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The last 40+ years of globalization have raised more people out of poverty than at any other time in history, and spread progress and prosperity around the worl

The last 40+ years of globalization have raised more people out of poverty than at any other time in history, and spread progress and prosperity around the world. Check your envy and hatred, friend.

rtx 9y ago
Both of you are correct. The issue I see is that we could have done more.
acalderaro 9y ago
This isn't at all related to the OP's comment. Globalism has allowed multinational corporations to expand their economic and political influence - since they have the economies of scale to expand globally. It's true that more people have been lifted out of poverty, but the fact remains that globalism favors wealthy owners of multinationals over everyone else. Look at how much influence western oil/tech companies have in countries around the world. Lobbies are stronger in our political realm, it really isn't fair to say that these policies benefited the poor more than the wealthy. That's not to say that globalism is bad. But we need to be careful because as the wealthy's influence and power grows, it becomes harder to solve the problems that will come with the age of automation.
- jrauser 9y ago
  Is it possible that the game isn't zero sum? To lift a phrase from your second paragraph, is it possible that globalism favors wealthy owners of multinationals AND everyone else? You're right to point out the risks of vast wealth disparities and the corrupting influence of money in politics, but I think that problem needs to be combatted separately, and not by making everyone less well off.
  - acalderaro 9y ago
    My whole comment assumes the game isn't zero sum. I recognize that globalism helps the poor. My conclusion is that it helps wealthy individuals who own these corporations more than the masses. To break this down further, the masses gain economic value and employment. The wealthy gain political/economic influence to solidify their wealth and position. I'm not talking about low-balling millionaires. I mean the billionaires and royalty of the world. The people who own industries, not just companies.
- weberc2 9y ago
  I appreciate your nuanced comment, but I think it's important to also recognize that it's better for everyone's fortunes to increase even unequally than for everyone to be equally impoverished. There is no economic law that says equality begets wealth creation, so the conversation needs to be about balancing equality with wealth creation. The left seems to think the conversation should only be about equality, and the right seems to think it's only about wealth creation. And if I had to be overly simplistic, I would err on the right, given the respective track records of capitalism and socialism (I know a lot of people throw a fit at any positive mention of 'capitalism', but please note I'm not saying that unregulated markets are optimal--only that they significantly outperform planned economies).
  - logicchains 9y ago
    I did my bachelors in economics, and one of our textbooks taught that all other things being equal (ceteris paribus), more equality means less wealth creation. Why? Wealth will naturally concentrate in the hands of those more capable of creating it: if Jo is making 2% per annum return and Jane is making 4% per annum return, and they both start with the same amount, then Jane's share of the total wealth pool will continuously increase relative to Jo. The key thing to note is that as Jane's making better use of resources, producing twice as much from them as Jo, if we take resources from Jane to give to Jo then they'll be used less effectively, slowing overall growth. To illustrate, imagine they both start with $1000 each. The total wealth pool is hence $2000, and they both have 50% each, perfect equality. Now, let's look 50 years in the future, assuming the previously mentioned interest rates per annum compounding annually. According to http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calculator.htm http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calcu..., Jo will have $2,691.59 and Jane will have $7,106.68. The total wealth pool is $9,798.27. Jo hence now has 27.47%, and Jane has 72.53%. They're both less equal, but they're also both wealthier, and the overall wealth pool has increased. Now, let's look ahead another 50 years. If no wealth transfer occurs, Jane will have $69,633.20 and Jo will have $19,128.28, with the total wealth pool being $88,761.48. If we equalise wealth, however, such that both have $4,899.13, then in 50 years they'll each have $34,816.57, for a total wealth pool of $69,633.14. This is 78.45% of the total wealth pool that there would be if no wealth transfer took place. In this sense there is hence a direct tradeoff between growth and financial equality.
crdoconnor 9y ago
In spite of neoliberalism, not because of it. The country which has done most to raise its citizens out of poverty (China) did the exact opposite of articles 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 of the Washington Consensus. The Latin American countries which applied it as directed in the 1980s, by contrast, subsequently did very poorly on raising people out of poverty.
- logicchains 9y ago
