At the international level, it is debate-able. It depends on the goodwill nations have towards one another.
At the individual and family level though, atomization is incredibly destructive to culture and community. Reliance on others is needed more than ever. To be absolutely independent, is to be without love (given or received). Family, community, and nation cannot exist without love — it is the vital glue that holds it all together and makes it worth holding together. Arguably if this was healthy at the local and national level, it makes sense then to extend it internationally as well.
I'd argue that inter-reliance is what brings a framework for peace and mutual respect, at all levels from family up to global politics.
Less personally, in Accidental Superpower, the case is made that the west's insistence on free and safe trade over international waters has helped to broker a long stretch of mostly peaceful time - precisely because it creates these interrelations that become important.
Europe has been war torn for thousands of years, then post ww2 we got a long lasting peace. Turns out a side effect of the union is that you are less likely to want to shoot someone who is buying your goods!
that was the German strategy towards Russia "Wandel durch Handel". Assuming that trade is mutual beneficial it makes an armed conflict less likely because both sides have so much to lose. With Russia it did not work unfortunately. It's debatable if it works with china.
Being self-reliant is a pre-requisite of being able to effectively help others. The self-reliant can still experience love and community, they just can't be trapped by dysfunctional relationships.
Edit: I guess if everyone was born radically self-reliant we might not learn to care. But no one starts out that way.
If you are a self-reliant individual with few needs, it can be destructive for you to associate indiscriminately with others as you are likely to end up in lopsided relationships where you are exploited and relied on more than you rely on others. You need to be very careful in selecting your friends to create balanced relationships, a task which requires a non-trivial amount of energy which can sometimes be put to better use in other pursuits.
While there is certainly some truth and wisdom to this view, it also worries me. I see the increasing globalization and interdependence of the modern world as one of the major reasons for the decrease in armed conflicts. You are a lot less likely to attack someone who is a trade partner.
There is a saying that “there has never been an armed conflict between two nations that both had a McDonald’s”. Russia has broken that, but that is case where the exception proves the rule. Russia has been devastated by the repercussions of their choice to invade Ukraine. And Europe is suffering due to the lack of oil and natural gas.
I fear a world where nations are not reliant on each other is going to be less peaceful. That being said, the memo specifically calls out relations with China, which is a country that is dangerous to have too much reliance on, due to also being run by an absolute dictatorship.
Besides preventing conflict, globalization was supposed to increase democracy in the world. Increasing trade relations with China was in part to make them more democratic, as the theory was the more prosperous a nation is, the more democratic they become. I think we got it backwards.
Now we know it doesn’t work, and this historic reason for globalization is moot.
If you ever visited China 20 years ago and now, you may have noticed the change in openness, though.
The first time I went, I was confined to limited areas, and had to be followed by a state appointed guide for my entire trip. I couldn't kiss my girlfriend in the street, it was considered bad behavior.
Now, I can just go alone, and where I please, and demonstrations of affection are not as frown upon. Women also seem have more freedom than before.
China was always a dictatorship, but I would say it looks more free that it used to be, at least from my very limited external point of view.
Now, China is still corrupted, with massive informational control. And it also became terribly polluted, and under systematic automatic surveillance, so I'm not sure it balances out, but it's not like there is an objective scale to those things.
I travelled freely in China fourteen years ago. I paid cash everywhere. Nobody had a smartphone. I didn't feel surveilled. From my limited perspective it seems much less free now.
> I see the increasing globalization and interdependence of the modern world as one of the major reasons for the decrease in armed conflicts.
On the flip side, I also see the reluctance or resistance of individual countries to said globalization and interdependence as one of the major reasons for the increase in armed conflicts affecting those individual countries.
I've never understood it actually. What does the author mean when using "proves the rule", is it somehow proving it by it being a clear exception with special circumstances (somehow that rarely seems the case) or are they just acknowledging the incorrectness of the rule in a joke-y manner?
> is it somehow proving it by it being a clear exception with special circumstances
Essentially yes. I would wager that if Putin could go back in time, he would not invade Ukraine. The economic consequences have been too severe. It really serves as a warning to other countries.
So Russia is now an exception to the “McDonald’s rule”, but it proves why the rule is generally true.
>> There is a saying that "there has never been an armed conflict between two nations that both had a McDonald’s". Russia has broken that, but that is case where the exception proves the rule.
That was from a 1999 book by Thomas Friedman.
"Shortly after the book was published, NATO bombed Yugoslavia. On the first day of the bombing, McDonald's restaurants in Belgrade were demolished by angry protesters and were rebuilt only after the bombing ended. In the 2000 edition of the book, Friedman argued that this exception proved the rule"
You also have the Russo-Georgian war, Russia's seizure of Crimea, and various other conflicts depending on your definition of war - US invasion of Panama, conflict between Israel and Lebanon, the Kargil War.
In general, if you are relying on something Thomas Friedman said for your argument, you are almost certainly wrong.
Reads like a slogan for anti-globalization and nationalism.
As with all slogans, it ignores important details that contradict it.
Over the past four decades, our current global economic system, promoting economic integration and interdependence between countries, has lifted billions out of poverty.[a][b] Billions. No sensible discussion of globalization can ignore that.
The current backlash is not against globalization per se, but against:
* greater concentration of economic power (e.g., more markets dominated by global mega corporations),
* greater concentration of political and military power in authoritarian regimes who play by different rules (e.g., China), and
* greater concentration of income and wealth (e.g., the hollowing out of the middle class in the US).
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater!
But let’s also not throw out the baby with the bathwater in the _opposite_ direction. We should not be reliant on Russia for energy to such an extent that our economy gets destroyed when a Russian tyrant goes on an ego trip. We should not be allowing Chinese entities to own our energy infrastructure. We should not be allowing foreign nationals to buy up massive amounts of property in London with shady money, distorting the property market for normal citizens.
There is a happy medium somewhere in between complete globalisation and complete isolation.
