Against the Tide
An Intellectual History of Free Trade
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
About two hundred years ago, largely as a result of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, free trade achieved an intellectual status unrivaled by any other doctrine in the field of economics. What accounts for the success of free trade against then prevailing mercantilist doctrines? And how well has free trade withstood various theoretical attacks that have challenged it since Adam Smith's time? In this readable intellectual history, Douglas Irwin explains how the idea of free trade has endured against the tide of the abundant criticisms that have been leveled against it from the ancient world and Adam Smith's day to the present. An accessible, nontechnical look at one of the most important concepts in the field of economics, Against the Tide will allow the reader to put the ever new guises of protectionist thinking into the context of the past and discover why the idea of free trade has so successfully prevailed over time.
Irwin traces the origins of the free trade doctrine from premercantilist times up to Adam Smith and the classical economists. In lucid and careful terms he shows how Smith's compelling arguments in favor of free trade overthrew mercantilist views that domestic industries should be protected from import competition. Once a presumption about the economic benefits of free trade was established, various objections to free trade arose in the form of major arguments for protectionism, such as those relating to the terms of trade, infant industries, increasing returns, wage distortions, income distribution, unemployment, and strategic trade policy. Discussing the contentious historical controversies surrounding each of these arguments, Irwin reveals the serious analytical and practical weaknesses of each, and in the process shows why free trade remains among the most durable and robust propositions that economics has to offer for the conduct of economic policy.
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Few economic debates have raised more emotion over the last two centuries than that between the champions of free trade and the advocates of protectionism. Irwin chronicles this controversy in great detail from the demise of mercantilism in the 17th century and the beginnings of free-trade ideology with Adam Smith to the present. As Free Trade was an essentially British invention, most of the book's cast of characters are of that nationality, Irwin also traces the thinking of John Maynard Keynes, who, after being an ardent advocate of free trade, went through a reversal to become a supporter of protectionism. "Free trade, combined with great mobility of wage rates, is a tenable intellectual position," he wrote, but "it presents a problem of justice so long as many types of money income are protected by contract and cannot be made mobile." The debate is still very much alive today--from EEC to NAFTA, to the campaign rhetoric in this year's presidential primaries. Although Irwin takes an historical approach, he clearly a supporter of free trade. Irwin is a professor of Business Economics at the and is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, both of which are bastions of supply-side theory, which is free trade in its purest form. The book will be most readable for those with more than a passing knowledge of economics.
