Dan Foster takes the vice president to task for saying he is trying to “undo 40 years of globalization.”
Foster retorts, what would that mean?
So what would it mean to turn back the clock on the last 40 years? In one big number, it would mean a ~70 percent reduction in global GDP. That would be the largest degrowthing event in history by a fairly large measure. During the Great Depression, global GDP fell by about 15 percent and U.S. GDP by about 30 percent at the low ebb. During the Black Death, European per capita output actually rose because of, well, labor scarcity. (Talk about your broken windows!) If anyone is aware of an event that wiped out 70 percent of global production, I’m curious to hear about it. (The only one that came to mind for me was the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event about 250 million years ago.)
But if you think the Black Death or extinction is dramatic enough, let’s just focus on the U.S. He then lists every single total economic change between 1985 and 2025 in a list starting this way:
Between 1985 and 2025, U.S. GDP roughly tripled, going from $8.5 trillion to $23.9 trillion, after inflation.
Between 1985 and mid-2026, inflation-adjusted U.S. GDP per person went from about $35,800 to $71,200, roughly doubling.
And proceeding on and on.
He then concedes “not all GDP growth or US growth is a result of the increased interconnectivity and cross-border flows of globalization. Though, undoubtedly a lot of it is.”
This is rather like crediting the imported olive oil in my pantry for every inch my son has grown since he was four years old. It’s good for him, it tastes good too, and perhaps without it he might be slightly shorter, but undoubtedly he was going to grow. And the substitute for imports isn’t nothing. Without one dietary fat from Spain or Italy, we likely would have found some butter from Vermont.
Without trade liberalization, what would have happened since 1985? I can’t speak for others, but it wasn’t the WTO that caused most of us to conceive children. U.S. population went up from 238 million in 1985 to 342 million in 2025, about 44 percent, and world population went from 4.49 billion to about 8.2 billion, up 70 percent. Population isn’t the whole of growth, but in compounding terms, roughly a third of U.S. real GDP growth and 40 percent of world growth is accounted for by population alone.
The rest is output per person. Economists like Solow attributed 87.5 percent of the rise in labor productivity to technical change rather than to more capital per worker in earlier periods. Technology and business improvements. Not all of these would have been absent without the free-trade deals.
The WTO figures: Dan’s own citation credits trade-cost reductions with 6.8 percent of global GDP over 25 years. Not quite 70 percent, even if you multiply it out to 40 years.
Costinot and Rodriguez-Clare put U.S. gains from trade versus none at all at 2–8 percent.
U.S. imports went from roughly 10 percent of GDP in 1985 to 14–15 percent by 2026. This seems not quite the difference between human thriving and a Permian-Triassic Extinction event.
U.S. GDP per person also grew at least as fast from 1950 to 1985, when trade was a smaller share of the economy.
It’s an odd position for me to find myself in, but someone has to defend the resilience of markets against free traders. In a market economy, people are free to adapt, and the price system works, even if the planners can’t quite remove borders from the globe.