 This lecture is going to be about globalization. You've probably heard this term before in relationship to people who quote unquote are anti-globalization. I want to make it clear that there are very few people in the world who are against globalization. Globalization is something that most people welcome because globalization is something that helps all people across the world to become more free. Because of globalization, we have freedom of movement. That is, we are able to cross borders much more easily nowadays than we ever have before. It's easier to get passports. It's easier to go to places without passports. Borders are not as guarded or as rigid as they used to be, and even with the anti-immigration discussions that are going on in the United States right now, it still remains easier to cross borders and to go places than it ever has before. Because of globalization, we have freedom of communication, cell phones, fax machines, the internet, email. All of these things have allowed us to talk to people all across the world in ways that we've never been able to before and to do it more freely without government or corporate interference in doing so. We also have freedom of trade, I don't know about you, but I've bought things from China off the internet. It is much easier for regular people to go out and price things and comparison shop, not just locally, not just nationally, but internationally. Again, this is because of globalization. There are trade agreements in place that make it easier for goods and services to cross borders. There are far fewer tariffs and other kinds of trade restrictions, especially on an individual level. And while we still have to often pay customs or have something go through customs and so forth, this is still freer than it used to be. And lastly, we can exchange information. It is easier for people in the same profession to talk to people in their profession across national borders now. It is much easier to just simply talk to each other about whatever you're interested in on the internet and find out that information about it just by going and searching and Google and so forth. So globalization generally means more freedom for individuals. And those people who are characterized in the media as being anti-globalization are not anti-globalization, they're anti-multi-national corporation, which is a form of globalization that is not as welcome as some other aspects of globalization. So we're going to talk first about what are the benefits of globalization. One of the first things is economies of scale. This is why things are less expensive. And it's often easier to get things from suppliers in other places because they can make more of it and they can make it cheaper labor and cheaper manufacturing costs. And because of that, you can buy it for less. This benefits you directly by being able to buy from other sources. It benefits you indirectly because the discount places like Walmart or Kmart or Target or any of these other kinds of stores that you buy from would not be able to achieve the prices that they're achieving if there were not economies of scale. So economies of scale just basically means that you can manufacture more goods for less overhead, which means that you can reduce the price and still make a profit. Power dynamics. It is very hard for governments to do things nowadays without there being scrutiny. Back in 2009, there was an election of Iran and there was alleged difficulties in that election with some alleged corruption in the way that the election was going up into that point since how many took over in the end of the 1970s, early 1980s. It has not been easy to know what's going on government-wise within Iran. But because of Twitter and because of cell phones and so forth, the protests that occurred in Iran were very well known around the world. The government tried to shut it down, but people shut up, created mirror sites that allowed the Iranians to continue tweeting. And I would say that the changes that have been made in Iran since the 2009, including their willingness to negotiate regarding nuclear power, is a direct result of the fact that they're aware that the legitimacy of their government is under question because of the dynamic shifting to the people during the 2009 election. So this is part of what happened with the Arab Spring because information was leaked by WikiLeaks about the corruption of particular governments in North Africa and the Middle East. A lot of people got that information and they began to fight back against their government. And this led to upheaval and changes in governments in a number of countries. So the freedom of information, the freedom of communication makes it possible for power dynamics to shift those who are in power to not hold as much power over their people as they once wielded. And believe it or not, I know that we think a lot about war in the United States because we're among the more war-mongering nations on Earth, if not the most war-mongering nations on Earth. But the truth is there is a lot more peace and tolerance in the world than there once was. It's very difficult when you are in communication with people in other countries to support your government bombing those countries. We saw this even before the internet. And there are a lot of people who talk about what happened in the 1980s with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the credit Reagan and his hard-line policies against the Soviet Union. But another thing that was going on during that time that changed because of global satellites was communication between the Russian people and the population in the United States. And this took the form of talk show host in Moscow and in New York having city halls in which people got on camera and asked each other questions. There were a number of peace activists who created exchanges where people in Russia came to the United States and lived with families in the United States and people in the United States went to Russia and lived with people in Russia. And you started having groups of people beginning to see each other, not as the enemy, that is other human beings. And as that continued, the pressure to continue that freedom, to expand that freedom, became a pressure to be more tolerant and eventually led to the downfall of the Soviet Union and a pressure for more freedom of movement and more openness within the former Soviet Union and Russian society. And this was global satellites, fax machines, easier travel to places. We're all part of expanding globalization even before the internet became a popular and common among people in the world. And then there's this thing called long tailed groups. Now I want you to imagine a bell curve. You should know what a bell curve is. It kind of looks like a bell on a graph. And most of you think of it in terms of grades where the majority of people get a C and people who are above average get A's and B's and people who are below average get F's and B's. But if you look at that and imagine it in your head what you