YouSaid · the spoken record

Doug Irwin

lines on the record: 63
first: 2017-11-29
most recent: 2017-11-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I've always been interested in that, in particular because I think there's something unique about Chicago in the 1930s, that you had these people, James Buchanan, your former colleague, who would go there as a socialist and come out as a free market advocate. In fact, he'd said within the first six weeks of Frank Knight's course he was converted. But he wasn't the only one. Milton Friedman went in as a new dealer and said Jacob Viner's course on price theory opened his eyes. And there are many testimonies of other people who go there with sort of leftist views, but they come out thinking something else. Now, to have that sort of intellectual or ideological conversion in the 1930s during the Great Depression of all periods, there must have been something going on in the classroom that is convincing people that despite the problems we see, socialism or communism is not the correct alternative. And so I've always been interested in what was Frank Knight teaching, Henry Simons, Jacob Viner that convinced people that the market-oriented”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know about pessimism, but certainly they're going to have to choose a different path. So if these people are going to be going into services rather than manufacturing, it could be the schooling system's much more important to the extent that human capital is more important for services. So they just can't follow the old recipe that other countries did before them.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't necessarily agree because when you look at the steel industry in the United States, it's really become fragmented. You don't have the big integrated mills anymore. They've spread across the whole geography of the United States. You have the local mini-mills. And I think the same thing can happen in many developing countries. So you can have local small steel industry that's efficient, same with other things. So I think you can still have sort of this fragmentation of production and local production and not necessarily just have everything centralized in one or two countries.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“optimistic because unlike manufactured goods or agricultural goods or merchandise in general, each service sector sort of has its own specific trade costs, if you will. Financial services, every country has its own regime, its own regulatory regime, a lot of services are regulated locally, harmonizing those is very difficult. It's not like you have one single transport cost or a tax at the border. It's more of the regulatory regime with regard to services. And that's why I think the WTO is actually sort of, I wouldn't say, failed, but there is a GATS, a general agreement on trade and services, and it's a pretty, in my view, empty agreement. It doesn't have a lot of deep commitments. It hasn't stimulated a lot of growth in trade and services, in my view, sort of this vague language about non-discrimination and what have you. But every service sector is different. Airline services, banking services, insurance services. And so these have to be sort of addressed not within one test.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The death of distance may have more of an impact on terms of trade and services. So for merchandise, there's shipping costs and things of that, and they have come down, of course. But with services, either there you need direct investment or it can be transmitted over the internet. And so their distance doesn't matter quite as much.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, the 1990s was special because we had the collapse of communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so a lot of regime change that led to some of these things. And so we need a big reform moment in Africa. I agree with you entirely that Africa is sort of the big chunk of the world where there are a lot of people and they're still very close to trade. They both have trade policies and bad infrastructure that greatly increase trade costs. So if we're going to see big growth in the future, you'd think that's where it's going to be. But I don't think we're going to have a big necessarily have a big reform moment in Africa where there's a sort of a simultaneous opening up. It could be more piecemeal. It could be more drawn out over time. That's where the growth could occur, but I don't think it's going to be a big bang like we saw in the 1990s.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My sorry for that is that what we saw in the 1980s, pardon me 1990s is the great opening of the developing world. So China, India, A bunch of African countries, other countries in Southeast Asia. Vietnam would be a great example too. And so you got this one-off big effect of countries that have been relatively closed to world trade, really reducing trade barriers significantly and big boosts to world trade growth as a result of that. That's sort of a one-off thing. Once you've cut tariffs from 30% to 10% or 5% or something, if you further cut them, you're just not going to get the growth and trade effects that you had before. So I think it's sort of a one-off effect of many developing countries entering into world trade, sometimes for the first time in a big way. And I'm not worried by the slowdown. Obviously, the world economy has slowed down. That's one reason why. We shouldn't expect world trade to grow at two or three times the growth of world GDP in perpetuity.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's almost hard to separate those things out because they're sort of reinforcing. So comparative advantage is sort of a narrow concept, but it has sort of a broad applicability. The way we teach it just is it sort of a technology factor. Specialization reinforces technological advantages in many senses. So I'm not sure I could sort of load what percent of trade is due to compared to advantage. In some sense, a lot of it, but can't give you a metric or a number.