Odd Lots - What a 150-Year Old Indian Railway System Tells Us About Trade

Episode Date: May 19, 2017

It's no secret that international trade has been criticized lately. But why exactly are countries generally happy to trade within their borders -- from one state or town to another, for example -- but... more reluctant to trade across international ones? And why are countries so focused on making things domestically? On this edition of the Odd Lots podcast we speak to an over-achiever in the field of economics who specializes in trade and is known for rigorous research that has included poring over railway records from the British Raj era in India. Dave Donaldson is the most recent recipient of the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal awarded to economists under the age of 40. He speaks about what he learned from studying trade across history and what exactly it has to offer in modern times.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:01:04 CIT offers commercial lending, leasing, and treasury management services for small and middle market businesses. Learn more at cIT.com. Put knowledge to work. We want to take a quick moment to let you know about something really new that's cool from Bloomberg. Starting right now, you can use our iOS app or Google Chrome extension to scan the news, look at any story on any way,
Starting point is 00:01:26 website and instantly bring up news and information from Bloomberg relevant to what you're reading about it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So it means that no matter where you're reading the news, you can basically bring all the data and information that's on the Bloomberg with you. It's kind of fun to test out, right, Joe? Right. So if you're reading a story about Tesla or Microsoft or Apple or Facebook, you can immediately bring up news and data from Bloomberg, and of course, We have all the news and data in the world. It's really awesome. You should check it out by downloading the iOS app
Starting point is 00:02:01 or search the Bloomberg extension on the Chrome store to try it out. Yeah, and it's called Lens. We should probably say what it's called, right? Oh, right, right. It's called Lens. Learn more at Bloomberg.com slash Lens. Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway.
Starting point is 00:02:33 And I'm Joe Wisenthal. So, Joe, I'm trying to think, have we ever had a Nobel Prize winner on the show? Can you remember? I don't think so. I don't think we have. Yeah, I don't think we have either. And not to get your hopes up, we don't have one for this episode either. Oh, shoot. Yeah. But we, very disappointing. We do have someone who has a really good shot at eventually getting one. We actually have the recent winner of the latest John Bates-Clark Medal. It's a medal that's given by the American Economics Association to economists under 40 who make big contributions to the field of economics.
Starting point is 00:03:14 Isn't it also true that among economists, the John Bates-Clark Medal is actually considered to be more impressive and prestigious than the Nobel Prize? You're probably right. I mean, statistically, I think 40% of the recipients go on to win a Nobel. And of course, the John Bates won is confined to young economists, so that's pretty impressive. Another thing that sort of will make today's episode distinct is it's kind of timely. So I kind of like the fact that on our podcast, we usually talk about things that aren't really in the news. We sort of give people a respite from the top stories of the day and just let them explore something completely out there. But this one might actually be a little bit sort of on the news.
Starting point is 00:03:59 Yeah. So we are definitely huge fans of financial and markets and economic history. And the guy that won this medal, I should just go ahead and say his name, it's David Donaldson. He's an associate professor of economics at Stanford. But Professor Donaldson is basically famous for being a sort of trade economic historian. And he's famous for one paper in particular. It's called Railroads of the Raj. and it basically went back and looked at the railway network that was built up by the British in the late 1800s, early 1900s in India.
Starting point is 00:04:37 And he used that to check what impact building that infrastructure has on trade and general incomes in India. So, I mean, imagine putting that paper together, right? It definitely sounds like it would be quite a task. All right. Well, should we just go ahead and ask him? Let's bring him in. David, thank you so much for joining us today. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.
Starting point is 00:05:11 You know, we just mentioned probably your most famous paper on Railroads of the Raj. And that was a paper you started, I think when you were a grad student, but you worked on it for years and years and years. And if I'm right, it still actually hasn't been published. It's still forthcoming, right? Yeah, I've been very slow in many ways. So, but yeah, it's something that, you know, has occupied my interest for a long time. It struck me as a, you know, among other episodes in world history, one of the great episodes that integrated economies made it easier for one market to trade with another market.
