Dani Rodrik's weblog: Deconstructing economists' take on free trade
Citation :
Once in a while you come across a paper that makes you nod in agreement and go "yes!" with every sentence you read. Robert Driskill's Deconstructing the Argument for Free Trade is such a paper. Driskill is a distinguished economist who knows the theory of comparative advantage as well as anyone else. And his argument is not against trade per se, but about the manner in which economists present their arguments in public and in their textbooks. His main argument is that the standard renditions
gloss over a key issue the resolution of which is anything but obvious: What does it mean for a change in economic circumstances to be "good for the nation as a whole", even when some members of that nation are hurt by the change?
In other words, instead of sticking to what they are good at--analyzing trade-offs--economists typically engage in amateur normative political theorizing about what is good for society.
