It's worth separating two issues in the *China Shock* debate. Autor-Dorn-Hanson was a positive development for academic research. It paved the way for a lot of interesting work on trade and inequality. Several follow-up studies estimate similar distributional effects using different data and methods (see Rafael's thoughtful thread on this). Outside academia, however, the results were widely misinterpreted. Many used them to push protectionist agendas and to argue that trade with China was a net negative for the US economy, which the results never supported. This kind of misinterpretation will keep happening until we adopt stricter guardrails on how to present cross-sectional estimates. As @ben_moll and @oliverhanney's Vox article argues, the practice of making aggregate claims from cross-sectional estimates is pervasive but generally invalid, because of the *missing intercept* problem.