This letter of mine will appear in the print edition of tomorrow’s Washington Post:
The July 19 news article “The U.S. saw the first ‘China Shock.’ Now the world gets the sequel.” reported that David Autor and his co-authors found that increased U.S. trade with China from 1999 through 2011 “displaced 2.4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs.” However, 2.4 million jobs is an upper-bound estimate of all jobs — manufacturing and nonmanufacturing — lost to trade with China. The estimate of manufacturing jobs lost is 985,000.
Perspective is also needed. A loss of 2.4 million jobs over a 13-year span is an average monthly job loss of 15,385. Yet from December 2000 (the earliest date for which good data is available) through December 2011 — thus, for the vast bulk of the “China Shock” years — each month, on average, saw about 2 million jobs destroyed. Even the maximum-estimated number of “China Shock” job losses is less than 1 percent of total job losses during those years.
The relatively minuscule number of jobs lost to increased trade with China combines with the far larger role that technology plays in destroying manufacturing jobs to suggest that the rise of Trumpian protectionism owes less to actual economic occurrences than to poorly informed tales about trade.
Donald J. Boudreaux, Fairfax
The writer is an economics professor at George Mason University.
