Kruse Kronicle

31 Charts That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity

Six years ago I did a series on American Social Indicators, 2007, and another five years ago on World Social Indicators. I've been toying with doing an update of those series this year. But for now, here is an excellent piece at Business Insider highlighting some of my main points: 31 Charts That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity. We are living through the most stunning advances in human flourishing in all of history. Here are just a few charts that caught my eye:

The Active Life - 7. “Loaves and Fishes": Acts of Scarcity or Abundance. Parker Palmer

Today we come to the seventh chapter in Parker Palmers’ The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring, titled “’Loaves and Fishes’: Acts of Scarcity or Abundance.” We will begin with a review of Palmer’s main points. I agree with his general conclusion in this chapter but I find his path to his conclusions problematic (more below.) The story in this chapter is the story of the Loaves and Fishes from the Gospel of Mark:

The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes

The apostle returned to Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. And he said to them, “Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a lonely place by themselves. Now many saw them going, and knew them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns, and got there ahead of them. As he landed he saw a great throng, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. And when it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a lonely place, and the hour is now late; send them away, to go into the country and villages round about and buy themselves something to eat.” But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” And they said to him, “Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?” And he said to them. “How many loaves have you? Go and see.” And when they had found out, they said, “Five, and two fish.” Then he commanded them all to sit down by companies upon the green grass. So they sat down in groups, by hundreds and by fifties. And taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples to set before the people; and divided the two fish among them all. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces and of the fish. And those who ate the loaves were five thousand people. (Mark 6:30-44, RSV. Inclusive language by Palmer.)

Palmer sees action and contemplation as inseparable in this story. Jesus and the disciples intend to take a break but the crowds follow them. This pressed home ever clearer the gifts they had to give and their own need to give them. But unlike the Angel in Buber’s story, these actions are not from “above.” The passage says Jesus acted out of compassion. It was responsive, not reflexive. It sprang from a sense inner truth, much like that the experience of the woodcarver.

But the focus of the story is this:

Hunger and food, of both the literal and metaphorical sorts, are the dominant images of this story. I want to translate these images into generic terms of scarcity and abundance. … In this story, as throughout his active life, Jesus wanted to help people penetrate the illusion of scarcity and act out the reality of abundance. (124)

The Scarcity Assumption

The quality of our active lives depends heavily on whether we assume a world of scarcity or a world of abundance. Do we inhabit a universe where the basic things that people need – from food and shelter to a sense of competence and of being loved – are ample in nature? Or is this a universe where such goods are in short supply, available only to those who have the power to beat everyone else to the store? The nature of our action will be heavily conditioned by the way we answer those bedrock questions. In a universe of scarcity, only people who know the arts of competing, even of making war will be able to survive. But in a universe of abundance, acts of generosity and community become not only possible but fruitful as well. (124-125)

From here Palmer enters a critique of contemporary economic systems. He views competition as a result of a false consciousness about scarcity. He says:

When we Americans, who comprise some six percent of the world’s population, consume over a third of the world’s resources, we create real scarcity for others.  (125)

By extrapolation, I understand him to believe that there is a fixed amount of resources in the world. Those resources would be more than sufficient for all if redistributed. A direct consequence of some having too much is that others do not have enough. Furthermore he complains:

The cash-exchange mechanism makes it so much easier for us to ignore the gross inequities in the distribution of food and shelter around the world. (126)

In contrast …

When we are in community, many things we think we must buy in the marketplace suddenly become available free of charge. (127)

… and …

Community and abundance go hand in hand; the two words are nearly synonymous. (128)

… and …

… the first step in any action that assumes abundance and wants to amplify it is to perceive, and receive, those resources already present to us in the abundance of life itself. (129)

In my estimation, Palmer is a profound philosopher/theologian but not a very good economist. More on that at the end.

