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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: TimF who wrote (51609)3/4/2008 1:41:11 PM
From: neolib  Read Replies (1) of 542598
 
More generally I'd say that the evidence that in the long run trade increases prosperity is greater than the evidence for most statements about climate change

I doubt that. It is equivalent to claiming that the economic interconnection of a larger population all most always results in increased prosperity compared to a smaller population on a normalized basis. Just like in climate change, such a claim must be based on economic (or physical) processes which show such cause and effect.

There are some such in economics, such as distribution of natural resources, which would support the notion that interconnecting the globe should be better. But I think the dominant component of global trade is driven by arbitrage issues related to disequilibrium in things like wages. As those tend towards equilibrium, the benefit decreases. Certain things like airliner development seem to require nearly a global market to support, so such would also argue for global trade. But for most products and technology, a country of 300M could most likely do just as well as a planet of 6B. In fact I'd argue that global technology exchange is likely more important than global trade.

I'll I'm trying to point out is that the signal to noise ratio of trying to claim that the last few decades of greatly increased global trade are generally positive for the USA does not look very good. Many economic metrics for the USA have not been great for the last couple of decades (real wages, individual debt, total national debt, employment, income distribution, etc) and all attempts to show attribution which I've read look downright amateurish compared to the level of sophistication in climate science. In fact, they largely look like "Think Tank Science" vs real science.
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