There were some interesting ideas presented in this article:

• Most of the decline in the manufacturing employment share was inevitable
• Germany is widely believed to have a first-rate manufacturing sector, yet it has seen the same pattern as the US
• The relative decline in employment in manufacturing since World War II is the biggest structural change, or evolution, to hit the American economy over the past half-century.
• The effects of NAFTA and China-WTO were softened by a tight US economy

Do you agree with DeLong's claims about the effects of the trade agreements on our economy?

"Try to calculate the share that those three “bad tr...

What are your thoughts on DeVita's arguments around the FDA?

Occasionally I have been told that FDA reform is something that only a few libertarian economists support. But in fact, there is strong support for reform in much of the medical community. See, for example, the survey that Dan Klein and I did on off-label prescribing and FDA reform or the many surveys of physicians done by CEI...

In his book, The Death of Cancer, DeVita has a chapter on the FDA. The title of that chapter? Frances Kelsey Syndrome. He writes:

The thalidomide episode sent the message to those who worked at the FDA that the way to do right by people was to say no. Saying yes would prove perilous–not only to patients, but to the caree...