Trump Vs. Free Trade with Richard Epstein

2017-06-24 · Guest: Richard Epstein (Professor at NYU School of Law) · 17:29

Filed under: Markets and money
Topics: Comparative Advantage · Tariffs

Economic principles of foreign trade and mutual gain

Bob Zadek and Professor Richard Epstein discuss the economic principles of foreign trade, debunking common misconceptions about “fair trade” and trade deficits. They explore the concepts of mutual gain, specialization, and comparative advantage, explaining why free trade benefits all parties involved despite political rhetoric to the contrary.

Topics: Free Trade, Fair Trade, Comparative Advantage, Tariffs, Economics, International Trade, Donald Trump

Speakers: Bob Zadek, Richard Epstein

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Introduction to Trade and Orwellian Rhetoric [00:30]

Bob Zadek: Well, with that stirring patriotic musical introduction, I’m happy to welcome you back to The Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. I am, as always, your eponymous host, Bob Zadek. Thank you so much for listening on this summer Sunday morning.

George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel entitled 1984 brought to us all the phrase “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” Black is white, dark is light. Everything is upside down. Why do I mention that? This morning’s topic is one of the most important and least understood policy issues confronting America today. The problem has been compounded by some loose, inaccurate, misleading talk by our President Donald Trump. The subject is trade, foreign trade, buying and selling goods to and from manufacturers located outside of the US.

The trouble with discussing trade is that all the words, or the common phrases used in a discussion of trade, mean actually the opposite of what they sound. Bad words sound good, good words sound bad. I had to go to one of the wisest men that I know, Professor Richard Epstein at NYU School of Law, to help us sort out these really important concepts that will influence economic and social life in America for decades if they are profoundly changed. Richard has written over 15 books. He is the senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a very important think tank here in California. He also has taught and is the professor of law emeritus and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. I could go on, and perhaps I will later on in the show, but Richard, thank you so much for joining us this Sunday morning.

Richard Epstein: Well, thank you so much for that stirring introduction following the patriots.

Defining the Vocabulary of Trade [01:30]

Bob Zadek: Well, Richard, now, trade—trade with companies located outside the US and with countries other than the US—is of course of profound economic importance, not only in the US and within the entire planet. We saw that when the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs were imposed during the Great Depression. So help us understand. First of all, we have to have defined terms, and our friends out there will be able to follow the conversation if they understand some key defined terms and what they mean so when they hear the discourse in public, they can follow the conversation. So first, explain in a few words what foreign trade is, and then there are concepts like deficits, which sound terrible, and fair and unfair trade, which are co-opted by those people who have a specific point of view. So give us the important vocabulary of foreign trade so we can follow the conversation.

The Economic Logic of Mutual Gain [02:31]

Richard Epstein: Okay, well the first thing to do in understanding trade is not to worry about domestic markets or foreign markets, to take the geography out of it and look at the first simple observation: two people come together and one decides to sell and the other decides to buy services or goods. Now, one of the ways in which you could think about this transaction is as a quote-unquote “zero-sum game,” meaning in effect that after the transaction is finished, neither side is better off than it was before. At which point the whole thing becomes a complete puzzle, because why would people expend resources to put the trade together if they’re no better off afterwards than before? Indeed, the only thing they would have would be that resource loss, the transactions cost, as what they’re commonly called.

So to understand why free trade is so important, there has to be a gain. And the gain comes from the fact that the party who buys the goods values the goods more than the price that is paid for them, and the seller prefers to receive the money to the goods that he surrenders. Now, why is it that that is true? Well, as Adam Smith said a long time ago, there are enormous gains from trade through specialization. So that if I as a seller specialize in making some commodity, I can sell it to you. You, when you go on to your business, can take the thing pre-packaged from me and use it to get a set of outputs that you can then sell into the market where the same progression of gains from trade necessarily follows.

So if you really want to understand what’s wrong in the upside-down world, think of this: the Marxist definition of exploitation through market exchanges is in fact one of these Orwellian-type situations. Exploitation is appropriately used for theft where I take something from you without your consent. I’ll be a little better off and you’re a lot worse off. But if the world existed only through theft, it essentially is going to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So exploitation is not the correct term to use here. It is essentially mutual gains through beneficial transactions, which is the hallmark.

