 And tonight's discussion is going to be about globalization. So the merits and drawbacks of globalization are again being debated by our politicians. With the passing of the Brexit vote and Donald Trump's America First doctrine, protectionist policies have become more prevalent, challenging globalization. So tonight our speaker is going to talk about that, how it will be affected by protectionist trade policies, how the United States and the world will be affected by these policies and is globalization really at an end or in need of a refresh. So our speaker is David Curry. He is a professor of humanistic studies and global studies and also co-director of the Center for Middle East Studies and Partnerships at the University of Wisconsin and Green Bay. Additionally, he is one of the advisors of the International Business Minor. He is an undergraduate professor Curry studied in Salzburg, Austria, and then later studied for almost two years at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He has published widely on contemporary German cinema as well as the contemporary novel. More recently, he has been studying the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures as expressed in European literature and film. Of particular interest in the role globalization has played in shaping conceptions of identity as well as the so-called clash of cultures and civilizations in Europe. And Avid Cinephile, he is also the director of the Green Bay Film Society and serves on the board of Film Green Bay. So let's all welcome Mr. Curry and we'll get started. Great. Thank you very much for that very nice introduction and can you all hear me okay? Great. Wonderful. Well, thanks for the invitation. I'm very thrilled to be here and I appreciate the invitation to come down to Sheboygan this evening and I appreciate that you all come out on somewhat drizzly evenings. So tonight's topic, the end of globalization is one that I feel very strongly about. I teach a class on globalization so I was very excited to talk about this. And I thought that the first thing that's really important to do is talk about what exactly is globalization. There's not a lot of consensus as to what it means and so I want to talk first to make sure that we all understand what some of the different ideas and definitions of globalization are. And then to also talk of course about some of the positives and negatives. What are the good things about globalization? What are some of the bad things about globalization? And then we'll raise the question why might it be coming to an end? The topic for this that was suggested by the Foreign Policy Association is the end of globalization. So why might it be coming to an end? And then what might the future hold? Let's make some speculations there and then most importantly that we'll have a chance to talk about it, discuss it, hear your thoughts, comments and questions. So I want to make sure we leave plenty of time for that at the end. So the question about what exactly is globalization? A lot of people say that globalization is really just a new term for something that's very old. So there has been this historical process of interchange from going back to trading back in the Middle Ages and afterwards of different cultures coming into contact with each other through ships trading and then of course in the late 19th century with trains and automobiles that not only bring different goods and services to other places but you have an interaction of people and contact with other people in other cultures and that can be good and that can also of course lead to some conflicts. So it's a historical process that began with a lot of our human ancestors moving around and migrating across the globe and then in the many thousands of years that followed that a lot of those distances have been overcome whereas people who originally had to go on foot and then on horse then with things that accelerated and made contact and travel much more rapid. A lot of these distances and barriers for this kind of interaction and connection became overcome and this facilitated even more an exchange of goods and an exchange of ideas and this exchange of goods and of ideas, the whole point of trade in many ways was a desire to improve our lives so that we can have better things that we can be aided by technology in of course in the 19th and then in the 20th century that brought us easier lives. Machines, mechanization, automation has made our lives and jobs of workers easier and improved the standard of living. So globalization in many ways has a lot to do with interconnectedness and interdependence and this has grown over time as our contact and our ability to interact and move across the globe has increased as well. So Jeffrey Sachs who is a very well known economist I believe at Princeton University has said that national economies have become integrated through globalization in four fundamental areas. The first being trade what we were talking about before. The second being finance, banking and global financial institutions and markets. The third being production and then the fourth are treaties and international institutions and so these four things he said have really brought what used to be individual nation states more and more together through these processes of globalization. So I want to take a look at these four aspects that he talks about a little bit more in depth to see what exactly he's talking about. So trade on the first one since World War II has grown actually more rapidly than global production and some of you might have heard on the radio or we're reading in the newspapers on television that we've seen that we have a problem right now after the pandemic of supply chain right that there are these stories in Savannah, Georgia and in Los Angeles that of cargo ships and these containers that are stacked up that we've got more things than we're able to actually move around. The trade has increased so much but for a variety of reasons that are specific to the pandemic have really caused a problem in getting these things moving around. We saw that with the pandemic as well suddenly there were shortages of things masks everybody here tonight is wearing masks thank you very much for that but you remember a year ago you couldn't find masks anywhere right they were all being made in China China couldn't produce enough of them billions of people around the world needed it so we were reliant on things like those or respirators because of increased trade and the interconnectedness that we had for these a lot of these products. Second one is finance and global financial institutions there's something in policy and an international finance called foreign direct investment but we more commonly think of this as just foreign aid and the amount of money that the United States sends in aid to other countries and this is also increased exponentially over the past 50 or 100 years and the United States is very generous in giving a lot of money developmental aid financial aid to other countries around the world to what we call developing world countries and there are a lot of institutions around the world that also help in promoting growth promoting financial stability and helping countries that have failed economies you might have heard of the world bank or the international monetary fund those are two global financial institutions that are as their name implies are global in scope and with the work that they do right that also contributes to the interconnectedness of national economies and of this process of globalization production falling transportation and communication costs have led to increase in production and of course increase in trade as well right so if we look probably at most of the things that we're wearing tonight i'm going to go out on a limb and say more likely than not it was probably produced in china or at least not in the united states right the united states used to produce a lot of things we used to have a lot of mills and produce clothing and textiles and things like that but through globalization it has been offshore or outsourced another word for that because labor costs are cheaper right so we can buy things more cheaply when they're produced in other countries and one of the pluses of globalization is that has brought jobs to poorer countries that didn't have those before and now can produce shoes clothes automobiles masks respirators all of those types of things which increases the standard of living in those countries and also provides cheaper goods for those of us in a wealthier and more developed countries that's one of certainly one of the positives of globalization so don't worry i'll also talk about some of the negatives of globalization as we go along as well but certainly trade finance production and then the fourth one that sacks talks about our international treaties this is the harmonization of trade