He who troubles in his own house....

The article, Why populist uprisings could end a half-century of greater economic ties - The Washington Post, is somewhat pedestrian, as are most the the comments in it.

One stood out to me, for its cluelessness

"There’s a sense that it [trade policy] hasn’t delivered,” IMF chief economist Maury Obstfeld

You think?


It is not a sense, but a fact that it has not delivered for a lot of people


One would expect in a democracy, that if a lot of people had a serious problem with a policy, we would call it a valid point -- at the very least.

Instead these people get:

“Trying to go back in time, trying to safeguard the achievements of the past will backfire. Because we cannot do that,” said Hans Timmer, the World Bank’s chief economist for Europe and Central Asia.

Not only does that beg the question, it misses the point.  Going forward as we have been has backfired for lots of people.

As a response, this is just as bad as:

“This movement toward isolationism and the movement away from trade is very bad for poor people,” Kim [World Bank President Jim Yong Kim] said last week in Washington.

Gee, losing your way of life, too bad, but in the long run it will help people you don't know -- and the very rich.

I have often wondered if the extreme hard turn toward 19th Century liberal economics and the end of the Soviet threat as and economic, and then a political model, may have some relation. It would make an interesting doctoral thesis question 100 years from now.  Assuming we still have history.