There's a natural antipathy on the part of the voters to a continuation of globalization as we know it. It's simply a code word today for bad trade deals that disadvantage the American people.
It does the American economy no long-term good to only keep the big box factories where we are now assembling 'American' products that are composed primarily of foreign components. We need to manufacture those components in a robust domestic supply chain that will spur job and wage growth.
Even though Mr. Trump is a billionaire, he is still able to relate to average working men and women. The billionaire gets along with the bricklayer.
If you've been to China, you know there are over 100 cities in China, and the pollution levels are just horrific - 60,000 people a year die in Chinese factories and facilities because they don't have any safety regulations. It's a carnage; it's Dickensian.
Donald Trump is not a protectionist. If he imposes tariffs on China or any other country that cheats, all he wants to do is defend America against unfair trade practices.
The way the textbook works is you have gains from trade that should be distributed across all the trading partners. As soon as one bad actor like China massively cheats, they win at the expense of us; they win at the expense of Europe, and over time, it threatens the entire integrity of the global financial system and the global trading system.
Politicians need money at election time and money to get the vote. Well, more than half of money in election comes from corporate interests whose interests are in polluting the Chinese environment and making products.
Let me say right off the bat that I'm not what you would call a 'tree hugger' or a 'bushes and bunnies' environmentalist out to save the planet or the whales - although I do not denigrate that perspective either, and I really like whales.
My fellow economists and academics fail to understand the economics of trade in the real world. Traditional models of academia respect free trade without considering whether it is fair trade.
My citizen activism is a direct outgrowth of a classical and fiscally conservative training in economics at Harvard. It is a perspective rooted in one of the most important concepts in economics - the need for government intervention in the presence of a market failure.
In a free market and in the absence of planning, developers will flatten every hillside, fill every canyon, obliterate every endangered species, and pave over every wetland they think they can make a buck on.
It's that evil twin part of me that always comes out at the absolute wrong political moment, like a demon possessing my soul; it exhibits itself as an arrogance or disdain or obnoxiousness or meanness or anger or pettiness - all traits that are lethal in politics.
The biggest single thing China needs to do is build an emergent middle class and domestic consumption, and the best way to do that is through pension and health-care reform, and currency reform to establish purchasing power among its citizens.
I am of the school that believes, for the most part, that gays are born and not made. That is, I believe - and there appears to be significant scientific evidence to back me up - that there is a genetic predisposition to be gay.
Would you rather have cheap, subsidized - illegally subsidized - goods dumped into the Wal-Mart and not have a job and not have your wages go up in 15 years, or would you like to pay a little bit more - not much - a little bit more, have a job, and have your wages going up? I think the American people are going to make that choice.
One of the goals of the Trump administration is to reclaim all of the supply chain and manufacturing capability that would otherwise exist if the playing field were level.
The far more likely Trump scenario is this: Chinese leaders realize they no longer have a weak leader in the White House; China ceases its unfair trade practices. America's massive trade deficit with China comes peacefully and prosperously back into balance, and both the U.S. and Chinese economies benefit from trade.
The defining moment in American economic history is when Bill Clinton lobbied to get China into the World Trade Organization. It was the worst political and economic mistake in American history in the last 100 years.
I teach MBAs. And I noticed, starting a few years after China joined the World Trade Organization, that a lot of my students were no longer employed. They were still coming to get their MBA, but they'd lost their jobs. And I started to ask questions why. And, at that point, all roads were leading to Beijing.
It's extraordinary to me - you cannot name a presidential candidate in history who has singlehandedly, through bad trade deals, destroyed more American jobs and more American factories than Hillary Clinton. She did NAFTA, she did China's entry into the World Trade Organization, she did the South Korean 2012 deal - every single one of those.
