Make A Pyre And Light A Bonfire

We were continually told a new service-sector paradise would replace the anachronism of manufacturing. “What’s happening in manufacturing had its counterpart 50 years ago in agriculture,” Michael L. Wachter, a UPenn economist, told the New York Times. “These deindustrialization guys must have had counterparts saying that the American economy is dying because there are not enough people on farms.”

Something big was coming to replace those old factories, and we were told over and about the benefits of access to the “biggest market in the world.” True, previous efforts to gain access to China had ended in tears, but this time it was different, because as the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour put it in 1994, “after decades of denial and deprivation, the Chinese have money and are ready to shop”.

It never happened. China never opened its markets, and the trade imbalance kept ballooning, alongside persistent complaints about violative practices that reminded me of Wall Street fraud cases I covered. Whether after rulings by the Department of Commerce or the DOJ or the WTO, China would admit to currency manipulation or “relabelling” or some other offense, promise to stop, and just keep going. The fact that they were there to buy whenever the U.S. issued debt was clearly a huge factor in us always turning a blind eye.

In the early 2000s, we began to be sold on the idea that globalization was really working, it was just hard for ordinary Americans to see because they were so wrapped up in bitterness and nostalgia. Papers like the New York Times gave top billing to boosters like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman to castigate the lost-in-the-past crowd and extol the exciting new world of borderless innovation.