Everything we thought we knew about free trade is wrong

Excellent article -- well worth reading.

http://qz.com/840973/everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-free-trade-is-wrong/

From the site:

The era between 1945 and 1975 is what economists Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have termed the Great Compression (pdf). During this time, incomes of the best-paid American workers grew at a slower pace than those of middle- and lower-income households, creating rare equality among different socioeconomic classes. Ironically, these halcyon days have their roots in two darker events, The Great Depression and World War II, as economist Robert Gordon explains in The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Despite the devastation the Great Depression wreaked on the US economy, it led to New Deal reforms that encouraged unions, boosting real wages at the same time as it shrank working hours. Xenophobic policies typified by the Chinese Exclusion Act kept out immigrants, making low-skilled native workers more valuable. A protectionist trans-Atlantic trade war that broke out in 1930 helped seal off the US to trade until after the war ended.