There are a growing number of people entering (or already in) the workforce who will never know how much it once cost just to talk to someone. Yes, we all still pay a monthly phone bill, but if you’re like me much of what you pay for is the right to stream Netflix movies that have – at best – a 50% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
That’s not how it used to be.
When I was growing up a phone was used for talking, and a call cost money.
And a phone call to Belgium would have cost a lot of money.
I say that because I have a client based in Belgium, and he is one of my favorite people to talk to on the entire planet. We have a Skype session every couple of weeks, and each of these calls inevitably ends being an hour-long discussion, 90% of which is spent talking about the differences in our two countries’ politics and culture.
I enjoy each of these conversations, but a few months ago my client and I had a particularly memorable discussion.
We ended up discussing the recent miniseries on FX, The People Vs. O.J. Simpson. On our call I started talking about the aftermath and reaction to the real life verdict, assuming that—despite the fact that my client had only seen the first few episodes—the verdict was common knowledge.
After all, who didn’t know about O.J.?
My client immediately shut down the conversation, telling me that he and his wife had intentionally avoided googling the trial on their phones so that the ending would still be a surprise.
Of all the things I thought I would do, spoiling the end of the O.J trial was never one of them.
But 1995 was a different time. The “news” didn’t consist of snidely written 140 character tweets about quasi-celebrities that instantaneously circulated throughout the globe.
And phone calls cost money.
Social Mobility
The idea that I could spend 50 minutes of a 60 minute phone call to another country talking about non-pertinent topics (which definitely includes O.J. Simpson) would be crazy—unless I wanted to spend hundreds of dollars.
Now the idea of free person-to-person communication is so mundane that we forget how revolutionary it is.
And the ease with which ideas and conversations flow is something I think about whenever I hear politicians talk about free trade.
Without a doubt, free trade has left many blue-collar workers behind, and despite what economic theory says about the long-run reallocation of a displaced workforce, the data shows that when some people lose their jobs as a result of free trade, many lose them forever.
And there is no more pressing issue to voters and the candidates seeking their votes than job loss.
As a result candidates from both parties have promised a return to a world that existed before free trade. And it’s not just politicians. Robert Putnam, author of the award-winning book Bowling Alone recently authored a book titled Our Kids about income inequality and the death of the American Dream.
In the very beginning of that book Putnam talks about the 1950’s as being the peak moment for American social mobility (of course, as long as you were a white heterosexual male). Putnam—and other researchers—site the prevalence of blue-collar manufacturing and factory jobs that paid a living wage as one of the primary sources of social mobility in that era .
The type of jobs most often eliminated by free trade.
We Can’t Turn Back the Clock
The inherent assumption in many of the political attacks on free trade is that somehow we can recreate the 1950’s and turn back the clock to a time when the physical production and sale of goods was restricted to the country they were manufactured in.
The political message says that we can go back to when the things that were made here were the only things bought and sold here.
But things that are made, bought, and sold always start as an idea. And in the 1950s ideas did not flow back and forth between people living on different continents for free. Ideas – like the goods manufactured as a result of those ideas – were restricted by borders.
While we could theoretically attempt to go back to an “unglobalized” world when it comes to the physical production and transportation of products, we will never go back to a world where ideas were restricted by the cost of communication.
Anyone who says we can solve the very real challenges created by free trade by just turning back the clock to a time when O.J. Simpson could be just an American story is making an empty promise.
And the workers most harmed by free trade—most often men like my father and uncles who made their living with their hands—deserve more than the empty promise of a non-existent time machine.