7 ms·

What’s Our Duty to the People Globalization Leaves Behind?

53 points by wallflower 11y ago

alwaysdoit 11y ago
The reality is that people who are less well-off often do not have the "liquidity" to rebalance their assets (educational, experiential, financial, etc.) to take advantage of changes in the global economy. On a macro level, society benefits from globalization, but on a micro level, there are often very high personal costs. If you have spent all of your life developing skills in one area, and that suddenly falls apart, it's going to be very difficult to drop everything and start over. As a society, we have the capability to use some of the gains to smooth out the costs for the people that lose out here, whether it's through basic income and welfare, or education and retraining.
- Retric 11y ago
  This has a lot to do with the widening wealth gap. If your assets are fairly liquid you can easily exploit new opportunities. If you happened to buy a house near a steel mill, there is not much you can do. Consider high school students are making choices based on what they think the job market will be in 50! years. Sure, we still have some bank tellers even with ATM's, but even a 50% reduction in demand is devastating if it takes 10+ years of specialist education. Retraining may seem reasonable for truckers, but for highly skilled professions it's tossing a way years of education and on the job training.
- nickff 11y ago
  I am a strong supporter of globalization, but pessimistic about government's ability to help the people who you describe as being left behind. Retraining has the worst record of the programs you describe, and 'education' usually does little (probably because of signalling). I am most vigorously opposed to government-backed 'education loans', which do little more than drive up tuition. I am generally opposed to welfare, because is does little to ameliorate the human issues related to joblessness, and basic income is little better, though BI can give people some flexibility to make their own choices. A globalization 'bonus' or temporary boost in BI might be worth considering (and testing), but we should also encourage people to adapt to the new world instead of building up resentment while refusing to change. It also seems that we should each take some personal responsibility, and help whomever we can. It is too often that we pawn off our responsibilities and moral duties on society.
  - trhway 11y ago
    > I am generally opposed to welfare, because is does little to ameliorate the human issues related to joblessness, it is a safety net, a helping hand society extends to let people to not starve to death on the streets, it is not a tool to solve structural economical/political/social issues.
  - Outdoorsman 11y ago
    >It also seems that we should each take some personal responsibility, and help whomever we can. It is too often that we pawn off our responsibilities and moral duties on society.< So very true...the single most important thing a person can do to strengthen a community--interpret community as broadly as you like--is to spend time helping those in your immediate vicinity...I'm prescribing this because of it's accessibility; it's a course of action available to anyone, usually costs little, and leaves you feeling pretty darned good... First-hand case in point: A boy who lives a couple of miles away from me started dropping by occasionally to visit...he'd pedal by on his bicycle and stop to chat if I was out in the yard... During our visits I learned about his circumstances...his father, a drug user, committed suicide in the shower of their home when he was 6 years old...his mother had had a series of boyfriends, and there were 3 partial families--14 people--living in his house, a 3 bedroom trailer... As we got to know each other a bit better he asked me one day,"Hey, everyone around here calls you the computer man; how could I learn about computers?" I told him I could teach him a few things, and did...he would drop by when my schedule permitted and was willing to sit for as long I was willing to teach him things...just basics, a few tricks... I could tell that he had a quick grasp of the material, and asked him how school was going, his grades, etc...turned out he had around a 3.7 GPA, and admitted that he never studied outside of school... I told him one day that he should consider college...the next day he said he had mentioned what I said to his mom and she flatly told him,"We can't afford something like that". To make a long story short, the state that I live in offers a program that essentially pays (combined with grants, and college scholarships) for those below a certain income level to attend 5 years of in-state college...I spent several days gathering information, presented it to him, and told him I thought he could do it...he just needed to sign up in the program right away, and keep his grades up... Rather predictably, his mother was initially skeptical, so at his invitation I visited with her and explained how this would work... I'll leave the story here...he's a junior in high school now and is on track to enter college in 2017...he would have never become aware of the opportunity if I hadn't mentioned it to him, and all it cost me was about 2 days of research and another day helping him apply... we'll see how it goes...