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Responsible for all of the successes he's had in his career because I interviewed him for a job at the Council of Economic Advisors. That was the first time we met. And if I had said, this guy doesn't merit a position here, he would have gone back to Harvard and nothing would have been heard of him since. So by launching his career and getting him into the CEA, it made available many opportunities for him later on.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But to journalists, to the public policy, professionals, and things of that sort. And so I think that's one thing I've also internalized a bit as well. You just can't write a paper, submit it to a working paper series, and then sent to journals. You have to market a little bit. That's much easier today in the age of Twitter. But back then that was considered something very unusual.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very big impact. He was my thesis advisor. I took a number of courses with him at Columbia University. I think I learned two things from him. One, he made economics very fun. So I don't know that you've ever talked to him, but he's always telling jokes. He's a great rock on tour. He has great stories. He's laughing a lot. In that came across in his class. Economics is a fun activity. It's a fun discipline. It's not just sort of sterile theory or what have you. So I try to bring that little bit of joy and levity to economics the way I teach it and hopefully the way I write about it as well. The other thing I learned from him is marketing. So this is back in the pre-internet and what have you. And we wrote a paper when I was in graduate school. And not only was there a paper, but he got a New York Times column that we were allowed to write for the business section out of it. The economist did a box on that article. I mean, he was a master at disseminating his work, not just to other academics.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is in 1987, I believe, and I was at the Council of Economic Advisors. I was in graduate school, big fan of Friedman, read his column in Newsweek in the 1970s in middle school and what have you. I was very excited. So he was going to give a talk to people in the administration. There's some room in the old executive office building where he was going to be speaking. So I made sure to get there very early and to get a good seat right up front so I could see him. So I sat literally in the front row, right in front of the podium, anxiously waiting his arrival. And he comes in, of course, crowd fills in, but I've got the best seat. And of course he's standing behind the podium and I didn't see anything but the top of his head for the hour that he's lectured because of course he's so short that he didn't really poke over the podium. So I should have sat like 10 rows back and I would have seen him. I did get to speak with him afterwards, but during his talk I didn't see him at all.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, but I guess you need the investment to draw people in or something. And Boston area has been much more flourishing in terms of attracting young people, certainly professionals and things of that sort. So I'm not sure exactly what New Hampshire's big claim to fame is. It's sort of an older state, so maybe that's why it's a high income state because in the Hanover area, you've got a lot of doctors.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure. You look at the sort of the southern part of the state where I don't live, Manchester, Nashua seems very prosperous. There's a lot of spillover investment from the Boston area, and its proximity to Boston has been a great help. It's a little bit isolated. The winters are cold, but I think I worry a little bit about, in fact, a lot of economists in the state worry about the demographics and the business climate, where a lot of young people are not being attracted to the state. And the business climate is not as favorable as we in the state like to think. We say we have no income tax, we have no sales tax, we want businesses to come here, but the business taxes are more of a hurdle than one would.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In other words, is it the, what did President Trump say as a hotbed of a den of It's a very beautiful place. It's got the highest per capita income in the United States. Yes, how did you?”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underrated or overrated I guess it depends on what dimension. So it's gotten a lot of attention. I'm very happy with that because I have a book on it. And so I think more people should be aware of it and some of its costs. It does get brought up a lot in trade policy debates. And maybe these are mainly among wonks. And it used to be the sort of reflex that Trade Economists would bring about saying disaster will happen if we impose this tariff. I guess to that extent the dirty little secret might be is that it's overrated because it didn't cause the Great Depression and a lot of the weight that was put on it, it doesn't support that. But that said, it was a very bad thing. So it's evil.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's very highly rated and I think deservedly so. So I don't think he's overrated or underrated. I guess I'll punt on that one”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I enjoyed it. I thought it got a lot of criticism because it didn't show the context or didn't show Churchill. But that's not the purpose of the movie. The movie was what the men on the ground were feeling and reacting to, and I thought it succeeded. I liked it.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you listen to the debate, and this is sort of maybe Britain's NAFTA in some sense, If you went back to the NAFTA debate, you got these, some people saying it's going to create a lot of jobs, create a lot of exports, it's going to be a huge gain for the United States, or the other side being huge number of jobs losses, disaster for the United States, giant sucking sound and what have you. And then you sort of lose the middle ground. And I think the weight of the evidence, in my view, is that Britain would lose some of its market access to Western Europe. They're going to lose some of their financial sector. And it's not clear that what they gain in terms of sovereignty or what have you or regulatory freedom is going to compensate for that loss of trade and investment.