But this doesn’t necessarily make the language of "winners" and "losers" jejune, or merely rhetorical, or what have you. That language still captures an important feature of the underlying moral case, namely that the losses can be too heavy to be justly born alone.

Large scale job losses in particular sectors raise the specter of entire communities of wage workers falling from roughly middle-class incomes into something far more precarious. If this coincides (as a result of expanded trade in that sector) with huge increases of in incomes of already-better-off professionals and managers, then surely we can make a colorable case for the "winners" compensating the "losers"?

That case would not then turn on the mere fact that one party won and the party other lost from trade (and so would not be reversible in principle). It would turn on the fact that one party suffered devastating losses, which no reasonable efforts of theirs could have averted, while the other party not only averted those losses, but profited from them.

You might say: But this is just the underlying distributive argument come back in other clothes. In a way that is true. But my point is that that underlying distributive argument encompasses the moral intuition that economic losses are not dollar-for-dollar equivalent, that their scale and social concentration are morally relevant facts.

The most popular adage in these globalization debates is that the benefits are distributed diffusely (through lower prices for everyone) and the harms are distributed very specifically to a small amount of people (ie, textile workers losing their jobs). And since voters are for a variety of psychological and evolutionary reasons more likely to a. sympathize with these large, specifc losses, we must frame trade debates as being about winners and losers. Additionally, there is a pretty serious empirical argument that more open economies are riskier, and people are generally short sighted about risk and seek to minimize it immediately. This all adds up to a conundrum for the left of center economist, who know that freer trade and more open economies promote higher growth and greater well being not only in the US, but also in other countries (krugman almost justifies trying to push forward with doha and other trade agreements exclusively on the grounds that they benefit poor countries). Of course there are also positive political externalities to freer trade (the argument that NAFTA was key to Mexican stability is often used as an ex post facto justification for it by leftie policy wonks)

The point is, for the leftie economist, whose trade battles are almost exclusively with other left of center types (the anti trade people in the GOP are nativists like Buchanon and even the GOP can get over its disdain for people from other countries for the sake of $$$ for its corporate overlords *snark alert*) needs to frame this debate as being about “winners and losers” and basically lie about their being some magical status quo ante that could be returned to, because this is how many democratic voters see it.

Also, in the world of pro free trade lefties, you see the “social democratic” argument emerging as compromise between populist, EPI style trade bashing, and DLC like free trade boosterism. This is a synthesis of the empirical fact about free trade’s benefit to the economy vis a vis lower prices, comparative advantage etc etc and voters concern about the increasing perceived risk due to globalization. This is the argument that free trade is all well and good, assuming a stronger social safety net to account for the increased risk. The canonical example is that social democratic heaven Sweden as well as Denmark, both of which have open economies with strong safety nets. Of course, many lefties view these social nets as externally desirable, apart from their role as a political cover for free trade. The big question is whether leftie economists and generally intelligent leftie policy types can convince right wing trade boosters to create some kind of system to deal with the dislocation caused by a more open economy, if not, the short term perceived desirability of populist economics, ascendant on both the right and left, will win the day, much to the detriment of not only Americans, but also of billions trying to get out of poverty in the developing world.

For better of for worse (Bryan Caplan surely thinks for worse) we aren’t ruled by a Supreme Council of Economists, (imagine that, you could have two right wingers like Mankiw and Bartlett, two lefties like Krugman and DeLong, and then Dani Rodrik and Tyler Cowen to spice things up, with Steven Leavitt as a tiebreaker…but alas, this isn’t happening). This means that economists must spice up policy proposals using the language that most people use in thinking about economic issues, I think that those of us who support more open economies can deal with a little oversimplification and obfuscation to prevent a populist uprising against trade.

PS – I’m a 17 year old whose never had a real job, experienced economic insecurity and my brother’s work at one point consisted of moving IP jobs from the silicon valley to singapore, so take what I say with the requisite grain(s) of salt.

Or, to put it another way: if it turned out that globalization helped the poor and middle class and hurt the rich, wouldn’t you then claim that protectionist policies required the rich to compensate the poor, too? At that point it’s not about the trade, it’s about the money.

But even if that make globalization already-justified, it doesn’t change the fact that it could be further justified through redistribution on the developed nation’s end. Presumably there’s a sweet spot where the inefficiencies of such a scheme make going any further a bad idea, but I’ve got a feeling we’re nowhere near it yet.

We’re always told its callous to tell the outsourced worker that “it’s really okay that he doesn’t have his job any more,” but isn’t it even more callous to tell the even more poor person in that foreign country “no job for you!” Everyone paints globalization as a fight between management and worker. But it’s not. It’s between worker and worker. Pro-globalization advocates don’t have to justify some diffuse gain to society, they just need to stand up the poor sap in India who won’t be getting a job because of your protectionist policies.

No one ever buys the “diffuse losses to the economy” thing, which is why protectionist arguments are so compelling. So you need to counter that with a specific person. This is what passes for political discourse nowadays. Finding the most sympathetic person in the debate and framing your argument so it helps them. I guess this is why “do it for the children” arguments work so well.

It doesn’t have to be framed in terms of justice — it can be put more pragmatically than that. It’s fine to say that the differences in wealth distributions between a society with a strong middle class and, say, an post-colonial kleptocracy are arbitrary. But I think you could point to convincing reasons why the former society is preferable to the latter.

Isn’t the only real reason for chasing globalization’s pie-increasing potential its presumed ability to decrease aggregate human suffering? It seems plausible to me that the marginal gains achieved by making the rich richer don’t offset the losses in utility experienced by the poor. If that’s the case then some redistributive mechanism is going to be necessary, or else the whole enterprise is subject to the same sorts of problems that make you find protectionism objectionable — namely, that it makes no sense in big-picture terms.

It’s not about preserving an arbitrary status quo, it’s about making sure the species is, on average, living a better life.