billybilly1920 11y ago
I think for each person who doesn't want to constantly move with the times, there is another person somewhere else that does, so we just swap those two people and call it good.
- PavlovsCat 11y ago
  Calling actions and decisions of humans "the times" does not make them a force of nature.
  - billybilly1920 11y ago
    things move forward; like it or not. Some people spend their entire lives trying to live the same moment over and over because that's what they know. The factory you worked at shutdown; you need to move on, and if that means moving to another town to find work, then do that. Don't just hunker down and demand everyone help you. (unless you are asking for help to move and find a job.)
    - rossdavidh 11y ago
      For me, that is fine; the way the "world has moved" happens to be in a direction that fits well with my natural talents. But your assumption is that every person is more or less equally trainable for more or less any job, and that is obviously untrue. If the "world moved" in a direction that didn't happen to fit well with what I can successfully train myself at, I'd hope not to be thrown under the bus by my country. For example, if some day computers program themselves and the jobs are all in looking beautiful and performing in public, I'd be doing a lot less well. Globalization only seems inevitable if it happens to be moving the globe your way.
    - billybilly1920 11y ago
      So the state should be forced to support you because you are unwilling to learn a new trade?
      - 11y ago
whack 11y ago
It's worth pointing out that Rattner ISN'T calling for brakes on globalization or free trade. He's calling for a stronger social safety net, in order to better help those who aren't benefiting from the economic wealth that globalization generates. This is a position that we can all get behind. Regardless of the precise causes of income inequality, whether it's due to globalization, labor automation, or industry cycles, there will always be people who find themselves left out in the cold due to unfortunate circumstances. As long as our society keeps getting richer, we should do more to help those who aren't benefiting from the same changes that have benefited the rest of us.
- proksoup 11y ago
  Why? Our resources aren't infinite. Why is there any should about who gets to live and who gets to die? We can't help everyone live without eventually hitting resource constraints, can we?
  - rifung 11y ago
    Our resources aren't infinite, but certain people have more than they need while others don't have enough to survive. I don't know if we could, even theoretically, let everyone in the US live a decent life. But, that doesn't mean we just don't do anything though, we can still do as much as possible given what we have. Not only that but if we helped those who are down get new skills to be productive, wouldn't that only be better for our economy and thus for everyone?
    - wang_li 11y ago
      >I don't know if we could, even theoretically, let everyone in the US live a decent life. In theory, yes. There are enough resources that people would live free of want and hunger. But, we can't because there is some portion of the populace that consistently exhibits zero self control. If given the self-control/candy test, they'd eat the candy and then fifteen minutes later tell you what a horrible person you are for not giving them the other piece. You could go out and top off everyone so that they have $50,000 liquid cash, find housing, explain how rent works, etc. and within three months there will be people being evicted and homeless with no money to their name. So you repeat. And three months later you have to repeat again. And again. And again. And after loading and reloading people with money, now you're poor and have nothing to give. It's basic reality that there are people we are told we need to have compassion and empathy for, yet they have none for us. This is exhibited by the fact that if they did they would make a realistic effort to not be a burden on others. And for many of these people there is no amount of money and resources they can be given that will cause them to say "enough, stop, i don't need any more."
sama 11y ago
We have a somewhat relevant announcement to this tomorrow...
- tuckermi 11y ago
  Nice little teaser that got buried here! I'm curious to see what gets posted tomorrow...
ChuckMcM 11y ago
