Keen On

Dumb globalization: America’s worst bet. That, at least, is the view of the Washington Post financial writer David J Lynch and author of The World’s Worst Bet. From Clinton to Bush, Lynch argues, America has bet stupidly on globalization and, not surprisingly, has lost. It’s no coincidence, he suggests, that the American dream has also unraveled in this tumultuous period. While globalization lifted billions from poverty worldwide and enriched coastal elites, Lynch contends that America's failure to help displaced manufacturing workers created the resentment that ultimately put Trump in the White House. The promised assistance to globalization's losers never materialized, leaving entire communities devastated by both catastrophic job losses and the equal catastrophe to tens of million Americans of the 2008 financial crisis. So what to do? Lynch argues that both Trump's tariffs and Biden's industrial policy are fighting yesterday's battles. Instead, America needs robust labor market policies—wage insurance, pla