I'm not saying we should revert globalization; I'm right now only trying to learn about the good and bad sides, their relative balance, to figure out whether and where something needs to be done to achieve a better outcome for everyone. Because I get this growing feeling that screwing up local communities in exchange for freer money flow isn't turning as good a deal as advertised.
Your initial paragraphs talk about freedom, and I appreciate this view coming from a principle. Though looking at the world as it is today, couldn't you say that this focus on individual freedom, scaled up, actually ends up taking freedom from individuals away? How come when talking about freedom we focus on freedom to choose, but ignore the increasing constraints, the disappearance of options to choose from?
Billions of people worldwide didn't rise out of poverty since the 60s from migration though.
Capital belongs to people. Capital freedom is people exercising their rights of ownership over their property. That's what capitalism is. I know this very well because my wife is Chinese. Her father's family were villagers in the Chinese countryside, but they owned a few plots of land they rented to other farmers otherwise like themselves. As a result they were branded 'class enemies' and persecuted ruthlessly. To this day he sometimes tears up when we talk about those times, although I speak very little Chinese myself.
The millions of people that have been lifted out of poverty in India and China are obviously still there, they haven't migrated. Globalisation is said to have helped people out of poverty by the increased flow of capital it represents, not by literally having them all move to richer countries.
In the face of the daily deaths along the "illegal" migrant routes, the idea that globalisation has made personal movement easier is unfounded.
China and the USA didn't pass a Jack Ma law that allowed Jack Ma to trade with America. He took advantage of individual freedoms available to anyone. I'm sure he had particular opportunities too, but he was free to take advantage of them, as others were free to take advantage of opportunities they had.
China is working it's way up the economic ladder. Low end assembly isn't moving out of China because other countries are getting cheaper. It's moving out because there are more higher paid jobs in China now, so it's harder (more expensive) to persuade Chinese workers to do low end jobs. Average factory worker wages in Chine are now 5x those in India, because their value-add has rocketed. Chinese workers have better opportunities now.
The fifties and sixties had a sustained period of increasingly shared worker participation, believed in by both sides of the political fence. Rising pay, conditions, pensions, fringe benefits, and reducing inequalities. Regulation to combat the ills of capitalism and markets, to prevent a repeat of 1929, to be suspicious of overly large corporations, to improve the lives both of worker and residents near the factory. It was Republican Nixon who formed the EPA and brought the clean air act.
By placing commerce above nation you restrict the impact of government, the shared deal is defenestrated, and it becomes a global race to the bottom. It makes it super-easy to trade one nation against another, and move profit around to avoid paying the rightful tax. Just because. The corporation is now above its government. Make it wherever's cheapest or has fewest restrictions. The current home of manufacture rises, the globe as a whole does not. Environmentally, climatically and regulationally it got worse.
Not to say I object to other nations rising, I don't at all. It could have been done without throwing baby out with the bath water.
I suspect this is simply due to the fact that there are now hundreds of millions more middle class people in the world that can do our jobs just as well as we can. However I can't bring myself to cry foul. Why shouldn't they get a fair bite at the apple?
Inequality is definitely an issue, but frankly if we're going to vote in billionaires so they can give themselves and their rich mates historically unprecedented tax breaks, while profiting enormously from their position of privilege, maybe we deserve it.
Coordination is required to avoid suboptimal solutions to games (as in game theory) that emerge in a modern economy.
If your a computer scientist saying individual freedom resolves all economic questions is like saying greedy algorithms provide the optimal solution to all cs problems.
You mean individual freedom for the rich?
> This dynamic has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty
And billions of people into modern slavery. And so much more complex misery that it is impossible to comprehend.
> It has increased pollution and accelerated the rate of consumption of resources.
Indeed! We are totally destroying life on this planet and it seems most people don't realize it's the economy. Economists have a 'raise people out of poverty' fallacy for this. All these false truths we learn at school are so persistent, amazing.
When you give people freedoms like that, and there is huge advantage to be gained from it, people quickly find ways to scale it up to benefit the maximum number of people as much as possible. That's what a company is. It's a way to scale up economic activity.
This dynamic has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last few decades alone. That's a number so big and a transformation in people's lives to dramatic that it's hard to grasp mentally in a meaningful way. That didn't happen because of farmer's markets and buying local produce in Wholefoods, much as it might pain us to admit it.
Does globalisation have it's down side? Yes, absolutely. It has increased pollution and accelerated the rate of consumption of resources. But what could we say to those families, those hundreds of millions of people, that could justify denying them their opportunities?