Posted on 04/02/2020 1:33:12 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Globalisation has been one of the buzzwords of the past 25 years.
It may seem a rather strange concept, since any economic historian will tell you that people have been trading across vast distances for centuries, if not millennia.
Easier travel, the world wide web, the end of the Cold War, trade deals, and new, rapidly developing economies, have all combined to create a system that is much more dependent on what is happening on the other side of the world than it ever was.
Which is why the spread of coronavirus, or Covid-19 to be specific, has had such an immediate economic effect.
Globalisation helps to explain while nearly every major car plant in the UK has shut down - they are dependent on sales and components from around the world. When both collapsed, they just stopped making cars.
China's wealth and health therefore matter to us all far more than they used to, but this is not just a matter of scale - there is also a deeper problem with globalisation.
Ian Goldin, professor of globalisation and development says that "risks have been allowed to fester, they are the underbelly of globalisation".
That, he says, can be seen not only in this crisis, but also in the credit crunch and banking crisis of 2008, and the vulnerability of the internet to cyber-attacks. The new global economic system brings huge benefits, but also huge risks.
While it has helped raise incomes, rapidly develop economies and lift millions out of poverty; that has come at the increased risk of contagion, be it financial or medical.
So what does this latest crisis mean for globalisation?
For Prof Richard Portes, it seems obvious that things will have to change, because firms and people have now realised what risks they had been taking.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
China should become an international pariah and shunned. Nixon opened China...Trump should shut it.
I’m all for a Monroe Doctrine revival.
It’s my fervent prayer is our country be the first to actually be back on it’s feet. Not just lying to the world about it.
A stage increase in tariffs, give companies time to build factories in the US and begin to ramp up tariffs on these products.
Hopefully the Wuhan virus will be the end of leftist very high density living. With fast internet leading to remote working, schooling, socializing, entertainment, and Amazon delivery of anything, people will stop living experimentally like hive insects. For the same reason farmers shouldn’t ever use human waste for fertilizer, people shouldn’t live beneath 10 floors of sewer pipes.
The question begs an answer. Will the world ever learn common sense? I doubt it.
Seems to me NYC area real estate is gonna have a bit of a slump in the weeks to come as some 5,000 to 25,000 “Vacancies” come on line. But as people learn to mask in public and wear gloves to touch things they can still live in high density. People who want to take the risk may be attracted by the higher wages. I don’t know the people of Nebraska want them all moving out there.
Another misconception people who don’t live in flyover country don’t get which struck me on a trip I took long ago in college. A dorm friend went with me over Thanksgiving one year to my home in SE New Mexico. I took him to a place I loved where you could see a panorama of over 180 degrees from an elevation of a couple thousand feet. You could see over 100 miles off into Texas. There was not a single clue of any human occupation outside of a deserted highway at the foot of the escarpment. “Lonesome Ridge” in the Guadalupe Mountains.
I took him there because he was a NYC boy. His response? “What’s all this fuss about overpopulation? You could put 7 NYCs out there.” He didn’t realize, in all that space there isn’t enough WATER for a village much less a city. Most of the flyover country in the Southwest is ABOVE it’s carrying capacity for water right now.
That's a major blessing in disguise. Demon-rats are water-rats, never far from sea level, lake, or river. It's their planned escape route after they destroy the place.
If you look at Google maps of the Sacramento Mountains, there are rivers that run in all directions. The Penbasco, the Rio Arriba, etc. but the river that runs south, the “Sacramento River” runs down toward Ft Bliss. It never reaches Ft Bliss. There is a 2,000 foot thick bed of limestone to the east that acts as a subterranean dam so it can’t go east when it is swallowed up by the desert. See those green circles around Dell City. Those are farms. Water is so precious there they “chase the river”, wells pump the water to the surface for irrigation, which is why there are those little green circles. SE New Mexico may look deserted but it is at about carrying capacity right now. That entire quadrant of the state. 5 inches of rain per year.
BBC: “Prof Goldin remains cheerful, but worries about who is going to take the lead. “We can be optimistic, but we are not seeing leadership out of the White House certainly,” he says”
30 Mar: China Daily: Oxford professor (Ian Goldin) praises role played by China
By ANDREW MOODY
“We can only combat these and other global threats, like climate change and antibiotic resistance, by coming together,” he said...
“It needn’t have been worse, but it is. China has acted quickly, but the problem is the rest of the world. The United States has been extremely erratic. The statements coming from the White House have been alarmingly unfocused, and blaming foreigners is hardly helpful...
Goldin, a regular visitor to China, said the world’s second-largest economy has demonstrated leadership and a willingness to help other countries.
“No country has done anything at the speed and on the scale that China has done.”...