The only sane answer is "Don't to put any roadblocks between them and catching up." or in a more positive spin, "Make available, without constraint, any resources they would need to catch up." And it really does come down to morality, social and personal. I am certainly in the "teach a person to fish" category of fixing societal ills. But I get it when previous choices have left someone "stuck" and unable to succeed. Back in the early 2000's before we had all sorts of data[1] to back it up, I could see that single parents were in a world of hurt. Married couples had a much better shot at getting by. But you couldn't really fix that by demanding people find some soul mate/life partner to marry in order to get out of poverty. I suggested to my representatives and others we really could use an institution that had the same benefits of marriage but was more contractual than spiritual. If two single parents, regardless of sex, could enter into a contract to work together to raise their children, it would encourage them to do so. And by institution I mean the whole thing, rights of survivorship, community property, shared health care information, joint filing status with respect to taxation. In my way of thinking that is removing a structural roadblock in the way of those people stuck in poverty by their past choices. At the same time, I have also met people who don't put any investment into getting out of their circumstances. I realized there can be a learned helplessness element here, but for folks who just don't want to, I don't feel any guilt or remorse for them as they slide down the slope. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/10/the-relationship-between-single-mothers-and-poverty-is-not-as-simple-as-it-seems/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/10/the-r...
- Terr_ 11y ago
  > The only sane answer is "Don't to put any roadblocks between them and catching up." I like to phrase of it in terms of designing feedback loops and augmenting existing ones when they aren't strong enough.
mannykannot 11y ago
While I have considerable empathy for people whose lives are being disrupted by globalization, and I am not particularly happy about how globalization is being pursued, we should recognize that anyone who, by accident of birth, is allowed to live in a liberal, technologically-advanced and stable nation, is the beneficiary of a considerable privilege.
bikamonki 11y ago
None. The system will find balance on its own, as always. So, a big chunk of US workers are left behind b/c their jobs are now in Mexico, China, etc. So, capital owners have found ultra efficiency producing goods and services thanks (in part) to Globalization. But now fewer people with stable jobs can buy them goods and services. Oops! Ok. Let's give them credit cards. Ok that works for a while but now they can't pay back. Boom! The system adjusts itself. Whats next? Who knows. Maybe universal minimum wage. Maybe resource-based economy. Maybe modern socialism. Who knows. But something WILL happen. Meanwhile, our duty is with our own.
- llamataboot 11y ago
  That's silly though. It's like saying, well, even if we nuke the earth and kill all humans that live on it, the radiation will eventually disperse and something new will evolve. Yes, that's fundamentally true on a birds-eye level, but that doesn't mean it's a sane or moral choice. If we know dynamic systems with feedback loops and delays tend towards overshoot and collapse, and collapse will really suck for a lot of people, we should try to build other feedback loops that make that collapse less likely, etc. Saying there is a self-correcting system in place doesn't mean that we should let all current trends just continue because they will eventually somehow correct. Violent revolutions are also a correction of sorts... Also, not sure with "our duty is worth our own" - who is "our own" and what social fiction is it built on? Family? Community? City? Nation-State? Race? Favorite board game? I think widening the empathy gap until you can view the people that grow your coffee as "your own brothers and sisters" is the name of the game for human evolution at the moment.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - bikamonki 11y ago
    By our own I meant family, I do not think it is a social fiction as human beings are born helpless and would just die if there is no family to take care of them. I do not mean family from a cultural perspective, I mean family from a biological perspective. Now, my comment may sound silly to you because we are comparing apples to floppy disks. Have you read GED? One interesting understanding I gather from that book is the concept of "levels of meaning". His example goes along these lines: an ant colony seems to act with intelligence from our point of view but such interpretation is out grasp from an ant's perspective; though a smart ant could imagine the colony viewed from above! Therefore, what you call social fictions have a meaning in the layer we all call society and if such layer was our only reality I would definitely agree with any moral argument against Globalization and Capitalism. But if you just move one layer above, if you switch your perspective a bit higher and see our species interacting with millions of other species in a planet with a certain expiration date: morality has no meaning. In that layer of meaning, the goal of each and all species is one: survival. This ecosystem couldn't care less if we leave the economically poor behind. In conclusion, I was commenting from a layer above, you replied from a layer below. If we both speak on the same layer most likely we would agree. If we speak from different layers (perspectives) time is lost. Now, speaking from my perspective, my best guess is that we humans are evolving from bio to bit. We know now the planet will be gone and at some point we would want to leave looking for a new home. These bodies are not the ideal spaceship. A computer is a good alternative. The drive to evolve and develop the technologies that will make this space trip happen may be out of the control of ourselves and our consciousness. It may be genes programmed to do so. It may be bacteria in our guts driving us to do so. I do not know. However, it seems that whatever the social system we invent on the layer below in order to keep us ruled and moving forward, that invented system simply responds to a higher drive.
