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I don't think that anybody ever claimed that free trade was going to be a Pareto improvement[1]. It is going to nearly always be a Kaldor-Hicks[2] improvement,

I don't think that anybody ever claimed that free trade was going to be a Pareto improvement[1]. It is going to nearly always be a Kaldor-Hicks[2] improvement, though, which means you can make everybody better off by doing free trade then taxing the free trade winners and giving the money to the free trade losers. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor%E2%80%93Hicks_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor%E2%80%93Hicks_efficienc...

lumberjack 11y ago
Did you miss the whole "it will be bad for the workers but good for the consumers" then? Because it was repeated incessantly even though it is immediately obvious to anybody that the average person, will be better off having a good job than being able to buy cheap crap from China.
- notahacker 11y ago
  It's also immediately obvious to anyone that the average person in America has a job which is much better than the assembly line drudge work outsourced to China, and the argument being made is that US economy has the additional funds (if not the political will) to compensate the relatively small number of people who are unable to find any work since their manufacturing roles were outsourced, especially since the dollar can purchase an awful lot more consumer goods than it used to be able to.