Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute devotes his latest National Review Online column to the misunderstood concept of globalization.
If there has been a bogeyman in politics this year, it has been “globalization.” While Brexit was seen by many as the latest rejection of the globalization that has been the mainstay of international economics since the end of the Second World War, American politicians, both left and right, have also turned against it.
Donald Trump is, of course, the high priest of anti-globalization. “We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism,” he swears. Bernie Sanders too complains that “the increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite, is failing people everywhere.” And, while Hillary Clinton seldom uses the actual term “globalization,” she often echoes the complaints of anti-globalists, especially on trade issues.
But the bitter denunciations of globalization miss the mark.
First, let’s understand what globalization is and is not. Despite the paranoid fantasies of the Internet, globalization has nothing to do with some nefarious plot to impose world government. It is not about United Nations control or some mythical North American Union. It has little to do with the bureaucratic nightmare of the European Union. Nor does it entail the military intervention and nation building popular in some neoconservative circles. Rather, globalization is simply about the free movement of goods, capital, people, and ideas around the world and across borders.
And we are much better off because of it. Globalization has lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty worldwide. As recently as 1990, nearly 2 billion people, 37 percent of the world’s population, lived in extreme poverty — that is, with incomes of less than $1.90 per day. Today, that is true of just 9.6 percent of the world’s population — barely 700 million people. That’s an enormous reduction in human misery that can be traced to globalization.