Starting point is 00:05:51 And that trade, that integration happens, obviously internationally, things like the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal or the invention of the steamship did that across oceans. And then, you know, the railroads sort of did that within countries, like, India and of course famously also the United States. So before we even get to what you did to work on this paper or even the conclusions, what originally sparked your interest in this particular event from history? Well, actually, I was a grad student and I knew I was interested in trade, and I knew I was particularly interested in intranational trade. That is kind of trade across regions of the same country, which has typically
Starting point is 00:06:34 always been hard to study just for lack of data, basically, when goods cross international borders, customs agencies have always taxed that, you know, not always, but for the most part, most countries throughout history of taxed international trade, and so they've kept a record of the flow of international trades, whereas typically when goods move within countries, they don't get either taxed or recorded, and so we don't know much about it. But I was always interested in India and I got wind to the fact that at the time when I was doing my doctoral work, in fact, almost still to this day, India had sort of domestic tariffs, tariffs on the movement of goods across state boundaries within India. And I wanted to know more about that. I wanted to
Starting point is 00:07:19 kind of scope it out. So I went to India for a couple weeks one summer and in order to meet with people in government, people in academia and librarians, in order to try to sort of find out the facts, And actually it was in that process that I met, I haven't, you know, just heard this kind of endless refrain, well, you know, the thing that really brought India together is, was the railroads of sort of about 100 years ago. And that, I guess, piqued my interest. I assume there would be no data, you know, that obviously the further you go back in time, that's typically the less data that survives. And so I thought, well, I guess I could at least sort of explore what exists in the libraries on that historical era. And I was just sort of shocked to learn what was actually available, you know, what they'd recorded back then, what they'd published, and what still survived. So one thing about the British railway system is it's famous for being absolutely massive in India.
Starting point is 00:08:15 I mean, hundreds of thousands of miles worth of railway. How did you go about collecting that data and then isolating certain effects away away from other? effects because I imagine like if you look at the fact that one railway line has been built between one county and another town or whatever that's gonna have an impact on all sorts of things right it's almost like a tree diagram like the impact just keeps spreading and spreading so how do you I have so many questions how do you go about kind of limiting that impact there's no easy easy way to do that and I don't claim to have
Starting point is 00:08:58 necessarily nailed it by any means. The ideal way that any scientist learns about the world around us is by something like an experiment, either a formal lab experiment or in less controlled settings where you can't, you know, a lab experiment is just advantageous because you know that you can control everything except the one treatment that you're trying to sort of study the effect of. But sometimes you can sort of make sure that the treatment is randomly assigned. That way you know that on average across the subjects, if you like, in the experiment, those differences will cancel out on average. And so social scientists like me are always looking for things that hopefully, you know, we think there's a case to be made for your features of the way
Starting point is 00:09:46 that some program was allocated to the world, having some quasi sort of random element to them. And of course, we never know if that's actually the case, except in rare instances where the social scientist, him or herself, or the policymaker actually explicitly decided to randomize, but that's, of course, extremely rare. Much more likely is the case, like the Indian railroads where they had a complicated decision process about where and when to roll out the network. And I should say all that is, it doesn't even really address the heart of your question, which is that there will be spillovers. You know, that is to say in a classic lab experiment, you have a treatment group that randomly is chosen to get the drug or something, and the control
Starting point is 00:10:27 group is randomly chosen not to. But there's a serious problem if you think that it's possible that your control group is affected. One way to think about it is the very fact that they were the control group means they're affected. The other way to think about it is closer to what you said, which is that some of the treatment spills over onto them. They're sort of partially affected. Even if they weren't directly affected, they were partially affected. Okay, so that's the big backdrop against which we tend to think about. these things. And you know, you need, you need help from theory. I think it's fair to say that we don't. There's no, you know, in principle, you could design an experiment that we'd just kind of
Starting point is 00:11:04 completely ideally nail everything. But in the real world, we don't have enough statistical power to follow all those spillover effects in their kind of manifold directions. As you said, this kind of forking tree just makes it sort of that basically impossible with the kind of data, the kind of world we live in. So economists, you know, like me, sort of turn to hopefully fairly uncontroversial notions in economic theory to help structure those, you know, where we expect to find those spillovers and sort of where, therefore, to sort of shine the light and try to see them. And another way would say it would be we can sort of structure things so that we know the kinds of places that are likely to have had a full treatment, other places maybe
Starting point is 00:11:52 that we think whatever the treatment was, we know that some other place had three quarters of that or half of that or a quarter of that or maybe finally just a place that we're pretty confident would have been almost unaffected by the event. So we're always trying to do that sort of thing and I guess that's a high level overview of how I thought about the problem. I want to ask you to talk a little bit more about the process. Like how many times did you have to travel to India, how many libraries did you have to visit? What was it like digging up the archives of all this data that you discovered about the, you know, what specific data you ended up looking at? And then also, you know, what did you discover about the ramifications of the railway buildout? Yeah, I mean,
Starting point is 00:12:32 the process was certainly unlike anything I imagined I would end up doing during my PhD. The first thing you just have to find out what data exists. So that's kind of a scoping project. This never would have been possible. I lived in London at the time I was doing my PhD at the London School of Economics, and none of this would have been possible if it weren't for the fact that the main libraries in London actually had as good a collection of kind of official government, British Indian publications, as did any library in India, almost better maybe because things have been preserved better. Yeah, so that made it all sort of possible, given where I was based.