so there's another organization called the world trade organization the wto which is an international global organization and what it does is it tries to ensure that all countries are playing by the same rules that they're playing fairly when it comes to trade that they don't put a lot of protectionist tariffs on their goods that they aren't discriminating against goods or services from another country to try to create a level playing field um the economic institutions that i talked about as well the world bank the international monetary fund but very important now are also international treaties dealing with climate change right there has been the Kyoto Accords back in the 1990s the Paris Accords more recently that are trying to get all of the countries in the world to come together to tackle the problem of climate change on a global scale because one country can't do it alone because we all share the same water the same air and it has to be coordinated and done on a global scale so globalization then has enabled these types of organizations to come together through international treaties and international institutions to try to work together another one of the positives of globalization so another definition of globalization is that globalization is the acceleration and intensification of interaction and integration among the people companies and governments of different nations so i like this definition because it's very concise and it touches on a lot of different things so we might ask why acceleration and why intensification so one acceleration we talked about things like well ship transportation and then trains and cars but now airplanes right we can fly around the world from here down to chicago and you can fly almost anywhere in the world from a major airport like chicago um intensification i have my cell phone right here and i could send an email or a text to somebody on the other side of the globe and they'll get it within seconds this was unthinkable a hundred years ago and so one of the tables that i like to show about this just particularly for my students who are all you know 17 18 years old and don't know a world that existed without computers or cell phones because that is their entire world that you can go back and look at the cost of a three-minute telephone call from new york to london in 1960 these are an adjusted dollars what it would cost in 2000 would have cost 60 dollars for a three-minute phone call right now you can do it for free right you can get on face time or zoom or skype and it doesn't cost you anything so i mean imagine in 1960 telling people you know 50 60 years from now this is going to be free where they are paying 60 dollars for that and then it gradually went down to in the year 2000 it only cost 40 cents as i say now it doesn't cost anything if you have internet you can come to your public library called anybody in the world and it won't cost you a penny the price of computer with its equipment and things again adjusted for inflation gdp and all that kind of stuff in the 1960s it would have cost almost 2000 dollars right i'm sorry a million dollars i got to look at a million dollars right this is when computers they were the size of this room and were able to do basic addition subtraction multiplication and division right some of you might actually remember those early days of calculators these big things and all they could do at the beginning was add subtract multiply and divide and then over the year as the price came down so that now you can have a really great computer like this one right here for a few hundred dollars right so from a million dollars down to a couple hundred dollars and all of the things you can do with that this is also one of the products of globalization but has contributed to this acceleration and intensification of interaction that we have with people's around the globe so what are the impacts then of all this been right has it been good or has it been bad well the increasing integration of the world or globalization has certainly enriched lives of all of us right i think that's without a doubt i was just talking the fact that you can call my son actually is in spain right now and we text all the time and you know years ago that would have been 30 or 40 dollars to call but now i can do it for free on the internet it's brought cheaper products that have raised the middle class up to be able to purchase things to be able to travel so lots of things have really been beneficial and enriched our lives as a result of globalization um so for many people looking at globalization is the only way for the future by continued globalization is necessary to tackle things like climate change certainly when the the pandemic hit i think we all realize this is a global problem it cannot be solved by one country australia tried to do that they said we're going to shut down our borders we're not going to allow anybody in and we're going to defeat the virus just by closing down and it didn't work you know why it didn't work for that and it wasn't they they still had cases of coven even though they were down to like zero sorry and what happened was that they found out was that they still needed things right they can't you can't live entirely in an island island so they were flying in goods from southeast asia and the pilots then who were going in a taxi to spend the night in a hotel before flying the cargo planes back they brought in the virus so they didn't allow anybody in and they had shut it down but they still weren't able to do that right because they couldn't be entirely self-sufficient so it's not possible on your own it has to be a global problem but for many others they look at globalization and say well this is really also a curse right there are a lot of negatives that come along with this and it's really important here that we think not only about wealthy developed world countries but we also have to think about the developing world what we used to call the third world right we used to talk about first second and third world then when the soviet union collapsed which was the second world the terminology has changed to developed and developing world so we are in the wealthy developed world but the developing world is impacted greatly by globalization as well and this has led to certain pushbacks against a lot of things about globalization that other countries or even some of us in the united states think are is not good and is negative so i'd like to move on now and talk about what are some of these pros and cons what are some of the more specific things that are good about globalization or some of the problems the globalization have brought politically and culturally there are lots of studies about these and and facts that have been ascertained as a result of globalization and it's been shown through a variety of studies that the more globalized the country is the greater the spread of democracy and freedom right so becoming more globalized having more open borders has resulted in democracy and freedom this was actually one of when you don't have 17 or 18 year old students in front of you have some people that have a more life experience and might remember when president nixon and henry kissinger opened up china this was exactly the goal right if you engage with china it will eventually lead to greater freedoms and greater democracy china's not there yet but it without a doubt did that whatever you think about richard nixon henry kissinger and that policy the opening up of china and making contact with them led to increased freedoms democracy and an increase in them in the middle class in china it also leads to free trade and free trade brings wealth prosperity jobs and opportunities right so of course there's always a flip side of that when i talked about outsourcing and those mills in used to be in north carolina that made a lot of textiles when they were outsourced either to mexico or to china all of those people lost their jobs but it created jobs in other countries that were poorer and helped lift up those countries out of poverty to bring opportunities jobs wealth and so forth to other countries the negative side are those here who lost their jobs had to retrain and find some sort of a job somewhere else the spread of ideas and information promotes opportunities but also freedom and human rights the internet is a wonderful thing and also a terrible thing right but one of the great things about it is that it is brought about the spread of freedom and human rights the arab spring some of you might remember from about 10 years ago started in tunisia moved on to egypt and so forth that was one of the first revolutions that was really driven by social media so people were using facebook they were using texting in order to gather in protest and through that type of information that was only available by the advent of the internet they were able