Governing Work and Welfare in a New Economy: European and American Experiments
by using policies that they intend should have negative effects on the economic welfare of u.s. residents. It is equally certain that the United States government would not pursue such policies if it were that political support were absent and the support for current policy need not come from a majority of the population. It is a heavy argument among these authors that the United States has "given away" a big part of its advantages in trade relationships. This must mean that other countries are better at manipulating their trade relationships to gain advantages that would otherwise be realized by the United States. The final essay in the book proposes a series of adjustments to United States trade policy which Professor Lovett believes will extricate the country from its current economic malaise. This is a wide-ranging set of suggestions from adopting a truly international mind set to some specific policy changes involving, among other things, serious modifications to several international economic agencies and a general commitment to negotiating with other countries in a multilateral framework between equal partners. Professor Lovett is not too kind to the current style of international negotiations. This book would benefit greatly from a focus on reasoned arguments regarding U.S. trade policy rather than depending on superfluous bibliographic references obscuring the thesis that the authors obviously are hoping to elucidate. It is easy to sympathize with their conclusion that the international trade of the United States is not reciprocated and so is disadvantageous to this country. Many of us have developed arguments to that conclusion other than those presented in this book, but we realize that the losses of welfare accrue only to a certain portion of the population of the United States while, at the same time, those policies work to the significant advantage of certain other portions of the population of this country. We might direct our research on trade policy to greater effect if we were to focus on the identification of the gains to certain groups from current trade policies compared to the welfare losses from those policies to everyone else. After all, neither "neoliberals" nor others would pursue these counterproductive policies if certain ones of us did not gain an advantage over the rest of us.