Thank you for taking the time to address this article. I skimmed it, getting more irritated as I went. It read like a fluffy life style trend piece that captures elite vibes - in this case, that what’s wrong with America and the world is somehow to be laid at the foot of “globalization.” In the process the NYT has produced a more polished version of complaints heard from the “down with the globalists” crowd that follows the Bannons, MTGs, and Elon Musk’s favorite trolls. I sorta doubt that was what the NYT editors had in mind
Cohen’s piece embraces a shocking number of straw men (persons). Equally shocking and disturbing is that this piece made through the NYT editorial process unquestioned. Regardless if your politics, this is sloppy argument and marshaling of evidence.
Disturbing, yes, but shocking, no. This is actually par for the course from what I expect from the NYT. In any subject that you delve deeply in to, you'll find that the NYT often publishes stuff that is facile or downright wrong.
I mean, it's not an academic journal; it's trying to get people to subscribe, which mostly comes down to justifying the feels of it's readership.
I'm not an economist so steer clear of discussions of the merits of globablization though the Gini findings quoted here seem rather compelling. But when I read critiques (if that's the word) by globalization I can't help thinking that people are constructing a bogey-man .
Thanks for this important article on this outstanding US pushback. Interesting to see how NYT is becoming populist and isolationist (Trumpian perhaps) and soon will be trumpeting walls and protections. I also see this happening with FT Rana Foroohar and her constant criticisms of liberal and market solutions and options (including trade agreements). Seems Cohen and Rana are just breading the same NYC "aire du temps" and so peddle their articles accordingly.
I find the way economists conceptualize inequality in this particular discussion unconvincing, but that may be because I tend to think about globalization first through my knowledge of African history--but I also don't think that national data and nation-level comparisons are the right lens for understanding global-scale inequality. But for the same reasons perhaps I'm less moved by the argument that the world overall is richer and that profound structural poverty is less common than many economists and political scientists are, because I think there's a sleight-of-hand involved in which how people *feel* in terms of their wealth and security is being equated with quantitative measures of their material possessions. I've walked through a rural village in southern Africa where one family had a generator, a satellite dish and a television because one son sent them some remittances and that's what they bought with it. But in terms of their basic lifestyle, their access to health care, their precarious relationship with the local manifestation of the state, their overall perspective on the world (except for the migrant remittance-sending son), they weren't really different than their neighbors--their overall sense of social belonging and their general deprivation compared to some wasn't notably transformed by their possession of an unusual luxury, even though they'd show up on a quantitative measure of the village as 'wealthy'. I've talked with people in a squatter camp who have more cash on hand than the settled township families living in small cinderblock homes right next to the camp, but the settled township families have rent-based incomes from their control over their small (undeeded and only complicatedly transferable) properties. The settled families seem wealthy to the squatters, and those families generally would agree with that impression--it has to do with relative precarity in both cases. And of course the wealth of both groups is effectively unmeasured in national-level data, which is true of people who operate in the informal sector everywhere.
I suppose this is all about disciplinary--and thus perspectival--differences, but when I think about whether globalization has increased or decreased inequality, that's the kind of landscape that matters--how people feel relative to others, but also about changes in the basic security and structure of their socioeconomic lives, which is not just measured by cash on hand or material assets.
So you're saying we should measure feels? OK, sure, but how then do you adjust for human cognitive biases that make humans think the present is always worse than some golden age in the past (at any time during human history)?
I liked Mastroianni's article in the NYT as well. I don't think you adjust exactly--you just understand that how people feel is an important part of the lived dimension of inequality, and that feelings motivate actions. Take the hedonic treadmill as a more limited example of this point. People may work to increase their wealth in the expectation that the relationship between wealth and satisfaction (aka utility) is closely bundled together, only to find that their satisfaction or happiness returns to the same point after wealth acquisition. It doesn't seem to matter if you point that out to most people--they continue to expect that the *next* step up in their wealth will catalyze an increase in happiness.
