Production wise, an economy that is not concerned with democratic institutions or reducing inequality will outperform one that is. With that in mind, globalization is basically a race to the bottom human rights wise.
Globalization is why extreme poverty has plummeted in the last few decades. Hundreds of millions of people chose to leave their subsidence farm to work long hours in a factory because it's still an improvement for the quality of life of themselves and their families. Sure it would be better if an Indonesia factory worker got paid $20 a day instead of $10, but nobody is offering them $20 and you can't force anyone to.
It's a political choice not to (for example) impose import taxes on goods based on the difference between wages in the two countries concerned.
Not doing this is bad for people, but good for capital.
Like, I'm Irish, so I have benefited from this trend for my whole life, but that doesn't make it right.
Literally hundreds of millions of people in the Third World to were able to raise themselves into the global middle class over the past few decades.
The main people hurt by the outsourcing trend have been middle-class people in wealthy countries who had well-paid, lower-skill jobs producing physical things which are now shipped in from far away.
Good for foreign labor, good for capitalists, and bad for the middle class in rich countries.
This could have even been a win-win-win, if managed more carefully — Germany had pretty robust job retraining programs for people who lost factory jobs. I'd imagine the UK did not.
We should be honest about who benefited, as well as who was hurt.
Yes. Trade is supposed to mean that no side of the bargain loses. If my country's working class loses, I'm losing. It's not our job to impoverish ourselves for other people's good.
Briefly, rising incomes under a non-democratic regime lead to a local maximum of growth, as totalitarianism is inextricably linked with economically inefficient institutions. As an autocrat, your top priority is to compensate those who keep you in power, which requires wealth extraction from the productive; this disincentivises efficient production. Unfortunately, nothing about rising wealth will necessarily lead to regime liberalization.
"Reducing inequality" is very different from democracy, and would probably lead to reduced economic efficiency, as it necessarily reduces the incentives for efficient production.
this argument gets made a lot (for instance, re: the lower capital gains rate) because proponents want it to be true and its flaws are not immediately obvious, but it's unambiguously mistaken.
first, esteem from wealth is relative, and as long as there is a spectrum of wealth, the wealthiest will derive maximal esteem regardless of the absolute value of wealth. and that's the primary driver for the ambitious and greedy, not putting resources to highest and best use (which is at best a side effect). greater equality doesn't change that equation one iota.
second, it's plain to see that large accumulations of wealth are fairly unproductive, simply illustrated by the localized real estate bubbles driven by both wealth seeking safe harbor and PE-backed landlords seeking unproductive rents.
in fact, there seems to be a central optimum. relative to now, wider dispersion of wealth (less wealth disparity) seems to provide the best bang-for-buck when it comes to efficiency, putting more potential to work rather than mostly relegating it to the menial sidelines.
They are absolutely bound together. Ensuring that every person has the same power in the political process means that everyone has the time and energy to pay attention and be educated on what's going on the world, and that nobody has so much wealth that they can use it to buy influence. The trend towards more inequality while the working class has less and less political power is painfully obvious, especially in the United States.
That cost is insignificant when the ruling nomenclature is a relatively small portion of the population and when basic workers rights are not respected. Especially in manufacturing stuff on a pipeline in huge quantities, a totalitarian system can be much more effective output-wise, at the cost of disregarding any environmental and human condition externalities.
This cost can be extremely high, as the autocrat has to pay off enough people to ensure that rivals cannot achieve an advantage.
The question is: How can the market be adapted to create a fair, innovative and sustainable society, globally?
How can a single government force any rules with these goals without lowering the welfare of its inhabitants and thus threaten its reelection?
Like the Scandinavian countries, which also have the highest reported rates of happiness in the world. Why, at the government level, do we not look at best practices worldwide?
Because there is a ruling class and for the rulers it is not about best practices or happiness, it is about maximizing wealth and maintaining power.
Education and healthcare (which should be considered human rights not industries) are very helpful in seeing some of the tools the ruling class uses to maintain power. Both education and healthcare are standardized enough they are rated by Country and while the US spends more on both than any other country the US is not even close to being rated number 1 in either category.
