10 ms·

Does it make sense then to limit the impact by de-globalising economic activity to a scale that can be more easily understood?

by ptah 7y ago

pjc50 7y ago
The cost of that is considerable. No more cheap smartphones means no more app economy. If you want to go even further, the only way to really de-globalise is to stop using oil ...
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  OTOH no more gig economy shenanigans, VC dollars destroying industries, less of a race to the bottom everywhere, less centralization, probably healthier competition... I don't have anything close to a belief yet, but the more I hang on HN and read stories from various industries, the more I'm starting to feel that maybe we took globalization a bit too far, or at least we're now learning about bad side effects. Human groups tend to be recursive hierarchies, and to this environment our intuitions about trust and behavior are adapted. Global economy does its best to cut straight through that. Many smart people must have already talked through this to death. If anyone has pointers towards reading material, I'd strongly appreciate it.
  - simonh 7y ago
    Globalisation is fundamentally about individual freedom. It's about removing the barriers between a person in the USA or Europe meeting and doing business with a person in India, China or Africa without governments getting in the way. Fewer trade barriers, fewer regulations, more freedom. When you give people freedoms like that, and there is huge advantage to be gained from it, people quickly find ways to scale it up to benefit the maximum number of people as much as possible. That's what a company is. It's a way to scale up economic activity. This dynamic has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last few decades alone. That's a number so big and a transformation in people's lives to dramatic that it's hard to grasp mentally in a meaningful way. That didn't happen because of farmer's markets and buying local produce in Wholefoods, much as it might pain us to admit it. Does globalisation have it's down side? Yes, absolutely. It has increased pollution and accelerated the rate of consumption of resources. But what could we say to those families, those hundreds of millions of people, that could justify denying them their opportunities?
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Corporate freedom, not individual freedom. Make your shite without government getting in the way with pesky regulations about adequate safety, working conditions, environmental impact and a living wage, etc. Move to somewhere else if you can make it a dollar cheaper. We're already seeing places lined up to replace China for cheapest production. Those opportunities might turn out to have been fleeting.
      - simonh 7y ago
        Individual freedom. The freedom of entrepreneurs in China to build factories and make deals with the West. The freedom for Chinese workers to apply for and take jobs in those factories. They're all individuals. You can't take those freedoms away without hurting individuals either. We don't pass laws that apply on a company by company basis. A law that allows one entrepreneur to start a new business can allow a thousand others to do the same. That's how capitalism works. It's what it is. China and the USA didn't pass a Jack Ma law that allowed Jack Ma to trade with America. He took advantage of individual freedoms available to anyone. I'm sure he had particular opportunities too, but he was free to take advantage of them, as others were free to take advantage of opportunities they had. China is working it's way up the economic ladder. Low end assembly isn't moving out of China because other countries are getting cheaper. It's moving out because there are more higher paid jobs in China now, so it's harder (more expensive) to persuade Chinese workers to do low end jobs. Average factory worker wages in Chine are now 5x those in India, because their value-add has rocketed. Chinese workers have better opportunities now.
        NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        It's what it is today because that's how it's been adjusted by the capitalists, economists and politicians. I'll avoid the inevitable diversion into neoliberalism. The fifties and sixties had a sustained period of increasingly shared worker participation, believed in by both sides of the political fence. Rising pay, conditions, pensions, fringe benefits, and reducing inequalities. Regulation to combat the ills of capitalism and markets, to prevent a repeat of 1929, to be suspicious of overly large corporations, to improve the lives both of worker and residents near the factory. It was Republican Nixon who formed the EPA and brought the clean air act. By placing commerce above nation you restrict the impact of government, the shared deal is defenestrated, and it becomes a global race to the bottom. It makes it super-easy to trade one nation against another, and move profit around to avoid paying the rightful tax. Just because. The corporation is now above its government. Make it wherever's cheapest or has fewest restrictions. The current home of manufacture rises, the globe as a whole does not. Environmentally, climatically and regulationally it got worse. Not to say I object to other nations rising, I don't at all. It could have been done without throwing baby out with the bath water.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    I do remember when there was a strong left "anti-globalisation" movement, mostly focused on the "G8" and "G20" meetings. Two things seem to have contributed to ending that: one is heavy police action against the violent demos, and the other is the rise of "rightwing anti-globalisation" which tends to be anti-immigrant and anti-semitic. Joseph Stiglitz and Naomi Klein are probably the standard starting points for reading about anti-globalisation.
simonh 7y ago
How do you do that without also limiting the up-side? Globalisation has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Localising economic activity would undo much of that.
- peteradio 7y ago
  Since 1970 the world has added about 4 billion people, I don't think the claim that "100 million" have been lifted out of poverty can be taken by itself. What if 100 million have been added to the "not super poor" class while 3.9 billion have been added to the "effectively" slaves class? Not saying that's what has happened but "lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty" sounds like a focused view that ignores all else.
  - simonh 7y ago
    I didn't say 100 million, I said hundreds of millions. That's a very cautious low ball though. That's probably the rough scale of people added to the middle class, not just raised out of poverty, in China alone. We don't need to guess what happened to the global population though, they're out there in the world. We can ask them. Just since 1990, the share of the global population living on less than $1.90 a day has fallen from 44% to about 9.5% in 2015[1]. The graphs there are broken because different studies have used different measures of poverty at different times, but the trends and absolute numbers are clear. Global poverty as a proportion of population is about 1/6th what it was in 1960. [1]https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-poverty-facts https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-...
    - bakuninsbart 7y ago
      According to official statistics, China's middle class grew from 2.1% (29 million people) in 1999 to 39% (531 million people) in 2013. Average wagegrowth has been 11% between 2001 and 2015. https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/ https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/
    - peteradio 7y ago