then to come together and result in change in a regime change in egypt it also brings quite simply the enrichment of human life right sharing of cultures new food new customs new ideas so our lives are enriched by our interaction our contact with other people who bring new ideas who bring new food new customs new things that we can learn from and it expands our horizons a few more things a few more statistics about the positives of globalization it's been shown that the more globalized a country is the more it spends on public education the more it enjoys political rights and freedom the more globalized the country is the less corruption it has in its country and its government and the more globalized the country is the more open its borders are right so having open borders free trade leads to things like more spending on public education greater rights and freedoms less corruption but some people will say well open borders is going particularly in this day and age is going to lead to increased crime or terrorism however there have been studies that have shown that having open borders and being more globalized does not necessarily lead to higher degrees of terrorism so there's not a direct correlation between open borders and increased terrorism so now which countries are the most globalized anybody have any idea i want to guess what country in the world there's of course there's an organization for everything and there's an organization that studies this through all kinds of statistics and charts and they come up with what are the most globalized countries in the world anyone want to guess yeah Finland good guess anyone else Denmark also up there at the top it's actually Ireland of all places but a lot of the Scandinavian countries as you mentioned Denmark is on there and the Finland is also on there they're certainly in the top 10 amongst those but a lot of countries in northern Europe Scandinavian countries that have these strong social democracies Singapore Hungary and Canada and the Czech Republic are also there as well so so those are certainly the positives right the good things that we know about globalization but what are some of the negatives because there's always two sides to a coin right and what are the negatives and one of the fears that people have had for many years about globalization particularly on the cultural level is the will lead to sameness right and that it will lead to uniformity and the loss of cultural specificity when everybody starts moving around in immigration you can fly there here or there then everything will become kind of the same this was one of the biggest concerns about the european union that it would create what people called a euro pudding right that Spain and Italy would lose its distinctiveness and would all become kind of bland and the same when you dump everything into a pot boil it and stir it and then it's just not as good and the term that many people have used for that is the McDonald's station of the world right that it all becomes sort of fast food fast cars fast paced life right and in particular and here's where I want you to think about other countries outside of the united states that their concern is that the spread of american style capitalism the spread of fast food and of american products will then slowly erode their own culture right and that this is the conquest of american style capitalism so we're exporting everything about the united states and saying all the world should be like us because we've been successful we're wealthy and we have a lot of wonderful things here right so a lot of people a lot of people who study globalization will say that in many ways globalization is really a westernization of the world it's the imposition of western ideas on the rest of the world and some people will go so far as to say it's really the americanization of the world that america is the driving force of the west westernization is equated with uh americanization and it's spreading around the world and you can see that even just very basically when you look at photos around the world how many times do you see young people wearing jeans t-shirts and tennis shoes anywhere you go in the world right coca-cola anywhere you go in the world you can find coca-cola everybody knows what it is and where did that come from where did Levi Strauss start where did coca-cola start it started in the united states and it spread all around the world right is that a good thing or a bad thing if you work for coca-cola that's a good thing if you work for Levi Strauss or Nike that's a great thing if you work for a small beverage company in Nigeria maybe it's not a good thing because coca-cola was putting you out of business right so it's all a matter of perspective on a lot of these another criticism that a lot of people have is they say that globalization is a kind of dictatorship of unelected officials who then impose a lot of these rules so it is true the world bank the international monetary fund the world trade organization have a lot of power right the united nations also has a lot of power but did you vote for any of these people i didn't right so how did they get there well they were appointed by governments right we voted for um whoever our president is maybe you did maybe you didn't but a lot of people voted for them and that government that appoints these representatives to these different organizations but other people particularly outside of the united states will say you know they're telling us how we have to run our country but i didn't vote for these and not surprisingly the united states overwhelmingly has a lot of power in the world bank the international monetary fund and the world trade organization and the majority of the people on those boards are from the united states because the united states gives the most money to those organizations so we also have a vested interest in that but other people were saying well you tell me that we can't have a nationalized airline or a nationalized corn industry because that goes against free trade rules because the world trade organization says so well i don't agree but those are sort of the new global rules so again it depends on your perspective whether this is a good thing or a bad thing so what is the fear of this the fear is the imposition of values and economic principles on to other from the wealthiest nations in the world on some of the poorer ones right that in order to be successful you need to do things the way we did things right that's sort of the argument maybe it's right maybe it's not but every country is a little bit different and the american model or the western model may not be the best one for them and the fear is that the rich will only get richer and the poor will get poorer right so that's one of the negatives that people see about this and there's also a concern about loss of tradition and loss of local institutions right with powerful multinational corporations they can come in and have a lot more power that can put smaller businesses smaller crafts people and these local traditions sort of out of business there and some people view that as the type of economic colonialization right that is american western style economics that are coming in and sort of maybe destroying the local economy there so the fear here another example of this how many countries are there in the world anyone know roughly recognize countries pardon 300 a little bit less there are 195 countries in the world how many countries in the world do you think have a mcdonald's north korea doesn't then iran doesn't either but the number goes up and down but it's 120 and so there are 195 official countries in the world recognized by the united nations and 120 of those have a mcdonald's the other ones have starbucks now is that a good thing or is it a bad thing well again it all depends and that's one of the things that i always want to tell students when i teach globalization it's not all good and it's not all bad it all depends on your perspective right i remember i had a polish student this was many years ago maybe 15 20 years ago an international student in my class and we're talking about this very fact and my students like yeah that's awful you know that mcdonald's it's the worst kind of food fast food greasy and we're exporting that to everybody else and it's the worst of american culture and there's so many things that are better than that but yet this is the image that people have and she raised her hand because poland as you know up until 1990 was a communist soviet satellite and she said my friends and i were thrilled when the first mcdonald's opened in poland because we thought we've joined the rest of the world this is great we have something from the united states and my students were like oh my gosh i never thought about that right for her this was something that poland was joining the world community because it had