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In the discussion about the impact of world trade and capital flows on the economy, much misinformation has been offered from people unfamiliar with both economic analysis and economic data that are readily available. Globalization makes very little difference in the determinants of overall national income, and redistribution has not been from labor to capital but rather from less skilled labor to more skilled. International trade has played a minor role in this redistribution. The focus in the debate should be on the facts - not the pronouncements of so-called experts.
I AM DELIGHTED and honored to be here, and deeply grateful to the National Association of Business Economists for presenting me with the Adam Smith award. This means more to me than you may think. I have been unusually noisy for a serious academic over the past few years, and some of what I have had to say has not been particularly popular. In fact, a story about me in the British newspaper The Guardianbore the headline, "Lunch with the irritating professor." It is a great source of comfort to me to know that the members of the NABE, while they may not always agree with everything I say, understand that my polemics have had a serious purpose - that I am not being irritating for its own sake, nor for the sake of the notoriety it brings, but rather because I am trying to rescue economic discourse from the rather sad state into which it has lately fallen.
WORLD TRADE, CAPITAL FLOWS AND THE ECONOMY
Today I want to talk about a topic that has been central both to my polemics and to some of my research over the past several years: the impact of growing world trade and capital flows - of "globalization" - on both the real economy and the way we look at that economy. This is hardly a new topic; indeed, we might argue that concerns over globalization are where economics as we know it began. As an amateur intellectual historian, I claim that modern economics actually dates from a few years before Adam Smith's Wealth Of Nations; the key breakthrough was not by Adam Smith but by his good friend David Hume, whose Of the balance...