Author Archives: editor

On a crisp November morning last year, when Donald Trump’s candidacy was little more than a cloud the size of a man’s fist — and the fist of a man with tiny hands, at that — it occurred to me that if it ever did take off, a lot of its success would be due to his strongly protectionist stance on global trade. My moment of revelation came, not after immersing myself in balance of payment and jobless statistics, but while getting dressed.

It dawned on me that, on that particular morning, I was wearing underwear made in Canada, an Oxford cotton shirt produced in India, heather-brown trousers from Bangladesh, a tweedy sports jacket “assembled” in Honduras, a Chinese necktie, and suede wingtips made in Brazil. Even the wristwatch I was wearing that day consisted of a Japanese quartz movement housed in a Chinese case with an “alligator” strap of unknown — but almost certainly non-American and non-reptilian — provenance. Despite their foreign origins, which I’d been mostly unaware of at the time of purchase, nearly all of these items bore the brand names of familiar American companies that, like the makers of Donald Trump’s men’s fashion line, had outsourced production to cheap overseas factories. Even my very nice Sheaffer fountain pen — a proud old brand long produced in Iowa — turned out to be the joint result of outsourcing to the Slovak Republic and Thailand. Other than my skin, the only thing I was wearing that was made in the United States was a lowly pair of socks.

All of which underscores the double-edged nature of free-trade globalism central to Anja Manuel’s concise, informed book on the potential benefits and hazards of a new world economic order that promises to be anything but orderly. As Ms. Manuel conceded in a recent interview, American companies have indeed, “moved blue-collar jobs to cheaper markets,” but singling out China for punitive tariffs “would just move these jobs to other low-wage countries, not back here.” The long-term solution to blue-collar joblessness is a drastic overhaul of the American education system at the primary and secondary levels so that high school graduates will be equipped with essential knowledge and skills applicable to rising rather than sinking industries and technologies.

Source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/20/book-review-this-brave-new-world-india-china-and-t/