6 ms·

Reads like a slogan for anti-globalization and nationalism. As with all slogans, it ignores important details that contradict it. Over the past four decades,

by cs702 4y ago

Reads like a slogan for anti-globalization and nationalism. As with all slogans, it ignores important details that contradict it. Over the past four decades, our current global economic system, promoting economic integration and interdependence between countries, has lifted billions out of poverty.[a][b] Billions. No sensible discussion of globalization can ignore that. The current backlash is not against globalization per se, but against: * greater concentration of economic power (e.g., more markets dominated by global mega corporations), * greater concentration of political and military power in authoritarian regimes who play by different rules (e.g., China), and * greater concentration of income and wealth (e.g., the hollowing out of the middle class in the US). We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater! -- [a] https://ourworldindata.org/poverty https://ourworldindata.org/poverty [b] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

HL33tibCe7 4y ago
But let’s also not throw out the baby with the bathwater in the _opposite_ direction. We should not be reliant on Russia for energy to such an extent that our economy gets destroyed when a Russian tyrant goes on an ego trip. We should not be allowing Chinese entities to own our energy infrastructure. We should not be allowing foreign nationals to buy up massive amounts of property in London with shady money, distorting the property market for normal citizens. There is a happy medium somewhere in between complete globalisation and complete isolation.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > We should not be allowing foreign nationals to buy up massive amounts of property in London Same way England should not be allowed to reign over 56 states with their King? I mean, if it goes both ways, I agree.
- cs702 4y ago
  We should not be reliant on fossil fuels for energy, period. There's a mountain of scientific evidence showing that extracting, transporting, storing, and burning all that poisonous crap is very bad for humankind. The sooner we move to other sources (fusion (!), solar, wind, etc.), the better for humankind. However, companies that make money from fossil fuels don't want that, and for the past four decades they've had the political and economic cloud to slow down or even stop progress. We have such "single points of failure" in the global economy because we have allowed market power to become highly concentrated, nationally and globally, without any checks and balances.
  - LargeWu 4y ago
    You're missing the point a bit. Replace energy with food, water, medicine, microchips, or any other commodities necessary for modern life and the point still stands.
    - cs702 4y ago
      I think I understood the point. The counterpoint I was trying to express, in response, is that this is a consequence of allowing high-concentration of market power in many of those commodities, nationally and globally, without any checks and balances.
  - tacitusarc 4y ago
    Reliance on other nations for critical resources is a separate concern from technological mechanisms for acquiring those resources, even if the later may help solve the former.
    - cs702 4y ago
      I think reliance on highly-concentrated markets (globally/nationally) for any critical resource is the bigger issue.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Yes, but this is entirely at odds with globalization. A primary reason we outsource production to developing countries is to exploit their lack of regulation (including environmental regulation). If the UK transitions to green energy, they’re not subject to Putin, but they’re still subject to Xi and they are still contributing substantially to emissions. Moreover, transitioning to green energy will probably create reliance on rare earth metals and other minerals that will likely be controlled by despots.
- Kaibeezy 4y ago
  Of course, the UK threw out the baby and the bathwater with Brexit. I'd have rendered that slogan as “The more reliant we are on others with whom we have any substantive combination of: a severe trade imbalance, no framework for meaningful dialog, and conflicting major foreign policy goals -- the less resilient we are as a nation”
tomp 4y ago
There’s also (4) dependence on other, potentially hostile regimes on “national security” imports/products like steel, chips, oil, energy, …
- cs702 4y ago
  Yes, but keep in mind that we find ourselves here due to the rising concentration of market power in fewer and fewer global mega corporations (e.g., TSMC in chips). Over the past four decades, there have been few checks and balances on the concentration of corporate power, both at the national and global levels.
koheripbal 4y ago
Wisdom comes from searching for balance. Slogans and absolutisms are designed to tap frustrations to manipulate the masses.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
psacawa 4y ago
> The current backlash is not against globalization per se, but against: ... I cannot speak about the UK, but in general this isn't all that people are dissatisfied with about globalization. Very many are angry about the loss of a sense of home. If you examine the situation in purely material terms, you won't observe or measure those feelings. For others, the loss of home extends to a loss of community, which extends to a loss of self. Educated tech people can be software engineers first and English second, while the lower classes are, in my experience, English first, and their profession second. The loss hits harder for them. I haven't seen media discuss the identitarian dimension of globalisation. I suppose that has to do with media being populated primarily by one social class. Yet I feel that by ignoring them they have been burying nuclear waste for decades. I don't mean to tell you whether these emotions are "abhorrent racism" or "valid", I just mean say that they are to me the elephant in the room in any discussion of globalisation.
- cs702 4y ago
  That's a really good point. I missed mentioning it in my post above. That "sense of loss" is definitely an issue. That said, I do wonder whether people would be experiencing such a "sense of loss" if market power, political clout, and economic gains hadn't become so highly concentrated. That is, if more people in rich countries felt that their lives have changed for the better, they'd probably want more economic integration, not less.
- _3u10 4y ago
