Building the Good Society by Dumas Lloyd J.;

Author:Dumas, Lloyd J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2019-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

Interacting with the World

Free Trade and Globalization

“Globalization” is the term which has been commonly used for the latest phase in the ongoing process of increasing worldwide economic, political, and cultural integration. Its most ardent cheerleaders claim that globalization will inevitably lead us to a world of unprecedented prosperity, where borders don't matter and all of us have the same opportunities to succeed in life. Its most skeptical detractors contend that it is destroying cultural, political, and social diversity, creating competitive pressures that drive wages down and worsen working conditions for an increasing proportion of the earth's labor force, and in the process, ruining the global environment. And then there are also those who argue that the whole phenomenon is grossly exaggerated, that the world was more economically integrated a 100 or more years ago, and more politically integrated in the late nineteenth century.7

Global interconnectedness is, in fact, an important feature of modern life. But it is not necessarily the result of an elitist grab for power nor the herald of a new era of global conscientiousness and cooperation. It is instead the natural outcome of a broad trend of widening and thickening human interaction that has been going on for thousands, if not millions of years. As the technologies of transportation and communication improved over many millennia of human history (and prehistory), formerly isolated groups have more and more come into contact. They increasingly traded with each other, learned from each other, and all too often, fought with each other. In the course of doing so, the exchange of goods, ideas, and practices broadened; intensified; and became more critical to them. Like the earlier stages of this process, the most recent globalization stage has been facilitated by improvements in the technologies of transportation (such as supertankers and jumbo jets) and communication (such as smartphones and the Internet) that had their origins in the late nineteenth century and underwent explosive growth during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In a sense, some form of globalization was virtually inevitable, given human curiosity, greed, and technological prowess.8 But that does not mean that the particular form of globalization we have today was or is inevitable. We do not face a simple choice of either embracing it as it is or rejecting it. We can and should instead change the shape of globalization to make it more supportive of the building of better societies around the world.

There are still today vast inequalities of opportunity as well as of outcomes (such as wealth, power, and income) around the world, though inequalities of opportunity may be less dependent on pure geography today than in times gone by. The opportunities available to individuals remain very much a matter of socioeconomic class, and increasingly a matter of skill level. While individuals with comparable levels of skill are in more direct competition across borders than ever before, access to the means of acquiring comparable skill is still far from universal. An engineer in India may be more able to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.