Ep. 218: Gordon Hanson on US-China Trade War, Immigration and US Elections

Gordon Hanson is the Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). He is also chair of the Social and Urban Policy Area at HKS, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Gordon’s current research addresses the causes and consequences of regional job loss, effectiveness of place-based policies in alleviating regional economic distress, and the labour market consequences of the energy transition. This work is part of the Reimagining the Economy project at HKS, which Gordon co-directs with Dani Rodrik. In this podcast we discuss: 

• Rise of China and its impact on the US 
• Did WTO entry matter? Which sectors played by the rules? 
• Comparison to rise of Japan and Asia Tigers 
• How did Mexico and NAFTA impact the US? 
• History and effect of US tariffs 
• Which jobs were lost during globalisation? 
• Did Trump policy help US workers? 
• Impact of immigration on US economy 
• Energy transition policies 
• Biden vs Trump on trade, energy and immigration policies 
• Books mentioned: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Caro), Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America (Fallows) 

You can follow Gordon’s work here. 

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