Trade has enriched humanity, continuously providing cheaper and better goods while dramaticallydecreasing global poverty. Extreme poverty’s end is now in sight. A Gallup poll released recently shows that 58% of Americans view trade as an opportunity rather than a threat, and this belief has been rising. Yet we seldom hear of the incredible benefits of exchange. The 2016 presidential election has brought with it an increased interest in U.S. trade with China, with political figures like Donald Trump prominently focusing on the alleged “harm” done by China to the United States. Here are the three main arguments that trade-skeptics use regarding China and reasons why those arguments are wrong.
1) Trade-skeptics often claim that trade with China is “taking American jobs.” However, in most cases American and Chinese workers are not competing for the same jobs because they do different kinds of work.
Comparative advantage and specialization play an important role in every trade relationship. China has the comparative advantage in light manufacturing and heavy industry, while the U.S. has an advantage in areas involving a high degree of human capital like technology, education, and precision industrial manufacturing.
Fewer and fewer Americans work in grueling areas like traditional manufacturing and agriculture—still common in China. The fall in traditional manufacturing and agriculture employment has been more than offset by a rise in the caring professions and in creative and knowledge-intensive careers, which are safer, more intellectually stimulating, and help improve the standard of living in the United States.
For example, the number of physicians per person has risen in the United States, and there are also more teachers per student. The graph below shows that, while manufacturing employment has decreased, total non-agricultural employment has soared.
2) Second, many people are concerned about China’s so-called currency manipulation. China, they claim, is keeping the value of the yuan artificially low relative to the U.S. dollar. That means that Americans pay less for Chinese goods. As HumanProgress.org board member Mark J. Perry puts it,
[T]he “manipulation” of China’s currency is actually to the distinct advantage of millions of American consumers (especially low-income Americans) and U.S. businesses buying products and inputs made in China. Those two groups certainly aren’t complaining about low-priced Chinese products, and in fact would be made worse off if China were forced to revalue its currency and in the process make its products more expensive for Americans.
So if neither American consumers nor U.S. import-buying businesses would benefit from a stronger yuan and a reduction in China’s “foreign aid” to America, who would really benefit? The same group that always benefits from protectionist, mercantilist trade policies: domestic producers who compete against foreign rivals in China and elsewhere … Unfortunately, the costs to consumers from protectionism are greater than the benefits to producers, resulting in a net economic loss for the country and a reduction in its standard of living.
In other words, while a few industries would benefit, the vast majority of Americans would be made poorer by America’s imposition of protectionist policies or penalties on China.
3) Finally, China trade-skeptics often claim that trade leads to the exploitation of Chinese laborers and makes them worse off. However, as Cato’s Johan Norberg wrote,
“Western activists rail against ‘sweatshops,’ but among researchers and economists from left to right there is a consensus that these jobs are the stepping stones out of poverty.”
Lest we forget, the United States and Europe had their own sweatshops during the Industrial Revolution. Work was often dangerous and difficult—though not as much as the drudgery of agricultural subsistence. Yet, as a result of the industrial revolution, life expectancy and GDP per capita shot up while poverty fell rapidly. Since economic liberalization, life expectancy in China has skyrocketed, nearing the U.S. level, and hundreds of millions of Chinese have escaped from extreme poverty. That represents the greatest reduction in poverty the world has ever seen.
As prosperity has increased, gender inequality has diminished, and a smaller share of the population suffers from food inadequacy. If the trade-skeptics genuinely care about the wellbeing of the poor in China, they should support the most successful anti-poverty program of all time: economic freedom, including freedom to trade internationally.
Mobile-Phone Technology Powers Saving Surge in Developing Economies
“More adults than ever in low- and middle-income countries now have bank or other financial accounts, leading to a rise in formal saving, according to the World Bank Group’s Global Findex 2025 report. This momentum in financial inclusion is creating new economic opportunities. Mobile-phone technology played a key role in the surge, with 10% of adults in developing economies using a mobile-money account to save—a 5-percentage point increase from 2021.
