Key Insights:
Finally, at long last, over the next two generations the tide is likely to be flowing strongly toward near-universal global development...
The fear was that dehyperglobalization would rob poorer countries of their ability to develop the export comparative advantages to support the manufacturing engineering clusters they need for learning by doing, establishing a good educational system, and converging to global North standards of living...
This fear appears to have been very overblown...
Optimism about future income growth and globalization is warranted because India has more people in it than Africa: the Asia Circle from Japan to Pakistan and down to Indonesia and up to Mongolia is and always has been half the human race. And South Asia and Southeast Asia are now in gear...
As long as dealing with global warming does not absorb too many of the resources that could otherwise be devoted to income growth...
This is true even though the great wave of increasing international trade intensity and integration that began in 1945 came to an end in 2008...
Even so, since 2008 there has still been increasing global integration in the flow of ideas and the growing interdependence of value chains...
A substantial part of the post-2008 reversal of globalization was partially due to China onshoring its supply chains—the pre-2008 situation in which China's manufacturing knowledge was vastly behind its manufacturing intensity was highly unstable...
This, however, hinges sufficient state capacity—which is not just the ability to do infrastructure and reorganize your economy, but also have people's stuff not get stolen from them either by local thieves or by government functionaries...
Distributional issues are another potential key blockage—the benefits of technological change flow to the global north, or to a small predatory internal élite, or the market economy's distribution goes spontaneously awry...
But there is the question of how much distribution matters in a rich world where few are starving—matters for social power, yes, and for whatever happinesses flow from that, but does distribution matter otherwise?
Countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America may be stubborn development problems for generations, however...
That beside, the basic mission of industrialization to uplift the human world out of poverty is likely to be complete by 2050 if we are lucky, by 2100 if we are not...
There is good reason to think that the next generation will be for the world better and more impressive than the last generation. And the last generation was, on a world scale, you know, better and more impressive than was the post-WWII Thirty Glorious Years in the North Atlantic...
Future guests, possibly?: Dietz Vollrath, Arvind Subramanian, Charlie Stross...
Hexapodia!
References:
Fourastié, Jean. 1979. Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. Paris: Fayard. <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TAVRU4Y>.
Subramanian, Arvind, Martin Kessler, & Emanuele Properzi. 2023. "Trade Hyperglobalization is Dead. Long Live...?" Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper, No. 23-11. <https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/2023-11/wp23-11.pdf.>.
Stross, Charles. 2005. Accelerando. New York: Ace Books. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/294259/accelerando-by-charles-stross/>
Vollrath, Dietrich. 2020. Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. <https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo44520849.html>.
+, of course:
Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0>.
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