We should not be reliant on fossil fuels for energy, period. There's a mountain of scientific evidence showing that extracting, transporting, storing, and burning all that poisonous crap is very bad for humankind.
The sooner we move to other sources (fusion (!), solar, wind, etc.), the better for humankind. However, companies that make money from fossil fuels don't want that, and for the past four decades they've had the political and economic cloud to slow down or even stop progress.
We have such "single points of failure" in the global economy because we have allowed market power to become highly concentrated, nationally and globally, without any checks and balances.
I think I understood the point. The counterpoint I was trying to express, in response, is that this is a consequence of allowing high-concentration of market power in many of those commodities, nationally and globally, without any checks and balances.
Reliance on other nations for critical resources is a separate concern from technological mechanisms for acquiring those resources, even if the later may help solve the former.
Yes, but this is entirely at odds with globalization. A primary reason we outsource production to developing countries is to exploit their lack of regulation (including environmental regulation). If the UK transitions to green energy, they’re not subject to Putin, but they’re still subject to Xi and they are still contributing substantially to emissions. Moreover, transitioning to green energy will probably create reliance on rare earth metals and other minerals that will likely be controlled by despots.
Of course, the UK threw out the baby and the bathwater with Brexit.
I'd have rendered that slogan as “The more reliant we are on others with whom we have any substantive combination of: a severe trade imbalance, no framework for meaningful dialog, and conflicting major foreign policy goals -- the less resilient we are as a nation”
Yes, but keep in mind that we find ourselves here due to the rising concentration of market power in fewer and fewer global mega corporations (e.g., TSMC in chips). Over the past four decades, there have been few checks and balances on the concentration of corporate power, both at the national and global levels.
> The current backlash is not against globalization per se, but against: ...
I cannot speak about the UK, but in general this isn't all that people are dissatisfied with about globalization. Very many are angry about the loss of a sense of home. If you examine the situation in purely material terms, you won't observe or measure those feelings. For others, the loss of home extends to a loss of community, which extends to a loss of self.
Educated tech people can be software engineers first and English second, while the lower classes are, in my experience, English first, and their profession second. The loss hits harder for them.
I haven't seen media discuss the identitarian dimension of globalisation. I suppose that has to do with media being populated primarily by one social class. Yet I feel that by ignoring them they have been burying nuclear waste for decades.
I don't mean to tell you whether these emotions are "abhorrent racism" or "valid", I just mean say that they are to me the elephant in the room in any discussion of globalisation.
That's a really good point. I missed mentioning it in my post above. That "sense of loss" is definitely an issue. That said, I do wonder whether people would be experiencing such a "sense of loss" if market power, political clout, and economic gains hadn't become so highly concentrated. That is, if more people in rich countries felt that their lives have changed for the better, they'd probably want more economic integration, not less.
A rig worker in the arctic explained it succinctly to me, I don’t care how many people it’s lifted out of poverty I care whether it’s better for me and my friends and family and right now it isn’t.
For software engineers globalization is wonderful for many in the economy it isn’t.
> I don’t care how many people it’s lifted out of poverty I care whether it’s better for me and my friends and family and right now it isn’t.
Except that:
- the same rig worker will gladly buy consumer products cheaply manufactured in some developing or non-free Country thanks to globalization and will immediately stop buying them if the prices go up due to un-globalization (it's actually happening in UK, newspapers are full of articles similar to UK Shop sales slow as consumers shift spending toward essentials)
- there are billions of people who don't care about the rig worker, they care about their own families. By virtue of how the democratic process works - majority wins - and how social evolution works - survival of the fittest form of society -, the rig worker either adapts to the new environment or will go extinct.
Third option is the west goes to war against developing countries, trying to set the clock of history back and exploit them again, but this time I'm not sure the west could win.
Point is: without solidarity among workers of the same class (I don't care about them, I care about me), the rig workers of the World will be ignored because they have literally no power other than their complains.
I too don't care about 'em, why should I? if they don't care about anything else than themselves? They surely don't give a flying f*ck about me and how the globalization helped me and my family to live a better life.
This is one of those things that a bit of global socialism could make better, but the solution, according to the rig worker, is the exact opposite: close the stable door when the horse has bolted, i.e. more nationalism, tarifs, walls, which will in the end work against the rig worker, not in their favour.
p.s.: you can agree or disagree, but expecting that a small country with 80 million people should be more important than 4 billion people living in the developing World is simply delusional.
Comply or die isn't that funny when it works against you, am I right?
He was driving a Ford and I was driving a Toyota. All of his tools as far as I could tell were top quality stuff that if not still made in the US / Canada were at one point. (He was helping me change out a wheel bearing)
I’d say for the most part this guy walked the talk as far as I could tell.
My point was not to validate / invalidate his point of view but to show what the POV is for anyone who hopes to get more people on the globalization train.
> but to show what the POV is for anyone who hopes to get more people on the globalization train.
It's impossible to get more people on the globalization train, because we all are on it already.
It's like saying "we should get more people on board with climate change"
It is happening, whether we like it or not, whether we agree or disagree about it.
What we should and can do, is to ask better questions.
instead of asking ourselves what is the cause of some personal condition, pat ourselves in the back and blame the foreigners (it's always the foreigners, of course) why don't we ask who left the rig workers of the story in the dust?
Was it a worker coming from the Philippines trying to have a better life for their children and great children, or was it the same corporations than now blame globalization because they are finding harder and harder to exploit developing countries that also stolen their job and have become as good as them to produce the same stuff?
How much of the wealth that Apple generated exploiting cheap Chinese labour, bowing to China just to enter their 1.5 billion people market, have come back to the US economy and actually helped the working class and our friend the rig worker (not the tech class)?
It's not globalization the problem, it's this capitalism.
