A Response to Bill Maher’s Recent Comments on Globalization.
No, globalization and free trade are not necessarily a net positive for the world community just because nominal poverty rates are down.
I’m a big fan of Bill Maher. He has written books worth of my type of comedy, and he carried the torch for using liberal “common sense” to spit in the eye of terrible conservative ideas for decades, even when it wasn’t popular. To me, despite being rooted firmly in the world of comedy, he has a kind of quasi-journalistic integrity in which I always feel like he’s being honest, even when he’s wrong. The result: I always respect his opinion, even when I disagree.
In that spirit, I must respectfully disagree with what I feel was a grossly misleading point that he made on his show last week.
Talking about labor markets in a globalized world, Bill said: “Is globalization failing everybody? Because global poverty in the 90s was 40%, and now it’s at 10%. It’s tough question for liberals because sometimes things help poor people overseas and are not so good for the working class here in America, and we have to decide, ‘who do we love the most, people or Americans?’”
This is technically true. “Extreme poverty” rates have been shrinking globally. Obesity has become a bigger killer than starvation. There has been a subtle but monumental shift in both the finances and availability of basic necessities for the global poor that has gone largely unnoticed by Western societies. It does represent a positive development. It should be acknowledged. It should be part of the conversation. However, the fact that fewer people are starving is not the whole story. Bill tries to add some nuance to an oft misguided liberal talking point, but ends up oversimplifying the case himself.
Bill’s logic has two major problems.
First of all, by saying that these people are better off because of globalization he is completely ignoring why the history of these places that has made the “low quality growth” of modern globalization a step up from their previous circumstances.
You have to take a bit of a long view of history to understand this one. The poverty that globalization is supposedly helping the developing world recover from didn’t occur in a vacuum. Most of these places are recovering from conditions that were forced upon them by a colonial legacy that the West is directly responsible for.
We colonized in two ways. When the West encountered other civilizations, which is to say, foreign powers with their own complex societies, governments, and cultures, we dominated them militarily. In places like China and India we kept local power structures in place while moving our business interests in and forcing indigenous people to extract their own resources for our benefit. This was done by constant threat of force. The British used the adage, “whatever happens, we have got the maxim gun, and they have not,” referencing their use of the maxim machine gun to decimate indigenous resistance, to describe the underlying philosophy of their relationship with their colonies.
In other places, we sought to civilize those we saw as savages. Western culture felt that it was the “white man’s burden” to bring the light of civilization to people we saw as more primitive than ourselves. Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists have recently begun reevaluating our understanding of the difference between agrarian societies and hunter gatherers. In some areas, nomadic lifestyles are actually more recent than agrarian ancestors, indicating a shift away from agriculture in some cases, largely driven by a desire to escape its negative effects (stratification, disease, stunted growth, environmental degradation). With that knowledge, it is easy to conclude that our traditional view of humanity on an inevitable and beneficial road from “savagery” to “civilization,” with each step representing “progress” has been erroneous. It was likely informed by our own bias towards civilization itself.
This gave Western Civilization a completely misplaced sense of superiority. It is a mistake for a society to think that, because it is capable of militarily and technologically dominating another society, one society is “better” than another. It’s a mistake we made for hundreds of years and still continue to make.
In any case, we subjugated the locals and plundered their natural resources to build our own economies. It’s important to point our that, when I say “we,” I’m really talking about wealthy and powerful members of Western Civilization. The factory worker in London scarcely saw his fortunes improve because of imperialism. On the other hand, Lords who owned shares in joint stock ventures like the East India Company became global powers unto themselves.
Then, after a couple of unprecedentedly resource-draining wars finally forced the West to abandon imperialism, it left its former colonies with nothing upon granting them self determination. Big surprise, things didn’t immediately go swimmingly for most of them. A few decades later, wealthy business interests from the developed world (the same class that had benefitted from imperialism) returned to those failing states with a business proposition. They wanted to exploit the one resource these countries still had in abundance: people. This time, the offer was to have the locals perform labor at a fraction of what it cost to perform the same labor in the high-wage countries that would buy the goods they would be making.
Poverty is technically going down because we have found a new way of abusing these places that involves actually paying the locals enough to not starve. However, that should not obfuscate the fact that what we do to them now still is abuse.
We have trouble acknowledging that because we have been treating them so badly for so long that this new kind of abuse, which comes with a side of economic empowerment, is actually an improvement. Market globalization hits with softer gloves than imperial globalization once did, and has a little bit more of an upside than the abject destitution that the locals were once left with. Nevertheless it is still a dubious proposition to say that “globalization has been good for people in the developing world.”
While cold economic numbers support Bill’s claim, the totality of evidence for how much better off these people are is actually pretty mixed.
Someone should tell the people in the developing world how well they’re doing, because they don’t seem to know. For instance, we all know about the nets below factory dormitory windows to designed prevent suicides in China. Apparently conditions in their factories are so abysmal that a not insignificant number of children (and they are children) wake up in the morning and decide that ending their everything right that moment is more tolerable than another day in these factories.
It doesn’t matter if these people are not still running the risk of starving to death as they were during the Communist era’s horribly managed policy initiatives like the “Great Leap Forward” (a low bar if ever there was one). Suicide-prevention nets are a sure-fire sign that something is horribly wrong with the way we treat labor and run our global economy. China is not unique in this regard either, depression and suicide rates are up globally. People’s entire lives increasingly exist to their own torment.
Not to mention the unsustainable methods of resource extraction and and consumption that have destroyed the environment in many of these places. People in those parts of the world exist in constant pollution, natural beauty having been largely eradicated from their lives. Unlike the developed world, countries in the developing world can’t afford to build their economies on environmentally sustainable forms of energy and methods resource extraction. When people in these countries face the long term costs from these short-sighted practices, the fact that their income went from one dollar a day to two will likely seem a hollow victory.