a mcdonald's right now maybe they may not think that but at the time it represents a kind of status symbol right you've reached this this global economy i don't recommend eating hamburgers all the time but you know there's there's something to be said about that so i talk a lot about mcdonald's not to be negative about mcdonald's but because it's a really good example to talk about globalization thomas freedman who is a columnist for the new york times wrote some years ago in a book about globalization that the more mcdonald's two countries have the less likely they are to go to war that's a strange statement right more mcdonald's right so the question is why why would there be a correlation to having more mcdonald's and being less likely to go to war the reason is because they're more globalized they're more economically interdependent relying on other countries and therefore they're more likely to find peaceful means of resolution to maintaining those economic trade relationships right so the more mcdonald's they have the more globalized they are the more interdependent they are and the less likely they are to solve conflicts via war right in 2008 when there was the big financial crisis you remember that the big downturn the great recession slate magazine and online magazine found another statistic related to this and they said the more starbucks the country has the bigger its financial problems were during the great recession of 2008 why would that be the case because the more starbucks the country had the more globalized it was the more interrelated its financial institutions were and this was a domino effect remember in 2008 that one country was you know the subprime mortgages and all of these you know toxic assets that were being bought and sold on wall street and it had this domino effect and all of the other countries that were linked financially through globalization got hit by that if they were very globalized and if they were very globalized they had a lot of mcdonald's or starbucks and mcdonald's probably both so this idea of mcworld as being um a symbol of globalization is something there was a political scientist at the university of maryland who wrote a book called jihad versus mcworld and this was before 9 11 he wrote in the 1990s and what he meant by jihad was not what we think of now as holy war from you know radicalized people in um in political islam but pushing back against mcworld and so mcworld he defined as the americanization of the world through consumer oriented market capitalism and jihad he defined as the resistance to this sort of the pushback that other countries had saying this is not what we want right we are don't want american style consumer oriented things we want to have our own culture our own way of doing things which could be quite different but nevertheless um our own sorts of economic um systems so this push and pull has led to a number of tensions within globalization so there's another very short article that i always like to teach with my students that talks about the three tensions of globalization and i just want to outline this here and i think you'll really get then a sense of that and then leading to why we might talk about the end of globalization in relationship to these um uh three tensions um so first of all before we got there i thought that was the slide that is globalization political economic and cultural integration or is it the westernization or americanization the world right so positive or negative is it a force for economic growth and the spread of democracy or is it the exploitation of the west of the underdeveloped world that is using cheap labor in um poorer countries and we've all read these horrible stories about countries that go and produce you know shoes and they pay people you know a dollar a day and then sell them back to the united states for $150 or something like that right so there are two sides to all of these and we can see these in many ways in these three tensions so the first tension that um the author of this this article talks about is individual choice versus societal choice can you think of any examples there of this tension between individual choice and societal choice this might be one these days right masks this is a big debate now about do i wear a mask is it my choice or is it doing something for society a few years back this was a big debate about smoking remember when more and more uh cities and counties were banning smoking first in restaurants and bars and people were saying i have a right to this and i you know if i want to smoke i have a right to this and other people were saying well secondhand smoke all of these causes and all of the negatives about smoking is about society right but it's a tension right what about my individual rights versus what's better for society sadly the pandemic is really exacerbated it yeah seatbelts is another one yep when that well came in in the 1970s people were like you know who's the government to tell me that i have to wear a seatbelt and blah blah blah my choice versus societal choice abortion as well right my body my choice versus the government saying i can or can't do that that's another one as well that's there so a second one free market versus government intervention or subsidies right so adam smith some of you might remember that his that name and the free hand of the market right that the free market will regulate everything and the government's role is sort of to step back and let the market do its thing or should government be involved in regulating things in order to create a level playing field right and this often comes up with subsidies and the united states is as guilty as this of any other country we we slap tariffs i think now you know we got into some tiff with france and we put a tax on french wine and then france put a tax on american bourbon some years ago president bush put a tariff on steel coming in in order to boost american steel production and it's a way of course of you know trying to improve local industries right but it can be used punitively to punish other countries about things or it can be used to try to boost our own industries right a lot of countries have a nationalized airline right so i tell students you know a small country like lithuania right if they had to work on free market principles they might not have an airport or a national airline because there's not enough people who want to fly to lithuania so the government says well it's important for our people to be able to fly to places so we're going to subsidize and we're going to have a nationalized airline that the government funds then delta and british airways say well that's not fair because the government's supporting them they're making a lot of losses and we don't get bailed out from the government etc right so this is one of those tensions free market versus government intervention and then the third is local authority versus sort of super national authority we see this tension all the time in the united states right between states rights and the federal government right people say states rights the state needs to do whatever whatever wants to do and that in washington should stay out of it because they're you know all the way over there on the east coast you see the same thing in europe about brussels tell it you know countries in europe saying you know brussels shouldn't tell us here in spain or in italy what we want to do or what we have to do we need to have our own local control and then you get in a more broader picture and look at things like the united nations a lot of people say ah we should get out of the united nations who are them they to tell us what we have to do local control etc right so that's another tension that comes along with globalization so all three of these play out on a very local level but they also play out on a broader more international and globalized level culturally globalization can promise an international civil society that leads to a new era of peace and democracy that we talked about for others as we said there's a negative side to this and it's the concern over the dominance of the american system of westernization and of so-called macworld right so a few more things about globalization for you to think about pros and cons and then we'll talk about why maybe um we might some people might think that globalization is is slowing down or coming to an end i'm sure you know i'll know this old adage right that give a man a fish and you feed him for a day teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime this is also related to globalization in many ways outsourcing international trade and the ability to lift up other countries to have an increased standard of living so since globalization has emerged in the 1970s we've seen that world infant mortality rates have fallen by half right expanded health care and medicine around the world