"In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for democracy." The author expands on this further in the piece:

"In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for democracy." The author expands on this further in the piece: Do businessmen have an obligation to ensure that their neighbors get first crack at the job opportunities their enterprises generate? Should businessmen deny such obligations, are lawmakers justified in imposing them? High and relatively egalitarian compensation served a number of social purposes. Society owed a debt to modest workers who steadied the constitutional compact in peace and shed blood for it in war. The “family wage” that many corporations paid reflected that debt. It also partially compensated the at-home work of wives and mothers that made it possible to reproduce the society. Corporate executives giddily discovered, once they got to Mexico or Southeast Asia, that they no longer had to think about such things. They were now dealing with a workforce to whom they didn’t owe jack. Viewed this way, the “prosperity” of globalization is just a transfer. It rests on a broken implicit contract. Globalization seems to have delivered up to private parties hard-won competitive advantages that were really the common property of American society. Some are quantifiable things like taxpayer-funded research and development, of the sort that the Carrier air conditioner company benefited from before it announced it was moving jobs from Indianapolis to Mexico. Others are advantages that can be grasped only conceptually, like economies of scale. The process of Western Bloc globalization that began in the 1990s differs in degree but not in kind from the contemporaneous Eastern Bloc looting of state assets. Globalization comes to seem a con game. AKA the old formula for democracy, sharing the wealth and economic gains among the inhabitants of a geographically contiguous region that pooled funds to build the infrastructure (military, social, and utilities) necessary for the generation of that wealth, no longer applies.