So, why America’s apparent turn toward nationalism, nativism, and even isolationism? How could the nation most responsible for leading this great and grand strategy to move mankind out of insularity to such unprecedented prosperity now wish to effectively take a wrecking ball to the whole lot?
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson attributes it to America’s Republican Party’s endorsement of Donald Trump, who campaigns on “a brand of populism rooted in ignorance, prejudice, fear, and isolationism.” That may explain in large measure the motivation of many of those attacking globalization.
One of the principal architects of the extraordinary post-WWII effort to bring the world closer together to ensure stability, then President Harry Truman, once confidently asserted, “No nation on this globe should be more internationally minded than America because it was built by all nations.” Truman uttered those words when faced with similar challenges posed by the isolationists of his period.
The wisdom of President Truman, a great student of history, might also apply when he remarked, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” Do Americans today understand what the world had gone through in the first half of the last century? More importantly, do they understand the extraordinary impact their nation has had on the world and the potential for even greater progress?
Globalization has brought all markets, both America’s and other nations’, practically to the front door of everyone. Internet commerce – something else introduced to the world by the U.S. – has opened new frontiers to innovators, of which America has a great many, who create business, wealth, and prosperity. It has also exposed the world to much greater understanding, as humans can now communicate with nearly anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Globalization’s detractors make some relevant arguments that governments and societies need to address. The first of these is the growing income disparity between the so-called “one percent” and the rest of the country. As reported by University of California Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, “Six years after the end of the Great Recession, incomes of families in the lower 99 percent have recovered only about 60 percent of their losses due to that severe economic downturn.” Incomes of the top one percent of families, according to Saez, grew from $990,000 in 2009 to $1,360,000 in 2015, a growth of 37 percent. In contrast, the incomes of the bottom 99 percent of families grew only by 7.6 percent, from $45,300 in 2009 to $48,800 in 2015. The upshot is that the one-percenters are collecting a greater share of total real income growth in the U.S., about 52 percent, than the lower 99-percenters.
Detractors argue that their jobs are going overseas or being replaced by robotization and that they are left with lower paying ones, often in the low-skill service industry. Many of those “exported” jobs were in the manufacturing industry. While manufacturing output in the U.S. has risen from about $400 billion in 1947 to $2.1 trillion in 2014, employment in that sector has fallen from a post-war high of 17. 2 million in 1979 to 12.2 million in 2015, according to the Federal Reserve and Bureau of Labor Statistics. That translates to productivity (output per hour of work) gains of 250 percent, a good thing for any economy. But, the percentage of the American workforce in manufacturing has declined from 32 percent in 1953 to under 10 percent today.
These developments, in fact, speak to the challenges as opposed to disadvantages of globalization. With technological advancement, developed countries innovate to produce the same or newer products faster, better, and less expensively. Meanwhile, with economic development and the improved health, education, and investment that come with it, lesser developed countries, with lower wages or taxes, learn to produce less expensively, products previously made in the more developed countries.
But for political candidates in America advocating a retreat from globalization, there is an additional and even more acute question. In such a scenario, how would the country maintain its position of global leadership? It is rationally inconceivable that the U.S. or any major world power can simultaneously maintain such a role and turn its back on an interdependent world.
In fact, globalization is now a force unto its own. Progress in every field of human endeavor and the imperative to continue have made it essential that people and countries borrow from, take advantage of, trade with, learn from, compete with, and ultimately find ways to live cooperatively and tranquilly with one other.
There is no turning back from it because the world has embraced it. The great movement initiated by the United States to benefit the global collective interest as well as its own is here to stay.
