Difference between revisions of "What is wrong (and right) in economics?/standard"

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| text = Similarly, when I questioned some of the excessive claims on the benefits of globalization I was simply reminding the profession what economics teaches. Take for example the relationship between the gains from trade and the distributive implications of trade. To this day, there is a tendency in the profession to overstate the first while minimizing the second. This makes globalization look a lot better: it’s all net gains and very little distributional costs. Yet look at the basic models of trade theory and comparative advantage we teach in the classroom and you can see that the net gains and the magnitudes of redistribution are directly linked in most of these models. The larger the net gains, the larger the redistribution. After all, the gains in productive efficiency derive from structural change, which is a process that inherently creates gainers (expanding sectors and the factors employed therein) and losers (contracting sectors and the factors employed therein). It is nonsensical to argue that the gains are large while the amount of redistribution is small – at least in the context of the standard models. Moreover, as trade becomes freer, the ratio of redistribution to net gains rises. Ultimately, trying to reap the last few dollars of efficiency gain comes at the “cost” of significant redistribution of income. Again, standard economics.
 
| text = Similarly, when I questioned some of the excessive claims on the benefits of globalization I was simply reminding the profession what economics teaches. Take for example the relationship between the gains from trade and the distributive implications of trade. To this day, there is a tendency in the profession to overstate the first while minimizing the second. This makes globalization look a lot better: it’s all net gains and very little distributional costs. Yet look at the basic models of trade theory and comparative advantage we teach in the classroom and you can see that the net gains and the magnitudes of redistribution are directly linked in most of these models. The larger the net gains, the larger the redistribution. After all, the gains in productive efficiency derive from structural change, which is a process that inherently creates gainers (expanding sectors and the factors employed therein) and losers (contracting sectors and the factors employed therein). It is nonsensical to argue that the gains are large while the amount of redistribution is small – at least in the context of the standard models. Moreover, as trade becomes freer, the ratio of redistribution to net gains rises. Ultimately, trying to reap the last few dollars of efficiency gain comes at the “cost” of significant redistribution of income. Again, standard economics.

Latest revision as of 13:42, 2 October 2019