Smoothe trade makes smooth evolution

JEFFREY FRANKEL, CAMBRIDGE

What if we look at the world as a whole, rather than individual countries? As Columbia’s Xavier Sala-i-Martin pointed out in 2002 and 2006, even as inequality has risen in nearly every country, inequality across countries has decreased, owing largely to the success of developing countries like China and India in raising their per capita incomes since the 1980s.

The entire trade debate is about who gets protected from evolution. But the Overton window does not like its mention.