American factories have increased production over the years, in part by drawing on a global supply chain to get what they need. A construction machinery plant in Illinois may buy ball bearings from China, glass displays from South Korea, computer chips from Malaysia and other parts from Mexico, some of them forged with American-made steel.
Obsessing over the balance of trade with any single country misses all of that. It also distracts from the force that, by many accounts, is the real threat to employment: automation. The decisive problem facing American workers is that making more products has not translated into sufficient numbers of new jobs, leaving millions of people searching for full-time work at wages high enough to pay the bills.
Economists generally dismiss bilateral trade deficits as essentially meaningless, for reasons easily recognizable in the rest of everyday life. Most people surely run lopsided trade deficits with their dentists, handing these professionals their dollars without expecting them to purchase anything in return.
One may assume that successful dentists will distribute their profits throughout the economy — on marketing, accounting, laundry and streaming music services. One way or another, these dollars generate jobs and income for other people. So it is with countries.
China’s trade surplus with the United States, which reached $347 billion last year, does in part reflect dubious Chinese practices, including lavishing state credit on favored exporters and flooding world markets with low-cost goods to keep its laborers employed.
Yet even if China were a paragon of fair trading practices, it would almost certainly run a surplus with the United States. Despite tremendous economic advances, China remains a relatively low-income country, home to hundreds of millions of people who cannot afford the more sophisticated fruits of the American economy. Though wages have risen in recent years, China’s fundamental advantage still involves making goods cheaply.
The Trump administration faces the problem that China’s high trade barriers are allowed by the World Trade Organization, because China entered the group as a developing country and insists it still is one.
In the case of the United States, trade deficits with the world have been a feature of economic life for more than three decades, a sweep of time that has seen economic booms, the worst downturn since the Great Depression and plenty of events in between.
“Trade deficits aren’t a good barometer,” said Chad P. Bown, a trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
Fluctuations reflect a host of factors that have little to do with the fairness of trade terms. As the government on Tuesday reported that the American trade deficit contracted by nearly 10 percent in February, analysts noted that exports from the United States had been aided by a recent weakening in the value of the dollar, which makes American goods cheaper on world markets.
The only thing one can say with certainty is that the deficit reflects how Americans have consumed more than they have been willing to save, purchasing from foreigners who have in turn invested in the United States. To the degree that this is a problem — and opinions vary — most economists suggest that it is best addressed with tax policies and incentives to save, rather than by impeding trade.
The American trade deficit with the world contracted sharply in 2008 and 2009, but this was not the result of a sudden resumption of old-school saving. It reflected a cratering of consumer spending in the midst of the Great Recession. Calling that progress would be like applauding a nation gripped by famine for limiting its intake of saturated fats.
But if trade deficits do not lend themselves to certain conclusions in the realm of economic policy, they have served as highly useful political fodder. Politicians use trade deficits — money departing the nation! — as a handy, if flawed, explanation for why paychecks are inadequate.
Back in the 1980s, it was Japan that played the boogeyman in the American political conversation, the goliath believed to be gobbling up American prosperity with every Sony Walkman it sent toward American shores. More recently, China has assumed that role.
Now, with Mr. Trump in the White House, much of human civilization has seemingly been cast as the predator class — Germany, Mexico, China, willfully fleecing Americans through a series of trade deals extended by a Washington elite too clueless to fight them.
Liberalized trade has proved punishing for lower-skilled factory laborers clustered in the American South and Midwest. Entire industrial communities have been upended by joblessness, mass foreclosure and attendant ills like substance abuse, domestic violence and depression.
But trade has proved a boon to bankers, executives and multinational corporations that harness low-wage labor in distant lands to make their products. Much of Walmart’s business model was built on a reliance on Chinese factories. American consumers have grown accustomed to low prices for clothing, shoes and other goods.
None of this action gets captured in narrow obsessions over trade deficits.
“Trump hugely mis-frames it,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, who is a persistent critic of trade deals. “We have U.S. companies that are hugely profiting by having access to low-cost labor in China. Portraying that China won and we lost is 180 degrees wrong. Factory laborers are the losers.”