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good afternoon welcome to world oregon's webinar excuse me on great decisions the end of globalization uh we are excited here today to have professor elizabeth bennett from lewis and clark uh and we are going to give all the time to her i just have a few opening announcements which will sound familiar for uh some of you been here for many of our webinars and if you're new to this just a few key points this is a zoom webinar where everyone's audio and video is off for muted except for world oregon staff and our presenter you can ask questions in the q a function like to encourage you to please if you have a question posted in the q a function we try to leave the chat function for links or other questions not related for the speaker so again if you look at the bottom of your zoom screen or depending on your setup there's a q a function that will allow tim to manage the questions for the speaker and then chat is where we will post links for different items that we'll mention this uh will be recorded and may later go up on youtube so mind your p's and q's and um you know we are very uh appreciative of you for either if you bought a series ticket for great decisions or if you are here just for this individual event if you bought the ticket just for today's event because you wanted to see professor bennett and you like it so much that you want to get the um series pass we're posting in the chat the link where you can buy the series ticket for the rest of this eight part series also as you know a big announcement that we had last week was we have launched uh sales for our international speaker series that starts february 4th with nicole hannah jones who was very uh well known from her 1619 project of the new york times i'm posting in the chat the link where you could buy tickets to see her ari shapiro tom calicio from lead chef and a great discussion too on what comes next after covet 19 with ohsu and a public health journalist so the link is in your chat these are all completely virtual if you are a member of world oregon you get a 10 discount using discount code if you can't find that email send us an email to the email address i'm posting in the chat and they can one of my colleagues can double check and send you the code for the discount so again i'm posting that in the chat it's community world oregon.org and uh that will get you a 10 discount for the series now without further ado we'll dive into great decisions hopefully maybe you have already ordered your great decision books as you know the foreign policy admit agency excuse me uh fba had a delay in shipping these out but they are now out and so the lecture that professor bennett's going to give is is connected in some ways to the article to hear about globalization if you haven't ordered yet you can directly from the foreign policy association on their website they have both the hard copy that you mail or a kindle version to talk today is on the end of globalization and our presenter as mentioned is professor elizabeth bennett we are excited especially not only because she's a renowned professor but also we share um her she has an endowed position by joseph m ha who many of you who are world oregon members will remember has been a before he passed away was a key part of both lewis and clark nike and world oregon he was key to helping oregon connect with the world very generous personally with his time and as a donor and it's just it's a great another tie between our two organizations and a really remarkable man if you haven't heard of him before i encourage you to google him he's got quite a life story professor bennett has her phd from brown university where she also has a master's she has a bachelor's from hope college in spanish and secondary education she teaches a wide variety of courses on international relations political economy social justice in the global economy and excitingly she's just recently been awarded a two-year fellowship for the carr center for human rights policy at the harvard's kennedy school and if i understand correctly this year is sort of virtual and then next year would be physically on campus so without further ado yes we are all hoping for that may the vaccines go fast um without further ado i'm going to drop off and and turn it over to our star thanks so much for joining us professor bennett uh good afternoon to everyone it's really great to be here with you today um and many thanks to tim derrick and the good folks at world oregon for inviting me to be part of this amazing lecture series i'm so glad this exists and i'm excited to to be part of it and my thanks as well to the friends and family and colleagues of joha who contributed to the position i have here at lewis and clark i'm terribly honored to be recognized in this way and look forward to meeting you as we're able to celebrate his legacy and the new position as i look through the list of attendees i also see some of my students and alum from lewis and clark college and i'm really glad that you can be here today as well it's a pleasure to work with you um so as you know today our our discussion centers on and cougar's article uh the end of globalization question mark um and i want to open my comments by highlighting what's at stake in this conversation and drawing out some key points of ann's argument then i'll present a pretty alternative perspective offering a much different description and diagnosis of what's happened and what's to come and pose some questions for discussion which hopefully is um um passionate and i've provoked enough to get the conversation flowing so first what's at stake in this conversation about the history and the future of globalization could not be overstated in 2018 the economist magazine which is a publication that has a penchant for inflammatory claims and also um is known for calling attention to trends before they fully emerge declared the death of the globalization era two years later in 2020 the covin-19 pandemic brought the global economy to its knees disrupting global supply chains and igniting nationalist fury over access to a vaccine not a week goes by without major business or political news publications drawing attention to the expanding role of china in the world limited not to its role in the global economy but its limit but including its role in global politics so when we ask the question is this the end of globalization the title of cougar's article suggests um what we really want to know is was it a good thing or a bad thing do we want more of it and what next so that's what i'll center some of my conversation on today um ann krueger is a brilliant scholar who for years has been writing about the benefits of trade liberalization and globalization and for those of you who haven't read the article or less familiar with her work when she talks about globalization what she means is the increased in economic interconnectedness in the world not just the movement of