I think if we want to talk about measurement, I'm more concerned that measures of relative inequality that are based on national data and the formal economy don't really capture the empirical reality of wealth distribution globally since 1980. E.g., I don't question that India, China, South Korea, and many other non-Western nations have closed the gap in wealth distribution at the national level with the US and EU, but I do question whether inequality within almost any nation has decreased over the last fifty years. I think that's particularly vexed in measurement terms because at both ends in many nations you have wealth (and poverty) that is unmeasured in the data consumed by major international institutions--at the high end, there's some substantial amount of wealth available to the top 5% in many nations that is not tracked, taxes or accounted for but is part of a huge global shadow economy that is a direct product of post-1980 elimination of restrictions on capital flows; at the low end, you've got a lot of people engaged in informal economies where it's hard to say whether they're poorer or richer than they used to be but who are certainly living with profound economic precarity regardless.
Yes, inequality within many/most countries have increased, but I daresay that the decrease in global inequality has been so great that if you poll a representative sample of the world population, despite the hedonic treadmill, the majority would not want to go back to the world pre-globalization (because note that the population of China is more than the entire West combined).
That's the part that I think feelings--or experience--inform in ways outside the way economists think about this. When we talk about empirical measures of the standard of living in 1850 or 1920 in any part of the world you care to name nobody actually viscerally remembers it. (This is where Mastroianni's point kicks in hard.) You could show people the data that their ancestors were eating gruel or wearing flaxen underwear and they will believe it as a kind of abstraction, but not in a deep way. And that's pre-globalization in the empirical sense (even 1920 isn't, not really)--everything in the living memory of all of contemporary humanity is post-globalization in significant measure. If we confine our meaning to "post-1980", then in many cases people are *perfectly right* in some places to remember that things were materially better in a more equal way where they are. (That might in some cases mean 'everybody where they are was poor', but often not even that.) James Ferguson has a great book about Zambia that's now some decades old that points out that from about 1955 to 1974, Zambians lived the future of prosperity that modernity had promised. When the price of copper crashed and then the Washington Consensus brought in 'structural adjustment', they found themselves poorer, more precarious, and with a net increase in inequality within the nation. I think if you asked people in a lot of those situations, "hey, when was the *best economic time of your lives* they would feel 'not now' but also have at least some actual evidence for feeling that way".
The problem now is that a large fraction of the US doesn't want to be confused by actual facts. The NYT was once a national treasure, scrupulously edited and fact-checked. No more. The NYT has now all-in on the race for "clicks" -- thanks, Mr. Baquet.
I think there was an elite consensus in the 90s that globalization (i.e. market liberalization along with advances in information technology) would result in political liberalization, fewer wars and broadly shared economic growth -- some combination of Friedman's McDonald's hypothesis and cartoon versions of Fukuyama's End Of History and Wright's Nonzero. I think people thought that, by now, that all of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union would end up more like Poland (and East Germany) really did and that Brazil, India, and South Africa would have grown like China. It's fair to say that the reality has been more complicated than that.
I suppose we do have different interpretations of what constitutes evidence and from where I sit linking to an article or two even from a “known expert” doesn’t cut it. But in that same spirit there’s this https://hbr.org/2018/03/40-years-of-data-suggests-3-myths-about-globalization and much more like it. That said, I remain a fan of your work.
Wow your critique is also impressively evidence free and doesn’t begin to address the entirely legitimate concerns about extreme inequality, the environmental impact of global supply chains, the backlash against outsourcing jobs to whatever country offers the cheapest labour and weakest regulations, the costs of financialization., the profit-price spiral that continues to drive costs, The worst article ever? Really?
I literally cited and quoted one of the world's leading experts on global inequality and globalization rebutting the inequality argument made in the article. There are hyperlinks sprinkled into this newsletter rebutting the "fragile global supply chains" claim. Maybe we disagree on what the word "evidence" means?