paulpauper 11y ago
What is often forgotten or ignored are all of the people globalization helps lift up
agorabinary 11y ago
Poverty is the natural state of things. Those that exist in a state of poverty exist in the natural state of things. It is only through globalization and development that some people free themselves from this natural order. This phenomenon is the only known on record to lift people out of poverty, and it so happens that this phenomenon allocates this wealth unequally. No alternative method has ever succeeded in both creating wealth and allocating it equally. If all the effort expended on arguing about this magical "other path" to prosperity was spent on actually generating prosperity, I think we would find that many of our former grievances would resolve themselves..
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  If you study the behaviors of pre-agricultural societies, you will find that, although life was less comfortable for hunter-gatherers, they tended to be far more egalitarian than agriculturists or anyone beyond. Poverty is NOT the natural state of things. The adoption of agriculture enabled property ownership which led to the owner-worker dynamic that persists to this day. In fact, examinations of certain agricultural civilizations, like in the ancient Indus Valley, show a distinct lack of poverty. Perhaps instead of calling poverty "natural" we can examine it for what it really is: cheaper for the owners than broad prosperity.
  - awinter-py 11y ago
    And if you look back even farther than that, the atmosphere was made out of lava for about a billion years. If we're voting I'd just as soon not go back to the natural state. In the cretaceous high concentrations of oxygen produced giant insects.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - awinter-py 11y ago
    Also, quality of life took a huge dip at the tail of the neolithic because early agricultural societies had worse nutrition and higher population density (= disease). Life wasn't less comfortable for the H-Gs.
mc32 11y ago
There is the local (domestic) perspective and the global perspective. Globalization results in a move towards global equilibrium so that locales with low cost workers will see improved financials and economics for their workforce, locales with high cost medium skills workers will see a decline in economic and financial outlook. The question, is what's best overall for the global workforce versus what's best for the local/domestic workforce. Does the EU, Japan and the US among others "owe" third world nations offshoring ensuring they, emerging econs, kick start their economies? The first world could form a cartel of sorts keep all progress to themselves, ensuring third work countries remain poor but also ensuring their own progress is stunted perhaps net negative. Could or should the first world and advanced economies provide some work insurance to their low and medium skill workforce? If they can afford it, why not?
caethan 11y ago
The problem is with the consistent hand-waving between economically efficient - on average we've got more wealth - and we all have more wealth. Suppose my neighbor has a plot of land that he's not really using - it's mostly idle, he's just got a little garden on it. I know that if I get it, I could produce much more wealth - maybe I'm a skilled farmer and I could grow high-value crops on it. It would be more economically efficient for me to own the farm. We'd produce more wealth collectively that way. But there are several ways to get to that more efficient state: 1) I could buy the land from my neighbor for a fair price. He gets the money from the land, which is worth more than he made from his garden. I get the land and produce lots of wealth, minus the money I paid my neighbor. We're both better off, huzzah! 2) I could steal the land from my neighbor. He's worse off - he no longer has his garden at all. I'm much better off - I get the land and I don't have to pay for it anymore! Economically efficient moves by definition mean that there's enough wealth to compensate everyone who loses. A lot of the anger about globalization is people being pissed because they're losing - their job or their benefits or whatever - and the folks who are winning respond by telling them that it's economically efficient so they'll just have to suck it up. It's one thing to say "Hey, change is inevitable, but at least we're all getting wealthier!". It's another thing to say "Hey, change is inevitable, and we're getting way more than you're losing!"

