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A friend sent me this very interesting Dublin Review article on Keynes' 1933 Dublin lecture on "National Self-Sufficiency" in which he expressed his growing doubts about unfettered globalization (although that word was not used until much later).
https://drb.ie/articles/keynes-in-dublin/
A friend sent me this very interesting Dublin Review article on Keynes' 1933 Dublin lecture on "National Self-Sufficiency" in which he expressed his growing doubts about unfettered globalization (although that word was not used until much later).
https://drb.ie/articles/keynes-in-dublin/
Comments
My favorite lines: "When Keynes started to publicly doubt free trade, it was a social scandal. Virginia Woolf and his close friends were horrified. ‘Maynard has become a Protectionist,’ she wrote to a friend in September 1930, ‘which horrified me so that I promptly fainted.’"
But of course Keynes wasn't a protectionist. He fully understood the value of free trade and how it raised global productivity by encouraging countries to specialize in comparative advantage, although he also recognized that were costs to undermining national sovereignty.
More importantly, he understood how violations of global free trade were common and could easily undermine comparative advantage while also putting downward pressure on global growth, and he distrusted the distortions caused by unfettered and highly volatile capital flows.
Then, as now, it seems that economists treated trade and capital flow intervention so moralistically that they were unable to distinguish between criticism of the existing trading system and the heresy of opposition to free trade.
“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various
products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably
expect their early delivery upon his doorstep;”