How To Trade Futures

You could promise to make their lives better in ways
that don’t involve bringing back the old plants and mines — which, you know, Obama did with health reform and Hillary would have done with family policies and more.
Part of the whole Trump phenomenon involves white working class voters rallying around a candidate who promised to bring back the coal
and industrial jobs of the past, and lashing out at anyone who refuses to make similar promises.
But back to the starting point: when I analyze the effects of trade on manufacturing employment, the
goal is to understand the effects of trade on manufacturing employment — not to win over voters.
The occasion is rather odd: I produced a little paper on trade
and jobs, which I explicitly labeled “wonkish”; the point of the paper was, as I said, to reconcile what seemed to be conflicting assessments of the impacts of trade on overall manufacturing employment.
And I have to admit to a strong suspicion that proposals for regional policies
that aim to induce service industries to relocate to the Rust Belt would not be well received, would in fact be attacked as elitist.
Job creation under Obama has been pretty good, but it hasn’t offered blue-collar jobs in the same places where the old industrial jobs have eroded.