The point is: corporations have to start giving back to the people in the form of very high taxes, that's the solution to the issues (some of them are real) of the globalization. Privatize the profits and socialize the costs is not a good idea, we see it, we all agree that it's not working, paradoxically it's been worse in richer countries, because social programs are shit there, they have always relied on having a lot more money to spend than the others. Still we avoid to give the right name to the problem. We have to even if in many Countries they prefer to die than talk about social welfare state, but it's a red pill, blue pill, situation.
But if we don't and corps wanna keep looking for workers everywhere in the World, we also have to let people do the same, in the opposite direction.
Tertium non datur.
Because tertium means we try'n'stop them and they will come anyway, but this time without asking.
I suppose I'm in the same boat as the rig worker on this topic.
I feel a heavy sense of pity and remorse for anyone so demoralised and deracinated that they have a greater connection to "tech" than to blood and soil. That's such an empty, nihilistic existence. What's even the point?
Another commenter points out that the worker must actually love globalism because of widgets from China. Who cares? I would give up every bit of cheap plastic junk in a heartbeat if it meant my great grandchildren will have a homeland to live in peace and prosperity among their own. How on earth can anyone put a price on that, nevermind such a low one?
> ? I would give up every bit of cheap plastic junk in a heartbeat if it meant my great grandchildren will have a homeland to live in peace
that's exactly what globalization did for billions of people once oppressed by colonialists Countries, such as the UK.
You could stop buying cheap plastic, but you'll never get the empire back.
Because people want their great grandchildren to have a homeland to live in peace
But you can have a poorer Country as in richer than 90% of the World, but not as rich as in the past when they exploited the poorest Countries for their own advantage, and call it homeland. You can be sure nobody wants it, you can keep it.
You also seem to believe that the point of it all is just lower prices, but the actual reality is that UK doesn't even have enough people to operate their own homeland's hospitals. [1]
You should blame your own political choices, not globalization.
None of this was our choice. Nobody wants this. Nobody likes this.
Those hospitals are understaffed because of extraordinary levels of foreign immigration (globalism); extremely high rates of reproduction among foreigners in Britain, many of whom add a disproportionate burden to the system (globalism ); an indigenous population displaced and demoralised in their own ancestral homeland, with record numbers of young people opting out of education and employment (globalism); indigenous Brits discriminated against in admissions and applications due to policies favouring foreigners in pursuit of diversity (globalism); plummeting birth rates among indigenous Brits due to a prevailing sense of existential insecurity, financial insecurity, loss of community, unsure future for their children, anti-natal and anti-nationalist propaganda (globalism); a top-heavy indigenous population courtesy of the former point, burdening the healthcare system; etc.
It's little wonder there is such resentment towards globalism and diversity among ethnic Europeans worldwide. Blaming the English for the problems imposed on them will only fuel this fire.
> None of this was our choice. Nobody wants this. Nobody likes this.
Billions of people do.
Don't confuse what you don't like with what nobody likes.
You had the freedom to vote, you voted, you elected people from your Country to govern your own Country, can't blame anyone else.
> Those hospitals are understaffed because of extraordinary levels of foreign immigration (globalism);
citation needed
> extremely high rates of reproduction among foreigners in Britain, many of whom add a disproportionate burden to the system (globalism );
citation needed, again.
But it's the opposite.
extremely low birth rates in the west are sinking the economy.
Come to visit my country where there are 18 million retired people on a population of 60 million and very low birth rates.
Besides, Ukraine has one of the lowest birth rates we know of, didn't help them much, did it?
Anyway, you had your Brexit, didn't you?
So, now that it's only you "indigenous" things are improving over there, right? It worked, am I right?
> an indigenous population displaced and demoralised in their own ancestral homeland,
You mean when you colonized other countries and brought them to your country to be slaves?
Ever heard of the windrush generation?
> indigenous Brits discriminated against in admissions and applications due to policies favouring foreigners in pursuit of diversity (globalism);
citation needed, again
> plummeting birth rates among indigenous Brits due to a prevailing sense of existential insecurity
citation needed (at this point do you understand that your motivations reek of bullshit, do you?)
UK has a birth rate of 1.7, in Hungary where there are virtually no immigrants, birth rate is 1.5.
Can you guess China's birth rate?
It's 1.7, exactly like UK.
I think something does not add up in your theory.
BTW, birth rates in the west are all very similar, but the economic outcomes of the single Countries are vastly different. For many reasons. One of them is that my Country cannot rely on former colonies to hire nurses and pay them less than the average "indigenous brits", as you call them.
Because we have no former colonies to exploit and the few we acquired during fascism, we left them be, because it's wrong to treat people like that.
Like, for example, what your German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha Kings and Queens later renamed Windsor to hide the fact that they are German, not English, together with their relative Lepold I of Belgium did to Africa.
> It's little wonder there is such resentment towards globalism and diversity among ethnic Europeans worldwide
We agree on this.
It's no wonder, when western people had to actually compete they found out that they are not as good as they thought, without their armies protecting them they were just average.
Unfortunately for you, your dream of being a pure blooded race having ancestral rights over the promise land have been shuttered by reality.
You can deal with it or keep crying in the corner, blaming some poor folks brought by force to your country.
Are these "indigenous brits" just a bunch of whiny spoiled brats that can't take their faith in their own hands, without external help?
This sentence attributed to Luiss CK sums it
"Of course foreigners steal your job, but maybe, if someone without contacts, money, or speaking the language steals your job, maybe, you're shit."
Yeah, bad idea to go to war unless your shit at home is already together. Wars are expensive. I think a lot of the domestic turmoil in the US can be linked to our useless wars in the ME. Could have used all that steel and those men to build stuff here: hospitals, schools, trains and so on.
Bush & cheney did enormously more damage to the US than Trump. Not that I liked Trump at all.
How many domestic problems in developed countries are the result of income inequality? Probably most of them. Poor education, poor wages, poor health(care)...these exist because of the billionaire class extracting wealth from the economy. Those problems aren't going to be solved by going to war.
