Costs and Benefits of Globalization

Some on the Right claim globalization to be an attempt by the Left to establish an international tyranny. In fact there are constituencies both for and against globalization on both the Left and the Right.

The conservatives who are for globalization are for the most part business-affiliated entities that want an access to international labor and international markets. The liberals who are for globalization for the most part want world peace, international friendship and poverty relief in the Third World.

The conservatives who are against globalization are people who want their nations to be sovereign and not have to follow instruction by entities such as United Nations, the WTO and the European Union. The liberals who are against globalization are for the most part labor – especially union labor – that has seen their jobs go overseas.

Who is right? Who is wrong? It appears that everyone involved has a point. Having been a part of the 1990s tech boom, I know how much prosperity global economy can generate. Having been either unemployed or underemployed the following decade, I know how hard can be the situation of the person whose job has been outsourced. I have been on both the winning side and the losing side of the global economy; and from what I can tell the amount of prosperity generated by global economy for business and consumer both should make it possible for the winners of the process to compensate the losers of the process – either through retraining them for jobs that are in demand or by hiring them on to do government projects.

From the standpoint of pure economics, globalization makes every bit of sense. I say this as someone with education in economics from a conservative American university. The problem is that the process also creates losers; and many of these losers become so through no fault of their own. An American laborer cannot compete with a man in China who can do the same job for $2,000 a year, and an American programmer cannot compete with someone in India who can do the same job for $5,000 a year and has a master's degree. By the logic of conservative himself, some degree of patriotism is called for in economic participants; and while some demands of the union movement – such as undoing free trade – are economically destructive, we cannot ignore the needs of working families who stand to lose their jobs to international economics.

Socially, globalization is a force for the better; however the process can be difficult in the short term and may be experienced as disruptive or painful by many participants. Ultimately it will work for the better, as it will tend to make winners of both men and women who are willing to be good to the other gender and losers of men and women who are not willing to be good to the other gender. Matches involving Western men and women from Russia, India, Iran or Brazil, will stand to result in better relationships for both parties than they stand to have at home. They will also result in an incentive for Western women and men in Russia, India, Iran and Brazil to treat the other gender right. People who want to be bad to the other gender will be rendered uncompetitive, and there will be a real-world reason for people to be good to the other gender, without there being any taxpayer money spend toward that effect. Many Western men – especially ones who like to be violent toward women – fear losing their women to men from abroad. If they were really thinking like Western men are meant to think, they will be seeing opportunity. An average Muslim or Russian man is worse to his wife than even the average “redneck”; and for a Western man globalization means access to beautiful, cultured, family-oriented woman from abroad for whom even he would be an improvement over what she faces at home. It allows him to be free of the feminist Western women he hates and gives him a chance at a life with a woman who is willing to be nice to him.

One thing that is known for sure: Globalization is in no way limited to the Left. I attended a conservative church in Virginia whose pastor said that “God is globalizing His world.” I was given empirical evidence that globalization is good economically by a conservative American university. The phrase “New World Order” was first used on a large scale in American political debate by Republican president George Bush Sr., who recommended it as a solution for “a world run by the rule of law and not by the law of the jungle.” The Cold War had ended, and the American statesmen, in whose favor it had ended, sought to move it from a world centered around the Cold War to a world based on international economics and rule of law. In neither case do we see any kind of tyranny, at least not of the left-wing type.

Of course the losers in globalization will seek its undoing; and the winners in globalization will seek to perpetuate it. I have been both; and what I seek is the best of all possible worlds. People should have the economic and social benefits of globalization, and there should be one or another way to compensate the economic losers. As for the social losers, the solution does not have any cost whatsoever. They just need to change their attitude to the other gender and the treatment thereof.