Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization

The big question I’ve been struggling with in regards to the free trade debate is this:

Is cheap labor a legitimate source of comparative advantage?

I increasingly don’t think that it is. Yes, we get products more cheaply. But those products are made in countries with fewer labor restrictions, often in places that are not democratic, where workers cannot vote for changing laws. We’re effectively saying we want democracy where we live, for our own white collar professions, but we don’t want to be shackled by those restrictions for how we get rich, or how we enjoy our wealth. We’re effectively telling local blue collar workers that we’re okay with their level of work being taken over by people with less rights than themselves.

That increasingly doesn’t feel just. Comparative advantage makes sense for natural differences between countries, such as availability of natural resources or favorable weather for certain types of crops. But not for fundamental human rights.

The odd part about capitalist based policies on trade and skilled work force immigration is how much the left has supported them. The right has long held a "capitalist laissez-faire" approach to economic policy, and has been open about that. But what I cannot wrap my head around is the paradoxical message of the left. On the one hand they have long been known for supporting and using government intervention to protect and bolster the common working man in the United States, but on the other hand have continuously and audaciously supported and put forwards free trade and ultra capitalist ideas. The outcome of which has been a disaster and is only getting started. Even more paradoxically, the most pro American Worker campaign ever ran, was run by Donald Trump, a quasi republican, who in turn won the election by stealing support from democrats in key states (Michigan, Ohio, Florida, etc).

> But after the Cold War ended, the debate over trade (Krugman’s Nobel-winning specialty) became a proxy for a larger intellectual struggle over free markets versus government intervention.

This is the crux of it. The notion that economics, as a field, was blindsided by the rapidity and extent of economic dislocation doesn't match the history. Such a narrative is a whitewashing of a particular clique of superstar economists, which explains why Krugman is so committed to it despite his current policy views.

I was studying International Affairs as an undergraduate in Washington, D.C. in the late 1990s. These issues were well known and heavily discussed, domestically and internationally. By the late 1990s the notion of controlled, incremental trade expansion as espoused by people like Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia was already on the upswing in the international community and cemented after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. That is, while mainstream economists were highly skeptical about the efficacy and unintended consequences of such industrial strategies, not to mention of the leaders like Mahathir who espoused them, it was impossible to deny the fundamental premise that the existential risks of too-rapid global trade expansion were very real.

The problem in the U.S. was much the same problem we've always had: free trade became synonymous to opposition to government intervention. All the free trade bills in the U.S. invariably included funding for re-education and R&D to help manage dislocation and build competitive advantages, but they were meager financially and suffocated by neglect. And that's because these measures were considered "government intervention" and hedges to preserve "big government", which as we all know as Americans (and, to a slightly lesser extent, everybody else in the Anglosphere) meant naivety, ineffectiveness, and corruption. So it's no surprise that the American public and politicians drifted toward a fundamentally broken policy situation.

This is no less true today even as we've soured on the notion of free trade. We'll put up trade barriers, but we still refuse to heavily invest in re-education and R&D, and not even our most liberal policymakers have proposed an industrial policy aimed at managing globalization. Just the same 20-30 years ago, these things are synonymous with big government, corporate subsidies, etc. Instead, we limit free trade presuming that the domestic industrial economy will naturally restore more equitable employment and wealth distribution.

Nothing about free markets guarantees "equitable" distribution; indeed, history has proven that they often tend to distributions that are untenable democratically. But we're even less prepared to effectively manage this stuff for our domestic economy than we are for international trade. Anybody expecting our social equities to substantially improve simply because we're limiting free trade is delusional, though they're in good company.

The thing is, we can never put the free trade genie back in the bottle. And the truth is, on balance free trade is better for the world and for every nation in it; just as with free markets more generally. The problem as always is managing dislocation and wealth distribution. We need to learn, as a society and as economists (armchair or otherwise--I'm not an economist), to stop equivocating industrial policy with government control. Until we do that, we'll never be able to discover and identify the levers and strategies available for mitigating the disruptive aspects of free markets while minimizing the risks of corruption.

> We're saying, we want, we're okay

By 'we', you mean the multinational corporations that write 'free-trade' treaties (that usually encompass much more than just tariff reductions). Because voters tend to not get much say (and sometimes not even senators!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership#Secr...

Of course they were bláse about it, it didn't affect their livelihood one way or the other.

Do you get paid for saying fancy sounding things, or do you get paid because you did fancy sounding things?

Economists are all talk and no stones and they should be ignored unless they can demonstrate that their portfolio represents the ideas that they espouse.