Donald Trump’s economic crankery

Donald Trump isn’t just a bombastic windbag. He’s an economic crank, most obviously in his claim that America has weakened itself by allowing manufacturing to go to China. He promises to make America great again by “beating” China and bring those jobs back. The only problem with that is that the jobs that have gone to China and elsewhere are not the great “value-added” jobs of economic mythology, but the low value-added assembly jobs that America has abandoned because, well, there are more valuable things for Americans to do and the unemployment rate today is 5.3 percent, or essentially full employment. Read the full analysis in my column for Economy Lab in today’s Globe and Mail (7th August, 2015).