I don’t understand what point you’re making because (1) no one has unregulated capitalism (2) globalization didn’t meaningfully exist in the pre-Reagan era, and (3) how would a “pre-Reagan globalization” not have exported jobs? “Exporting jobs” is pretty much the definition of globalization as it pertains to wealthy countries.
EDIT: Also (4) I’m pretty sure almost every “very regulated” economy in the world has more inequality as a consequence of globalization. It’s really hard to imagine a practical globalization that doesn’t create concentrated wealth and poverty.
No sensible discussion about globalization should ignore the impact of economic sanctions have had over the developing world and how globalization in some ways made weak countries subservient to strong countries.One of the main arguments is how it undermines a nation's self-determination and how the price is too high.
Global trade isn't the same as globalization. You can trade fine with others without relying on them. So your discussion about lifing people from poverty should include how specifically interdependence between countries as opposed to improvements in technology amd trade relations has resulted in poverty reduction.
We don't have to look far, because of globalization, a potential conflict between taiwan and china is the current biggest threat to global peace. TSMC is building factories in the US and India as well as apple trying to get out of China specifically to avoid global interdependence. TSMC plans to supply US demands by US fabs. But apple will face the same issue in other countries if or when conditions become hostile.
We don't live in a world where every country is working together for the progression of mankind. Each country looks out for itself. This means banning US tech companies from operating in Countries like China but allowing them to outsource labor there. Anyone from the rustbelt or former industrial towns in the US will tell you the impact of outsourcing labor (greedy business finding a way to to pay people less).
Another consideration is the impact of automation and how cheap labor is needed less and less so why not make stuff locally?
It isn't just poverty that reduced but the wealth of the few top rich businesses increased by many orders of magnitude because they got around tax and labor laws thanks to globalization.
My argument is you can still have free trade and innovation without giving up your sovreignity as a nation or looking the other way on tax and labor laws or undermining local labor unions.
4. you looted a billion people to uplift those billions — and they hate you now for robbing and oppressing their families to the point they couldn’t breed
People who believe in globalism should’ve taken your advice thirty years ago — but after destroying families for two generations, they’re going to fall on the managerial class like feral animals seeking blood.
The managerial class in the West will be executed for betraying their nations — and we’re past any way to stop that.
Why is it people only give your wise managerial quips after disasters, but never proactively?
I don’t think people are just peeved that authoritarian regimes have passively become powerful, but that western nations are actively subsidizing them directly at the expense of our domestic middle classes (trading the welfare of our own citizens to empower authoritarian regimes and to pollute the environment).
>As with all slogans, it ignores important details that contradict it. Over the past four decades, our current global economic system, promoting economic integration and interdependence between countries, has lifted billions out of poverty.[a][b] Billions.
In other countries doing the providing. It didn't do as well for the ones doing the dependency ones - except in transfering welth and competence outside, and to a small minority people on the inside getting mega-rich from this outsourcing, and a quite larger but still small minority of people benefitting from related jobs.
Hence the "hollowing out of the middle class in the US", with the majority of the middle class and working class getting the short end of the stick, and a much smaller part of it and the upper middle class improving their lot.
(And the overall impact of this process softened or hidden entirely for a good while through cheap money published and going around as credit and QE)
I’m going to have to disagree with the core premise here.
At face value, this article implies that if we all just live alone in the woods and hunt and grow our own food, that somehow we will be stronger as a people.
The irony here is that this is coming from a post made on the internet. The internet is comprised of a large network of servers and infrastructure that isn’t possible without relying heavily on the labour and creativity of lots of other people. Yes, that includes the work of people from other nations. We’re talking international, here. Imagine you couldn’t see a website hosted in Australia because some right wing politician arbitrarily decided that invisible borders should define our evolution as a species.
This post is literally self defeating by virtue of the mechanism in which it was messaged.
At a granular level, the earth can't produce enough food for all of us to live by subsistence, without technologies that require a relatively sophisticated society just to function. For example, more than half of the world's animal population is sustained by the Haber process.
Although Juche never really was meant to be taken as actual NK policy but just as internal propaganda (why want to leave if we have everything we need and the rest of the world must be worse?). NK has always been dependent on foreign aid from the USSR (when it existed) and China. Originally because these countries supported NK ideology, but now mostly because China fears what would happen if NK collapsed.
...if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. — JFK
The comments in this thread are kneejerk responses to the quote in the OP, which is silly because if you people had just clicked the link you'd realise that the report is mainly focused on China. We are _all_ too reliant on China and addressing the issue is not "nationalistic" or "North Korean juche" or the other rubbish I've read ITT so far.
There are dangers to our already-declining reliance on China, but also benefits. The big one is that countries with deeply entangled economies rarely go to war with each other. A world where we don’t rely on China for anything is a world where we are more likely at war with them.
“Security means not depending on anyone else” is just off-the-grid survivalism writ large. It’s true in some very narrow sense, but it is also naive to think it’s even possible, especially while continuing to pursue any other goals.
Russia did not think it was attacking Europe. It is not a remotely analogous situation to US/China. China is much more mutually dependent on the US, and much more sane.
Do you really think Putin and his generals thought that everyone would stand by and watch as they invaded Ukraine and do nothing? That's absurd.
>It is not a remotely analogous situation to US/China.
China-Taiwan and Russia-Ukraine are eerily similar, actually.
>China is much more mutually dependent on the US, and much more sane.
Their massive military build up and itchy trigger finger aiming at anyone who even tries to insinuate that Taiwan isn't part of the PRC says otherwise. Not to mention their posturing in the South China Sea, which has perturbed not only Taiwan but Vietnam and the Phillipines too.
Around 40 people died in these skirmishes. And 40 is a conservative figure btw. India claims that more than 30 Chinese soldiers died, whereas China claims 4 died. US intelligence has the number at 20-35.
I admire your strength of feeling on this topic but you’ve really mistaken my point.
My point: countries with economic interdependence are less likely to go to war, which is a fact to consider when advocating for reduction of interdependence among nuclear powers.
