Interesting to see Patricia Cohen in today’s New York Times (p. 1) deem “newsworthy” globalization’s retreat. Like many others, she emphasizes Covid, the Russia-Ukraine war, and US-China tensions. Yet in doing so she ignores more fundamental problems. First is the myth of “open markets and liberalized trade.” This is what for decades we have called an unjust neocolonial economic order in which the wealthy countries remain affluent only by exploiting a vast periphery of impoverished countries. China’s growth in recent decades might be symbolic of a needed change. Second is the canard about the global economy somehow being efficient. If we ever got around to “monetizing” the massive environmental harm and social misery that our consumer capitalist system causes worldwide, we would indeed see how horrifically inefficient our system truly is. Globalization’s retreat can therefore be seen as little more than a sclerotic global economy starting to buckle under the accumulation of problems it has long been creating.