Thank you for taking the time to address this article. I skimmed it, getting more irritated as I went. It read like a fluffy life style trend piece that captures elite vibes - in this case, that what’s wrong with America and the world is somehow to be laid at the foot of “globalization.” In the process the NYT has produced a more polished version of complaints heard from the “down with the globalists” crowd that follows the Bannons, MTGs, and Elon Musk’s favorite trolls. I sorta doubt that was what the NYT editors had in mind
Yes, sadly, many people (including elites) just bloviate based on feels.
Cohen’s piece embraces a shocking number of straw men (persons). Equally shocking and disturbing is that this piece made through the NYT editorial process unquestioned. Regardless if your politics, this is sloppy argument and marshaling of evidence.
Disturbing, yes, but shocking, no. This is actually par for the course from what I expect from the NYT. In any subject that you delve deeply in to, you'll find that the NYT often publishes stuff that is facile or downright wrong.
I mean, it's not an academic journal; it's trying to get people to subscribe, which mostly comes down to justifying the feels of it's readership.
Clotted cream is the BEST. Thx for your ongoing reads. So good.
I'm not an economist so steer clear of discussions of the merits of globablization though the Gini findings quoted here seem rather compelling. But when I read critiques (if that's the word) by globalization I can't help thinking that people are constructing a bogey-man .
Thanks for this important article on this outstanding US pushback. Interesting to see how NYT is becoming populist and isolationist (Trumpian perhaps) and soon will be trumpeting walls and protections. I also see this happening with FT Rana Foroohar and her constant criticisms of liberal and market solutions and options (including trade agreements). Seems Cohen and Rana are just breading the same NYC "aire du temps" and so peddle their articles accordingly.
Eh, being anti-globalist is chic amongst the upper-middle class NYT readership these days.
I find the way economists conceptualize inequality in this particular discussion unconvincing, but that may be because I tend to think about globalization first through my knowledge of African history--but I also don't think that national data and nation-level comparisons are the right lens for understanding global-scale inequality. But for the same reasons perhaps I'm less moved by the argument that the world overall is richer and that profound structural poverty is less common than many economists and political scientists are, because I think there's a sleight-of-hand involved in which how people *feel* in terms of their wealth and security is being equated with quantitative measures of their material possessions. I've walked through a rural village in southern Africa where one family had a generator, a satellite dish and a television because one son sent them some remittances and that's what they bought with it. But in terms of their basic lifestyle, their access to health care, their precarious relationship with the local manifestation of the state, their overall perspective on the world (except for the migrant remittance-sending son), they weren't really different than their neighbors--their overall sense of social belonging and their general deprivation compared to some wasn't notably transformed by their possession of an unusual luxury, even though they'd show up on a quantitative measure of the village as 'wealthy'. I've talked with people in a squatter camp who have more cash on hand than the settled township families living in small cinderblock homes right next to the camp, but the settled township families have rent-based incomes from their control over their small (undeeded and only complicatedly transferable) properties. The settled families seem wealthy to the squatters, and those families generally would agree with that impression--it has to do with relative precarity in both cases. And of course the wealth of both groups is effectively unmeasured in national-level data, which is true of people who operate in the informal sector everywhere.
I suppose this is all about disciplinary--and thus perspectival--differences, but when I think about whether globalization has increased or decreased inequality, that's the kind of landscape that matters--how people feel relative to others, but also about changes in the basic security and structure of their socioeconomic lives, which is not just measured by cash on hand or material assets.
So you're saying we should measure feels? OK, sure, but how then do you adjust for human cognitive biases that make humans think the present is always worse than some golden age in the past (at any time during human history)?
I liked Mastroianni's article in the NYT as well. I don't think you adjust exactly--you just understand that how people feel is an important part of the lived dimension of inequality, and that feelings motivate actions. Take the hedonic treadmill as a more limited example of this point. People may work to increase their wealth in the expectation that the relationship between wealth and satisfaction (aka utility) is closely bundled together, only to find that their satisfaction or happiness returns to the same point after wealth acquisition. It doesn't seem to matter if you point that out to most people--they continue to expect that the *next* step up in their wealth will catalyze an increase in happiness.