  >The country which has done most to raise its citizens out of poverty (China) did the exact opposite of articles 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 of the Washington Consensus. It's interesting to compare China, GDP per capita of around $8000, with neighbours like Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea, all of which are now developed countries (GDPs per capita of $20000-$50000), and all of which opened up more and sooner than the Chinese mainland.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    Of course. China took inspiration from them. They all followed an almost identical, although subtler model. Singapore and Hong Kong made less use of tariffs and disguised their subsidies better, and made greater use of currency manipulation, though. Western economists, by and large, advocate doing the exact opposite of what they all did. 90s Russia is a good example of where those recommendations were taken to heart. It didn't go well: http://fair.org/extra/harvards-best-and-brightest-aided-russias-economic-ruin/ http://fair.org/extra/harvards-best-and-brightest-aided-russ...
neffy 9y ago
Yes, but that has really nothing to do with economics. Globalization is above and beyond all else a result of the Internet, and digital communications, dropping latency to practically 0. No economist predicted, understood or indeed currently understands what that would bring, and what it is doing to our world. At this point in time, the inability of the economics academy to understand, debate or indeed correct, the multiple feedback loops that are operating to concentrate money into the financial sector, is probably the biggest single threat to capitalism that has ever existed. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if power is concentrated through the monetary unit, or through the gun - or indeed the latter as a result of the former - the end is wide scale impoverishment.
- amalcon 9y ago
  > Globalization is above and beyond all else a result of the Internet I didn't downvote you, but the reason people are is probably that this is obviously wrong. Globalization began well before the Internet was commercialized.
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  Container shipping did a lot more for economic growth in the last 50 years than the Internet did.
  - neffy 9y ago
    All part and parcel of the same thing. Literally. Container shipping comes as a result of technological development that comes as a result of increasing point to point communication speed and information transfer. It's an underlying and fundamental change across the globe. cf. printing presses did the same thing and ushered in 100 years+ of economic and social disruption.
eternalban 9y ago
Your line of thinking implies that sans globalization the benefits of modern technology would not have achieved the same, if not better, without offering a scintilla of evidence for that self-affirming assertion. Let's be clear here: the dissenting position that you dismiss (in an ad hom manner) as motivated by "envy and hatred" is critical of the unbelievably distored distribution of wealth and political power that has resulted. We are concerned about the future generations, "friend".
- logicchains 9y ago
  Consider looking then to a country that completely rejects globalism, like North Korea. How has _modern technology_ helped citizens there live long, healthy and satisfying lives? >unbelievably distored distribution of wealth and political power Distorted by who's standard? There's no way to scientifically assert that a certain distribution of wealth and power is correct; it's just a distribution. To assert that a particular distribution is "wrong" (or synonyms in this case like "distorted") is a value judgement. It's a natural impulse for people to feel bad when other people have more than them, and this feeling is called envy, so it's not unreasonable to attribute a person's dislike of a distribution in which others have more than them as motivated by envy. Especially from the perspective of someone who believes increasing the size of the pie is more important than equalising the distribution, which many economists believe.
  - eternalban 9y ago
    North Korea can not possibly be considered a meaningful 'control' in an empirical context given that it represents a bona fide edge case. > Distored by who's standard? By the standard of those of us who have a contrary "belief" than your economists. As for envy, I hold that envy is operational amongst near peers. Peasants don't "envy" the king.
samirillian 9y ago
The problem is the impossibility of posing counterfactuals about historical questions. If we could compare the last 40+ years with Chicago School economists spreading their theories vs. some other school of economic theory or none at all, then your statement would be sensical. As it stands, you're just throwing out a superficially relevant correlation with no possible way of disproving it.
- logicchains 9y ago
