Mr. Blinder’s answer is not protectionism…he accepts the economic logic that U.S. trade with large low-wage countries like India and China will make all of them richer — eventually.  He acknowledges that trade can create jobs in the U.S. and bolster productivity growth.  But he says the harm done when some lose jobs and others get them will be far more painful and disruptive than trade advocates acknowledge.  He wants government to do far more for displaced workers than the few months of retraining it offers today.  He thinks the U.S. education system must be revamped so it prepares workers for jobs that can’t easily go overseas, and is contemplating changes to the tax code that would reward companies that produce jobs that stay in the U.S.

Here is the article.  Arnold Kling says technological progress will be more important than trade.  I think that China is due for a crack-up and India will soon bump up against its horrible legal and educational systems.  I saw that economists are listed as among the most threatened groups, but I doubt if the United States can look forward to the liberation of so much talented and witty labor.  I also think that corporate welfare is a bad idea, and that universities should not train everyone to be a small town divorce lawyer.  Teaching reading and writing would be a good start.

When our economists start preaching that we should look to economists and higher educators to predict the new, growing economic sectors, I again think that the Chinese are not the major problem.

Life without socks would be… "undignified," but no one recommends government provision or even sock vouchers.  Relative to income, socks are sufficiently cheap.  There is some inequality of socks, but it seems that just about everybody — even the poor — "has enough."  We don’t even force people to buy socks for their kids.

Might there come a time when health care and education fall under the same rubric?

Yes, I know that, due to rising labor costs, health care and education might continue to eat up an increasing percentage of national income.  But still, can’t "rich enough" people make do?  Living in Aspen might cost half your income, but if you’re a multi-millionaire no one weeps for you.

Of course today’s poor aren’t rich enough for us to remove government aid.  But when will the splendid era of libertarian freedom be possible?  Today’s poor are much richer than the poor fifty years ago, and the poor of the future are likely to be richer yet.  Won’t the welfare state, at some point, simply become unnecessary?

Readers, please tell me in the comments when the time will come for dismantling the welfare state.  Will you sign your name to a pledge:

"I am a left-winger, but only until 2078"?

More elegant would be:

"I’m a 2096 libertarian."

Social democracy is but a mere transitional strategy.

If this were 1890, what Year of Libertarian Freedom would you have named?

Writing in the April 02 issue of the New Republic, Noam Scheiber
argues Yes.  The article is no screed – it’s
well informed about economics and the state of the profession.  Unfortunately, it’s gated but do try find a copy somewhere.  This bit gives some of the flavor.

Several years after his paper on schooling, Angrist noticed
that the Armed Forces Qualifying Test had been misgraded for a few
years in the late ’70s. This had opened the doors to thousands of
subpar applicants and allowed Angrist to compare the lucky
underachievers with the people rejected once the glitch got corrected,
thereby isolating the impact of military service on wages. The
practical effect was to send the grad students scrambling to find other
instances in which life-altering decisions had been handed down
incorrectly. In 2000, a Harvard professor named Caroline Hoxby
discovered that streams had often formed boundaries to
nineteenth-century school districts, so that cities with more streams
historically had more school districts, even if some districts had
later merged. The discovery allowed Hoxby to show that competition
between districts improved schools. It also prompted the Harvard
students to wrack their brains for more ways in which arbitrary
boundaries had placed similar people in different circumstances.

Every few weeks, when a student would stumble onto some new
test-grading error or fatefully drawn boundary–what economists call
"instruments"–word of the discovery would rocket through the
department. The discoverer would become instantly, if momentarily,
famous, like the holder of a winning card at a Bingo hall, and
inspiring the same mix of reverence and jealousy. A typical
conversation around the snack machine at the National Bureau of
Economic Research, where many Harvard students had cubicles, went
something like: Hey, did you hear that so-and-so found this crazy
example of excess tax refunds in western Manitoba in the early ’60s? At
which point the other would reply, Uh, no, wow, that’s, uh, great, and
then scamper back to his desk to brainstorm for some similar quirk of
public policy. At an age when most people brood that life is too random
and arbitrary, these people’s biggest complaint was that it wasn’t
random and arbitrary enough.

In retrospect, I have come to see this as the moment I realized
economics had a cleverness problem. How was it that these students, who
had arrived at the country’s premier economics department intending to
solve the world’s most intractable problems–poverty, inequality,
unemployment–had ended up facing off in what sometimes felt like an
academic parlor game?

I think Scheiber is off in a few ways.  First, he conflates methods and
questions.  It’s true that clean identification is often found with
quirky experiments but a quirky experiment does not necessarily imply a
quirky question.  Hoxby’s work on education, mentioned above, is asking
a big question about the effect of competition on schools.  Levitt’s work
on crime uses quirks in police assignment as do those of his "pale imitators" (like those
guys that used terror alert levels
to estimate the effectiveness of police on the street.  Ha, ha!) but we
spend well over 100 billion dollars a year combating crime so it’s
pretty damn important to know how well police, prisons and punishment
work.  Scheiber criticizes Emily Oster’s work but his criticism has
nothing to do with his thesis, Oster’s work on AIDS, missing women and
so forth is on big questions. It’s possible to be clever and to think
big.

The second problem is to think that if only people did less Freakonomics they
would do more big think economics.  If only it were so.  The truth is
that even today most of economics is a wasteland of boring papers on
profoundly uninteresting questions.  The choice is not Levitt v.
Heckman it’s Levitt and Heckman (and many others like Buchanan who neither Levitt nor Heckman might appreciate) versus a huge number of non-entities (many
highly paid and famous) who answer trivial questions poorly and do it
without even the courtesy of offering some entertainment on the
side.

Addendum: Tyler has the first comment.

Californians appear willing to pay $4,000 more for used gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles that have state-issued carpool stickers than for hybrids that don’t.

Here is the full story.

Old definition:

A loan shark is a scumbag who charges the poor
obscenely high rates of interest.

New definition:

A loan shark is a scumbag who charges the poor obscenely low rates of interest.