  A rig worker in the arctic explained it succinctly to me, I don’t care how many people it’s lifted out of poverty I care whether it’s better for me and my friends and family and right now it isn’t. For software engineers globalization is wonderful for many in the economy it isn’t.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > I don’t care how many people it’s lifted out of poverty I care whether it’s better for me and my friends and family and right now it isn’t. Except that: - the same rig worker will gladly buy consumer products cheaply manufactured in some developing or non-free Country thanks to globalization and will immediately stop buying them if the prices go up due to un-globalization (it's actually happening in UK, newspapers are full of articles similar to UK Shop sales slow as consumers shift spending toward essentials) - there are billions of people who don't care about the rig worker, they care about their own families. By virtue of how the democratic process works - majority wins - and how social evolution works - survival of the fittest form of society -, the rig worker either adapts to the new environment or will go extinct. Third option is the west goes to war against developing countries, trying to set the clock of history back and exploit them again, but this time I'm not sure the west could win. Point is: without solidarity among workers of the same class (I don't care about them, I care about me), the rig workers of the World will be ignored because they have literally no power other than their complains. I too don't care about 'em, why should I? if they don't care about anything else than themselves? They surely don't give a flying f*ck about me and how the globalization helped me and my family to live a better life. This is one of those things that a bit of global socialism could make better, but the solution, according to the rig worker, is the exact opposite: close the stable door when the horse has bolted, i.e. more nationalism, tarifs, walls, which will in the end work against the rig worker, not in their favour. p.s.: you can agree or disagree, but expecting that a small country with 80 million people should be more important than 4 billion people living in the developing World is simply delusional. Comply or die isn't that funny when it works against you, am I right?
mozman 4y ago
I support nationalism, we have many domestic problems we must fix before we start fixing other countries. If we have to go to war than so be it. People will always argue and there will always be consequences of these arguments.
- FpUser 4y ago
  >"many domestic problems we must fix before we start fixing other countries." >"If we have to go to war than so be it." The more I look at these two statements the more I think that someone would benefit from having their head examined.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    Yeah, bad idea to go to war unless your shit at home is already together. Wars are expensive. I think a lot of the domestic turmoil in the US can be linked to our useless wars in the ME. Could have used all that steel and those men to build stuff here: hospitals, schools, trains and so on. Bush & cheney did enormously more damage to the US than Trump. Not that I liked Trump at all.
    - FpUser 4y ago
      >"Yeah, bad idea to go to war unless your shit at home is already together." So if your country doing fine and all "shit is together" it is ok to start a war? What is fucking wrong with people.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- LargeWu 4y ago
  How many domestic problems in developed countries are the result of income inequality? Probably most of them. Poor education, poor wages, poor health(care)...these exist because of the billionaire class extracting wealth from the economy. Those problems aren't going to be solved by going to war.
_8j50 4y ago
No sensible discussion about globalization should ignore the impact of economic sanctions have had over the developing world and how globalization in some ways made weak countries subservient to strong countries.One of the main arguments is how it undermines a nation's self-determination and how the price is too high. Global trade isn't the same as globalization. You can trade fine with others without relying on them. So your discussion about lifing people from poverty should include how specifically interdependence between countries as opposed to improvements in technology amd trade relations has resulted in poverty reduction. We don't have to look far, because of globalization, a potential conflict between taiwan and china is the current biggest threat to global peace. TSMC is building factories in the US and India as well as apple trying to get out of China specifically to avoid global interdependence. TSMC plans to supply US demands by US fabs. But apple will face the same issue in other countries if or when conditions become hostile. We don't live in a world where every country is working together for the progression of mankind. Each country looks out for itself. This means banning US tech companies from operating in Countries like China but allowing them to outsource labor there. Anyone from the rustbelt or former industrial towns in the US will tell you the impact of outsourcing labor (greedy business finding a way to to pay people less). Another consideration is the impact of automation and how cheap labor is needed less and less so why not make stuff locally? It isn't just poverty that reduced but the wealth of the few top rich businesses increased by many orders of magnitude because they got around tax and labor laws thanks to globalization. My argument is you can still have free trade and innovation without giving up your sovreignity as a nation or looking the other way on tax and labor laws or undermining local labor unions.
zmgsabst 4y ago
4. you looted a billion people to uplift those billions — and they hate you now for robbing and oppressing their families to the point they couldn’t breed People who believe in globalism should’ve taken your advice thirty years ago — but after destroying families for two generations, they’re going to fall on the managerial class like feral animals seeking blood. The managerial class in the West will be executed for betraying their nations — and we’re past any way to stop that. Why is it people only give your wise managerial quips after disasters, but never proactively?
throwaway894345 4y ago
I don’t think people are just peeved that authoritarian regimes have passively become powerful, but that western nations are actively subsidizing them directly at the expense of our domestic middle classes (trading the welfare of our own citizens to empower authoritarian regimes and to pollute the environment).
coldtea 4y ago
>As with all slogans, it ignores important details that contradict it. Over the past four decades, our current global economic system, promoting economic integration and interdependence between countries, has lifted billions out of poverty.[a][b] Billions. In other countries doing the providing. It didn't do as well for the ones doing the dependency ones - except in transfering welth and competence outside, and to a small minority people on the inside getting mega-rich from this outsourcing, and a quite larger but still small minority of people benefitting from related jobs. Hence the "hollowing out of the middle class in the US", with the majority of the middle class and working class getting the short end of the stick, and a much smaller part of it and the upper middle class improving their lot. (And the overall impact of this process softened or hidden entirely for a good while through cheap money published and going around as credit and QE)