53 points by wallflower 11y ago

The reality is that people who are less well-off often do not have the "liquidity" to rebalance their assets (educational, experiential, financial, etc.) to take advantage of changes in the global economy. On a macro level, society benefits from globalization, but on a micro level, there are often very high personal costs. If you have spent all of your life developing skills in one area, and that suddenly falls apart, it's going to be very difficult to drop everything and start over. As a society, we have the capability to use some of the gains to smooth out the costs for the people that lose out here, whether it's through basic income and welfare, or education and retraining.

Retric 11y ago
This has a lot to do with the widening wealth gap. If your assets are fairly liquid you can easily exploit new opportunities. If you happened to buy a house near a steel mill, there is not much you can do. Consider high school students are making choices based on what they think the job market will be in 50! years. Sure, we still have some bank tellers even with ATM's, but even a 50% reduction in demand is devastating if it takes 10+ years of specialist education. Retraining may seem reasonable for truckers, but for highly skilled professions it's tossing a way years of education and on the job training.
nickff 11y ago
I am a strong supporter of globalization, but pessimistic about government's ability to help the people who you describe as being left behind. Retraining has the worst record of the programs you describe, and 'education' usually does little (probably because of signalling). I am most vigorously opposed to government-backed 'education loans', which do little more than drive up tuition. I am generally opposed to welfare, because is does little to ameliorate the human issues related to joblessness, and basic income is little better, though BI can give people some flexibility to make their own choices. A globalization 'bonus' or temporary boost in BI might be worth considering (and testing), but we should also encourage people to adapt to the new world instead of building up resentment while refusing to change. It also seems that we should each take some personal responsibility, and help whomever we can. It is too often that we pawn off our responsibilities and moral duties on society.
- trhway 11y ago
  > I am generally opposed to welfare, because is does little to ameliorate the human issues related to joblessness, it is a safety net, a helping hand society extends to let people to not starve to death on the streets, it is not a tool to solve structural economical/political/social issues.
- Outdoorsman 11y ago
  >It also seems that we should each take some personal responsibility, and help whomever we can. It is too often that we pawn off our responsibilities and moral duties on society.< So very true...the single most important thing a person can do to strengthen a community--interpret community as broadly as you like--is to spend time helping those in your immediate vicinity...I'm prescribing this because of it's accessibility; it's a course of action available to anyone, usually costs little, and leaves you feeling pretty darned good... First-hand case in point: A boy who lives a couple of miles away from me started dropping by occasionally to visit...he'd pedal by on his bicycle and stop to chat if I was out in the yard... During our visits I learned about his circumstances...his father, a drug user, committed suicide in the shower of their home when he was 6 years old...his mother had had a series of boyfriends, and there were 3 partial families--14 people--living in his house, a 3 bedroom trailer... As we got to know each other a bit better he asked me one day,"Hey, everyone around here calls you the computer man; how could I learn about computers?" I told him I could teach him a few things, and did...he would drop by when my schedule permitted and was willing to sit for as long I was willing to teach him things...just basics, a few tricks... I could tell that he had a quick grasp of the material, and asked him how school was going, his grades, etc...turned out he had around a 3.7 GPA, and admitted that he never studied outside of school... I told him one day that he should consider college...the next day he said he had mentioned what I said to his mom and she flatly told him,"We can't afford something like that". To make a long story short, the state that I live in offers a program that essentially pays (combined with grants, and college scholarships) for those below a certain income level to attend 5 years of in-state college...I spent several days gathering information, presented it to him, and told him I thought he could do it...he just needed to sign up in the program right away, and keep his grades up... Rather predictably, his mother was initially skeptical, so at his invitation I visited with her and explained how this would work... I'll leave the story here...he's a junior in high school now and is on track to enter college in 2017...he would have never become aware of the opportunity if I hadn't mentioned it to him, and all it cost me was about 2 days of research and another day helping him apply... we'll see how it goes...

billybilly1920 11y ago

I think for each person who doesn't want to constantly move with the times, there is another person somewhere else that does, so we just swap those two people and call it good.