has led to a dramatic decrease in infant mortality rates adult literacy has increased by a third as a result of a lot of these processes of globalization primary school enrollments has arisen has arisen and the average lifespan has shot up by almost 11 years around the world okay so undoubtedly there's a lot of pros from a lot of good things about globalization economically growth and globalization is responsible for reducing poverty around the world and studies have shown that developing countries with open economies grew by approximately five percent a year in the 1970s in the 1980s while those with closed economies had a decline in growth in gross national product right so this idea of having open borders free trade leads to economic prosperity leads to economic growth and having closed societies like North Korea or like Iran or now Myanmar those countries are seeing economic collapse afghanistan right now is on the also on the verge of economic collapse as a result of this as well right so open economies open societies lead to wealth growth and prosperity today 24 of the developing countries that is the former third world we have about three billion people have adopted policies that allow their citizens to take advantage of globalization what is the result of that been their economies are catching up with those i mean just look at china over the past 50 years and you can see that the increase in mexico's economy or of vietnam right i mean a lot of things now is an industrial nation has really caught up quite a bit and the economies of the least globalized countries iran pakistan north korea have dropped a remains stagnant but there's the question of the winners and losers so why now getting to the final point before our discussion why is there this pushback and why do people say globalization is not a good thing right this has not brought all that it's been cracked up to be well who are the winners and losers when we look at this taking a look at the united states the real median hourly wage in the united states in 1973 adjusted to two thousand dollars was twelve dollars and forty five cents okay so if you adjusted to two thousand dollars in 2012 it was twelve dollars and ninety cents okay so you've seen that over the course of 50 years in real dollars there has not been any increase in the real median hourly wage in the united states so a lot of people particularly the working class the working poor are saying what have i got not a globalization all right what has this brought me during that same time however the us economy grew by 72 percent but the hourly median wage did not so there are a lot of people in particularly in the former rust belt in rural areas that look at this and say uh-uh this has not brought anything for me right all it's doing is shipping jobs overseas we're sending billions of dollars to other country in aid but what am i getting out of this right so since the median is by definition the middle wage ladder the losers in many case in the united states have been a lot of employees workers right the working class and here's a um a graphic that shows this uh a little bit better and it's showing that american paychecks are bigger than 40 years ago but their purchasing power hasn't really changed since 1964 right to 2018 so the green line shows uh purchasing power something called ppp purchasing power parity when you adjust for inflation and everything although if you look at the actual wages but because of inflation and all of these other things there hasn't really been a budge in 50 years from this right so you can see now why people with a lot some people not everybody but a certain group of people not only in the united states but in other countries are saying this isn't working right globalization is not working for me it might be working for those people but it's not really bringing much for me so some of the negatives about this as well that in 1950s 60s and 70s it was quite common for people a typical wage earner one person instead of uh husband and wife both to buy a house support a family and put their kids through college on one income i can guarantee you that is impossible now unless you're super wealthy i know because i have two kids in college and my wife and i are both working and we can't wait till payday comes for that right so is that still possible for some people yeah but for a lot of people it's not right so you look back and you say well things were better thing we were less globalized then but things economically were perhaps a little bit better um so our countries and politicians then sort of souring on globalization and saying well you know maybe this isn't um all it's cracked up to be and perhaps might it signal the end of globalization and i would suggest there are two trends that have exemplified this push then push back towards against globalization one is a form of populism or what i'll call trumpism i don't mean president trump as an individual but i mean his policies his economic policies of isolationism and nationalism right or what he referred to as america first right we're going to focus on things here we're going to build our own industries not import things we're going to get out of all these trade deals nafta remember he said the worst trade deal in the world right tpp the trans specific worst trade deal since nafta we're not going to be in that either we're going to end the nuclear agreement with iran we're not going to ratify the paris accord right we're going to concentrate on what's best for the united states right and that means getting out of all of these treaties cutting down ending all of these wars bringing everybody back not sending money to all of these organizations he wanted out of the united nations didn't want in the world trade organization anymore the imf all of those things get rid of it and we'll focus on the united states and a lot of other countries saying yeah what he's saying that's what we want to do too right and who was the first country to do that england brexit they said we're done with the european union right we don't want to send money to brussels for them to send more money to these poorer countries we want to focus on britain first right we want to control our own borders we want to take all that money that we were sending to brussels and we're going to invest it in the national health service which turned out not to be true and was the downfall of nigel farage one of the the people who made that big claim but a lot of people bought it and said yeah why are we sending that money to brussels that they then just send off to poland and bulgaria when our national health service is struggling here right so stop let's get out and end it and they did anybody looked how things are going in britain these days not so good right they've had a lot they actually just this past week they said they want to renegotiate some of the terms of brexit because they've got some problems with it now that doesn't mean that everything was wrong and a lot of those people that had those complaints they were right so the question is was the real problem globalization or was it how globalization was managed for them right so are we or are they throwing the baby out with the bath water so some of these things trumpism as i call it in populism how does it sort of manifested it's manifested in being anti elite right there are these elites people like me university professors bad people right that are spouting all this stuff that are that's not good and is not helping the united states we want america first right close down our borders stop all of this trade reshor a lot of industries bring back you know he was going to bring back coal as well right that was one of the promises to west virginia and kentucky where coal is still a big um employer for people there and he was going to bring back you know the automobile industry the steel industry the textile industry all this stuff was going to come back to the united states production industry create jobs prosperity and everything rather than having it shipped overseas choice and individualism right we can make this choice rather than having to be in multilateral agreements with other people around the world and think back now about the three tensions right individual choice versus societal choice free market economy versus protectionist economy and then local control versus supranational or international kinds of organizations and that's what populism and trumpism were sort of pushing back and rejecting and you see this populist rise all across europe the same type of things in the same type of government and what is one of the things that people say about that the people who vote for brexit and vote for populists or saying this is only benefiting the wealthy right the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and here's an example in the united states i mean it is a fact but again the