Some Thoughts on Trade (Admittedly Naive) (2009)

 Originally published as a Facebook Note January 19, 2009.

[I ran across this bit I wrote three years ago, after having seen the satirical documentary "The Yes-Men." Since I wasn't socially networked then, I'll share it with you now. I claim no expertise in this area, but these questions nag. If anything, our current economic downturn makes them more urgent than they were when I wrote them, because it shows how vulnerable we all are... not just unskilled workers and people in developing countries.]

"I am decidedly ambivalent about globalization. It has long seemed to me an inevitable trend, so don't try to fight it but rather manage its effects--kind of a modern equivalent of how the US and other Western nations dealt with the economic market throughout most of the 20th century. But I'm increasingly wondering if such an approach is even possible.

"Worldwide free trade, for which the WTO is chief enforcer, promises more efficient movement of goods and to a lesser extent services. For people as consumers that means more plentiful goods, at less cost. The downside is that wages and environmental protection go down as countries compete against each other (much as happened in American states before the Feds stepped in).

"Liberal free traders, like Robert Reich and Thomas L. Friedman, had two answers to this dilemma. First, in the short run, countries should focus on better equipping their workforce for global competition, through education and training. (But what if, as Wendy Bashant responded to me 15 years ago, some people aren't mentally equipped to be information workers?) In the long run, as the flow of low-wage work to poor countries caused their living standards to rise, workers in those countries would start to demand the same rights and working conditions Western labor movements demanded three generations ago. (But will that ever really happen? Third world countries' populations continue to grow faster than you can say "reserve army of the unemployed.")

"So what's the answer? So far Democrats haven't come up with an alternative to riding the tiger that is global capitalism. And it may be that there is no alternative--that the realities of global finance dictate countries play the game or starve. In that case, maybe pranks and satire are the only choices."