Then the question is, how do you put this in some kind of a geographical setting? And well, the easy case turns out to be you have a single sovereign. And what that sovereign does, binding both the buyer and the seller, is to say, “Look, I know you guys want to make this trade, and in fact it’s going to have mutual gains, but transactions are tricky. Often times they’re sequential. I have to pay for the goods before they’re delivered, or I have to deliver the goods before they’re paid for.” And if the state is essentially going to back both promises, what people can do is now trade along another dimension, which is time. So I can do something for you now and get paid for you later, or the reverse. And hence, therefore, government enforcement of contracts increases the possibility of gains for the party.

The Disappointed Competitor and Protectionism [04:31]

Richard Epstein: But then you will ask, what about the effects on third parties? And the answer to that question starts as follows: essentially, if I’m better off by selling and you’re better off by buying, what we will do is increase the opportunities for further trade at both ends of the transactions. I will buy more inputs and you will take your inputs and get more outputs from the particular transaction. So that the circle of beneficial situation will expand so long as you keep the transactions cost that are going into place working. And if everything is within a single jurisdiction and the state decides that it’s going to enforce these kinds of contracts, what you do is you get this virtuous circle in which each transaction is positive-sum, as I’ve just mentioned.

Now, what happens when you have two different jurisdictions? Well, before you get to the foreign case, which you wanted to talk about and rightly so, well, what you do is think about trade inside the United States. We do not have, fortunately, a mercantilist policy in which we try to protect our sellers by encouraging their exports and punishing any imports. Essentially, the United States is organized by and large as a free trade zone, so that anything that takes place in production in one state can now be sold in another. What this does in effect is it expands the possibility for gainful pairing between parties and accelerates the process of positive-gain transactions. And one of the great achievements of the United States Supreme Court is making sure that states cannot put up protectionist barriers to the movement of goods and services across state lines.

Take this argument one step further and now put it into the international context and ask yourself what’s going on here. Well, oddly enough, the transactions cost of working international trade arrangements will probably be a little bit more expensive given the distance and the change in culture than they are domestically, but the improvements in technology have reduced these kinds of financial barriers, and so the ability to get gains from trade given that different cultures have different resources and different skills and different abilities is even greater. So the same logic starts to apply. You want more and more of these transactions to take place.

Now, what’s the basically the bugaboo in this situation? It’s the question of the disappointed competitor. And so it turns out that domestically I buy from X at a price of 10, and now I go overseas and I buy from somebody else at a price of 8. The domestic guy says, “You’ve hurt me.” And so we get the Orwellian language that somebody who could no longer make a sale is allowed to treat himself as though he’s been beaten up in a back alley somewhere. Well, the answer is this is awfully good, not bad, because if I now can have my inputs at a lower price, I could expand the kinds of things that I can sell. And it turns out that the fellow who’s disappointed in one transaction has greater opportunities to move somewhere else in the market and improve the overall situation.

So the basic theorem of all trade, whether it be domestic or international, is disappointed competitors who lose out to superior products at lower prices should never be heard to demand they block in tradition. If you go into the Trump-like domestic policy or the Clinton-type domestic policies, what you will always see in particularly strongly unionized industries which have very high wage structures because of domestic monopolies are the first to complain about international trade. And that’s just a sign of their precarious position, and indeed you want the international trade to come in because what it does is it erodes the domestic power or the monopoly power of any local party. So gains from trade, which works between two people, works within a single jurisdiction, works across different states, and works across international relationships. So this is a real imperative. And to see both American parties, Republican and Democrat, deeply skeptical of this shows you that Bernie Sanders, one of the most ignorant men in public affairs and public life today, makes the same kind of mistakes as Donald Trump. Fortunately, now that Trump is in power, he’s backing off of this a little bit, and the more he backs off from his anti-free trade campaign, the better we will be.

Understanding Comparative Advantage [05:51]

Bob Zadek: Just to add a little bit of embellishment or color to it, you mentioned without identifying it the concept of comparative advantage when you talked about the foreign seller being able to sell goods in the US domestic market cheaper than a domestic manufacturer. Comparative advantage is a very important concept which provides a benefit to all buyers on the planet. Just explain in a few syllables if you can the concept of comparative advantage, because that goes such a long way to explaining why free trade is so important.

