Economist's View: The Debate over Inequality: "The Debate over Inequality

Well, me versus Samwick, Mankiw, and DeLong seems like a difficult match to win, but I am going to persist anyway. Stay the course so to speak (see also the Paul Krugman column that is at issue, an earlier post by Andrew Samwick, my response to Andrew, and a follow-up at Angry Bear). Each is objecting to Paul Krugman's claim that government policies may be able to change income inequality and that changes in political ideology may explain, in part, variations in income inequality over time.

I hope to have more to say later, but for now let me offer a bit of evidence from Australia through Andrew Leigh, and add a bit more on the US as well. First, here's Andrew Leigh:

Top Floor, Going Up, by Andrew Leigh: An updated version of my research with Tony Atkinson on top incomes is written up by John Garnaut in the SMH today. There’s not much there to surprise regular readers of tbis blog. But since it’s not every day that I crack the front page of the SMH, I thought I’d indulge in some shameless self-promotion.

Here's the abstract from the article. It's also written up in the Sydney Morning Herald as noted by Andrew:

ABSTRACT Using taxation statistics, we estimate the income share held by top income groups in Australia over the period 1921-2002. We find that the income share of the richest fell from the 1920s until the mid-1940s, rose briefly in the post-war decade, and then declined until the early-1980s. During the 1980s and 1990s, top income shares rose rapidly. At the start of the twenty-first century, the income share of the richest was higher than it had been at any point in the previous fifty years. Among top income groups, recent decades have also seen a rise in the share of top income accruing to the super-rich. Trends in top income shares are similar to those observed among other elite groups, such as judges, politicians, top bureaucrats and CEOs. We speculate that changes in top income shares may have been affected by top marginal tax rates, skill-biased technological change, social norms about inequality, and the internationalisation of the market for English-speaking CEOs.

Factors like top marginal income tax rates and social norms are connected to the political environment, but of course, this is in no way conclusive. A lot of the change is driven, according to their results, by the incomes of CEOs. But I think it's at least suggestive that the political environment drove some of the change.

For the US, as passed along to me in an email, factors such as the New Deal's very large tax increases on the wealthy, both directly on income and indirectly on corporate profits are an important factor connected to the political environment at the time. It's an open question how much of the change in inequality that might explain by itself.

Unions are also worth taking seriously with union membership nearly tripling to about a third of the workforce from the mid 1930s to the mid 1940s. This would affect all wages, not just those in sectors where unions are prevalent. The decline of unionization after the 70s is also a factor to consider, and there's a strong case to be made that this was made possible by a political environment that allowed union busting to occur. In any case, I don't think this is a settled question and I hope to follow up with more later.

Update: Please see Brad DeLong's excellent summary and follow-up on this debate.

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Economist's View: Paul Krugman: Tax Farmers, Mercenaries and Viceroys: "Paul Krugman: Tax Farmers, Mercenaries and Viceroys

Back to a bad old future:

Tax Farmers, Mercenaries and Viceroys, by Paul Krugman, A Monarchy Commentary, NY Times: Yesterday The New York Times reported that the Internal Revenue Service would outsource collection of unpaid back taxes to private debt collectors, who would receive a share of the proceeds.

I

It’s an awful idea. Privatizing tax collection will cost far more than hiring additional I.R.S. agents, raise less revenue and pose obvious risks of abuse. But what’s really amazing is the extent to which this plan is a retreat from modern principles of government. I used to say that conservatives want to take us back to the 1920’s, but the Bush administration seemingly wants to go back to the 16th century.

And privatized tax collection is only part of the great march backward. In the bad old days, ...[t]here was no bureaucracy to collect taxes, so the king subcontracted the job to private “tax farmers,” who often engaged in extortion. There was no regular army, so the king hired mercenaries, who tended to wander off and pillage the nearest village. There was no regular system of administration, so the king assigned the task to favored courtiers, who tended to be corrupt, incompetent or both.

