Ha-Joon Chang, mentioned in my commentary, is probably among the best-informed modern scholars on the dynamics of the free trade debate. I'd shared the item with him. and he was kind enough to reply with thanks, though I'm not sure if he's made use of the example.

The whole notion of narrative and its power, especially contrasted with discrete facts and fact-checking, is another area I've been exploring, arguably under the sscope of my blog's purview (intentionally both broad and vague, a blessing and curse).

Douglas Ruskoff's "Team Human" blog explores this with George Monbiot here, quite well.

Ep. 89 George Monbiot "Beyond Salvation and Disaster". Episode: https://shows.pippa.io/teamhuman/ep-89-george-monbiot-beyond...

Media: https://feed.pippa.io/public/streams/58ad887a1608b1752663b04...

The theme shows up both in the intro, at 4m30s, and in the conversation, starting at 11m30s, andcontinuing through the rest of the episode.