Speaking Plainly About a Changing Economy

The NY Times editorial board does a good job of calling out the Democratic candidates on their anti-trade pandering. It's amazing how these conversations -- where candidates merely speak to what they know are the preconceived beliefs of a particular constituency -- occur in the absence of any reference whatsoever to actual facts.

During the run-up to the Ohio primary, the fodder here turned overwhelmingly to anti-China and anti-NAFTA talking points. There are legitimate and critical discussions to have about both China and NAFTA's relationships to our changing economy, but the candidates basically eschewed any thoughtful nuance in exchange for shooting exotic fish in a barrel.

I won't claim to be a cultural expert on the working class in the rust belt, but it is my impression since moving here that people expect to inhabit a static economy where the jobs never change and they last the length of one's working life. It would be refreshing if a Democratic candidate would stop playing this Luddite game and instead speak plainly about tough but necessary changes. There were vague references of this sort, in the form of job retraining, etc., but they were always couched among a backdrop of essentially xenophobic economic rhetoric.

It's not the government's responsibility to keep our economy and workforce frozen in time, nor should we want it to do so. Imagine if we'd taken such an approach since the inception of this country; we'd still inhabit a largely agrarian economy. The people making these arguments expect to be taken seriously, but one can see by applying them to a different time period just how ridiculous such a mindset is.

I have no doubt that some of the changes in our economy over the last few decades have both economically and culturally jarred some segments of the public, but the answers to such anxieties do not lie in clamming up and refusing the acknowledge a changing world.