What is Reddit's opinion of International Economics: Theory and Policy (10th Edition) (Pearson Series in Economics)?

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If you're trying to actually make a point, you should try to do it more clearly. >we don't and the people who absorb the vast majority of the gains use their gains to make sure that we don't.

First of all, false, there have been plenty of policies aimed at doing just what you said we don't. Second, it is unclear who you're implying these people are. I could take some guesses, with varying degrees of specificity, but I still wouldn't be sure. Third, it is unclear what you are implying they do to make sure "we don't." It sounds like you have some point here but for some reason you are taking large tiptoes around saying exactly what it is you mean.

>You can't just arbitrarily treat economic and political systems as separate of each others influence.

Unclear who you think is doing this, because it's not me. Nor is it the economists who model trade, because the political economy of trade policy is quite well understood (a standard reference for undergraduate-level courses has at least an entire chapter devoted to it, for instance).

It depends. I recommend you Krugman and Obstfeld book. I’ll reproduce the arguments of the first chapters of this book in my comment below.

First, trade is always good to maximize collective PPF (production possibility frontiers). Trade works as a mechanism for exchanging goods which can be produced with comparative advantages in each country. In theory, therefore, free trade would be always the best option.

But modeling in economics almost always assume a series of hypothesis that don’t happen in real life. When you insert variables such as imperfect competition and scale production, you may see that free trade is not always the best (it actually can make things worse for some countries). Risking some reductionism, we could say that large countries, with big domestic markets, have many incentives to not adopt free trade: large countries can isolate themselves to create big enough scale economies to compete in the future with foreign scale economies, eventually opening their markets after becoming competitive. Large, populous countries have even more incentives to create obstacles to free trade if they are developing countries: they can use the isolation period to enhance their infant industries, which can turn out to be after some years or decades as competitive as other countries’ industries. In opposite sense, small and less populous countries have many incentives to adhere to free trade: they are not strong enough to create scale industries by themselves, and they would lose way more than they would win if they closed the country to support any infant industry.

This explains, for example, why countries like India, China and Brazil do well, even having relatively closed markets. It also helps explaining how small, less populous countries like the Asian Tigers (and other medium sized countries, like Uruguay and Chile) do better with more free trade. The two countries which grew the most during the 20th century in terms of real GDP per capita in purchase parity were Japan (1st) and Brazil (2nd). Japan, being relatively small (although populous), did best opening its trade, while Brazil, being big and populous, was one the most closed countries in the world and did best this way, transforming the purely agrarian country from the 1910’s into a industrial country by the 1990’s (or a mixed up country, balancing agriculture, mineral extractivism and industry).

Also, there is another variable to understand: not everybody wins when trading freely. According to Hecksher-Ohlin model, since each country has relative advantages in either factor of production (labor or capital, being either labor-abundant or capital-abundant), any variation in relative prices regarding labor-abundant and capital-abundant goods will affect the income of labors and the yield of capitalists. Trade can thus make workers poorer or richer, depending on the conditions of the international markets and prices. The same though can be used to understand the effects of free trade + open borders, differentiating skilled from unskilled labor. Krugman and Obstfeld show in their book how free trade and open borders between the US and Mexico can make the US richer, with the skilled labors from the US (the majority of the country) getting better paid, but at the cost of making the unskilled American labors poorer, losing jobs to Mexican immigrants, who would get the worst paid jobs that the majority of the Americans don’t want. A parallel thing would happen to Mexico: Mexico would become richer, with unskilled workers getting better paid, but at the cost of its skilled labors becoming poorer, since they would be shoved away by the skilled American workers who would emigrate to Mexico.

It loads perfectly fine for me. Anyway, the textbook is by Krugman, Obstfeld & Melitz. It can be found on amazon here.

If you want to go deeper, here is a full undergraduate course in international trade. The lecture notes are included.