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we really haven't seen many actions except for pulling out of TPP, which arguably Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders would have done as well. But we haven't seen the trade cases come to the president's desk and higher tariffs being imposed or quotas or what have you. But I think the damage is more the rhetoric in some sense. You're alienating South Korea, an ally during a very tense time. You're getting the Mexicans to actually think about, gee, we could live without NAFTA. And we could stick it to the Americans like we used to in the past instead of thinking about them as a partner because we've got all these other free trade agreements with the EU and we'd keep the one with Canada and we could keep TPP. And so you sort of get, so there's no gain to the US from that and we lose sort of market access in terms of exports if we're discriminated against. So I think there's sort of this deterioration, this rot that can set in.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if we go back to this decentralized view of US trade policy, that's partly been a check and a balance, I think, within the government of Trump just doing something very quickly. So Wilbur Ross, the Department of Commerce, they've sort of encouraged higher steel tariffs in some guys on your national security or what have you. That report has been delayed. Delayed and delayed and delayed. And I think the reason is because there are other agencies that weigh in, other constituencies that can weigh in, and say this isn't good for diplomatic reasons, for national security reasons, for downstream user reasons, or something like that. And so you see the administration sort of divided and actually the reflex can't be activated because there are all these other parties that are getting their voice heard. Whereas if you did centralize things, it might be very easy for that centralized authority to say, this is what we're going to do. It doesn't matter if their voices to the negative. We just won't listen to them. So I think you're referring to Bob Zellick's Wall Street Journal article of not too long ago. I think the damage is not so much in particular actions.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wish, but what would it be? I haven't thought about which terrace I'd like to impose recently, but I guess if I was advisor, I'd say they're coming because there are certain cases under the provisions of US trade law where you will have a choice on your desk about whether to impose tariffs or not. So that's the way the process works. You cannot unilaterally decide to raise these things by yourself. You have to wait for them to come to you. And they are coming, just be patient. But of course, he's not very patient, and we'll see.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I prefer the sprawling mess. So I spent a year at the Council of Economic Advisors a long time ago, and I got to watch this interagency process work its way out. And I think what it does is it provides it sort of checks and balances on USTR or any lead agency in terms of any one particular area of trade negotiation. So it's an internal checks and balances. It provides coherence because USTR is not going to do something that the Department of Agriculture is going to be very upset about. They can sort of coordinate that. And I think the problem is if you centralize it, and actually there have been many proposals over the years, particularly in the 1980s when we needed a MIDI, just like Japan had one negotiating arm that would do everything in industrial policy. Your centralized power, whenever you centralize power, I think it'll become, do things that we don't necessarily want it to do.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Process. And the question is, is this a way to go forward? And I think what you've seen is that countries are just bypassing it. They've gone to regional bilateral or even sectoral sorts of agreements to avoid the whole mass of countries trying to agree on one common trade policy for everyone.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Organization. And at some point, as we're moving in this direction, Canada sort of snuck up to the US negotiations and whispered in their ear, you know what, it may not be a good idea to every country talking about these things because not everyone's on the same page. And in particular, they pointed out India and Brazil and a few others, which they called the more protectionist-minded countries of the era. And so that's why we went ahead with the GATT, which is a small nuclear club of sort of like-minded countries to liberalize trade. And the ITO actually never came into being. But when we shifted from the GATT to the WTO in 1995, we brought everyone into the room. And so now it has 160 members or something like that. And it operates by consensus, meaning it's sort of the lowest common denominator sort of negotiating forum. Everyone has to agree. The former director general of the WTO once said it was like a car with one accelerator and 150 handbrakes. So any country, not quite, but almost any country can sort of step on the brakes and stop.