Dan Foster takes the vice president to task for saying he is trying to “undo 40 years of globalization.”

Foster retorts, what would that mean?

So what would it mean to turn back the clock on the last 40 years? In one big number, it would mean a ~70 percent reduction in global GDP. That would be the largest degrowthing event in history by a fairly large measure. During the Great Depression, global GDP fell by about 15 percent and U.S. GDP by about 30 percent at the low ebb. During the Black Death, European per capita output actually rose because of, well, labor scarcity. (Talk about your broken windows!) If anyone is aware of an event that wiped out 70 percent of global production, I’m curious to hear about it. (The only one that came to mind for me was the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event about 250 million years ago.)

So what would it mean to turn back the clock on the last 40 years? In one big number, it would mean a ~70 percent reduction in global GDP. That would be the largest degrowthing event in history by a fairly large measure. During the Great Depression, global GDP fell by about 15........

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