It was never a mystery who the winners and losers of free trade would be. Classical economic theory had long predicted that free trade would increase the wealth of the wealthy while making less-educated Americans poorer, a concept referred to as the “distributional effects” of free trade. Free trade threw American factory workers into economic competition with some of the hungriest workers in the world. But it offered untold wealth, market access, and investment opportunities to U.S. corporations.