people and goods but also the improvements that allow us to do that so technology communication transportation the things that facilitate life that transcends borders her perspective as she presents in the article makes four points first for most people in most parts of the world life is better now than it was 200 years ago and we know this because people are living longer eating better losing fewer children and enjoying higher incomes second the widespread improvement in the quality of life she says is attributable to globalization globalization was ignited by the industrial revolution in the 1700s and for the last 200 years she says the notable exceptions of the interwar period between world war one and world war ii and the last two years have been marked by nationalism and trade wars but the rest has been globalization her evidence for the linkage between globalization and improved quality of life includes and it's not limited to the fact that countries intending to engage in trade experienced more improvements in their income and well-being than countries that did not take the opportunity to participate this great divergence she argues explains the historic and contemporary gap between the lived experience of the average person in the global north today and the lived experience of the average person in the global south third for the last 75 years globalization can be understood as a collaborative project in which collective action problems are resolved by multilateral institutions namely the imf the world bank and the world trade organization and her last argument is that the way forward is actually to step back to return to a golden era of 20th century multilateralism and 21st century styled globalization marked by trade travel transportation and the movement of goods and services full steam ahead in my comments today i want to offer an alternative to kruger's solution of going back to the future so first i'll present a different interpretation of what it means to be better off today than 200 years ago second i'll call into question globalization's role in facilitating our greatest achievements as a global community third my challenge the notion that the last 75 years of globalization can be actually described as a multilateral project and finally i offer an alternative way forward that is in no way a continuation of the past so overall i disagree that the great benefits from globalization that have already taken place will serve as a lesson and persuade countries to continue its progress in my perspective the best is yet to come and only if we change course drastically so the question to start out of whether or not we're better off than 200 years ago is a really interesting one and i'm not sure it really serves us well has gdp increased yes but growing the size of the pie is not as valuable as sharing it well some point to a reduction in inequality among countries in the world pointing to a diminishing genie coefficient of all people in all countries i might point out that global inequality is worse than the least equitable country in the world and at the current rate that it's improving in none of our lifetimes in none of our children's lifetimes will we see world equality look as good as the worst country measured by income and well inequality within almost every country has become worse over the last 25 years and globally today the top one percent of households in the world own 43 percent of all the wealth while the bottom 50 percent of the world owns only one percent income and wealth inequalities are not simply disappointing from a moral perspective if we assert to like equality then this isn't a good thing but they also generate a host of additional problems including mental health issues domestic violence radical political strategies and religious extremism and in many countries such as the united states inequalities are diverging not indiscriminately but clearly along racial lines adding fire to the kindling of long-term racial injustice are people eating more than they used to yes but not because more food is available the problem of hunger has never been about food scarcity it's an issue of distribution and disruption in markets when we count those who are not going hungry among them are people who suffer from obesity due to malnutrition because they can't access healthful food and people who are children being fed in food maintenance pro in feeding programs such as the world food program who are consuming calories in forms that are not culturally appropriate to what they would be eating at home and might be lacking some of the nutrition and also watching their families not be provided the same their parents not be provided the same amount of calories that they are today climate change is posing a new threat to food security and also calling attention to the need for food sovereignty or the ability of communities to create nutritionally adequate and culturally appropriate foodstuffs it's particularly alarming because in the imf's management of globalization it's convinced so many communities to stop growing food altogether and transition to exporting crops for cash cash which is no longer enough to buy the quality and variety of food that they're accustomed to eating and need to thrive so are incomes and calorie counts increasing sure but does that equate to an improvement in well-being i'm not so sure krueger notes that we're now pandemic aside able to travel all over the world for meetings and as she notes medical tourism yes we can travel more but in doing so we contribute to more co2 emissions we generate massive amounts of landfill waste in airports and air travel and we increase dependency on gas and oil that have clear environmental consequences kovit has aided many of us in distinguishing between the necessity of travel and the luxury of moving so quickly and i question whether we should we should celebrate the externalization of the environmental costs of cheap flights as a win from globalization in a way that we're truly better off than 200 years ago do people live longer yes she's right but with what quality of life through globalization we have lost a lot of indigenous knowledge including medicinal cultural and sociological solutions to individual problems the kind of solutions that don't lend themselves to opioid addictions and epidemics of addictions of all kind suicide rates have never been higher violence against women including femicide remains an intractable problem i for one would gladly give up a decade of my white american female lifespan expectancy of 78.6 years to improve the quality of someone else's i understand that contra that comment might be controversial my point is living longer is only a good thing if that quality of life is maintained and i'm not so sure it has been are there more economic opportunities yes but there are two problems with these new opportunities first the opportunities that do exist are inflated in ways that incentivize people to take