2025-12-30
25 分钟Hey, Greg Grzalski here.
Today we're sharing our most popular bonus episode of 2025.
It's my conversation with economist David Otter from the beginning of this year.
It's about the cost of free trade.
If you're new to NPR Plus, we wanted to make sure you didn't miss this one.
If you've already heard it, don't worry,
we'll be back with a fresh bonus episode for you in two weeks.
And if you're not signed up for Plus, but want more bonus content like this, go to plus.npr.org.
So for decades,
the mainstream thinking in economics was that free trade would be a clear win for the United States.
Sure, the reasoning went some workers might lose jobs,
but the thinking was they'd get new ones as the economy changed and grew and everything would basically be fine.
Everything turned out not to be fine.
No research project has made that more clear than once spearheaded by MIT economist David Otter and his colleagues.
The story that has been told.
About the consequence of trade is so far from the reality of how people live that it's just you know It's all gains.
Everyone's better off.
There's no real cost I mean in theory there could be but in practice there's not but that's just not the lived experience of anyone and that's not what the data ultimately show Over the last 15 years or so,
Otter, along with economists David Dorn and Gordon Hansen,
have published a series of eye-opening studies on something known as the China shock.