To the extent that Donald Trump's trade war with China is based on a coherent story about the world, it is this: Free trade with China has been a disaster for the American worker, and we need tariffs to reverse the damage. No one knows more about that story than the MIT economist David Autor. In 2016, he co-wrote a paper with David Dorn and Gordon H. Hanson that challenged the economics profession's rapturous view of free trade. Drawing on their previous research, Autor and his co-authors concluded that from 1999 to 2011, the rise in Chinese imports had cost roughly 2 million American workers their jobs, with the bulk of those losses coming in the years immediately following China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. In the subset of factory towns where the damage was most concentrated, entire communities fell into ruin. The authors called the phenomenon 'the China shock.' The same year that the paper came out, Trump ascended to the White House'in part by railing...
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