Can We Just Take Globalization Out Back And Shoot It In The Back of the Head?

January 30th, 2009

My apologies for not having written for so long. I have been “otherwise pre-occupied” and have also been watching the first weeks of the Obama presidency and the accelerating unwinding of the financial markets.

The situation looks increasingly bleak. I hope you are prepared.

Readers know that I have been a critic of globalization in its present form. In this article, I will lay out for you how badly Americans have been fleeced by their own politicians, losing their own jobs, factories and any hope of a better future for themselves and their children. And all this has happened in a country with a supposedly free media, and where people can exercise greater free will than in China, where I am writing from now.

I’m going to keep this simple, but there are some numbers involved. Keep in mind that I’m not an accountant, but I do understand business. To make my illustration, I’m going to create a simplified fictional scenario.

OK, let’s suppose that there is a factory in Pennsylvania which employs 500 people to make widgets. This factory has been making widgets since 1955 and employs 500 people, who make an average income of $2,000 a month. This means that the monthly payroll is US$1 million a month, or US$12 million annually. Of course the factory owners and employees all pay taxes which go to the city, state and federal government.

Now, the owner goes to China and finds that he can go to China, and instead of paying his workers an average of US$2,000 every month, he can get Chinese workers at an average salary of US$200 a month. Their productivity is just as good as the American workers, but they cost only 1/10 the wages. His monthly payroll expenses fall from US$1 million a month to US$100,000 a month, and his annual China payroll becomes only $1.2 million. This means that he can afford to lower the price of his widgets, thus selling more widgets.

Moreover, in order to attract the investment, the local Chinese government is willing to give him cheap land and a tax holiday for several years. This means that his upfront investment costs are lowered drastically to only US$500,000 for land and factory. The business owner would be a fool to turn down such an opportunity, right?

So he goes back to Pennsylvania and begins transferring production to China, gradually laying off his Pennsylvania workers along the way. Now this is where things start getting wacky. As he lays off his workers, they go to the state government to collect unemployment, which for the sake of simplicity, we will say, runs about $400 per worker per week for six months. This cost is carried by the state government. Eventually all are laid off, and the state pays out a total of $5.2 million (400 * 26 * 500) for all the laid-off workers.

Now, our factory widget owner is happy, because thanks to globalization and WTO, not only has he lowered his costs drastically, but he can export all over the world duty-free, since WTO has regulations against import tariffs and barriers. He has more markets, and more market access. His investors are happy because they are making more because of lower costs and higher profit margins.

But what has happened in the US? More and more unskilled, then skilled, workers are losing their jobs. The state governments need to pay unemployment, and they need to tax the employers who remain in the state for corporate taxes to sustain the system. Meanwhile the tax base of factories which remain in the state shrinks while the number of unemployed grows. At the same time, there is a very large group of politicians who rail against taxes, so the states cannot raise taxes even though their tax base is shrinking and the number of unemployed is growing. Meanwhile, the number of people accessing free state services continues to grow.

Basically, this is what has been happening in the US over the past 15 years with globalization. If you think about it, it is amazing the US economy, with all the deficit spending over the past eight years, has not collapsed sooner! And mind you, we have not even talked about subprime mortgages and derivatives yet!

Now before WTO and globalization, there would have been import tariffs. If Chinese costs were so low (which they are), the US would at least have been able to impose some tariffs to bring costs closer to what they would cost in the US and thereby mitigating some of the difference, and bringing money into the US Treasury. China’s growth would have been slower, and probably healthier for China and the rest of the world.

Now there is talk in the US of a “Buy America” campaign. Too late folks! If the US raised tariffs now, it would trigger a protectionist trade war, one which the US is very poorly prepared to win, since it now has to look to China to bail it out of its current mess. In times like these, cash is king, and China has the cash.

Now, is this the fault of the Chinese? I would say no. The Chinese just took maximum advantage of a system which was given to them, and the Chinese government wanted to maximize exports to the US so that it could earn foreign exchange to fund China’s economic development.

