What’s Our Duty to the People Globalization Leaves Behind?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
On a macro level, society benefits from globalization, but on a micro level, there are often very high personal costs. If you have spent all of your life developing skills in one area, and that suddenly falls apart, it's going to be very difficult to drop everything and start over.
As a society, we have the capability to use some of the gains to smooth out the costs for the people that lose out here, whether it's through basic income and welfare, or education and retraining.
Consider high school students are making choices based on what they think the job market will be in 50! years. Sure, we still have some bank tellers even with ATM's, but even a 50% reduction in demand is devastating if it takes 10+ years of specialist education. Retraining may seem reasonable for truckers, but for highly skilled professions it's tossing a way years of education and on the job training.
It also seems that we should each take some personal responsibility, and help whomever we can. It is too often that we pawn off our responsibilities and moral duties on society.
So very true...the single most important thing a person can do to strengthen a community--interpret community as broadly as you like--is to spend time helping those in your immediate vicinity...I'm prescribing this because of it's accessibility; it's a course of action available to anyone, usually costs little, and leaves you feeling pretty darned good...
First-hand case in point: A boy who lives a couple of miles away from me started dropping by occasionally to visit...he'd pedal by on his bicycle and stop to chat if I was out in the yard...
During our visits I learned about his circumstances...his father, a drug user, committed suicide in the shower of their home when he was 6 years old...his mother had had a series of boyfriends, and there were 3 partial families--14 people--living in his house, a 3 bedroom trailer...
As we got to know each other a bit better he asked me one day,"Hey, everyone around here calls you the computer man; how could I learn about computers?"
I told him I could teach him a few things, and did...he would drop by when my schedule permitted and was willing to sit for as long I was willing to teach him things...just basics, a few tricks...
I could tell that he had a quick grasp of the material, and asked him how school was going, his grades, etc...turned out he had around a 3.7 GPA, and admitted that he never studied outside of school...
I told him one day that he should consider college...the next day he said he had mentioned what I said to his mom and she flatly told him,"We can't afford something like that".
To make a long story short, the state that I live in offers a program that essentially pays (combined with grants, and college scholarships) for those below a certain income level to attend 5 years of in-state college...I spent several days gathering information, presented it to him, and told him I thought he could do it...he just needed to sign up in the program right away, and keep his grades up...
Rather predictably, his mother was initially skeptical, so at his invitation I visited with her and explained how this would work...
I'll leave the story here...he's a junior in high school now and is on track to enter college in 2017...he would have never become aware of the opportunity if I hadn't mentioned it to him, and all it cost me was about 2 days of research and another day helping him apply... we'll see how it goes...
it is a safety net, a helping hand society extends to let people to not starve to death on the streets, it is not a tool to solve structural economical/political/social issues.
I do agree that rising college cost is a problem, but blaming it mostly or entirely on government-backed student loans is far too simplistic, and ignores the benefit that it has provided.
I think that's the problem that the NYT completely misses. If modern globalization causes centralization on an economy of scale basis, then there is less "wealth" generally created overall.
Centralized economies are less competitive economies. Less wealth goes into the hands of few than leaves the hands of many, if that makes any sense. If HP were to merge with Apple (joke hypothetical), there would be some very happy board members and execs, but far more, less happy workers fired for redundancy. Unfortunately, this is the situation we are seeing more and more today, particularly in the 21st century. And yes, the population does have an impact on this
The major point of contention here is: "does globalization cause centralization?"
But, that doesn't mean we just don't do anything though, we can still do as much as possible given what we have.
Not only that but if we helped those who are down get new skills to be productive, wouldn't that only be better for our economy and thus for everyone?
