Yeah, but it's always an option. Ie., you can make money ripping people off, and somebody's always gonna try.
OK, I'm about 1/2 way thru Friedman's "The World Is Flat." Aside from being a bit pedestrian and suffering from Thomas L.'s massive ego, its a good read, as usual. For me, it highlights what i've been saying all along relative to globalization, that is...
1. connectivity is making the world a more competitive marketplace.
2. if firms or countries embrace global collaboration, consumers benefit from much lower prices. in the short term, jobs can be lost but if it comes with worker retraining, it can improve standard of living.
3. we have schizophrenia as consumers (who like lower prices) and workers (whose jobs are at risk). we also have cultural identity issues to deal with.
4. in the end, though, there isn't a choice. unless the world shuts down globalism, you can either get on the bus (and manage the transition) or isolate yourself and lose.
I know many here are against globalization. I wanted to post here to test what people object to in the logic above. Or, is the debate all about the transition - how to preserve culture in the overall move toward globalization, how to ensure our workers are ready, etc.
lol. I agree. Being against something that is inevitable is amusing at best. For the record, I'm against bad government.
My objection is not with globalization, but with the inefficient and short sighted government officials (particularly since the coup of 2000) who have focused their intentions on maximizing corporate profits while ignoring the needs and livelihoods of the US workers whos jobs have been co-opted by the lower wage scales of India, Pakistan, Thailand and other countries where outsourcing has become a prominent source of revenue.
While there have been a few (myself included) who have re-invented or re-directed their careers and managed to maintain or even improve their lifestyle, there are a vast majority who have been victimized by the loss of higher paying jobs in this country, being forced into sccepting lesser paying jobs with fewer or no benefits.
The fact that the ones at the helm of this disastrously erroneous course are also the ones with the most to gain (profit wise) gives me pause to consider where their motivation truly lies. Or maybe thats the key word right there. Lies.
But I digress. Answerman, for me the debate is more in the transition of preserving cultural identity and properly preparing and retraining American workers to better assimilate into a global economy. I believe our government has failed miserably in this category, failing to provide for the short term needs of the people, as well as long term retraining and development of new industry and good paying jobs. The areas showing the biggest increase in employment are the low paying service industries (you want fries with that?). And in the meantime, the minimum wage still sits at a miserable $5.15 per hour (somewhat higher in some states), so lets get real here. A forty hour per week job paying the California minimum wage of $6.25 per hour yields a gross paycheck of $250 per week. That's not going to break the poverty ceiling even with NO taxes taken out. At least not in the United States.
I am fully in favor of "One planet, one people" in theory. But as long as there is such a disparity between the wealthy and corrupt who are running things, versus the rest of the people, the problems will continue.
Ideally, a good start would be to purge corruption from our leadership. But thats a pipe dream.
And speaking of pipes, its time for me to get back to mine.
Today's lunch menu is Rib steak with steamed veggies and caesar salad, with a bowl of Humboldt herbal delight for dessert. L'Chaim.
OK, I hear ya (particularly the Humboldt part). My question is...what would you like to see done? My criticism of the anti-globalists has never been that I disagree with their intentions, its that I'm not exactly sure what they'd like to do to solve things. What could our government do to prepare people? And how can we make that salable in the context of politics.
I don't buy into the minimum wage thing either - that's counter intuitive to the issue. The higher the minimum wage, the greater outsourcing will come. To me, make it the contrary - have governments support the dissolution of archaic pension and health benefits negotiated by organized labor that are killing our old school companies like GM. That will free up money for other things and perhaps discourage them from moving overseas (a la Daimler Chrysler). But, the unions would rather make companies spend their money supporting the old rank and file system rather than moving to a new one.
OK, I'll admit, I enjoyed a little visit to my Colorado stash before I wrote this, so please excuse if I'm babbling.
I think the best way to address globaliztion is to embrace it and address it headon - encourage other countries to grow. There isn't any easy answer to growing investment, skills and talent in places like China, India and South America. It's not going away - the whole globe is too interconnected.
But like the implication of EV's post below, how is this environment going to surface such pragmatic thinking? There are so many interest groups invested in old modes of entitlement thinking.
We need to scare the hell out of the middle class and lower middle class, to ensure they understand the competitive environment, so that we can respond. Otherwise, the most dangerous county in the world is going to become pretty trigger-happy. That's what scares me.
globalization is neither an economic, nor cultural, and not even much a class issue - anymore (since the 2000-coup/9-11-01license-to-rampage).
now it is an issue of war or peace on a global scale.
globalization is a reality (due to technology, communications, transportation, migrations, history, etc.) - it is no longer optional on anyone (that includes "leaders," wage-earners, capitaliststic colonialists, idealists, etc.)
today's u.s. "policies" and worst-practices should be viewed through the rear-view mirror - and not from anyone's nationalisic pov.
what globalization needs, and is still sorely lacking, is a universal, cosmopolitan consciousness and awareness.
unfotunately, strained times fuel radicalism, fanaticism, fascism, and, in its 21st-century incarnation: bushism a' la gwb; increased religiosity is a similar byproduct of turmoil.
it is easy to get very cynical about it; it is also easy to add more and more items to the lists of severe ailments that threaten the world-as-we-know/want/wish-it-to-be;
where are the solutions?
fixating on the 'transitional aspects' of one or another aspect of the collective, multi-fracmented "problem" really misses both the point and the forrest for the trees.
