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Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu

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Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#31

Post by DINKDINK »

pillowkusis wrote: post #2

I don't like the use of the word "predictable". I would qualify this populist uprising as a Black Swan[0], and as Taleb describes in his book, one of the common reactions to a black swan is to rationalize it's obvious predictability after the fact. Were there logical reasons to believe this populist uprising would occur? Of course (and this paper does a good job exploring them). Was it predictable? I don't know. By a…

I agree that we should doubt that the populism was predictable. Ex-post many people claim things could have been predictable but I would argue against this political movement as a Black Swan. The main point in Taleb's book is that Black Swans are /critically/ a result of inductive reasoning. Black Swans events are called such because black swans used to be a mythic creature that people would refer to because they had never been seen.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#32

Post by Leader2light »

People need to realize there is not enough for everyone. Apple just hit 1 billion iphones. Facebook is close to 2 billion. There are 7.5 billion people on earth. They all want iphones, facebook, AC, food, clean water. You can see where this is going and it's not good.

I personally think its almost made worse by the internet and people being connected, they see and feel what they are missing. Most Africans, for example, would kill to be in Europe / USA.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#33

Post by rayiner »

Swizec wrote: post #24
candiodari wrote: post #6

It is too easy to forget that when a person is employed at $100k-$200k per year in the Bay Area, you want things like stopping climate change, more parks, more air, fair treatment, and above all, peace and prosperity. When making $30k with absolutely zero hope of real increases in Atlanta being a warehouse worker for an industry that's disappearing, the same person would burn all those things down, I would have said…

I for one support globalization because it's how me and all my friends escaped the fate of our parents. Working all your life for $20k/year in a tiny little country in Europe. Without globalization we'd all be fucked. If we could get skills and jobs that rival Bay Area or are in Bay Area from half the world away, why can't someone from Atlanta? What's stopping them? What, realistically, are the missinh opportunities…

Globalization unlocks the potential of top 5% types stuck in underdeveloped countries. At the same time, it often undermines the prosperity of bottom 2/3 types born in wealthy countries. As a matter of democratic theory, however, the political establishment's duty is to the majority of the populace in their own country, not to untapped potential in other countries.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#34

Post by heavenlyblue »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #16

just a minor gripe: was predictable is lame. you either predict the future or you dont. you dont say that you could have predicted it. i get the point of the article, but its lame when people try to act like the "could have predicted" something, because they are using the fact that it happened.

One of the first names that comes to my mind regarding the prediction of the right-wing populism is Camille Paglia.

Now while I agree with the point you're trying to make, it seems to me that the main motivation behind the article is that there are political climates when the changes are inevitable; and the question this article is trying to answer is when should we listen to the individuals rather than take the larger picture of the opinion landscape?

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#35

Post by clavalle »

The trouble with economic globalization is that we assumed that markets work and work well all over the world. That there would be an inevitable stable middle class built from the sheer power of market forces.

It turns out that those in power around the world have every incentive to keep the gains to themselves and keep their population desperate -- desperate people have to weigh their economic decisions against their physical well-being and continued existence and play the game not to gain power but not to lose everything. And our answer in the US seemed to be that the market is always right; if parity can't be achieved by lifting the poor around the world up to a near-US level of middle class, then it must be reached by pushing the middle class in the US down to desperation level and reducing our overhead to compete on a world stage where other leaders in power can more easily ignore the negative externalities that they push on their population.

It was, in a word, stupid.

It is too easy for the wealthy of the greater world to ignore the problems they create at home by being 'citizens of the world'.

I don't agree with Trump on much but I do agree that relying upon the market to fix all ills hasn't worked. We need to flex the economic muscle we have and tie trade to political reforms or find a way to bypass the powers that be and pull up the people directly. Otherwise, we are stuck in a race to the bottom.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#36

Post by candiodari »

pillowkusis wrote: post #2

I don't like the use of the word "predictable". I would qualify this populist uprising as a Black Swan[0], and as Taleb describes in his book, one of the common reactions to a black swan is to rationalize it's obvious predictability after the fact. Were there logical reasons to believe this populist uprising would occur? Of course (and this paper does a good job exploring them). Was it predictable? I don't know. By a…

I would argue quite the opposite. It's not a Black Swan at all. It's an entirely predictable outcome that is caused by the incentives of large groups of people.