I think if we want to talk about measurement, I'm more concerned that measures of relative inequality that are based on national data and the formal economy don't really capture the empirical reality of wealth distribution globally since 1980. E.g., I don't question that India, China, South Korea, and many other non-Western nations have closed the gap in wealth distribution at the national level with the US and EU, but I do question whether inequality within almost any nation has decreased over the last fifty years. I think that's particularly vexed in measurement terms because at both ends in many nations you have wealth (and poverty) that is unmeasured in the data consumed by major international institutions--at the high end, there's some substantial amount of wealth available to the top 5% in many nations that is not tracked, taxes or accounted for but is part of a huge global shadow economy that is a direct product of post-1980 elimination of restrictions on capital flows; at the low end, you've got a lot of people engaged in informal economies where it's hard to say whether they're poorer or richer than they used to be but who are certainly living with profound economic precarity regardless.
Yes, inequality within many/most countries have increased, but I daresay that the decrease in global inequality has been so great that if you poll a representative sample of the world population, despite the hedonic treadmill, the majority would not want to go back to the world pre-globalization (because note that the population of China is more than the entire West combined).
That's the part that I think feelings--or experience--inform in ways outside the way economists think about this. When we talk about empirical measures of the standard of living in 1850 or 1920 in any part of the world you care to name nobody actually viscerally remembers it. (This is where Mastroianni's point kicks in hard.) You could show people the data that their ancestors were eating gruel or wearing flaxen underwear and they will believe it as a kind of abstraction, but not in a deep way. And that's pre-globalization in the empirical sense (even 1920 isn't, not really)--everything in the living memory of all of contemporary humanity is post-globalization in significant measure. If we confine our meaning to "post-1980", then in many cases people are *perfectly right* in some places to remember that things were materially better in a more equal way where they are. (That might in some cases mean 'everybody where they are was poor', but often not even that.) James Ferguson has a great book about Zambia that's now some decades old that points out that from about 1955 to 1974, Zambians lived the future of prosperity that modernity had promised. When the price of copper crashed and then the Washington Consensus brought in 'structural adjustment', they found themselves poorer, more precarious, and with a net increase in inequality within the nation. I think if you asked people in a lot of those situations, "hey, when was the *best economic time of your lives* they would feel 'not now' but also have at least some actual evidence for feeling that way".
The problem now is that a large fraction of the US doesn't want to be confused by actual facts. The NYT was once a national treasure, scrupulously edited and fact-checked. No more. The NYT has now all-in on the race for "clicks" -- thanks, Mr. Baquet.
I think there was an elite consensus in the 90s that globalization (i.e. market liberalization along with advances in information technology) would result in political liberalization, fewer wars and broadly shared economic growth -- some combination of Friedman's McDonald's hypothesis and cartoon versions of Fukuyama's End Of History and Wright's Nonzero. I think people thought that, by now, that all of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union would end up more like Poland (and East Germany) really did and that Brazil, India, and South Africa would have grown like China. It's fair to say that the reality has been more complicated than that.
Yep. Basically, people have been disillusioned from their illusions and now think being anti-globalist is chic.
I suppose we do have different interpretations of what constitutes evidence and from where I sit linking to an article or two even from a “known expert” doesn’t cut it. But in that same spirit there’s this https://hbr.org/2018/03/40-years-of-data-suggests-3-myths-about-globalization and much more like it. That said, I remain a fan of your work.
Wow your critique is also impressively evidence free and doesn’t begin to address the entirely legitimate concerns about extreme inequality, the environmental impact of global supply chains, the backlash against outsourcing jobs to whatever country offers the cheapest labour and weakest regulations, the costs of financialization., the profit-price spiral that continues to drive costs, The worst article ever? Really?
I literally cited and quoted one of the world's leading experts on global inequality and globalization rebutting the inequality argument made in the article. There are hyperlinks sprinkled into this newsletter rebutting the "fragile global supply chains" claim. Maybe we disagree on what the word "evidence" means?
As for the race-to-the-bottom hypothesis, that dog won't hunt either: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691096421/all-politics-is-global.