{"id":512,"date":"2011-04-25T11:57:37","date_gmt":"2011-04-25T10:57:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=512"},"modified":"2011-04-25T11:57:37","modified_gmt":"2011-04-25T10:57:37","slug":"globaloney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2011\/04\/25\/globaloney\/","title":{"rendered":"Globaloney"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most recent Schumpeter<\/a> column in The Economist<\/a> discussed a\u00a0recent book: World 3.0: global prosperity and how to achieve it<\/a>. \u00a0The column's headline is: The case against globaloney: at last some sense on globalisation, which gives the reader a sense of where the argument is going. \u00a0It begins:<\/p>\n

GEOFFREY CROWTHER, editor of\u00a0The Economist<\/em> from 1938 to 1956, used to advise young journalists to \u201csimplify, then exaggerate\u201d. \u00a0He might have changed his advice if he had lived to witness the current debate on globalisation. \u00a0 There is a lively discussion about whether it is good or bad. \u00a0But everybody seems to agree that globalisation\u00a0is a fait accompli: that the world is flat, if you are a (Tom) Friedmanite, or that the world is run by a handful of global corporations, if you are a (Naomi) Kleinian.<\/p>\n

Pankaj Ghemawat\u00a0of IESE Business School in Spain is one of the few who has kept his head on the subject. For more than a decade he has subjected the simplifiers and exaggerators to a barrage of statistics. \u00a0He has now set out his case\u2014that we live in an era of semi-globalisation at most \u2014 in a single volume, \u201cWorld 3.0\u201d, that should be read by anyone who wants to understand the most important economic development of our time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And a few of those statistics are set out in the column.<\/p>\n

only 3% of people live outside their country of birth<\/p>\n

only 7% of rice is traded across borders<\/p>\n

exports are equivalent to only 20% of global GDP<\/p>\n

only 20% of shares traded on stockmarkets are owned by foreign investors<\/p>\n

less than 20% of internet traffic crosses national borders<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was struck by these, and especially the last one. \u00a0I wondered whether I get anywhere this figure these days \u2013 and resolved to check.<\/p>\n

The column ends by noting that\u00a0people seem to have a tendency to overestimate the distance-destroying quality of technology, reminding us that this addiction to globaloney has been with us for a while:<\/p>\n

Henry Ford said cars and planes were \u201cbinding the world together\u201d. \u00a0Martin Heidegger said that \u201ceverything is equally far and equally near\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Schumpeter's final word is to remind us that George Orwell got so annoyed by all this that he wrote a blistering attack on all the fashionable talk about the abolition of distance and the disappearance of frontiers \u2014 and that was in 1944, when Hitler was advancing his own unique approach to the flattening of the world. \u00a0 Steve Gough and I wrote about Globalisation in our 2003 book: Sustainable development and Learning: framing the issues. \u00a0Here it is: [Chapter 13]\u00a0Globalisation and Fragmentation- Science and Self<\/a> . \u00a0It has fewer stats than Ghemawat manages and, sadly, no endorsement from the Economist!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The most recent Schumpeter column in The Economist discussed a\u00a0recent book: World 3.0: global prosperity and how to achieve it. \u00a0The column's headline is: The case against globaloney: at last some sense on globalisation, which gives the reader a sense...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}