Pop Internationalism

Conventional wisdom holds that foreign competition endangers U.S. jobs, that Americans must learn to compete in an ever-tougher global marketplace and that we can do so only by forging a partnership between government and business. But in Krugman's dissenting view, this consensus is nonsense--""pop internationalism,"" a set of misleading cliches reinforced by economists and pundits such as Lester Thurow, Robert Reich, Clyde Prestowitz and James Fallows. In these stimulating, maverick essays, reprinted from Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, Harvard Business Review and elsewhere, Stanford economics professor Krugman (The Age of Diminished Expectations) argues that the growth of Americans' real income has slowed almost entirely for domestic reasons. He also defends the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), deflates the myth of Asia's miraculous economic boom and warns that our obsession with competitiveness distorts U.S. economic policy by encouraging protectionism and trade wars. (Mar.)