This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 26, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A Financial Times Harris Poll indicates that citizens of rich countries view globalization as an

overwhelmingly negative force. As such, citizens of Europe and the United

States want higher taxes on the wealthy to iron out what they believe are globalizations inequities.

But what underlies this attitude?

Is it simply questions being asked in a vacuum?

Or is globalization really that unpopular?

Cato Institute Vice President for Research, Brink Lindsay weighs in on the possible impact.

Do the results of this poll indicate some new wave of protectionism?

I don't really think so. wave of protectionism?

I don't really think so.

At least in the United States, the numbers that indicate support for or opposition to

globalization and freer trade, bop up and down.

They're never particularly rosy from a free trader's perspective as Cato

adjunct scholar Brian Kaplan has written about in his new book

The Myth of the Rational Voter, which we have excerpted in a policy analysis for Cato.

Public opinion is woefully ill-informed about economics and there's a whole bunch of economic

illiteracy that shapes people's views about the economy and in particular on the issue of trade

there is a lot of widespread public misunderstanding about the effects

of trade.

And so we see fairly weak support for the creative destruction of international commerce.

...