Word: trading
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...risk of losing your job one way minus the risk of losing it another, the extra money you make if your industry is shielded from foreign competition minus the extra money you pay for goods and services that are protected--that you reach the conclusion that on average, free trade benefits us all. Yes, there are various economic theories about circumstances in which all this may not be true, but their authors win prizes precisely because the circumstances are unusual. In general, the numbers work irrespective of what policies other countries follow. They just get worse if one country...
Still, a half-century of general prosperity in the U.S. has created a climate of toleration, if not enthusiasm, for the free-trade gospel--mostly, indeed, as a gospel of our civic religion rather than out of anyone's buying the math. Alarm about imports tends to ebb and flow with the economy--less in good times, more in bad. So how, in the best times ever, did the World Trade Organization become the global bogeyman? No earnest college kid ever hitched across the country to carry a picket sign against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade...
...growth of global economic forces that are actually impinging on national sovereignty, even though it's the paranoid hysterics who say so. But the WTO isn't responsible for either of these trends, both of which are probably inevitable and neither of which undermines the basic case for free trade or for an organization empowered to promote trade through binding arbitration of trade disputes...
Maybe it's the name. If you call yourself the World Trade Organization, you can't complain much if people dial your 800 number and gripe about world trade. If a bunch of heads of government plan a triumphalist self-celebration in Seattle, you can't blame party poopers for showing up to horn in on the publicity. But really, the WTO is O.K. Do the math. Or take it on faith...
...have had my own questions with the WTO. Most of those questions were a variation on "What is this stuff in the newspaper about the WTO?" But thanks to this week's protests in Seattle, I now know that the WTO is some sort of organization that deals with trade barriers but doesn't help women, the environment, indigenous people or anarchists. Personally that sounds like a lot to ask from people already willing to spend entire days discussing tariffs, but still, I am definitely down with the protesters in Seattle. They are expressing rage about being dominated by corporations...