Globalism is and always was inevitable and has in fact started already 200 years ago. It's also not a problem. A problem is how countries deal with the middle class and how they transform their society when there are shifts in production. For example, it's not China's fault that the average salary of a US CEO was 361 times higher than that of a factory worker in 2018, as opposed to only having been 20 times higher in the 1950s.
What we see right now is really just the emergence of China as an economic super-power, thanks to their gigantic internal market and their technological advances. This was predicted for the past 40 years or so and it nothing to do with the problems that the US is facing. These problems are mostly internal.
You can embrace globalism without damaging your economy. You just have to choose to only deal with countries that play fairly. China does not play fairly and, as such, we should not do business with them.
I'm not in agreement or disagreement but I'm genuinely curious how you can embrace globalism without damaging your economy? I have found myself leaning more towards neo-liberalism in some aspects but I don't know how this piece fits in.
USA has embraced globalism and benefitting from it.
American middle-class wealth has moved to upper-class rather than to outsiders.
"The recent stability in the share of adults living in middle-income households marks a shift from a decades-long downward trend. From 1971 to 2011, the share of adults in the middle class fell by 10 percentage points. But that shift was not all down the economic ladder. Indeed, the increase in the share of adults who are upper income was greater than the increase in the share who are lower income over that period, a sign of economic progress overall."
"American middle-class wealth has moved to upper-class rather than to outsiders."
As your quote says, it's not the wealth that has moved per say, but that people have moved upward out of the middle class and brought that wealth with them with more people moving up than moving down.
I saw some comments (in this thread and some others) that seems to be of the opinion that USA has not benefitted by embracing globalization. That opinion is in contrast to what I have seen in data analysis/reports.
So I wanted to say that maybe problem is not that USA hasn't benefitted from globalization but rather that benefit hasn't been distributed appropriately.
I'm not from USA and my knowledge comes by reading about news reports and expert data analysis so I might be missing something.
Why should the American middle class give two shits about American businesses having to jump through hoops to operate in China?
90% of their income comes from wages, not investments. The last thing they want is for American businesses to operate in China, period - because operating in China typically means that manufacturing capacity gets moved there. This unfairness is only unfair to the owner class - the middle class is actually a net beneficiary of policies that make offshoring harder.
China's policies that make foreign operation in it difficult are, in that sense, actually a gift to the American middle class.
