Pardon this interruption of your regularly scheduled web design info… I have a random post to get off my chest. Recently, my International Trade professor wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post. It is entitled, No More Second-Best Trade Solutions and it discusses the recent happenings in US trade news, especially concerning China and Korea.

Now, if you had not studied international trade, you very well may be outraged at the article. But some of the commentors were just plain ridiculous:

“Chad P Brown is just another loony free trader fingering his roseray while saying the free trade catechism.”

“Why do we keep buying free trader rationalizations of insanity?”

“Until we start by admitting that we have allowed ourselves to be held hostage by the Red Bushies comrades in Red China, we will never find the solution.”

All I have to say is, wow…

It seems to me that people view trade economists as these soulless entities clamoring about surpluses and welfare. Granted, they do clamor quite a bit, but they are certainly not soulless. The fact is that there are models that we can use to actually quantify real gains and losses for countries. The major aspect that these models lack is some sort of political influence, but there is no kind of Bentham-esque means of quantifying this influence. Actually, the political sphere is just beyond the scope of what a trade economist’s main concern is. Indeed, far from being soulless, trade economists oftentimes remove the most soulless of entities from their analysis: politics.

However, if I may offer one argument against the professor’s article, it is that I do not agree that the US should halt its bilateral negotiations. I understand that these are inherently discriminatory, but if they are fashioned in the “right” kind of way, they may serve as a building block towards multilateral agreements. If anyone is interested, I co-authored this paper about that very subject.