The Misattribution of Growth: Free Trade, the Minimum Condition, and the Structural Origins of Modern Social Problems

Economic growth is widely attributed to free trade. This paper argues that the attribution is afactual error. Western economic development depended on colonial extraction, slave trade,forced market opening, and protectionism. This growth was re-attributed to free trade, andthe misattribution was institutionalised in the post-war order: Bretton Woods, GATT,structural adjustment programmes.The paper identifies the minimum condition for economic autonomy: a subsistence base plussecondary industry drawing on domestically available materials, operated by a maintainedpopulation. When met, trade is additive. When broken — as comparative advantageprescribes — structural dependency results.Three cases illustrate: Edo-period Japan, where 260 independent domains each met theminimum condition and achieved social maturation without external capital; interwarGermany, stripped of resources at Versailles, which collapsed when substituted externalcapital ceased; and post-war developing countries, systematically prevented fromestablishing the condition.The paper traces how the same institutional framework dismantled domestic socialinfrastructure, switching survival from community participation to unguaranteed monetaryincome and producing a self-reinforcing symptom cluster — declining birth rates, poverty,middle-class erosion, regional decline, and structural unemployment — as consequences of asingle misattribution.