It’s still looking like the international Middle East conference will take place in November at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. It’s a good venue, providing Camp David-like security and easy and fast access to Washington, DC. Should peace break out, Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert will be able to get to the White House within an hour to announce it with the President at their side.

You shouldn’t hold your breath.

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I really did mean every word in my tribute earlier today to former Vice President Al Gore. Emails from campaigns, Senate and House press operations, the White House, NGOs, and even some in corporate America have been streaming into my email box congratulating him. I can't imagine what Gore's own email inbox looks like.

Hillary Clinton's campaign site even posted a large banner across her home page.

But Jim Lobe called today and asked what the political implications of the Gore Nobel Peace Prize win (shared win, of course) are. I gave him an earful of thoughts -- but the thing most folks have not thought about is what tension this creates for the next President of the United States.

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In recent years, student debt has sky-rocketed as credit card companies have relentlessly targeted college campuses. Yesterday, Businessweek noted the beginning of an innovative national effort to counteract the credit card industry’s heavy-handed on-campus tactics by mimicking them. This article reports on how savvy activists organized by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group are turning the tables on the credit card industry by employing the industry’s very own aggressive on-campus marketing tactics to educate students about credit traps and unfair practices.

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Turns out you can tune out S&N and skip their new book, Break Through. They have nothing to bring to the table but petty attacks and historically-inaccurate straw men.

S&N spend far more time attacking the environmental community and Al Gore (and even Rachel Carson!) than they ever do proposing a viable solution. Worse, they don't even attack the real environmental community -- they spend their time creating a strawman that is mostly a right-wing stereotype of environmentalists.

Now it turns out they support the exact same thing the environmental community -- and energy technologists like me -- have been pushing for many years: an aggressive and intelligent regulatory strategy coupled with a significant increase in the energy R&D budget.

To my great surprise, they have taken up my challenge and endorsed Barack Obama's terrific climate plan. So why are we fighting? Only because S&N keep attacking, keep trying to rewrite history.

S&N claim over and over and over again that environmentalists don't support increases in clean energy budgets. They even claim I don't support an increase in the budget of the very office I ran at the Energy Department -- and that " 'experts' like Romm" shift our analysis "after the political winds changed direction." Silly (and petty).

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As you know, Al Gore has won the Nobel Prize along with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Share your thoughts and comments with the rest of the TPM Community.

As the week draws to a close, I want to emphasize a significant point of agreement with S&N.

If I may, let me quote myself:

It's tempting to think that if you scare the shit out of people -- really convince them, down to their bones, that hurricanes, diseases, and starving refugees are hiding just around the corner -- mass mobilization against global warming will at long last ensue.

There's good reason to doubt it. Fear causes fairly predictable reactions, which do not include international cooperation, equitable distribution of resources, cost-benefit analysis on a multidecadal scale, and short-term sacrifice in the service of long-term problem-solving. They do include increased xenophobia, reactionary moralism, and susceptibility to demagogues.

That is to say, the language of fear intrinsically serves the needs of authoritarian-leaning politics, regardless of the fear's particular object.

This is, more or less, the core insight that animates S&N's work, and obviously I agree entirely. Environmentalists have historically been too wedded to a message of looming apocalypse (though I, unlike S&N, see that changing). That kind of message can work when the object of fear is close-at-hand and can be overcome locally and on a fairly short-term time scale. But for something like global warming -- where our effort, if it is too succeed, will be generations long -- it is counter-productive. Fear drives people inward; it makes them feel hopeless, selfish, and tribalistic. It is a tool of the right. This isn't just S&N's opinion -- it's backed by plenty of psychological and sociological research. It's also supported by the fact that despite years of campaigning, and polls showing that a majority of people acknowledge the danger of climate change, the rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions has not flagged.

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In Break Through, S&N argue that environmentalists are too "fundamentalist" in their approach to scientific analysis, that science is, in effect, a religion. It's true that many environmentalists mistakenly imagine "here's scientific proof of the problem" to be an effective human motivator. But the clumsy use of sobering science as a motivational tool doesn’t negate the need for analytic science as a strategic tool, as S&N seem to believe.