Richard Epstein: This is one of the most important developments. To understand why we use this funny trade “comparative advantage” is first of all what you have to think about is a situation in which there’s an absolute advantage, right? And so if I have an absolute advantage, what this means is I can do everything better than you can do. A comparative advantage is as follows: you make two things and I make two things, and what you can do is you can make thing number one at a cost of 5 and thing number two at a cost of 10, and I’m the reverse. So essentially, each of us as self-sustained would be okay, but if you specialize in making the thing that you do cheaper and I specialize in making the things that I can make cheaper, what happens is it turns out we’re both going to be better off because my comparative advantage, which is that I have slightly lower costs than you, is something that can spread itself out throughout the entire system.

So what international trade and what all trade does is what it tends to do is to move situations into a situation where they’re better. So if I’m better at you at two things, right? I can do A and B better than you, but you have resources. The trick is that you want to devote your resources to the case where your comparative advantage is greater. So if I’m twice as good at you at doing one thing and only 10% better than you at doing the other, I should specialize in the twice and you should specialize in the 10%. And this is a notion which goes back I guess to David Ricardo some 200 years ago, and what it does is it explains why it is that even if somebody is better at everything than somebody else, the guy who is inferior at everything will still find a place in the marketplace if he can produce goods at a cost below the price that they will demand inside the marketplace.

And comparative advantage is one of these things which actually drives market, and what Adam Smith said, which is still true: the bigger the market that you have, the more of these pairings that you can find. And so what happens is the benefits of comparative advantage take place because there’s now more sorts of people who can come in there and you can then organize the production of goods and services so that on relative terms, the low-price producer is in fact going to be the party who will command that. So do not think of a world in which I’m better at you than everything, Bob, which means in effect that you get to do nothing, which is one of the nightmarish themes that people have about international trade. What trade does is it blocks some possibilities by technological improvements, but it opens up others.

So to give you but one example: the United States for years had a situation in which we wouldn’t allow the export of refined or unrefined gasoline or oil overseas. And if you’d in effect kind of do things like that, what you’re doing in effect is you’re taking people who have a real comparative advantage in this country and making sure that they can’t reach foreign markets. And that means that somebody else is going to get a monopoly position—call that somebody Russia, call it Gazprom—and they’ll be able to charge higher prices because you will not be able, given the trade barriers, to exploit the comparative advantages that you have. So it’s absolutely vital that you lower your particular protective situations even if the other guys want to do something crazy, because as you make yourselves stronger, what will happen is you will command more resources, they will be deployed more efficiently, capital markets will work better, and in the end, free trade is a rosy story even if the other guy doesn’t want to practice it. What he’s going to do is to harm himself by preventing himself from getting the inputs that he needs. If he doesn’t get the inputs that he needs, he’s not going to have the capital necessary to create exports. So essentially, think of trade barriers as a self-inflicted harm by the nation that imposes them, ironically most savagely on itself.

Bob Zadek: And thank you. And one clear comparative advantage in the third world trading with the US is of course wages. If wage rates are lower in third world countries, then they have an advantage because they can provide labor at a cheaper cost. Now, they are not exploiting us, we are not exploiting them. They are using their comparative advantage in cheap labor to get our goods where we have a comparative advantage in manufacturing acumen and manufacturing skill. Both parties benefit, both parties will be better off, and both parties will grow accordingly. Now, another concept, Richard…

Richard Epstein: By the way, on that wage advantage, you know, it creates the following kind of dynamic. You have very low wages in a place called China, and then all of a sudden a lot of American…

Show prep notes

Bob’s own preparation for this episode.

Elizabeth Warren’s Socialist Dogwhistle

Guest: Richard Epstein

Date: 8/26/18

Bob Zadek: In the past week, Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, formerly a Harvard Law professor, published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled the Accountable Capitalism Act – right out of Atlas Shrugged. In that opinion piece, she offered a proposal to basically “redo” – some might say eliminate – capitalism in America. She wants to juggle everything from how we do business to how we organize business affairs in America.

