It was “the paper that shook the world of economics,” according to Bloomberg. The paper, written by David Autor, David Dorn and my guest today, Gordon Hanson, introduced the “China trade shock” into the lexicon and gave the narratives of disintegrating American manufacturing and loss of American jobs – whether seen in campaign trail rhetoric, or in books like Hillbilly Elegy – a hard economic edge.  So, now that we know that the China Shock happened, that it dramatically cut American employment, that even those who lost jobs went on welfare and those who kept them took permanent pay cuts, the question is: what now?

Gordon Hanson specializes in the economics of international trade, international migration and foreign direct investment. He holds the Pacific Economic Cooperation Chair in International Economic Relations at UC San Diego, and has faculty positions in the Department of Economics and GPS, where he also is director of the Center on Global Transformation. He is the acting dean of the School and is presently a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and co-editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.