Darby Quast, Chapter 6, Question 6

One thing that stood out to me while reading chapter 6 was the passage about NAFTA.  If I was told about this before reading chapter 6, I would have agreed with Ross Perot.  Its logical to me to think that if America opened their borders to free trade with Mexico, America would be loosing jobs.  The reason this does not happen is productivity.  In many cases American workers can produce more than Mexican workers because they are better educated.  While jobs that require unskilled labor would be outsourced to different countries, there would be more jobs created by the increase in exports to Mexico.  Another example he gave was what the effect on America would be if 500 million people in india became more productive and moved into the middle class.  At first I thought this could potentially hurt America, more people to compete with but this is not true.  Those 500 million people would be able to produce more goods, possibly find the cure for AIDS or fix global warming.  Overall an increase in productivity helps everyone.