I've already pointed out that while we do need new research, very large parts of the current greenhouse-gas emissions inventory can be solved by regulatory, price, or economic and social policy changes, and in fact will not be solved in a timely fashion by any kind new technological breakthroughs. (Three obvious examples: tropical deforestation, an auto market tilted toward living rooms on wheels, and leaky buildings in need of retrofit.)

But greenhouse-gas emissions come from many places.

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It's always surprising when racist,homophobic, right-wing, male chauvinist, anti-choice, bible-thumpers turn out to be anti-Semitic, isn't it?

Of course not. That is why Jews invariably vote for liberals. They understand that it is safe to assume that haters (unless they themselves are Jews!) are well-infected by the oldest hatred of all-Jew hatred.

And now the lovely Ann Coulter, perhaps America's leading Apostle of Hate, forgets herself and reveals that her feelings about Jews are right up there with her feelings about African-Americans, Muslims, Latinos, gays etc. I'd guess she doesn't like Catholics much either but she hasn't told us yet.

Here is what she said yesterday about Jews.

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The Twentieth Century was marked by efforts to improve the workplace.  Worker safety moved from "assumption of the risk" which was another way of saying "that's the worker's problem," to minimum safety standards that ALL employers must meet.  Over time, fewer and fewer people were maimed or killed on the job. 

The latter part of the Twentieth Century was marked by another change:  More families with young children had all parents in the workforce.  The consequence of a rising number of one-income households and both parents working in two-income households has meant that workers increasingly have no one at home to deal with emergencies and provide care.  But what has been the response in the workplace?  A new report, Family Values at Work, notes that 70% of workers can be fired for staying home with a sick child.

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You've read the articles--and gotten angry at the debate. Are vast numbers of working mothers bolting the career track--or dreaming of doing so? Are elite women betraying feminism by staying home with their children? Or do the Opt-Out stories rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence--while shoving aside actual labor statistics and working families' needs? What, in short, is the real state of working motherhood today?

Coffeehouse contributors talked about all this here last spring. Now it's time to do so face to face. If you're in NYC this coming Tuesday, join us as an all-star panel -- i.e., some of your favorite Coffee House contributors -- discusses and debates, live and in person, what we've been shouting about in print & pixels for some time: WORKING MOTHERS: WHO'S OPTING OUT?

I will be moderating; panelists include Heather Boushey, Linda Hirshman, Joan Williams, and Ellen Bravo. We will try thrashing out an agenda for feminism and for working families in years to come.

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I got my hopes up a little when, in his contribution to this discussion, David Roberts advised us to address S&N’s politics, rather than their policies, which, he characterizes as thin gruel. Sadly, he then immediately lapses into the small politics of the environmental movement, defending environmentalists against the authors’ woos (sp?) attack. Roberts paints a picture of environmentalists as just the kind of Nietzschean ubermenschen S&N are hoping for – robust, independent entrepreneurs far from wicked Washington. All this does is cede the underlying ground to the duo, conceding that nothing but such a politics is valid. FRAMING ALERT: Why would you concede that?

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This week saw a watershed moment for those of us committed to moving environmentalism from a politics of limits to a politics of possibility. Senator Barack Obama proposed a $150 billion investment to develop and deploy clean energy technology on a scale approaching the challenge we face. In doing so, he has become the most recent of several national political leaders to go beyond the narrow regulatory agenda lobbied for by environmental groups.

Hillary Clinton proposed a $50 billion investment in clean energy last summer. John Edwards proposed we spend $13 billion annually. And even some Republican politicians, such as Newt Gingrich, have jumped into the fray, calling for major new public investments in clean energy in his new book.

Romm asks if we embrace Obama's plan. Not only do we embrace it, we've been advocating such a plan since 2002. In the run up to the 2004 presidential elections we aggressively lobbied the Kerry campaign for such investments and were repeatedly rebuffed by his environmental policy and political advisers who claimed, similar to Romm, that major public investments weren't a priority.

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As a public service to my fellow TPM’ers, I watched the Tuesday night’s Republican debate—the one focusing on the economy.

It’s too easy to make fun of the process and lack of substance of these debates. I can’t imagine we learn much from, for example, the “lightening round:” thirty second answers to pressing policy questions.

To the extent that these seemingly endless primary debates are useful, perhaps they’re answering amorphous questions like: was X presidential enough? Did Y seem likeable? Did X stand up to Y? Who got trapped in a gotcha moment?