Modern governments solved these problems by creating a professional revenue department to collect taxes, a professional officer corps to enforce military discipline, and a professional civil service. But President Bush apparently doesn’t like these innovations, preferring to govern as if he were King Louis XII.

So the tax farmers are coming back, and the mercenaries already have. There are about 20,000 armed “security contractors” in Iraq, and they have been assigned critical tasks, from guarding top officials to training the Iraqi Army.

Like the mercenaries of old, today’s corporate mercenaries have discipline problems. “They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath,” declared a U.S. officer... And armed men operating outside the military chain of command have caused at least one catastrophe. ...

To whom are such contractors accountable? Last week a judge threw out a jury’s $10 million verdict against Custer Battles, ... a symbol of the mix of cronyism, corruption and sheer amateurishness that doomed the Iraq adventure — and the judge didn’t challenge the jury’s finding that the company engaged in blatant fraud.

But he ruled that the civil fraud suit ... lacked a legal basis, because ... the Coalition Provisional Authority ... wasn’t “an instrumentality of the U.S. government.” It wasn’t created by an act of Congress; it wasn’t a branch of ... any ... established agency.

So what was it? Any premodern monarch would have recognized the arrangement: in effect, the authority was a personal fief run by a viceroy answering only to the ruler. And since the fief operated outside all the usual rules of government, the viceroy was free to hire a staff of political loyalists lacking any relevant qualifications for their jobs, and to hand out duffel bags filled with $100 bills to contractors with the right connections.

Tax farmers, mercenaries and viceroys: why does the Bush administration want to run a modern superpower as if it were a 16th-century monarchy? Maybe people who’ve spent their political careers denouncing government as the root of all evil can’t grasp the idea of governing well. Or maybe it’s cynical politics: privatization provides both an opportunity to evade accountability and a vast source of patronage.

But the price is enormous. This administration has thrown away centuries of lessons about how to make government work. No wonder it has failed at everything except fearmongering.

Deal Maker Details the Art of Greasing the Palm - New York Times

Deal Maker Details the Art of Greasing the Palm

By DAVID JOHNSTON and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON — In 1992, Brent R. Wilkes rented a suite at the Hyatt Hotel a few blocks from the Capitol. In his briefcase was a stack of envelopes for a half-dozen congressmen, each packet containing up to $10,000 in checks.

Mr. Wilkes had set up separate meetings with the lawmakers hoping to win a government contract, and he planned to punctuate each pitch with a campaign donation. But his hometown congressman, Representative Bill Lowery of San Diego, a Republican, told him that presenting the checks during the sessions was not how things were done, Mr. Wilkes recalled.

Instead, Mr. Wilkes said, Mr. Lowery taught him the right way to do it: hand over the envelope in the hallway outside the suite, at least a few feet away.

That was the beginning of a career built on what Mr. Wilkes calls “transactional lobbying,” which made him a rich man but also landed him in the middle of a criminal investigation.

Last November, Mr. Wilkes was described as “co-conspirator No. 1” in a plea agreement signed by Representative Randy Cunningham, a California Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. In the plea deal, Mr. Cunningham admitted accepting more than $2.4 million in cash and gifts from Mr. Wilkes and other contractors. Another defense contractor, Mitchell J. Wade, pleaded guilty to paying some of the bribes.

Mr. Wilkes could also figure in a related federal investigation into the House Appropriations Committee. The inquiry has focused on ties between Mr. Lowery, who left Congress and became a lobbyist, and Representative Jerry Lewis, a California Republican who is the chairman of the committee and the former chairman of its Defense Subcommittee.

Speaking publicly for the first time since Mr. Cunningham’s plea agreement, Mr. Wilkes said in recent interviews that he had done nothing wrong and did not believe that Mr. Lewis and Mr. Lowery had broken the law. Mr. Wilkes, who has not been charged in the Cunningham case, has refused prosecutors’ appeals to plead guilty.

