Much better conversation than the book title woud lead one to believe.
Two and 1/2 points
1) A lot of "globalization," for good or ill, had little to do with "policy" in the US or developed countries generally. The main factor was the Chinese decision to join the world economy. A concerted effort by the the US, Europe, and Japan to resist this, to restrict trade with and investment in China would have made tht much more difficult, but NOT doing that is not what most people mean by "globalization. Simultaneously, the container ship was being invented and internatinal communications got easier making it a lot more feasible to "ship" goods across oceans and set up subsidiary plants on the other side of the world. Policies more supported than opposed these trends, but they did not create them.
2) The post 90's globalization coincided as well with a secular shift in fiscal policy from roughly balanced budgets under Clinton (a full recovery from the Reagan deficits) to large full employment deficits with Bush, Trump and Biden. [The feeble recovery from the GFC was a separate problem.] Deficits draw in financial capital and this flow "strengthens" the dollar shifting internal price relations in favor of production of non-traded goods and away from traded goods. Deficits (the patterns of taxes and expenditures than make up deficits) also shift resources from investment to consumption meaning that growth was slower than it woud have been with more responsible fiscal policies. This shift in fiscal policy is not generally understood as nor is it an inevitable part of "globalization."
and 1/2) There WERE trade policy initiatives both NAFTA and WTO negotiations but the US negotiating strategy gave greater weight to creating opportunities for agricultural and service exports than for manufacturing.
Together these were extremely challenging for mid-skill workers in manufacturing. The first exposed their employers to greeter competition, competition which some employers coud meet by offshoring investment. The first and second together shifted investment away from domestic manufacturing even as employment opportunities from growth diminished, relative to different fiscal and trade negotiation policies.
Capital "G" Globalization has been a planetary economic central planning regime that has deliberately sought to lock geographic areas into fairly rigidly defined economic divisions of labor. And it absolutely required internal US policy, if the huge transformations, which were in some cases wild structural divergences from a 155 to 200 year law and regulation paradigm, in the decades that preceded it in order for it occur at all (some final touches even happened in the 90s). And I could go on but I'm pretty sure you already know this stuff.
Globalization has undoubtedly made the world a lot richer, the rich a lot richer, and huge numbers of the very poor a little richer. But it has made a substantial number of middle class or formerly middle class people much poorer. I can't speak globally, but in the US, the enormous right wing effort to make sure those who suffered from globalization received no compensation or share of the bounty has led us to where we are.
The idea that Globalization “lifted billions out of poverty” is analytically misleading. Most of the statistical claims behind this are derived from China’s trajectory alone, and even then, they rely on narrowly defined poverty metrics that were often revised downward in ways that obscure counterfactuals. More importantly, China’s success wasn’t a product of the Washington Consensus or the core tenets of global neoliberal integration. For most of the 1980s through the early 2010s, China remained one of the most decentralized and regionally sovereign large economies on Earth with an economy and political economy that was diffused, decentralized, deliberately economically redundant, and policy variable. Local governments directed investment, ran banks, managed trade zones, and made their own industrial policy. What worked in China worked because it deviated from the globalization model, not because it followed it.
In contrast, the countries that did embrace globalist prescriptions, centrally directed planetary capital flows, harmonized law and regulation, and externally directed fiscal design typically suffered serious long-term damage. Sub-Saharan Africa saw widespread de-industrialization in the 2000s and 2010s, much of Eastern Europe became a low wage periphery for Germany, and a sizable areas of America were hollowed out as industrial bases collapsed under the logic of planetary divisions of labor. Without domestic demand drivers and locally coordinated investment, many countries have found themselves reduced to mono-exporters or labor reservoirs, often with less capacity to feed or educate themselves than theys had before.
There’s also seems to be an error in the historical timeline here. Globalization didn’t begin with Bill Clinton. By the early 1980s, international finance was already highly mobile, and key transformations had been set in motion, internationalization of finance and the push to eliminate capital flow inhibitors, the the restructuring of scientific and technical funding toward centralized institutions, etc. The WTO may have replaced GATT in 1995, but the real architectural shift occurred earlier, when decentralized systems of credit, capital formation, and regional production were dismantled under the banner of "efficiency" (efficient for whom?) and central planning logics. Clinton’s contribution was to codify what had already been largely built via NAFTA, PNTR for China, key WTO agreements, etc but the framework was in place well before he took office.
And more importantly, and I want to emphasize this isnt just a social matter it has immense effect on economic and scientific organizational designs and outcomes, we need to be awares the political consequences. Globalization was primarily not an economic phenomenon, it was inherently a political project that hollowed out democratic governance in country after country. In America, in order to do it in the first place, the participatory party systems had to be dismantled, turning once robust civic machines into shell organizations. Decision-making moved from town halls and state legislatures to multilateral bodies, closed-door committees, and corporate-legal hybrids with little or no accountability. Globalization then finished the job and buried the remains in an unmarked grave, people don’t even remember that they once had meaningful influence over credit policy, education systems, or scientific development in their communities. This wasn’t beneficial progress, it was the coordinated liquidation of democratic structures in service of an some coordinated powerful special interests groups' transnational vision that concentrated capital, destroyed or nullified lower case "d" democratic governance structures, and replaced pluralistic political life with technocratic managerialism.
