NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money, I'm Stacey Manick-Smith.

And I'm Greg Rizalski.

For decades, economists saw globalization as almost like this universal good.

If a company that made socks in Virginia could more cheaply make socks in China than it

should probably move there.

For America, this would mean cheaper socks.

And for China, it would mean workers would be given a ladder out of poverty.

Win-win.

Now of course, the sock maker in Virginia would lose her job.

But the traditional thinking was that the whole economy would grow richer and grow larger.

And so there would be more opportunities for the sock maker.

She could move to a different town or get some new job skills and find different employment.

About a decade ago, three economists began taking a closer look at some of the collateral

damage from globalization.

And they found that the story was a bit more messy than that.

The research came to be known as the China Shock.

What we found was that the major loss and manufacturing jobs that occurred in the first decade

of the 2000s, about a quarter of that we could attribute to increasing poor competition

from China.

And that ends up being kind of right about a million jobs.

This is Gordon Hanson.

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