I think you took that to be a claim that any economic interdependence absolutely eliminates any chance of war.
I’m not arguing that China is great or any of the other things you seem yo have read into my relatively straightforward point.
>My point: countries with economic interdependence are less likely to go to war,
And my point is: Russia broke this `rule' indirectly (meaning going to war with a country that they know would be protected by countries that they are interdependent on), so China could too. Russia and Europe were strongly intertwined, yet Putin and his generals still went to war knowing that there would be dire economic consequences. The only thing that would make China wary of doing the same is if Ukraine wins.
>which is a fact to consider when advocating for reduction of interdependence among nuclear powers.
Nuclear weapons are more of a deterrent of war than trade among nuclear powers over than anything else.
>I’m not arguing that China is great or any of the other things you seem yo have read into my relatively straightforward point.
That's not what I gleaned from your posts. What I got was a lack of urgency about China and her aspirations in the world.
Users flagged it, software marked it as a flamewar, and moderators downweighted the thread. I don't know in what order these things happened, but as the article seems like garden-variety political material (not to mention flamefodder), it's not particularly on topic for HN.
p.s. Number of comments doesn't make a story rank higher, nor should it.
My take on globalization is that it appears to make sense from a global stability and business perspective. Most of this is uneducated opinion but based on experiences with the local auto industry and some personal thought on the impact:
1. Having inter- and co-dependence between nations decreases the likelihood of global (potentially nuclear) war. It is difficult to decimate another country when all of your aluminum, cars, wheat or salt were coming from that country.
2. From a "big-picture" perspective, global markets enable massive potential growth for many corporations. I lived through the globalization of the auto industry here in Michigan; it was a slow-motion horror show affecting virtually every person, everywhere. Similar things happened in the mining and steel industries to the south and east of us.
3. There is no free-market value to extract from 500,000,000 poverty-stricken people; better to have them working and buying your products. Low growth/low margin industries (laundry soap, packaged food, etc.) were virtually drooling over the thought of opening up the Indian, Chinese and African markets.
4. The assumption that if, through globalization, you reduce entire industries that helped build a nation (steel, automobiles, are good examples in the USA) those people will simple re-train and get jobs in other industries, particularly white-collar or service industries.
5. People are adaptable.
But, these seemingly sensible ideals are difficult to attain. We have seen that:
1. Inter- and co-dependence can be adversely affected by things other than war: e.g. a global pandemic.
2. Not all countries open their markets the same, with trade imbalances being more frequent than desired. More modern, higher-precision industrial equipment simply made Japanese cars better and longer-lasting than the decades-old "Big Three" equipment.
3. There is no guarantee that 500M newly-appointed-middle-class people will even buy your countries products. A global free market is designed so that better designs win; but marketing and market manipulations don't always work out that way. A vast majority will spend less on a product if they can; even if it is of lower quality. (looking at you Amazon).
4. Some people just don't want to be white-collar workers or provide services to others. A "days work" is best measured by the things they built, rather than the processes they optimized, or the signatures they acquired.
5. While people are adaptable, watching them adapt to seemingly non-sensical drivers (at least in their world view) breeds great amounts of discontent. Hence movements like MAGA are born.
> It is difficult to decimate another country when all of your aluminum, cars, wheat or salt were coming from that country.
Conversely if the supplier of salt and aluminium has a government that is acting in an immoral or oppressive way, then the dependence of other nations upon that supplier would seem to reduce the likelihood and magnitude of coercive action that might be taken by those nations.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadLess personally, in Accidental Superpower, the case is made that the west's insistence on free and safe trade over international waters has helped to broker a long stretch of mostly peaceful time - precisely because it creates these interrelations that become important.
Edit: I guess if everyone was born radically self-reliant we might not learn to care. But no one starts out that way.
eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless
There is a saying that “there has never been an armed conflict between two nations that both had a McDonald’s”. Russia has broken that, but that is case where the exception proves the rule. Russia has been devastated by the repercussions of their choice to invade Ukraine. And Europe is suffering due to the lack of oil and natural gas.
I fear a world where nations are not reliant on each other is going to be less peaceful. That being said, the memo specifically calls out relations with China, which is a country that is dangerous to have too much reliance on, due to also being run by an absolute dictatorship.
Now we know it doesn’t work, and this historic reason for globalization is moot.
The first time I went, I was confined to limited areas, and had to be followed by a state appointed guide for my entire trip. I couldn't kiss my girlfriend in the street, it was considered bad behavior.
Now, I can just go alone, and where I please, and demonstrations of affection are not as frown upon. Women also seem have more freedom than before.
China was always a dictatorship, but I would say it looks more free that it used to be, at least from my very limited external point of view.
Now, China is still corrupted, with massive informational control. And it also became terribly polluted, and under systematic automatic surveillance, so I'm not sure it balances out, but it's not like there is an objective scale to those things.
On the flip side, I also see the reluctance or resistance of individual countries to said globalization and interdependence as one of the major reasons for the increase in armed conflicts affecting those individual countries.
On the contrary, I think this exception disproves the rule.
Essentially yes. I would wager that if Putin could go back in time, he would not invade Ukraine. The economic consequences have been too severe. It really serves as a warning to other countries.
So Russia is now an exception to the “McDonald’s rule”, but it proves why the rule is generally true.
Typically when it is used now it means "I'm wrong but I'm still right".
That was from a 1999 book by Thomas Friedman.
"Shortly after the book was published, NATO bombed Yugoslavia. On the first day of the bombing, McDonald's restaurants in Belgrade were demolished by angry protesters and were rebuilt only after the bombing ended. In the 2000 edition of the book, Friedman argued that this exception proved the rule"
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_peace#Golden_arches...
You also have the Russo-Georgian war, Russia's seizure of Crimea, and various other conflicts depending on your definition of war - US invasion of Panama, conflict between Israel and Lebanon, the Kargil War.
In general, if you are relying on something Thomas Friedman said for your argument, you are almost certainly wrong.
