This critique isn't entirely fair, but the anger behind it is heartfelt. Global markets are giving poor countries a shot at prosperity, and the attack on trade is an attack on that hope. The protesters, an Indian participant told Salon's Shapiro, were "like Marie Antoinette, saying let them have cake." Self-sufficiency sounds romantic and independent, but it is a prescription for poverty. While many protesters seemed genuinely concerned about the fate of the world's poor, the policies they advocate would cut off the only processes through which living standards improve.
Rising living standards--whether in a village, a region, a nation, or the world--depend first on specialization: on letting people concentrate on what they do best and trade with others who specialize in other things. The part of this process that is hard for anyone but economists to understand, because it is not intuitive, is that success doesn't depend on doing something better than the person (or country) with whom you're trading. As my economist husband likes to put it, there's a good reason that Michael Jordan doesn't mow his own lawn. Jordan might be the best mower in the world, but his time is more productively used elsewhere. As societies grow richer, they also become more and more specialized, a process that is both cause and effect.
The countries of the Third World want the chance, in effect, to cut the grass for the basketball stars of the rich West. Their workers would like the opportunity to specialize in labor-intensive drudgery that creates products for which people elsewhere are willing to trade. Through that trade, the poor people of the world can obtain goods produced in capital- and skill-intensive industries abroad--pharmaceuticals, refrigerators, even movies and basketball--and the capital needed to invest in productive infrastructure. Without the specialization and exchange, these products would be impossible to obtain. So what look like bad jobs at bad wages are in fact the paths out of poverty.
Would it be better if poor people around the world could have fun at work? Absolutely. Unfortunately, the choice they face today is not between drudgery and fun. It is between drudgery without exchange--self-sufficiency without the bonus paid by other people to avoid it--and drudgery with the possibility to accumulate the skills, property, and perhaps capital that represent a better life.
There are other, more upbeat, aspects of trade. One is the creativity encouraged by competition: the open-ended push to do more, better, with less. The vast improvements in the quality of products from shoes to automobiles over the past 20 years has made us all effectively richer.
And that improvement is not just a matter of competition. Worldwide markets also foster the exchange of knowledge. They bring more minds, working from more different perspectives, to every problem. International exchange carries knowledge through words, of course, but also through experience--as people move across companies and countries--and through products, customs, and services themselves.
These processes are abstract and mysterious when they happen to other people. And they are so particular, real, and incremental that we barely notice them when we experience them ourselves. We assume that toys have always been cheap, clothes always abundant, menus always varied, and Japan always rich. We get lulled into believing that free trade with poor people will make us poor ourselves, forgetting that we live in the world's largest, and most prosperous, free trade zone, and that the people of California have not been immiserated by the rising wealth of Georgia.
Seattle was about "everything." Most particularly, it was about whether we will allow the complacency that comes with affluence--the assumption that good times will continue because the institutions that support them are inevitable--to wreck not only our own hopes but the hopes of humanity worldwide. People who want to build walls never, ever give up.
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