Where Ricardo and Mill Rebut and Confirm Arguments of Mainstream Economists Supporting Globalization

As far as I read this, Paul Samuelson has finally exposed enough truth to turn around the equilibrium theory, and free trade theories. This paper, that was originally published in September, is, in my opinion, the most important economic facts ever produced. If enough economists recognize the significance of Paul's refutation of his original work about equilibrium theory and facts, we have a chance of truly solving the world's problems.

If you check out Skidelsky's article I posted yesterday, and look at it in conjunction with this new post by Samuelson, I think you may come to the same conclusion I have. My conclusion is to look at Paul Davidson's and John M. Keynes' full works and realize how valid they truly are, now that the false equilibrium theory has been exposed by Samuelson. I'll have much more on this later...

Paul A. Samuelson
Most noneconomists are fearful when an emerging China or India, helped by their still low real wage rates, outsourcing and miracle export-led developments, cause layoffs from good American jobs. This is a hot issue now, and in the coming decade, it will not go away. Prominent and competent mainstream economists enter into the debate to educate and correct warm-hearted protestors who are against globalization. Here is a fair paraphrase of the argumentation that has been used recently by Alan Greenspan, Jagdish Bhagwati, Gregory Mankiw, Douglas Irwin and economists John or Jane Doe spread widely throughout academia.

Yes, good jobs may be lost here in the short run. But still total U.S. net national product must, by the economic laws of comparative advantage, be raised in the long run (and in China, too). The gains of the winners from free trade, properly measured, work out to exceed the losses of the losers. This is not by mysterious fuzzy magic, but rather comes from a sharing of the trade-induced rise in total global vectors of the goods and services that people in a democracy want. Never forget to tally the real gains of consumers alongside admitted possible losses of some producers in this working out of what Schumpeter called “creative capitalist destruction.”

Correct economic law recognizes that some American groups can be hurt by dynamic free trade. But correct economic law vindicates the word “creative” destruction by its proof [sic] that the gains of the American winners are big enough to more than compensate the losers.

The last paragraph can be only an innuendo. For it is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings—as I proved in my “Little Nobel Lecture of 1972” (1972b) and elsewhere in references here cited (see also Johnson and Stafford, 1993; Gomory and Baumol, 2000). The present paper provides explication of the popular polemical untruth... Paul A. Samuelson - Continued

GLOBAL IMBALANCES AND THE LESSONS OF BRETTON WOODS - Barry Eichengreen