Krugman Raises White Flag on Trade, admits his “free-trade” cheerleading was mostly garbage [View all]

[Cheese Sandwich]

The Times columnist made his name by ridiculing critics of globalization. Now he admits that “free-trade” cheerleading was mostly garbage.

By William Greider in The Nation

The working-class voters of Michigan put a big dent in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but they also body-slammed celebrated economists like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who made his name by relentlessly ridiculing critics of globalization like myself.

Anti-trade anger was the decisive issue that gave Bernie Sanders his victory in the Michigan primary. In the aftermath, Krugman decided to raise the white flag of surrender.

The Nobel Prize–winning economist now admits in a column and blog that the orthodox case he championed for “free trade” globalization was mostly garbage. Now he tells us. On a point of personal privilege, I claim the right to hoot derisively.

I am among the supposedly misguided reporters who didn’t major in economics but wrote critically about what we saw unfolding in the “manic logic of global capitalism” (the subtitle for my book One World, Ready or Not, which Krugman dismissed as “a thoroughly silly book”). The multinationals were colonizing the world while systematically draining America of manufacturing and the core jobs of our broadly shared prosperity. Meanwhile, the globalizing companies brutishly exploited the low-wage peasant workers in their new factories in Asia.

The professor stomped hard on my reporting, so naturally I took it personally. But his belated confessional should be understood as a meaningful indicator of economic orthodoxy in collapse.

The facts did not fit the professor’s theory. Yet influential voices like Krugman grossly misled the nation’s political debate for a generation. He was the bell cow for a herd of ambitious young academics who mimicked his sharp-tongued style and worshiped at the same shrine of macroeconomics that’s now a shambles.
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more: http://www.thenation.com/article/paul-krugman-raises-the-white-flag-on-trade/