In 2024, 40% of adults in developing economies saved in a financial account in 2024—a 16-percentage-point increase since 2021 and the fastest rise in more than a decade. Higher personal saving—through banks or other formal institutions—fuels national financial systems, making more funds available for investment, innovation, and economic growth. In Sub-Saharan Africa, formal savings increased by 12-percentage points to 35% of adults.”
There Are Half a Billion Mobile Money Accounts in the World
“In 2010, there were just 13 million mobile money accounts in the world, fewer than the population of my home country, the Netherlands. By 2023, this had reached more than 640 million. That’s more than twice the total number of Netflix subscriptions worldwide…
What’s immediately obvious is how much of this growth has come from Sub-Saharan Africa; it’s home to more than half of the world’s accounts. In 2023, there were over 330 million active mobile money accounts in the region; more than one mobile money account for every four people.
What’s changed? One of the obvious drivers of this growth has been the widespread adoption of mobile phones, not just in the richest countries but across the globe. Mobile subscriptions have surged in nearly every region.
But the total number of mobile money accounts doesn’t tell us what percentage of people use mobile money. A small portion of people could each have many accounts. So instead of examining absolute numbers, let’s look at the share of people with mobile money accounts in Sub-Saharan Africa.
As the chart below illustrates, the percentage of people in Sub-Saharan Africa with a mobile money account grew rapidly, from 12% in 2014 to 33% by 2021.”
Milei Cools Argentina Wholesale Inflation to Lowest Since 2020
“Argentine President Javier Milei notched another economic victory Tuesday after data showed wholesale prices declined in May for the first time since the height of the pandemic, adding to his momentum before October midterm elections.
The producer price index fell 0.3 percent from April and rose 22.4 percent on the year, according data from the INDEC national statistics bureau. It’s a sharp turnaround from December 2023, Milei’s first month in office, when wholesale monthly prices soared 54 percent. The libertarian often uses the indicator to warn that Argentina was nearing hyperinflation due to his predecessor’s policies.
Local prices stayed constant while prices for imported products fell 4.1 percent, according to the monthly report. Economy Minister Luis Caputo celebrated the good news on X.
Discounting pandemic data that saw demand plummet, the May print is the lowest in the series, which begins in 2016, Caputo wrote.
In May, monthly consumer price increases also cooled to their slowest pace in five years to 1.5 percent.”
History's cycle of progress and stagnation can be broken.
Chelsea Follett —
Summary: Throughout history, cities and nations have repeatedly sparked extraordinary—but relatively brief—periods of innovation. Cardwell’s Law is the idea that creative peaks are historically short-lived. Can any society sustain innovation over the long term? The conditions that support progress are fragile, but by identifying and safeguarding them, we can break out of this historical cage.
Donald Cardwell, a British historian of science and technology, famously observed that “no nation has been very creative for more than an historically short period.” Known as Cardwell’s Law, this dictum haunts many people concerned about the future of innovation. Can the United States, or any other country, break free of the cage of Cardwell’s Law and create an environment that fosters innovation indefinitely?
To better understand this challenge, it helps to zoom in from the level of nations to that of cities, which often function as engines of innovation. While intended to describe whole societies, Cardwell’s Law scales down well to the level of individual urban centers. After all, city-states were the first states and served as the sites of institutional experimentation. And for a long time, it was cities, not larger nations, that commanded loyalty.
A grim message from my otherwise uplifting book, Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World is that a city’s creative peak tends to be—as Cardwell noted—brief. As the British science writer Matt Ridley observed in the foreword to the book, “Global progress depends on a sudden series of bush fires of innovation, bursting into life in unpredictable places, burning fiercely, and then dying rapidly.”
Are there any exceptions to that rule? Have any cities managed to maintain longer-than-expected golden ages of innovation, and what can we learn from them?
