Is globalization a myth?
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There’s lots of debate over globalization. Some experts believe globalization is dying. Others say it’s going through a reboot. And some think the free flow of goods across borders is evolving into something else.
But what if we never really globalized to begin with?
On the show today, Shannon O’Neil, author of “The Globalization Myth,” breaks down what we got wrong about globalization and what it means for the future of the U.S. economy.
In the News Fix, how inflation is affecting the cost of a Thanksgiving meal. Plus, are rich people running a shell game with money and the global economy?
Then, we’ll hear from a teacher who left the profession and learn why talking about the weather isn’t so boring after all.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
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- “The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter” by Shannon K. O’Neil
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- “Is this the end of globalization?” from Marketplace
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- “Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, and a secret text” from Semafor
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- “The rising cost of Thanksgiving” from CNN
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- “Real wages are falling nearly everywhere” from Axios
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- “The Types of Clouds and What They Mean” from Jet Propulsion Lab
“Make Me Smart” will be off the rest of the week for the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ll be back on Monday. In the meantime, keep sending your comments and questions to 508-U-B-SMART or email makemesmart@marketplace.org.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In that case, I think the next time you're here is gonna be a little bit of music and then we'll go. |
| 0:04.0 | Yeah, wait, I've got J. Keep it, dude. |
| 0:08.0 | Hello, I'm Kimberly Adams and welcome to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:16.0 | I'm Kyle Rizdal, it is Tuesday. Today that means single show, single topic globalization. |
| 0:22.0 | It's the topic, did you or? Everybody's been talking about it. |
| 0:26.0 | Powering the global economy lets you buy holiday gifts from all of us to anywhere, really cheaply and have them delivered to your front door. |
| 0:32.0 | Well, yeah, but maybe what we think about globalization is not what we ought to be thinking about globalization. That's what we're gonna talk about today. |
| 0:38.0 | Yes, and our guest today makes the case that the narrative we've had around globalization doesn't actually match reality. |
| 0:46.0 | Her name is Shannon O'Neill, she's a senior fellow of Latin American Studies with the Council on Foreign Relations and nonpartisan think tank. |
| 0:53.0 | And she's the author of the new book, The Globalization Myth, Why Regions Matter. Welcome to the show. |
| 1:00.0 | Thank you so much for having me. So what do we have wrong about globalization? |
| 1:05.0 | What I would say we have wrong are two things. One is of these last 40 years, as we think about the world opening up, |
| 1:12.0 | there have only been about two dozen countries, 24 or 25 countries that really have taken advantage of that, |
| 1:19.0 | have really seen their economies transform with trade and foreign direct investments. So most of the world, dozens of other countries, |
| 1:26.0 | really didn't see a big change. They didn't participate in this globalization. So it's not as widespread as we often think. |
| 1:32.0 | That's one. The other thing is when they opened up, when companies went abroad or money went abroad, |
| 1:38.0 | it didn't usually go to the other side of the world. It didn't usually go global. It went more regional. |
| 1:45.0 | So usually when companies went abroad, they would look toward their neighbors, the countries nearby. |
| 1:50.0 | And we see that in a lot of numbers, but one I'll give you right here is the average good that is traded. |
| 1:57.0 | So a good that goes abroad, it goes about 3000 miles. And that is about the distance from New York to Los Angeles. |
| 2:03.0 | It does not get you to Shanghai. So those are the two things I think we get wrong. |
| 2:08.0 | But you can see in the economic data when you dig into it. |
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