Dani Rodrik says “What makes news nowadays is the growing list of mainstream economists who are questioning globalisation’s supposedly unmitigated virtues.”

Unmitigated? That’s a straw argument. When did economists start selling free lunches?

Jonathan Chait has a good dissection of how Naomi Klein went from being wrong about Starbucks and the WTO to being really wrong about Pinochet, Iraq, and ethnic conflict.

Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. “I felt it emotionally,” she told The New York Times, “before I understood it factually.” Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was–guess what?–part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization…

The Shock Doctrine has a single, uncomplicated explanation for everything that ails us. It identifies the fundamental driving force of the last three decades to be the worldwide spread of free-market absolutism as it was formulated by Milton Friedman and the department of economics at the University of Chicago…

The notion that crises create fertile terrain for political change, far from being a ghoulish doctrine unique to free-market radicals, is a banal and ideologically universal fact. (Indeed, it began its dubious modern career in the orbit of Marxism, where it was known as “sharpening the contradictions.”) Entrenched interests and public opinion tend to run against sweeping reform, good or bad, during times of peace and prosperity. Liberals could not have enacted the New Deal without the Great Depression…

She is conscientious enough to provide readers with facts that blow her thesis to smithereens, yet at the same time she is deluded enough not to notice the rubble of her thinking on the floor…

Naomi Klein’s relentless lumping together of all her ideological adversaries in the service of a monocausal theory of the world ultimately renders her analysis perfect nonsense.

Rarely do I have the opportunity to report on experimental evidence about trade. Here’s Erik Kimbrough, Bart Wilson, and Vernon Smith in the AER on Historical Property Rights, Sociality, and the Emergence of Impersonal Exchange in Long-Distance Trade:

This laboratory experiment explores the extent to which impersonal exchange emerges from personal exchange with opportunities for long-distance trade. We design a three-commodity production and exchange economy in which agents in three geographically separated villages must develop multilateral exchange networks to import a good only available abroad. For treatments, we induce two distinct institutional histories to investigate how past experience with property rights affects the evolution of specialization and exchange. We find that a history of unenforced property rights hinders our subjects’ ability to develop the requisite personal social arrangements to support specialization and effectively exploit impersonal long-distance trade.

There’s little need to subsidize industrial clusters, at least in France.