In theory, yes. There are enough resources that people would live free of want and hunger. But, we can't because there is some portion of the populace that consistently exhibits zero self control. If given the self-control/candy test, they'd eat the candy and then fifteen minutes later tell you what a horrible person you are for not giving them the other piece. You could go out and top off everyone so that they have $50,000 liquid cash, find housing, explain how rent works, etc. and within three months there will be people being evicted and homeless with no money to their name. So you repeat. And three months later you have to repeat again. And again. And again. And after loading and reloading people with money, now you're poor and have nothing to give.
It's basic reality that there are people we are told we need to have compassion and empathy for, yet they have none for us. This is exhibited by the fact that if they did they would make a realistic effort to not be a burden on others. And for many of these people there is no amount of money and resources they can be given that will cause them to say "enough, stop, i don't need any more."
It seems to me that we should be giving people the tools they need to better their lives, and if they muck it up, our conscience can remain clear.
Of course, there is something to be said about mental issues people have too. I feel like even those who "lack self control" can be helped, but they need to be helped in a similar way to how we try to help drug addicts.
Even if you succeed, and you provide enough for an abundant lifestyle ... perhaps they then have many children. Perhaps they raise those children with the same values.
It's just not a bright vision of the future in my head if just because you were born a human you get the special privilege to live and multiply.
How could it possibly be sustainable?
[1] http://web.worldbank.org/archive/website01241/WEB/IMAGES/INE...
I think it's better to phrase it as a problem statement: how can we help everyone live without eventually hitting resource constraints?
Humans are good at figuring out solutions to problems. Don't give up!
And it really does come down to morality, social and personal.
I am certainly in the "teach a person to fish" category of fixing societal ills. But I get it when previous choices have left someone "stuck" and unable to succeed.
Back in the early 2000's before we had all sorts of data[1] to back it up, I could see that single parents were in a world of hurt. Married couples had a much better shot at getting by. But you couldn't really fix that by demanding people find some soul mate/life partner to marry in order to get out of poverty. I suggested to my representatives and others we really could use an institution that had the same benefits of marriage but was more contractual than spiritual. If two single parents, regardless of sex, could enter into a contract to work together to raise their children, it would encourage them to do so. And by institution I mean the whole thing, rights of survivorship, community property, shared health care information, joint filing status with respect to taxation.
In my way of thinking that is removing a structural roadblock in the way of those people stuck in poverty by their past choices.
At the same time, I have also met people who don't put any investment into getting out of their circumstances. I realized there can be a learned helplessness element here, but for folks who just don't want to, I don't feel any guilt or remorse for them as they slide down the slope.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/04/10/the-r...
I like to phrase of it in terms of designing feedback loops and augmenting existing ones when they aren't strong enough.
Suppose my neighbor has a plot of land that he's not really using - it's mostly idle, he's just got a little garden on it. I know that if I get it, I could produce much more wealth - maybe I'm a skilled farmer and I could grow high-value crops on it. It would be more economically efficient for me to own the farm. We'd produce more wealth collectively that way. But there are several ways to get to that more efficient state: 1) I could buy the land from my neighbor for a fair price. He gets the money from the land, which is worth more than he made from his garden. I get the land and produce lots of wealth, minus the money I paid my neighbor. We're both better off, huzzah! 2) I could steal the land from my neighbor. He's worse off - he no longer has his garden at all. I'm much better off - I get the land and I don't have to pay for it anymore!
Economically efficient moves by definition mean that there's enough wealth to compensate everyone who loses. A lot of the anger about globalization is people being pissed because they're losing - their job or their benefits or whatever - and the folks who are winning respond by telling them that it's economically efficient so they'll just have to suck it up. It's one thing to say "Hey, change is inevitable, but at least we're all getting wealthier!". It's another thing to say "Hey, change is inevitable, and we're getting way more than you're losing!"
Globalization results in a move towards global equilibrium so that locales with low cost workers will see improved financials and economics for their workforce, locales with high cost medium skills workers will see a decline in economic and financial outlook.
The question, is what's best overall for the global workforce versus what's best for the local/domestic workforce.
Does the EU, Japan and the US among others "owe" third world nations offshoring ensuring they, emerging econs, kick start their economies?