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a big question about whether there is. So it used to be said that, okay, so it's not so great for negotiating trade agreements anymore. They can't seem to get a consensus. The Doha round is the first real negotiating round that absolutely failed, and that's been terminated now. And it's been over 20 years since they have reached any sort of major multilateral agreement. The argument among economists has been, well, okay, so it's not so great people are bypassing it in terms of trade negotiations, but it's great because of the dispute settlement system. But now we see the Trump administration saying we don't like this dispute settlement system. And if the US undermines that, then it's really not clear what the role of the WTO would have. It wouldn't be an efficient forum for trade negotiations and it wouldn't have an effective dispute settlement system if the US blows it up or walks away from it or something like that. I think part of the problem with the WTO, at least in terms of negotiations, has been something that Canada identified way back in the 1940s, which I think is in the book. After World War II, we were going to set up a big multilateral organization called the ITO, the International Trade.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Others not. But to say that we'd be better off without NAFTA, I don't think either United States or Mexico would be. And here's where you get sort of these nebulous things. John Stuart Mill talked about them in terms of the benefits of trade. There's sort of an attitudinal shift in Mexico, much greater openness towards the world. And that's been all to the better. We've seen basically one-party state dissolve into a competitive democracy. And so I think NAFTA and the greater openness that it's brought about has been very good for Mexico.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spoke to one trade negotiator about this once, and they said, NAFTA's not a good trade agreement. NAFTA is an effing great trade agreement. And I agree, it's a great trade agreement. And once again, U.S. barriers towards a Mexican products were already pretty low. So it's not like we're getting some big consumer surplus gains from taking down pretty big barriers. But what it did was, so let us fly the U.S.-Mexican relationship. And so here you're appealing to foreign policy a little bit, but also you're trying to undertake measures to strengthen the Mexican economy and have a long-term partnership. And I think it's on net been very good for Mexico. Once again, it hasn't been perfect because recall that within a year after NAFTA went to effect, they had a financial crisis. They've had major banking and financial issues through the late 1990s and into the 2000s. Obviously, NAFTA is not a silver bullet. Well, it just makes the Mexican economy transformed into something great. There's a lot of still reforms that have to be done in Mexico. Some of it macroeconomic.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, remember, we had huge fiscal surpluses in the 1880s, late 1870s and 1880s. So there was clearly scope for a big tax cut and tariffs. And you don't need protectionist tariffs to raise enough revenue to fund the federal government. So the sugar tariff alone, I think it's in the book, I can't remember off the top of my head, but the sugar tariff alone accounted for like 25% of all revenue coming from the tariffs, maybe even more. So you could tax a few select commodities, have them as sort of excise taxes. That raises all the revenue that you need, and you don't need heavy duties on steel rails and cotton textiles and things of that sort, which truly were protectionist duties. They didn't raise much revenue. They did block imports and helped out domestic interests that way.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Import competing producers in Philadelphia and elsewhere began shifting their allegiance from the Federalists who are thought to be in favor of a strong center of government and promotion of manufacturing to the Jeffersonian Republicans who they saw as being much more willing to impose pretty draconian restrictions on imports.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For various reasons, not just defense, but possibly for productivity increases. It's producing useful things. It's an economic activity that we should want and not try to discourage. But there's so many things to point out about that report. The main thing, I think, is when you look at his activities when he was Secretary of the Treasury, he did not want to keep out imports. He wanted a constant flow, a large flow of imports coming in, because that was his tax base. And he viewed the fiscal sustainability of the federal government as being much more important than any sort of tinkering with trying to promote manufacturers here and there. And so he actually rejected proposals coming from the opposite party, Jefferson and Madison, to have embargoes against Britain or limits on trade because he wanted to finance the fiscal deficits and he thought any sort of disruption to imports would upset those fiscal plans. In fact, he was so much against those plans that”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, first of all, he gets that reputation because of the report on manufacturers, which can certainly be read that way, and he certainly makes, actually, what's interesting about the report on manufacturers is an anti-Adam Smith argument. And it's also an anti-physiocrat argument. So it's anti-Adam Smith in the sense that he doesn't think that the invisible hand will lead to the right allocation of resources, but it's also an antiphysiocrat argument because apparently he was confronting at the time the argument that the wealth of nations is really based on agriculture. And manufacturing is not something we want to get into. And he said,”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a way of getting allowing that 13 independent states to sort of band together and have negotiating authority against other powers, which we didn't have during this period. So the Constitution is very much an outgrowth of U.S. trade politics during this time, and revenue, of course, was another key consideration there under the Articles of Confederation Congress couldn't raise funds. And we had these big deficits, and the debts couldn't be financed. So I think it was sort of a Brexit-gone badly. And in fact, economic historians, Jeff Williamson and Peter Lindert have a book just a couple years ago on sort of American wealth over time. And once again, the data are sort of sketchy, but when you look at U.S. wealth and income in 1776 or the early 1770s, and then you look at it in the 1790s, we're basically after 20 years or so just getting back to where we were before. And a lot of people think this is possibly worse than the Great Depression in terms of the impact on the economic activity of the United States. It wasn't just the revolution, but the 1780s was not a good decade.