Global stability depends on globalization
Sir, Jan Kregel and William Milberg in their “Global stability rests on sharing the gains” (September 5) get it quite right in their title but from thereon their message seems a little bit muddled, perhaps because the authors are still suffering that wall-syndrome that makes us all want to believe you could isolate yourself sustainably from your neighbors.
Globalization, in any form, is unequivocally here and is as a bare minimum seeping through all borders with its environmental impacts and its spread of nuclear arms capabilities. Of course there are gains, and pains, to be derived from globalization but in order to understand them better we must move away from looking at short term data like this year’s GDP growth or last year’s unemployment rate and find ways to measure it more in terms of where we would have been without it, after a couple of decades.
For instance when Kregel and Milberg mention that in “the US, a strengthening of the pension systems, a substantial increase in the minimum wage and the provision of universal access to health insurance would protect against the unequal effects of globalization” they create false expectations. Better pensions and a health insurance could indeed, if provided independently, by redistributing some of the profits, help to aminorate some local inequalities (not global) but an increase in the minimum wage would just directly eat away on the possibilities of competing in the global markets, thereby willingly renouncing to capture some of the profits that could be shared.
This comment is not intended to criticize the authors but to try to illustrate the complexities of the issues. I am the first to admit taking some wrong turns in this debate, a couple of times a day.
Jan Kregel William Milberg sharing globalization
Globalization, in any form, is unequivocally here and is as a bare minimum seeping through all borders with its environmental impacts and its spread of nuclear arms capabilities. Of course there are gains, and pains, to be derived from globalization but in order to understand them better we must move away from looking at short term data like this year’s GDP growth or last year’s unemployment rate and find ways to measure it more in terms of where we would have been without it, after a couple of decades.
For instance when Kregel and Milberg mention that in “the US, a strengthening of the pension systems, a substantial increase in the minimum wage and the provision of universal access to health insurance would protect against the unequal effects of globalization” they create false expectations. Better pensions and a health insurance could indeed, if provided independently, by redistributing some of the profits, help to aminorate some local inequalities (not global) but an increase in the minimum wage would just directly eat away on the possibilities of competing in the global markets, thereby willingly renouncing to capture some of the profits that could be shared.
This comment is not intended to criticize the authors but to try to illustrate the complexities of the issues. I am the first to admit taking some wrong turns in this debate, a couple of times a day.
Jan Kregel William Milberg sharing globalization
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