“Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters”, Anthea Roberts and Nicholas Lamp, Harvard University Press, 2021: overview

This book [Roberts and Lamp (2021), henceforth R&L] “offers a meta-framework for understanding Western debates about economic globalisation” (p. 19 K&L). The authors are Australian and Canadian law academics, allowing them to experience globalisation from different lands at the same time.In Britain, Brexit 2016 was the high point of debate about the benefits of globalisation. Later the election of Donald Trump as US President confirmed the concern felt by native citizens about the scale and speed of globalisation. The authors conceive of the globalisation process as a Rubik’s Cube with different, but not mutually exclusive, faces. These faces come in the form of competing, and sometimes, complimentary narratives.Narratives are important because we fit facts into narratives. If a particular fact is refuted, no matter, we just look for another one that confirms our chosen narrative. So for R&L, “Narratives are stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world, but they are also stories we tell others to influence their view of the world” (R&L, p. 28). These are the following:This philosophy might be seen to be embedded in the “end of history” perspective of Frances Fukayama (Fukayama, 2006). For Fukayama, you may be an Indian Hindu and I an Irish Catholic. But, surely, we both want the same things really? Health, happiness and security. And the most efficient way to serve these needs is free-market capitalism, overseen by a democratic State. Indeed, this seemed the message of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.After various escapades in “nation building”, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, almost no one believes this. The institutional structures that have served, Britain, the USA, India and Israel so well were a horrific disaster in these lands. This suggests there is more to national building than Free Market + Democracy = Happiness:Nigel Farage’s poster “Breaking point” gave the feel with a mass of men, often of Arabic appearance, walking into Europe, but not matched by Europeans walking out. This suggests globalism is good for someone, just maybe not so good for native English folk. Here, I stand with those of my nation, faith or ethic group, against those seeking to undermine our shared well-being.So for Bernie Sanders, the ageing firebrand of the American progressive globalism “is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite”. Like the right-wing populist narrative there is an enemy. But it is the rich, wherever they may live, whatever their race or faith, not those of another land or faith.So Starbucks thinks so little of the British State that it has made voluntary tax contributions, in recognition of how well aggressive tax planning has worked for them. This can make us wonder who runs Britain Parliament. Or an elite class of company executives allocating investment capital at will.For Navaro, the Chinese could not believe their luck as Nixon and his successors committed to free trade with China. This allowed the Chinese grab market share unhindered.With such a disparate group of globalisation narratives it may seem that making sense of globalisation will prove impossible. But R&L point out unless one narrative can be eliminated we must continue to look upon our complex, globalised, world through multiple, sometimes conflicting, narratives. In doing this, we should aware that what matters for a narrative’s power is not so much the facts supporting it, but rather its overall coherence. Such coherence can be embedded in powerful examples or the visual impact of Farage’s “Breaking point” poster. R&L point out that sometimes looking at the World with “dragonfly eyes”, evaluating the terrain from different vantage points can make us better negotiators. To enable this, they suggest we note for each narrative points of.integration with other narratives. This is most obvious in the various winner/loser narratives who all focus on the separation of nation, class, national corporations, from the rest; anddifferentiation by which the geoeconomic narrative chooses one nation, usually China, for special treatment.On points of differentiation, we might expect little progress to be made by negotiation. Defeating a narrative by facts alone may prove a gargantuan task. But an informed discussion may at least allow us to walk a mile in another’s shoes. As “Empathy is an antidote to righteousness”.Tolstoy made a distinction between hedgehogs and foxes as articulators of past history. Hedgehogs relate everything to one central vision, say free trade or immigrants, as drivers of the cost/benefits of globalisation. Foxes know many things and use those to form integrated story. R&L (p. 283) encourage us to be integrative thinkers who follow foxes on using multiple narratives to build coalitions capable of supporting action. Philip Tetlock, whose studies found that hedgehog like grand theorists tend to come unstuck when they apply their narrowly focused insight outside the domain into which it reasonable applicable. But it is vital that context matches cognition in Herbert Simon’s “behavioural scissors” (Simon, 1990). One way to ensure this is to make our decision-making teams more diverse, helping the suppress emergence of blind spots, induced by ignorance or lack of sensitivity.One of the simplest defences of globalisation is that like any form of competition it is always there and always will be. I may wish my employer was the only University in London and my module the only one on the Business School programme. But this is not how life is, so I must struggle to get good students to our school and then into my class. As Tony Blair has put it to discuss the pros and cons of globalisation “you might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer” (R&L, p. 45). Such chatter might be interesting; but ultimately it is pointless.The original justification for globalisation was simple and morally based. Gains-from-trade meant that any politician who impeded trade was a rogue trying to impoverish their own people. David Ricardo had demonstrated the theory of comparative advantage to show that if the English made cloth more efficiently than the Portuguese (Ricardo (1821)). But the Portuguese made wine better than the English. Both could be made better off through trade. To see why this happens consider two simple points:A bigger market brings economies of scale selling wine to two populations, English and Portuguese, allows greater investment in wine husbandry, distilling, etc. which lowers per litre of wine sold costs.Specialisation improves quality and suggests new products if the English can settle to specialise in cloth they can spend more time to vary, perfect, the weft and the warp of the cloth produced. Just consider the huge variety of clothes produced in the Scottish Highlands according to the various Clan colours and textures.So bigger markets are better, more efficient, markets. It is true some will lose out. But then an enriched society can just make their loss more bearable. But in reality, as the 2008 global financial crises shows us, often public financial support is lavished on the richest, not the