Can the Global Economy Be Healed?

You’re reading The Financial Page , John Cassidy’s weekly column on economics and politics.

Hours before Donald Trump met with Xi Jinping in South Korea last week, I sat down with Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard University, to talk about his new book, “ Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World ,” in which he discusses ways to create something positive atop the wreckage of the postwar global economic order. Although the U.S. and China have agreed not to escalate their trade war, Trump’s blanket tariffs and the rest of his America First agenda remain in place, and many economists are despairing about the demise of an open trading system that they regard as a key driver of prosperity. But Rodrik, who shot to prominence in the nineteen-nineties as a critic of the untrammelled globaliza