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I know how to find out if we have genuine differences or purely rhetorical ones -- and to find out if you support the whole solution to global warming, or just your small piece of it.

Do you endorse Barack Obama's energy and climate plan -- details here? I do without reservation.

It combines your huge clean energy fund -- in this case "$150 billion over the next ten years to develop and deploy climate friendly energy supplies, protect our existing manufacturing base and create millions of new jobs" -- with all the regulations and mandates I think are critical to actually getting existing and emerging technologies in the market fast enough to save the climate (see below).

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A former editor at the New York Times Book Review who read my remonstrance here about its war-hawkish bent referred me to something I’d missed: In July, Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus took to the literary section of The New Republic to pen his second elegy to American conservatism in those pages. His meditation on the allure and dangers for writers of false promises of politico-moral clarity could have been an elegy for his own stewardship at the Times. And maybe it was.

Reminding us that the anti-Communist crusader Whittaker Chambers eventually escaped the "haunted air" of ideological crusading in his later years, Tanenhaus decides that were Chambers alive today he would dismiss the Bush Administration’s zeal to rid the world of Evil: “Not every good fight is a millennial fight. George W. Bush's worldview is precisely the one that Whittaker Chambers outgrew. It is a punishing irony, and one can imagine all too easily how Chambers himself would have greeted it: with the sly half-smile of a melancholy man who knows better.”

I think that Tanenhaus is signaling that he knows better now, too. It is too late for him to say that he knew better all along.

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Last night’s debate among Republican presidential candidates was supposed to be about “the economic issues facing the American people,” as moderator Maria Bartiromo described the festivities. The discussion meandered to and fro on the usual topics – taxes, trade, immigration, health care. Yet in all of these discussions of “economic” issues, there is a glaring omission -- the telecommunications/Internet sector of our economy. Perhaps there is a perception that telecom and Internet policy is too complicated for public discussion, or only suitable for a select group of geeks and/or wonks.

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Yesterday, Senator Hillary Clinton released her plan to help middle class Americans achieve retirement security.  The plan would create private, individual “American Retirement Accounts,” to which the federal government would provide up to $1000 annually in matching funds for each middle-income person.

Here’s the rub: Sen. Clinton proposes to “pay for” this initiative by, well, cutting taxes.  Has Ms. Clinton embraced trickle-down economic theory?  No, but she does appear to have unflinchingly adopted Republicans’ framework for the debate over domestic economic policy.

Indeed, this plan reflects the shocking success Republicans have had in pursuing their radical tax agenda over the past seven years – and highlights the need for true progressive leadership that will break out of the Republicans’ distorted tax framework and reverse President Bush’s “reverse Robin Hood” tax cuts.

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Chaloupka thinks the path forward on mitigating climate change "isn't all that clear" and that "The debate between public investment and regulation hasn't been settled." I think the path forward is very clear -- indeed, we have simply run out of time for delay as we are fast approaching climate tipping points.

S&N claim, “The kind of technological revolution called for by energy experts typically does not occur via regulatory fiat.” Actually, that is typically the only way it occurs. I defy anyone to name a country that has successfully adopted alternative fuels for vehicles without employing some kind of regulatory mandate.

This is also true in the electricity sector. Consider that in terms of electricity consumption, the average Californian generates under one third of the carbon dioxide emissions of the average American while paying the same annual bill.

And this brings us to the answer in the public investment vs. regulation debate:

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The Bush administration's recent wrangling with Russia over the U.S. plan to put missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic is the last thing we should be doing if we want to reduce the danger of nuclear confrontation. Add to this the Department of Energy's plans to build a new generation of nuclear weapons -- under the antiseptic name of the "Reliable Replacement Warhead" -- and you have a strategy almost guaranteed to generate more nuclear weapons states, not fewer.

On the flip side, major Democratic candidates have not only opposed the new warhead, but three of them -- John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson -- have called for the elimination of nuclear weapons altogether. Is their commitment genuine? If so, can it overcome bureaucratic opposition within the U.S. national security apparatus?

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First, allow me to apologize to Joseph Romm. I did indeed misread "delayers" as "deniers."

