President Donald Trump’s threats to levy sweeping trade tariffs on China and other countries have provoked near-universal condemnation, from Democrats as well as Republicans. These critics say tariffs will raise prices and invite foreign countries’ retaliation while doing little or nothing to bring back the glory days of bountiful middle-class manufacturing jobs.

They have a point. The nation’s trading partners are already preparing lists of iconic made-in-America goods like bourbon and jeans to hit with their own restrictions. And, indeed, the very promise of tariffs — the whole point of them — is that they raise prices for the protected product: If they didn’t, the policy wouldn’t work for the industry meant to be helped. There are also plenty of explanations besides globalization for the loss of manufacturing jobs. Automation has reduced the number of workers needed to churn out a slab of steel.

But these objections have been a little too knee-jerk and unreflective. Trump won the 2016 election in no small part by focusing on jobs, jobs, jobs. He mocked elites who focused on trade policy’s benefits but who ignored the painful economic losses in too many communities. The sources of Trump’s political support have been much debated, but his argument that trade deals were a “very bad deal” for Americans was compelling to a swath of voters across the political spectrum.

It would be deeply unwise to ignore the power of that message.

As an initial matter, it is worth establishing that what we’re talking about, at root, is the availability of good jobs, with benefits, that support the economic vitality of communities. Trade does matter on this score. Take the case of how trade with China has played out across the country. Economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson quantified the effects of China’s 2000 entry into the global trading community on local labor markets around the United States.

While this entry led to lower prices, the researchers found that businesses (and workers) faced with increased exposure to Chinese imports also paid a dear price.

A link between more imports and fewer jobs

From 2000 to 2007, local economies that had seen the most growth in their exposure to competition from Chinese imports over the preceding decade (1990 to 2000) — that is, those in the top 25 percent of all US communities in terms of exposure — saw larger declines in employment.

Relative to communities with the least increase in competition from China (those ranked in the bottom 25 percent of US communities in terms of exposure), they saw a 4.5 percent decrease in manufacturing jobs and a 0.8 percent decline in the share of people with a job. In a community like Louisville, Kentucky, a metropolitan area with about 1.2 million people, this would amount to 9,700 people tossed out of work.

The researchers also found that those who kept their jobs saw lower pay. Applying their estimate of the decline in average weekly pay to the annual pay of manufacturing workers nationwide suggests trade with China led to a $455 annual pay cut in that sector. To put this in context, the Federal Reserve estimates that nearly half of Americans don’t have $400 to cover an emergency — so that’s real money.

Economic models predict this kind of job displacement while also projecting that the economy overall benefits from trade openness. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (once fully phased in) would have increased annual US incomes by $131 billion, or 0.5 percent of US gross domestic product. (Yes, that’s the TPP that Trump has been flip-flopping on this week, briefly embracing and then once again rejecting it.)

There’s no contradiction between that finding and the Autor study: You can have positive overall effects even if pockets of workers suffer. In general, economic studies that find positive overall effects for trade argue that the “winners” must compensate the “losers.” Otherwise, trade expansion will likely lead to greater inequality as some communities face employment and earnings decline due to heightened competition from abroad. Such compensation can include helping workers move to where the jobs are, develop new skills, or giving them money to bide them time to search for another job.

Here’s the catch: displaced workers don’t get the assistance economists say they need

Yet programs like the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance are woefully inadequate to the task. For every $1,000 increase in import competition from China between 1990 and 2007, this program increased by a paltry 23 cents per person. That’s not enough to offset the drag caused by new trade or revitalize communities or restore dignity to those out of work.

Indeed, what’s happened instead is that in these communities, people end up tapping into benefits set up to support economically struggling families — unemployment insurance, disability benefits, income support, and medical benefits like Medicaid. It’s good that these programs are available, but they treat the symptoms of lack of jobs, not the cause. Nor do they put the community and its people on a path toward a stronger economy.

The failure of trade policy has become emblematic for the failure of economic policy more generally to deliver on the promise of the American dream. This has led to growing dissatisfaction, and Trump tapped into this frustration like no other politician in recent memory. The question then is: What to do? How do we get to growth that is broadly shared? This deeper problem affects not only erstwhile manufacturing towns but also communities across America — and it can’t be solved only with trade policy.

Help those hurt by trade, but think about more than trade

In the middle of the past century, the United States created an economically secure middle class through a plethora of manufacturing jobs. Trump’s agenda harks back to this time, but the good pay and benefits those jobs provided was not because there was something magic about manufacturing, but rather because these were union jobs. Go back to the 19th century and manufacturing work was sweatshop labor. Bad jobs became good jobs because workers organized and some politicians supported them.

So, yes, it’s important that programs that funding for the Trade Adjustment Assistance program be substantially increased. But on a more basic level, if communities and workers are being left behind, the question is: Why privilege trade over other policy levers — whether that means restricting it, as Trump wants to do, or expanding it, as many economists advocate? In the end, trade is a modest slice of our $18.6 trillion economy.

Exports and imports account for 12 and 15 percent of gross domestic product, respectively. Government spending, investment, and consumption are each higher. Consumption — a rough proxy for how well ordinary Americans are doing — is by far the largest part of GDP, accounting for nearly 70 percent.

Free trade lowers prices, thereby boosting family budgets on average, but there are myriad other ways to boost consumption, strong unions being first among them. And reams of social science research show that strong unions do much more than that: They bolster regional economies, increase democratic participation, and even strengthen the social safety net for non-unionized workers.

In short, while protecting those hurt by a free trade regime should remain a priority, there are policy steps that can be taken that would have a more direct effect on living standards than trade policy. These include higher minimum wage, better infrastructure, expanded collective bargaining rights, and universal benefits — health care, but also paid family leave and retirement security.

Trump is not the only politician guilty of misguided priorities. The Democrats’ 2016 infrastructure proposal was projected to generate 25 times the gains that would have resulted from the Peterson Institute’s projection for the TPP. The Obama administration hardly gave it 25 times the attention.

Overspecialization in the social sciences shapes how we view the economy

Why did policymaking become so myopic? Part of the blame rests with how experts write and talk about economic problems. Rather than taking a holistic approach to the economic health of the nation, the debate tends to focus on individual policies in isolation.

This is in no small part because that’s how researchers think about policy questions. They’re specialists. Economists can now pinpoint with a high degree of precision causality from a policy change to economic outcomes, which is enormously useful but also too narrow.

A more well-rounded assessment of a trade deal like TPP would also look at whether important social institutions, including manufacturing unions, would be negatively affected by more openness to trade, and what changes to labor law we would need to make to soften the blow.

Such an analysis might suggest that trade endeavors like the TPP are only worth the pain if accompanied by, say, a rollback of right-to-work laws that currently make it harder to unionize in the service sector. If such a deal can’t be struck, then policymakers should approach further liberalization with caution.

Trump is not wrong in talking about communities left behind. Our economy, and the companies within it, need to serve all the nation, not just parts of it. But by stopping at trade, the president is passing up an opportunity to truly remake the economy to serve all Americans.

Heather Boushey is executive director and chief economist of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and author of Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict. Todd N. Tucker is a political scientist and fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and author of Judge Knot: Politics and Development in International Investment Law. Find them on Twitter @hboushey and @toddntucker.

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