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weave clothing and I will construct your home, and so on. It is the notion that
each of us is at once a producer and a consumer. By this, we mean that every-
one has a gift to offer society as a whole in that all gifts are complementary,
whereby no one's gift is more or less important than anyone else's, all are
required for the mutual benefit they offer. In this way, we have depended on
one other for our survival since time immemorial, and for any level of pros-
perity above subsistence that might be attainable.
Put more succinctly, what is lost today is a sense of community that overlays
and integrates with the economy. Clearly, anything approaching the full res-
toration of this feature is impossible in a world rapidly approaching seven
billion people. It takes much more awareness of the human condition than
most of us can muster in order to feel a sense of community with a Chinese
worker in a factory producing some trinket for export—often at the cost of
an outsourced American job. But, as we contend in the concluding section of
this topic, there may be positive steps we can take.
A question arises. Suppose an American consumer, or perhaps a consumer
group, observes with alarm the degree to which the dramatic imbalance of
trade with China is embraced—even perpetuated. We import over 10 times
the value of goods from China than we export to them. People often com-
ment that it seems like we do not produce anything in the United States any
more, even when our economy is visibly in recession. Suppose further that
we were now to embark on an aggressive campaign of “Produce American”
and “Consume American.”
Abstracting from the financial, macroeconomic, and foreign trade poli-
cies that might be required to achieve this, the question becomes as follows:
Would this represent a healthy, return step in realizing the economic futures
on which Americans are interdependent, or would it be a form of self-cen-
tered “beggar-thy-neighbor” nationalism leading to increased international
tensions and perhaps even more world economic inequality? (“Beggar-thy-
neighbor” is an economic expression describing a policy of seeking benefits
for one country at the expense of others.)
The question is largely unanswerable—even though an overall response is
probably aspects of both . However, the important point is not the answer to this
hypothetical situation, but the fact that we are driven to raise the question in
the first place. It underscores the fact that globalization actually represents
the ultimate depersonalization of the economic process.
For our traditional economics, and especially David Ricardo's venerable
theory of comparative advantage , it should represent the crowning achieve-
ment. Finally, goods are all produced in the cheapest place possible in the
world, and trade (read mutually beneficial exchange in the textbooks) is ubiqui-
tous. 6 There is, however, one dramatic difference between the modern world
and the one imagined by Ricardo. Namely, the dominant institution is no
longer the nation but rather the transnational corporation . This demonstrates
once again, but on the ultimate global scale, that production has finally
dominated consumption. To the powers that be, both private and public, the
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