  Fortunately during the past 40 years different countries engaged in different degrees of liberalization, so it is in fact possible to compare them to some degree. Some of these countries even had very similar cultures and economic starting points. For example, Hong Kong and Singapore were extremely economically liberal. They still are, to some extent (some of the lowest tax rates in the world; Singapore even has no capital gains tax, and its top tax rate is 20%). According to Google, Singapore has a per capita GDP of $52,960.71 (the US is $57,466.79), a rich country by international standards. Hong Kong has a GDP per capita of $43,681.14. Taiwan and Korea were/are less economically liberal than Hong Kong and Singapore, but still have relatively low tax rates by international standards. Korea has a GDP per capita of $27,538.81, and Taiwan of $31,900.00. China was slow to open up economically, waiting until the 1970s, and even since then its policies are less liberal than the aforementioned countries (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_doing_business_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_doing_business_index). China now has a GDP per capita of $8,123.18. North Korea is even less liberal than China, almost completely rejecting international trade. It has a GDP per capita of $583.00. While this is not a large sample size, it's better than nothing, and does seem to indicate a correlation between economic liberalisation and economic growth.
  - WhatIsDukkha 9y ago
    Or that being agreeable with already established economies, ie the west, allows you to get in on the pyramid scheme early? The longer term impact for global development is explored by Dani Rodrik """This means countries are running out of industrialization opportunities sooner and at much lower levels of income compared to the experience of early industrializers""" https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper107.pdf https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper107.pdf Does it bother you at all that you took a simple set of numbers, largely devoid of context, and then waved your hands with some math and made a huge conclusion? No relevance to the subject of the original post we are discussing here? I think its a direct example of Premature Mathiness but I suspect you'll disagree :)
Koromix 9y ago
Burning through the vast energy and natural resources at our disposal is what has allowed us to "lift" so many people out of poverty. "Proposerity" and "progress" are not a miracle of economic thinking, or technology. We owe all of this to fossil fuels, nothing more, nothing less. In fact, you'd need to slap an extremely inefficient economic system on top of this mind-blowing amount of resources to not enrich the global population at least a little bit. Or you'd have to purposefully design it to work that way.
- logicchains 9y ago
  >Burning through the vast energy and natural resources at our disposal is what has allowed us to "lift" so many people out of poverty. "Proposerity" and "progress" are not a miracle of economic thinking, or technology. We owe all of this to fossil fuels, nothing more, nothing less. The Soviet Union had equal access to natural resources as America and Western Europe, yet at the time of its collapse it was much poorer, and many former Soviet Union countries still are. Clearly in the short term at least natural resources aren't all that matters.
  - dpc59 9y ago
    They started out poorer though, and the reverse argument can be made comparing Cuba and various Caribbean countries (Haiti and Jamaica in particular come to mind).
  - Koromix 9y ago
    Maybe, but I hope there are better arguments for the current system than "it works better than the Soviet Union". All you have done here is establish that an extremely dysfunctional economy can either waste or fail to use its resources, which would mean that America and Western Europe are not completely dysfunctional. This is a pretty low bar. And as you said, we're talking short term here. Very short term. On slightly longer terms, it really doesn't look so good. Indeed, it takes an absurd level of denial / techno-optimism / magical thinking (whichever you prefer) to look at paleoclimatology and current climate indicators and think it can go on for much longer without global catastrophy. At the end, if the best we can say of globalization is "For around 40+ years it was great fun for a lot of people. Well, for the most privileged countries anyway. And then it collapsed, and took a great chunk of the biosphere and the human population with it"... I don't see much to celebrate.
chroem- 9y ago
>The last 40+ years of globalization have raised more people out of poverty than at any other time in history This claim is a prime example of the cargo cult pseudoscience that's in question here. No causal relationship is established between corporate globalization and it's just assumed as an axiom that "we must be responsible for it!". It totally ignores the factors of technological progress, decolonization and self-rule, as well as the efforts of countless NGO's. It's not just wrong: it's horribly misleading.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> The last 40+ years of globalization have raised more people out of poverty than at any other time in history The last 40 years of globalization have done more to reinforce durable economic inequality—often along ethnic lines—in both the more and less developed partners in trade, globally, than any other comparable time period in history; since human misery is largely driven by relative rather than absolute deprivation, this is a fairly significant problem even before considering the ethnic component, and the ethnic aspect has been fuel for significant, mostly intrastate, ethnic violence.

