Dani Rodrik explains globalization anxiety:

There is plenty of evidence that suggests that people are concerned about globalization not (just) because their pocketbooks are adversely affected but because they do not think its outcomes are right or fair. Issues of labor rights, environment, and pharma patents excite people because of the sense that the rules are not right. Economists may struggle with the term, but “fairness” in trade does resonate with most others. People do not seem to mind that technological progress makes the Sergey Brins and Bill Gates’s of the world multi-billionaires—because this kind of inequality seems somehow to fit with people’s moral code of what is acceptable. The inequality you get when a corporation fires a long-term employee to employ an (almost) equally productive Chinese at one-tenth the wage is viewed differently. It is not just about inequality, but also about procedural fairness.

If people oppose greater economic integration not primarily out of concern for the economic and social costs of labor market churn, but rather because they think there is something morally wrong with firing an American employee to hire a foreigner at a lower wage, then I have little sympathy for them. What’s procedurally unjust in (bilateral) employment at will? And why does crossing a national border bring greater scrutiny?

If downsizing and income inequality are tolerated at home, but outsourcing and foreign investment are met with hostility, then “people’s moral code of what is acceptable” strikes me as insufficiently cosmopolitan.

Is Rodrik merely describing the emotions underpinning globalization anxiety, or is he defending the American nation as the relevant moral community? He’s previously said he believes “cosmopolitan considerations should enter our calculus when the gains abroad (or to foreign nationals) are sufficiently large.” We know the gains are large in China.

In considering technological-induced inequality versus outsourcing-induced inequality, I think cosmopolitan considerations are sufficient to demand consistency between the two. If so, then heeding calls to “tinker with the rules of globalization” in response to this brand of public anxiety would amount to yielding to an ignoble instinct.