PavlovsCat 11y ago
Calling actions and decisions of humans "the times" does not make them a force of nature.
- billybilly1920 11y ago
  things move forward; like it or not. Some people spend their entire lives trying to live the same moment over and over because that's what they know. The factory you worked at shutdown; you need to move on, and if that means moving to another town to find work, then do that. Don't just hunker down and demand everyone help you. (unless you are asking for help to move and find a job.)
  - rossdavidh 11y ago
    For me, that is fine; the way the "world has moved" happens to be in a direction that fits well with my natural talents. But your assumption is that every person is more or less equally trainable for more or less any job, and that is obviously untrue. If the "world moved" in a direction that didn't happen to fit well with what I can successfully train myself at, I'd hope not to be thrown under the bus by my country. For example, if some day computers program themselves and the jobs are all in looking beautiful and performing in public, I'd be doing a lot less well. Globalization only seems inevitable if it happens to be moving the globe your way.
  - billybilly1920 11y ago
    So the state should be forced to support you because you are unwilling to learn a new trade?
    - 11y ago

whack 11y ago

It's worth pointing out that Rattner ISN'T calling for brakes on globalization or free trade. He's calling for a stronger social safety net, in order to better help those who aren't benefiting from the economic wealth that globalization generates. This is a position that we can all get behind. Regardless of the precise causes of income inequality, whether it's due to globalization, labor automation, or industry cycles, there will always be people who find themselves left out in the cold due to unfortunate circumstances. As long as our society keeps getting richer, we should do more to help those who aren't benefiting from the same changes that have benefited the rest of us.

proksoup 11y ago
Why? Our resources aren't infinite. Why is there any should about who gets to live and who gets to die? We can't help everyone live without eventually hitting resource constraints, can we?
- rifung 11y ago
  Our resources aren't infinite, but certain people have more than they need while others don't have enough to survive. I don't know if we could, even theoretically, let everyone in the US live a decent life. But, that doesn't mean we just don't do anything though, we can still do as much as possible given what we have. Not only that but if we helped those who are down get new skills to be productive, wouldn't that only be better for our economy and thus for everyone?
  - wang_li 11y ago
    >I don't know if we could, even theoretically, let everyone in the US live a decent life. In theory, yes. There are enough resources that people would live free of want and hunger. But, we can't because there is some portion of the populace that consistently exhibits zero self control. If given the self-control/candy test, they'd eat the candy and then fifteen minutes later tell you what a horrible person you are for not giving them the other piece. You could go out and top off everyone so that they have $50,000 liquid cash, find housing, explain how rent works, etc. and within three months there will be people being evicted and homeless with no money to their name. So you repeat. And three months later you have to repeat again. And again. And again. And after loading and reloading people with money, now you're poor and have nothing to give. It's basic reality that there are people we are told we need to have compassion and empathy for, yet they have none for us. This is exhibited by the fact that if they did they would make a realistic effort to not be a burden on others. And for many of these people there is no amount of money and resources they can be given that will cause them to say "enough, stop, i don't need any more."

sama 11y ago

We have a somewhat relevant announcement to this tomorrow...

tuckermi 11y ago
Nice little teaser that got buried here! I'm curious to see what gets posted tomorrow...