But Mr. Wilkes acknowledged that he was a willing participant in what he characterized as a “cutthroat” system in which campaign contributions were a prerequisite for federal contracts. “I attempted to get help and advice from people who could show me the way to do it right,” Mr. Wilkes said. “I played by their rules, and I played to win.”

Mr. Wilkes said he was speaking now to rebut false assertions about him by prosecutors and the news media. While it is unknown whether his account is complete and it is impossible to verify his recollections of certain conversations, many aspects of his story were confirmed by federal records, other documents and interviews with people involved in the events he described.

The Cunningham scandal set off alarms about the proliferation of Congressional earmarks — money for pet projects inserted anonymously in spending bills — which critics say pervert public policy, encourage cronyism and waste federal money. The 12,000 earmarks in this year’s spending bills amount to $64 billion.

Offering a rare insider’s view, Mr. Wilkes described the appropriations process as little more than a shakedown. He said that lobbyists close to the committee members unceasingly demanded campaign contributions from entrepreneurs like him. Mr. Wilkes and his associates have given more than $706,000 to federal campaigns since 1997, according to public records, and he said he had brought in more as a fund-raiser. Since 2000, Mr. Wilkes’s principal company has received about $100 million in federal contracts.

Mr. Wilkes described the system bluntly: “Lowery would always say, ‘It is a two-part deal,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘Jerry will make the request. Jerry will carry the vote. Jerry will have plenty of time for this. If you don’t want to make the contributions, chair the fund-raising event, you will get left behind.’ ”

Lanny A. Breuer, a lawyer for Mr. Lowery, acknowledged that his client had been a lobbyist for Mr. Wilkes. But he said Mr. Wilkes’s portrait of their dealings was “an absolute fabrication.”

“Bill Lowery never demanded lobbying fees in return for any kind of a guarantee of an earmark,” Mr. Breuer said. “He never demanded contributions to Jerry Lewis. There was absolutely no quid pro quo.”

Barbara Comstock, a spokeswoman for Mr. Lewis, said the congressman was unaware of any conversations like those Mr. Wilkes described having with Mr. Lowery.

Contractors who do business with the federal government routinely contribute to the campaigns of Congressional appropriators, and politicians frequently assist constituents in their efforts to win government contracts. But legal experts say that explicitly linking official acts to campaign contributions could constitute a criminal offense, including bribery or extortion. They caution that proving criminal intent is difficult.

The culture of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee is one of great power and little scrutiny. Mr. Wilkes said every member appeared to have a personal allowance of millions of dollars to disburse without public disclosure. Lawmakers, though, sometimes boast about money being spent in their districts.

In the spending bill for this fiscal year, each member took credit for an average $27 million in earmarks, with the chairman, Representative C. W. Bill Young, Republican of Florida, claiming about $125 million, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan group that tracks earmarks.

‘Feast or Famine’

When Mr. Lowery became a lobbyist, he set himself up as a gatekeeper to his old friend, Mr. Lewis, the appropriations chairman, Mr. Wilkes said. At times, Mr. Lowery hinted ominously that Mr. Lewis might block future earmarks if Mr. Wilkes stopped making campaign donations and paying Mr. Lowery’s fees, Mr. Wilkes said.

In recent months, Mr. Lewis has said that he barely knew Mr. Wilkes and that he did not remember seeing him in nearly a decade. But Mr. Wilkes says their relationship was closer than that.

Ever since they went on a scuba-diving trip together in 1993, he said, Mr. Lewis had referred to him as his “diving buddy.” They occasionally dined together or met at political functions, Mr. Wilkes said. At a Las Vegas fund-raiser in April 2005, Mr. Wilkes said, Mr. Lewis greeted him as “Brento” and hugged him as Mr. Wilkes surprised the lawmaker with $25,000 in campaign contributions.

At his peak, Mr. Wilkes controlled a dozen companies whose work included digital document storage. The federal government was his chief customer, and he spent up to 30 weeks a year in Washington courting congressmen and agency procurement officials.

Mr. Wilkes capitalized on the system. The license plate on his black Hummer still reads “MIPR ME,” a reference to a “military interdepartmental purchase request” — bureaucratic jargon for payments for a defense contract.