Different American politicians and pundits have pedaled globalization to Americans as the panacea to all their ills. But what has happened in reality? Americans have lost their jobs, lost their homes because of the growing subprime and now prime mortgage crisis, and they do not have the skills which are needed for this new period we are entering. The companies are optimized for a world which no longer exists. Americans have lost their own future, and the futures of their children and maybe grandchildren. And most are completely unprepared for this new kind of globalization, which looks like it may very well bring the US standard of living to something more closely resembling the Chinese standard of living.

For your information, until very recently, the Chinese were dirt poor. They remember what it’s like, and even though they do not want to live that way again, they can roll back expenses to the minimum if it needed. Give you an example: there is now a movement among Chinese university students to spend 100 yuan (about US$15) a week. How many Americans can do that?

These are the times we are in for.

Saying that Americans were fleeced by charlatans and politicians on both sides of the aisle does not even begin to describe the situation. Just about the only thing they have left is their own internal organs. Already there are young women who are selling their eggs to make a living. And it will just get worse and worse.

Now does China export jobs? No, China exports Chinese. The country has too many people, and the government is encouraging them to go to Africa where many Chinese companies are investing in hard assets, otherwise known as commodities. Anyone who has lived in China can tell you that Chinese are great believers in hard assets.

So what can President Obama do? It doesn’t look like he can do very much. Collapsing sales and profits reports keep on coming down the pike, and have acquired a momentum all their own. It would be nice if we could take globalization out back and shoot it in the back of the head, but it’s too late. The cat’s out of the bag, and it’s not going back in.

That’s why I’m in China.

Now, why is it the US with its free press, tell the people what was really happening? Or were they just distracted by left-wing/right-wing pseudopolitics and red/blue arguments so much that they did not notice what was happening to them?

If you want another angle on this bleak picture, I’d recommend that you read Clusterfuck Nation.

Why Globalization Will Fail

October 29th, 2007

For the past fifty years, globalization was offered as the answer to all the world’s ills: it would raise standards of living in the developing world, it would create more wealth, nations would understand each other better and eventually trust each other, and so on and so forth.

I’m going to state what is increasingly obvious: globalization is fading in the struggle against nationalism for peoples’ hearts and minds. The world has not become global; instead capital, wealth, classes and class values, as I have mentioned in the previous post, have gone global while leaving most of the rest of the world behind. For the moneyed classes, nations are less important, perhaps even irrelevant. That is happening now as the Chinese economy grows and Chinese companies are expanding their presence to other nations by investing in their financial companies, for example.

But the moneyed classes represent only a comparatively small percentage of the world’s population. Most belong to the middle class, who still see the world in terms of the nation-state. What do they think?

They are becoming more, not less, nationalistic. A recent article shows that Chinese consumers are gravitating to Chinese brands, not western brands. In the online search struggle, search engines become victims of these games.

The simple fact is that although the US and Chinese economies are tightly bound together, and depend on each other as their largest trading partners, they do not trust each other. This trust is getting wider and deeper with the passage of time; it is not getting smaller. People for the most part, still think in terms of national interests, not global interests.

As the rich/poor divide widens, and as the US dollar weakens and the US standard of living starts to head downhill, it will become expedient to blame globalization for the country’s ills. We aren’t there yet, but we will be. Previous administrations and the WTO will be blamed for the shortcomings of globalization. Increasingly, China and the Chinese people will be seen as a threat to western values and the western way of life.

This will make it increasingly difficult for brands to become international. Are they national? Whose side are they on? Who sits on their boards? These are questions they will be asked more and more.

That is why globalization is failing, and will ultimately fail. It’s just that no one wants to take the blame and be the first to make the call.

