Just finished watching this amazing 2 part interview with John Raulston Saul that aired on TVO’s The Agenda this week. A really fascinating discussion of the real nature of Globalization and how and why Saul believes it failed.
I’m not sure I agree with everything Saul says, but most of it does make a large degree of sense. One of the most interesting things he explained (for me) was about the “Oil Crisis” that occurred in the 1970’s, of which Oil was only a part of the problem. The short version is that what really happened in the 1970’s was that we went from an economy of scarcity (there not being enough product) to an economy of surplus (lots of product available from multiple competing sources) and this rocked our whole financial system. Suddenly, there wasn’t big profit in making things anymore because there would always be so much competition out there to drive prices (and profits) down. Globalization was an attempt to solve this problem by “creating new markets through pulling down borders and bringing up standards of living”, thus creating more customers and in theory driving up prices again by making products scarce again. Of course, I’d say it didn’t work out so well for many reasons, including that those new markets became our factories where where produced products even more cheaply, and instead drove prices and profits down even more!
An interesting sidenote is that this is why in the 1980’s we saw a rise in Stock Markets and financial instruments, because making money by real investing didn’t produce the kind of profit people wanted anymore, so it became about playing with money in order to produce more money. Think about it, people don’t buy stocks because they care about a product or company, they buy them because they want to ride the wave and dump them at a time when they can make more profit from that stock.
Anyways, enough of my thoughts on the subject, spend the 50 minutes it will take to watch this 2 part interview (especially the second part) and give Saul a listen. It’s one of the most interesting interviews I’ve seen in a while, and I may just pick up his most recent book and give it a read.
JRS is a hugely brilliant man. Go read his book “Voltaire’s Bastards”. It’s a triumph. The only problem is the people who would best benefit from it, won’t get it because it’s written above their heads. That’s not a slam on their comprehension, its a slam on JRS’s inability to make simple his complex concepts.
A friend once commented that one of the tragedies of intellectuals is that they tend to wall themselves off from the very people who need their wisdom the most. :-/