Here’s a letter to a second cousin of mine. (Because he mentions his lifetime, note that he’s in his early 80s.)
Mr. Prentiss Davis
Prentiss:On Facebook, you offered the following comment in response to one of my posts:
I will gladly pay more for prescription drugs that are made in the US, not China. Actually, I will happily pay more for jeans, auto parts and most of the other stuff that in my lifetime was produced domestically. I would happily pay more to see all the dead towns in America come to life again, towns who died when its industry was “GLOBALIZED”. I will pay more to buy products from anywhere the leadership, unlike the CCP isn’t devoted to destroying America and the West.
Your sentiment undoubtedly comes from a noble place. But noble motives fueled by misunderstanding are often as destructive as are ignoble motives. And your misunderstanding is significant.
Let’s here examine some facts. In a follow-up letter I’ll explain why you would harm, rather than help, your fellow Americans were you, motivated solely by the belief that imports are harmful, to “pay more for jeans, auto parts and most of the other stuff that in my lifetime was produced domestically.”
Although there are surely a handful of “dead towns” in America – it’s a big country, and towns died in America long before the era of globalization – it’s untrue that the towns most affected by increased foreign trade are dead. In fact, the great majority are thriving. After looking at the locales hardest hit by the so-called “China Shock” – a “shock” that occurred in the years 1999 through 2011 – the economist Jeremy Horpedahl found that those locales have performed well economically
Horpedahl’s finding is consistent with new research by Stephen Rose and Scott Winship who “find that the ‘core’ middle class has shrunk, but only because more families have become upper-middle class over time. The upper-middle class boomed from 10 percent of families in 1979 to 31 percent in 2024, and its share of income doubled. The share of families whose income left them short of the core middle class fell from 54 percent to 35 percent.”
And let me report some of my own research: From 1958 through 1980 (before globalization really took off), the average monthly rate of job loss for American manufacturing workers was 1.6 percent. But since January 1994 (the month NAFTA began) through today (November 2025), the average monthly rate of job loss for American manufacturing workers has been lower, at 1.2 percent. (I can find no data for 1981 through 1993.) And if we look only at the period December 2000 through November 2025, that rate is, at 1.1 percent, even lower.
Although trade isn’t the only or even the main source of manufacturing-job loss – technology is – the era of rapidly increasing globalization saw a slowing of the rate of manufacturing job loss compared to the rate of earlier years going back to 1958.
Findings such as these are practically impossible to square with your assertion that globalization has generally harmed America and her middle-class.
You make other mistaken claims that I’ll address in a follow-up letter.
Sincerely,
Don
