable that the United States will not have a large manufacturing sector in the future with a considerably lower trade deficit in this area than it has today.
[Btw, Rattner is also very misleading in his use of statistics. He asserts that the wages of college graduates have risen by 4 percent in the last decade, after adjusting for inflation. This is misleading because it is entirely the result of wage increases for workers with post-graduate degrees. The wages of workers with college degrees but nothing beyond have not risen more than inflation over the decade.]
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