> either made the US better off or worse off. It's very hard (meaning impossible) to make such an assessment for the US as a whole. Some groups net benefited f

> either made the US better off or worse off. It's very hard (meaning impossible) to make such an assessment for the US as a whole. Some groups net benefited from globalization and trade liberalization, others net lost, for many it was a wash. Remarkably, this is one of the predictions of mainstream economists (MSEs) that is empirically true. What they should have stressed more, therefore, is the distributional aspect of trade liberalization: that the gains from trade must be distributed to compensate the losers. The gains are so large that this could have been done and still leave something over for the natural beneficiaries of free trade. What Yang is saying, and I TOTALLY agree on this point, is that automation or progress in AI is like that only ten times worse. We all know that tech is full of natural monopolies, while the economic gains are HUGE because they are aggregated over so many people/transactions/etc. and marginal costs are low. Therefore we should think about reorienting our economies (talking globally here, not just US) to ensure that we don't see the same that happened with trade now with automation and AI. Namely huge segments of the population left behind "because market" and all the gains accruing to a handful of data oligarchs.