For virtually all my life the savants of economics have pledged their political heroes to strict loyalty to the doctrine of free worldwide movement of capital, materials and products. It was said to promise unprecedented prosperity. Democracy in the government and free trade in the marketplace. Written above the door at the shrine was “Neo-liberalism.”
Well, we did have growth and we did have prosperity. But at the expense of many (think sweatshops) and an unequal distribution of material wellbeing in all societies. For we discovered that the “invisible hand” was not altogether even-handed.
The sober reality has been an unequal geographic distribution of wealth in all industrialized societies, and extreme inequality in dependent nations. That is, as many now acknowledge, large areas of industrial activity shuttered, as wealth and power moved to knowledge-based centers in societies like the US (the two coasts primarily) and factories closed in the heartlands, while many poorer societies were ravaged by chaos and extremism.
There is more to the story of course, and I’d like to share some of my thinking about it over the next week or so in several blogs. You might want to “google” topics like globalization and neo-liberalism and see what others are saying. There are well-argued rebuttals to what I have been writing, and all of this is playing out across a broad sweep of new technologies and climate variations. Fundamentally, I believe this discission can, and should, be non-partisan.
Economics is the study of doctrines, and these abstractions cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.
It's almost as if globetrotting elites have given us the symptoms of Dutch Disease while shipping our Triangle Shirt Factory jobs to wherever things like this are tolerated.