ECONOMIC CONVERGENCE
My latest NYT column looks at a real-world example of a common fear:
Suppose we lived in an economic world with no borders, where goods, capital and people could move anywhere.
We've all heard the dire predictions of what would happen. All the businesses and jobs would rush to the places with the lowest wages. The poor countries would get richer, but only by making rich countries poorer.
Eventually we'd all be roughly equal, but formerly well-to-do Americans would be a lot worse off. Many Americans are afraid that globalization and free trade will have exactly this effect.
We rarely realize that we already live in a version of that theoretical world. The United States is one giant free trade zone. Businesses can move their plants, investors can move their money and workers can move themselves from region to region without government permission.
The rest is here.