That said, it doesn't change my argument that much. I've long been nervous about green's using the phrase "climate change deniers." The obvious political reference is to Holocaust deniers, and I don't believe the current usage matches that much more serious precedent. While some so-called deniers do seem to be acting in bad faith at a very high level, I'm still not sure it rises to the level set by Holocaust denial. And as a result, our notion of climate change politics is at risk: if all the adversaries to green programs were on the level of Holocaust deniers, we wouldn't have a political problem, which in my view, we do.

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I have been trudging through the sturm und drang around S&N's work for two weeks now on Grist, where we've hosted a long series of essays, rebuttals, prebuttals, kickbuttals and take names ... buttals focused on the "bad boys." As it turns out, a substantial portion of the blowback is based on a misunderstanding. Numerous people who have read the book or subsequent articles have taken from them that S&N are opposed to, or dismissive of, carbon regulations like a cap-and-trade system. As it happens they are not, and say so explicitly, but if the tenor and tone of their work misleads so many people in the same direction, it's worth asking why. We'll return to that.

I'm told we're to focus more on the politics than the policy substance of S&N's work, and that's for the best, because there's less to the latter than meets the eye. S&N support both carbon regulations and public investment in cleantech; so do other environmentalists. S&N say big green groups are placing too much emphasis on regulation and not enough on investment; big green groups disagree. I happen to think greater emphasis on regulation is appropriate for the moment, but whatever -- it's not an either/or. I'm fairly sure most greens would welcome an approach that balances the two -- as Obama's energy proposal does quite deftly -- or better yet, one with substantially more regulatory reform and more investment. It's not the precise balance of the efforts but their size relative to the magnitude of what's needed that should alarm us.

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Later today (Wednesday), an interesting letter that I will post at 2 pm will be sent to President Bush outlining key requirements necessary to secure any real success in the November Israel-Palestine Peace Summit that President Bush and Condoleezza Rice will orchestrate in Annapolis.

The signers of the letter are diverse and will send a powerful, provocative message to President Bush.

Signers include former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US Trade Representative Carla Hills, Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and US Ambassador to Russia Thomas Pickering, former Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker, former House International Relations Committee Chiarman Lee Hamilton, former Counselor to President Kennedy Theodore Sorensen, and former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker.

The letter essentially makes the point that America -- in addition to the Israelis and Palestinians -- can ill afford yet another staged "epic effort designed to fail'. In the past, America could earnestly attempt to negotiate solutions in this unresolved Middle East mess but still could 'afford to fail'.

Today, when as Zbigniew Brzezinski has said, America's engagement in the Middle East is the defining challenge it faces in this era -- another failure will come at the very high cost of further eroding American credibility internationally.

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William Chaloupka is outraged I declared S&N were climate change Deniers. I didn't.

That said, I realize I could have been crystal clear on this point. Let me be so here.

S&N (and Lomborg) are not deniers, obviously. They are delayers, as I have defined the term. I have written this so many times, I forgot to be clearer in my first post. For a similar perspective in the San Francisco Chronicle, see here.

Last Tuesday I published an Op-Ed in the Boston Globe about mortgage companies that pay brokers to sell higher priced mortgages to customers. (E.g., a customer qualifies for a 6% mortgage, but the mortgage company pays the broker a higher fee to sell him a 7% mortgage.) I called the payments "bribes" paid by the mortgage companies to the brokers to boost mutual profits at the expense of the homeowner. I was in good company. The Vice-President of the Fannie Mae Foundation called them "kickbacks." After the op-ed was published, I was flooded with hate mail. It was so bad that when there was no let up by the end of the third day, I thought I might have to change my email address.

Some of it was funny ("your stupid"), weird ("I thank God my son went to BU instead of Harvard"), or silly ("you must be a Communist"). But most of the correspondence fell into three main buckets:

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I'm on record elsewhere as saying that the second half of Shellenberger and Nordhaus's Break Through is worth reading, even if irritating, because they make an intriguing and somewhat convincing case that progressives in the United States suffer from what I would call the politics of nostalgia--looking backward to the economic solidarity born of the depression, the social solidarity born of World War II and the G.I. bill, and the wildness of a continent yet unshaped by industrial technology.