by cs702 4y ago

HL33tibCe7 4y ago

But let’s also not throw out the baby with the bathwater in the _opposite_ direction. We should not be reliant on Russia for energy to such an extent that our economy gets destroyed when a Russian tyrant goes on an ego trip. We should not be allowing Chinese entities to own our energy infrastructure. We should not be allowing foreign nationals to buy up massive amounts of property in London with shady money, distorting the property market for normal citizens. There is a happy medium somewhere in between complete globalisation and complete isolation.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> We should not be allowing foreign nationals to buy up massive amounts of property in London Same way England should not be allowed to reign over 56 states with their King? I mean, if it goes both ways, I agree.
cs702 4y ago
We should not be reliant on fossil fuels for energy, period. There's a mountain of scientific evidence showing that extracting, transporting, storing, and burning all that poisonous crap is very bad for humankind. The sooner we move to other sources (fusion (!), solar, wind, etc.), the better for humankind. However, companies that make money from fossil fuels don't want that, and for the past four decades they've had the political and economic cloud to slow down or even stop progress. We have such "single points of failure" in the global economy because we have allowed market power to become highly concentrated, nationally and globally, without any checks and balances.
- LargeWu 4y ago
  You're missing the point a bit. Replace energy with food, water, medicine, microchips, or any other commodities necessary for modern life and the point still stands.
  - cs702 4y ago
    I think I understood the point. The counterpoint I was trying to express, in response, is that this is a consequence of allowing high-concentration of market power in many of those commodities, nationally and globally, without any checks and balances.
- tacitusarc 4y ago
  Reliance on other nations for critical resources is a separate concern from technological mechanisms for acquiring those resources, even if the later may help solve the former.
  - cs702 4y ago
    I think reliance on highly-concentrated markets (globally/nationally) for any critical resource is the bigger issue.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Yes, but this is entirely at odds with globalization. A primary reason we outsource production to developing countries is to exploit their lack of regulation (including environmental regulation). If the UK transitions to green energy, they’re not subject to Putin, but they’re still subject to Xi and they are still contributing substantially to emissions. Moreover, transitioning to green energy will probably create reliance on rare earth metals and other minerals that will likely be controlled by despots.
Kaibeezy 4y ago
Of course, the UK threw out the baby and the bathwater with Brexit. I'd have rendered that slogan as “The more reliant we are on others with whom we have any substantive combination of: a severe trade imbalance, no framework for meaningful dialog, and conflicting major foreign policy goals -- the less resilient we are as a nation”