But that will happen soon enough…

Report: Cory Doctorow of Boingboing Speaks in Beijing

September 13th, 2007

Cory Doctorow, open-source advocate and publisher of the Boingboing blog, spoke in Beijing yesterday on Sept. 12. The Boingboing blog was one of the first blogs on the Internet, and now reportedly has more than 600K subscribers. The venue for the event was the Beijing Bookworm bookclub/bookstore in Sanlitun. Many members of Beijing’s English-blogging digerati were there including Jeremy Goldkorn of danwei.org who served as host, William Moss of ImageThief and Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy China Digital Watch.

Cory opened his talk by reading a short story he had written. The story was set in 2027, where a VC was trying to talk a woman into letting him invest 600K in her company, which created customized mobile devices from junk, which she would then sell to customers. It was a perfect case of mass customization; this time, the VC had become commoditized, he was now part of a venture capital franchise and was looking for places to put his money. Trouble was, he had more cash to invest than what he knew to do with. The woman complained saying that she had tried to get money from Sand Hill Road in 1999, but she was blown off because her business did not, as the VCs put it then, scale. Now the tables were turned, and the woman was able to buy her raw materials for very cheap prices, and taking advantage of new technology design software and equipment, was able to design unique devices very quickly. At the end of the story, the poor VC was reduced to asking if he could work a shift on her assembly line so that he could have one of the devices.

After the reading of the story, Cory proceeded to talk about the issue of DRM (digital rights management) and copyright. He related the story of how Google had recently stopped selling videos from Google Video, disabling the ability of people who had paid for downloads to watch videos they had already paid money to buy. For this reason, many had turned to the Google search engine to find unauthorized downloads of those same videos which they did not have to pay money to buy, and which they could play anytime they wanted. This was a perfect example of how screwed up the whole copyright issue had become; it encouraged unlawful behavior by punishing those who acted lawfully, but now changes forced people to adopt and use products which were not “lawful”.

He then proceeded to talk about the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown request, which was used to remove content from Internet websites. He recounted the experience of one publisher, the Science Fiction Writers Society, of which Cory is a member, which asked that all references to Isaac Asimov be removed from a document publishing website. As a result, even high school reading lists had to be removed.

All this was done without any need for proof of ownership to be submitted to a court, or seeking of an injunction. His point was that the copyright laws are much more strict on the Internet, and do not need “proof”. In a twisted way, this has encouraged the proliferation of online piracy because the laws are unreasonable and unenforceable.

He then talked about how changes in technology had helped the publishing industry as a whole. Whereas before, major book hits needed to sell 50,000 copies, now many books became profitable by selling only 3,000 books. Technology has lowered the threshold of costs and profitability for small niche publishers, which are now able to reach a wider audience through the Internet, and later through mobile search and applications.

When the US was founded, for the first hundred years of its history, the US pirated all books written by English authors, and refused to honor British copyright laws. Cory added that the American founding fathers knew what they were doing; they were not prepared to have US dollars go into the pockets of the English treasury. It was only Mark Twain, an American author, became famous, did Americans become interested in copyright laws.

Now, Cory noted, China wants to become an accepted member of WTO and the international business community, and is seeking to honor international copyright laws. He warned that it is important for China to think through what its own interests are so that the country’s own best interests are not sacrificed to globalization.

Cory made it very clear that he believes that the current copyright laws are formulated to favor current copyright owners, at the expense of consumers. He noted that the current US copyright law, introduced some thirty years ago, has gone through eleven revisions, and that literally no one, including judges, lawyers and politicians understands it completely.

If there was a theme to his discussion, it is that the Internet has opened up a whole new world for those who are savvy enough to use it intelligently, and use it to reach niche audiences and interest groups all over the world, without being restricted by geography and language.

It’s great to know that we are all tied into our own interest groups through the power of the Internet. If we are willing to reach out, we can find people with similiar interests without any restrictions at all.

It’s all in our hands now.

Andrew Lih has posted a photo of the event on his blog and Frank Yu has posted photos of the event on Flickr. Search for “cory doctorow beijing”

Updated 9/15/07: Danwei has posted a video of Cory’s talk.