The Case for Smart Protectionism
About 11.5 million of the 11.6 million jobs created in the recovery have gone to workers with at least some college education, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
.. The U.S. government spends 0.4 percent of GDP on childcare and early education, while France, Denmark, and Sweden all spend at least three times more as a share of their economies. It is cheaper to publicly invest in the achievement and health of poor young children than to spend billions trying to remediate them as adults.
.. Many workers don’t have time for training, because U.S. welfare policy pushes them to find work immediately, even if it doesn’t lead to a more prosperous career
.. Automation redistributes wealth—from routine-based work to work that cannot be automated. Globalization redistributes wealth, too—from activities that can be off-shored to the owners of global supply chains. Economic history is one long story of wealth being created, destroyed, consolidated, and, yes, redistributed.
.. Of the 27 million net new jobs created between 1990 and 2008, 99 percent occurred in so-called “nontradable” occupations, which is work that must be done locally, such as a treating patients, teaching students, or cutting people’s hair.