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the American founding fathers really didn't want to lose market access to the British Empire. So we wanted our political independence. We didn't want taxation without representation. But we thought long term we're very integrated with the British economy. We should maintain that integration. And there was this hope, and actually there's some reason for the hope after we had won the war that Britain would be magnanimous and we could maintain our trading status within the context of the British Empire. But of course, the British didn't see it that way. They said, okay, if you want your political independence, you're going to get your economic independence as well. So all the privileges that you used to have, they're out the window. You're now outside the British Empire. And I don't think the founding fathers really anticipated that this would be the case. And they spent a lot of the 1780s trying to claw their way back into the British Empire and got absolute no give from the British authorities. A lot of this had to do with the Constitution itself and the formation of the Constitution.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They really were, in a sense, that what Britain was doing was actually during this period through the T-Act was cutting the duty on tea and trying to help out and spur undercut smuggling and help out the East India Company. So it wasn't a big tax hike at all. It was actually a tax cut. But the smugglers were the ones who really were invading the British ships and throwing the tea overboard.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think we were very good at whining. First of all, we were getting an enormous implicit subsidy in terms of British national defence. And our tax burdens compared to the average British citizen were very, very low. So we wanted to have it both ways. We wanted Britain to sort of underwrite our defense, but we didn't want to have to pay for it. So there's all the tax debates in the 1760s. We are a little bit of a whiner's. In addition, the trade barriers, Britain was sort of our natural trading partner anyway. And there are some commodities such as tobacco, which were enumerated and had to go through Britain. But when you look at the post-independence period, we don't really shift away from Britain too much. I think the navigation acts have been exaggerated in popular history in terms of how much they're really constricting U.S. commerce and harming the American economy.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they used to be just Terrafax, so they would just change U.S. tariffs. And that was the main purpose of it. So they would be named for the chairman or chairwoman of the House Ways and Means Committee in the Senate Finance Committee. So the official act, for example, Smoot Hawley, which actually should be called the Holly Smoot Tariff because it's always the House first and then the Senate. But the official name of that is the Tariff Act of 1930. So either the press or the members of Congress themselves sort of introduced the moniker to give it a little bit more cachet. But since Smooth Hawley, all the trade acts are not really about tariffs per se. They're about trade negotiating authority. So that's sort of maybe a little less interesting. And so we have the Trade Expansion Act of 1973, the Trade Act of 1974. It's not really like there's one or two key people on key committees who are saying I'm setting tariff rates here, like a tax bill or something like that. So I guess because they're less interesting in that sense, they don't get named.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try to cut it down by saying a lot of it's the index, a lot of it is the endnotes and the references. So it's actually about 690 pages text.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of government spending is just transfer payments, so it made those transfer payments, and the U.S. fiscal deficits easier to accommodate. But, of course, there is going to be a reckoning we do have to pay for those at some point. And just because you're getting cheap credit for a five or ten-year period doesn't mean that you don't want to think about correcting that fiscal deficit and worrying about access to cheap credit, which may not be there forever.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There would have been a China shock, but we said, boy, there are a lot of alternatives elsewhere. So, yes, we were getting capital inflows and had lower interest rates because of the inflows of capital from China, but people don't see that as much and think maybe it propped up the housing bubble and shifted resources into housing. Is history? It happened. I think it doesn't cause me to rethink the case for free trade in any way. We've always known their adjustment costs. We always known certain communities are going to be hurt. But I do think we can exaggerate how important that was in terms of where the US economy is today.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then, and actually, there's some evidence that workers who are displaced from the textile industry in the 1990s were actually getting higher wages outside. But the 2000s is a very different situation. Even though the aggregate unemployment rate was coming down, the 2000s, the Fed was tightening. So the China shock was not a macroeconomic shock, it's not an aggregate demand shock. And as sort of Scott Sumner point of view, certain communities were hurt. But this is also a period where we had a 10% of current account Chinese current account surplus and a big U.S. current account deficit. So I think the problem during the 2000s was the economy wasn't particularly robust. We had these big macroeconomic imbalances, which I think you have to sort of understand the context during that period.