Why globalization is better than a brick in the face

I came to an interesting revelation the other day, while I was reading about the protests surrounding the big IMF, G7, World Bank meetings, with their references to top hats and big steaks, and hitting women in the faces with bricks lastish week. All good fun… but this led me to think back on the ‘99 WTO Seattle protests, which a number of my friends went to (one guy I knew being so awesome as to hop a freight train to get there). Back then, in the eager days of my youth, it seemed to me as though there were some legitimate reasons to protest the WTO, but I realized last week that I’ve completely forgotten what those reasons are.

I’m writing about this today, instead of last week, because today I came across a new blog, and was distressed to find out that the first post was about the impending failure of globalization. Reading other posts I discovered that the writer has some fairly nice insights into why globalization is good, he just thinks that the anti-globalization backlash will eventually prove too strong, you know, with the majority of people caring more about hating foreigners than sound economic policy.

I’m a fairly regular reader of the Free Exchange blog over at the economist, which does a fairly good job of explaining why people who don’t believe free trade and globalization are good ideas are heavily lacking in common sense, and probably just want everyone in the world to starve to death. So I find this position a bit baffling, and needless to say, I think the argument that globalization will eventually fail is downright silly.

Paul Denlinger, the writer of said post, seems to forget that while “the moneyed classes represent only a comparatively small percentage of the world’s population,” they provide the largest number of cost benefit analyses, which often drive decision makers. Ever closer union, in EU parlance, does make everyone richer, and in a capitalist society the forces that add wealth always, at least eventually, win out.

Denlinger seems to unconsciously be arguing not about whether globalization will “succeed,” but rather whether the typical voter is rational, and thus, whether non-democratic countries will have more success adapting to the challenges of globalization because they don’t have to deal with pesky globalization protesters.

I’m rather ambivalent towards the question, as I’ve always heard that transparency and accountability overcome voter irrationality (anti-globalization leaders tend to crash their country’s economies, leading to them being booted out in a Democracy), on the other hand I hear India’s parliament is filled with socialist hippies.

I think the moral of the story here is that there is no need to choose between globalization and a brick in the face, because, for the time being at least, we’ll have both.

Bradley Gardner