There's no need to change trade agreements to achieve this

More of the usual in The Guardian. Radial calls to change the world without having the first clue of how it works right now:

Progressives must not cede discussion of the world economy either to the liberal globalizationism promulgated by Thomas Friedman and Mark Zuckerberg or the pseudo-protectionism associated with Trump and Le Pen. While the former accepts the current slide of the western working class as inevitable, the latter proposes only arbitrary and authoritarian countermeasures.

Instead, we need to push for a new architecture of international trade, investment and technology transfer that puts worker representatives at the decision-making table. Moving forward, international trade deals – in principle a good thing – must bring wages in cheaper-labor countries into closer alignment with those of their developed-world trading partners.

That last being, of course, exactly what trade deals do right now. If we, for example, sign a trade deal that opens the UK to more Bangladeshi garment imports then the income of Bangladesh goes up. As does the income of Bangladeshis, exactly the point that is being argued for.

If you buy one t-shirt made by those in some sweatshop in Dhaka, those earning 5,000 taka a month (£54 apparently) then those wages rise by some infinitessimal fraction. And if you buy two by two such and if millions of us buy all our clothing from such places then economic growth observably happens.

As it has been these past years as we have been buying more from Bangladeshi sweatshops - the country has been growing at between 5 and 7% for most of the past couple of decades in fact.

Sure, we'd all like that growth to be faster - thus Madsen of this parish's insistence that we should all buy goods made by poor people in poor countries. Because this aids them in getting richer.

And thus why we should indeed have more trade deals, even just the one announcing unilateral free trade. In order that the poor may become richer as billions have been doing these decades.

But we don't need such trade deals to consider low wages rates - we just need to be doing more trade and those low wage rates will, over time, disappear. Because, you know, economic growth?