Bill Clinton had predicted that China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization would eventually create a “win-win” for workers. American companies would theoretically be able to export products to China’s growing consumer class, an argument Wall Street championed when stock prices climbed with every new plant-closing announcement. Corporate shareholders and CEOs ate up Clinton’s prediction, a cheery best-case version of Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century “invisible hand.” As the economists described it, Chinese peasants would better their lot by making chairs in factories, while dislocated
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