In 1979 I was one of a group of students in a graduate economics class who wrote a paper about globalization and it’s future impact. The expected results were dire, massive unemployment, a long lasting depression, as bad or worse than the Great Depression.
The difference between those forecasts and what happened was due in large part to technology, all possible to a great extent by government funded research and development. Computers, the internet, jet aircraft, cell phones, satellite communications, GPS systems, NASA spin-offs...
Public access to the internet and GPS were afterthoughts. Those technologies created millions of jobs and huge economic boosts in the entire world.
Sam Walton founded Walmart in 1962. By the 1980s they had expanded all over the U.S. They bought locally and nationally produced goods, created some jobs, but eventually destroyed small businesses and small towns.
Meanwhile, corporate interests and privately owned large farm companies were forcing out small farmers with price manipulation and other tactics, buying up that land at auctions or otherwise low prices.
Walmart was just one of many U.S. companies that replaced American made goods with imports. Look at the labels in the clothes you wear, automobiles, appliances, cameras, computers, cell phones... are mostly made in foreign countries.
Vietnam is a prime example of more recent exploitation of cheap labor. After the war, part of our greater war against "godless communism", U.S. sanctions continued damage to their economy, but foreign money, much of it from South Korea, provided funds for capitalism. Vietnam may still be "socialist" to an extent, but there are very wealthy oligarchs, just as there are in China and Russia.
Comments