...Bob applauded the Obama administration’s first stimulus package but complained that it mostly just dumped money into the economy, a lot of which ended up “going to China.” That remark about China segued into a short but thoughtful complaint about the federal government’s focus on free trade.
I said I didn’t have a problem with freer trade and was actually glad to see living standards improve so much in some of the poorest parts of the world in the last couple of decades. I know there are some losers, I said, but I’m okay with the American middle class getting a little worse off if it means billions of really poor people in other countries are now much better off. After all, they’re all people, right?
I would call Bob a strong liberal, so his response came as a surprise. “I am not okay with that,” he told me...
I won’t try to resolve that debate here, and you already know what I think from the anecdote. Instead, I wanted to share the story because it reminded me of something important in the politics of global development. Equality sounds good in the abstract, but we do not sit comfortably with it in practice. Most of us care more about some people than others, and those feelings shape our politics. We can—and, I think, should—aspire to global fairness, but we can also expect to keep tripping over our own feelings when we walk in that direction.