As I write this column, recession talk grows louder. In the transportation sector, that’s no surprise but in the general public-having taken the abundance of cheap money and available credit largely for granted the past few years-anxiety builds. 

Which, taken in the context of a Presidential election, ups the ante for vote-seeking politicians to pander to fear.  

For those engaged in global supply chains, this scenario makes for double trouble. Not only are their immediate businesses in flux but also there’s the lurking danger that demagoguery will replace reason in formulating U.S. trade policy. 

The fire is being stoked from all sides. Even a usually moderate voice like journalistic doyenne Helen Thomas, in a column published in the Jamestown (North Dakota) Sun, typifies the confusion of the conversation when she wrote recently “…manufacturing has fled the country, and globalization has proven to be a race to the economic bottom rather than a boon for U.S. jobs.”

Well, facts tell a different story. 

According to those who study this stuff from a disinterested perspective, free trade-rather than being a scourge-is a positive force for growth. University of Michigan economist Mark J. Perry poses a serious hypothesis that, indeed, globalization offers the U.S. economy a downside hedge. “Assuming the world GDP grows at the IMF forecast of 4.8 percent,” he recently observed, “it would be inconceivable that we could go into a recession with such strong growth in the rest of the world or at least unprecedented that we could suffer a recession while the world economy continues to grow at almost 5 percent.”

True, global growth of this magnitude has become problematic, but the point is that the U.S., rather than having to endure the economic health of the world, is in fact positively integrated into it and correspondingly benefiting.

Indeed, the authors of the newly published Economic Turbulence: Is a Volatile Economy Good for America? (University of Chicago Press), folks with serious credentials, conclude that, “the general idea that low-wage workers have suffered as a result of economic change (read: globalization) does not hold up. Although there is high worker turnover at the bottom end of the earnings distribution, low-wage workers have typically gained ground.”

Obviously, this is not the kind of foot-noted analysis that makes for a compelling sound bite. Nor are those who point to deserted Rust Belt factories and blame off-shoring wholly without merit. Nonetheless, fundamental to America’s political will to master the new global economic landscape is our capacity to understand it.

Yes, the GoldToeMoretz sock-making plant in Alamance County, North Carolina announced in January that it was moving production to Mexico and Asia, putting 425 people out of work (in 1990 there were some 300 sock mills in North Carolina, today there are less than 75). But at the same time, Honda Aircraft is establishing a jet engine plant in the same county, which will employ 140 people by 2010-jobs more skilled and better paying than making socks.

So what is the ‘elevator speech’ rebuttal to those who would roll up U.S. borders to international commerce? Simply that, on balance, the American spirit of innovative enterprise is deftly adapting to the emerging global order. Not without casualties but on sum, benefits are being more broadly distributed than is popularly believed. New companies are being organized to exploit new global opportunities. And, the net-net is positive. 

The volatility of the American electorate right now suggests the magnitude of the fundamental changes we are being asked to accommodate-not the least of which is free trade. Our challenge is to move forward confidently, to have faith in our strengths and not turn our backs on them.