The last 40+ years of globalization have raised more people out of poverty than at any other time in history, and spread progress and prosperity around the world. Check your envy and hatred, friend.

rtx 9y ago

Both of you are correct. The issue I see is that we could have done more.

acalderaro 9y ago

This isn't at all related to the OP's comment. Globalism has allowed multinational corporations to expand their economic and political influence - since they have the economies of scale to expand globally. It's true that more people have been lifted out of poverty, but the fact remains that globalism favors wealthy owners of multinationals over everyone else. Look at how much influence western oil/tech companies have in countries around the world. Lobbies are stronger in our political realm, it really isn't fair to say that these policies benefited the poor more than the wealthy. That's not to say that globalism is bad. But we need to be careful because as the wealthy's influence and power grows, it becomes harder to solve the problems that will come with the age of automation.

jrauser 9y ago
Is it possible that the game isn't zero sum? To lift a phrase from your second paragraph, is it possible that globalism favors wealthy owners of multinationals AND everyone else? You're right to point out the risks of vast wealth disparities and the corrupting influence of money in politics, but I think that problem needs to be combatted separately, and not by making everyone less well off.
- acalderaro 9y ago
  My whole comment assumes the game isn't zero sum. I recognize that globalism helps the poor. My conclusion is that it helps wealthy individuals who own these corporations more than the masses. To break this down further, the masses gain economic value and employment. The wealthy gain political/economic influence to solidify their wealth and position. I'm not talking about low-balling millionaires. I mean the billionaires and royalty of the world. The people who own industries, not just companies.
weberc2 9y ago
I appreciate your nuanced comment, but I think it's important to also recognize that it's better for everyone's fortunes to increase even unequally than for everyone to be equally impoverished. There is no economic law that says equality begets wealth creation, so the conversation needs to be about balancing equality with wealth creation. The left seems to think the conversation should only be about equality, and the right seems to think it's only about wealth creation. And if I had to be overly simplistic, I would err on the right, given the respective track records of capitalism and socialism (I know a lot of people throw a fit at any positive mention of 'capitalism', but please note I'm not saying that unregulated markets are optimal--only that they significantly outperform planned economies).
- logicchains 9y ago
  I did my bachelors in economics, and one of our textbooks taught that all other things being equal (ceteris paribus), more equality means less wealth creation. Why? Wealth will naturally concentrate in the hands of those more capable of creating it: if Jo is making 2% per annum return and Jane is making 4% per annum return, and they both start with the same amount, then Jane's share of the total wealth pool will continuously increase relative to Jo. The key thing to note is that as Jane's making better use of resources, producing twice as much from them as Jo, if we take resources from Jane to give to Jo then they'll be used less effectively, slowing overall growth. To illustrate, imagine they both start with $1000 each. The total wealth pool is hence $2000, and they both have 50% each, perfect equality. Now, let's look 50 years in the future, assuming the previously mentioned interest rates per annum compounding annually. According to http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calculator.htm http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calcu..., Jo will have $2,691.59 and Jane will have $7,106.68. The total wealth pool is $9,798.27. Jo hence now has 27.47%, and Jane has 72.53%. They're both less equal, but they're also both wealthier, and the overall wealth pool has increased. Now, let's look ahead another 50 years. If no wealth transfer occurs, Jane will have $69,633.20 and Jo will have $19,128.28, with the total wealth pool being $88,761.48. If we equalise wealth, however, such that both have $4,899.13, then in 50 years they'll each have $34,816.57, for a total wealth pool of $69,633.14. This is 78.45% of the total wealth pool that there would be if no wealth transfer took place. In this sense there is hence a direct tradeoff between growth and financial equality.

crdoconnor 9y ago

In spite of neoliberalism, not because of it. The country which has done most to raise its citizens out of poverty (China) did the exact opposite of articles 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 of the Washington Consensus. The Latin American countries which applied it as directed in the 1980s, by contrast, subsequently did very poorly on raising people out of poverty.

