Link Banana

It’s worth considering the fact that Paul Krugman is wrong. But it’s also worth considering his point that the Georgia-Russia conflict may be the dawn of a new era:

But as I was reading the latest bad news, I found myself wondering whether this war is an omen — a sign that the second great age of globalization may share the fate of the first.

David Brooks penned an interesting column in today’s New York Times. The basic premise:

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

The Economist did a recent survey about political positions in the two countries with a number of interesting results.

The gap between Britain and America is widest on religion: no surprise there, as Britain is famously a post-Christian society and Americans are, if anything, rediscovering the faith of their fathers. But the difference in views is so wide that even British Conservatives are a great deal more secular than American Democrats are. The two are a bit closer on social values (abortion, homosexuality and so forth), and they overlap on ideology (mainly, how active the state should be), with Britain’s Tories to the right of America’s Democrats.

They overlap again on how free their countries should be to intervene militarily (both the Tories and Labour are more hawkish than the Democrats). Britons are more international than the Americans, keener on free trade and globalisation. Views coincide most nearly on climate change—ironically, the area where the two governments have been least in step.

It worth giving the first graph in that article a look (as it summarizes the findings well), the more comprehensive second graph is here.

Making a case similar to Mr. Brilliant’s, The Economist argues that the situation in the world’s better than most think, and still improving.

Indeed, for a great many people the way things are is pretty rotten: Burmese monks, for instance, or the Luo in Kenya. Life is not too bright for investors at the moment, either. But is the broader proposition true? Is the world really becoming worse for the majority of mankind? We argue that it is not.

To some extent, our qualified optimism is borne out by impartial data. In this article we look at three pieces of evidence: the underlying social conditions in poor countries; poverty alleviation over the past decade; and the incidence of wars and political violence. By those measures the world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realise.

In a very interesting article for The American, Amity Shlaes talks fondly of his family’s love for infrastructure tourism. In infra-touring the Panama Canal, she delves into the history of Panama, the realities of global trade, and the damage America has done the country.

Panama, the canal, inspired; but Panama, the country, seemed to move without a hitch from being the region’s “canal country” to being its drug country. The United States certainly cannot be blamed for all that is wrong in Panama; but it did its share by being cavalier about sovereignty (TR), by enabling villains like Manuel Noriega, and by fostering a lot of trouble in between. A century after the canal opened, and nearly two decades after the U.S. invasion, Panamanians are still ambivalent about the United States. They seek confirmation that Washington will follow through on the good things that it promises.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Steven Landsburg makes a valuable — even if moderately disjointed — point: in free trade, we should accept the bad if we want the good. It’s a very uncomfortable idea that deserves serious consideration.

I doubt there’s a human being on earth who hasn’t benefited from the opportunity to trade freely with his neighbors. Imagine what your life would be like if you had to grow your own food, make your own clothes and rely on your grandmother’s home remedies for health care. Access to a trained physician might reduce the demand for grandma’s home remedies, but — especially at her age — she’s still got plenty of reason to be thankful for having a doctor.

Some people suggest, however, that it makes sense to isolate the moral effects of a single new trading opportunity or free trade agreement. Surely we have fellow citizens who are hurt by those agreements, at least in the limited sense that they’d be better off in a world where trade flourishes, except in this one instance.

The Economist has an interesting — but rather dry — feature about the composition and rise of emerging-market multinationals. Where many have long assumed that first-world multinationals would buy and otherwise dominate less-advanced companies in the “third world,” the piece argues that while this does occur, it’s shortsighted and reductive to pretend that that’s the only evolution of multinationals.

The latest trend reflects a new, fundamental shift. In a more open world, emerging economies are spawning their own giants. UNCTAD is turning its attention to the new shape of global business: investment now flows increasingly from south to north and south to south, as emerging economies invest both in the rich world and in less developed countries.