The True Miracle

Many people focus on a “magical” quality in this story. But they may be missing the intended  personal application. Like the woodcarver in the earlier story, we might say “the Spirits did it,” seeing ourselves as bystanders. Palmer writes:

What Jesus does instead of magic is to act on the assumption of abundance. First, he divides the crowd into “companies” of hundreds and fifties and commands them all “to sit down … upon the green grass.” His miracle begins with the simple act of gathering the faceless crowd of five thousand into smaller, face-to-face communities. This is the stock-in-trade of every good community organizer, this clustering of people into more intimate settings where everyday miracles have a chance to happen. (130)

… and …

In the faceless crowd we experience scarcity – a scarcity of contact, of concern, of affirmation, of love. But as the crowd is replaced by community, an invisible sense of abundance arises long before the community produces any visible goods or services. True abundance resides in the simple experience of people being present to one another and for one another.  (130)

Palmer says he feels no need to dismiss a supernatural interpretation of the story but he suspects a miracle of a different sort was going on. As the small groups of people saw the disciples being generous, they were inspired to share what they had with each other.  He writes ...

… the experience of community it is itself abundance. In the faceless crowd we experience scarcity – a scarcity of contact, of concern, of affirmation, of love. But as the crowd is replaced by community, an invisible sense of abundance arises long before the community produces any visible goods and services.

… and conversely …

Our refusal to believe that we have enough is one cause of the competition that has resulted in such an inequitable distribution of resources at home and around the world. (132)

Leadership for Community

Palmer closes the chapter noting how action and contemplation are intertwined in this story. The presenting issue is the need to feed so many people. That leads to contemplation of the problem. That contemplation informs Jesus that there is enough. There is abundance. But the realization is pointless without action. So by active participation in the truth of God’s abundance and sending his followers to act on such a basis, a miracle happens. That miracle transforms individuals and communities, leading them into deeper contemplation of God and the truth of the world God created. Abundance requires our participation but it is not our creation. So also with community.

“But even as we act to evoke community, we must remember that community itself is a gift to be received, not a goal to be achieved. We have a strong tendency to make community one more project among many, to struggle and strain to come into relationship with one another, only to find that the stress of the very efforts exhausts us and drives us apart. Still, time after time we try to “make” community happen in the same effortful and self-defeating ways. Why? Because as long as we are the makers, we remain in control; and as long as we are in control, we will not be vulnerable to the risks of true community.” (136)

A Rejoinder

Palmer has some very important truths in this chapter but his misunderstanding of economics shades things in some unfortunate ways.

First, scarcity is real! God may have created a world of abundant natural resources but none of these resources are useful to humanity without human action (apart from maybe air and sunshine). Matter, energy, and data must be transformed from less useful forms to more useful forms through human imagination and labor. Everything we need cannot be fabricated at once. Each human being has a finite level of labor, combined with a finite number of hours to work in any given day. Priorities must be set. Production capacity is scarce relative to what we need at any given moment. How will we decided which things to do in which order? How can abundance best be realized given the absolute scarcity of goods and services? Economics studies how we go about these decisions. We can acknowledge the abundance of resources God has entrusted to us. But economics acknowledges the scarcity of goods and services with the appreciation that generation of abundance is humanity’s aim.

Second, Palmer says, “When we Americans, who comprise some six percent of the world’s population, consume over a third of the world’s resources, we create real scarcity for others.” (125) This statement is incorrect in two technical ways.

• The USA may have consumed one third of the resources the world consumed in year but it did not consume one third of the world’s resources. Each year, only a small fraction of global resources are consumed.
• At the time Palmer was writing twenty years ago, the USA percentage of the global economy was about 23%, and the USA share of the world population was about 4.5%. Since 1999, the USA share of the global economy has been shrinking by a fraction each year, down to about 19% today. The share of world population is only slightly smaller.

But his statement and analysis is indicative of deeper conceptual flaw: Palmer sees the world economy as a zero-sum game. There are a fixed number of goods and services (not just resources) in the world. That number is constant from year to year. If someone has more than the average, then others must have correspondingly less. With generosity, we would equal out the imbalance in the zero-sum game.

The world economy is not a zero-sum game. Since the time Palmer wrote his book, the world economy has grown by about 50%. The USA share of the world economy has declined to 19% over the last two decades. The share has also dropped for Europe (27% to 21%) and Japan (9% to 6%). Yet all of these economies have grown of over the same time period. How is it possible for their shares of the world economy to decline as their economies become larger? Because regions outside of these nations are growing even faster (like China 2.5% to 12.5%, and India 2.5% to 5%), growing the size of the global economy. Again, the world economy is not a zero-sum game.

Mohammad Yunnis, “Banker to the Poor” wrote Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism.

“To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate.

Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.”