Yet, to your point, when one points to other countries as evidence how well other systems work (with less funding) that person will be demonized as Anti-American. Even in the current pandemic where the numbers speak for themselves, we are subjected to having to hear the ruling class get on TV and tell us how we are #1 and doing better than every other Country and even worse in many cases this ruling class refers to the pandemic in the past tense and proclaim how they defeated it. It is Machiavellianism incarnate.
I've seriously been wondering why there isn't a field of study dedicated to comparing government policies across countries. I'm sure such a field of study exists, but I have no idea what the name of that field is - does that fall under public policy? Comparative politics? The fact that I can't put a name on it is the very problem as it shows the field (if it even exists) has very little influence on public policy (unlike say economics, which has the Council of Economic Advisors, CBO, BLS, Fed, U.S. treasury, etc).
This is a bit too reductionist. I'd wager that most Americans agree that these are worthwhile goals, but many are skeptical that empowering the government is the best way to achieve these ends.
Just as a recent example of the influence of money here, there was a vote to reduce defense budget (which is at record highs) by 10% and reallocate that money. It was voted down. But those that voted against the reduction got 3.4x as much money from the defense industry as those that voted for the cut.
The same dynamic plays out on issues like single payer health care, with those against it getting major contributions from health insurance lobbyists who want to defend the status quo even while the policy has a large majority approval across both democrats and republicans (and a whopping 88% approval among Democrats).
[1] https://readsludge.com/2020/07/22/dems-voting-against-pentag...
That just seems like a rejection of socialism with extra words.
The real goal of education is to teach people how to think. Logic, rhetoric, analysis, scientific method, how to identify logical fallacies, understanding statistics, falsifiable theories, analyzing history not only through secondary sources, but actively seeking out primary sources to corroborate secondary sources, so on and so forth.
A useful education for a healthy well-functioning society is about inquiry, not regurgitation.
I mean, if I were designing a system to reinforce inequality in districts and schools, local property taxes would be first on my list of policies.
If you go to Scandinavia or study comparative politics, the answer is simple: Scandinavia is Scandinavia, the US is the US. They are different places with outcomes that reflect different values and choices.
What people ignore about Scandinavia: mono-cultural society (if you tried some of the integration stuff that these countries do in the US, you would have people loading guns), huge tax burden on middle class (in the US people who currently pay no tax will have to hand over 40%+ of their income), small population, heavily monopolistic economy, significant exposure to trade/reliance on individual companies, significant natural resources (Norway has 20% of the US oil reserves, their population is smaller than almost every state in the US). Saying they are happier is very woolly, particularly as most countries in that region are societies that place significant social pressure on individuals to conform and be happy (their rates of depression and suicide are high, indeed when Sweden was the socialist paradise their rate of suicide was highest in the world).
Also, you ignore that most Scandinavian countries have moved towards the US model after decades of underperformance and then financial crisis. Even Denmark which has huge trade union membership has the most flexible labour anywhere...again, what people understand about Scandinavia is usually based on their preconceptions about America and their belief in a perfect, easy ideal that confirms their views about the world.
The US gets things far more right than wrong. It is, by far, the most successful economy that has existed to this point. No other large country has replicated that success (all the East Asian economies used Germany as their model, which has resulted in significant baggage). You can say that some stuff needs to be changed...okay, but it isn't as simple as just copying Scandinavia. That will never happen, and won't work if it did. It just makes no sense. The solution to an American problem is American, not Swedish.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
In the US farmers don’t need to expend significant political capital maintaining farm subsidies. It still comes up from time to time, but nowhere near as much as you would think given the economic and heath costs of such policies.
Voters hold many mercantilist and nationalist beliefs (on both sides of the aisle), and policies largely reflect these, not some propaganda-driven special interests.
It is an interesting bit of history, but the specifics really drive home what I was talking about.
The first of these is incompatible with the latter two.