Robert opened his new issue of Foreign Affairs with anticipation this month. He heard On the radio a few weeks earlier, he had heard Michael Spence say that he had finalized an article for Foreign Affairs to appear this summer. Michael Spence is a fancy pants economist who was the dean of the Stanford Business School in the 1990’s. He is now Chairman of the Commission on Growth and Development. Oh, and he won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001.

The article is The Impact of Globalization on Income and Employment.  All in all, Robert was disappointed.  He could be wrong, but the article did not seem to add anything important to an economic discussion of the globalization and its effects on the US economy.  He thinks the article was important for Spence as a means to publicly announce his belief that the current Federal and state governments should be intervening in the labor market in order to stimulate job creation in certain sectors. I guess that when you win the Nobel Prize, you get to make these announcements in Foreign Affairs and not on a blog that gets a few hundred hits a year.  This is not to say that Robert did not enjoy the article.