At the Financial Times, Martin Wolf purports to provide a prescription for "How to defeat rightwing populism."  Beyond the all too typically mindless bashing of Donald Trump (see, e.g., "This is why Mr Trump is so dangerous: he has no notion of the foundations of US success" and other quotes therein), Wolf provides the following insight: If rightwing populism is to be defeated, one must offer alternatives. In a forthcoming article Dartmouth College's Douglas Irwin notes that protectionism is quack medicine. Productivity growth accounted for more than 85 per cent of the job losses in manufacturing between 2000 and 2010. This is very wrong. The Federal Reserve has kept records of real output per hour of all persons in manufacturing since 1987: If productivity growth between 2000 and 2010 accounted for 85% of all job losses in U.S. manufacturing, then we would expect to have seen some type of break (aka a tipping point) in the historical...(Read Full Post)