...It's no Fulbright scholar who sees that a global economy based on long distance trade is having seriously deliterious effects

Low costs for consumer products, a global supply chain increasing productivity and providing education, employment and money to hitherto agrarian societies, rising stars of the global economy like India and China - these do not seem too deleterious effects. If you would rather that the new global forces be bottled up and Indians return to their villages, Chinese to their fields, well then fuck anti-globalization efforts.

Globalization is here to stay, not for the first time in history. A shift of global dynamics, power and production is underway - fortunately not led by Comintern.

>>You may have noticed that our dollar doesn't mean very much internationally. A fundamental tenet of trade theory is that trade amongst nations should be balanced evenly between imports and exports. We are flouting this economic truism, and waving around our 620 billion dollars of foreign date like so much dirty laundry. In this country we are living so high on foreign borrowing to pay for our excess of imports, that our foreign debt is skyrockting.<<

This widely accepted trade imbalance 'problem' is actually not the problem people think it is. Our foreign debt is high because our level of imports is high. This has been characteristic of the US since colonial times. While we are great producers, we are even greater consumers, and despite common assumptions, a huge consumer marketplace weilds enormous economic power - really much more than a producing economy does. Consumers drive the market and Americans consume like no one else. What the world produces, how they produce it and what they can sell it for is determined almost entirely by what US consumers want. Without our giant level of consumption and massive imports the rest of the industrial world would basically implode economically. And we buy these products with US dollars. That's why the current relatively modest decline in the dollar is so significant. Not because it hurts the US, but because of the pressure it puts on foreign manufacturers by cutting their profit margins. They can't afford to raise prices on their products in the US, but the amount they are making on those products has been slightly reduced. This has the effect of basically transfering economic weakness out of the US economy and into the economies of our trading partners. As the dollar has gone down the US GDP has actually gone up, while the GDPs of our major trading partners has correspondingly gone down.

Dave

Thanks Jennie and glad to see you back!

Opposition to globalization seems to be largely based upon philosophy rather than economics, since the overall economic success of the system is hard to dispute. Of course there are relative winners and losers as there are with any system, but the opportunity is there for most anyone in the world to take advantage of economies of scale and efficiency and I fail to see how this can be bad.

I agree that improving the environment is a critical goal, but I see a global approach as the only way to achieve that goal on a "sustainable" basis.

>>I agree that improving the environment is a critical goal, but I see a global approach as the only way to achieve that goal on a "sustainable" basis.<<

To date the problem with the global approach to environmental reform is that the issue has been used by certain special interests and certain nations as a club to use against the United States not because we are great polluters, but because we are economically powerful. Environmental mandates which let China and Mexico and Nigeria spew forth enormous amounts of pollution while heavily penalizing the United States for the relatively tiny amount of pollution we produce is blatantly unfair. Countries which have taken steps to limit emissions should not be penalized while those which are making virtually no efforts to limit pollution are given free reign merely because they are farther behind on the track of industrialization.

Dave

exactly Dave, that's why I say a true "global" approach is necessary

This has the effect of basically transfering economic weakness out of the US economy and into the economies of our trading partners. As the dollar has gone down the US GDP has actually gone up, while the GDPs of our major trading partners has correspondingly gone down.

dave,
thanks for your thoughts. please enlighten for me how this effect of 'transferring economic weakness into the economies of our trading partners' is a good thing. also, to which trading partners do you refer specifically? jennie

Opposition to globalization seems to be largely based upon philosophy rather than economics, since the overall economic success of the system is hard to dispute.

i think this depends on your metric of economic success, eric. as to the opposition being largely in the world of the immaterial (ie: philosopical), i suspect the book aims to mitigate that pitfall with real world case studies of working 'alternatives.'

>>thanks for your thoughts. please enlighten for me how this effect of 'transferring economic weakness into the economies of our trading partners' is a good thing. <<

I didn't actually say it was a good thing. But it's not necessarily a bad thing either. As long as it's not done excessively it helps bolster our GDP by making it cheaper for big corporations to do business in the US than it would be otherwise and making it more expensive for them to do business in competing nations. It also essentially steals wealth from manufacturers in other countries who are operating and paying expenses in Euros but have to sell their products in the US for devcalued dollars, but cannot raise prices so long as there is competition in the marketplace becaus the US us the only consumer marketplace large enough and affluent enough to buy their products in sufficient quantity.

>>also, to which trading partners do you refer specifically? jennie<<

Germany and France more than anyone else, but also oil producing nations and to a lesser degree Japan because their economy and monetary system are more intimately intermeshed with ours.

Dave
http://www.diablog.us