So what would it mean to turn back the clock?
The vice president holds with a view of U.S. economic history that claims that globalization was a mistake and that things would be better if it hadn’t happened. In a recent video he speaks about the need for patience from voters because “trying to undo 40 years of globalization [is] . . . going to take time.”
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.)
So maybe if you’re with Vance, you think I’m being unfair because his issue, after all, is how Americans have fared in that time, not how the world fared in aggregate.
Well:
— 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.
— Between 1985 and 2025, the inflation-adjusted income of the median U.S. household went from $63,090 to $87,460, a 39 percent gain.
— Between early 1985 and mid-2026, the inflation-adjusted weekly earnings of the median full-time worker went from $314 to $378 in 1982–84 dollars, a 20 percent gain.
— Between the end of 1985 and mid-2026, U.S. household net worth went from $15.5 trillion to $195.9 trillion (or about $48 trillion in inflation adjusted dollars), roughly a fourfold increase.
— Between 1985 and 2025, the share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who were employed went from 76.7 percent to 80.6 percent, close to an all-time high.
— Between 1985 and 2025, the number of Americans working part-time because they couldn’t find full-time work went from 5.6 million to 4.8 million, a 14 percent drop even as the population grew 44 percent.
— Between 1985 and 2025, the official U.S. poverty rate went from 14.0 percent to 10.2 percent, a drop of more than a quarter.
(Shout-out to both Claude and ChatGPT for helping me fact-check my reading comprehension and, especially, my math skills.)
Obviously, not all of global GDP growth or U.S. growth is a result of the increased interconnectivity and cross-border flows of globalization. Though undoubtedly a lot of it is.
A 2024 WTO study suggests that reductions in trade costs between 1995 and 2020 increased global real GDP by about 6.8 percent. For low-income economies, the increase was much larger, about 33 percent. As for the U.S. in particular, one estimate concludes that international trade alone led to “an increase of $7,014 in [inflation-adjusted] GDP per capita and $18,131 in GDP per household” in the United States between 1950 and 2016. A census report concludes that lower import prices under globalization held inflation down for all American groups between 1995 and 2018, relative to autarky. (The benefits were most pronounced for rural Americans, which will be relevant when you get to the paragraph after next.)
None of these studies capture the full warp and weft of globalization. They’re mostly focused on trade barriers, with some comparative advantage and diffusion of technology and ideas thrown in. But left out are the beneficial effects of foreign direct investment, labor and capital mobility, factor price convergence, multinational production chains, financial integration, and so forth, which are also well-recognized drivers of growth.
Now you might say, “Okay, but wage earners, and especially the wage-earners that I care about didn’t get their fair share of the macro benefits. Those all went to people who are my enemies, or the people it is convenient to pretend are my enemies!” Fine, fair enough. But then you owe me an argument for why simple after-the-fact redistribution or targeted jobs training or what have you aren’t better fixes than distortive, price-raising protectionism and heavy-handed industrial policy. I still haven’t seen one. Oren Cass’s “dignity of work” stuff may get at an important thing about the American psyche, but it doesn’t actually match means to ends.