The first world could form a cartel of sorts keep all progress to themselves, ensuring third work countries remain poor but also ensuring their own progress is stunted perhaps net negative.
Could or should the first world and advanced economies provide some work insurance to their low and medium skill workforce? If they can afford it, why not?
Whats next? Who knows. Maybe universal minimum wage. Maybe resource-based economy. Maybe modern socialism. Who knows. But something WILL happen. Meanwhile, our duty is with our own.
Also, not sure with "our duty is worth our own" - who is "our own" and what social fiction is it built on? Family? Community? City? Nation-State? Race? Favorite board game? I think widening the empathy gap until you can view the people that grow your coffee as "your own brothers and sisters" is the name of the game for human evolution at the moment.
Now, my comment may sound silly to you because we are comparing apples to floppy disks.
Have you read GED? One interesting understanding I gather from that book is the concept of "levels of meaning". His example goes along these lines: an ant colony seems to act with intelligence from our point of view but such interpretation is out grasp from an ant's perspective; though a smart ant could imagine the colony viewed from above! Therefore, what you call social fictions have a meaning in the layer we all call society and if such layer was our only reality I would definitely agree with any moral argument against Globalization and Capitalism. But if you just move one layer above, if you switch your perspective a bit higher and see our species interacting with millions of other species in a planet with a certain expiration date: morality has no meaning. In that layer of meaning, the goal of each and all species is one: survival. This ecosystem couldn't care less if we leave the economically poor behind.
In conclusion, I was commenting from a layer above, you replied from a layer below. If we both speak on the same layer most likely we would agree. If we speak from different layers (perspectives) time is lost.
Now, speaking from my perspective, my best guess is that we humans are evolving from bio to bit. We know now the planet will be gone and at some point we would want to leave looking for a new home. These bodies are not the ideal spaceship. A computer is a good alternative. The drive to evolve and develop the technologies that will make this space trip happen may be out of the control of ourselves and our consciousness. It may be genes programmed to do so. It may be bacteria in our guts driving us to do so. I do not know. However, it seems that whatever the social system we invent on the layer below in order to keep us ruled and moving forward, that invented system simply responds to a higher drive.
If all the effort expended on arguing about this magical "other path" to prosperity was spent on actually generating prosperity, I think we would find that many of our former grievances would resolve themselves..
Poverty is NOT the natural state of things. The adoption of agriculture enabled property ownership which led to the owner-worker dynamic that persists to this day.
In fact, examinations of certain agricultural civilizations, like in the ancient Indus Valley, show a distinct lack of poverty. Perhaps instead of calling poverty "natural" we can examine it for what it really is: cheaper for the owners than broad prosperity.
If you feel strongly about defending the people who were left behind, you can get to work supporting the candlemaker's guild. (Or you could buy me a sailboat! Practicing obsolete methods of transportation is a ton of fun.)
For example, if some day computers program themselves and the jobs are all in looking beautiful and performing in public, I'd be doing a lot less well. Globalization only seems inevitable if it happens to be moving the globe your way.
Therein lies a big part of the problem. You're asking families who've lived somewhere to abandon the place they've called home and established for decades when the only big employer in their small town closes. This is a big problem when you have an entire region of a country that is nothing but small towns with only one (now no) big factory in them. Michigan says hi.
That's still the same euphemism to abstract human responsibility away. The clock moves forward, otherwise what we tend to call "progress" as if it's on a one-dimensional line is just a point on one branch in a tree with infinite branches, and it's made up mostly of decisions.
I just explained this; now "things moved forward", and you'll simply have to drop your euphemism and never use it again. Don't look at me for help, unless you're looking for help to have this explained more thoroughly.
I think you meant "trade." But your mistake is quite illustrative.
You can't go to school to acquire (in this example) supermodel looks.
Why post it at opinion pieces at all? Just post your opinion and lock the thread.