Globalization@Recession.com : Mails From a Globalized World

Globalization@Recession.org

Looking out of the classroom window, in the Belfer Center of Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, USA, I tried to focus my mind on the ongoing lecture – “Globalization”. It was a part of the curriculum in my Masters degree in Public Management.

I know... today it is a much maligned word, especially in the developing world. In the desert settlements of Sub-Saharan Africa, where much of the teeming humanity strives to live in one-dollar-a-day income, it assumes the proportion of a divine curse.

But not too long ago it was the Holy Grail for the developed world, as Jagadish Bhagawati, the famed American Economist of Indian Origin would testify. Never mind the occasional attacks mounted by a certain Joseph Stiglitz, another American Nobel Economist.

At the beginning of the lecture, the Nash looking professor had asked all of us to define “globalization” in our own words. It was so difficult to define it. I mean you know a thing in a kind of vague way , but when someone asks you for a precise definition , you would be kind of "dashed" as Wooster ( of P.G.Wodehouse fame) would have put it . The classroom had students from all over the world- from Mexico to Kenya. Yet only a few ventured to define. None was satisfactory...at least to the professor.

Right after that moment my mind was not on the lecture. So simple and familiar a word and yet it appeared to confound us all. After struggling for a while an American student, sitting near me opened his lunch box and closed his mind.

I tried to pen my thoughts on a scrap of paper and surprised to see it taking the shape of a rhyming poem. Here is what I wrote that day :-

“
Globalization

When a virus in Pakistan,
Crashes computers from Botswana to Boston...
When a twist from Michael Jackson,
Triggers epileptic feats in a Mongolian maiden...

You feel an invisible force,
The force, my friend, of globalization!

When a terrorist in Jordan, Transfers money from Japan
To buy a bomb in Ukraine, for a target in Manhattan...

You feel an invisible force,
The force, my friend, of globalization!

If Dollars catch fever from the sneezes of a Yen,
And pizza-wars over market share are fought in dry Congo-terrain,
When Baggio turns Buddhist and Beckham’s tattoo reflects Vedic Religion...

You feel an invisible force,
The force, my friend, of globalization!

What is globalization?
Is it an attempt to create a single face and one vision?

For a planet that ploughs through the space,
In a state of perpetual motion …? “

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PostScript: - As recession casts its long shadow over the global economic landscape, virtues of Milton Freedman style capitalism seem less evident. The Keynesians appear to be back with a bang in the free market havens of USA as Obama tries to drag the country away from the approaching apocalypse through Government intervention - an euphemism for “Capitol crying for Capital”. The Indian-GDP sized stimulus package announced by US government to pull the omnipotent multinationals of yesterday up the abyss of bankruptcy brings the curtain down on a quarter century of unbridled free market economic theory. Remember, the cardinal principle of Free Market Capitalism – “No artificial correction to the “Aggregate Demand” through Fiscal and Monetary measures. The market would recover by itself in the long run.” More than 700 billion dollars of tax payer’s money for correcting the imbalance! Seems more of a “creation” of a new economic curve than a “correction” to an existing one.

Remember how Keynes had ridiculed the free market champions in his famous phrase “In the long run we are all dead .... His policy prescription during the depression years was that instead of trying to save ,the Government should “spend the money they don’t have”. In recession his innovative idea was when the private industry shrinks and hands over the pink slip to its workers, the State should create work and may even pay its citizens “ for digging holes and filling them back”.

So we will be unfortunate to witness one more epic battle of “Free market Philosophy” (that is at the heart of “Free Trade and Globalization”) of Bhagawati and the “Interventionist” approach of John Maynard Keynes – a battle that has been witnessed more than once in the last century. So far Obama seems to listen to the ghost of Keynes while Hayek and Freedman turn in their graves.

And as I write today , my sacred belief in Hayek and Freedman seems to shake, wobble and totter – a dashed unpleasant state of mind as Bertie Wooster would have testified...
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