History and Economic Cycles

Can Trump Turn Back the Economic Clock?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/magazine/trump-economy-finance-history.html
The president thinks he can return America to manufacturing glory — but the cycles of economic history are hard to break.

Binyamin Appelbaum notes:

Free trade is not the primary reason for these trends. It’s not even the biggest reason manufacturing employment has declined; technology has eliminated a lot more jobs than China. But Trump’s fixation on trade resonates with many Americans because it captures something fundamental about the way that American elites have betrayed the social contract. Economists argued that trade could benefit everyone, but even if that was true, it required the government to redistribute the gains — and for the most part, it didn’t.

Trade made the rich richer, and it reduced the earnings of the 70 percent of workers who didn’t have college degrees. “The argument was always that the winners could compensate the losers,” the economist Joseph Stiglitz told me in 2015. “But the winners never do.” 

Related:

The Intellectual Godfathers of Protectionism
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-intellectual-godfathers-of-protectionism