Reply #15: I had an argument about this a few years ago [View All]

[depakid]

with a British economist. I believe it was on the Smirking Chimp- though it could have been here.

Anyway, I took the regional integration approach- and basically showed him how stupid it was for Oregon growers to be cutting down their pear orchards due to competition from artificially cheap (and potentially pesticide ridden) Chilean imports.

He was really good and countered with examples of how Japan's protecionism with with respect to their rice farmers hurt both the American and Japanese economies- and particularly Japanese consumers.

This went back and forth for 10 or 12 posts over several days- finally ending with an agreement to disagree.

He was one of those cornucopian types who believes (despite all of the scientific evidence to the contrary) that there's going to be some great technological fix for all this and that we'd find it before the situation became untenable.

I wonder, given the demand increases in China and India, whether he would be so strong a proponent of globalization today (with respect to food imports) as he was back around 2001?