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Comment by ffnewfkjewf | Hacker News Reader

>on the whole we have benefited from trade deals

Despite the amount of rhetoric I see claiming this, I have yet to see any empirical evidence.

Corporate profits have benefited greatly which thus benefits all who own stocks (top 20%). Wages have been crushed which negatively impacts the other 80%. [1] Personally, on a whole I feel we’ve lost as Americans and disagree with the parent. You can argue about cheaper goods or more competition, but most these trade deals seem fairly lopsided with the main beneficiaries being other countries getting jobs and corporations getting cheaper labor.

1. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/29/hillary-clinton-cannot-win-us...

Corporate profits have benefited greatly which thus benefits all who own stocks (top 20%).

This is extremely misleading. Most of that 20% own it via their 401(k) or IRA or whatever retirement plan they are enrolled in. Those people will benefit from the ownership at some point if the market doesn't crash just before or during their retirement.

Also, the wealth of almost all those 20% depends strongly on their labor income. Almost all the stock is owned by people whose wealth depends almost entirely on investment returns. So those corporate profits are helping the top 20%, but mostly by helping the top 1% (mostly by helping the top 0.1%...).

This is a good interview with economist Gordon Hanson on trade, poverty and US job losses: http://www.vox.com/2016/4/20/11466868/trade-poverty-economis...

Well the fact that the global population has begun the climb out of poverty is a pretttttttty good indicator. You may be approaching from the protectionist side, of course, but I'm not and so the happy truth is plain to see.

That's a result of technology, not trade policy. Not only that, but I can't think of rising, developing countries that have free trade policies. Brazil, China, and the rest are all protectionist. Further, the the notion is that we in the US have benefited from free trade.

So the answer is none of the above.

I agree with you, but would dispute that Brasil is rising at the moment

Well to be fair "the whole" isn't fully visible yet so we don't actually know the plain truth. Maybe trade deals are better for everyone overall. Maybe they aren't.

Maybe they have sustainably and permanently lifted millions of people out of poverty and it's a long term step forward on the path to a better life for everyone. Or maybe they have served to increasingly concentrate capital into fewer and fewer hands to the point the entire world will be eventually perpetually enslaved with no path out and this causes very bad things for the human race to happen. Not to mention the destruction of culture (or is this a positive? I never know) and destruction of ecosystems (I'm pretty sure this isn't a positive).

The point is, we don't know the full story yet. The jury is still out. But I'm always wary of concentrated power. Distributed power seems to produce much more good IMOP.

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