Starting point is 00:13:11 And also made it possible because just getting the, sort of numbers out of the books was, of course, just a huge project. Because obviously, I think I, it's complete back of the envelope calculation, but I once convinced myself there was somewhere between 50 and 100, man, you know, a person years worth of work involved in typing in the numbers. So I was never going to do it myself. And so that, but that process, you know, very fortunately just around the time I was doing this in the mid-2000s, late 2000s, was just when people started talking about business
Starting point is 00:13:43 process outsourcing, you know, the ability. to hire somebody to do a fairly low-skill task, like typing in numbers, on a computer terminal far away. If only you can find them, and of course that wasn't hard by that period of time and pay them, that was also relatively easy once I could raise the money, and then finally just get the raw materials to them. And I could never send these books, obviously, they're way too big, and obviously they're held in libraries. But I was able to organize a team of people to take kind of digital photographs of every page, kind of like scanning, but way faster. You know, scanning is super slow.
Starting point is 00:14:21 But luckily, digital cameras just became good enough around that time where, you know, archive-based historians like me were able to kind of skip the scanner, skip the photocopier and just go straight to a good digital camera. Anyway, so I sent, you know, I don't know, 50,000 JPEGs or something, took almost half a year just to organize the JPEGs, sent them to a number of firms in India, actually, and they sent back spreadsheets full of, you know, the numbers typed in. You know, the original publications were kind of too low quality to trust optical, digital character recognition, at least at that period of that technology. Yeah, so I guess, you know, that's the basic
Starting point is 00:15:04 idea of how I and many people like me kind of would convert the sort of archival paper records into digital machine readable versions. And then, right, so I guess, you know, there were a number of things I looked at. I looked at trade, actual volumes of trade flows. I looked at prices, that is, whether there was evidence that, you know, I guess a basic prediction is that when two markets get connected via some technology that makes it easier to move something between the markets, then the price of that thing should look more similar. That's often just the basic notion of arbitrage. If the price were different and yet it
Starting point is 00:15:45 didn't cost much to move it, you could always just sort of buy in the cheap place and then sell the good at the high price place. So we kind of think that if arbitrage is likely to be, likely to happen, and it certainly did in this environment of British India, then we would expect that the railroad should narrow the difference in prices of exactly the same good over, over say two points in space. And the data was consistent with that, obviously, as well, that as railroads connected places, their prices started to converge. And then finally, I looked at the kind of consequences for income, as you put it.
Starting point is 00:16:25 This I should stress this sort of aggregate income. Think of kind of like a county or a district, as they were called in British India. We're looking at the just, this is not individual people. I wasn't able to look at inequality or anything important like that. but on aggregate, the closest notion we could get to sort of GDP of a county kind of went up. And on average went up, and you're right, because of spillovers and the fact that everybody's experience was different, these averages can be, of course, a little misleading. But they represent the average, and the average was an increase of about 18% in GDP.
Starting point is 00:16:57 Huh. We are going to pause for a short break. Put knowledge to work and grow your business with CIT, from transportation to help, health care to manufacturing. CIT offers commercial lending, leasing, and treasury management services for small and middle market businesses. Learn more at CIT.com. Put knowledge to work. David, I know the railroads of the Raj paper is probably your most famous work, but a lot of people were pointing out when you won the John Bates Medal that it was fantastic that you had won it.
Starting point is 00:17:39 on the 200th anniversary or birthday of the notion of comparative advantage, which is, of course, a big, big deal in economics. And it's basically the idea that people can specialize in one type of industry or production, and then they can trade with other people who are also specialized and everyone can eventually benefit. Walk us through your work when it comes to comparative advantage. What have you been looking at and what have you found? All everything I've done on comparative advantage, in fact, most of my work really since my doctoral thesis has been joint with a guy at MIT named Arnaud Kostino. And so we started thinking about comparative advantage.
