fatvegan

I read through a touch of In Defense of Globalization in the bookshop today. All the economically chauvinist things I read say it's done wonders for their sex life. I thought about buying it until I started reading it. It basically said that every area the anti-corporate crowd thinks is hurt by globalisation, is actually helped or unaffected by it.

For example, some misguided fools might think that the competitive pressures of globalised trade would reduce wages of unskilled labour. However, the data doesn't support this at all. In reality, the drop in real wages over the past couple of decades has nothing to do with globalisation. Globalisation has actually increased real wages. Just imagine how low real wages would be if it wasn't for globalisation! The real reason wages have dropped is that unions aren't as strong as they once were. Obviously, the destruction of the unions has nothing to do with globalisation or international competition.

Also because of new technology, the demand for labour has dropped and wages have fallen. Not just unskilled wages as you might think, but all wages. So the wages of the many souls who build these tremendous labour-saving devices does't make up for the lost wages of their less skilled comrades. So even though there are these brilliant labour-saving machines to reduce the amount of work we have to do, the average person has to work harder for the same quality of life. It doesn't seem very labour-saving to me. Perhaps these machines aren't labour-saving as much as profit-increasing. So we work the same or a bit more, produce much more stuff, and never see any of it.