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Yeah, but it's always an option. Ie., you can make money ripping people off, and somebody's always gonna try.
Thomas Friedman's "Globalization" and "Flat Earth Society" is based on the writings of David Ricardo over 150 years ago. It is often called "Ricardian Socialism". It was the rationale for reforming the United Kingdom's Corn Laws. And while lower food prices made British industry more efficient, they also made Britain extremely vulnerable to unrestricted submarine warfare in WWI and WWII.
The petroleum industry was one of the first industries in the world that became "globalized". The UK's conversion from coal to oil made it dependent on Persian oil. Worse, the discovery of extremely cheap crude in Saudi Arabia led to the world economy becoming dependent upon oil from the Persian Gulf. This has not made the world a safer place. If I had to choose between agricultural subsidies in the US and EU for biodiesel and continued dependency on oil despotisms, I'd choose agricultural subsidies.
So, now since free democracies are held hostage by their dependency on oil despotisms, we are now told that exporting our manufacturing base to China is good for America, presumably because entangling China with trade will make them like us more, just like those Saudis who were celebrating the September 11 attacks.
"Free trade" actually stifles technological innovation. It is cheaper to pay a pittance to a starving woman from the Third World than it is to invest in the kind of robotics that has increased productivity in the coal and automobile industries.
"Free trade" makes us half-slave, half-free. Are we really free when we buy goods produced by prison labor in China? Or are we becoming the beneficiaries of the enslavement of others? This is not an academic question, as it was asked concerning the atrocities of Congo Free State one century ago. Although Congo Free State's charter was based on "free trade", it in fact created monopolies (especially in rubber) that enslaved the population of Congo. It took a Liverpool accountant to discover the atrocities when he noticed that guns and bullets were sent to Congo and rubber was leaving Congo -- statistical proof of enslavement. That was the age of the severed hands, as hands were systematically severed from natives who could not meet their quota of rubber. But the "globalization" of the economy back then meant that every consumer of cheap rubber became a beneficiary of Belgian atrocities in Congo.
And that's not including problems associated with the rise of market dominant minorities, documented in Amy Chua's "World on Fire".
Protectionism can exist for excellent moral reasons, ones that Mr. Friedman doesn't seem to notice. And to paraphrase Alexander Hamilton, war is at least as likely to result from disputes between trading partners as peace would be from the rational self interest of the merchant class. It seems to me that Thomas Friedman's medication for the globalization hangover is more and more of his Flat Earth Vodka.
-- Modified on 6/21/2005 7:21:47 PM
Interesting series of posts, and it makes me think of the issue in a slightly different context. My son is a history student and last night we were discussing the rise and fall of empire. In that context I speculated on globalization being perhaps a catalyst for the decline of the US role as current superpower. This may not take place within our lifetimes (then again, as a student I was informed by a history teacher that the decline of the Soviet empire and the unification of Germany was unlikely to take place in our lifetimes - how things can quickly and radically alter).
We were discussing this in the context of issues like outsourcing, the transfer of key manufacturing to third world countries, the seeming unconcern by corporate conglomerates for anything other than the greatest profit.
You can correct me if I'm wrong, but to me it seems that globalization is intrinsically at odds with nationalism and will inevitably tend towards the decline of certain nations at the expense of others. Globalization works all right - it's just that as things stand the US may not, in the end be one of the ultimate beneficiaries.
This, btw, is the reason why European countries like the UK should and must embrace the EU. Without aligning ourselves wholeheartedly to the European cause, we'll be lost. Well, maybe we are already, but that's another story.
Aphra
-- Modified on 6/21/2005 1:15:19 AM
I'm writing a report on it at the end of the summer.
Globalization is now inevitable. In the long run it will probably be good-- if we survive in the long run. Right now, it looks good. But there are going to be some traumas in the short term. One that I foresee is a bursting of the housing bubble worldwide. Another is a plague out of Asia, the avian flu being a good candidate now. Wreckage of farming or ecosystems from introduced species is another one (the Asian mite wiping out whole honeybee populations in the US.) A third one is the fall of US economic dominance. China and India are set to do to us what we did to Britain in the 19th-20th century. The worst challenges, however, are bound to be the unanticipated ones.
There's no way to stop globalization. There seems to be little options for moderating it. I've realized, however, that if human beings are going to ever move into space and colonize other worlds, they do need to evolve a different social system. Globalization might be that necessary step.