BRIAN AUNSPACH thought he had a job for life. After six years at a smelter owned by Alcoa, America’s largest aluminium company, his work was hard but the benefits decent. Warning signs came with crashing aluminium prices in the summer of 2015 and murmurings about unfair Chinese competition. Then reality hit: in January 2016 Alcoa announced the smelter’s closure. Around 600 people lost their jobs.

The events of 2016, from Brexit to Donald Trump’s election, were widely seen as a backlash against globalisation. The Warrick smelter in Indiana, which shut amid “challenging market conditions”, was perceived to be a victim of free trade. And the likes of Mr Aunspach, an American displaced by trade, are the objects of keen attention from wonks as well as politicians.

His is an old problem, with old solutions. Since 1962 America has earmarked funding to help people adjust to trade-related shocks. Trade-Adjustment Assistance (TAA) offers people money for retraining and income while they do so. Workers over 50 can get their wages topped up by 50% of the difference between their new and old wages. The money should help cushion the financial blow, and tempt them towards on-the-job training.

On paper, TAA should make wonks glow. It protects workers, not jobs, and links qualifications to local demand. Mr Aunspach is a beneficiary, and a big fan. He credits Pam Haskins, his caseworker and “life coach”, with making him see that he was getting “the opportunity of a lifetime”. His income from TAA quashed his initial panic about feeding his children and paying his mortgage, and allowed him to take a lengthy welding qualification. Without TAA, state benefits to pay for his course would have lapsed after six months.

Ms Haskins also thinks TAA works, but qualifies that “they have to want it”. Some of Alcoa’s ex-employees were snapped up by other firms. Others drifted into early retirement. Still others waited, hoping the smelter would reopen, swayed by Mr Trump’s promises to help the industry.

In the 12 months to September 2016 just 127,000 workers received TAA. Applying is tricky and can be slow. Ms Haskins knows of one coal supplier who, 18 months after the Warrick smelter closed, is still waiting for approval for the 30 employees he let go. Americans have been turning elsewhere. David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, three economists, have estimated that of the extra government payments associated with Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007, only 6% came through TAA or unemployment insurance. Most came from other sources: 32% from disability or retirement insurance; 26% as federal-government income assistance; and 32% as extra medical spending.

Historically, TAA has had narrow eligibility criteria: for its first seven years no one qualified. Since then, coverage has undulated, expanding in 2009 to include people in service industries, then contracting in 2014 as the provision expired. Now they are covered again, but only until 2021.

The scheme can be confusing and administratively complex. Worse, most Americans have not heard of it; it can also be difficult to avoid the stigma associated with getting state help, reckons Mr Aunspach. Howard Rosen, an architect of the current TAA law and executive director of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Coalition, a lobby group, complains that successive governments have failed to push TAA: “We like to have programmes, but we don’t want people to use them.”

Building support for TAA might be easier if evidence of its benefits were more solid. Headline statistics seem impressive: within three months of leaving the programme, participants boast a 74% employment rate, and 92% of those are still employed three months later. But success relative to the amount spent on it, or relative to other schemes, is hazier.

Not made to measure

The TAA was set up without any proper system to gauge its effectiveness. Its most recent thorough assessment, in 2013, found that recipients had lower incomes than similar people receiving unemployment insurance over its first four years. Overall, they estimated that the programme was a net loss to TAA participants, of almost $27,000. But four years might not be long enough to measure the gains from retraining. Moreover, the evaluation happened just before America’s recession. Since people without TAA joined the workforce sooner, before the worst of the downturn, it is perhaps unsurprising that they fared better during the subsequent period.

Besides lacking a framework for assessing success, the scheme has other flaws. Mr Rosen thinks the government should offer people help to start their own businesses, and expand the wage-insurance component to workers under the age of 50. By law, employers about to engage in mass lay-offs have to tell the government about it with 60 days of notice. Roy Houseman, whose job is to help people apply for TAA, thinks that notice of a mass lay-off should also trigger an automatic TAA application.

A bigger fix may be necessary. TAA offers to protect workers rather than jobs. But an ideal version, says Mr Rosen, would protect people based on need, not cause, so that a trade shock is not the only trigger. Even that may not be enough. Export-oriented manufacturing industry tends to be geographically concentrated, which means that trade shocks can have devastating regional effects. Boosting the amount available for relocation under TAA (currently $1,250) could help. Or perhaps policymakers should be thinking about how to help places as well as people.