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Comment by adwhit | Hacker News Reader

Globalization is a hegemonic project of the West, best understood as a means to transfer capital from the economic peripheries to the imperial core, and has tended to wreak havoc on developing countries that have exposed themselves to it. China has been very sensible to ignore the dogma about free trade and to exploit weaknesses and loopholes in trade treaties when they find them.

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Hmm. It might be possible for one person to create wealth without another person losing it. Almost as though it wasn't a zero-sum game. Just a theory.

This is true. Nothing to do with what I said, but, it is true.

It isn't what happens at the moment. Every dollar of growth worldwide is subtracted many times over from our environmental commons. At the moment the global economy is a heavily negative-sum game.

Please illustrate one example of how someone (not the Fed firing up the presses) can make money without someone else giving them money.

I didn't mention money.

You don't need to have read The Wealth of Nations to know that it's possible to increase the GDP of a country without decreasing the overall savings. Service driven economies are the best example of this.

And those services exist without any exchange of money?

This is a total lie. The economic development of many of the poorer nations that have engaged in global trade has exploded in the last fifty years. Human development in those countries, as measured by uncountable metrics (IDH, child mortality, rates of education), has soared.

Please show your evidence that global trade is a zero sum game and that the "imperial core" has reaped all the benefits. Not one example of a singular country (sure, there are some losers for a variety of reasons), but for example, show us how the African continent has gotten worse due to globalization.

> Please show your evidence that global trade is a zero sum game and that the "imperial core" has reaped all the benefits.

I didn't say it was zero sum. Poorer nations have experienced some growth, and a lot of that growth has been extracted by the West. Generally, the more a developing country has embraced globalization, the worse it has been exploited. This is not a hugely controversial statement.

If you'd really like to understand the power dynamics, you'll need to do some reading. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz's "Globalization and its Discontents" is a good start, though a little dated now.

See you on the picket lines, comrade!

Very true. In reality this is following the model South Korea, Japan took.

And the U.S.!

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