The Intellectual Godfathers of Protectionism

The Intellectual Godfathers of Protectionism

When a 40-year-old economics professor at Harvard University named Dani Rodrik was preparing to publish his first book in 1997, he sent the manuscript to a fellow economist to ask for an endorsement. The title of Rodrik’s book was Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, and it argued that without government policies to mitigate the downside of free trade, the result would be deep and corrosive social divisions.The economist he approached—Rodrik won’t n…