1/5
I don’t think the economic argument should be whether or not the US should “bring home” such things as apparel manufacturing. There is nothing wrong in itself with outsourcing the manufacturing of products that can be made more efficiently abroad. https://www.ft.com/content/561a4c74-87b3-44aa-8cec-9cf2acbbe83c
2/5
The problem arises only when foreign workers – Chinese workers in this case – are paid a lower share of the revenues they generate than American workers.

When that happens, they are unable to replace American consumption with enough Chinese consumption to maintain or...
3/5
raise total global demand. In that case the rest of the world does not benefit from the outsourcing of manufacturing to China.

If Chinese workers were paid as much – relative to their much lower productivity, of course – as American workers, however, manufacturing that...
4/5
was outsourced to China would result in greater Chinese imports, directly or indirectly through other countries, of American goods, and both Americans and Chinese would benefit from the consequent rise in productivity and wages. The problem, as Matt Klein and I explain in...
5/5
our book, is not outsourcing per se, but rather the distribution of income in the countries to which the US outsources. As long as workers everywhere retain roughly the same share of the revenues they generate, global trade raises everyone's income.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244175/trade-wars-are-class-wars#book-reviews
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