The cities from earlier eras that I profiled in my book tend to be featured for their achievements over longer periods of time. That is, unfortunately, because in the distant past, progress was often painfully slow—not because someone had cracked the code to break Cardwell’s Law.
Writing, for example, developed over multiple generations, as simple pictographs that accountants invented for record-keeping purposes evolved into a symbolic script and eventually into highly abstract, cuneiform characters. The birthplace of writing was Uruk, an ancient Sumerian city. The most noteworthy part of Uruk’s history lasted for many centuries, but only because the city’s great achievement took generations to accomplish. We should hardly want to emulate a society that advanced at such a pace.
In contrast, when we turn to modern history, the pace of progress accelerates—but the creative window narrows. Manchester, the so-called workshop of the world, led the way during the Industrial Revolution, but only for a few decades. Houston’s heyday helping drive forward space exploration also only lasted a few decades. Today, the youngest living person to have walked on the moon is 89. Tokyo went from being a world capital of technology in the 1980s to decades of economic stagnation. The San Francisco Bay Area that birthed Silicon Valley and the digital revolution has lost its crown, with many technological breakthroughs now occurring elsewhere. In the modern era, the golden age of innovation in any locale tends to last only a few decades, or even less.
To understand why this pattern repeats so consistently, consider the underlying conditions that support—or sabotage—sustained innovation. The economic historian Joel Mokyr, in an illuminating 1993 essay, describes the narrowness of the path that societies must walk to promote creativity, a veritable tightrope where one wrong move can lead to everything crashing down. “In retrospect, the most surprising thing is perhaps that we have come this far,” he concludes.
What causes the downfall of centers of progress, making Cardwell’s Law so seemingly prophetic? While world-changing innovations have come from an extraordinarily diverse set of places, from Song–era Hangzhou to post–World War II New York, sites of creativity almost always share certain key features. It is the loss of those factors that spells their doom. These feature are: conditions of relative peace, openness to new ideas, and economic freedom.
Free enterprise and healthy competition encourage innovation, and the freedom to trade across borders plays an important role by increasing that competition. At the same time, free exchange across borders must not be confused with the total dissolution of borders: vast empires under centralized control tend to stagnate technologically, and complete integration of countries under a global government would in all likelihood be a disaster. A certain type of international competition can be beneficial—just not the kind of rivalry that leads to war.
War redirects creative energies toward making deadlier weapons and away from technologies aimed at improving living standards. And, of course, losing a war can lead to a society’s complete destruction.
Moreover, war prevents innovators from collaborating across borders, and even thinkers within the same country often cannot put their heads together due to the secrecy inherent in war. While some credit WWII with speeding up the creation of the computer, a case can be made that the conflict actually delayed the computer’s invention by preventing collaboration between many innovators, from Konrad Zuse in Berlin to Alan Turing in Great Britain. Even in peacetime, innovation can be stifled when freedom and openness are curtailed.
In short, progress is threatened when peace is lost to war, openness is stifled by the suppression of speech, and freedom is undermined by restrictive or authoritarian laws.
Hong Kong provides a recent and illustrative example of how quickly the conditions for progress can disappear. During its whirlwind economic transformation in the 1960s, Hong Kong rose from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the wealthiest. It accomplished this feat through policies of “noninterventionism”: simply allowing Hong Kongers to freely compete and collaborate to enrich themselves and their society. But the city’s proud tradition of limited government, the rule of law, and freedom has been abruptly extinguished by a harsh and unrelenting crackdown from the Chinese Communist Party.
Despite sobering examples such as that of Hong Kong, there is reason for hope. Centers of progress are often short-lived, but the fact that throughout history most societies remained creative for only a short time should not discourage us. To defy Cardwell’s Law, all that is needed is a clear-eyed willingness to learn from the mistakes of the past and to fiercely protect the conditions needed for further progress.
This article was published at Econlib on 5/17/2025.
