Economists Against Free Trade!

Some heresy on trade from Harvard's Dani Rodrik, who argues in the Financial Times that the greatest threat to globalization is not from its opponents, but its "cheerleaders." He writes:

That is because the greatest obstacle to sustaining a healthy, globalised economy is no longer insufficient openness. Markets are freer from government interference than they have ever been. Import restrictions such as tariff and non-tariff barriers are lower than ever. Capital flows in huge magnitudes. Despite barriers, legal and illegal immigration approaches levels not seen since the 19th century.

Consequently, no country's growth prospects are significantly constrained by a lack of openness in the international economy. Even if the Doha trade round fails, poor countries will have enough access to rich country markets to achieve what countries such as China, Vietnam and India have been able to do. Closed markets may have been a fundamental problem during the 1950s and 1960s; it is hard to believe they still are. The greatest risk to globalisation is elsewhere. It lies in the prospect that national governments' room for manoeuvre will shrink to such levels that they will be unable to deliver the policies that their electorates want and need in order to buy into the global economy.

Globalisation's soft underbelly is the imbalance between the national scope of governments and the global nature of markets. A healthy economic system necessitates a delicate compromise between these two. Go too much in one direction and you have protectionism and autarky. Go too much in the other and you have an unstable world economy with little social and political support from those it is supposed to help.

The other side, from the Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby, who takes on the argument that the US should take a "strategic pause" in pushing trade agreements:

If the United States refuses to do new trade deals, its partners will push ahead with agreements among themselves, reducing tariffs for each other's products while shutting out American ones. And if they are denied a chance to gain access to U.S. markets via negotiation, foreigners will seek it via litigation.

Meanwhile, over at Princeton, Alan Blinder is having doubts about trade, too, according to the Wall Street Journal. Greg Mankiw, who was an undergraduate student of Blinder's at Princeton, answered with a blog post "My Father is Darth Vader." Of course, that implies that Mankiw thinks he's Luke Skywalker. That's fine with me, provided I can be Lando Calrissian.