In Poor Man’s Hero, Reason magazine interviews Johan Norberg, Swedish author of In Defense of Global Capitalism. Norberg makes a number of interesting points:
Look at Vietnam, which I visited recently. It had the benefit that when the Communists took power there, they actually implemented their ideas. They collectivized agriculture and they destroyed private property, which meant that in the mid-1980s people were starving there. The Communists’ own ideas managed to do what the American bombs never did: destroy communism. In the wake of such failure, the government began to look for other examples, and they saw that Taiwan had succeeded by globalizing. The Communists in China were liberalizing trade and ownership laws and were seeing fast progress. The contrast is especially clear on the Korean peninsula. It’s the same population, with the same culture, just having two very different political and economic systems. In 50 years, one of them went from hunger and poverty to Southern European living standards. The other one is still starving.
I particularly like this point:
Sweatshops are a natural stage of development. We had sweatshops in Sweden in the late 19th century. We complained about Japanese sweatshops 40 years ago. You had them here. In fact, you still do in some places. One mistake that Western critics of globalization make is that they compare their current working standards to those in the developing world: “Look, I’m sitting in a nice, air-conditioned office. Why should people in Vietnam really have to work in those terrible factories?” But you’ve got to compare things with the alternatives that people actually have in their own countries. The reason why their workplace standards and wages are generally lower is the lack of productivity, the lack of infrastructure, the lack of machinery, and so on. If workers were paid U.S. wages in Vietnam, employers wouldn’t be able to hire them. The alternative for most workers would be to go back to agriculture, where they could work longer hours and get irregular and much lower wages.
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When I was in Vietnam, I interviewed workers about their dreams and aspirations. The most common wish was that Nike, one of the major targets of the anti-globalization movement, would expand so that a worker’s relatives could get a job with the company.
I’ve seen this point before:
Places without natural resources, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, have developed relatively broad-based economies, where countries rich in oil or minerals often have not. The broader an economy is, the more wealth and income are spread around. The best thing that could happen to the Arab world would be for them to run out of oil. Then they’d have to open up to trade, and a small number of people wouldn’t be in control all of the wealth, as is the case in Saudi Arabia.
Returning to the idea of developing versus developed economies:
Many environmentalists care about green forests, clean air, clean water, and so on. What they don’t appreciate is that attitude is itself a result of industrial development. In our countries, people didn’t care about these things 100 years ago. Preferences shift when you can feed your children and give them an education. That’s when you begin to care about these sorts of things.