Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Today we're talking about all things trade and innovation, and it's a really meaty topic. So we begin by talking about why, beyond the obvious, the topic's so hard, what trade is responsible for when it comes to tech change and jobs. And we cover everything from some really interesting theories of the past and whether they matter for the present and the future to the debates around productivity, manufacturing, China, protectionism, and more.

So a hell of a lot. To have this conversation, we have two special guests, Russ Roberts,

host of the longstanding and excellent econ talk podcast and research fellow at Stanford University's

Hoover Institution, and Noah Smith, who did his PhD in economics at the

University of Michigan, was a finance professor at Stony Brook University and is now a columnist

at Bloomberg View. And he's the first voice you'll hear.

We're really talking about the part of trade they don't teach in Econ 101. We're talking about

the adjustment to trade. And in Econ 101, there's pretty much this unstated assumption that economies adjust

very frictionlessly and very easily, and everything goes very smoothly. To be honest, it's really

not easy to tell when that will and won't happen. And there's no general theory that economists

have about adjustment. Economists often think to the very end and think

about equilibrium and ignore the path for how you get there. But that can be a little bit like saying

like World War II is great because it brought us human rights. But the road to get to the UN Human

Rights Convention was a little bumpy. Yeah, the reality is very messy in that way.

The only thing I would add to that, I think a good econ 101 teacher talks about the adjustment. I think it's a little bumpy. Yeah, the reality is very messy in that way. The only thing I would add to that, I think a good Econ 101 teacher talks about the

adjustment.

I think it's a bad teacher and a bad economist who says, well, trade creates net benefits,

so therefore it's good for the country.

Trade's good on average for the Americans, and it obviously has big distributional effects

depending on who you are, what you do. There

could be long-term distributional effects that your skill is no longer valuable. And there could be a

short-term adjustment, which is it's no longer valuable. You're going to have to find something new to

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