Gotta disagree with you, I thought the linked article was a lousy mock-Socratic dialog that muddied the issues terribly. About as insightful as it got was the following excerpt:

[economists have] always said that there are winners and losers from trade, and that it's possible to compensate the losers and still leave the winners better off. Whether that happens or not is a political choice.

Bingo.

The benefits of globalisation are undeniably massive, and the decisions to leave the bulk of those benefits in the wrong hands have been entirely political (ie. we've demanded loudly at the ballot box that this be so), and nothing at all to do with "economists".

The capacity of the working classes to vote against their own best economic interests is (or should be) a constant source of astonishment.

You only get over that astonishment when you realize, as Bertrand Russell did, that people simply don't "band together to ward off a common danger".

What we want, and we say this loud and clear election after election, is quite simply to be better off than the next guy.

Yes some manufacturing goes away. It's the manufacturing that Korean firms don't make a great deal of money on. I'm looking at the back of my own Samsung phone & it clearly says it's made in China. But why not? Cell phones are almost commodities now. Sprint 'gave' me mine for free.

No though in the framework of the next technology wave. There was an article in the WSJ, oh I think 2 years ago maybe 3 that covered the huge investment LG and others were making in new flat screen fabrication technologies. All the subtypes: plasma, LCD, etc. Multiple billions of dollars sunk into fab plants that resemble the chip wafer fabs of the 1990's. They are building up flat screen technology and research on a massive scale not only for production volume but for larger panels and higher quality displays. Which is why you're starting to see consumer grade screens that are >60". If you go out and buy a computer now you'll spend $400-600 for an average desktop and cap it off with a $300 19" LCD flat panel that a few years ago cost $2000. I know because I have an old Sun 18" flat panel which probably cost $1700 new. My son has a 46" LCD HDTV that is less than 10% of the cost relative to 1998.

Korea has done the smart thing and taken a head start on a technology that really only they are good at. Not China or Japan or the US or Germany. And in 10 or 15 years when they've amortized the costs of those massive plants they'll begin to licence the technology to other countries for them to start building even cheaper units.

I agree, the real issue that most people don't understand is that investment follows returns. Its that simple. Since most plat & equipment is portable then all thats left to figure out are 3 things one- local infrastructure (ports, utilites, security, local housing stock, city/town infrastructure), two -Political (government stablity,trading agreements, property rights or legal status for property)& three - skills (relative skills to worth ratio human capital available) The US is fine with 1 & 2 for the most part. But 3 our skills capacity is awful. We are not matching the market & investment returns need for skills with available skills. Our Human Capital is very uneven. Investment flows to returns & income flows to market valued skills. If our skills/human capital stock was greater then our wealth would be greater. Until we decide to lead the world in advanced skills in many industries

http://www.bls.gov/bls/naics.htm

then we will not get the investment and it will go elsewhere. If we decided to get serious about advanced degrees in the US our wealth structure would change in 5-15 years as investment flows would seek returns where human capital was available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States

If only 27 % of americans have BA/BS & less then 9 % have masters then thats where you can expect the wealth to flow to its very simple.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States

We can complain about the flow of wealth & how we should tax it etc.. but that masks a more basic issue if people (not the government, don't decide to get skills) we can make all the programs, tax breaks & solutions we want and nothing will change. I feel most of those can be improved but we need to see the truth of basic economics before we complain about trade or outsourcing or the rich are evil etc..

The key lines from Mark Thoma's piece are these:

"I don't have the answer. As I said, when costs were concentrated on small groups of individuals it was easier to help. Now, with the costs so widespread and the benefits so concentrated at the top of the income distribution, there will be more resistance."

In a vibrant democracy, such an observation would be absurd on its face. It is only a testament to how broken our democracy is that many will read those lines and think, "how true, how true..."

I would not be surprised if some Koreans or Vietnamese offshore something to Detroit. We Detroiters have offshored like crazy, and now we have the pre-developed infrastructure and the idle workforce and the fallen currency... We are just about ready to receive, rather than giving away.

If you follow global economic logic out to its conclusions, Detroit could be the next hotspot. We haven't been giving our livelihood away. We have been getting ready for the next round. What goes around, maybe, comes back around pretty quickly.

Geez, if industry is deserting S. Korea, the working class is really in a mess. What lacks here is a well rounded sense of social responsiblity. Bottom line thinking leads to places like Detroit (probably never on the list for new capital, given the union history there) turning into a third world county.

The notion of profit and return must be redefined to include a meaningful social wage that, instead of impoverishing, assures people a reasonable standard of living.

Hence, lobby your federal electeds to bury the new 'trade deal' before it becomes reality.