Dean Baker — Why Is It So Hard for Intellectuals to Envision Alternative Forms of Globalization

When it comes to critics of globalization with standing in the mainstream of the economics profession, few are better than Dani Rodrik. Nonetheless when it comes to laying out the indictment of the path pursued over the last three decades in a Washington Post interview, even he largely accepts the story that the basic story that “globalization” has some specific direction attached to it.

The point here is that globalization, meaning the greater integration of economies across the world, could have been designed an infinite number of ways. The way it was designed was intended to redistribute income upward, with those at the top of the income distribution using their political power to make changes that enhanced their wealth and power. The upward redistribution was not an accidental outcome of a process of economic integration: it was the purpose of this process.…

The is is short definition of neoliberal globalization — using political power to impose economic liberalism where it favors capital with free cross-border competition, one hand, and, on the other hand, to use policy, law and regulation also to favor capital by erecting and enforcing cross-border property rights that restrict competition. Classical liberalism was based on the first, laissez-faire, while neoliberalism adds government intervention to favor capital.

Dean Baker points out this was a choice. It did not have to be this way.

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Why Is It So Hard for Intellectuals to Envision Alternative Forms of Globalization
Dean Baker | Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C