David J. Lynch

But as you say, trying to read too much into oral arguments can be a mistake.

Well, the reception's been good.

There was the Financial Times gave me a nice review a week or two ago, and the Irish Times, the Irish finance minister, in fact, reviewed the book for the Irish Times and had very complimentary things to say, which I appreciated as an Irish-American.

And I'll be talking to Bloomberg next week.

It's moving forward and selling well, which I'm gratified by.

Could always have more attention, of course.

Any authors out there in the marketplace peddling his book, he can never have enough attention.

The short answer is no, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to write the book, and I did want to make it.

I'm glad you described it as accessible, because I didn't set out to write a book for economists or trade specialists.

I tried to write a book for the average curious and informed person who wants to try and understand what the hell's happened over the last 30 years or so.

Because I think we have all these kind of unresolved conflicts and questions from the period that's described as the hyperglobalization era.

And I don't think we can, I don't think we're going to be able to move forward and prosper for the next 30 years if we don't understand what we got wrong about the past 30 years.

And like so many debates in Washington, you know, you've got folks in sort of two camps.

There's the people I think of as the traditional pro-trade liberalization folks who, and this is maybe only slightly a caricature, but think everything was done fine, nothing was done wrong.

Anybody who disagrees is just a troglodyte, a protectionist who doesn't get it.

And then the folks on the other side think everything about trade and globalization is a conspiracy by the elites to screw the common man.

And, you know, I personally don't think either one of those views captures some of the nuance that's necessary to figure out where we went wrong.

And to my mind, where we went wrong goes all the way back to the stuff Bill Clinton used to say in the 90s, which was that, you know, he saw it coming.

And I think I describe him in the book as kind of the godfather of American globalization.

that there were going to be winners and losers, and that was inevitable.