Her plan received a lot of attention from thinkers both on the left and on the right, including this morning’s guest. I am happy to welcome back to the show Professor Richard Epstein. Professor Epstein teaches law at NYU and is also at the University of Chicago School of Economics. Richard has written a bunch of books, all of which I proud to say I have read, some more than once. Richard published a response to Senator Warren’s piece on his weekly blog, Defining Ideas. We are here to discuss the Accountable Capitalism Act.

Why have I selected this as the topic for this morning’s show? Because it is so gosh darn scary. The fact that a law professor – a United States Senator – could actually write this with a straight face (I don’t know how you write with a straight face) is terrifying. She might even believe what she wrote makes sense, and because it comes from a United States Senator – somebody who is being discussed as a presidential candidate in 2020 – it is worthy of at least an hour of time to study both the piece itself as well as what it tells us about how the political left looks at business life in America. Richard, welcome to the show this morning.

Richard Epstein: Glad to be here.

Bob Zadek: Tell us the bullet points of what Senator Warren is proposing regarding the management of American business?

Richard Epstein: Essentially she wants to convert the American corporation from a shareholder-run operation to a stakeholder-run operation. These two terms are a little bit elusive, at least the second one, so let me explain the way in which this works. The traditional American corporation – the public corporation – is an organization owned by shareholders, which elects a board of directors, that in turn appoints a CEO. These three groups each have a distinct set of responsibilities and opportunities.

Shareholders at some level can sell their entire share out to somebody else in the takeover market. Each of them individually is entitled to sell their shares and all of them have the right to vote with respect to the selection of the board of trustees or the board of directors. The directors, meanwhile, are charged with the general oversight of the corporation. They appoint the CEO to run things on a day-to-day basis, subject to the general direction that they give.

So, you have these three layers of governance, the total goal being primarily to maximize the rate of return that it gets on its investment consistent with its legal obligations to the states and for the party with whom they entered the contract.

Fiduciary Duties and the “Business Judgment Rule”

The board of trustees and the CEO each have “fiduciary duties.” Fiduciary duties are essentially the idea that when the CEO starts to make decisions, they don’t make them in their own interest – their own interest is taken care of by the pay that they receive for the job – but rather, they are supposed to look at the class of shareholders and essentially try to do what in their good judgment is the best long-term operation for the company at large.

The entire law rests on the following kinds of propositions. First, that there is something called the “business judgment rule,” which states that if you are running a corporation and trying to maximize the value for your shareholders, you will not be held responsible if it turns out that the choices you make do not turn out particularly well. The idea is that people make good choices and bad choices, and if in the long run you’ve got a decent board of directors, the good choices will outdo the bad choices. The last thing you want is to allow individual shareholders to snipe at the bad outcomes while keeping all the gains from the good outcomes. “Heads, I win. Tails, you lose,” essentially is a recipe for closing down the corporation because the board gets all the downside while the shareholders get all the upside. This imbalance is not viable.

The exception to this rule is in cases of “self-dealing,” whether by members of the board or the CEO. This occurs when a board member enters into a transaction with a buddy or a friend. We no longer think of you as acting as a fiduciary agent for the shareholders. Instead, we think of you as trying to deal for your own benefit. If you look at these transactions, it’s not that you invalidate them per se (although many corporations have very stringent restrictions on what officers and directors can do by way of transactions), but we subject them to something known as the “fair value test.” Essentially, the value received by the corporation must be as great or greater than the value of the assets that they surrendered. If you put this situation together, then essentially what happens is that everybody is focused on the same goals.

In order to make this work in a public corporation, you tend to have only single class of shareholders, and the reason you do that is that the moment you start introducing preferred shareholders and common shareholders, there are going to be lots of choices which, if safe, benefit the preferred shareholders, and if risky, will benefit the common shareholders. You don’t want these people to start figuring out, “Well, which class of shareholders do we wish to prefer, and why?” So, the single class of shareholders means that everybody is equal to the extent that the law can create it. If you maximize the welfare of one shareholder, at least at a first approximation, you have done it for all.

Now, how do you then deal with the rest of the world? Well, the rest of the world is not owed a fiduciary duty, because if it were owed a fiduciary duty, you would get conflicts much more intense than those that you have with respect to the difference between a preferred and a common shareholder.

