If you want to drink deeply of unabashedly pro-globalization essays, the Cato Institute has a “Defending Globalization” project underway. The well-written essays are mostly short or mid-length, and clearly aimed at the general public–including undergraduate students. I can’t hope to summarize the essays here, and indeed, more essays are on their way (and you can sign up at the website to be on the distribution list).
But for a flavor of one essay, there’s are a few of the comments that caught my eye from the characteristically trenchant essay by Deirdre N. McCloskey titled “Globalization Creates a Global Neighborhood, Benefiting All,” and subtitled “Globalization puts everyone whose government permits it into a global neighborhood in which the price of a Samsung TV at a Best Buy in Washington is pretty much the same as in Beijing or New Delhi” (September 12, 2023).
McCloskey on the false allure of economic self-sufficiency:
A hermit could refuse to take advantage of globalization and achieve self‐sufficiency in his own little hut. It sounds lovely and brave. Grow your own wheat. Make your own accordion. But it’s been calculated that nowadays a hamburger made wholly self‐sufficiently would cost about $83. Perhaps it would be better to work a little in a market and then take the earnings to spend at the neighborhood McDonald’s. When Henry David Thoreau went to be self‐sufficient for two years from 1845 to 1847 on the banks of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, he still bought nails in town for his hut, and hoes for his crops, and books to read. Every Sunday, he went into town for dinner. Towns and trade are mighty tempting, with their low prices in production achieved by specialization and their low prices in marketing achieved by arbitrage.
McCloskey on “if trade and globalization is so bad, then why has the rise in globalization since the 1960s and 1970s coincided with ongoing economic growth?”
If the neo‐mercantilism of the 1930s, or for that matter the long‐running opposition on the left of politics to “neo‐liberalism,” as the left calls it, and now also on the right in the “new economic nationalism,” was a good idea, then the Kennedy Round and the GATT/WTO and the second globalization would have been a global disaster. It would have impoverished the poor of the world. One could buy bumper stickers declaring, “Milton Friedman, Father of Global Poverty.” But in 1960, four billion out of the five billion people in the world lived at an appalling $2 a day in present‐day prices, cooking over cow‐dung fires, hauling water two miles for drinking, and dying young and illiterate. It was how almost all humans had lived from the beginning. By now, one billion of the present eight billion people still live in such misery. But the other seven billion have leapt forward, many to the “superabundance” that Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley have recently chronicled. It happened in the face of gloomy predictions that rising population would starve us all, that our best days were behind us.
McCloskey on the gains from creative destruction:
Furthermore, the force of arbitrage works to erode pools of great wealth. The Nobel economist William Nordhaus has calculated that the gain from all the innovations in the United States since World War II went overwhelmingly to us, the customers, American and foreign, when competitors to General Motors, General Electric, and General Foods rushed in. Once upon a time we faced the terrible “monopolies” of Kodak, Nokia, IBM, Toys R Us, Tower Records, and Blockbuster. They are all now one with Nineveh and Tyre. Eighty‐five percent of the Fortune 500 firms in 1955 are gone. That’s good, not bad. New ideas replace the old ones, and then new investment replaces the old, and new jobs replace the old, which is to our benefit.
McCloskey on globalization as a form of liberty:
The ethical case for globalization is not simply that it enriches us all, though it does. It’s also that permitting arbitrage is an implication of allowing you to buy and sell with anyone you wish. It’s elementary liberty. And liberty is liberty is liberty. The liberty to trade is among the liberty to speak and read and vote and live and love. The left and the right, and often enough the center, disagree. They want to stop you from buying marijuana or buying a Toyota or buying a book with gay characters, even in the land of the free. The economic historian J. R. T. Hughes pointed out long ago that Americans have two contradictory positions, “Don’t tread on me” and “Don’t do that.” That “that” consists of things like dressing as you want or loving whom you want or buying where you want. Globalization is part of liberty.
