Q) You spend a fair amount of time on describing the underbelly of the beast – the 998 million Indians with no access to Internet, the farmers committing suicide there, or the laid-off workers in Detroit. The global middle class and under-class are suffering. But certainly the number of Chinese below poverty line has taken a dramatic nosedive in the past two decades. It also seems clear to me that the 9% growth rates in India are benefiting some poor. Certainly the story of globalization is not all doom and gloom. Tell us about the cross-cutting forces at work in globalization today.
MR: Today, leading economists, both advocates and critics of globalization, agree that international trade has improved the lives of many across the world, bringing technology and knowledge to virtually every corner of the globe, and has raised many above the tyranny of backward and often repressive cultures. No doubt volumes could be filled with success stories of international trade. It’s “corporate globalization” that’s at issue in the 21st century. Neoliberal free-trade proponents too often frame the issues in a polarizing way: “free-trade” versus “protectionism,” “good” versus “bad.” “Your are either for us, or against us,” they might say. “Free-trade reduces poverty, protectionism creates poverty.” Of course, this is bullshit. Globalization is not a bipolar issue, while the case can be made that “corporate globalization” is.
Defining poverty is key to any discussion of the so-called poverty lines. Is economic globalization the only form of globalization? Should some goods be off limits to corporate globalization and, if so, which ones? To answer these questions, we’ve included a large section in the book devoted to the concept of the Privatization of the Commons. We quote Indian ecologist Dr.Vandana Shiva, “People do not die for lack of incomes. They die for lack of access to resources. Here too Jeffrey Sacks (The End of Poverty) is wrong when he says, ‘In a world of plenty, 1 billion people are so poor, their lives are in danger.’ The indigenous people in the Amazon, the mountain communities in the Himalaya, peasants whose land has not been appropriated and whose water and biodiversity has not been destroyed by debt-creating industrial agriculture are ecologically rich, even though they do not earn a dollar a day. On the other hand, even at five dollars a day, people are poor if they have to buy their basic needs at high prices. Indian peasants who have been made poor and pushed into debt over the past decade to create markets for costly seeds and agrochemicals through economic globalization are ending their lives in thousands.”
After China announced plans to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers' rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980s, guess who started lobbying the Chinese politicians? As David Baboza reported in the New York Times, “The move, which underscores the government's growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here. The workers’ advocates say that the proposed labor rules — and more important, enforcement powers—are long overdue, and they accuse the American businesses of favoring a system that has led to widespread labor abuse.” “You have big corporations opposing basically modest reforms,” said Tim Costello, an official of the Global Labor Strategies and a longtime labor union advocate. “This flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will raise standards around the world.”
Article comments
1 - Jake
The following is writing response assignment I have done for my English class on the world is flat?. Is my analysis misguided or is it nearer to the truth than Friedman was?
In this critique of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, the reader receives an occasional glimpse into Friedman’s book itself. Some of these glimpses are more disturbing than others and some are even given appropriate recognition by the authors of the critique, Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo. However, there is one excerpt from Freidman’s book which I found to be far and above the most disturbing and culturally degrading. In this section Friedman asserts that there are certain jobs in our new flat world that have become “untouchable”. These “jobs” are demarcated by Freidman as the Great Collaborators and Orchestrators, the Great Synthesizers, the Great Explainers, the Great Leveragers, the Great Adapters, the Passionate Personalizers, and the Great Localizers. As Aronica and Ramdoo have paraphrased this proposal from Friedman’s book, “we should all become masters of social, organizational, and motivational skills”, or as they go on to say, managers. The most disturbing aspect of this idea is Freidman’s apparent perception of the American people as only being interested in getting a job so we can have money to buy stuff. In his defense, this is a very popular ideal of the American identity, but it is not the kind of goal we should hold above all else and certainly not what we should be teaching our children.
It is also important to note that Freidman is pushing for the American people to do something which not everyone was made for, to lead. Being a manager or president is a
heavy responsibility that requires lots of work with very little recognition aside from a pay check. To lead is essentially to carry the concerns of all those who are under you and this is a task that very few are suited for. Should we start telling our kids, “you can do whatever you want when you grow up…on the weekends.” Friedman’s idea not only contradicts the ideological foundations of this country but also a later chapter in his book. In this later chapter Friedman encourages for a push in math and science. Are these jobs also untouchable? Or is that only if we become smarter than China and India? As a college student graduating with a degree in English, it is a very bleak, flat world that Thomas Friedman has painted for me.