I think you missed my point @BrianCAlbrecht I did not mean to debate the finer points of econometric method. My point was that most people make political decisions based on their experience. In the 1970s and 1980s workers in the heartland were unionized and worked in close-knit communities. Those communities disintegrated when manufacturing jobs declined, and low-paying service jobs were not a good substitute. Anyone who has visited a town in decline will not be persuaded by econometrics. Perhaps the absolute loss of manufacturing jobs after 2001 had nothing to do with the increased import share from China. That, to me, seems unlikely. But even if the decline was in part inevitable as a consequence of automation, we did a terrible job as a society of managing a transition for communities to new stable ways of subsisting. A welfare check is not a good substitute for a high-paying job. Call me a cynic, but it has not been my experience that the majority of my colleagues are dispassionate scholars who leave their priors behind when analyzing data. We find what we look for, and often what we look for is confirmation to support policies from which we personally benefit. Most economists, as members of the coastal elite, benefit from cheaper consumer goods. And we proceed to write papers demonstrating how American workers also benefit from globalization, even though workers in the towns that lost manufacturing jobs have voted with their feet by moving away from a Democratic Party that supports globalization towards a Republican Party that is unashamedly populist. Economics is, and always has been in part, a political venture. Ricardo’s arguments for free trade were in direct opposition to the corn laws, which supported landowners over manufacturers and workers. The repeal of those laws redistributed away from the landed gentry toward merchants, manufacturers, and labor. Nobody compensated the landowners out of the gains from trade. So perhaps the Autor-Dorn-Hanson papers had no influence on the debate. But the political economy of the issue was instrumental in the rise of MAGA and the success of Trump.@carney @greg_ip @bungarsargon @jasonfurman @IvanWerning