DeLong vs. Krugman on globalization
I'm going to do the inadvisable, and argue with Brad DeLong. Hopefully this will turn out OK, since it's in response to Brad doing the inadvisable and arguing with Paul Krugman (thus breaking at least two of his own rules ). The topic is globalization. Krugman has a new essay in which he lays out what seems to be a rapidly crystallizing conventional wisdom on the recent history of globalization. Some excerpts: [D]uring the 1990s a number of economists, myself included...tried to assess the role of Stolper-Samuelson-type effects in rising inequality...[these analyses] generally suggested that the effect [of factor price equalization from globalization] was relatively modest, and not the central factor in the widening income gap... [T]he basic fact in the mid 1990s was that imports of manufactured goods from developing countries [were only] around 2 percent of GDP....[T]his wasn’t enough to cause more than a few percent change in relative wages... In retrospect, however, trad...