21/11/2017 Who would benefit from globalization?
Who would eventually benefit from globalization? Owners and managers of global enterprises would be the greatest beneficiaries. Most Americans would be better off than the status
quo because globalization is almost the same as Americanization, which enlarges
Americans’ various opportunities. English-speaking people would also be better
off because the world’s only common language would be English, and their
cultures are close to American culture.
Most other people would be worse
off than the status quo because they would not only be unable to use their
mother tongue for work but also be forced to follow the American custom in many
important situations. The amount of their gains from free trade would be much less than that of these losses.
Today’s ideology that is used to
promote globalization is neoliberalism whose theoretical basis is neoclassical economics or general equilibrium
theory. As I hinted in this blog on the 18th
of November, general equilibrium theory has many defects. I mentioned that it
assumes contract completeness, which is quite unrealistic.
I would like to add that it lacks
organization theory because each firm’s technology is exogenously given there. Put
differently, it does not analyze how firms should be organized or what human relations
should be established within organizations. Ask any economics major how
economics teaches desirable behavior within organizations. And you would not
get any ‘scientific’ answers because it does not investigate the question.
This means that the general equilibrium
theory considers the efficiency of markets only and ignores that of
organizations. Thus, it is nothing but a partial efficiency theory. I believe
organization efficiency or production efficiency is more important than market
efficiency because the economy does not have much without production.
One of the most fundamental claims of neoclassical economics
(general equilibrium theory) is that it applies to any economy in the world independently
of cultures, which is a necessary trait of a theory for globalization. However, people's behavior within organizations is very much influenced by their own culture. Efficient
human behavior in one culture is not necessarily so in another. An efficient organization
structure in one culture is not necessarily so in another either. Neoclassical economics
avoids this problem simply ignoring organization efficiency.
Using a fundamentally wrong theory, neoliberalism
seeks for globalization and destroys almost all cultures including languages in
the world. The globalized world would be an enlarged USA with a complex hierarchy
of people with different ethnicity and English abilities.
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