Just as there are bonsai people, there are also bonsai economies in nations across the globe. Given the right soil they can flourish just as much as the other trees.

(I know some will interject here that such growth will exhaust all of our resources. It will not … or at least it need not. Such thinking discounts human creativity and imagination. That discussion is for another day.)

Third, Palmer fails to distinguish between face-to-face community and commercial society. He correctly identifies the need for face-to-face interaction with others if community is to emerge. I affirm all he has to say about community. Within such community we come to truly know each other. We can share and care based on personal knowledge of need and merit. Attempts to substitute market exchange as a means for fulfilling many of the things we find in community is rightly challenged. But each of is only capable of being in true community with a few dozen people, at most. How do we coordinate economic activity beyond the scope of face-to-face community?

Most of the things we use today, from #2 pencils to high tech gear, require the seamless coordination of countless thousands (millions?) of people scattered across the planet. We cannot accomplish them in face-to-face community. Prices in a market system help people know the demand for the work they do and the goods they produce. Prices are an information system that coordinates our behavior. Without prices and monetary-exchange there is no way for people to know how much to buy or sell. Without this information, there is no way to achieve substantial prosperity. People are left only to the resources immediately available to them in local community. There is much less to be generous with.

Palmer writes:

“The cash-exchange mechanism makes it so much easier for us to ignore the gross inequities in the distribution of food and shelter around the world.” (132)

No! As I said above, employing the cash-exchange mechanism in face-to-face community is often inappropriate, but the cash-exchange mechanism is absolutely essential for commercial society and for reducing inequities around the world. Certainly generosity in the form of aid to relieve immediate need is required, but the bigger issue is that bonsai people need to be transplanted into better soil. They need to be included in networks of productivity and exchange. Just as it is foolhardy to make face-to-face community a matter of market exchange, so too is it foolhardy to view commercial society as face-to-face community writ large.

My Application

With all this in mind, what do we make of the story? I begin with a question: If the story is about people being inspired to share with others based on the actions of Jesus and the disciples, where did the bread and fish come from that the people had stashed away? The bread came from the labor of clearing a field, planting seeds, nourishing a crop of wheat, harvesting the crop, adding ingredients to make dough, and then baking that dough into bread. The fish came from putting a boat into the water, dropping a net, hauling in a catch, salting and preserving the fish, and then retrieving the fish for such an occasion as this. Because of human imagination and labor, people had something they could share with others in face-to-face community.

Jesus inspired generosity with offering the loaves and fishes. Elsewhere in the New Testament Jesus tells us we will accomplish much greater things than he did. If generosity in face-to-face community is first grounded in productive labor, then how much greater can the generosity be if each of were radically more productive, generating more to share? We can’t be in community with millions of other people. But we can be sure that bonsai people are given better soil and included in networks of exchange and productivity, making the most of their imagination and labor, creating the opportunity for them to be generous with each other in face-to-face community.

I think Palmer is right about scarcity and abundance in the sense that we too often mistake want for need. Our drive for these “needs” inclines us to depersonalize others, to abuse nature, and become stingy with what we have been given. This is not to say the only things we are to pursue are minimalist needs. Rather, we must prioritize our wants in relation to other considerations within the Kingdom of God. We need to be grateful for what we have. When superfluous wants rise to the status of needs, we experience a scarcity created by our own imagination. We become fearful and turned inward. Community is lost.

Leadership for community is not just about inspiring generosity. It is also about inspiring and creating the optimal conditions for expanding abundance, about ever increasing the fruitfulness of the garden in ways that honor God. Like the woodcarver, it requires delving deep into the reality of our context (economics in this case) to know how to act truthfully.

 

Questions

In what ways have you felt scarcity? When have you felt scarcity the strongest? When have you been most aware of abundance? What do these experiences teach us about action in our daily existence?

 Does my critique of Palmer ring true with you? Why or why not?

 What do you think Jesus was intending to communicate with his actions on this occasion?

 

Previous/Next

More poor people now live in U.S. suburbs than cities

Reuters: More poor people now live in U.S. suburbs than cities

(Reuters) - The number of people living in poverty in U.S. suburbs surpassed the number of poor in cities over the past decade, driven by strong growth in overall suburban populations, according to an analysis released on Monday. ...

