Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism

The next chapter is now being written, and it will not be a better one. That’s because globalism contains the seeds of its own destruction: Even as it makes the world better, it breeds economic and cultural insecurity, and when people act out of fear, bad things happen.

Social media allows us to follow those we agree with and ignore those we don’t, enabling us to deprive ourselves of opportunities to deepen our thinking and change our minds.

Globalization’s champions continue to sound the trumpets, and many political officials and business leaders still insist that trade creates jobs without admitting that it can kill jobs as well.

This isn’t simply a story about robots sending workers home. As in the past, new technologies will create new jobs—and new kinds of jobs. But the increasing automation of the workplace, advances in machine learning, and the broad introduction into the economy of new forms of artificial intelligence will ensure that jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of education and training.

Why do Palestinians throw rocks? To attract attention? To improve their lives? To make progress toward creation of a Palestinian state? They throw rocks because they want others to see that they’ve had enough, that they can’t be ignored, and that they can break things. Voting isn’t helping them. Outsiders don’t care. Where are the opportunities to bring about change? There is nothing left but to throw rocks.

These leaders aren’t arguing that government should be bigger or smaller, that it should tax less or spend more. They’re challenging the right of “elites” to make the rules that govern our lives. They tell citizens they’ve been cheated of their chance to succeed, and that the media is in on it. They promise to comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable, and burn down the houses of power.

Nigeria’s economy has grown at a strong pace in recent years, but the study notes that it is one of the few countries where the number of people living in poverty has increased—from 69 million in 2004 to 112 million in 2010—over the past generation.

Globalization—the cross-border flow of ideas, information, people, money, goods, and services—has resulted in an interconnected world where national leaders have increasingly limited ability to protect the lives and livelihoods of citizens. In the digital age, borders no longer mean what citizens think they mean. In some ways, they barely exist.

The result is that known global reserves of crude oil are now almost 2.5 times higher than in 1980, and abundant available supply ensures that prices won’t anytime soon recover to the peak they reached in 2014, if ever.

It is not rising China, a new Cold War, the future of Europe, or the risk of a global cyberconflict that will define our societies. It’s the efforts of the losers not to get “fucked over,” and the efforts of the winners to keep from losing power. Not just in the United States and Europe, but in the developing world too, there will be a confrontation within each society between winners and losers.

It’s the growing doubt among citizens that government can protect them, provide them with opportunities for a better life, and help them remain masters of their fate.

Is the purpose of government to bring about change, to enable others to bring about change, or to protect society against the worst effects of change? Some will say there’s a place for all three of these roles.

A 2015 study conducted by Ball State University found that automation and related factors, not trade, accounted for 88 percent of lost U.S. manufacturing jobs between 2006 and 2013.

When human beings feel threatened, we identify the danger and look for allies. We use the enemy, real or imagined, to rally friends to our side. This book is about ongoing political, economic, and technological changes around the world and the widening divisions they will create between the next waves of winners and losers.

“For every unemployed American man between the ages of 25 and 55,” Eberstadt wrote, “there are three who are neither working nor looking for work.” Some 57 percent of white men who have left the labor force receive a government disability check. About half of U.S. men who stopped looking for a job take pain medication every day.

But Donald Trump didn’t create us vs. them. Us vs. them created Donald Trump, and those who dismiss his supporters are damaging the United States.

But along with new opportunities come serious vulnerabilities, and the refusal of the global elite to acknowledge the downsides of the new interdependence confirms the suspicions of those losing their sense of security and standard of living that elites in New York and Paris have more in common with elites in Rome and San Francisco than with their discarded countrymen in Tulsa, Turin, Tuscaloosa, and Toulon.

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has some good counterarguments. What’s special about robots? he has asked.

About 28 percent of Obama 2012 voters who qualified as “populist” then chose Trump in 2016.

In addition, governments must minimize inequality. This is especially important in a world where it has never been easier to find out how foreigners live. The point is not to prevent wealth creation or to reward people who have done nothing to deserve help and will probably squander it. It’s not a question of equality of outcome but of opportunity, a viable path toward a better life. The larger the percentage of people with good reason to believe that the system will prevent them from bettering themselves, the greater the risk of conflict for which everyone pays a price.