The political weaknesses of this politics of nostalgia, they argue, affect most of the progressive spectrum. But this makes their signature argument--that there is something wrong with the environmental paradigm--hollow and unconvincing. If environmentalists look backwards because they want to protect nature, what explains the weaknesses of economic populists like Thomas Frank?

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What an odd phenomenon. Joseph Romm declares Shellenberger and Nordhaus (henceforth, S&N) are climate change deniers. His evidence for this outrageous charge seems to be that he disagrees with their energy investment proposals. It's sort of like saying I hate the Yankees because your dog is ugly.

Why would an obviously reasonable and accomplished gentleman make an argument like that? I believe the answer is a political one: advocates for addressing climate change have wagered every ounce of their credibility on a simple political logic that goes something like this: first, we scare the dickens out of as many people as possible. Then, having demonstrated our ability to frighten seemingly serious, sensible persons by the tens of thousands, we holler at the millions of people who actually matter in politics, screaming that the experts have spoken and, roughly, all you dummies better start listening to us, or you're going to roast in hell-on-earth!

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When I opened The New York Times today, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. The headline of the lead story announced that "The Democrats Seem Ready to Extend Wiretap Powers."

What, I asked myself, won't they deny the Bush administration?

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Do we need “disruptive clean-energy technologies that achieve non-incremental breakthroughs” to solve the global warming problem, as S&N (and Lomborg and Bush and his advisors) argue? Let’s hope not — for the sake of the next 50 generations!

Why? Two reasons:

1. Such breakthroughs hardly ever happen.
2. Even when they do happen, they rarely have a transformative impact on energy markets, even over a span of decades.

Consider that solar photovoltaic cells — a major breakthrough — were invented over 50 years ago, and still comprise only about 0.1% of U.S. electricity (and that amount thanks to major subsidies).

Consider that hydrogen fuel cells — a favorite technology of the breakthrough bunch — were invented more than 165 years ago, and deliver very little electricity (and what little they do deliver comes only because of major subsidies) and no consumer transportation.

Consider fusion — ’nuff said!

I know this seems counterintuitive, when we see such remarkable technology advances almost every month in telecommunications and computers. But it’s true — and I will explain why in this post.

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In my comments on Dexter Filkins' profile of Kanan Makiya in yesterday's NYT Magazine, I wrote that "at NYU in November 2002, [Makiya] used his polemical skill to convince George Packer, among others, that the moral case for his go-for-broke expedition into Iraq trumped all the objections raised by myself along with Michael Walzer, Frances Fitzgerald, and Mansour Farhang." That was true as far as it went, about the occasion in question, but may well have conveyed the wrong impression--an impression I sorely regret and want to scotch, and from which I also want to extract a lesson.

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Well, maybe everything does look like a nail to me. I know no more about environmental politics than any other reasonably well-educated lay person. To me, “Break Through” is an interesting example of what I have been writing about elsewhere at TPM, which is an effort to set forth the philosophical underpinnings of a policy position. The policy, I take it on faith from the excerpt, is that the United States government should invest $30 billion a year for ten years or a total of $300 billion to develop clean fuel technologies. Pretty soon, to quote Everett Dirksen, we’re going to be talking about real money.

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What do Michael Crichton, Bjørn Lomborg, Frank Luntz, George W Bush (and his climate/energy advisors) have in common with Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus? They all believe 1) new “breakthrough” technologies are needed to solve the global warming problem and 2) investing in such technology is far more important than regulating carbon.

In fairness to President Bush — he doesn’t really believe those two things (as evidenced by the fact that he has actually cut funding for key carbon-reducing technologies), he just says them because conservative strategist Frank Luntz says that is the best way to sound like you care about global warming without actually doing anything about it.

The “breakthrough technology” message is certainly the cleverest one the Deniers and Delayers have invented — who wouldn’t rather have a techno-fix than higher energy prices? — that’s why Lomborg endorses it so much in his book Cool It — but it is certainly wrong and dangerously so, as I argue at length in my book, Hell and High Water.

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Shellenberger and Nordhaus' analysis is right on point: if global warming were recast as a non-environmental issue, it would rise to the level of the major political challenges of the day -- the Iraq war, the budget deficit, the challenge of nuclear weapons' proliferation, etc.