... The number of poor people living in suburbs rose 64 percent between 2000 and 2011, reaching 16.4 million, it showed. The number of poor people living in urban areas increased 29 percent to 13.4 million. ...

Saturday Links

1. I loved this map: Dialect Map Of U.S. Shows How Americans Speak By Region

2. What's Driving the Rise in Suicide Among Middle-Aged Men?

... The suicide stats from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that middle-aged men (35 to 64) living in the American West are more likely to commit suicide than men living elsewhere in the United States, and that suicide has risen fastest over the last decade in a Western state, Wyoming, as Richard Florida pointed out here last week. ...

... And over the last two decades, it's men without college degrees who have ended up most disconnected from the core institutions of work, marriage, and civil society. Guess who is most likely to kill themselves? Men without college degrees. In fact, according to recent research by sociologist Julie Phillips and her colleagues, suicide has surged in recent years (this research covers the period up to 2005) among precisely this group of less-educated middle-aged men, even as suicide remained essentially stable among middle-aged men with college degrees over this period. ...

3. America's New Manufacturing Boomtowns

Conventional wisdom for a generation has been that manufacturing in America is dying. Yet over the past five years, the country has experienced something of an industrial renaissance. We may be far from replacing the 3 million industrial jobs lost in the recession, but the economy has added over 330,000 industrial jobs since 2010, with output growing at the fastest pace since the 1990s. ...

4. I had some personal identifcation with this article: Michael’s Still the Top Name for New York Babies, and There Are Reasons

... But about this Michael thing. Were it not for 1964, when John briefly ascended in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, Michael would have been the New York chart-topper every year since 1956, when it upended Robert.

You might think that with that kind of stranglehold on the local name rankings, Michael would dominate the top spot nationwide. During the last half of the 20th century, you would have been right. But in 1999, Jacob wrestled the title from Michael and has held it ever since. Michael has now fallen to eighth in the national baby-name rankings.

That statistic, though, does not get at how deeply disparate the results are. In a large handful of states, Michael barely cracked the top 40. In Nebraska it was No. 37, right behind Bentley. The name was 36th in Iowa, 35th in Vermont and 31st in North Dakota, well behind the very New Yorkish pairing of Henry (No. 23) and Hudson (No. 24). In Utah, where Samuel and Jackson placed 6th and 7th, Michael was 28th.

Aside from New York, only New Jersey and Delaware have maintained their enthusiasm for Michael. ...

5. A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries

6. WHO data shows narrowing health gap

...The number of under-fives dying fell from 12 million in 1990 to less than seven million in 2011, the data shows.

But that will not be enough to reach the 2015 Millennium Development Goal. ...

7. NPR on Stay-At-Home Dads, Breadwinner Moms And Making It All Work

... The Census Bureau finds that about , though that's doubled in a decade. But Stephanie Coontz of the Council on Contemporary Families calls the figure vastly underreported. It doesn't include who do some work yet are their children's primary caregivers, a trend that cuts across class and income. ...

8. AT&T Predicted The Future In These 1993 Ads

In 1993, AT&T released a series of commercials grouped by the theme "you will."

They were all about things people would be doing in the future.

Unlike most futuristic concepts, these turned out to be surprisingly accurate. True, there are no far-out ideas like flying cars, but there is plenty of great stuff that was mind-blowing in 1993.

Today, most of this stuff is commonplace.

Revisiting these predictions is a good reminder of how far we've come in a very short period of time. ...

... "Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away?"

"Cross the country without stopping for directions,"

"Sent someone a fax from the beach?" ...

9. Sign me up! This Flying Car Concept Takes Off And Lands Like A Helicopter

10. Is Organic Food All It's Cracked Up To Be?

Bottom line: From a scientific perspective, there doesn't seem to be a clear answer on whether organic or traditionally-grown foods are "better."

Healthwise, the studies don't support the idea that in general organics contain fewer pesticides, are healthier or taste better, but this varies from crop to crop.

There are certain nasty environmental effects of factory farming — like dead zones — that could be less likely with organic and smaller-scale farming, but those farming techniques mean less productivity — and less food to feed the world.

If you have a large food budget and worry about the environmental impacts of factory farms, organic may be the way to go. But, if you have a limited budget and were just trying to ingest fewer pesticides, it might not be worth the money to go organic.

It largely comes down to an individual's values, budget, and taste buds.