should see also is that at the end of the bell it doesn't hit the bottom of the graph but it just goes off like a tail in either direction. So that little section that's very close to the axis line and very small is called a long tail. And this distribution works not just for grading. It also works for different things that are going on within a particular population. So let's think for a minute if we're talking about what people do for entertainment and hobbies. So in the big bell part of that bell curve is probably things like sports, walking the dog, going to movies, things that are very popular to do. And lots and lots of people do that. But if you start getting into kind of weird things like knitting for your dog or playing sports, tabletop sports games or other kinds of kind of strange hobbies and so forth, you start getting more and more outliers along that long tail. And for a long time that meant that you had to really work hard to find other people that you shared your less than popular pastime. But nowadays there are lots of ways for you to connect to other people who share those interests. To give you an example when I'm talking about my husband, likes tabletop sports game called Stratomatic. There's probably only about, I don't know, maybe 5 million people in the world who play this game, which is not that much. Mostly men, mostly in upstate New York, but there are definitely a lot of people around the world who play it. And when I first got married to him, he used to send letters to other players in order to connect with them. There was a newsletter that you had to subscribe to it and it cost money. And then if you were going to play with other, you put together teams, they put together teams and you would send your picks to them and the other person would play the game. And there would be huge delays. And then maybe if you were lucky, like in a city of 4 million people, Atlanta, he had three friends that he could play with in person. He found nobody in Las Vegas that he's been able to connect with and play. And yet, he's now, and during that time in the early 1990s, a lot of the mail came from prisons because it was prisoners who would play these games because they had a lot of time in their hands. So you had to find each other. It was very hard to do. And when we wanted to talk to each other, it was pretty much letter writing, maybe occasional phone call, that kind of thing. But it was very difficult without cell phones, without the internet to connect with each other. Well, nowadays, he runs a 500 plus person list online and posts YouTube videos about it. And it's very easy to find other people who share his interest in tabletop sports games. So because he has a long tail interest, he's able to connect much easier to other people who share his passion than he used to be able to connect. So that improves people's lives. It makes it possible for them to enjoy things. It works against pushing people into conformity. It allows you to explore things that otherwise you might be lonely about and not be willing to explore. So it's very beneficial to individuals and to their lives. There are drawbacks, particularly the first drawback, is that it's much easier for hegemony to spread because you can live anywhere in the world and see an American newspaper, see an American magazine, see an American film, listen to American music, listen to American radio. All of these things carry with them cultural messages. You remember Gramsci and talking about hegemony and the way of spreading power. And it then spreads influence around the world. And it's been shown that sometimes that influence can be quite negative. It destroys local customs at times. And it also passes along information that makes American economy richer and encourages people to purchase things that they might not normally purchase and do things that they might not normally do because of this influence, this hegemonic influence. And connected to that is this idea of death of cultures. There are a lot of people who feel like because of globalization, we're pushing to kind of almost a uni culture around the world that is very materialistic, very commercial, very commodified, and that local customs and local traditions are suffering because of this widespread global culture. Also, it's much easier for oligopolies to develop. We've seen this with the media companies themselves because we have moved from lots and lots of newspapers, lots and lots of radio stations, lots of different outlets and lots of local, small media outlets now becoming conglomerated and now, depending upon how you count the internet, there's somewhere between five, only five and eight companies that are responsible for disseminating 90% of the information that you find. And of course, they're gonna disseminate information that's in their best interest rather than the interest of the rest of us. So this can be detrimental to us because we are not aware of things that are going on that we would have been aware of if there had been more competition and widespread outlets of information. Other oligopolies that have developed, we've seen car companies becoming multinational now and so you don't have just American-made cars, you have Ford, I think owns, Ford or GM now owns a Land Rover, Jaguar, all of these European car companies that used to be quite independent of the US car companies are now all intermixed with each other. Oil companies is another place where this conglomerated power has occurred so it's much easier in a highly globalized world to conglomerate that power and bring that power together and create just a few players within a particular industry. And then this, of course, also has encouraged an imbalance of power. Those countries that have the ability and the technology and the infrastructure, like say electricity is a big part of this, can become much more powerful in a global society in a global world than those who do not have that infrastructure in place. So this has had a tendency to give more power to the powerful and to make it harder for less powerful countries to move up in the world. So it has, at the same time, that it puts a check on power, and it also can create situations where power expands. So to understand globalization and these drawbacks and these benefits, you need to understand that both of these things, even when they're contradictory, can be true. Globalization is complex and it creates both benefits and drawbacks and it benefits individuals, but it can also be used to expand power that limits individuals. But the big takeaway here is that both these beneficial forces and these detrimental forces, while they both exist, the overall effect is to give people more freedom. So it's just a matter of figuring out how to put checks on the runaway power and the unintended consequences. No one that has any voice in this debate is against globalization. They are just simply trying to figure out ways to create globalization that it maximizes the freedoms that are involved and minimizes the unintended harmful consequences.