Despite the fact that there were neighboring commuting zones essentially unaffected by the shock (and zones that actually benefitted, say, by importing certain components from China), workers did not move. The working-age population did not decline in the

In the United States, there is another possible reaction. Because many believe the American market system is fundamentally fair, they must then find something else to blame. If they don’t get that job, it must be because the elites have somehow conspired to give it to an African American, a Hispanic, or at one remove, to a Chinese worker. Why would

The idea that more trade is good (on balance) is deeply engrained in anybody who went to graduate school in economics. In May 1930, over a thousand economists had written a letter encouraging President Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley bill. And yet there is something else economists do know but tend to keep closely to themselves: the aggregate gains

What started as an unjustified preference against women resulted in women actually doing worse through no fault of their own, and this reinforced their inferior status.

It drives the point home that for the ultimate consumer, time is money, as is reliability, and it’s money we will never recover. It is not like Amazon will pay Abhijit his hourly wage for his two trips to the grocery store or the two hours spent trying to fix the machine.

McKinsey report6 concludes that 45 percent of US jobs are at risk of being automated, and the OECD estimates that 46 percent of the workers in OECD countries are in occupations at high risk of being either replaced or fundamentally transformed.

“Empirical research in recent decades suggests that findings remain by and large consistent with those in The New Americans National Research Council (1997) in that, when measured over a period of more than 10 years, the impact of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small.”

We don’t understand very well what can deliver permanently faster growth. It just happens (or not).

Even when our preferences do not directly depend on what other people do, the behavior of others can convey a signal that alters our beliefs and our behavior.