Mr. Wilkes built a headquarters of smoked glass and stainless steel outside San Diego with a 450-seat banquet hall, where Cirque du Soleil performed at a birthday party for his wife, Regina. He crossed the country in private jets and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004, making him a Republican “Pioneer.”

Nancy Luque, his lawyer, said the image of Mr. Wilkes as a swaggering deal maker was a caricature. “He had his life in Washington and then his real life,” Ms. Luque said. “His real life was his family, his friends and his business.”

His success, though, depended on government contracts. “It’s a feast or famine deal,” Mr. Wilkes said. “If we didn’t get our earmark, we were finished.”

Washington Connections

A former accountant in Washington and San Diego, Mr. Wilkes had known Mr. Lowery casually for years in California Republican circles. Because of those ties, a San Diego businessman hired Mr. Wilkes as a consultant in 1992 to help persuade Congress to earmark contracts for his company, Audre, which was seeking to convert military documents into digital form.

Mr. Lowery, in his final months in Congress, was looking for new opportunities as well. He had decided to resign after a 1992 inquiry into the misuse of an internal House bank found that he had written more than 300 bad checks.

Mr. Wilkes said Mr. Lowery set up meetings for him with a handful of House Defense Subcommittee members, including Representative John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who was the chairman at the time, and Mr. Lewis. Mr. Lowery instructed Mr. Wilkes to go to the sessions prepared.

“Lowery says, ‘We should raise money; you get the checks,’ ” Mr. Wilkes recalled, describing the meetings at the Hyatt. “I was a rookie. I didn’t want to separate the checks from the briefing,” he said, explaining that he did not understand the need to avoid appearing to link the money to his pitch.

Although they welcomed the checks, Mr. Wilkes said, the lawmakers seemed bored by a lengthy presentation. “I became the king of the 10-minute meeting,” he said.

Later that year, Mr. Wilkes and Mr. Lowery took a diving trip to Belize, where they visited the United States ambassador. Eugene Scassa, then the envoy, said in an interview that Mr. Lowery had quizzed him about his out-of-pocket expenses and then suggested, “You need a chuck wagon.”

Mr. Scassa said Mr. Lowery pointed to Mr. Wilkes and explained: “He is a chuck wagon. If you have expenses, they pay. If you go out to lunch, they pay. If you need a pair of boots, you go out to the chuck wagon to get them.” (The next year, Mr. Lowery and Mr. Wilkes returned for a diving trip with Mr. Lewis.)

When Mr. Lowery left Congress in January 1993, Mr. Wilkes hired him to lobby for Audre. Mr. Wilkes was impressed by Mr. Lowery’s knowledge of the Defense Subcommittee and his confidence in being able to help deliver an earmark.

Mr. Lowery and Mr. Lewis seemed “like brothers,” Mr. Wilkes said. “These guys ate dinner together a hundred times a year.”

Mr. Wilkes and Audre executives gave members of the Appropriations Committee about $54,000 in campaign donations from 1992 to 1994. The Defense Subcommittee earmarked $14 million for Audre in 1993 and $20 million in 1994.

Mr. Wilkes said that at his suggestion, several recipients of his campaign contributions — Mr. Lewis; Mr. Cunningham; Representative Charlie Wilson, Democrat of Texas; and Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California — wrote a letter to top defense officials supporting the expenditures. Mr. Lewis wrote a second letter to an admiral.

In December 1994, Mr. Wilkes set up his own company, ADCS, and continued to use Mr. Lowery’s services. Later, the lobbyist got Mr. Wilkes invited to a party at Mr. Lewis’s town house. The purpose was to help pay the legal bills of former Representative Joseph M. McDade, a Pennsylvania Republican charged with bribery in awarding earmarks. (He was acquitted in 1996.) Many members of the Appropriations Committee and many prominent lobbyists, Democrat and Republican, were there.