Bill’s argument has the problematic feature of almost making globalization sound like a noble attempt by wealthy companies to improve the lot of developing world citizens by providing them with jobs. This is in contrast to what globalization actually is: a worldwide race to the bottom for increasingly meager wages motivated by the desire of corporate shareholders to maximize profits.
We basically pillaged these people’s homes for hundreds of years. We primed them to be so desperate for money that they would allow their own exploitation and the destruction of their environment if it meant some kind of employment. Eventually that exploitation allowed them to reliably feed themselves, despite stripping their lives of joy.
Now, wealthy people in the West are patting themselves on the back because the decline in developing world poverty makes them feel like they have done something good while enriching themselves. This warped perspective would be fascinating if it wasn’t so tragic. Still, it’s understandable, the global economic elite don’t get many opportunities to make their greed seem virtuous. These moments must be among the great joys of their own miserable lives.
While our new methods of exploitation have become marginally less brutal, we should be careful describing the modest relative improvement in their treatment as being “beneficial” to developing world citizens. Lessening the severity of something rarely amounts to a cure, and the West has a long history of being a plague on the rest of the world.
Wealthy business interests in the West aren’t creating sweatshops for the benefit of the locals. More importantly, in the long run, the wages they are paying will never be enough to create a “middle class” lifestyle for large numbers of working people. Those wages are enough, however— low enough, that is — to destroy our middle class. Which is precisely what is happening.
There is a very real possibility that we could look back on this and say that while we nominally ended world hunger, we managed to turn that accomplishment into a tragic Pyrrhic victory. The methods we used to achieve that goal created a global population made to feel miserable, exploited, and tormented by the constant labor that their lives had become. We also managed to dispossess the developed world’s middle class, whose lifestyles were stripped away to end global poverty (“gee I’m glad we ended poverty, but did we have to do so by destroying my ability to send my kids to college?”). Meanwhile the wealthy sat back and only got wealthier. Have the costs really been worth the benefits?
If globalization is really about improving the lives of millions of people around the world, then the West should be honest with itself, get serious about forgiving debts, and offer huge amounts of aid as economic stimuli. That money shouldn’t come in exchange for near-slave labor. It also shouldn’t come at the expense of the developed world’s middle class. It should be offered as recompense for the West’s disgraceful history and come directly from wealthy citizens and families in the developed world. That grievance should be redressed by the class that profited most from generations of exploitation, and continues do so today.
Which brings me to my second, and frankly, more important issue with Bill’s point. He neglects the fact that concern over globalization is as much about who the money is coming from as where it is going. The global middle class is being bled dry to feed the growth of both low wage jobs and corporate profits. That’s not where money should be coming from to improve the fortunes of the developing world.
Bill completely glosses over the fact that, despite poverty being down, inequality is going up and the middle class is being destroyed. This is important because most of us would probably say that if the plight of the poor is going to improve globally, it should happen by bringing more people into the middle class where their lives can be more than just perpetual toil.
That’s not what is happening. The formerly impoverished are being raised to a level of bare subsistence that is technically above poverty, but the working class is losing any semblance of leisure or luxury. The “middle class lifestyle” that those workers are supposedly chasing is disappearing in the developed world. In effect, workers in the developing world are destroying what they seek in its pursuit.
One example of this is that poverty rates are now higher in the United States (around 15%) than in the rest of the world. Now, these measurements do take into account cost of living, so a janitor here is still paid nominally more money that a factory worker in the developing world. However what this really means is that, once functional “cost of living” is factored in, the average child laborer in Bangladesh is having an easier time meeting her basic necessities than poor person in the United States. If disposable income from the developed world can be spent on pointless nonessentials in such large amounts that it actually lifts the entire developing world out of poverty, then shouldn’t those wealthy countries be able to secure a basic standard of living for all their citizens and prevent poverty within their own borders?
Right now the rising fortunes of workers in the developing world and declining fortunes of workers in the developed world are uniting the two into a permanent global underclass. They contribute all of the labor and reap none of the rewards. Of course, it’s clear where the rewards have gone. The absolute wealthiest people in the world are currently seeing their net worths skyrocket away from the rest of society. And let’s be honest, today’s super rich is composed of people who, for the most part, were well off before corporate globalization. There hasn’t really been an increase in opportunities to excel for the average person, that’s a myth used to defend our indefensible levels of inequality. It would be a poor defense even if it were true, as it is, it constitutes nothing. Silence would be a better defense of their behavior.
At some point, in order to make lives in the developing world better, it will likely become necessary for working class people in the developed world to learn to live with less, and consume fewer resources as part of our daily lives. However, if we’re asking whose fortunes should be first on the chopping block in pursuit of global economic justice, I think most people would agree that Mr. Moneybags should lose his fifth Italian sportscar at before Average Joe loses the mortgage on his reasonable 2,000 square foot neighborhood home.
Instead, globalization is shaping up to be a partnership between the richest people in the world and the poorest people in the world to destroy the concept of the middle class.
The fact that Bill even picked this battle was a little a uprising. Of course, it is understandable that Bill Maher would have a blind spot for all of this. He is personally wealthy and doesn’t have a job that can be readily outsourced. He has the luxury of taking a step back and looking at what’s happening through a dispassionate global lens. These forces don’t present an imminent threat to his livelihood.
My question for Bill and anyone who Would argue as he does: when we hit 2030 and the World Bank tells us that poverty has technically been eradicated, but the vast majority of us are still miserable and and barely making ends meet while the wealthiest are rubbing their offensively cushy lifestyles and disgustingly excessive resource consumption in our faces more than ever, what then? Can we finally admit that making the rich richer was the only point of all of this?
