"Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods"
About this Quote
Reich starts by granting the orthodox case, and that concession is the whole move. “Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth” isn’t a love letter to Davos; it’s a throat-clearing that signals credibility before the pivot he’s famous for: growth is real, prices do fall, and none of that settles the argument about who wins, who loses, and who gets to call it “success.”
The diction is tellingly technocratic. “Spur” suggests a horse and rider: growth is driven, directed, made to run. “Lower prices” frames the consumer as the primary citizen, the shopper as the unit of well-being. That’s the familiar free-trade moral math: if the basket at Walmart is cheaper, the policy worked. Reich’s subtext is that this is an incomplete ledger, one that counts the gain at the cash register more carefully than the loss in bargaining power, community stability, or wage growth.
Context matters because Reich has lived on both sides of the policy membrane: a mainstream economist who served in the Clinton-era consensus, then became one of its most persistent critics. By the time he’s making statements like this, he’s speaking into a political culture where “free trade” has become both technocratic dogma and populist villain. His opening clause anticipates the bad-faith rebuttal (“You’re anti-growth”), then narrows the debate to distribution and governance: growth for whom, prices at what cost, and what happens when the savings are diffuse but the dislocation is concentrated.
It works because it sounds like agreement while setting a trap for complacency. The sentence is a permission slip to stop arguing about whether globalization “works” and start arguing about what we owe the people it works over.
The diction is tellingly technocratic. “Spur” suggests a horse and rider: growth is driven, directed, made to run. “Lower prices” frames the consumer as the primary citizen, the shopper as the unit of well-being. That’s the familiar free-trade moral math: if the basket at Walmart is cheaper, the policy worked. Reich’s subtext is that this is an incomplete ledger, one that counts the gain at the cash register more carefully than the loss in bargaining power, community stability, or wage growth.
Context matters because Reich has lived on both sides of the policy membrane: a mainstream economist who served in the Clinton-era consensus, then became one of its most persistent critics. By the time he’s making statements like this, he’s speaking into a political culture where “free trade” has become both technocratic dogma and populist villain. His opening clause anticipates the bad-faith rebuttal (“You’re anti-growth”), then narrows the debate to distribution and governance: growth for whom, prices at what cost, and what happens when the savings are diffuse but the dislocation is concentrated.
It works because it sounds like agreement while setting a trap for complacency. The sentence is a permission slip to stop arguing about whether globalization “works” and start arguing about what we owe the people it works over.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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