All of these arrangements are handled in one of two ways. If you’re talking about externalities and harms to individuals who don’t trade with the corporation, you will have things like environmental protection laws on the books which limit emissions and things of that sort, and the fiduciary duty requires you to comply as best you can with that external obligation.

If you’re dealing with trading partners, like bond holders, employees, suppliers, customers, and so forth, in those particular circumstances, each of them know that you owe a fiduciary duty to your shareholders, so you bargain at arm’s length for transactions that would be mutually beneficial. In some cases there’s going to be a contest as to how this ought to work. Do we have unionized corporations? Do we have contracts at-will with lenders? What kinds of covenants can they put into foreclosure and so forth. But the whole model is that they will take care of themselves. We will take care of ourselves. The fiduciary duties create win-win arrangements inside the corporation, and if you’re doing voluntary transactions, you then get a win-win on the other side.

It is not that there aren’t stakeholders – people who are interested in the affairs of the corporation –

but we have a very clear way in which they defend themselves.

The Scheme

What Elizabeth Warren wants to do – and it’s mindless as far as I’m concerned – is to say that the fiduciary duty model, which applies to shareholders, also requires you to have fiduciary duties with respect to all of these outside stakeholders, such as employees and everybody else. Now, the question is, “how do you discharge that duty?”

She comes to the right conclusion. I use the word “right” in quotation marks. If you only have a board represented chosen by the shareholders, how is it going to act as a fiduciary to people who are non-shareholders? Her solution is to have a federal agency call in every charter that has been issued to every corporation by every state – which means virtually all corporations, a massive move – and tell them that they will get their federal charter only if they agree to put on their board individuals who represent these other stakeholder groups.”

(424) BOB-SHOW // (424) 262-7469

Notes: Skip planning call – I will send email to substitute.

Be sure to mention the podcast!

1 MINUTE WARNING

This is Bob Zadek, thanking you for listening – also I invite you to subscribe to the podcast – BobZadek.com

AUDIO:

Trump Inauguration Speech

**7:57 - 8:30 - “**One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.

But that is the past. And now we are looking only to the future.”

10:56 - 11:02 - “We will follow two simple rules - buy American and hire American.”

Sunday: Landline (269) 465-4030

Show Notes:

Main Article:

Secondary Article:

Background (Audio)

Articles

Show Notes:

Headline: Richard Epstein on Trump Vs. Free Trade

Take a guess who said the following: “I believe strongly in free trade but it also has to be FAIR TRADE.” If it weren’t for the all-caps giveaway at the end, President Donald Trump’s recent tweet about trade could just as easily have come from Bernie Sanders or his predecessor in the Oval Office. To many, Trump’s statement appears perfectly sound. After all, we expect fairness in our personal dealings with others, and our deals with global trading partners would seem to be no exception. Senior Hoover Fellow and NYU Law Professor Richard Epstein says there’s no problem in applying a principle of fairness to our trade deals with other countries. However, according to his classically liberal outlook, free trade is fair trade. The use of coercion or fraud against a competitor is certainly unfair, but mutually beneficial trade among willing buyers and sellers in a global marketplace is not only fair, but is the very source of wealth and prosperity for all. Epstein is known for his wide-ranging and erudite commentary on law, politics and economics. He recently spoke about Trump’s wrong-headed trade ideas on his Hoover podcast, The Libertarian, and he joins the show to explain how free trade keeps both Federal and State governments in line when it comes to bad economic policies domestically. Let us all hope that President Trump heeds Epstein’s advice and pulls back from his anti-free-trade rhetoric before a trade war results.

Tune in to the show to of ideas, not attitude, and call Bob and Richard with your questions at (424) BOB-SHOW.

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Links

• @RichardAEpstein | Twitter

• “Defining Ideas” - Column by Richard A. Epstein | Hoover Institution

• Podcast - The Libertarian | Hoover Institution

• Trump Vs. Free Trade by Richard Epstein, March 7, 2017

Related Shows (Subscribe to the Podcast):

• Ian Vasquez on the Prospects for a Free Cuba — The Bob Zadek Show

****[BIO | NYU School of Law ]

• Epstein is the inaugural Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law.

• Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2000.

• Professor of Law Emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985

• Senior fellow of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the U of Chicago Division of Biological Sciences since 1983.

• Has written over 15 books; his most recent is The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (Harvard U. Press, 2014).

• He has also edited (with Catherine Sharkey) Cases and Materials on the Law of Torts (11th edition, 2016).

FIND HIS WORK AT:

• Weekly column for Defining Ideas and is a contributor to Ricochet.com and Forbes.com.

• @RichardAEpstein on Twitter

Main Article:

Trump Vs. Free Trade by Richard Epstein, March 7, 2017

The great mystery of Trump’s mindset is that he does not carry over the market-driven principles of his sensible domestic policies into the realm of international trade. The introduction of national borders does not mean that the gains from competition, certainty, and administrative simplicity no longer apply. The key principle of comparative advantage applies in both contexts. A good analogy is trade between states in the United States: Open trade among our states has produced growth and lowered costs for goods and services—and it could do the same at the level of nations. It would be a national disaster if states erected barriers to goods and services coming from other states. Trump’s views on international trade represent outright invitations to the worst mercantilist excesses found in Obama’s protectionist trade policies.

…

At the root of Trump’s intellectual confusion lies his statement that “I believe strongly in free trade but it also has to be FAIR TRADE.” (The all-caps are vintage Trump.) The former term is easily defined. Each government allows cross-border transactions in goods and services to take place on the same terms and conditions as ordinary domestic trades: no tariffs or quantitative restrictions on the flow of goods, services, or cash. The net cash balances, plus or minus, are of no particular concern. Let them fall as they may. Where there is a trade deficit with a particular country, it only means that the United States has persuaded individuals and firms from other countries to invest their money in the United States, where it can help fund new domestic businesses that generate growth, jobs, and products.

The flawed logic of protectionism comes from thinking that just because other countries are doing something that tends to hurt both parties, we should double down.

Ideally, of course, all nations should follow the same policy, but often, for a variety of protectionist reasons, many nations try to prop up exports with subsidies and drive down imports with tariffs or quantitative restrictions. The hard question is how to improve the position for the United States in this second-best world. Trump is keenly aware that we often face tariffs and taxes overseas, while foreign goods come into this country virtually free. But, notwithstanding his distaste for this practice, there is a huge virtue in adopting a strict policy of non-retaliation that seeks to lift tariff barriers overseas without raising tariffs at home. The subsidies that foreign governments confer upon their export industries redound in part to American buyers, who in turn increase their levels of consumption, or reduce the costs of the goods that they make for sale in both domestic and export markets.

…

Trump’s backward views on international trade are reflected in his constant refrain that we should “Buy American and Hire American” domestically.… he issued the related but indefensible Executive Order that “all new pipelines, as well as retrofitted, repaired, or expanded pipelines, inside the borders of the United States, including portions of pipelines, use materials and equipment produced in the United States, to the maximum extent possible and to the extent permitted by law.”

Fortunately, the “to the extent possible clause,” will mean that it probably doesn’t get very far:

“It is hard to give economic content to the phrase “maximum extent possible,” because the words conceal the question of just how much unnecessary extra cost must be incurred in order to make good on a promise that, if kept, only drives up the energy costs of American manufacturers and consumers. Nor is it clear how much of this order can survive the provisions of the World Trade Organization that prevent various kinds of favors to local over foreign suppliers.”

Trump insists that “America must put its own citizens first,” but fails to see the disaster that can follow if this mantra leads to the introduction of new protectionist policies. “A great wall” along the Mexican border will do nothing for America other than inflame passions with one of our vital trading partners. It’s a similar story with infrastructure repair. Protectionist “Buy and Hire American” policies will only impoverish this nation as they alienate the rest of the world. Infrastructure will only be restored if we reverse the wildly restrictive permit policy that has made it easier to file applications and law suits than to engage in new construction. Here, again, some well-directed domestic reforms will far outperform any pointless diatribe against our trading partners and military allies.

Secondary Article:

The ‘Exporting Jobs’ Canard, by Matthew J. Slaughter, June 14, 2017 (WSJ)

Repeated research shows that multinational hiring abroad doesn’t come at the expense of U.S. workers.