I figured this would eventually happen, but not as quickly as it seems to be happening and, for this, Paul Krugman should get credit. For years mainstream economists were unable to understand how trade and globalization work because they were locked into trade models that implicitly assumed that trade was balanced (except, occasionally, over short time periods) and that capital flowed towards its most productive use. That is why their understanding of trade had no relevance to the actual world of trade that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.

But this couldn't last. As the problem of unbalanced trade became more obvious , and as policymakers were increasingly forced to ignore the advice of their economists and respond to real problems, mainstream economists would eventually begin to recognize how, in an unevenly globalized world, countries that aggressively intervene in their domestic economies and externalize the costs through trade surpluses are also effectively intervening in the domestic economies of countries that supposedly remain committed to "free trade".

Most economists still don't understand trade. But with Krugman now acknowledging that tariffs and other forms of trade intervention can be expansionary under some conditions and contractionary under others (as Ragnar Nurkse explained as long ago as in his 1944 book), I suspect that younger economists will develop a completely different understanding of trade, and one that is perhaps a little more realistic.