"The Greatest Gift that Economic Wisdom Ever Bestowed on Humankind"

Clive Crook in the October issue of the Atlantic (only an excerpt available free online) looks with distress on a recent trend of major public economists turning their backs on the wisdom of international free trade. His conclusion:

[Paul] Samuelson once regarded the principle of comparative advantage–the modern theory of the gains from trade–as nontrivial. I would go a little further and say it was the greatest gift that economic wisdom ever bestowed on humankind. In a way that Samuelson did not envisage, the doubts that he and others have expressed threaten to make that idea trivial after all–dismissed as nothing more than an arresting curiosity, apt to be oversimplified by blinkered pro-trade types, with no real policy content and no claim on politicians' attention. What a tragedy that would be.

In our July 2004 issue, contributing editor Brink Lindsey offered "10 Truths About Trade."