question is is the problem globalization or is it how globalization is managed and how it's been implemented in various countries right but this is um from the data from the congressional budget office over uh household income of various percentages of people it's flat line for everybody below the top 1 percent since 1979 another thing which i think is fascinating that shows that you know we have a lot of polarization in this country but when you really get down to the heart of it about what people really want and what they really think they want a sense of fairness how how we get there i think we're still miles apart but this was a fascinating study done by two people at harvard business school in duke university and they ask people what um do they think the wealth distribution in the united states is and that's the middle line right so they think that the top 20 percent owns about 60 percent of the world of the wealth in the united states when in fact is over 80 percent but then they were also asked what do you think would be fair what should it be and there was this real sense of fairness at the bottom the bottom graph is what americans think the wealth distribution should be in an ideal world the middle one is what they think it currently is that it's not fair the top one is what it actual is see so there is this sense of a desire for fairness and a sense that is not happening through the system that we have now and that is a system of globalization brexit same types of things right there was this anti-eu sentiment right that england is different it's an island nation it's not really part of the european union it didn't work we want to divorce we don't want to be in the european union anymore right they wanted to control their own borders which was a little bit problematic if you want we can talk about why that was problematic but it was sold to them that way i mean they were they were never part of a different agreement called the schengen agreement in the european union so they did have a lot of control of their own borders to begin with but the perception was they didn't and they wanted more control they wanted again britain first right this nhs funding the national health system with which brits are very proud of they have a nationalized socialized health care system and they thought bringing this money back from brussels would go into the national health system and then boost it up it didn't happen because they were also getting a lot of money from the european union for a lot of things and a lot of the money that they weren't paying in had to replace the money that they were getting from the european union so it was a two-way street in many cases but then finally autonomy more autonomy we want more control so think again about those three tensions right individual choice versus societal choice local control over the european union telling us what the rules and regulations have to be and so they wanted out what they're finding now is they have a lot of problems right one of the biggest problems anybody know what the one of the biggest problems that england has had in the past couple weeks gasoline and why but there's not a shortage of gasoline no truck drivers exactly on my drive down here from green bay there was a story on npr about exactly that the united states has the same problem that they can't get there's a guy in louisiana that said he runs a truck driving school teaching people how to drive trucks he said i could double my class and every single one of them would get a job tomorrow making 60 to 80 000 a year he said i can't get enough people to do this right every i don't know how it is in shaboy but in green bay every single store has signs help want it right and england has that problem to really exacerbate it and part of that has to do with immigration right when you shut down the pandemic has closed down travel and borders and a lot of the people that were driving those trucks in england were immigrants or people that were driving back and forth on ships from mainland europe on to or to to great britain and that stopped and there's simply not enough people there right we've also shut down our borders we haven't had a lot of immigration because of the pandemic and we have a decreased population right our population growth in the state of wisconsin you can look how many kids are there in elementary school you can predict how many people are going to be graduating 10 years from now how many people are going to go go to the university i can tell you because our administration has been giving us these numbers for the past 15 years and it's going like this and if it's going like that you still need people to do things and if people aren't having babies you've got to have people immigrating the pandemic has really made it worse cracked down on immigration exacerbated that even before and now we've got this problem that there's just simply not enough people for all of the jobs that are available now that the economy is turning around again so looking forward this is my final slide i talked a little bit longer than i wanted to i apologize for that but i i always try to emphasize to students that globalization isn't all good and it's not all bad there are a lot of things undeniably that are good and important about globalization but there are also a lot of things that are bad about or problematic about globalization both of them are the case so we have to try and find a middle ground and it's also a fact you can't really be for or against globalization because we've already crossed that bridge you know the internet's not going away air travel is not going away trade all this stuff is not you can't just say we're against it and thanks we're going back to the way it was in the 1900s that's not going to happen right so the question is how is it managed how is it managed so it's fair both vertically and horizontally around the world but also within our own society those statistics that i showed you it is true the richer are the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting stagnant right that's not because there's not wealth there but because of how it's managed and it's not equitable vertically in the united states or horizontally around the world so how is it managed who benefits and who loses from this and that we have to consider the implications in the united states but also around the world for the developed world as well as for the developing world are there any bright spots i always hate to leave things on a down note and a negative there's there's some glimmer of hope and and things of positive about that in my opinion i think the global covid response i mean we're still struggling and we've got a lot of work to do in the united states but this was a time when the world came together and said we have to find a way to do this you can criticize a lot of the pharmaceutical companies and it's justifiable but they are doing a lot of right things right they are trying to make cheaper vaccines the united states has spent billions of dollars producing this and are giving it away to people or to other countries around the world everybody in the united states who wanted a vaccine and i hope everybody got one got it for free my university you could get tested in fact last year i had to be tested every two weeks to be on campus right i got a vaccine for free i was tested for free and this type of thing is going on around the world as well so the world came together to try to solve a really global problem climate change we have not done nearly enough but at least the world realizes this is a global problem and it has to be addressed together globally with a sense of cooperation the united states has to get on board to the paris accords and has to do things to move much much faster talk to my students talk to kids who are 17 18 years old their number one concern climate change and what their world is going to look like and what their children's world is going to look like 40 or 50 years from now they get it and it's really really important to them and i can tell you because i talk to students all the time and you ask them are you worried about climate change and they say yes in fact in germany they just had elections two years ago or two weeks ago the number one topic when they polled people in germany what's your number one concern it was not immigration it was not covet it was not the economy their number one concern was climate change and they voted based on that and the green party had huge gains and the conservative party that was in power lost because they did not have an aggressive enough climate policy so it is something that the world is working on and it recognizes that this populist wave of sort of nativist kinds of ideas brexit isolationism economic nationalism is a little bit on the wane there are some signs in europe and around that that boom for a while when people thought a