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think they've done some really interesting work. I call it a great piece of economic history because the Shiny Shako is a one-off shock. It's not going to happen again. There's a huge increase in the supply of labor to the market sector in China from the 1990s and into the 2000s. And actually, I think we're going to have some papers in the future about the negative China shock because the Chinese labor force is going to be shrinking. So it was a very particular unique period in economic history. And I think if you're thinking about bringing in hundreds of millions of people in China into the market sector, and then you're losing 1 million jobs in the United States over 10 years, that's actually pretty small impact on the United States. Now, impact is particularly hard on those communities where it's a one-factory town or something like that. They're producing furniture or apparel. So it's clear that that had a negative impact there. But there's also sort of a macroeconomic context to what I think you have to think about in terms of the China shock. I don't worry about the 1990s so much because we had a robust growing economy.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit agree because actually the US negotiators were very defensive in terms of what they were asking China. They wanted really exceptions that the US could impose trade barriers against China rather than saying we want much stricter rulers that you can't intervene in this sector or that sector or provide sort of free credit to domestic firms. So we were more interested in exceptions for ourselves to block their textiles or have a special safeguard exception rather than making firm our insistence that China not get its fingers all over their own economy.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possibly, but the question is also you would, I think, have a lot of Chinese entrepreneurship in terms of web development and new apps and things of that sort simply because they know the local market much better than a foreign firm coming in saying we're going to provide this particular service. In addition, if you were able to attract Google and other apps to produce in China, you're adding to local capabilities. So foreign ownership, I don't think, is a particular problem.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Personally, I don't think so because you're limiting access to more choice. Google's a very efficient search engine by limiting access to information by your domestic citizens. Your scientists and others, unless they can breach that wall, they're not going to have access to the best ideas out there.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terms of the rules of trade we in the West sort of see them in terms of limited government support for firms and things of that sort, they're pushing things and I think that we could be moving in a direction where there will be more trade conflict, even set aside Trump and all that sort of thing.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, so one could invoke national security. One could also, I mean, without answering that specific question, and of course we do have this process for reviewing those things, there is a big question about how easily we can integrate China further into the world trading system. That is, I don't think things have developed the way a lot of people hoped when China joined the WTO. And we gave them a permanent normalized trade status. It's become much more mercantilist, much more interventionist, much more protectionist, I think, in sort of non-tariff ways than I think a lot of people thought and hoped that China would evolve. There's a question of, actually, this is a question that economists raised after World War II as well, a great economist such as Jacob Viner saying, can we really integrate the communists and the non-communist worlds in a trading system? And it turns out the answer was no. And I think, I guess my worry with China is the more they push it, and they are pushing sort of the envelope.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said it changes the cost benefit calculation. And I think it may have for China. Just recently watching the Ken Burns Vietnam series on PBS, there are a lot of wars in Southeast Asia beyond the Vietnamese War. China invaded Vietnam, Vietnam invaded Cambodia. And I'm not sure that that sort of local conflict is more, I don't think it's more likely, given the tremendous amount of commerce that's going on and the perceived need of the governments to justify themselves by saying we're providing an adequate standard of living for our people.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know that it's weaker, and I think China is a really difficult one to figure out in terms of whether all the openness we've seen over the past two decades or so is going to lead to political transformation or a change in their foreign policy. It doesn't seem to have yet. So I'd say that the jury is still out. But still, the costs, this goes back to Norman Angel's point. And, of course, he's widely misinterpreted from saying we won't see wars in the future because of increased trade. He didn't say that.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“phenomena, but partly it's because it's very difficult to quantify, first of all, what constitutes peace, how do you sort of operationalize this, what constitutes a trade agreement, trade is endogenous in many respects. So if there's a lot of trade, what exactly is the consequence of that? Sort of what's the exogenous variation where more trade leads to less peace? We'd like to see more peace rather. You'd like to see something like that. So I'm not sure we have really hard social science evidence on it, but I think it's sort of a factor that we economists often overlook. I think a lot of trade policy debates are foreign policy driven, and it's not something we should really neglect.”
2017-11-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Doug Irwin on US Trade Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source