Starting point is 00:18:24 And you're right, it was about 200 years ago to this kind of day that David Ricardo really wrote down the first logical argument about why trade between two people or two regions or two countries would, you know, should benefit both of those people in that trade. And the essence of his argument was just a kind of simple example with two activities. They were cloth and wine in his example, and two countries. These were England and Portugal. And the example completely generalizes to as many countries and products as you want, but the two-by-two was the minimum ingredient to kind of see the point. So the one kind of catch that Arnault and I got interested in, and this point was well known, but we kind of, we were a little bit taken aback when we discovered it for ourselves, was that once those two regions are actually trading, you know, suppose you observe them today, suppose you
Starting point is 00:19:18 ever observe England, or even in David O'Cardo's time, you observe England and Portugal, they're actually trading cloth and line with each other. Then, you know, according to that very same model in which that you're using to explain the trade and understand the consequences of trade, In that exact same model, actually, it would have to be the case that one of the two activities is not being done in one of the two countries, at least. So as you put it, there will be specialization, and that means, you know, in a sense that there's something that somebody's not doing. So I guess it won't surprise you that we kind of predict, you'd expect that England was not producing much or any wine, right? That was sort of the result of specialization was that England was not producing wine. And the theory tells us that there's a good reason for that.
Starting point is 00:20:03 It's that England is relatively worse at making wine than they are at making cloth relative to Portugal. But the question is, how bad are they at making wine? And we kind of know they're bad, both from introspection and also from the theory. We know that they couldn't have been good or else they would have been producing it. But how bad? And of course, that basic idea pervades all of economic life. I mean, I know I benefit from not doing my own dental work, but how bad would life be if I had to be my own dentist? I don't know, but I know it would be awful.
Starting point is 00:20:32 And that kind of unknown number, it's not just unknown, it's kind of unknowable, right? I mean, so basically everything I've been working on with comparative advantage with Arnaud has this flavor of how could an economist ever hope to know that fourth number in Ricardo's example? That's the basic idea. We got interested in where one could know that, in general, that sort of fourth number or more generally just how good are regions at doing the things they don't do? And the first example that came to our mind was agriculture.
Starting point is 00:21:07 We thought that's a case where, you know, nowadays regions of, let's say, Iowa, most farms grow either corn or soy or maybe wheat. Other regions of the U.S. do different crops. But so the question, again, comes up, well, how bad would, how bad, how bad? bad would life be if we didn't sort of outsource all of our specialization, all of our output of corn and soy to the corn and soy belt, right? I mean, what if we had to do it ourselves in, say, New England or in California or in the southeast? You know, we were, of course, you know, in a sense discovered, but deep down weren't too surprised to learn that there are, of course, entire scientific fields,
Starting point is 00:21:49 typically under the name of agronomy, where their goal is to, in a sense, kind of just try to tell farmers, you know, how, given your soil, given your climate, given everything else about your local environment, how good would you be at growing any of the following kind of list of crops, you know, corn and soy, but also cotton and wheat and peanuts, you know, and it's that advice that agronomists give to farmers that, of course, helps those farmers make the right decision about what to grow. But we, so we sort of, in a sense, kind of downloaded that advice in a data file, you know, the advice from the agronomist, the actual numbers on, you know, if this small parcel of land somewhere in the U.S., divide the U.S. up into about a million small parcels of land, and the agronomists
Starting point is 00:22:32 will tell you how good each parcel would be at a whole, at virtually any crop. And, of course, it doesn't mean the agronomists are necessarily right, but they have kind of hundreds of years of their own randomized trials, in a sense, and greenhouse trials, et cetera, and physiological knowledge of how crops work to, in order to build up those numbers. So anyway, so we kind of designed a study, a way. around that information because we thought it was the core of the economic notion of comparative advantage was to know things like, you know, how hard would it be to grow peanuts in Iowa? So we then kind of used that information and filtered it through the last hundred year,
Starting point is 00:23:11 120 years or so of U.S. agricultural history, you know, as the, as the U.S. counties, you know, one plausible story that we think is consistent with the data is that, over the last 130 years or so, this study started in 1880, the ability for one county in the US to trade with another county in the US or with consumers elsewhere in the US, like in a big city, that ability to trade dramatically improved. We had the railroads, we had the interstates, we had the invention of the truck, you know, major improvements in the ability to trade. And so we wanted to kind of quantify how beneficial that that
Starting point is 00:23:52 process was for the U.S. economy as a whole. And what the numbers that came out were startling, to me at least, you know, the U.S. agriculture has been this incredible growth story, right? I mean, in a sense, the fastest sustained productivity growth that we've experienced in any sector has happened in agriculture over the last hundred years or so. And that's why we can feed, you know, the nation and beyond with, I don't forget the exact number, but something under 3% of the workforce. And so that dramatic growth in productivity is just amazing.