“The set of rules that Lowery was teaching me was obviously the right set of rules,” Mr. Wilkes recalled thinking. “If I wasn’t playing the game the way they wanted me to, I never would have been there.”

During his Washington visits, Mr. Wilkes held poker games at the Watergate Hotel, in a suite stocked with beer, Scotch and cigars. He invited several congressmen, colleagues and intelligence officials. Among the occasional guests was Kyle Foggo, the chief administrative officer of the Central Intelligence Agency and a childhood friend of Mr. Wilkes.

Federal prosecutors in San Diego are investigating whether Mr. Foggo, who resigned in May after coming under scrutiny, accepted vacation travel expenses from Mr. Wilkes in exchange for a classified agency supply contract, lawyers involved in the case said.

Ms. Luque, Mr. Wilkes’s lawyer, said, “My client did not give his best friend of over 40 years anything because of any position he may have held.” Mr. Foggo’s lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, said his client had done nothing unlawful.

Former colleagues say Mr. Wilkes was frank about his view of the appropriations process in Washington. “He was just on a power trip,” said Steve Caira, the former chief executive of a company that sometimes collaborated with Mr. Wilkes. “You would be at a party, and he would come out and say he paid this guy so-and-so, if you throw enough money at him you will get your share back,” Mr. Caira recalled. Mr. Wilkes denied making those comments.

In Mr. Cunningham’s guilty plea, prosecutors portrayed the lawmaker as eager to help Mr. Wilkes. In court documents, they say Mr. Wilkes made cash payments of more than $500,000 to Mr. Cunningham, who intervened to help him earn earmarks and pressed a Defense Department official for faster payment of an inflated invoice. Mr. Cunningham was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison.

Mr. Wilkes said that in recent years, he preferred to work with other Appropriations Committee members. In 1998, records show, he turned to Mr. Lewis for help with the Veterans Affairs administration. Mr. Wilkes was then a subcontractor on a project paid through the Department of Veterans Affairs, and he wanted to take over as the primary contractor. In February 1999, he met with Jeffrey Shockey, a Lewis aide, to ask the congressman’s office to intervene, according to a follow-up letter by Mr. Wilkes that was obtained by The New York Times.

When a Veterans Affairs accounting officer complained about questions from a congressman on ADCS’s behalf, a Wilkes aide, Mike Williams, wrote back that Mr. Lewis was “a close personal friend of Brent’s.” The letter offered to “have the congressman’s office contact the V.A. to put this issue to rest.”

Sometimes, Mr. Wilkes said, lobbyists offered him an earmark if he could come up with a project. In 2004, he said, Edwin A. Buckham, another lobbyist for Mr. Wilkes, reported that the House Appropriations Committee wanted to make a “going-away gift” in the form of an earmark to Representative George Nethercutt, Republican of Washington, who was leaving his seat on the panel to run for the Senate.

Mr. Wilkes suggested a shipboard communications project in Washington State and got $1 million for it. Mr. Nethercutt said he thought the technology was promising.

As he grew more confident, Mr. Wilkes said, he often considered dropping Mr. Lowery, whose fees had escalated to $25,000 a month by 2005, from $2,500. But Mr. Wilkes said Mr. Lowery threatened to block future projects if their relationship ended. Mr. Wilkes said Mr. Lowery had warned several times that doing so could prompt Mr. Lewis to cut off earmarks, saying, “You don’t want me telling those guys on the committee that you are moving on without me.” That meant, Mr. Wilkes said, “I’d be out of business.”

Mr. Breuer, Mr. Lowery’s lawyer, said Mr. Lowery did not make any such threats and called the account “pure fantasy.” He pointed out that in the late 1990’s the two men severed their relationship for a few years, but that Mr. Wilkes retained Mr. Lowery again in 2002.

Business in Jeopardy

In the end, it was the Cunningham investigation that jeopardized Mr. Wilkes’s business with the government. In August 2005, a team of F.B.I. agents swept through Mr. Wilkes’s headquarters. The flow of earmarks, his companies’ lifeblood, dried up. He laid off 200 employees.

