Noam Chomsky And Ha-Joon Chang In Conversation On Globalization
There’s a nice interview of Noam Chomsky and Ha-Joon Chang by C.J. Polychroniou of Truthout on the myths of globalization. Of course, as Chomsky and Ha-Joon Chang point out, the debate is not against globalization per se, but globalization under the current rules of the game.
Ha-Joon Chang is direct about his views:
The assumption that globalization benefits everyone is based on mainstream economic theories that assume that workers can be costlessly re-deployed, if international trade or cross-border investments make certain industries unviable.
In this view, if the US signs NAFTA with Mexico, some auto workers in the US may lose their jobs, but they will not lose out, as they can retrain themselves and get jobs in industries that are expanding, thanks to NAFTA, such as software or investment banking.
You will immediately see the absurdity of the argument — how many US auto workers do you know who have retrained themselves as software engineers or investment bankers in the last couple of decades? Typically, ex-auto-workers fired from their jobs have ended up working as night-shift janitors in a warehouse or stacking shelves in supermarkets, drawing much lower wages than before.
He also talks of winners and losers and compensation. Of course, I wish he went further and argued that globalization—under the current rules of the game—-produces not just individual winners and losers and also leads to polarization between nations.
[the title of this post is the link]