It strikes me as a problem that the editorial board of The Washington Post is either innumerate or dishonest -- there's just no other excuse for comparing Mexico's pre- and post-NAFTA GDP's in non-inflation adjusted terms. As Dean Baker says, "If we don't adjust for inflation, Zimbabwe's economy, wracked by hyperinflation of several thousand percent annually, is the fastest growing economy on the planet. If the Post editorial writers use a consistent measure, we can expect to see warm praise for Zimbabwe's extraordinary growth on the editorial pages in the near future." And, remarkably the editorial gets worse from there, cherrypicking poverty statistics, ignoring GDP growth, sidestepping distribution, and so on, and so forth. As Daniel Davies famously wrote, "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance." By this standard, The Washington Post is beginning to convince me that NAFTA was not a good idea. Otherwise, why would they have to make such a pathetically weak case?
