The Incidental Economist

Globalization: Pros and Cons, Examples, Free Markets, Economic Growth (2001)

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• published: 19 Oct 2015
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Globalization (or globalisation) is the process of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture. Advances in transportation, such as the steam locomotive, steamship, jet engine, and container ship, and in telecommunications infrastructure, including the rise of the telegraph and its modern offspring, the Internet, and mobile phones, have been major factors in globalization, generating further interdependence of economic and cultural activities. Though scholars place the origins of globalization in modern times, others trace its history long before the European Age of Discovery and voyages to the New World. Some even trace the origins to the third millennium BCE. Large-scale globalization began in the 19th century. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the connectedness of the world's economies and cultures grew very quickly. The concept of globalization is a very recent term, only establishing its current meaning in the 1970s, which 'emerged from the intersection of four interrelated sets of "communities of practice": academics, journalists, publishers/editors, and librarians.[9] In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and the dissemination of knowledge.[10] Further, environmental challenges such as global warming, cross-boundary water and air pollution, and over-fishing of the ocean are linked with globalization.[11] Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, socio-cultural resources, and the natural environment. As summarized by Noam Chomsky: The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization" to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become "anti-globalist." This is simply vulgar propaganda, like the term "anti-Soviet" used by the most disgusting commissars to refer to dissidents. It is not only vulgar, but idiotic. Take the World Social Forum (WSF), called "anti-globalization" in the propaganda system – which happens to include the media, the educated classes, etc., with rare exceptions. The WSF is a paradigm example of globalization. It is a gathering of huge numbers of people from all over the world, from just about every corner of life one can think of, apart from the extremely narrow highly privileged elites who meet at the competing World Economic Forum, and are called "pro-globalization" by the propaganda system. Economic liberals and neoliberals generally argue that higher degrees of political and economic freedom in the form of free trade in the developed world are ends in themselves, producing higher levels of overall material wealth. Globalization is seen as the beneficial spread of liberty and capitalism.[275] Jagdish Bhagwati, a former adviser to the U.N. on globalization, holds that, although there are obvious problems with overly rapid development, globalization is a very positive force that lifts countries out of poverty by causing a virtuous economic cycle associated with faster economic growth.[157] Economist Paul Krugman is another staunch supporter of globalization and free trade with a record of disagreeing with many critics of globalization. He argues that many of them lack a basic understanding of comparative advantage and its importance in today's world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization