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Comment by fifilura | Hacker News Reader

> What Globalization should have been is a butter smooth system to trade goods and services.

> Concentrating all manufacturing in China leads to power centralization, as is evident, and forms the basis of creation of another hegemony.

Sorry but 2 is an effect of 1, free trade leads to concentration.

* Iceland has plenty of fish, they do the fishing and buy everything else.

* Ukraine has good farmland, they grow all the crops and buy everything else.

* China has cheap labor, they do all the labor intensive manufacturing and buy everything else.

It is national economics 101.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

International organizations (like WTO, WIPO [even if we think the copyright is too long, and most of patents are dumb, etc] various UN projects), free trade agreements and such are supposed to keep that "power centralization" in check (eg. with things like ISDS and so on).

But in the end we can't just ignore politics and hope for the best. Yes, maybe, maaaaybe in the graaaaaaaaaaand scheme of things we can. (After all if humanity fuck up so much that we go extinct maybe that's "the best".) But, but, it also doesn't mean that markets and free trade doesn't work. (They work, but they are not miracle tools.)

> International organizations (like WTO, WIPO [even if we think the copyright is too long, and most of patents are dumb, etc] various UN projects), free trade agreements and such are supposed to keep that "power centralization" in check (eg. with things like ISDS and so on).

Unfortunately, almost all historic international organizations (no matter if the UN, EU, NATO or anything else - hell, even the WHO!) operate on a fundamental requirement of trust and the assumption that there are no obstructionist forces and everyone largely plays by the established rules.

This fundamental assumption has been dismantled, starting in the early 90s with the collapse of the USSR... now we have the US and Israel blocking every investigation into war crimes (I do understand the reason though, given anti-Zionist resentments across the world), China not willing anyone to investigate what happened at Tiananmen Square or in the Uyghur concentration camps or with Covid, the Russians protecting the criminal Assad regime, Turkey fighting with Greece, Hungary and Poland blocking anything that could help refugees or hold their regimes accountable for corruption and a boatload of other bullshit.

Sure, like the general assembly is not voted on by almost all of them by countrys, who then get economic-hegemonic-ally sacked. This is the trouble with almost all international institutions - they are deeply subverted by economic interests.

This goes from the human right council barely condemning genocide, if it is committed by economic ruling partys to WHO recommendations, towing the party line when it comes to them damaging economic interests.

That isn't economic interests - it is raw military power. Although the two do correlate at times.

This plays out clearly in the hyper-free trade bloc that is the EU, where different countries end up specialising in particular stages of the production of meat, for example.

What if you live in Ukraine and want to build microprocessors or live in China and likes to be well paid and have worker rights?

Globalisation creates more inequality.

Recent history has vastly improved the majority of people's lives. Prior to globalization, it's not like China had good workers rights or Ukraine built a lot of microprocessors, so you are setting up a false view of the world without globalization.

I am personally convinced that the only way we can do globalization in a way that makes sense is enforcing labor rights overseas. If our $5 T-shirt can only exist with the exploitation of poor workers in Vietnam then I don't believe we deserve $5 T-shirts. The United States is in a somewhat unique position where we can uplift most of the world if we chose to just stop exploiting their poverty.

Another way to fix it would be to allow the free transit of people. If an iPhone charger has more rights than the person who built it, we are in a very weird place.

How about a few people has most rights and others mostly none of? What if those rights correlate with amount of power and money? /whataboutizm

Realistically that basically calls for taking over the world as step one as it would be required to enforce demands upon others.

The "stop exploiting poverty" sophistic frankly doesn't map to reality. If the US pulled out of trade in Vietnam they would get worse off instead of better. The issue isn't the result of an action to be stopped which turns the entire notion into dross covered up with guilt tripping.

It is the same "leave the cookies on the table to gather dust while trying to eat far richer imaginary cakes" mental pattern as IP zealots who snub overseas direct sales with things like region locks because they think they could get more selling distribution rights months.

You would enforce it with tariffs.

So the poor in the US are not exploited?

The US would be hit hard. Labor laws and lack of universal healthcare would make it difficult to export to, say, the EU.

Regardless of what you think we deserve or what is right, those sweatshops in Vietnam are lifting the nation out of poverty, just as they lifted us out of poverty in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Sorry to reply to an old thread but I am just finishing "Planet of Slums" and one of my main takeaways is that neoliberal reforms in third-world countries are absolutely not helping (and in fact hurting) the vast majority of people in urban environments. It is our policies that are putting them in this situation and now it's our responsibility to help them out of it.

Of course this is partially a domestic policy thing, but how we view foreign labor now is not working.

Yes. Tariffs for all countries that have lower labor law and environmental standards.

In the GPs "perfectly round cow in a vacuum" model, the same thing happens all the way down to personal competences / preferences.

Anyway, more problems come from market concentration and market power abuse by single companies than from international competition (except by the point that international market power abuse makes governments powerless).

It is an idealized example of what free trade gives you.

Every resource is used optimally.

The argument for it is that the end result is more wealth for "everyone" (on average!)

> Every resource is used optimally.

Would you like to be used optimally? As in, extracting the maximum work possible for as little compensation as possible?

There are animal rights groups that won't let you do that to horses.

> The argument for it is that the end result is more wealth for "everyone" (on average!)

Looking at the average and not paying attention to the distribution is a mistake.

I am not arguing for either.

Note the quotes around "everyone" and the exclamation mark after average.

Non optimal resource allocation -> less overall wealth.

And free global market is the machine that has optimal resource allocation as optimization goal.

> Non optimal resource allocation -> less overall wealth.

Unless the wealth is well distributed, it makes no difference for the bulk of the population whose bodies are being optimally allocated.

Your comment is fine. And accurate.

But I am arguing from the standpoint of "global-trade-as-a-machine". And in this case an idealized machine with only one dimension (fish or crops or labor).

Of course if you live in Ukraine and have only one leg and love developing microprocessors, the "global-trade-as-a-machine" will pick that up and let you work on that rather than work as a farmer (one-leggedness and interest/drive as two new dimensions). (Although just as likely it will allow you to move to another country to pursue your interest.)

And of course governments have noticed the inequalities produced by this machine and are doing its best to counter that with more or less enthusiasm.

> the "global-trade-as-a-machine" will pick that up and let you work on that rather than work as a farmer (one-leggedness and interest/drive as two new dimensions). (Although just as likely it will allow you to move to another country to pursue your interest.)

That's not really how immigration and economic opportunity works. Our one-legged farmer would have to be astonishingly lucky for that to happen.

> And of course governments have noticed the inequalities produced by this machine and are doing its best to counter that with more or less enthusiasm.

It's more like they are taking measures against other governments that gain strategic relevance based on these factors. One way to counter China's advantage with manufacturing cost would be to force China to adopt and enforce better labor laws and increase compensation.

In fact, having a single global standard for compensation and worker rights would be a wonderful thing. As long as it's good and includes progressive taxes on the accumularion of wealth and a mechanism to compensate for undue political power from wealth.

More wealth on average means Americans get poorer. Minimum wage, fourty hours a week puts you in the top 4% of wage earners globally.

> Minimum wage, fourty hours a week puts you in the top 4% of wage earners globally.

Now just imagine what the rest of the world has to cope with.

Who gets to decide what counts as optimal?

It's money that decides.

Certainly not the resources.

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