poorest.Another great co-product of free trade is peace between nations. This makes sense because blowing up your customers just makes no sense. The sanctions now being imposed on Russia and by Russia on others, remind us of the tit-for-tat nature of such disputes. This re-runs the tariff wars began with the US’s imposition of Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. This set the stage for the great depression and the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany.And if we could get by as “little Britain” who would want too anyway? To miss out on French cheese, American cinema, Italian fashion and German Opera, would be a sad life indeed.All the above can sound like rather lofty ambition to those who struggle to work regularly, feed their kids, eat and stay warm each day. For most of us, our globalised world must seem rather wonderful. But tell that to illiterate folk who struggle to get by in Indian villages or the unemployed of Boston, Lincoln or East Kilbride in Glasgow. They may agree with Jeremy Corbyn, the former British Labour Party leader, who stated “We’re not broke, we’re being robbed” (R&L, p. 60). Never was this more clear than in the financial crisis of 2008 when what appeared to be a weird form of “socialism for rich people” was implemented. Senior bankers were fine, precious few job losses on the Boards of Barclays Global Capital or RBS. Nor could executive bonuses be “clawed back” despite bailouts almost bankrupting the nation in Britain and actually bankrupting Iceland and Ireland. But sacking public sector workers in libraries, schools and hospitals was not a problem at all.Nor are those condemned to the economic lower realms of clearly inferior worth or bad repute. R&L (p. 73) discuss the PhD research of Senator (once Professor) Elizabeth Warren at Harvard. Warren looked at those who entered personal bankruptcy in the USA.One might expect to find an assortment of drunks, work-shy no–goods and fraudsters in such a group. She did find such people in her sample. But she also found many bankrupted by unanticipated health bills, expensive divorces or unexpected regulatory compliance costs.In this narrative, winners are Mexicans/Croats who cross the border into the USA/UK and the losers are American or English folk who struggle to find housing, decent health care or schooling for their kids. So here opposition to globalism derives from fear of “losing ground” to the city – slickers in New York or London, who thrive on globalisation.But R&L point out the division also reflects a barely disguised contempt for those who left school at 16, or just never bothered to learn a foreign language, apply for a passport. For Steve Bannon, one-time advisor to Trump, “the Party of Davos” see British/US natives are “just another unit of production/consumption” (R&L, p. 97) devoid of culture, history or self-respect. As such, they are every bit as tradable as any other good/service.But resentment of foreigners is sort of global itself now, with Farage in England, Le Pen in France, AfD in Germany, VOX in Spain, Bolsanaro in Brazil and Modhi in India. For each it is “[Insert Nation] 1st” and this tide shows no signs of easing. In France Marine Le Pen’s National Rally part rose from 8 to 89 seats, suggesting the UK is not the only unhappy camper in the EU.For David Goodhart, a British journalist, globalism exposes a marked difference between those from “somewhere” and those happy to dwell “anywhere”. Those from somewhere value, family, faith and tradition, often focusing on those and seeing work as something that makes those possible.Companies are legal persons, formed by real persons, to implement the company’s articles of association, to sell coffee, explore oil, etc. So companies are, by their very nature, the instruments of humanity. If corporations were allocating capital away from inefficient territories, like Europe, to more efficient ones, like China, we might at least admire their astute use of investment capital.But R&L (p. 101) point to evidence 40% of the global profits of multinational corporations have been shifted to lie in tax havens. One economist estimates such tax-sheltering cost the US Treasury $130bn a year. It is certainly true that it is not a CEO’s job to maximise their employer’s tax bill. But it is hardly as if such companies are slow in requesting State subsidies or preferential treatment.One reason the rise in corporate power is the very intangibility of major modern corporations. Increasingly the value of firms like TESLA, Apple or Google is to be found in intangibles, be that brand value or intellectual property. Moving a factory, shopping venue to Panama or Berlize can be tricky, but incorporating a tax haven–based company that holds a company’s IP is not that hard.A central part of the establishment narrative is that it allows production to flow to the nation that has a comparative advantage. So even if China makes everything better than Britain, Britain should produce the things in which it has a comparative advantage. If this happens, we can all be better off. But a new question arises if one country, China, is a lot better off across a broad range of goods and services. How long can we in good faith allow this to happen with a country with which we have major ideological and political differences?Of course Europe has faced this problem before with Russia during the Cold War. But Russia was seen to be our military, but not economic, equal. Indeed, under China’s belt-and-road initiative, overseas foreign direct investment is being used as a strategic level to gain political and diplomatic power, especially with African and southern European Nations, for example, Greece and Italy.Typically economists ask simply is it cheaper, more efficient to make/source good X in nation Y? If it is, then we are all better off by making/sourcing it there. But efficiency of production comes at a high price when we rely on China for technology to produce our own weaponry, or network technology, to implement the “internet of things”.Robert Lighthizer has called this a “lemming–like desire for efficiency” (R&L, p. 125). Huawei may be cheap, but we cannot guarantee that China will service our weapon systems being used to stop them overrunning Taiwan, or even Russian forces in Ukraine. This creates a myriad of “single points of failure” where the lack of turret lid, or fabric for tents, exposes front-line troops to terrifying dangers (R&L, p. 130).It was Greta Thunberg, the who stated want you to as if our is on it (R&L, p. Such are certainly but they are not by the evidence we seem to be his on the crisis of has a huge in global and But this has come at a than the from derives from the past when globalisation has been a rise in This in the and is not so if at before that This suggests we may entered an when is the in which we all live, rather than to the nature to this new of health and financial a value is One always has to ask what happens when the So India and China us well with personal and when we did not them so But during they not to sell to customers rather than had from the of to into bankruptcy and itself was by many more major financial had seemed even now in the at the of the financial for the for a more State. 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