lot of these populist leaders that the european union was going to collapse a lot of these global things were going to go away england is seeing the negative results of that and i think some other countries that were thinking maybe we want to try the same thing are now having second thoughts when they're looking at how it's going in britain and it's not going too well for them and they're thinking well maybe things aren't so bad we just need to work harder to improve it and have things work better for us rather than bailing out all the way so this idea of being better together is something that's slowly coming around in the sense of a need for greater cooperation but that's not to say there are a lot of challenges left ahead so thank you as i said i talked a little bit too long longer than i wanted to but thanks for listening and your patience and now i would love to hear your thoughts and questions comments ideas um that anyone has yes and we had to call my brother in law in norway to see if we could get to a country that didn't have mcdonalds and all that garbage and he sent us to poland to poland poland so we got to poland we got in an apartment and we were in a big and the soldiers still had big long life really big guns everybody wore black nobody smiled and my sister likes to spin and you could go into the store nobody would look up nobody would look up to and you could stand there to give them money and they're not looking at you yeah it was amazing it was just amazing that they have learned that still a legacy of the 40 years under um communist rule and uh as a soviet satellite that uh yeah and now i was here he said you are just wild so i know dad very well so he's a great guy so how do i get my son away from coler he's been there five years cleaning toilets twelve dollars and ten cents still yeah and you said back in the sixties it was in adjusted to today's dollars that was the same yeah well that that's a great question what to do i can say that um as a result of the pandemic wages are going up so he can certainly earn more than that i have a student whose boyfriend is earning 20 an hour at chipotle that i was shocked and in green bay there are signs that at you know dick sporting goods targets that they're starting 17 18 an hour so it is going up and that is another you know again trump ism and not president trump himself but the idea about that was if you decrease immigration and you have fewer people coming in to take these lower paying jobs that will push wages up and it does but it was so much so that we have a shortage of workers but the bigger problem i think is a much bigger more structural thing right i mean there was a push recently the so-called fight for 15 i don't know if you remember that slogan about having a minimum wage at um 15 dollars an hour which failed and the counter argument was that you know entry level positions are not meant to be careers they're stepping stones for going up however there are a lot of people that have those jobs and they're working two of those jobs um to to make ends meet they used to be jobs in the 50s and 60s where you could i mean there were people who worked at sears or jc pennies and that was a job where you had benefits and you could raise a family from that and in my personal opinion that's also connected to things like the cost of daycare right i mean if you the cost of daycare i remember when our children many you know 17 18 years ago were in daycare we calculated that what we were paying and my wife and i are both professors so we had a lot of flexibility and we did not put our children in daycare from seven o'clock in the morning until seven o'clock at night which some people had to do and i respect the fact that they had to do that in order to work we didn't but still the cost was the same as tuition at uw green bay at daycare so if you're working just to pay for daycare you can't do it so you have to get a second job and if you get a second job then you have to put your child in daycare for even longer to work that second job just to be able to pay that right so this idea of i mean lots of little things structural things like that having subsidized cheaper or even free daycare having paid maternity leave a lot of those types of things can contribute so those types of things i think can make a big difference of trying to help people in situations like that and maybe eventually will increase the wages professor um this is not a question but who is the president of the world bank right now who is the president of the world bank that is a good question and i don't know who it is right now do you know no you're the professor but it's a great point because we don't know who it is but that person has a lot of influence i think about late 60s early 70s maxima i do know who it is good but go ahead okay he was a president correct world bank maxima yes but was the president of the world bank and then one of the architect of the war was also president of the world bank and you call them dictators to me you have to choose people like that to be president of the world bank i didn't mean um so that was one of the criticisms of them and and i put it in quotation marks not that these people were dictate dictators themselves but that people in other countries viewed them as dictators because they were imposing particular policies uh on developing world nations for which they had no say and they had were not elected these individuals so viewing it in that sense and i'll give you an example in argentina there was uh they've argentina has a lot of economic crises over the years and they had to get bailed out by the world bank and the international monetary fund and there were conditions placed on it so that they wouldn't default i mean they did default they weren't able to pay workers they weren't able to pay governed employers which were teachers professors police etc the world bank and the imf said okay we're going to give you this money but here are the conditions you need to privatize this industry you need to cut pensions of public sector employees you need to do this that and the other and they felt like we're in the situation where our economy is collapsing there's inflation of you know 100 a week and prices going up that every all of my savings is worthless so here's this international institution which is going to help us but the conditions that they are imposing on this bailout are you have to be more like the united states and run like a western economy so they viewed these people who were the directors of the imf for the world bank as types of financial dictators not like asadam hussein or astalin or somebody like that only because they felt we didn't elect these people but the only chance we have is to have a bailout from the imf for the world bank but they then impose these conditions that we're not in agreement with so the president is who is christ is actually the imf is uh christine lagarde i don't know and the world bank i don't know but i can look it up you can have great ideas all the professors that are thinking about immigration and a climate change but if people with authority don't want to listen what can you do yep very true very true all you can do is vote maybe vote somebody from different do you death the us worry about the decrease in birth rate do i worry about it here yeah i do um and i think that you know people are living longer which is wonderful my mother who i loved the early is going to turn 92 this year my father lived to be 90 nobody in their family nobody lived even near that her parents both her father died when he was in his late 50s early 60s my father's parents died in their 40s my father lived to 90 and as we live to be older and older we have to have money being paid into support systems for that population and the only way you can do that is by having workers and if our if our demographics look like this and many countries have this kind of a demographic you've got two choices people have more babies or you have more immigration or you cut medicare medicaid and social security which i think is ethically and morally wrong right because there are other options to support people and as any society a democratic free society should support the older population who have contributed all their lives to society that's my personal opinion for it so i do think it's a problem in either people need to have more children but a lot of people young people look at it and say i can't afford it right i can't afford to have a child i mean that's sad if a young person thinks i can't afford it because of daycare because of this that and the other i have to work two jobs rent keeps increasing then the only other way to do that is increased immigration and that is a complicated and polarizing issue as well and the infrastructure part of that bill was for job care yeah yeah right so infrastructure doesn't that doesn't only mean that we