Defunct Economists

Professor Paul Samuelson's Economics: An Introductory Analysis has been the bestselling college economics textbook for more than fifty years. Many of his brightest students went on to important positions in business, finance and government policy-making. Some became influential economists themselves and spread the faith further. "I don't care who writes a nation's laws--or crafts its advanced treaties--if I can write its economics textbooks," the author once boasted.

Now comes Professor Samuelson, age 89, to announce an important correction. Free trade, he explains, may not be win-win, after all. In certain circumstances, when a very poor but ambitious nation is trading with a wealthy advanced economy, free trade can turn into a very ugly loser for the wealthy country--inflicting permanent economic loss, stagnant wages, greater inequality and other hurtful consequences. The professor's reasoning is expressed in the abstract language of orthodox economics, but he does name the two countries he has in mind--the United States and China. His paper, published in the Summer issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, bears the lighthearted title, "Where Ricardo and Mill Rebut and Confirm Arguments of Mainstream Economists Supporting Globalization."

Samuelson's announced purpose is to correct the sloppy thinking of leading economists (including some of his former grad students). He scolds them for promoting "popular polemical untruth" to defend globalization against those Luddite antiglobalization protesters in the streets, who turn out to be not entirely wrong.

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