Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is November 15th, 2019, and my guest is economist and author, Kimberly Clawzeng.

She is the Thoreameda Miller and Walter Ments Professor of Economics at Reed College.

She's the author of Open, the Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration and Global Capital,

which is the subject of today's episode, Kim. Welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

What's fun about your book is that I agree with it almost entirely on trade issues,

but disagree about policy that you advocate in the book.

So I think we're going to have a great conversation.

One of the things we disagree on is how the average Americans have been doing over the last 30 or 40 years

during a time of rising globalization.

Want you summarize your perspective on that?

Sure. Yeah. I guess I would preface it by saying that I think American living standards are quite high,

particularly in comparison to a lot of countries.

One of the key features of recent economic history is that what's been going on with the macro economy as a whole

isn't always mirrored in what's happening to typical workers.

So if you compare two recent periods, if you look at the period after World War II,

...