I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. We were right. We said jobs would go to low cost countries, hollowing out Canadian manufacturing. They did. The rich got richer and everyone else got poorer. And now resurgent populism.
I guess the question is what we need to do next.
I always liked the idea of globalizing rights: free trade with countries that have similar labour and environmental standards. Maybe that’s the next move? Or are we back to bespoke tariffs on everyone?
Globalism is based. Free trade is based.
Yeah, I have a feeling national security and a possible fascist takeover of the US wasn’t their main bone to pick.
The argument seems to be “I think free trade is bad. It led to a shitload of prosperity for everyone involved, but now that people are projecting their personal grievances onto free trade and undermining it by electing an isolationist nationalist, things are going to get worse. Told ya so.” Feels like hella cope to me lol.
Yeah, I just read it. There’s no attempt to actually defend the connection between globalisation and Trump, let alone claim they saw it coming. To the contrary:
It’s looking like we were right – only in ways we didn’t predict.
That’s a funny definition of “right”. Usually knowledge is regarded as having to be both true and well founded, and definitely directly about the thing in question. As per usual with activists, though, sides are the only thing that matter, not factual accuracy.
I don’t get this article, is it assuming that everyone thought globalization was a good thing?
I’m pretty sure what happened was politicians just did it and gaslit everyone saying it will be good for the economy.
Globalization IS a good thing. Many people didn’t like globalization and free trade because while being a huge productivity boost overall it was also a large wealth transfer to many of the poorest nations on Earth. And they used this math to make some very convincing arguments that we were “falling behind” and “living standards were declining” and maybe in some cases the speed of that wealth transfer did go too far. But mostly what was really happening was simply that other countries were catching up and this is not a bad thing unless you consider those people sub-human.
I don’t consider people in other countries sub-human so I think our goal should be to make the entire world a nice and equitable place to live for everybody, because having a nice world that everyone can live in benefits us personally and the rising tide will lift all boats and we can finally start to put all this horror and war and injustice behind us and try to focus on things that actually improve our civilization together. This is not a zero sum game, we do not have to steal from the very poor to make our own poor richer, we can gradually fix the historical inequality to bring everybody up to the same level without causing too much stress to ourselves if we just adjust our expectations a little and frame it in the right way.
The thing that was actually bad about free trade was that some very non-democratic, non-free countries abused it, monopolized manufacturing of entire industries and bribed us with very cheap products about it so we didn’t mind very much. We let our enemies, actual enemies who abuse their own populations and want to destroy us and take everything in the world for themselves and abuse us too, use it against us. It’s not free trade that’s bad, it’s the tyrants running these evil despotic regimes that we are too lazy and peaceful to do anything about. They lied to us and pretended that they were being reasonably democratic and we knew they were sort of lying but we gave them a passing grade anyway and let them carry on. Nobody minds that they torture their own people or work them to death when they’re importing their nice cheap goods at a great price.
It seems like we hoped that if we provided them a good economy, freedom would follow. But that’s putting the cart before the horse. Freedom must come first, then economy can follow. By tolerating evil, by letting free trade support and provide for that evil, we allowed that evil to infect us and now we’re feeling the pain of what evil left unchecked will do to the world.
So now it’s time to prepare for a war to defeat evil once again, because we let it happen.
Globalization IS a good thing.
Nope. If something can be produced locally, you would pay less transportation costs.
By definition, it’s less work to access goods and services that are closer, unless your country can’t produce it, then you outsource.
If you’re making an argument about efficiency, the massive inefficiency of hundreds of countries making redundant efforts and frequently failing, sometimes disastrously, far outweighs the cost of transportation of most things. Ships in particular are an incredibly efficient form of bulk transport and are likely only going to get more efficient. In theory, they could be completely wind powered – they used to be, and yes that would make it less reliable and much slower but we could manage that if we needed to. Shipping can easily go green, or at least much greener than it already is, it is simply a choice, and one that we should start to make soon.
But globalization is also about so much more than just financial efficiency and energy efficiency. Globalization interconnects countries. It makes them less likely to wage war. It generally encourages the harmonization of laws and governance, it forces us to work together to find a mutually acceptable path forward and that is the right path to be going down long-term. At least when it’s not abused. True global unity is going to become an essential requirement as our civilization moves into the solar system, we will already have more than enough problems up there without bringing our old problems from down here. This is not optional, this is a mandatory stepping stone into the only future that makes sense, the only future that seems like a bright one.
If you hate the inefficiency of transporting stuff globally, you should see how wasteful war is, and then you should imagine what it would be like on an interplanetary scale.
We are all one people, it’s time we start acting like it. Globalization is one of the essential steps in doing that. We cannot skip it.