They are also absolutely correct that it is governments who need to jumpstart the clean energy revolution. My concern is that their suggested implementation of a carbon tax in the US will be too little too late. We are already seeing scientific reports that changes in the climate are taking on their own internal dynamics, with the warming providing its own feedbacks -- independent of the CO2 we put up into the atmosphere.

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Most progressives today are optimistic that, in 2008, Democrats will regain the White House and solidify their majority in Congress, largely on the basis of the country's anti-war sentiment alone. But down this path lies danger, for if Democrats fail to offer a vision for the future that is as large and positive as the war in Iraq is negative, we may take back the White House and Congress and fail to take back America.

A new politics should inspire Americans to grapple with certain existential questions: What kind of a country do we want? How can we achieve it? These questions implicitly contain a question about investment: how shall we invest our wealth and our labor?

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Ever since the right launched its campaign to demonize the term, liberals have been worrying about their philosophical principles. When asked during the Democrats’ You Tube debate, Hillary Clinton suggested that liberalism fell from grace, because it became the party of “big government.” She’d call herself a “Progressive,” just like those virtuous old farmers taking on the railroads in 1880. Democrats can do better. I’m no Bill Galston, and it’s always easier to tear others’ ideas down than to come up with principles of your own, but just to get the discussion going, here are some thoughts for openers.

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Welcome to TPMCafe's Book Club table. This week we're hosting a discussion of Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.

In their book, part of which was excerpted in a recent issue of The New Republic, Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue that the traditional environmentalist movement stands in the way of the innovation and experimentation needed to produce effective responses to the climate crisis. The authors join us this week to discuss their argument.

Joining them in the discussion will be William Chaloupka, Ross Gelbspan, Linda Hirshman, Carl Pope, David Roberts, and Joseph Romm.

Previous Book Club discussions have covered the work of Thomas Frank, Anthony Shadid, Larry Diamond, George Packer, Ivo Daalder/James Lindsay, Robert Dreyfuss, Chris Mooney, Gene Sperling, Gershom Gorenberg, Peter Beinart, Kevin Phillips, Sidney Blumenthal, Reed Hundt, Anne-Marie Slaughter, John Ikenberry, Jonathan Cohn, Daniel Gross, Steven Cook, Chris Hayes, Josh Kurlantzick, Glenn Greenwald, Todd Gitlin, Jonathan Chait, Greg Anrig, Jr., Matt Bai, and Katha Pollitt.

Dexter Filkins' piece on Kanan Makiya in the NYT Magazine is a must read in the ongoing autopsy of the Iraq catastrophe. It's also a valuable document for an anatomy of intellectual folly--make that human folly--in our time.

Makiya, the courageous, soulful, and gravely misguided Iraqi in exile, wrote two indispensable books about Iraq: one about Saddam Hussein's regime of terror (Republic of Fear), the other about the default of Arab intellectuals (Cruelty and Silence). In the 1990s, he campaigned for American intervention. He was tireless.

He knew that to liberate Iraq he needed a practical champion, and the man he lined up with was Ahmad Chalabi. And playing Trotsky to Chalabi's Lenin, most consequentially after September 11, 2001, the onetime Trotskyist became the public face of an invasion that could now be presented to a panicked America as a kick-start for the dramatic top-to-bottom remaking of the corrupt Arab Middle East.

In this, Kanan Makiya was also deeply, catastrophically, flowers-and-sweets wrong. He was also compelling. I well remember how, at NYU in November 2002, he used his polemical skill to convince George Packer, among others, that the moral case for his go-for-broke expedition into Iraq trumped all the objections raised by myself along with Michael Walzer, Frances Fitzgerald, and Mansour Farhang. (The text of my own talk that night is here.)

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The trade agenda of the “free traders” appears to be hitting a political dead-end as it becomes ever harder for them to get new trade pacts approved by Congress. While the mass-based opposition to the economic elites is inspiring, it comes at a point at which the “free-traders” have already won most of their agenda. They have used trade to effectively place the less-educated portion of the labor force in the United States (workers without college degrees) in direct competition with the lowest paid workers in the world.

This policy has had exactly the effect that trade theory predicts. It has lowered the wages of less-educated workers relative to workers with college degrees and especially workers with advance degrees. We can reverse this upward redistribution by adopting trade policies that subject the most highly educated workers to the same sort of international competition that textile workers and autoworkers now face.

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