“There is no wall high enough that is going to keep out climate change, antibiotic resistance, or the next financial crisis or next pandemic. The idea that you can insulate yourself and have a wealthy, prosperous society as an island in a world which is systemically in crisis, is a complete fantasy,” he said...
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202003/30/WS5e816725a310128217282fbf.html
BBC loves Goldin, an ultra globalist.
BBC is their problem not ours. We have NEJM, Joutnal of Infectious Disease. Where are the editors of these Journals. If they can’t step forward now maybe they should be getting their CVs out there.
No. The bubble heads who foisted this doctrine on us will continue to use their money and influence to keep it going.
“Will coronavirus reverse globalisation?”
No.
It will change globalization, not reverse it. The Just-in-Time process will be regionalized.
A key point to note — what this means for the USA is different for what it means for the UK or France or Germany and different for what it means for China or India.
There will be more factories coming back to the USA, but these factories will be:
1. Far, far more automated - with 1/100th or less the workers they had earlier and these “workers” will be highly skilled, highly trained technicians
2. There will be globalization of more completed parts.
For parts that are not needed for JIT - like seasonal toys etc. there will be no reversal of globalization.
Note that ending globalization is also something that hits the USA - farmers in particular — Mid-West giant farms are far more cost effective than farms in the UK (for instance).
I don’t see the small tools etc. moving away from China manufacturing — the shelf-life of a hammer is pretty long.
I don’t see generic clothes manufacturing moving back to the USA - they will be in BAngladesh, China, Vietnam etc. - more specialized clothes will come back.
I do see higher tech companies now hedging and building capacity in Europe - and even FMCG companies like RB, P&G are shifting large capacity to regional factories
High density living is not a leftist idea. It’s what people have done since Sumerian times.
Living in a city has the disadvantages of diseases - it always has - look at the antonine and Justianian plagues — or even the black death struck mostly city folk.
The move towards urbanization is NOT going to stop.
Even this disease - unless you live on a farm, completely rural, you’re still at risk of getting it.
Will coronavirus reverse globalisation knock some sense into the fools and jolt them into reality?
"people have been trading across vast distances for centuries, if not millennia"
Yes, and maintaining their national and cultural identities, resisting the destructive forces of decadence, and refusing to allow themselves to be conquered by invaders.
"firms and people have now realised what risks they had been taking"
Yes. Risks such as open borders, unrestricted immigration, and--of greatest importance--giving consideration to the voices of decadence, propaganda, mendacity, and destruction.
The bubble heads who foisted globalization??? You’re going to have to head back to the Bronze Age to find them.
In the Bronze Age you had Indus Valley folk shipping textiles made from cotton to Greece, Egypt, Sumer and Greeks shipping wine back.
Globalization took off with the Roman Empire centralizing production in certain areas.
You had continuous globalization from then on - spices and cotton textiles shipping from India to the Roman empire and gold heading east. And silk and tea from China.
Manufacturing — the Brits took Indian cotton and made clothes and sold them back to Indians as well as to others.
Globalization can’t be wished away. It should be wisely managed - and the USA DID that in the period 1950 - 1970 when it opened up markets to American-made products.
Puts me in mind of my reaction to Syracuse, NY: you could plop Syracuse down anywhere in Nassau County (western Long Island) and from the air nobody would notice the difference.New Yorkers consider themselves sophisticated, but their densely populated world is, geographically, tiny. From that sort of perspective people can be easily gulled into the idea that the world is crowded and people are transforming the environment.
Ex-New Yorkers in my family visited friends there years ago, and were shocked to experience the tight living quarters which they no longer take for granted. Nobody not named Trump or Bloomberg can afford any living space. Yeah, this epidemic might cause some vacancies - but immigrants will fill them sooner than flyover country folk might suppose.
Now to the real question. What about the loaded term "globalism" which is defined as the European Union (aka the Fourth Reich)? Will the European Union's popularity continue its decline?
Yes.
During the COVID-19 crisis the so-called leaders of the EU have stumble, bumbled, and mumbled. They have displayed leadership skills somewhere between those of the Keystone Kops and the Three Stooges.
In short, the EU has demonstrated that leaders (its leaders) who are disconnected from any direct representation of voters and instead were bureaucratically selected for leadership are ill-equipped to deal with any problem more serious than boiling an egg.
I hope it will reverse the decadence of Western civilization - I was appalled with the callousness of spring breakers and Mardi Gras folks
“Yes, and maintaining their national and cultural identities, resisting the destructive forces of decadence, and refusing to allow themselves to be conquered by invaders.” — well yes and no. As an amateur historian, to me it is fascinating how nations are created, live, merge and die. For instance the nations of the Saxons who invaded what is now the area around Edinburgh, then merged with the Bretons of Glasgow, the Scotti (who came from Ireland) and the Picts to form the nation of Scotland.
the Pictii survived for millenia but merged with the Scotti and then with the others.
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