Ms. Luque said her client’s legal problems were a battle that he “will fight and win.”

She said federal prosecutors told her in January that they were not interested in Mr. Wilkes’s dealings with Mr. Lowery and Mr. Lewis. “Cunningham couldn’t have followed through on what he did without the cooperation of other people on the committee,” Ms. Luque said. Prosecutors should be looking at the entire committee, she said.

Sitting in his office recently, the shelves lined with photographs of himself with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the presidential adviser Karl Rove, Mr. Wilkes reflected on his plight.

“I’m a dead man. I wouldn’t be able to get a meeting. I wouldn’t be able to get a phone call returned,” he said. “There’s no way I could get a deal.”

Sabrina I. Pacifici contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Aron Pilhofer from New York.

Economist's View: Baumol: Errors in Economics and Their Consequences

New Economist notes William Baumol's essay on the consequences of errors in economics:

    Errors in economics a reason for modesty: Baumol: NYU's William Baumol thinks economics "is particularly vulnerable to mistaken ideas contributed from the outside." His article, Errors in economics and their consequences, appeared in a special issue of Social Research on errors (hat tip: Political Theory Daily Review). His concluding remarks...

Here's the section of the article just before the conclusion highlighted by New Economist, along with the conclusion itself. Those of you who have been critical of economists will want to read this, and there's plenty for everyone else too:

    Must Outsourcing to Other Nations Always Benefit Both Affected Countries?

    I come to my last illustration, this time as a misunderstanding widely current among economists, and one on which the unspecialized general public seems to have arrived at a more defensible conclusion than many of the professionals. Not without reason, economists are usually strongly predisposed to favor free trade, globalization, and market-driven apportionment of industries among nations. But this orientation has led many of them to conclude that when a portion of an economic activity or even an entire industry moves from a high-wage to a low-wage country as a result of an increase of productivity in the latter, both the gainer and the loser of the industry can be expected to benefit. In particular, while some individuals in the country from which the activity has emigrated will evidently be harmed, on this view the country as a whole will normally benefit ... sufficiently to compensate for the damages and more.

    Here, a colleague and I have been driven to disagree with many other economists and have shown that, in what we believe to be a large range of cases, the country that loses the activity can be expected as a result to suffer a decrease, possibly substantial, in its overall per-capita income, that is, in its standard of living, and this damage need not just be a transitory loss (see Gomory and Baumol, 2000 and forthcoming).

    Those who believe that macroeconomic policy can effectively limit involuntary unemployment have reason to conclude that loss in the total number of jobs is not an inevitable consequence of globalization... But though we may reject the popular view that globalization is a major threat to employment and an instrument of extensive job loss, we cannot deny that there is reason to be concerned with at least the short-term effects on wages in both developing and developed lands. International competition can influence relative input prices and thereby determine whether machinery will be substituted for labor, for example, or whether skilled labor will be substituted for unskilled. There are, also, more direct implications for wages. Surely, the increased use of computer programmers in India can be expected to reduce the demand for such skills in the United States below what it might otherwise have been.

    For the developing countries, economic history suggests that an industrial revolution initially tends to depress real wages and real living standards, thus supporting the concerns of those who fear the consequences of globalization for the world's less prosperous nations. Though the British industrial revolution is usually considered to have taken off about 1760, it was probably not until approximately 1840 that wages began to rise. Data on life expectancy and average height also indicate that the spread of innovation was accompanied by worsening of the economic status of wage earners, perhaps in part as a result of the move from the countryside to crowded, unsanitary slums; the evidence indicates that the US labor force underwent a parallel trajectory. One may surmise that part of the explanation was a rise in the power of employers and an inability of the workers, in the absence of labor organizations, to resist.

    The opponents of globalization draw attention to a similar phenomenon in twenty-first-century globalization, with multinational employers subjecting their employees to disturbingly low wages and shocking working conditions, particularly on the criteria widely accepted in the affluent economies (though by no means always adhered to even there). Thus, even if globalization is a very promising influence for the more distant future prospects of the developing countries, there is good reason to fear that in the short run the workers in those lands may gain little and may even lose out in the initial stages of globalization.