Starting point is 00:24:28 But according to our estimates, about half of it comes from just pure allocative efficiency in the sense of kind of specialization. Places being sort of free, as markets are trading, places are free to specialize in what they're good at and not produce what they're bad at. And that, that, of course, enhances aggregate productivity. And those are the gains from trade. Those are the gains due to comparative advance. at work. That's pretty startling. We just have a few minutes left, and of course, we want to talk about
Starting point is 00:24:55 some current applicability of your research. And obviously, the place I think most people's minds would go is sort of, you know, some of the trade disputes that the U.S. might soon find itself in. But something else occurred to me that is maybe a little more off the beaten path, but also interesting, which is that India, which you studied, obviously, is still dealing with a lot of the same things that you talked about in terms of the diversity of its regions and lack of a completely coherent domestic free trade area. I believe it was sometime last year that the Modi government tried to sort of move forward and pushing through a national sales tax so that there wouldn't be this sort of disparate tax regime across regions. There's also efforts to have
Starting point is 00:25:44 the sort of national payment system to harmonize and unify payments. Do you see applicability of your work on India's rail system to some of the big domestic debates happening in Indian policy right now? Yeah, I do. I mean, I, of course, you know, it'd be naive to suggest that sort of the, it is easy to translate a lesson from one technology, one point in the past. Of course, it was a very backward technology. It was these trains were slow and, you know, they were the first trains the world has ever seen. So even just for studying trains, they're a misleading piece of evidence. The more versatile and long-living, I think, piece of evidence is more to do with, or lesson that we learned from that kind of work is more just to do with the overall sense of benefits from trading.
Starting point is 00:26:32 If you do something that allows more trade, the odds are good that people are going to benefit on the whole. The average kind of the total pie will grow. And that's the kind of thing I've tried to quantify. And I think, you know, the lesson from that work I've done as well as the huge body of work that I've read that other people have done that's built up our knowledge of that tends to leave a pretty unequivocal picture that on aggregate those gains can be, you know, exist and they're there in the data and they're important and they're worth not standing kind of in the way of. So when we make it hard for people within the same country to trade with each other, we stand in the way of those benefits. Just wait, and we make it hard for me to do, we make it hard for me to hire a dentist rather than doing my own dental work. You know, we stand in the way of gains from trade between me and a dentist. Thankfully, in the U.S., there's not much discussion of international trade barriers.
Starting point is 00:27:29 And in fact, everyone tends to agree that improving infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, would be a good idea. You know, we don't think it's, you know, we want to encourage more trade between Colorado and California or Kansas or Connecticut. it. We think we have a basic instinct that those are things are a good idea. And that's consistent with the evidence that I've seen and that I've worked on myself. And I don't think it needs to be any different internationally. Just kind of turn into your first question about the international trade policy tariffs. There's no good reason to embrace international trade and yet stand in the way of international trade in my book. Unless one possible reason would be extreme distributional concerns. You know, if you, I've stressed obviously the aggregate gains.
Starting point is 00:28:14 I have not, you know, myself worked on the distributional consequences, how virtually any change in the economy is very likely to have people who are harmed by the change. You know, as Walmart displaced Kmart and as Amazon displaces Walmart, people suffer, right? I mean, people who have jobs and capital tied up in the industry, the firm that's being pushed out by competition, they suffer. and competition from foreigners is no different. So we need policies that help minimize that suffering, but standing in the way of growing the aggregate pie, I don't think is likely to be the best policy solution to those challenges. David, can I ask just one very, very quick follow-up, which is, I mean, given the body of academic research that points out the benefits of trade and the benefits of comparative advantage and specialization, why do you think the notion that trade is a zero-sum
Starting point is 00:29:08 game seems to persist in the wider world and in some parts of the world seems to be growing. I think there's two basic answers. One is, this is a well-known problem that political scientists have talked about for a long time, that whenever you have something that, you know, as I stress, virtually any change I can think of is going to generate benefits for, you know, some people, maybe everyone, and some costs for some people. But sort of trade and many, many other things like it, you know, free markets in general tend to sort of have very concentrated costs, when I say concentrated, concentrated, concentrated on a relatively small chunk of the population, and very dispersed benefits, right? I mean, think of China, right? They've displaced somewhere,
Starting point is 00:29:53 you know, relatively, I mean, a huge number of jobs in the in the absolute, but relative to the total population, a relatively small percentage of workers, yet virtually all of us every day, consume things that are cheaper and maybe only exist thanks to large foreign manufacturing countries like China. So, but you know, I think deep down there's a bit of a sort of incumbent producer bias in our society. You know, it's as if, you know, it's as if as a nation we think, I mean, I don't mean we all, but if you listen to a number of people, you get this impression that we're
Starting point is 00:30:30 just dying to produce, right? I mean, when my wife and I trade, you know, when we kind of bargain over who's going to sort of cook the food and who's going to mow the lawn, you know, I think we specialize according to comparative advantage. We understand that's in our mutual best interest. We tend not to fight over who gets to do more producing. You know, the debate is more about, like, if anything, you know, we'd both rather not produce. But so somehow weirdly at the national level when it concerns international trade, we stress. over the fact that there's a trade deficit. You know, that's, of course, like the other people are doing the producing.