As with all slogans, it ignores important details that contradict it.
Over the past four decades, our current global economic system, promoting economic integration and interdependence between countries, has lifted billions out of poverty.[a][b] Billions. No sensible discussion of globalization can ignore that.
The current backlash is not against globalization per se, but against:
* greater concentration of economic power (e.g., more markets dominated by global mega corporations),
* greater concentration of political and military power in authoritarian regimes who play by different rules (e.g., China), and
* greater concentration of income and wealth (e.g., the hollowing out of the middle class in the US).
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater!
--
[a] https://ourworldindata.org/poverty
[b] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
There is a happy medium somewhere in between complete globalisation and complete isolation.
The sooner we move to other sources (fusion (!), solar, wind, etc.), the better for humankind. However, companies that make money from fossil fuels don't want that, and for the past four decades they've had the political and economic cloud to slow down or even stop progress.
We have such "single points of failure" in the global economy because we have allowed market power to become highly concentrated, nationally and globally, without any checks and balances.
Replace energy with food, water, medicine, microchips, or any other commodities necessary for modern life and the point still stands.
I'd have rendered that slogan as “The more reliant we are on others with whom we have any substantive combination of: a severe trade imbalance, no framework for meaningful dialog, and conflicting major foreign policy goals -- the less resilient we are as a nation”
Same way England should not be allowed to reign over 56 states with their King?
I mean, if it goes both ways, I agree.
(4) dependence on other, potentially hostile regimes on “national security” imports/products like steel, chips, oil, energy, …
I cannot speak about the UK, but in general this isn't all that people are dissatisfied with about globalization. Very many are angry about the loss of a sense of home. If you examine the situation in purely material terms, you won't observe or measure those feelings. For others, the loss of home extends to a loss of community, which extends to a loss of self.
Educated tech people can be software engineers first and English second, while the lower classes are, in my experience, English first, and their profession second. The loss hits harder for them.
I haven't seen media discuss the identitarian dimension of globalisation. I suppose that has to do with media being populated primarily by one social class. Yet I feel that by ignoring them they have been burying nuclear waste for decades.
I don't mean to tell you whether these emotions are "abhorrent racism" or "valid", I just mean say that they are to me the elephant in the room in any discussion of globalisation.
For software engineers globalization is wonderful for many in the economy it isn’t.
Except that:
- the same rig worker will gladly buy consumer products cheaply manufactured in some developing or non-free Country thanks to globalization and will immediately stop buying them if the prices go up due to un-globalization (it's actually happening in UK, newspapers are full of articles similar to UK Shop sales slow as consumers shift spending toward essentials)
- there are billions of people who don't care about the rig worker, they care about their own families. By virtue of how the democratic process works - majority wins - and how social evolution works - survival of the fittest form of society -, the rig worker either adapts to the new environment or will go extinct.
Third option is the west goes to war against developing countries, trying to set the clock of history back and exploit them again, but this time I'm not sure the west could win.
Point is: without solidarity among workers of the same class (I don't care about them, I care about me), the rig workers of the World will be ignored because they have literally no power other than their complains.
I too don't care about 'em, why should I? if they don't care about anything else than themselves? They surely don't give a flying f*ck about me and how the globalization helped me and my family to live a better life.
This is one of those things that a bit of global socialism could make better, but the solution, according to the rig worker, is the exact opposite: close the stable door when the horse has bolted, i.e. more nationalism, tarifs, walls, which will in the end work against the rig worker, not in their favour.
p.s.: you can agree or disagree, but expecting that a small country with 80 million people should be more important than 4 billion people living in the developing World is simply delusional.
Comply or die isn't that funny when it works against you, am I right?
I’d say for the most part this guy walked the talk as far as I could tell.
My point was not to validate / invalidate his point of view but to show what the POV is for anyone who hopes to get more people on the globalization train.
It's impossible to get more people on the globalization train, because we all are on it already.
It's like saying "we should get more people on board with climate change"
It is happening, whether we like it or not, whether we agree or disagree about it.
What we should and can do, is to ask better questions.
instead of asking ourselves what is the cause of some personal condition, pat ourselves in the back and blame the foreigners (it's always the foreigners, of course) why don't we ask who left the rig workers of the story in the dust?
Was it a worker coming from the Philippines trying to have a better life for their children and great children, or was it the same corporations than now blame globalization because they are finding harder and harder to exploit developing countries that also stolen their job and have become as good as them to produce the same stuff?
How much of the wealth that Apple generated exploiting cheap Chinese labour, bowing to China just to enter their 1.5 billion people market, have come back to the US economy and actually helped the working class and our friend the rig worker (not the tech class)?
It's not globalization the problem, it's this capitalism.
The point is: corporations have to start giving back to the people in the form of very high taxes, that's the solution to the issues (some of them are real) of the globalization. Privatize the profits and socialize the costs is not a good idea, we see it, we all agree that it's not working, paradoxically it's been worse in richer countries, because social programs are shit there, they have always relied on having a lot more money to spend than the others. Still we avoid to give the right name to the problem. We have to even if in many Countries they prefer to die than talk about social welfare state, but it's a red pill, blue pill, situation.
But if we don't and corps wanna keep looking for workers everywhere in the World, we also have to let people do the same, in the opposite direction.
Tertium non datur.
Because tertium means we try'n'stop them and they will come anyway, but this time without asking.
I feel a heavy sense of pity and remorse for anyone so demoralised and deracinated that they have a greater connection to "tech" than to blood and soil. That's such an empty, nihilistic existence. What's even the point?
Another commenter points out that the worker must actually love globalism because of widgets from China. Who cares? I would give up every bit of cheap plastic junk in a heartbeat if it meant my great grandchildren will have a homeland to live in peace and prosperity among their own. How on earth can anyone put a price on that, nevermind such a low one?
that's exactly what globalization did for billions of people once oppressed by colonialists Countries, such as the UK.
