"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."