have better roads it also is a huge influx into our economy right you have jobs and you have those people then that are paying taxes and that will bring increased tax base to places like sheboygan when i don't know how your roads here are in green bay that could be a little bit better we got some bridges that could be need some repair and everywhere around um you know high speed train i think would be wonderful to get from green bay for packers games of nothing else people coming up from chicago and milwaukee so they don't have to drive back after tailgating and cuts down in traffic it's better for the environment it's good for the economy i mean there's so many things like that that help climb it help jobs help the tax base um so infrastructure can be huge thank you that's a great question one thing i noticed i happened to be in combat a few years ago about three years ago and there were allies they didn't have coal or toilets in charlotte yeah yeah so that's global it is yeah the other thing i was thinking about when you mentioned daycare during world war two we did have uh kaiser industries had a wonderful daycare system they had laundry services meals that you could take home 24 hour daycare and it wasn't expensive why has that fallen that the industries can't do that now i don't know that they can't um it's a question of do they want to or where the priorities are in many cases um for them that will change now with many women that are unable to go to work because they have to be home with their children i hope so i mean i think that you know i my main area is is german studies so i teach classes on on germany and the european union and there are a lot of a lot of countries in the european union that have free daycare they have in germany i tell my students this and i go my gosh and you guys will be even more shocked by law your first year on a full-time job you're guaranteed by law six weeks of paid vacation if you have a child you are guaranteed six months of paid maternity leave that's paid in part by the employer but also by the government and also by the taxes and the in the benefits that you're paying into so it's the responsibility is shared three ways three ways and you also have a right to take three years off of your job unpaid but that you're guaranteed to be able to return to that job after three years because the idea is the first three years of a baby's life are the most crucial for the development of that child for the bonding with the parent and the parent and it could be either a woman or a man not many men take it but it is parental leave not maternity leave so there are ways of doing that the trade-off of course is you have to pay higher taxes right i mean a lot of people complain here about taxes our taxes are not that high in comparison to other countries and there's also a question of what you get back out of it but you know the united states is a very individualistic country so coming back to the three tensions that first tension free choice versus societal choice i mean look what happened with the affordable care act the so-called obama care right there was a lot of opposition to an idea of universal health care so that everybody has health care right i mean why i how that got to be a controversial idea i'm not really sure but the basis of it was choice i don't want the government telling me i have to have health care right i mean that was the basic argument i don't want the government telling me that i have to get health care and to make it work there was a penalty if you didn't get health care you could get a financial penalty initially that was then chipped away and that part was taken out and then you know people thought well the mandate and so forth complicated legal issues there but it comes down to this idea of individual choice versus societal choice and the united states is for better for worse there are many good things about it but we're a very individualistic society that we don't like paying taxes we don't like the government telling us what to do but the flip side of that is there's a lot of things that we don't have the social safety net that used to be in place to a greater degree after f dr is the new deal in the 1950s have eroded but at the same time there has also been an increase overall in um prosperity for certain sectors of the population so i don't know if that answers your question will it come back i hope so um because i think that it's uh you know i i worry about my children the kids kids they're young adults that i teach at the university when they're concerned about things like that that i i have to wait i have to get a better job i have to work for this many years before i can get married or have children because i can't afford it you know and i think it goes without saying for most people that they think and there's positives about that too but they both have to work right that greater equal i mean it could be the man of course there's absolutely no reason why a man cannot stay home and take care of the children and the woman being the primary breadwinner but the reality is that two incomes are necessary then to i think to raise children to pay for daycare to pay for college which is skyrocketed as well you gave a good example of germany good things but germany is not not the united states nope it's not even california which is still what fifth and sixth seventh largest economy i mean i can't i can't fathom and people are moving out of california and it's still that big and economically germany no california or california yeah well germany is the fourth largest economy in the world and if california were a country it would be like the fifth or sixth so um and it there becomes a little bit more complicated but you're right primarily because of housing costs uh in the san francisco bay area are astronomical but that also has to do with the fact that all of the tech companies are there have moved there those people are paid a lot of money and that drives prices up so if california were a country things would look different because it's not just a state where you know you can move across the border into nevada or or or again or something like that so the comparisons are a little uh and i'm not an economist but um but there are people in germany as well that don't like or holland or or or denmark that don't like paying a lot of taxes either right i mean it's not like everybody's happy and um with uh the system but there is a greater it's more of a collectivist society i would say than an individualistic society is one better or worse than the other it depends on your perspective right but there are trade-offs to both sides i would say and look at countries that have natural resources like norway it's only loyal yep and as a result norway is not in the european union because they said we have our own resources gas and oil in the north sea and they never joined the european union however they are they have a very very left leaning government despite that but are much more self-sufficient than that but you're right countries that have natural resources can benefit and one of the most important natural resources going forward is going to be water and where is a quarter of the entire planet's fresh water right here that's right right so this is a huge resource that everybody in california and nevada and everybody else wants because we're sitting on the future oil yeah right and a lot of those are as a result of climate change as well right that winters are going to be or storms are going to be stronger hurricanes drier summers with heat causing fires etc and and again this is something that really coming back to the positives of globalization have to be dealt with on a global scale as opposed to i think that it doesn't matter if it's too late we have to do something there are going to i we're not going back to you know these we're going to have to adapt to these changes we're going to have to build higher i don't know how things are here on lake michigan whether they're increasing the dykes along lake michigan they did along the bay of green bay that they've reinforced and built them up higher so we're going to have to live with those but we also in my opinion we shouldn't say it's too late because then we're giving up and i don't think we should give up because we can while it might be too late for some things there are other things that we can lessen the impact if we move on from that getting towards the end yep if water is so important and it is it can't dissolve the i think that that will have to be there are countries that are doing that a lot of middle east countries are working on that desalination um technology to do exactly that would that be more important than jeff basal was putting something i mean isn't that more important just saying yeah yeah okay so i think we're gonna have to wind up now thank you for great questions and a great discussion