If Donald Trump somehow did mean to create a golden age, it’s pretty clear that his plan isn’t working. Rather than fixing any of the many things that were wrong with the U.S. or the global economy, the chaos of Trump’s shifting tariff policy has broken even the things that were going right. Inflation and interest rates are up, the dollar is sinking. And that’s even putting aside the rest of the damage the Trump regime is doing to domestic institutions.
To understand whether there was any method beyond Trump’s chaos, why massive tariffs aren’t working (and can’t), and what could actually be done to address the discontents of globalization, we talked to the economist Dani Rodrik, professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and he walked us through how we got into this mess — and how we might get out.
The era of hyperglobalization that started in the 1990s — and flipped trade policies on their head by putting democracy to work for globalization — has ended.
The rise of populist authoritarianism is a backlash to the very real problems of hyperglobalization and loss of local agency — with the blame shifted onto out-group Others.
Trump’s plans can’t work because he’s only looking at adjusting trade policy — tariffs — and is repeating the mistakes of the architects of free trade in the 1990s by ignoring domestic problems.
The economic collapse we are living through is not an effect of policy, but of Trump’s lack of policy — he’s just a chaos machine.
The key to better policy is a coherent domestic strategy for upgrading productivity — trade should be in a supporting role, not a leading one — that’s what China did in the 1990s, and it lifted millions out of poverty.
To win in the future, progressives need to put domestic policy first: not just offer a vision and a pathway for making service jobs satisfying and enabling a middle-class existence, but to organize around that fundamental challenge.
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A programming note: More Live conversations this week!
We’re back tomorrow, Wednesday, April 23, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, when we’ll be speaking with the writer, lawyer, and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Then on Thursday, April 24, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be joined by labor leader Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO. You won’t want to miss any of these!
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