logicchains 9y ago
>The country which has done most to raise its citizens out of poverty (China) did the exact opposite of articles 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 of the Washington Consensus. It's interesting to compare China, GDP per capita of around $8000, with neighbours like Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea, all of which are now developed countries (GDPs per capita of $20000-$50000), and all of which opened up more and sooner than the Chinese mainland.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  Of course. China took inspiration from them. They all followed an almost identical, although subtler model. Singapore and Hong Kong made less use of tariffs and disguised their subsidies better, and made greater use of currency manipulation, though. Western economists, by and large, advocate doing the exact opposite of what they all did. 90s Russia is a good example of where those recommendations were taken to heart. It didn't go well: http://fair.org/extra/harvards-best-and-brightest-aided-russias-economic-ruin/ http://fair.org/extra/harvards-best-and-brightest-aided-russ...

neffy 9y ago

Yes, but that has really nothing to do with economics. Globalization is above and beyond all else a result of the Internet, and digital communications, dropping latency to practically 0. No economist predicted, understood or indeed currently understands what that would bring, and what it is doing to our world. At this point in time, the inability of the economics academy to understand, debate or indeed correct, the multiple feedback loops that are operating to concentrate money into the financial sector, is probably the biggest single threat to capitalism that has ever existed. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if power is concentrated through the monetary unit, or through the gun - or indeed the latter as a result of the former - the end is wide scale impoverishment.

amalcon 9y ago
> Globalization is above and beyond all else a result of the Internet I didn't downvote you, but the reason people are is probably that this is obviously wrong. Globalization began well before the Internet was commercialized.
barry-cotter 9y ago
Container shipping did a lot more for economic growth in the last 50 years than the Internet did.
- neffy 9y ago
  All part and parcel of the same thing. Literally. Container shipping comes as a result of technological development that comes as a result of increasing point to point communication speed and information transfer. It's an underlying and fundamental change across the globe. cf. printing presses did the same thing and ushered in 100 years+ of economic and social disruption.

eternalban 9y ago

Your line of thinking implies that sans globalization the benefits of modern technology would not have achieved the same, if not better, without offering a scintilla of evidence for that self-affirming assertion. Let's be clear here: the dissenting position that you dismiss (in an ad hom manner) as motivated by "envy and hatred" is critical of the unbelievably distored distribution of wealth and political power that has resulted. We are concerned about the future generations, "friend".

logicchains 9y ago
Consider looking then to a country that completely rejects globalism, like North Korea. How has _modern technology_ helped citizens there live long, healthy and satisfying lives? >unbelievably distored distribution of wealth and political power Distorted by who's standard? There's no way to scientifically assert that a certain distribution of wealth and power is correct; it's just a distribution. To assert that a particular distribution is "wrong" (or synonyms in this case like "distorted") is a value judgement. It's a natural impulse for people to feel bad when other people have more than them, and this feeling is called envy, so it's not unreasonable to attribute a person's dislike of a distribution in which others have more than them as motivated by envy. Especially from the perspective of someone who believes increasing the size of the pie is more important than equalising the distribution, which many economists believe.
- eternalban 9y ago
  North Korea can not possibly be considered a meaningful 'control' in an empirical context given that it represents a bona fide edge case. > Distored by who's standard? By the standard of those of us who have a contrary "belief" than your economists. As for envy, I hold that envy is operational amongst near peers. Peasants don't "envy" the king.

samirillian 9y ago

The problem is the impossibility of posing counterfactuals about historical questions. If we could compare the last 40+ years with Chicago School economists spreading their theories vs. some other school of economic theory or none at all, then your statement would be sensical. As it stands, you're just throwing out a superficially relevant correlation with no possible way of disproving it.