Much better conversation than the book title woud lead one to believe.
Two and 1/2 points
1) A lot of "globalization," for good or ill, had little to do with "policy" in the US or developed countries generally. The main factor was the Chinese decision to join the world economy. A concerted effort by the the US, Europe, and Japan to resist this, to restrict trade with and investment in China would have made tht much more difficult, but NOT doing that is not what most people mean by "globalization. Simultaneously, the container ship was being invented and internatinal communications got easier making it a lot more feasible to "ship" goods across oceans and set up subsidiary plants on the other side of the world. Policies more supported than opposed these trends, but they did not create them.
2) The post 90's globalization coincided as well with a secular shift in fiscal policy from roughly balanced budgets under Clinton (a full recovery from the Reagan deficits) to large full employment deficits with Bush, Trump and Biden. [The feeble recovery from the GFC was a separate problem.] Deficits draw in financial capital and this flow "strengthens" the dollar shifting internal price relations in favor of production of non-traded goods and away from traded goods. Deficits (the patterns of taxes and expenditures than make up deficits) also shift resources from investment to consumption meaning that growth was slower than it woud have been with more responsible fiscal policies. This shift in fiscal policy is not generally understood as nor is it an inevitable part of "globalization."
and 1/2) There WERE trade policy initiatives both NAFTA and WTO negotiations but the US negotiating strategy gave greater weight to creating opportunities for agricultural and service exports than for manufacturing.
Together these were extremely challenging for mid-skill workers in manufacturing. The first exposed their employers to greeter competition, competition which some employers coud meet by offshoring investment. The first and second together shifted investment away from domestic manufacturing even as employment opportunities from growth diminished, relative to different fiscal and trade negotiation policies.
Capital "G" Globalization has been a planetary economic central planning regime that has deliberately sought to lock geographic areas into fairly rigidly defined economic divisions of labor. And it absolutely required internal US policy, if the huge transformations, which were in some cases wild structural divergences from a 155 to 200 year law and regulation paradigm, in the decades that preceded it in order for it occur at all (some final touches even happened in the 90s). And I could go on but I'm pretty sure you already know this stuff.
Globalization has undoubtedly made the world a lot richer, the rich a lot richer, and huge numbers of the very poor a little richer. But it has made a substantial number of middle class or formerly middle class people much poorer. I can't speak globally, but in the US, the enormous right wing effort to make sure those who suffered from globalization received no compensation or share of the bounty has led us to where we are.
The idea that Globalization “lifted billions out of poverty” is analytically misleading. Most of the statistical claims behind this are derived from China’s trajectory alone, and even then, they rely on narrowly defined poverty metrics that were often revised downward in ways that obscure counterfactuals. More importantly, China’s success wasn’t a product of the Washington Consensus or the core tenets of global neoliberal integration. For most of the 1980s through the early 2010s, China remained one of the most decentralized and regionally sovereign large economies on Earth with an economy and political economy that was diffused, decentralized, deliberately economically redundant, and policy variable. Local governments directed investment, ran banks, managed trade zones, and made their own industrial policy. What worked in China worked because it deviated from the globalization model, not because it followed it.
In contrast, the countries that did embrace globalist prescriptions, centrally directed planetary capital flows, harmonized law and regulation, and externally directed fiscal design typically suffered serious long-term damage. Sub-Saharan Africa saw widespread de-industrialization in the 2000s and 2010s, much of Eastern Europe became a low wage periphery for Germany, and a sizable areas of America were hollowed out as industrial bases collapsed under the logic of planetary divisions of labor. Without domestic demand drivers and locally coordinated investment, many countries have found themselves reduced to mono-exporters or labor reservoirs, often with less capacity to feed or educate themselves than theys had before.
There’s also seems to be an error in the historical timeline here. Globalization didn’t begin with Bill Clinton. By the early 1980s, international finance was already highly mobile, and key transformations had been set in motion, internationalization of finance and the push to eliminate capital flow inhibitors, the the restructuring of scientific and technical funding toward centralized institutions, etc. The WTO may have replaced GATT in 1995, but the real architectural shift occurred earlier, when decentralized systems of credit, capital formation, and regional production were dismantled under the banner of "efficiency" (efficient for whom?) and central planning logics. Clinton’s contribution was to codify what had already been largely built via NAFTA, PNTR for China, key WTO agreements, etc but the framework was in place well before he took office.
And more importantly, and I want to emphasize this isnt just a social matter it has immense effect on economic and scientific organizational designs and outcomes, we need to be awares the political consequences. Globalization was primarily not an economic phenomenon, it was inherently a political project that hollowed out democratic governance in country after country. In America, in order to do it in the first place, the participatory party systems had to be dismantled, turning once robust civic machines into shell organizations. Decision-making moved from town halls and state legislatures to multilateral bodies, closed-door committees, and corporate-legal hybrids with little or no accountability. Globalization then finished the job and buried the remains in an unmarked grave, people don’t even remember that they once had meaningful influence over credit policy, education systems, or scientific development in their communities. This wasn’t beneficial progress, it was the coordinated liquidation of democratic structures in service of an some coordinated powerful special interests groups' transnational vision that concentrated capital, destroyed or nullified lower case "d" democratic governance structures, and replaced pluralistic political life with technocratic managerialism.