tremendous risks because they have unrealistic expectations of great rewards for the past 200 years indebtedness is inflated like a balloon for workers and businesses alike people are taking huge risks with their financial future the future of their families and everything they're offering is collateral for the opportunity to invest in an economic future that's unrealistic each year thousands of people are literally dying for economic opportunities as they migrate across borders in hopes of a better paycheck there are new economic opportunities but they're not as good as people think and they're dying for them the second problem is that those opportunities often require people to engage in abusive trade-offs as the nobel laureate america sena argues truly being free precludes the need to forfeit one freedom in order to access another about 20 years ago more than half the world moved to urban areas sorry that wasn't very articulately put about 20 years ago we hit the mark where about half of the world's population was living in urban areas much of that migration happened in the 10 years prior under globalization it created massive slums and diminish the volume and diversity of indigenous and local culture and language people shouldn't have to decide between living at poverty or leaving their home that's not development and i would be reticent to even call that opportunity are many people now access able to access and afford imports from all over the world yes and as a coffee and french wine drinker i appreciate those very much but we also have a problem for consumption now the concept of an ecological footprint which was conceived in 1990 is simply put the amount of biologically productive land and water that we need to supply ourselves to support our lifestyle and the amount that we need to offload and have the environment reabsorb our waste if we were to divide the world's resources by the number of people living in it we might be able to identify how much each of us consume to sustain the earth in its current form of course americans unsurprisingly consume enough for 7.1 people that's not a good thing is china india south africa brazil mexico and russia bring hundreds of thousands of people into the middle class international relations are challenged by the notion that their citizens should not do the same and
he earth can't handle it can corporations now source from multiple countries and move their sites of production to chase cheap labor materials yes she's absolutely right but doing so incentivizes countries to stop enforcing labor and environmental protections in order to draw business from all over the world it also facilitates creativity and how to invade standards of decency in work which is why today we not only have unprecedented job precarity but also 30 million people living in conditions identified as modern slavery as companies and consumers flee to these black holes of labor rights enforcement such as shrimping vessels off the ship off the coast of southeast asia where labor is considered dispensable at best and a cheap factor of production at worst in the foxconn factories in china management has put up nets to catch workers who are jumping to their death because life in a foxconn factory isn't what they thought it would be um but it's where we have apple products made so that we can get our iphones a little cheaper in india the farmers movements of the past three months have been brutally attacked by the government and indians in response are committing suicide and returning to home with less hope than what they started factory and farm suicides and modern slavery are not something to celebrate i could continue but doing so would simply generate a list of the pros and cons of globalization and that's not so interesting so let me stop there when i consider the question are most people better off today than 200 years ago my first instinct isn't yes or no my first response is why is the bar so low after 200 years of thinking and science and collaboration and cross-cultural conversations can't we do better than comparing the current moment with 200 years ago why not compare today with what would have been possible with 200 years of inclusive sustainable development why not compare today with the sustainable development goals why focus on growing growing the economy growing personal incomes growing our lifespan when we have an alternative to focus on sustaining and conserving the natural beauty and the culture and the awareness of how to connect with one another that we already have so my first argument is this the benefits of globalization pale in comparison to the world that our global community has the potential to create and it's much better than today and much better than 200 years ago i'll make quite briefly three more points krueger argues that the social political and economic successes that we celebrate today can be attributed to globalization but i wonder if they might have been achieved in spite of globalization instead take for example the emergence of a middle class in the united states in the mid 20th century in american farms and small towns it was trade protectionism not free trade that allowed the textile industry cotton farmers in texas and textile manufacturers in small towns scattering across new england to flourish long after they have become globally non-competitive similarly agricultural subsidies not free trade allowed u.s farmers to thrive despite not being able to compete on global markets so if we can credit globalization for anything in that period it's providing a market for the united states to dump its goods abroad rice from arkansas went to the caribbean decimating rice cultivation wheat from the great plains headed to sub-saharan africa replacing native grains with more protein corn from the midwest flooded mexican americans and the flooded mexican markets in the wake of nafta leading to a turn toward marijuana cultivation and eventually a rise in cartels and organized crime around drug production in cities in america during that time workers lives improved not because of globalization and liberalization but because unions were still strong from the support they received during the war periods the national labor relations board had a sticky way of maintaining its power long after the need to protect the war machine had ended and that lasted for a number of decades until the 1970s when union membership began to decline and protection of workers was rolled back reagan doubled down on it in the 1980s minimizing basic worker protections and their enforcements and we don't really see a middle-class america that came from globalization but instead the opposite of a free market in this great america which so many americans want to make again income and wealth equality economic growth improvements in health were supported by market interventions not globalization i can illustrate the same point with an example from the global south yes there have been tremendous