ChuckMcM 11y ago

The only sane answer is "Don't to put any roadblocks between them and catching up." or in a more positive spin, "Make available, without constraint, any resources they would need to catch up." And it really does come down to morality, social and personal. I am certainly in the "teach a person to fish" category of fixing societal ills. But I get it when previous choices have left someone "stuck" and unable to succeed. Back in the early 2000's before we had all sorts of data[1] to back it up, I could see that single parents were in a world of hurt. Married couples had a much better shot at getting by. But you couldn't really fix that by demanding people find some soul mate/life partner to marry in order to get out of poverty. I suggested to my representatives and others we really could use an institution that had the same benefits of marriage but was more contractual than spiritual. If two single parents, regardless of sex, could enter into a contract to work together to raise their children, it would encourage them to do so. And by institution I mean the whole thing, rights of survivorship, community property, shared health care information, joint filing status with respect to taxation. In my way of thinking that is removing a structural roadblock in the way of those people stuck in poverty by their past choices. At the same time, I have also met people who don't put any investment into getting out of their circumstances. I realized there can be a learned helplessness element here, but for folks who just don't want to, I don't feel any guilt or remorse for them as they slide down the slope. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/10/the-relationship-between-single-mothers-and-poverty-is-not-as-simple-as-it-seems/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/10/the-r...

Terr_ 11y ago
> The only sane answer is "Don't to put any roadblocks between them and catching up." I like to phrase of it in terms of designing feedback loops and augmenting existing ones when they aren't strong enough.

mannykannot 11y ago

While I have considerable empathy for people whose lives are being disrupted by globalization, and I am not particularly happy about how globalization is being pursued, we should recognize that anyone who, by accident of birth, is allowed to live in a liberal, technologically-advanced and stable nation, is the beneficiary of a considerable privilege.

bikamonki 11y ago

None. The system will find balance on its own, as always. So, a big chunk of US workers are left behind b/c their jobs are now in Mexico, China, etc. So, capital owners have found ultra efficiency producing goods and services thanks (in part) to Globalization. But now fewer people with stable jobs can buy them goods and services. Oops! Ok. Let's give them credit cards. Ok that works for a while but now they can't pay back. Boom! The system adjusts itself. Whats next? Who knows. Maybe universal minimum wage. Maybe resource-based economy. Maybe modern socialism. Who knows. But something WILL happen. Meanwhile, our duty is with our own.

llamataboot 11y ago
That's silly though. It's like saying, well, even if we nuke the earth and kill all humans that live on it, the radiation will eventually disperse and something new will evolve. Yes, that's fundamentally true on a birds-eye level, but that doesn't mean it's a sane or moral choice. If we know dynamic systems with feedback loops and delays tend towards overshoot and collapse, and collapse will really suck for a lot of people, we should try to build other feedback loops that make that collapse less likely, etc. Saying there is a self-correcting system in place doesn't mean that we should let all current trends just continue because they will eventually somehow correct. Violent revolutions are also a correction of sorts... Also, not sure with "our duty is worth our own" - who is "our own" and what social fiction is it built on? Family? Community? City? Nation-State? Race? Favorite board game? I think widening the empathy gap until you can view the people that grow your coffee as "your own brothers and sisters" is the name of the game for human evolution at the moment.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bikamonki 11y ago
  By our own I meant family, I do not think it is a social fiction as human beings are born helpless and would just die if there is no family to take care of them. I do not mean family from a cultural perspective, I mean family from a biological perspective. Now, my comment may sound silly to you because we are comparing apples to floppy disks. Have you read GED? One interesting understanding I gather from that book is the concept of "levels of meaning". His example goes along these lines: an ant colony seems to act with intelligence from our point of view but such interpretation is out grasp from an ant's perspective; though a smart ant could imagine the colony viewed from above! Therefore, what you call social fictions have a meaning in the layer we all call society and if such layer was our only reality I would definitely agree with any moral argument against Globalization and Capitalism. But if you just move one layer above, if you switch your perspective a bit higher and see our species interacting with millions of other species in a planet with a certain expiration date: morality has no meaning. In that layer of meaning, the goal of each and all species is one: survival. This ecosystem couldn't care less if we leave the economically poor behind. In conclusion, I was commenting from a layer above, you replied from a layer below. If we both speak on the same layer most likely we would agree. If we speak from different layers (perspectives) time is lost. Now, speaking from my perspective, my best guess is that we humans are evolving from bio to bit. We know now the planet will be gone and at some point we would want to leave looking for a new home. These bodies are not the ideal spaceship. A computer is a good alternative. The drive to evolve and develop the technologies that will make this space trip happen may be out of the control of ourselves and our consciousness. It may be genes programmed to do so. It may be bacteria in our guts driving us to do so. I do not know. However, it seems that whatever the social system we invent on the layer below in order to keep us ruled and moving forward, that invented system simply responds to a higher drive.