Does it make sense then to limit the impact by de-globalising economic activity to a scale that can be more easily understood?

by ptah 7y ago

Does it make sense then to limit the impact by de-globalising economic activity to a scale that can be more easily understood?

pjc50 7y ago

The cost of that is considerable. No more cheap smartphones means no more app economy. If you want to go even further, the only way to really de-globalise is to stop using oil ...

TeMPOraL 7y ago
OTOH no more gig economy shenanigans, VC dollars destroying industries, less of a race to the bottom everywhere, less centralization, probably healthier competition... I don't have anything close to a belief yet, but the more I hang on HN and read stories from various industries, the more I'm starting to feel that maybe we took globalization a bit too far, or at least we're now learning about bad side effects. Human groups tend to be recursive hierarchies, and to this environment our intuitions about trust and behavior are adapted. Global economy does its best to cut straight through that. Many smart people must have already talked through this to death. If anyone has pointers towards reading material, I'd strongly appreciate it.
- simonh 7y ago
  Globalisation is fundamentally about individual freedom. It's about removing the barriers between a person in the USA or Europe meeting and doing business with a person in India, China or Africa without governments getting in the way. Fewer trade barriers, fewer regulations, more freedom. When you give people freedoms like that, and there is huge advantage to be gained from it, people quickly find ways to scale it up to benefit the maximum number of people as much as possible. That's what a company is. It's a way to scale up economic activity. This dynamic has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last few decades alone. That's a number so big and a transformation in people's lives to dramatic that it's hard to grasp mentally in a meaningful way. That didn't happen because of farmer's markets and buying local produce in Wholefoods, much as it might pain us to admit it. Does globalisation have it's down side? Yes, absolutely. It has increased pollution and accelerated the rate of consumption of resources. But what could we say to those families, those hundreds of millions of people, that could justify denying them their opportunities?
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Corporate freedom, not individual freedom. Make your shite without government getting in the way with pesky regulations about adequate safety, working conditions, environmental impact and a living wage, etc. Move to somewhere else if you can make it a dollar cheaper. We're already seeing places lined up to replace China for cheapest production. Those opportunities might turn out to have been fleeting.
    - simonh 7y ago
      Individual freedom. The freedom of entrepreneurs in China to build factories and make deals with the West. The freedom for Chinese workers to apply for and take jobs in those factories. They're all individuals. You can't take those freedoms away without hurting individuals either. We don't pass laws that apply on a company by company basis. A law that allows one entrepreneur to start a new business can allow a thousand others to do the same. That's how capitalism works. It's what it is. China and the USA didn't pass a Jack Ma law that allowed Jack Ma to trade with America. He took advantage of individual freedoms available to anyone. I'm sure he had particular opportunities too, but he was free to take advantage of them, as others were free to take advantage of opportunities they had. China is working it's way up the economic ladder. Low end assembly isn't moving out of China because other countries are getting cheaper. It's moving out because there are more higher paid jobs in China now, so it's harder (more expensive) to persuade Chinese workers to do low end jobs. Average factory worker wages in Chine are now 5x those in India, because their value-add has rocketed. Chinese workers have better opportunities now.