You could stop buying cheap plastic, but you'll never get the empire back.
Because people want their great grandchildren to have a homeland to live in peace
But you can have a poorer Country as in richer than 90% of the World, but not as rich as in the past when they exploited the poorest Countries for their own advantage, and call it homeland. You can be sure nobody wants it, you can keep it.
You also seem to believe that the point of it all is just lower prices, but the actual reality is that UK doesn't even have enough people to operate their own homeland's hospitals. [1]
You should blame your own political choices, not globalization.
[1] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/-nhs-nurses-recruited-overs...
Those hospitals are understaffed because of extraordinary levels of foreign immigration (globalism); extremely high rates of reproduction among foreigners in Britain, many of whom add a disproportionate burden to the system (globalism ); an indigenous population displaced and demoralised in their own ancestral homeland, with record numbers of young people opting out of education and employment (globalism); indigenous Brits discriminated against in admissions and applications due to policies favouring foreigners in pursuit of diversity (globalism); plummeting birth rates among indigenous Brits due to a prevailing sense of existential insecurity, financial insecurity, loss of community, unsure future for their children, anti-natal and anti-nationalist propaganda (globalism); a top-heavy indigenous population courtesy of the former point, burdening the healthcare system; etc.
It's little wonder there is such resentment towards globalism and diversity among ethnic Europeans worldwide. Blaming the English for the problems imposed on them will only fuel this fire.
Billions of people do.
Don't confuse what you don't like with what nobody likes.
You had the freedom to vote, you voted, you elected people from your Country to govern your own Country, can't blame anyone else.
> Those hospitals are understaffed because of extraordinary levels of foreign immigration (globalism);
citation needed
> extremely high rates of reproduction among foreigners in Britain, many of whom add a disproportionate burden to the system (globalism );
citation needed, again.
But it's the opposite.
extremely low birth rates in the west are sinking the economy.
Come to visit my country where there are 18 million retired people on a population of 60 million and very low birth rates.
Besides, Ukraine has one of the lowest birth rates we know of, didn't help them much, did it?
Anyway, you had your Brexit, didn't you?
So, now that it's only you "indigenous" things are improving over there, right? It worked, am I right?
> an indigenous population displaced and demoralised in their own ancestral homeland,
You mean when you colonized other countries and brought them to your country to be slaves?
Ever heard of the windrush generation?
> indigenous Brits discriminated against in admissions and applications due to policies favouring foreigners in pursuit of diversity (globalism);
citation needed, again
> plummeting birth rates among indigenous Brits due to a prevailing sense of existential insecurity
citation needed (at this point do you understand that your motivations reek of bullshit, do you?)
UK has a birth rate of 1.7, in Hungary where there are virtually no immigrants, birth rate is 1.5.
Can you guess China's birth rate?
It's 1.7, exactly like UK.
I think something does not add up in your theory.
BTW, birth rates in the west are all very similar, but the economic outcomes of the single Countries are vastly different. For many reasons. One of them is that my Country cannot rely on former colonies to hire nurses and pay them less than the average "indigenous brits", as you call them.
Because we have no former colonies to exploit and the few we acquired during fascism, we left them be, because it's wrong to treat people like that.
Like, for example, what your German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha Kings and Queens later renamed Windsor to hide the fact that they are German, not English, together with their relative Lepold I of Belgium did to Africa.
> It's little wonder there is such resentment towards globalism and diversity among ethnic Europeans worldwide
We agree on this.
It's no wonder, when western people had to actually compete they found out that they are not as good as they thought, without their armies protecting them they were just average.
Unfortunately for you, your dream of being a pure blooded race having ancestral rights over the promise land have been shuttered by reality.
You can deal with it or keep crying in the corner, blaming some poor folks brought by force to your country.
Are these "indigenous brits" just a bunch of whiny spoiled brats that can't take their faith in their own hands, without external help?
This sentence attributed to Luiss CK sums it
"Of course foreigners steal your job, but maybe, if someone without contacts, money, or speaking the language steals your job, maybe, you're shit."
~ Louis C. K..
Rubbish. The rest of your post is just as bad.
If we have to go to war than so be it. People will always argue and there will always be consequences of these arguments.
>"If we have to go to war than so be it."
The more I look at these two statements the more I think that someone would benefit from having their head examined.
Bush & cheney did enormously more damage to the US than Trump. Not that I liked Trump at all.
So if your country doing fine and all "shit is together" it is ok to start a war? What is fucking wrong with people.
How many big anti-monopoly moves were actually done in the last 20 years compared to pre-Reagan or pre-Thatcher times?
EDIT: Also (4) I’m pretty sure almost every “very regulated” economy in the world has more inequality as a consequence of globalization. It’s really hard to imagine a practical globalization that doesn’t create concentrated wealth and poverty.
Global trade isn't the same as globalization. You can trade fine with others without relying on them. So your discussion about lifing people from poverty should include how specifically interdependence between countries as opposed to improvements in technology amd trade relations has resulted in poverty reduction.
We don't have to look far, because of globalization, a potential conflict between taiwan and china is the current biggest threat to global peace. TSMC is building factories in the US and India as well as apple trying to get out of China specifically to avoid global interdependence. TSMC plans to supply US demands by US fabs. But apple will face the same issue in other countries if or when conditions become hostile.
We don't live in a world where every country is working together for the progression of mankind. Each country looks out for itself. This means banning US tech companies from operating in Countries like China but allowing them to outsource labor there. Anyone from the rustbelt or former industrial towns in the US will tell you the impact of outsourcing labor (greedy business finding a way to to pay people less).
Another consideration is the impact of automation and how cheap labor is needed less and less so why not make stuff locally?
It isn't just poverty that reduced but the wealth of the few top rich businesses increased by many orders of magnitude because they got around tax and labor laws thanks to globalization.
My argument is you can still have free trade and innovation without giving up your sovreignity as a nation or looking the other way on tax and labor laws or undermining local labor unions.
