Politics & Power Quote by Paul Samuelson

Globalization isn’t framed here as a moral project or an inevitable tide; it’s a conditional bargain. Samuelson, a Nobel economist with a talent for making abstractions feel like household physics, is warning that open trade is politically rented, not owned. The rent gets paid in rising living standards. If that payment stops, the coalition that tolerates churn - plant closures, wage pressure, regional hollowing-out - evaporates fast.

The line’s sharpness is in its quiet reversal of the usual story. We often treat globalization as the engine of growth. Samuelson flips it: growth is the lubricant that keeps globalization from grinding into backlash. When economies expand, losers can be compensated (through new jobs, mobility, social insurance, or simply time). In stagnation, distributional conflict turns zero-sum. The same cross-border flows that looked like opportunity start to look like extraction, and politics begins to price in anger rather than efficiency.

The subtext is also a jab at elite complacency. “Presumes” signals a critique of models and policymakers who treat growth as a default setting and ignore fragility: financial crises, demographic slowdowns, productivity plateaus. Samuelson wrote in a long postwar era when growth made liberalization easier to sell; his later work also stressed that trade can create domestic losers even when the country “wins” overall. This sentence reads like the missing footnote to every free-trade promise: the economic case may survive weak growth on paper, but the political case rarely does.