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        It's what it is today because that's how it's been adjusted by the capitalists, economists and politicians. I'll avoid the inevitable diversion into neoliberalism. The fifties and sixties had a sustained period of increasingly shared worker participation, believed in by both sides of the political fence. Rising pay, conditions, pensions, fringe benefits, and reducing inequalities. Regulation to combat the ills of capitalism and markets, to prevent a repeat of 1929, to be suspicious of overly large corporations, to improve the lives both of worker and residents near the factory. It was Republican Nixon who formed the EPA and brought the clean air act. By placing commerce above nation you restrict the impact of government, the shared deal is defenestrated, and it becomes a global race to the bottom. It makes it super-easy to trade one nation against another, and move profit around to avoid paying the rightful tax. Just because. The corporation is now above its government. Make it wherever's cheapest or has fewest restrictions. The current home of manufacture rises, the globe as a whole does not. Environmentally, climatically and regulationally it got worse. Not to say I object to other nations rising, I don't at all. It could have been done without throwing baby out with the bath water.
- pjc50 7y ago
  I do remember when there was a strong left "anti-globalisation" movement, mostly focused on the "G8" and "G20" meetings. Two things seem to have contributed to ending that: one is heavy police action against the violent demos, and the other is the rise of "rightwing anti-globalisation" which tends to be anti-immigrant and anti-semitic. Joseph Stiglitz and Naomi Klein are probably the standard starting points for reading about anti-globalisation.

simonh 7y ago

How do you do that without also limiting the up-side? Globalisation has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Localising economic activity would undo much of that.

peteradio 7y ago
Since 1970 the world has added about 4 billion people, I don't think the claim that "100 million" have been lifted out of poverty can be taken by itself. What if 100 million have been added to the "not super poor" class while 3.9 billion have been added to the "effectively" slaves class? Not saying that's what has happened but "lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty" sounds like a focused view that ignores all else.
- simonh 7y ago
  I didn't say 100 million, I said hundreds of millions. That's a very cautious low ball though. That's probably the rough scale of people added to the middle class, not just raised out of poverty, in China alone. We don't need to guess what happened to the global population though, they're out there in the world. We can ask them. Just since 1990, the share of the global population living on less than $1.90 a day has fallen from 44% to about 9.5% in 2015[1]. The graphs there are broken because different studies have used different measures of poverty at different times, but the trends and absolute numbers are clear. Global poverty as a proportion of population is about 1/6th what it was in 1960. [1]https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-poverty-facts https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-...
  - bakuninsbart 7y ago
    According to official statistics, China's middle class grew from 2.1% (29 million people) in 1999 to 39% (531 million people) in 2013. Average wagegrowth has been 11% between 2001 and 2015. https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/ https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/
  - peteradio 7y ago