People who believe in globalism should’ve taken your advice thirty years ago — but after destroying families for two generations, they’re going to fall on the managerial class like feral animals seeking blood.
The managerial class in the West will be executed for betraying their nations — and we’re past any way to stop that.
Why is it people only give your wise managerial quips after disasters, but never proactively?
In other countries doing the providing. It didn't do as well for the ones doing the dependency ones - except in transfering welth and competence outside, and to a small minority people on the inside getting mega-rich from this outsourcing, and a quite larger but still small minority of people benefitting from related jobs.
Hence the "hollowing out of the middle class in the US", with the majority of the middle class and working class getting the short end of the stick, and a much smaller part of it and the upper middle class improving their lot.
(And the overall impact of this process softened or hidden entirely for a good while through cheap money published and going around as credit and QE)
At face value, this article implies that if we all just live alone in the woods and hunt and grow our own food, that somehow we will be stronger as a people.
The irony here is that this is coming from a post made on the internet. The internet is comprised of a large network of servers and infrastructure that isn’t possible without relying heavily on the labour and creativity of lots of other people. Yes, that includes the work of people from other nations. We’re talking international, here. Imagine you couldn’t see a website hosted in Australia because some right wing politician arbitrarily decided that invisible borders should define our evolution as a species.
This post is literally self defeating by virtue of the mechanism in which it was messaged.
> The goal of Juche is to establish a self-reliant state which independently determines its political, economic, and military affairs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche
...if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. — JFK
There are dangers to our already-declining reliance on China, but also benefits. The big one is that countries with deeply entangled economies rarely go to war with each other. A world where we don’t rely on China for anything is a world where we are more likely at war with them.
“Security means not depending on anyone else” is just off-the-grid survivalism writ large. It’s true in some very narrow sense, but it is also naive to think it’s even possible, especially while continuing to pursue any other goals.
Russia did not think it was attacking Europe. It is not a remotely analogous situation to US/China. China is much more mutually dependent on the US, and much more sane.
Do you really think Putin and his generals thought that everyone would stand by and watch as they invaded Ukraine and do nothing? That's absurd.
>It is not a remotely analogous situation to US/China.
China-Taiwan and Russia-Ukraine are eerily similar, actually.
>China is much more mutually dependent on the US, and much more sane.
Their massive military build up and itchy trigger finger aiming at anyone who even tries to insinuate that Taiwan isn't part of the PRC says otherwise. Not to mention their posturing in the South China Sea, which has perturbed not only Taiwan but Vietnam and the Phillipines too.
>much more sane
Are you sure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_China%E2%80%...
Around 40 people died in these skirmishes. And 40 is a conservative figure btw. India claims that more than 30 Chinese soldiers died, whereas China claims 4 died. US intelligence has the number at 20-35.
My point: countries with economic interdependence are less likely to go to war, which is a fact to consider when advocating for reduction of interdependence among nuclear powers.
I think you took that to be a claim that any economic interdependence absolutely eliminates any chance of war.
I’m not arguing that China is great or any of the other things you seem yo have read into my relatively straightforward point.
And my point is: Russia broke this `rule' indirectly (meaning going to war with a country that they know would be protected by countries that they are interdependent on), so China could too. Russia and Europe were strongly intertwined, yet Putin and his generals still went to war knowing that there would be dire economic consequences. The only thing that would make China wary of doing the same is if Ukraine wins.
>which is a fact to consider when advocating for reduction of interdependence among nuclear powers.
Nuclear weapons are more of a deterrent of war than trade among nuclear powers over than anything else.
>I’m not arguing that China is great or any of the other things you seem yo have read into my relatively straightforward point.
That's not what I gleaned from your posts. What I got was a lack of urgency about China and her aspirations in the world.
https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/brexit-buyers-remorse-over-50-10...
I guess we'll see how that shakes out
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/britain-br...
p.s. Number of comments doesn't make a story rank higher, nor should it.
1. Having inter- and co-dependence between nations decreases the likelihood of global (potentially nuclear) war. It is difficult to decimate another country when all of your aluminum, cars, wheat or salt were coming from that country.
2. From a "big-picture" perspective, global markets enable massive potential growth for many corporations. I lived through the globalization of the auto industry here in Michigan; it was a slow-motion horror show affecting virtually every person, everywhere. Similar things happened in the mining and steel industries to the south and east of us.
3. There is no free-market value to extract from 500,000,000 poverty-stricken people; better to have them working and buying your products. Low growth/low margin industries (laundry soap, packaged food, etc.) were virtually drooling over the thought of opening up the Indian, Chinese and African markets.
4. The assumption that if, through globalization, you reduce entire industries that helped build a nation (steel, automobiles, are good examples in the USA) those people will simple re-train and get jobs in other industries, particularly white-collar or service industries.
5. People are adaptable.
But, these seemingly sensible ideals are difficult to attain. We have seen that:
1. Inter- and co-dependence can be adversely affected by things other than war: e.g. a global pandemic.
2. Not all countries open their markets the same, with trade imbalances being more frequent than desired. More modern, higher-precision industrial equipment simply made Japanese cars better and longer-lasting than the decades-old "Big Three" equipment.
3. There is no guarantee that 500M newly-appointed-middle-class people will even buy your countries products. A global free market is designed so that better designs win; but marketing and market manipulations don't always work out that way. A vast majority will spend less on a product if they can; even if it is of lower quality. (looking at you Amazon).
4. Some people just don't want to be white-collar workers or provide services to others. A "days work" is best measured by the things they built, rather than the processes they optimized, or the signatures they acquired.
5. While people are adaptable, watching them adapt to seemingly non-sensical drivers (at least in their world view) breeds great amounts of discontent. Hence movements like MAGA are born.
Conversely if the supplier of salt and aluminium has a government that is acting in an immoral or oppressive way, then the dependence of other nations upon that supplier would seem to reduce the likelihood and magnitude of coercive action that might be taken by those nations.