Starting point is 00:31:07 You know, we should, in some sense, embrace that. So I don't understand how at the micro level people understand that kind of consuming is good and producing is costly and unpleasant, whereas the macro level is sort of the opposite. I sort of think deep down that might be because producers, you know, have a lot of power. Obviously, for an individual firm, they would much rather produce than, the knot, right? That's how they make their profits. But at an aggregate societal level, we should sort of embrace the fact that we can consume for less effort. And that's the basic notion of gains from trade. It's just we're more productive. We can get more for less input.
Starting point is 00:31:51 All right. Dave Donaldson, Associate Economics Professor at Stanford and the recent winner of the John Bates-Clark Medal Award. Thank you so much. Fascinating conversation. fascinating work. I can't wait to continue seeing the evolution of what you've done. Really appreciate you coming on the podcast. Well, like I said, thanks again for talking with me. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, come back when you've won a Nobel Prize. Okay. I don't want to jinx it, though. Do my best. So, Joe, I thought that was fascinating, and it was sort of right in the sweet spot for our O'Dlots podcast because it uses all these historical examples to really illustrate some of the
Starting point is 00:32:39 stuff that's going on today, right? Yeah, I love that conversation. I think my favorite detail was the idea that the best recorded data on all this Indian trading and taxes and income levels and weather was what was housed in the UK. And then the ultimate solution to putting that in usable form was to take photographs of all the pieces of paper and then email 50,000 JPEGs to people in India, appropriately enough, to that. then put back into an Excel spreadsheet to be usable for an economist. I mean, it does make you wonder what other academic research could be enabled by new technology relatively soon, based on old data. And I think we've had similar discussions about this before, at least I think I did with Sid Verma and Simon Hinrickson.
Starting point is 00:33:31 The other thing that I thought was really interesting was some of the stuff he was saying about the way we trade within countries versus the way we trade. internationally. And it does seem to be that trading with our neighbors within a country, with the exception of India, just seems to be much more palatable to us than trading with other people outside of the country, which I assume speaks to human nature a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think this does really get to questions of nationhood so that if we see, you know, even just sort of domestically within this country, we have some places that have done very well. like the coastal areas, San Francisco, New York, some places that have done really poorly.
Starting point is 00:34:17 And it doesn't really, you know, for the most part, international gains from trade don't seem to get people anxious or winners and losers. But then the idea that, you know, if we expand it beyond the borders in some countries doing well and the perception that parts of this country are losing out in that trade, then that really sort of, you know, strikes a deep chord with people and gives them anxiety. I don't think there's any obvious way to resolve that. I think the sort of purely academic way, perhaps still doesn't sit right with people. And obviously we see that playing politically. But it is a really interesting comparison. All right. Should we call it a day? Let's do it. Cool. All right. This has been another edition of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Wisenthall. Follow me on Twitter at The Stallway. And also, Tracy, I realize we never, unlike some other podcast, thank our awesome producers. So I think we should start doing that. Maybe we're just ungrateful.
Starting point is 00:35:17 I think we're, it's just, I realized other people do that. We've never been doing it. We've been doing this podcast for a long time. So I say we change the tradition. We want to thank our awesome producers, Sarah Patterson, who is on Twitter at at Sarah Pat, with two T's, and the head of podcasts,
Starting point is 00:35:35 ELEC McKeough. Put knowledge to work and grow your business with CIT, from transportation, to health care to manufacturing. CIT offers commercial lending, leasing, and treasury management services for small and middle market businesses. Learn more at CIT.com. Put knowledge to work.
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