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Globalization's Wrong Turn
- wahern 7y agoA few paragraphs in the author states, "More trade and freer finance... came with risks that the hyperglobalists did not foresee, although economic theory could have predicted the downside to globalization just as well as it did the upside." Two paragraphs later they say, "The right wanted to cut taxes and slash regulations; the left asked for more spending on education and public infrastructure. Both sides agreed that economies needed to be refashioned in the name of global competitiveness." They're wrongly equivocating the center-left and center-right, perhaps because they don't want to contradict themselves. The center-left wanted greater spending on education and infrastructure precisely because economists warned that it would be needed to counter the dislocation caused by globalization. Education initiatives, among other things, included retraining and placement programs; and infrastructure didn't just mean roads and bridges but also research and industrial investments. The latter were intended to accelerate the establishment of new employment sectors, and the former to ease the transition. This was all well known and argued at the time. Some countries, like Germany, successfully executed But the center-right in the U.K. and the U.S. held, and continues to hold, a radical belief that the "free market" will miraculously work things out, and so they limited and later starved education and infrastructure initiative, thus ensuring the very same results those initiatives were intended to mitigate. This revisionist history is maddening. It excuses the knowing and willful policy decisions of politicians--many of them still in power, many others who continue to proudly carry forward their broken politics--by trying to argue that everybody was at fault, which is another way of saying nobody was at fault.