Americans often complain that too many manufacturing companies outsourced their jobs to China, and they catastrophise about the day the people in the US will have no middle-class work available. The doom prophets misunderstand comparative advantage - the jobs move abroad because the US citizens are better positioned to do something else. China’s big, and the world is even bigger. Yet, even the smallest country has a role in the global economy because as more humans consume more resources, the humans best placed to serve different demands are spread across the trading partners.