I am glad to see Rakesh returning to pen-l, but please, Rakesh, try to
avoid attacking others on the list, even obliquely.
Rakesh Narpat Bhandari wrote:
> 1. Alex's concerns about dynamic increasing returns speak mostly to
> North-North trade--as Richard Nelson and Sylvia Ostry have noted--not
> to the North-South trade which has motivated anti-globalization,
> protectionist sentiment. So the theoretical concerns which he raises
> seem out of place in the present debates.
>
> 2. Not convinced that the CAD is so foreboding. Flow of funds data do
> not allow us to know how much of the foreign debt is owned by
> Americans and very special friends (e.g., the Saudis) operating out
> of foreign hedge funds.
>
> 3. As for protectionism itself, I am concerned about the lack of
> consideration of obvious counter-productive effects. There seems to
> be so little recognition of this by the self styled populists, so I
> submit that they are in the thrall of mythical nationalist thought
> which gains power as class antagonisms threaten to develop in times
> of uncertainty. It wouldn't be the first time that the reaction to
> the highly formalist and abstract analysis of bourgeois economics had
> led to an embrace of the myths of nation and neo mercantalism.
>
> I refer here not only to retaliations and beggar-thy-neighbor
> policies (to which Mark was perhaps averring) but the possibility
> that by limiting the supply of dollars abroad through tariffs and the
> other import restrictions meant to protect declining industries--and
> this seems to be what Godley is proposing--the dollar's value will
> probably increase and thus put added pressure on US exports. That
> is, as the free trade Keynesian Bob Eisner warned (but I guess he has
> already been forgotten), there could be one aircraft job loss in
> Seattle (to Airbus) for every textile job protected in South Carolina.
>
> Rakesh
>
> As a side note: on his list from which I have been banned, Doug H
> downloaded a NYT article on the labor situation in Cambodia. Though
> of course I couldn't reply, he suggested to his list that my thinking
> was not complicated enough, but he did not notice--though I have
> pointed this out to to him several times--that the US has reserved
> the unilateral right to determine whether labor conditions are good
> enough in Cambodia to allow it a quota increase, and he did not
> notice that the NYT article did not say a word about what the
> consequences of last year's quota denial had been on the Cambodian
> workers who had lost their jobs presumably to return to the mine
> infested country-side. But I suppose keeping on nationalist
> chauvinist blinders is considered to be complicated analysis.
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
