Wayne Winegarden and Rowena Itchon on creative destruction

International trade, like all productive contributions to economic growth, is a creatively destructive process that improves our lives by disrupting the old way of doing things.  While necessary to generate broad-based prosperity, these disruptions are not without a cost.  The growth in internet retailers, for instance, has brought a wider array of more affordable goods and services directly to people’s doorsteps around the world.  Between 2007 and 2017, it also created nearly a half million new jobs in fulfillment centers and e-commerce companies in the U.S. alone that paid nearly a third more than brick-and-mortar retail jobs on average.  While the job gains in the new economy also caused job losses and business closings for brick-and-mortar retailers, on net, e-commerce has vastly improved our quality of life.

~ Wayne Winegarden and Rowena Itchon, “Free Trade Myths and Realities” Free Trade in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 643-644