11. Forbes says It's About Time Walmart Waged An Ad Campaign Like This One. I  think they are right.

12. From a Forbes commentary, Sorry Global Warmists, But Extreme Weather Events Are Becoming Less Extreme

• New Records for Lack of Tornadoes
• New Records for Lack of Hurricanes

13. Scientific American reports that Minoan Civilization Originated in Europe, Not Egypt

When the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans discovered the 4,000-year-old Palace of Minos on Crete in 1900, he saw the vestiges of a long-lost civilization whose artefacts set it apart from later Bronze-Age Greeks. The Minoans, as Evans named them, were refugees from Northern Egypt who had been expelled by invaders from the South about 5,000 years ago, he claimed.

Modern archaeologists have questioned that version of events, and now ancient DNA recovered from Cretan caves suggests that the Minoan civilization emerged from the early farmers who settled the island thousands of years earlier. ...

14. Why do I hear Indiana Jones theme music? A Fabled Lost City Might Be Hiding Under This Remote Honduras Jungle

New pictures claim to show the possible architectural remains of Ciudad Blanca, a mythical "White City" rumored to be buried somewhere deep in the forests of eastern Honduras.

Cambridge-based scientists develop 'superwheat'

BBC: Cambridge-based scientists develop 'superwheat'

British scientists say they have developed a new type of wheat which could increase productivity by 30%.

The Cambridge-based National Institute of Agricultural Botany has combined an ancient ancestor of wheat with a modern variety to produce a new strain.

In early trials, the resulting crop seemed bigger and stronger than the current modern wheat varieties. ...

... One in five of all the calories consumed round the world come from wheat.

But despite steady improvement in the late 20th century, the last 15 years have seen little growth in the average wheat harvest from each acre in Britain. ...

... Around 10,000 years ago wheat evolved from goat grass and other primitive grains.

The scientists used cross-pollination and seed embryo transfer technology to transfer some of the resilience of the ancient ancestor of wheat into modern British varieties.

The process required no genetic modification of the crops. ...

World Total Fertility Rate, 1960-2010

This chart explains why many demographers worry about a population bust, not a population bomb. Replacement rate fertility is 2.1. In country after country, economic development has led to declining fertility rates but the rates drop right past 2.1 into population decline. Some countries in Europe have rates in the 1.0-1.5 range. Assuming there are not reversals in low fertility countries, and assuming the global trend follows the lead of developed nations, about thirty years from now there are going to be significant economic problems. Some are already becoming evident in countries that have had prolonged low fertility.

Source: Carpe Diem

You Can't Buy Your Way to Social Justice

Christianity Today: You Can't Buy Your Way to Social Justice

I'm afraid of some American Christians.

I am an American, but I haven't lived in the United States in a while. I live in Djibouti, a country in the Horn of Africa, and when you pick me up at the Minneapolis airport, I might invite you to coffee and suggest the wrong place—you know, one that doesn't serve fair-trade coffee. I will arrive wearing the wrong jeans—ones sold by companies that don't offer fair wages. And I won't use the right vocabulary—the language used by Western bloggers to talk about social justice. ...

... If my generation cares so deeply about global issues of justice and poverty that they are willing to change eating, clothing, and living habits, where are they? A significant challenge for nonprofits and ministries remains recruiting people who will commit to serve long-term outside the United States.

I know there are a plethora of good reasons that concerned American Christians can't just uproot and leave the States, from family to health to finances. I know I simplify. But I have a theory about what is partly contributing to the dearth of young Americans willing to spend their lives on behalf of others.

They think they already are.

They think that with their pocketbooks and food choices alone, by sewing their own clothes and purchasing fair-trade coffee, by boycotting Wal-Mart and preaching that as gospel, they have already done their part to address global injustices. ...

... Consumer activism comes with the inherent danger of separating us from the very people we want to serve. To buy fair trade coffee, for example, we might need to drive across town instead of sitting in the corner café where people in our neighborhood mingle. We can buy that fair trade coffee and never know the family in Burundi who grew, harvested, washed, and roasted the beans. And still we can feel that have done our part. ...

... While remaining passionate and continuing to gently educate the ignorant (like me!) about how our purchases affect the world, we also need to ask whether current trends are becoming a convenient excuse not to delve into the complexities of social justice. We need to ask whether our consumer choices distort the words of Jesus, and whether they help us enter relationships or separate us from others.

