There are a few things I don't yet understand about the Faux-DeLong debate, and I am not nearly knowledgeable enough about these issues, so my questions are not rhetorical:

Jeff, you seem to be describing a process in which, in response to the political power of the Party of Davos, the U.S. government affirmatively acts to encourage outsourcing and related bad things, through trade agreements. So your first step is a moratorium on new trade agreements, which presumably would then be the leverage to force Davos Man to cut the deal on a global social contract.

My first question is, How much difference do trade agreements, especially future trade agreements, make in the grand scheme of things?

How much less outsourcing would there actually be, how much would our trade imbalance with China, for example, change if we put a moratorium on new trade agreements? Is there any agreement among economists about the relative weight of trade agreement-opened trading in the current economic picture for workers, as opposed to other factors -- trade not related to specific agreements, technological change, etc.?

James K. Galbraith's recent article in the Nation, which is generally closer to your worldview than to Brad's, seems to suggest it's not much:  "The late 1990s showed two things about trade agreements. First, they don't prevent full employment in the United States: We went smartly to a full employment economy in 1998 and stayed there for three years. Second, they don't do much good either. Compared with the productivity gains engendered by full employment in the boom, those brought on by NAFTA in the mid-1990s were trivial." (It would be interesting to get Jamie into this debate.)

If Jamie is right, or if I'm reading him right, then how much value does the moratorium really have -- either in itself, or as a bargaining chip with the Party of Davos? In other words, why wouldn't Davos Man just say, "fine, have your silly moratorium; we'd like a deal with Peru, but we don't really need it to keep doing what we do?"

Second question: How much of the global social contract you refer to is intended to be a roadblock to globalization, and how much do you intend it to be real? It seems to me that there's been a change since the time of NAFTA. In the 1990s, it was completely transparent that the argument that we need a continent-wide leveling on wages, union organizing, and environment was simply a way to block NAFTA. If you got such a deal, great, but it wasn't going to happen. The real choice was NAFTA as it was, with at best unenforceable side-deals on labor and environment, or no NAFTA.

Recently I've gotten the sense that there's a change in the way people talk about labor and environmental standards attached to trade deals, it's much more serious, and not just about killing deals. Instead of starting from the premise of looking at trade deals and saying, No Way, not unless you put in these agreements, it seems like people are starting to say, look, we absolutely need some global standards on global questions, first on climate change but then on things like the global labor market. Tnd the only structures we have that are capable of enforcement, and capable of bringing both nation-states and global captialists to the table, are things like the WTO, so let's use that leverage for good purposes. That's a different approach, a different purpose, and it would lead you to a different kind of global contract, one that would likely be very compromised to be actually achievable for China, India, etc.

I think one source of difference between you and Brad is that Brad is assuming you're the old anti-NAFTA Faux (or NAFTA-foe), and that when you talk about global governing, you're just throwing out unachievable conditions with the intent of stopping the trade-deal train. But I think there's a different place one could come from, where you basically say, look, we're living in a globalized world, deals or no deals, and in a globalized world we need some basic agreements about how we share the planet and what the baseline obligations to workers are. Those standards are not going to be first-world standards, but they will be movement up instead of down.

But I'm not sure that is where you're coming from, because if you were, your answer to Brad, when he accuses you of wanting to keep China poor and isolated, might have been, "I don't want to keep China poor, I want them to be part of this minimal global governance contract, so that the benefits of trade in China are more broadly shared." But without that answer, I'm inclined to think that "global governance" is a red herring, and you'd rather have no deals and no global contract than a realistically achievable global contract.  I don't see how that's a better path for either U.S. or Chinese workers.