Gains from Trade: Is Comparative Advantage the Ideology of the Comparatively Advantaged?

Quotes

00:11:38

Eric Weinstein: What you have to understand is that the idealism of every era is usually the cover story of a theft.

00:11:48

Michael Knowles: I want to I want to pause there for a moment, say that again, because that strikes me as an important point.

00:11:52

Eric Weinstein: Okay. The idealism, and the sloganeering, of every era is typically the fig leaf that is put over the greed of one party, goring the ox of another.

00:12:07

Michael Knowles: So what would be an example?

00:12:08

Eric Weinstein: Well, for example, in the 80s, you'll remember that competitiveness was a rallying cry, and competitiveness was about trying to get American unions to give up hard won advances, for the national good. So it was a patriotism that was associated with understanding, we're going to have to tighten our belts, we're going to have to get into fighting shape. And that was going to be painful, but we were all going to be better off on the other side. So after Patco was destroyed—again, a problem of the Reagan time, what you then had was the next phase, which was We-Are-The-World. And the We-Are-The-World Globalization narrative was about breaking the bonds that tie our fellow—ourselves to our fellow Americans. So the idea is, if we could just get rid of the rights of hillbillies and Appalachians, of blacks, of various people inside of the U.S., what we could then do is relocate all of these factories and various opportunity overseas and get access to other labor. And then when Bill Clinton and Dick Morris figured out that the Republicans had this great thing going, they wanted to get in on the act. So they got really aggressive about it. And then we have things like NAFTA. And one of the really interesting things that you have recently is people like economist Brad DeLong, who was one of the architects of NAFTA, admitting, you know, tearing off the mask and saying, you do realize that, what we were optimizing was a social welfare function that was intrinsically social Darwinism because it actually benefited you by the cube of your wealth. And then his point was, I don't understand why we're getting so much hate, look at all the good we did for peasants in Mexico, which is a little bit of a weird thing to say when you trick American voters into voting something and then after the fact, you say, sure, it may have made some of you worse off in Ohio and Michigan, but look at all the good it's done—

00:13:58

Michael Knowles: For the other country.

- Eric Weinstein, July 23, 2020 on Verdict with Ted Cruz

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