PRESTOPUNDIT

Paul C. Roberts replies to his critics on the necessary conditions for mutually beneficial free trade. Quotable:

Another widely made error is to assume that US labor displaced by outsourcing, off shore production or the Internet moves into US export industries to meet increased demand for US goods from countries whose labor is made more productive by the inflow of US capital and technology. This model assumes that comparative advantage reigns. The model does not work if absolute advantage reigns.

And this:

The downward adjustment in wages and salaries necessary to bring the US into equilibrium with the global labor market requires reductions that cannot be achieved. For example, try to imagine what must happen to existing mortgages and debts if US workers are to compete with Chinese and Indian workers employed by first world capital and technology. So many people forget that the reason that highly paid US workers could compete against lowly paid Asian workers is that the US workers were much more productive due to the immobility of capital and technology. The international mobility of factors of production has stripped away the productivity advantage of first world labor. Try to imagine the political instability in store for the US as the ladders of upward mobility collapse. The reality toward which we head is not a libertarian paradise.

But this is simply and grossly false:

the collapse of world socialism and the advent of the Internet have made factors of production as mobile as traded goods. Indeed, factors of production are more mobile. Capital, technology, and ideas can move today with the speed of light, whereas goods have to be shipped.

Capital goods are real stuff -- and the transfer of technology and ideas requires the complex development of substantial cultural and institutional "infrastructure". The truth is that e.g. India and China have been "growing" these for a long time now, and it has NOT happened overnight.