    It can be argued that all this is transitory and that in the long run the lower-income groups in the developing countries will be better off, as has indeed been true in the developed economies. But the process can easily take decades. We cannot just ignore decades of very substandard earnings that amount to preservation of grinding poverty in a developing country or the permanent structural unemployment in a developed economy that can beset older workers whose skills are made redundant by innovation, and for whom the acquisition of new skills is not a practical option. These are hardships that constitute an extremely painful economic pathology for the affected individuals. At the very least, one can argue that those who stand to benefit from the process should be expected to agree to provide systematic and substantial assistance to the victims, presumably through government channels, and supported liberally by the wealthier communities. If that is not acceptable politically, there is surely little that can be said convincingly in support of a contention that the suffering of the victims will be justified by the promised future benefits to their descendants.

    Possible Longer-Run Damages from Globalization

    Though it can be hoped that, in the longer run, globalization will help to reduce (and even eliminate) poverty in the developing countries, as I have stated earlier (and contrary to widely held views), globalization can also permanently damage economic well-being in some of the affected countries, notably those countries that are now in the economic vanguard. This possibility may seem surprising, and even paradoxical. The simple explanation is that competition and mobility of products tend to equalize wages, raising those that are low, but also reducing those that are especially high. ... [T]his scenario shows the possible dangers to wealthier nations that arise from globalization. It does not mean that globalization is inherently undesirable, or that wealthier nations should never make sacrifices to help impoverished societies. But it does mean that we should not proceed under the illusion that we will assuredly profit from the process.

    What Have We Learned and What we Need to Learn

    The approach taken here is quite different from most current discussions of globalization. ... The approach ... has been used to investigate that overall effect, and has told us that the net consequence for a country of improved productivity abroad is neither always beneficial nor always deleterious but can be either, depending on the circumstances characterized above. To this result there is also something contributed by the more popular discussions that characteristically focus on the possibility that displaced workers will not find new jobs or will only obtain jobs that provide a lower wage than before, because these workers can no longer use the accumulated skills and know-how of a lifetime.

    Of course, that is not the end of the story, at least in the long run. For there is a powerful countervailing force that works to produce long-run benefits to all countries affected by globalization. The power of international competition has arguably contributed much of the unparalleled, sustained economic growth and the unrivalled explosion of innovation that the free-market economies have experienced in the past two centuries. In the countries that have participated in this process, the economic benefits are so spectacular that they could hardly have been imagined by our ancestors. Globalization can extend this process to other nations and can strengthen such developments substantially even in the world's leading economies. Although difficult to quantify, this may well be the greatest economic promise of globalization.

    Anyone Can Err

    If the arguments of this paper are not themselves in error, what I have shown is that the economics profession can, indeed, sometimes show the layperson the error of his or her more common-sense thoughts. But not always. Sometimes the errors and the route toward correction go the other way. This observation is not meant in any way to denigrate the work of my colleagues. After all, it is only through careful analysis that one can discover where it is the specialist who has been wrong and where the often exceedingly fallible common sense of those with no formal training in the field has turned out to be closer to the underlying reality.

    We have also seen that misunderstanding in the field of economics can have consequences beyond pushing researchers and teachers in misguided directions. Perhaps as much as any discipline, erroneous economic analysis and conclusions can elicit policies severely damaging to the public interest. And, in this, I believe that we economists do have something to answer for. We are all too prone to put more faith in the implications derived from our quite appropriately simplified models, and to draw from those implications policies that really only apply universally in the artificial world of the constructed model.

    The recommendation to ourselves that seems appropriate here is advocacy of somewhat enhanced modesty when we do offer advice, and more ready willingness to remind our listeners that, though we are offering the best advice we are in a position to provide, they must recognize that the recommended course may yet prove dangerous to the public health.