Both the Financial Times (Krishna Guha) and the Wall Street Journal (Greg Ip) ran articles summarizing the papers presented at Jackson Hole.   I liked Guha’s summary more than Ip’s summary, largely because Ip's summary seems to put too much emphasis on the positive.   Ip writes:

Globalization, the conventional wisdom goes, has downsides: It hurts the wages of the lesser skilled. It leads to large and possibly dangerous trade imbalances. It can threaten economic stability through financial-market volatility … But academics, investment bankers and government officials at the Federal Reserve's annual symposium here heard a much more upbeat vision of a globally integrated world.

I’ll set Rajan, Prasad and Subramanian’s paper on foreign capital and economic growth aside for now.  It argues capital inflows help growth in rich countries and hurt in poor countries, so the flow of capital from poor to rich may not be such a bad thing. Instead, I will consider some of the issues raised in Gene Grossman and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg’s paper arguing that the offshoring of many of the tasks associated with the production of goods and services hasn't been a bad thing for unskilled American workers …  

I have only skimmed the Grossman paper.   But it hardly paints a wonderful picture of that state of working America. Real wages of the least skilled manufacturing workers increased by 3.7% since 1997, while total factor productivity is up by 11.8%.    Real wage growth for low skilled blue-collar manufacturing workers has been flat 1998 (Figure 5, p. 24) -- most of the 3.7% growth came in 1997.  Real wage growth for average blue-collar workers has been flat since 2002 (Figure 6, p. 25).

Why aren’t wages rising in line with total factor productivity?  Because the price of the goods produced by low-skilled workers is falling.  Grossman and his co-author’s don’t claim that things are good, only that without the higher productivity from offshoring, things would be worse:

“Real wage growth for low-skilled workers in the US has been far from exceptional (and some might say “far from acceptable”), the experience has not been as bad as one might have expected based on the sharp improvement in the United States terms of trade.”

Not as bad as might be expected isn’t exactly an upbeat account, at least in my book -- even if cheap imported goods are good for those in sectors insulated from global competition.