paulpauper 11y ago

What is often forgotten or ignored are all of the people globalization helps lift up

agorabinary 11y ago

Poverty is the natural state of things. Those that exist in a state of poverty exist in the natural state of things. It is only through globalization and development that some people free themselves from this natural order. This phenomenon is the only known on record to lift people out of poverty, and it so happens that this phenomenon allocates this wealth unequally. No alternative method has ever succeeded in both creating wealth and allocating it equally. If all the effort expended on arguing about this magical "other path" to prosperity was spent on actually generating prosperity, I think we would find that many of our former grievances would resolve themselves..

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
If you study the behaviors of pre-agricultural societies, you will find that, although life was less comfortable for hunter-gatherers, they tended to be far more egalitarian than agriculturists or anyone beyond. Poverty is NOT the natural state of things. The adoption of agriculture enabled property ownership which led to the owner-worker dynamic that persists to this day. In fact, examinations of certain agricultural civilizations, like in the ancient Indus Valley, show a distinct lack of poverty. Perhaps instead of calling poverty "natural" we can examine it for what it really is: cheaper for the owners than broad prosperity.
- awinter-py 11y ago
  And if you look back even farther than that, the atmosphere was made out of lava for about a billion years. If we're voting I'd just as soon not go back to the natural state. In the cretaceous high concentrations of oxygen produced giant insects.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- awinter-py 11y ago
  Also, quality of life took a huge dip at the tail of the neolithic because early agricultural societies had worse nutrition and higher population density (= disease). Life wasn't less comfortable for the H-Gs.

mc32 11y ago

There is the local (domestic) perspective and the global perspective. Globalization results in a move towards global equilibrium so that locales with low cost workers will see improved financials and economics for their workforce, locales with high cost medium skills workers will see a decline in economic and financial outlook. The question, is what's best overall for the global workforce versus what's best for the local/domestic workforce. Does the EU, Japan and the US among others "owe" third world nations offshoring ensuring they, emerging econs, kick start their economies? The first world could form a cartel of sorts keep all progress to themselves, ensuring third work countries remain poor but also ensuring their own progress is stunted perhaps net negative. Could or should the first world and advanced economies provide some work insurance to their low and medium skill workforce? If they can afford it, why not?

caethan 11y ago

The problem is with the consistent hand-waving between economically efficient - on average we've got more wealth - and we all have more wealth. Suppose my neighbor has a plot of land that he's not really using - it's mostly idle, he's just got a little garden on it. I know that if I get it, I could produce much more wealth - maybe I'm a skilled farmer and I could grow high-value crops on it. It would be more economically efficient for me to own the farm. We'd produce more wealth collectively that way. But there are several ways to get to that more efficient state: 1) I could buy the land from my neighbor for a fair price. He gets the money from the land, which is worth more than he made from his garden. I get the land and produce lots of wealth, minus the money I paid my neighbor. We're both better off, huzzah! 2) I could steal the land from my neighbor. He's worse off - he no longer has his garden at all. I'm much better off - I get the land and I don't have to pay for it anymore! Economically efficient moves by definition mean that there's enough wealth to compensate everyone who loses. A lot of the anger about globalization is people being pissed because they're losing - their job or their benefits or whatever - and the folks who are winning respond by telling them that it's economically efficient so they'll just have to suck it up. It's one thing to say "Hey, change is inevitable, but at least we're all getting wealthier!". It's another thing to say "Hey, change is inevitable, and we're getting way more than you're losing!"