By Paul Krugman
SYNOPSIS: Anti-globalization protestors want to turn the world into a
nasty place. There is an
old European saying: anyone who is not a socialist before he is 30 has no
heart; anyone who is still a socialist after he is 30 has no head.
Suitably updated, this applies perfectly to the movement against globalization
— the movement that made its big splash in Seattle back in 1999 and is doing
its best to disrupt the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City this weekend.
The facts of
globalization are not always pretty. If you buy a product made in a third-world
country, it was produced by workers who are paid incredibly little by Western
standards and probably work under awful conditions. Anyone who is not bothered
by those facts, at least some of the time, has no heart.
But that doesn't mean
the demonstrators are right. On the contrary: anyone who thinks that the answer
to world poverty is simple outrage against global trade has no head — or
chooses not to use it. The anti-globalization
movement already has a remarkable track record of hurting the very people and
causes it claims to champion.
The most spectacular
example was last year's election. You might say that because people with no
heads indulged their idealism by voting for Ralph Nader, people with no hearts
are running the world's most powerful nation.
Even when
political action doesn't backfire, when the movement gets what it wants, the
effects are often startlingly malign. For example, could anything be worse than
having children work in sweatshops? Alas, yes. In 1993, child workers in
Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom
Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage
workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped
employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to
happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child
workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets — and that a significant
number were forced into prostitution.
The point is
that third-world countries aren't poor because their export workers earn low
wages; it's the other way around. Because the countries are poor, even what
look to us like bad jobs at bad wages are almost always much better than the
alternatives: millions of Mexicans are migrating to the north of the country to
take the low-wage export jobs that outrage opponents of Nafta.
And those jobs wouldn't exist if the wages were
much higher: the same factors that make poor countries poor — low productivity,
bad infrastructure, general social disorganization — mean that such countries
can compete on world markets only if they pay wages much lower than those paid
in the West.
Of course, opponents of
globalization have heard this argument, and they have answers. At a conference
last week I heard paeans to the superiority of traditional rural lifestyles
over modern, urban life — a claim that not only flies in the face of the clear
fact that many peasants flee to urban jobs as soon as they can, but that (it
seems to me) has a disagreeable element of cultural condescension, especially given
the overwhelming preponderance of white faces in the crowds of demonstrators.
(Would you want to live in a pre-industrial village?) I also heard claims that
rural poverty in the third world is mainly the fault of multinational
corporations — which is just plain wrong, but is a convenient belief if you
want to think of globalization as an unmitigated evil.
The most sophisticated
answer was that the movement doesn't want to stop exports — it just wants
better working conditions and higher wages.
But it's not a serious
position. Third-world countries desperately need
their export industries — they cannot retreat to an imaginary rural
Arcadia. They can't have those export industries
unless they are allowed to sell goods produced under conditions that Westerners
find appalling, by workers who receive very low wages. And that's a
fact the anti- globalization activists refuse to accept. So who are the bad
guys? The activists are getting the images they wanted from Quebec City:
leaders sitting inside their fortified enclosure, with thousands of police
protecting them from the outraged masses outside. But images can deceive. Many
of the people inside that chain-link fence are sincerely trying to help the
world's poor. And the people outside the fence, whatever their intentions, are
doing their best to make the poor even poorer.
Originally published in
The New York Times,
4.22.01