improvements in health literacy and poverty all over the developing world or the south from the post-world war ii period until today but at the same time they've been supported by unprecedented flows of aid from the global north to the south in the form of usaid formed in 1950 to promote foreign policy through development aid through philanthropy capitalism the process of wealthy financiers extracting from land extracting from labor in the global south profiting accumulating and then giving back to the places they exploited in the form of donations globalization provided opportunities for wealth accumulation for some at the expense of others and the fact that philanthropic capitalism has softened the blow should not be understood as a benefit of liberalization that's something else entirely my third point krueger describes the process of globalization that unfolded over the last 75 years as a multilateral project organized by international institutions but i wonder if it was just u.s hegemony kruger's own examples illustrate my point the world trade organization a so-called multilateral organization was effectively stopped last year as she notes from fulfilling one of its most important functions in world trade to adjudicate trade disputes among different countries the world trade organization is where a country brings a trade dispute a trade allegation against another country for it to be heard and adjudicated the united states president trump refused to sign off on the appointment of new members to the oppolet body at the dispute settlement body single-handedly the united states stopped cases from being heard by the world trade organization that's not multilateralism that's hegemony similarly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis it was not the international monetary fund charged with providing stability to the global economy that provided the most relief to economies it was the united states that offered billions of dollars in currency swaps to countries all over the world even before the g20 could act that's not multilateralism the fact that recent reforms and leadership and voting rights in the imf in the world bank did very little to dethrone the us and western europe from having decision-making power should emphasize to us that bretton woods isn't now and hasn't been a multilateral global project instead it's an american one with a few europeans on the side in my fourth argument krueger identifies three ways forward isolation which she claims is unlikely preferential trade agreements mostly regional which she identifies as undesirable and multilateralism which is the way of the past and in her opinion also the future but perhaps there's a better way i would challenge us to examine the potential for true multilateralism in the global economic order a multilateralism that's inclusive a multilateralism that is based on the idea of achieving the sustainable development goals a multilateralism that privileges equity and diversity above profit and growth some of the ways that we might achieve that way forward i've already mentioned the imf and the world bank could do more to decouple voting power and leadership from the wealth of the nations that are members the world trade organization could rescind u.s right to approve opulent body members and provide a more multilateral approach to decision making i'll add some others tomas pikiri in his now famous 2014 tome capital in the 21st century suggests a global attack on tax on wealth he rightly notes that no one country can tax wealth it will just move across borders but if all countries collaborate and do it together a small tax of half of one percent on huge amounts of wealth holdings would be enough to fund many of the projects required for us to achieve the sustainable development goals literacy life expectancy infant mortality health hunger the things that we kruger claims that globalization may have provided those could actually be funded through true multilateral collaboration adjustments to trade as she points out are too little and too late but it doesn't have to be that way we can offer the opportunity for countries to join in the globalization products slowly with sequenced policies that are well funded to help those who will inevitably lose their jobs retrain recreate and draw on their local knowledge to join the global economy in a way that truly works for them without the trade-offs that no person should have to make some of the international legislation around global supply chains such as the business and human rights act from the united nations suggests that that countries should be doing more to ensure that what they're importing wasn't created with slave labor these due diligence requirements that states ask corporations to check and see what's happened in their factories and farms they're supplying from before importing in a country is thus far an underutilized tool in the fall of 2020 trump for the first time brought six cases um sorry halted six uh cargo containers um from china um with the allegation that well that the contents within them um were made with bonded labor that's the first time a president of the united states has made such a sweeping effort to use the due diligence requirements to prevent imports why don't we do more the oecd countries have begun to roll out guidelines for business and human rights but they're going slowly what's stopping us so as i close my comments i'll reiterate that what i'm arguing is this globalization generated as many problems as it did solutions many of the successes we celebrate today were not in fact products of globalization but of something else entirely globalization has always been a hegemon's project the uk in the 19th century and the u.s since world war ii it's never been the brainchild of global cooperation that would be new and the way forward is certainly not to go back not it's to learn and to redirect perhaps in a radically new direction that de-emphasize having more life more income more economic growth maybe we can redirect in a way that reasserts the primacy of self-determination of diversity and of equity to kruger's concession about the benefits of globalization that some were harmed along the way i respond first do no harm and second the way to where a world that's comprised of rapid climate change and rampant inequality is not the world i want to live in can't we do better i of course anticipate counter arguments to the points that i've made um but instead of identifying them and offering rebuttals i prefer to open the floor to discussion um i'm eager to hear the thoughts of folks in the room on these issues your agreements with krueger your disagreements with me vice versa and in particular i invite you to share the trade-offs that you've seen with globalization and the ways forward that may minimize our need to fulfill one priority at the expense of another so with that i'll close my my comments and look forward to what i'm sure will be a great conversation
