Re: Free-trade economists use Bad Math

"topmind" wrote in message ...

And there are additional factors that should be considered, such as
environmental damage and labor laws (40-hour work weeks, child labor,
etc.)

That's true even if you don't have free trade.

Raw free-trade is only the most logical if you use an oversimplified
model that measures *only* GDP.

Not necessarily.
For many years, free trade was considered best by most economists. Then in
the 1980s, the "new" trade theory showed that free trade might not be as
good as previously thought; in fact, under some conditions, protectionism
could be better than free trade. Then different variants of new trade
theory arose, which showed that free trade was _even_better_ than the old
theory predicted.

Moral: If you don't like the predictions from an economic theory, just
change the assumptions till you get the result you like.

<snip weird stuff about Toshiba vs Apple. Note that it wasn't Toyota vs GM>

Dan in Philly


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