tomp 4y ago

There’s also (4) dependence on other, potentially hostile regimes on “national security” imports/products like steel, chips, oil, energy, …

cs702 4y ago
Yes, but keep in mind that we find ourselves here due to the rising concentration of market power in fewer and fewer global mega corporations (e.g., TSMC in chips). Over the past four decades, there have been few checks and balances on the concentration of corporate power, both at the national and global levels.

koheripbal 4y ago

Wisdom comes from searching for balance. Slogans and absolutisms are designed to tap frustrations to manipulate the masses.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

psacawa 4y ago

> The current backlash is not against globalization per se, but against: ... I cannot speak about the UK, but in general this isn't all that people are dissatisfied with about globalization. Very many are angry about the loss of a sense of home. If you examine the situation in purely material terms, you won't observe or measure those feelings. For others, the loss of home extends to a loss of community, which extends to a loss of self. Educated tech people can be software engineers first and English second, while the lower classes are, in my experience, English first, and their profession second. The loss hits harder for them. I haven't seen media discuss the identitarian dimension of globalisation. I suppose that has to do with media being populated primarily by one social class. Yet I feel that by ignoring them they have been burying nuclear waste for decades. I don't mean to tell you whether these emotions are "abhorrent racism" or "valid", I just mean say that they are to me the elephant in the room in any discussion of globalisation.

cs702 4y ago
That's a really good point. I missed mentioning it in my post above. That "sense of loss" is definitely an issue. That said, I do wonder whether people would be experiencing such a "sense of loss" if market power, political clout, and economic gains hadn't become so highly concentrated. That is, if more people in rich countries felt that their lives have changed for the better, they'd probably want more economic integration, not less.
_3u10 4y ago
A rig worker in the arctic explained it succinctly to me, I don’t care how many people it’s lifted out of poverty I care whether it’s better for me and my friends and family and right now it isn’t. For software engineers globalization is wonderful for many in the economy it isn’t.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > I don’t care how many people it’s lifted out of poverty I care whether it’s better for me and my friends and family and right now it isn’t. Except that: - the same rig worker will gladly buy consumer products cheaply manufactured in some developing or non-free Country thanks to globalization and will immediately stop buying them if the prices go up due to un-globalization (it's actually happening in UK, newspapers are full of articles similar to UK Shop sales slow as consumers shift spending toward essentials) - there are billions of people who don't care about the rig worker, they care about their own families. By virtue of how the democratic process works - majority wins - and how social evolution works - survival of the fittest form of society -, the rig worker either adapts to the new environment or will go extinct. Third option is the west goes to war against developing countries, trying to set the clock of history back and exploit them again, but this time I'm not sure the west could win. Point is: without solidarity among workers of the same class (I don't care about them, I care about me), the rig workers of the World will be ignored because they have literally no power other than their complains. I too don't care about 'em, why should I? if they don't care about anything else than themselves? They surely don't give a flying f*ck about me and how the globalization helped me and my family to live a better life. This is one of those things that a bit of global socialism could make better, but the solution, according to the rig worker, is the exact opposite: close the stable door when the horse has bolted, i.e. more nationalism, tarifs, walls, which will in the end work against the rig worker, not in their favour. p.s.: you can agree or disagree, but expecting that a small country with 80 million people should be more important than 4 billion people living in the developing World is simply delusional. Comply or die isn't that funny when it works against you, am I right?

mozman 4y ago

I support nationalism, we have many domestic problems we must fix before we start fixing other countries. If we have to go to war than so be it. People will always argue and there will always be consequences of these arguments.

