A good post from Mark Thoma about worker assistance for jobs lost to globalization. He includes a good piece from John Berry of Bloomberg in it. I wanted to highlight this bit of Mark’s own commentary after the Berry piece:

There are political reasons for paying particular attention to workers displaced by globalization, and that attention was needed in the past to allow markets to be opened, but unless there are economic reasons I’ve missed I don’t see why we should treat workers displaced by globalizaton differently than we would treat a worker displaced by technological change (e.g. labor saving machinery), changes in consumer preferences (the demand for hula hoops falls and you lose your job), or cyclical factors (the natural boom and bust cycles in capitalist economies).

It’s an issue that is important, especially with all the political hay that is made from globalization when most of the job loss in this country has nothing to do with it.

Mark’s full post is here.