A RUSTBELT ROMANCE

You can visit the steel mill town of Gary, Indiana, as a tourist. Rustbelt Ruin Tours will take you to the vestiges of Gary Screw & Bolt Factory, formerly a major employer, for example.

Since 1980 more than six million – that’s more than a third of all – manufacturing jobs in the US have vanished. Much of this loss is concentrated in the Midwest.

The received wisdom of globalization – and its centrepiece, free trade – is that it produces some winners and some losers in the short term, but in the longer term we are all winners. All boats will rise on the tide of free trade.

Well, it didn’t happen in Gary – which also happens to be the town where Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz grew up. Every year, for the past five decades, he has gone back for his school reunion.

During one such event he detected in many former schoolmates who had stayed in the area, ‘a sense of bitterness… They had a feeling that the system was unfair, rigged. I saw in my former classmates what the statistics had