FpUser 4y ago
>"many domestic problems we must fix before we start fixing other countries." >"If we have to go to war than so be it." The more I look at these two statements the more I think that someone would benefit from having their head examined.
- boppo1 4y ago
  Yeah, bad idea to go to war unless your shit at home is already together. Wars are expensive. I think a lot of the domestic turmoil in the US can be linked to our useless wars in the ME. Could have used all that steel and those men to build stuff here: hospitals, schools, trains and so on. Bush & cheney did enormously more damage to the US than Trump. Not that I liked Trump at all.
  - FpUser 4y ago
    >"Yeah, bad idea to go to war unless your shit at home is already together." So if your country doing fine and all "shit is together" it is ok to start a war? What is fucking wrong with people.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
LargeWu 4y ago
How many domestic problems in developed countries are the result of income inequality? Probably most of them. Poor education, poor wages, poor health(care)...these exist because of the billionaire class extracting wealth from the economy. Those problems aren't going to be solved by going to war.

_8j50 4y ago

No sensible discussion about globalization should ignore the impact of economic sanctions have had over the developing world and how globalization in some ways made weak countries subservient to strong countries.One of the main arguments is how it undermines a nation's self-determination and how the price is too high. Global trade isn't the same as globalization. You can trade fine with others without relying on them. So your discussion about lifing people from poverty should include how specifically interdependence between countries as opposed to improvements in technology amd trade relations has resulted in poverty reduction. We don't have to look far, because of globalization, a potential conflict between taiwan and china is the current biggest threat to global peace. TSMC is building factories in the US and India as well as apple trying to get out of China specifically to avoid global interdependence. TSMC plans to supply US demands by US fabs. But apple will face the same issue in other countries if or when conditions become hostile. We don't live in a world where every country is working together for the progression of mankind. Each country looks out for itself. This means banning US tech companies from operating in Countries like China but allowing them to outsource labor there. Anyone from the rustbelt or former industrial towns in the US will tell you the impact of outsourcing labor (greedy business finding a way to to pay people less). Another consideration is the impact of automation and how cheap labor is needed less and less so why not make stuff locally? It isn't just poverty that reduced but the wealth of the few top rich businesses increased by many orders of magnitude because they got around tax and labor laws thanks to globalization. My argument is you can still have free trade and innovation without giving up your sovreignity as a nation or looking the other way on tax and labor laws or undermining local labor unions.

zmgsabst 4y ago

4. you looted a billion people to uplift those billions — and they hate you now for robbing and oppressing their families to the point they couldn’t breed People who believe in globalism should’ve taken your advice thirty years ago — but after destroying families for two generations, they’re going to fall on the managerial class like feral animals seeking blood. The managerial class in the West will be executed for betraying their nations — and we’re past any way to stop that. Why is it people only give your wise managerial quips after disasters, but never proactively?

throwaway894345 4y ago

I don’t think people are just peeved that authoritarian regimes have passively become powerful, but that western nations are actively subsidizing them directly at the expense of our domestic middle classes (trading the welfare of our own citizens to empower authoritarian regimes and to pollute the environment).

coldtea 4y ago

>As with all slogans, it ignores important details that contradict it. Over the past four decades, our current global economic system, promoting economic integration and interdependence between countries, has lifted billions out of poverty.[a][b] Billions. In other countries doing the providing. It didn't do as well for the ones doing the dependency ones - except in transfering welth and competence outside, and to a small minority people on the inside getting mega-rich from this outsourcing, and a quite larger but still small minority of people benefitting from related jobs. Hence the "hollowing out of the middle class in the US", with the majority of the middle class and working class getting the short end of the stick, and a much smaller part of it and the upper middle class improving their lot. (And the overall impact of this process softened or hidden entirely for a good while through cheap money published and going around as credit and QE)