E.g. when people say "software is eating the world", that really means software engineers, like most people reading this site, are taking away the means of existence of hundreds millions of people. In the US, but much more so outside of the US.

Can you really call it a black swan when

1) you see it coming

2) it is perfectly clear what can be done (e.g. killing globalization and stopping people movement around the globe, as is being advocated, yes it's racist, yes it's going to kill GDP and in that sense "make us all worse off", but it's hard to deny that it will help. Not in the way we want it, it'll kill our access to ipads, and force inferior alternatives in many ways. But it will help)

3) you will not cooperate with preventing the black swan, even yourself, because of incentives (you would lose your job)

4) ...

This "populist uprising" is a feedback loop that's just barely getting started. It is currently absolutely not worth the word "uprising". A few republicans got elected. Sorry to point this out but that won't be the end of it. It hasn't even begun.

We'll need to be very lucky to avoid another war.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#37

Post by justforFranz »

1. Labor has no pricing power.

2. All the spigots for cheap labor & goods have been on full blast with no real sign of slowing - at all.

3. We can't have a mature conversation in this country about adjusting the pace of change in society. It's basically whatever capital wants, capital gets.

4. Since productivity gains were decoupled from labor's wage increases in the late 1970's, the notion of "getting ahead" by working & providing labor is ultimately an exercise in irony.

5. Ameliorating these concerns by replacing them with race antagonism is deeply stupid.

6. Fundamentalism of all religious stripes is a conservative reaction against encroaching modernity, globalization & cosmopolitanism - which upsets local power hierarchies & is a threat to the status quo.

7. We need labor power with continued, but this time measured international engagement. Isolationism won't work and is an over-reaction.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#38

Post by Mikeb85 »

The biggest problem with Globalisation is that it doesn't contribute to global economic development. It merely outsources manual labour and less profitable/desirable work from rich countries to less-developed countries because of the price difference in labour.

Growing up I always imagined a world where the big cities of Africa could be just as developed as those in Europe, Asia or America. Instead we've been given a new form of colonialism where developed countries take the best minds from the developing world, and outsource all the work we don't want to poor countries.

This of course hurts our working class, as well as contributing nothing to the actual development of poor countries. So it's really no surprise that our working class is rebelling, as well as creating unrest in the developing world.

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#39

Post by Jtsummers »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #22
perfmode wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racism and poverty are related.

Yes, and you can fix it by fixing poverty. Not by calling poor people racists.

Poor people aren't racist (well, some are, racism knows no class boundaries), but many minorities are in poverty due to racist policies (or their families were pushed into poverty by said policies and the poverty cycle is incredibly hard to break out of, even if the policies have been largely removed or mitigated).

Re: Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

#40

Post by Brakenshire »

deepnotderp wrote: post #29
candiodari wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that while the 1% doesn't include all IT workers in the bay area, the 2% does (I believe 1.6% is 100k per year before tax). It's easy to complain about the 1%, but most people on this site ... are the 1%. Median household income in the US is $55,775. That means, about half of all US households have less than that. [1] By and large, it's not the wealth enjoyed by the few. It's the comfortable, but proba…

It's not even the "1%", it's the "1% of the 1%", Zuckerberg is great no doubt, but does he really deserve 2000X as much as a high level machine learning researcher? The issue is that ~6-8 people in the world own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 40% of the world, that's not because of eight software engineers making $100K.

> The issue is that ~6-8 people in the world own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 40% of the world,

Broadly speaking, isn't this because the bottom 40% of the world don't have savings? The statistic seems misleading. You could have 1 dollar, and you'd have greater wealth than more or less everyone in the world with a mortgage.

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