logicchains 9y ago
Fortunately during the past 40 years different countries engaged in different degrees of liberalization, so it is in fact possible to compare them to some degree. Some of these countries even had very similar cultures and economic starting points. For example, Hong Kong and Singapore were extremely economically liberal. They still are, to some extent (some of the lowest tax rates in the world; Singapore even has no capital gains tax, and its top tax rate is 20%). According to Google, Singapore has a per capita GDP of $52,960.71 (the US is $57,466.79), a rich country by international standards. Hong Kong has a GDP per capita of $43,681.14. Taiwan and Korea were/are less economically liberal than Hong Kong and Singapore, but still have relatively low tax rates by international standards. Korea has a GDP per capita of $27,538.81, and Taiwan of $31,900.00. China was slow to open up economically, waiting until the 1970s, and even since then its policies are less liberal than the aforementioned countries (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_doing_business_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_doing_business_index). China now has a GDP per capita of $8,123.18. North Korea is even less liberal than China, almost completely rejecting international trade. It has a GDP per capita of $583.00. While this is not a large sample size, it's better than nothing, and does seem to indicate a correlation between economic liberalisation and economic growth.
- WhatIsDukkha 9y ago
  Or that being agreeable with already established economies, ie the west, allows you to get in on the pyramid scheme early? The longer term impact for global development is explored by Dani Rodrik """This means countries are running out of industrialization opportunities sooner and at much lower levels of income compared to the experience of early industrializers""" https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper107.pdf https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper107.pdf Does it bother you at all that you took a simple set of numbers, largely devoid of context, and then waved your hands with some math and made a huge conclusion? No relevance to the subject of the original post we are discussing here? I think its a direct example of Premature Mathiness but I suspect you'll disagree :)

Koromix 9y ago

Burning through the vast energy and natural resources at our disposal is what has allowed us to "lift" so many people out of poverty. "Proposerity" and "progress" are not a miracle of economic thinking, or technology. We owe all of this to fossil fuels, nothing more, nothing less. In fact, you'd need to slap an extremely inefficient economic system on top of this mind-blowing amount of resources to not enrich the global population at least a little bit. Or you'd have to purposefully design it to work that way.

logicchains 9y ago
>Burning through the vast energy and natural resources at our disposal is what has allowed us to "lift" so many people out of poverty. "Proposerity" and "progress" are not a miracle of economic thinking, or technology. We owe all of this to fossil fuels, nothing more, nothing less. The Soviet Union had equal access to natural resources as America and Western Europe, yet at the time of its collapse it was much poorer, and many former Soviet Union countries still are. Clearly in the short term at least natural resources aren't all that matters.
- dpc59 9y ago
  They started out poorer though, and the reverse argument can be made comparing Cuba and various Caribbean countries (Haiti and Jamaica in particular come to mind).
- Koromix 9y ago
  Maybe, but I hope there are better arguments for the current system than "it works better than the Soviet Union". All you have done here is establish that an extremely dysfunctional economy can either waste or fail to use its resources, which would mean that America and Western Europe are not completely dysfunctional. This is a pretty low bar. And as you said, we're talking short term here. Very short term. On slightly longer terms, it really doesn't look so good. Indeed, it takes an absurd level of denial / techno-optimism / magical thinking (whichever you prefer) to look at paleoclimatology and current climate indicators and think it can go on for much longer without global catastrophy. At the end, if the best we can say of globalization is "For around 40+ years it was great fun for a lot of people. Well, for the most privileged countries anyway. And then it collapsed, and took a great chunk of the biosphere and the human population with it"... I don't see much to celebrate.

chroem- 9y ago

>The last 40+ years of globalization have raised more people out of poverty than at any other time in history This claim is a prime example of the cargo cult pseudoscience that's in question here. No causal relationship is established between corporate globalization and it's just assumed as an axiom that "we must be responsible for it!". It totally ignores the factors of technological progress, decolonization and self-rule, as well as the efforts of countless NGO's. It's not just wrong: it's horribly misleading.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> The last 40+ years of globalization have raised more people out of poverty than at any other time in history The last 40 years of globalization have done more to reinforce durable economic inequality—often along ethnic lines—in both the more and less developed partners in trade, globally, than any other comparable time period in history; since human misery is largely driven by relative rather than absolute deprivation, this is a fairly significant problem even before considering the ethnic component, and the ethnic aspect has been fuel for significant, mostly intrastate, ethnic violence.