Mad about Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization (Hardback)
By Daniel Griswold
About the Book
If you look at where nearly all of the clothes in your closet were manufactured, as Dan Griswold does at the opening of Mad about Trade, the picture is clear. China, Canada, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Peru, Korea, Egypt, India, Mexico, Thailand, and more—a United Nations of pants, shirts, ties, and jackets. In every sense of the word, trade suits us exceedingly well.
Politicians and pundits can rage against free trade and globalization, but much of what they convey is myth. Griswold embraces the global marketplace and shows how free trade is the American family’s best friend. Here are a few of the benefits Griswold takes us through:
• Import competition provides lower prices, greater variety, and better quality, especially for poor and middle- class families.
• Driven in part by trade, most new jobs are well-paying service jobs that form the backbone of today’s middle class.
• Trade barriers erected in the United States are manipulative and harmful, and their “value” is often deliberately misrepresented by those with economic or political axes to grind.
• Foreign investment here has created well-paying jobs, and investment abroad has given United States companies access to millions of new customers.
• Trade has helped expand the global middle class, reducing poverty and child labor while fueling demand for U.S. products.
But, it’s not just about better and cheaper goods. As Griswold compellingly details, over the past three
decades trade and an open global economy have created a more prosperous, democratic, and peaceful world.
Before you accept what you hear on cable TV and talk radio, consider the real story of America’s growing integration in the world economy presented in Mad about Trade. This book is a must-read for every American who wonders where we are all headed in this more open world of ours.
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About the Author
DANIEL GRISWOLD is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. and a nationally recognized authority on international trade and immigration.
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What Others Have Said
"In 10 well-organized chapters, international trade expert Griswold, director of the Cato Institute’s trade policy center, reaches out to low- and middle-class readers to make a persuasive case against U.S. protectionism by illustrating how have-nots are the most likely to benefit from the global marketplace in the form of lower prices, greater variety and better quality of goods. Bringing complex issues home, literally, Griswold opens his examination with a survey of his closet, containing items from Australia, Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, and Vietnam, but little from the U. S. How and why these faraway items wind up here is something few Main Street Americans think about, but Griswold explains the complicated mechanisms of world trade with brisk, easy-to-read prose."
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"There are few subjects so important and so misunderstood as the value of international trade to the American public. Dan Griswold does a masterful job explaining these issues in this highly readable and enjoyable book."
—FREDERICK W. SMITH
CHAIRMAN & CEO, FEDEX CORPORATION
"The public debate over trade policy is always in need of clear thinking. Marshalling an abundance of evidence, Dan Griswold makes a persuasive case for free trade that will give even the most hardened critic reason to pause."
—DOUGLAS A. IRWIN
PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
"Mad about Trade explains in plain English how important more open trade has been in growing the American middle class and how devastating it would be were we to reverse course, as some politicians have suggested. It is very tempting for American politicians to blame economic problems on free trade, globalization, or both. Griswold comprehensively and credibly shows how it would hurt the very people that politicians presume to help!"
—CLAYTON YEUTTER
FORMER U.S. TRADE REPRESENTATIVE
"Daniel Griswold's tour de force explores, reasons and documents how import competition benefits the American consumer, seeing him move ahead toward greater peace incentives, lower real prices, more choices, better quality."
—WILLIAM H. PETERSON, Washington Times
"Daniel Griswold is not shy about sharing the high aspirations he harbors for his superlative new book. Griswold has managed to compose a volume as accessible and persuasive as it is indispensable, as fresh and uplifting as it is firmly grounded in accumulated wisdom -- a rare bird, indeed."
—SHAWN MACOMBER, The American Spectator
"This concise treatise makes a convincing case for free trade as not only the economically superior path, but also the morally superior one. Using a minimum of economic jargon, Griswold describes how real household income has risen steadily over the past quarter century, explains that U.S. manufacturing output is higher than it has ever been, and demonstrates that the trade deficit is offset by capital inflows from our trading partners. Griswold also offers an eloquent defense of globalization, touching on its ability to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty while simultaneously strengthening democracy abroad."
—MASON RAYNER, Richmond Times-Dispatch
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Look Inside the Book
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