It’s at Salon, of all places, that we get half the lesson about why international trade is good and tariffs are bad. That 50 percent of the clue is in their examination of how Amazon is forcing other retailers to buck up their act or go bust. The entirely true point is that the competition from the retail behemoth is cutting swathes through the other people who try to sell us things. Anyone sticking with the same old methods, like Toys R Us and others, disappears. Only those who also use the insights of new models with more efficiency survive.

That means competition from Amazon is forcing the entire retail sector to become more productive. Greater productivity is what makes us all richer over time. The major effect is that the resources now not being used in the original activity (the labor, capital, and land) can now be used to go do something else. We’re richer by the output of that something else. If Amazon drives the rest of retail into using fewer people, less capital, fewer stores, then we get all our retail needs plus all that those resources produce instead – diversity advisers, perhaps. We’re richer by whatever the value of diversity advisers is.