Another piece on why trade agreements are beneficial. I will highlight some key passages.
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21695855-americas-economy-benefits-hugely-trade-its-costs-have-been-amplified-policy
"Robert Lawrence and Lawrence Edwards, two economists, estimate that trade with China alone put $250 a year into the pocket of every American by 2008. The gains from cheap stuff flowed disproportionately to the less well-off, because the poor spend more of their incomes on goods than the rich.
In 1993 America sold nearly $10 billion-worth of cars and parts to Mexico, at today's prices. By 2013 that had risen to $70 billion.
Exports to China grew by almost 200% between 2005 and 2014, with agriculture and the aerospace and car industries leading the charge. Some workers have benefited from rising exports, because firms that export pay more; one estimate puts the export wage-premium at 18%. Outsourcing low-wage assembly has also increased the productivity of America's high-skilled workers.
Yet on the extreme assumption that every dollar spent on imports replaced a dollar spent employing an American, Mr Lawrence calculates that between 2000 and 2007 Chinese imports caused, at most, 188,000 of 484,000 annual manufacturing-job losses. A recent, more detailed, estimate by Daron Acemoglu, David Autor and others chalks up about 1m of 5.5m manufacturing jobs lost between 1999 and 2011 to Chinese competition (with similar-sized job losses in other industries).
This implies that many other factors are in play. Technological change is probably the prime culprit for shrinking manufacturing employment. Productivity increases in the industry have been staggering
But another recent achievement of trade economists has been to show that trade-induced job losses, while relatively small, are particularly painful: more so than those caused by technology. Until recently, most economists assumed that displaced workers could find new work relatively easily. After all, in June 2007, on the eve of the financial crisis, unemployment was 4.6%—lower than it was before the recession of the early 1990s. Between 2000 and 2007 Americans left 5m jobs a month and started 5.1m new ones. A million or so jobs lost to trade with China over more than a decade seems tiny by comparison.
But many workers displaced by Chinese imports did not simply find another job. Mr Autor and his colleagues have shown that, at local level, employment falls at least one-for-one with jobs lost to trade, and that displaced workers are unlikely to move to seek new work.
You can oppose protectionism, or you can oppose redistribution. It is getting harder to do both."