As Matthew Lee Anderson notes in his recent CT cover story, Christians begin to fulfill the command to love our neighbor as ourselves "not when we do something radical, extreme, over the top, not when we're really spiritual or really committed or really faithful, but when in the daily ebb and flow of life, in our corporate jobs, in our middle-class neighborhoods, on our trips to Yellowstone and Disney World . . . we stop to help those whom we meet in everyday life, reaching out in quiet, practical, and loving ways." ...

There are some people who are deeply committed to social justice but go about it in ways that I think misunderstands the issues involved. I do not doubt their commitment or their sincerity. But there are also wide swathes for whom identifying with a social justice cause as a fashion statement, an identity signifier, communicating to the world how enlightened and moral they are. Digging into the economic intricacies of fair trade coffee to see how ineffectual it is (even damaging) for the poor, or realizing that Wal-Mart's ability to keep the staples of life inexpensive in our society is probably the single most important factor in keeping the cost of living for the poor manageable, or the reality that it is the poor who clamor for a Wal-Mart while their moralistic economic "superiors" block construction, does not sit well with the social justice crowd they seek solidarity with. And that is what too much of this is about -- solidarity with the social justice crowd, not with the poor. It is moralistic elitism from outside and above the poor, not action and contemplation in community with the poor.

Americans Love Moving More Than Almost Everyone Else In The World

Business Insider: Americans Love Moving More Than Almost Everyone Else In The World

Forget ‘Buy American’? U.S. Retailers Push an ‘Imports Work’ Campaign

Time: Forget ‘Buy American’? U.S. Retailers Push an ‘Imports Work’ Campaign

... You may not have noticed, but last week was promoted as something called “Imports Work Week.” The celebrate the importance of imports in the U.S., a group of business associations led by the National Retail Federation (NRF) has released a study showing the many ways that imports benefit American consumers and businesses alike.

Cheaper prices are the most obvious benefit. “In the past decade, the price of television sets sold in the United States has dropped 87 percent. Computers have gone down 75 percent, toys 43 percent and dishes and flatware by a third,” the NRF’s Jon Gold explains in a blog post. “Why? The answer is easy – imports."

But the benefits don’t stop there, according to the study, which runs down how imports also help farmers, mom-and-pop businesses, working-class Americans, and even U.S. manufacturers. Here are a few of the groups that should love what imports do for them, per the report:

• Imports improve American families’ standard of living. They help families make ends meet by ensuring a wide selection of budget-friendly goods, like electronics we use to communicate and many clothes and shoes we wear, and improve the year-round supply of such staples as fresh fruits and vegetables.

• Imports support more than 16 million American jobs. A large number of these import-related jobs are union jobs, held by minorities and women, and are located across the United States.

• More than half the firms involved in direct importing are small businesses, employing fewer than 50 workers.

• American manufacturers and farmers rely on imports including raw materials and intermediate goods to lower their production costs and stay competitive in domestic and international markets. Factories and farms purchase more than 60 percent of U.S. imports. ...

Protectionism is one of the most persistent misunderstandings I encounter when talking about economics. What person wants to make everything the use ... car, computer, house, clothes, etc. ... or become an expert on any number of topics to live self-sufficiently ... medicine, climate, chemistry, biology, etc. At the micro-level of our personal lives, we intuitively understand that specializing in our work and then engaging in exchange with neighbors who specialize in their work benefits everyone involved. We seem to get that benefits multiply if we expand exchange beyond our neighborhood, to our city, state, region, and country. But somehow when expand the idea beyond national boarders, this understanding flies out the window.

Some will say their concern is international trade is unfair because workers in other countries get paid lower wages. But they are also far less productive. Given a relatively free market, as workers’ productivity increases, so does their wages. And while there are certainly some exploitive circumstances around the world, multinational corporations and their satellites typically offer some of the highest wages and have the most sought after jobs. There are challenges when societies of different degrees of development interact but I don't perceive that this is really the issue behind much protectionist thinking. Rather it is the abstract belief that our country will be better off our country made everything we consume, a standard we do not apply to our state, city, neighborhood, or family. And this is particularly problematic for the many who say they want justice for the poor but want to exclude the foriegn poor from networks of growing productivity and exchange.