still more globalization
...Finally, who's afraid of globalization? If you raised your hand, and
you're a liberal, well, you shouldn't be:
If you want to read more about the Rawls comparison, look at Matthew Yglesias at TAPPED. I happen to agree with Yglesias's first two commenters on this point, though.Suppose you were setting immigration policy from behind that veil of ignorance. [That's philosopher John Rawls dictum that societal rules are fair if you would endorse them without knowing what your position in society would be.] Which of these would you choose?(1) Restricting immigration to protect some of the lower- paid workers in America from a decline in wages that would be no more than 8 percent, if it occurred at all.(2) Expanding immigration to benefit most Americans while also giving some non-Americans living in dire poverty the chance to quadruple their income.You don't need to slog through"A Theory of Justice" to figure out this one.Because globalization leads to greater social justice when it's done properly:Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard, estimates that a worker in the first world earns 10 times more than someone with similar qualifications in the third. Even a light loosening of immigration restrictions, Rodrik argues, would provide a far bigger boost to the world's poor than knocking down all the famously crippling agricultural subsidies.The trouble is, at the moment it isn't being done properly:¹... the ongoing wave of globalization—the third in a series that began in the sixteenth century with the conquistadors and continued in the nineteenth with British imperial free trade—occurs largely in a realm of virtual reality and leaves much of everyday life untouched. Nineteenth-century globalization involved large-scale movements of population to new lands, while the present phase involves mainly commodities and images."Today's globalization ... is 'immobile.'" Goods are produced and marketed on a planetary scale but those who live in rich countries encounter other societies chiefly through television and exotic vacations. There are politically controversial migrations of poor people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe and from Mexico to the United States, but immigrants still make up only around 3 percent of the world's population today, whereas in 1913 it was about 10 percent.There's about enough immigration to make people nervous about it but not enough to do very much good. Some historical observations:If in 1913, about 10 percent of the world's people were immigrants, about 6 percent of the world's people were immigrants who had gone to the United States. They were not distributed evenly around the country, but were concentrated in certain places—mainly, America's cities.
In cities where there were a lot of immigrants, politicians (responsive as ever to their constituencies) tended to favor immigration. But in cities where there were enough immigrants to scare native-born workers, but not enough to form a strong voting bloc of their own, politicians tended to favor restricting immigration.
In the decades around 1900, Americans spent a good deal of money on social policies that helped workers move around—specifically, on education and on public health.
But they didn't spend much on safety net policies—say, unemployment insurance—that might have reduced the fearsome prospect of immigrant competition for jobs.
In the end, the anti-immigration forces won, and Congress passed a series of laws making it vastly more difficult to enter the United States. Historians often point to these laws, along with laws restricting trade and capital flows, as major forces preventing the re-emergence of nineteenth-century-style globalization after World War I.
And the failure of nineteenth-century globalization to re-emerge after World War I helped cause the Great Depression.
Which we would all like to see not come back.
If we could cautiously draw a lesson from this history, it might be this: let's have enough immigration to generate opportunities (hurray, social justice!) and let's also have a better safety net, so that people competing with immigrants for jobs won't have cause for complaint (hurray, more social justice!); then, globalization can continue to work on reducing inequality in the world (and a third cheer for social justice!).
It sounds good to me, and like something all politicians should back. Also, I would like a pony.
¹For those of you who are curious, that's this John Gray, not that one.