I think Brad DeLong makes a good point today. It’s true that we lost a lot of traditionally blue-collar-male jobs to China in the early aughts, but the trade deficits that crowded-out those jobs also had a mirror-image effect: Imports crowd-in traditionally-male blue-collar wholesale trade jobs, and finance traditionally-male blue-collar construction (and capital-goods manufacturing) jobs. If you look at all traditionally-male blue-collar jobs—wholesale, construction, manufacturing, and mining—what you get is not a story of the trade deficit, but rather a story of (a) macro shocks to aggregate demand, and (b) the long-run technology-and-preferences trend—some of which is automation…. [The […]
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