Globalization offered the model for this. When the economy is globally linked there is more pressure for stability than conflict. I think that theory still holds. The fallout of the last 10 years is that the distribution of the wealth created in that system has not been even at all, and we are seeing huge wealth gaps. Jobs were redistributed to poorer nations and lost in a lot of wealthier markets.
If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.
I'll add to this by saying that globalization works as well as it does because the average person would suffer dramatically from a major war and the resulting breakdown of global supply chains. People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace.
As a corollary: people who, because of geography, are unlikely to suffer any traditional or novel military consequences of a war in country <X> (e.g. Americans w.r.t a war in the middle east) are only going to have moral reasons for avoiding such a war, other than the risk to members of their family and friends. This makes the risks from such countries significantly worse than those who are militarily at risk should they choose to attack another.
Of course, none of that stops terroristic responses to war, but those by themselves affect relatively small numbers of people (or have done so far; obviously terroristic use of nuclear weapons would change that).
We can see all of this in the voices of the segment of the American population that is "all in" for the war in Iran, safe in their belief that they will suffer no militaristic consequences from it.
> People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace.
Eh, if you’re a billionaire factory owner and landlord, the kind of war that would send you to a military grade bunker in New Zealand will be bad for your factories, properties, workers and tenants.
Also, a man can only go to the opera if the singers and orchestra aren’t busy scavenging for food or fighting mutant wolves. And the same is true of most other entertainment, fine dining, fashion and suchlike.
Sane wealthy people gain nothing from a world scale war, and in fact would face a big loss in quality of life.
As I understand it, the idea was that there would be winners and losers from globalization but overall the benefit would be more global and outweigh localized drawbacks. This means that you can tax the global benefit and compensate the losers while still having everyone come out ahead! Sounds fantastic right, but in reality there were winners and losers and no one gave a shit about the losers. Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.
>Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.
For people who give such lip service to sustainability you'd think their political policy would have taken longer to run such a course.
One of the reasons for this is that the financial system - which is supposed to serve as a mechanism for representing value in a fungible way - does not assign value to many forms of structured, engineered creation. For instance, a high-performing team within an organization has value, held in the agreements and trusts between the people; organizations will destroy this in a second if it suits them because there is no quantitative record of the value of that group. Similarly, at scale, there is intense value in having all of the necessary tooling in one city to manufacture something as complicated as a car, to use your Detroit example. We can see the shadow of the qualitative value by looking at the losses incurred by all the ancillary industries affected when a major company like GM moves manufacturing out of town and everything downstream of that shuts down; and we can see the long tail of the loss in terms of the socioeconomic outcomes of the average working class person living there.
In a sense, these corporate (and on the next scale up, governmental) decisions have a large scale social cost that is externalized when it should probably have to be borne by the company. A generation of men that should have grown up to take their father's place building cars instead are relegated to either leaving their city or accepting one of the lesser jobs that they're forced to fight for; meanwhile the shareholders of the company profit from lower labour cost somewhere else.
Capitalism offers no means of dealing with this problem; creating this problem is incentivized. Many of the problems capitalism does solve, it does so through quantization of value; perhaps we need to find a better way to map social value as a second or third order system out beyond raw currency so that we don't destroy it.
Capitalism offers a means of dealing with the problem. Workers are free to start their own companies. People can just do things and don't need permission. Henry Ford himself started from nothing.
Your "just" there is doing a lot of work. Don't trivialize the difficulty of starting a company. Most people who start companies and are successful either have some financial backing or reserves already, or they have very little in the way of other responsibilities (like a spouse, children, or elderly family members) to cause them to think twice about living on ramen for years.
Yes, there are exceptions, as with everything, but this isn't a path to be taken lightly. Your average worker who lost their job due to globalization ends up scrambling to find a job, any job, immediately, or else risk their family living on the street.
Relatively speaking, it would seem Ford was well enough off.
Born in 1863, given a pocket watch at 12 (1875), starting a company at age 40 after some years pottering about as an apprentice machinist before working on steam engines and other "advanced machines".
This is well above "having nothing" for those times - some decades earlier a pocket watch was an extremely high end highly valued prestige item - not so much so when Ford was given one at 12, but absolutely a signifier of "better than nothing"
Working on machines at that time was also a fairly prestige career path, well paid, in demand, not at all like being "just an auto mechanic" might be seen in the 1950s.
You're falling into the liberatarian trap of assuming a level of agency on the part of average people that lines up with your own. Turns out that most normal folks do not feel empowered or capable in any way of starting their own company, or we'd see a hell of a lot more of it. Regulatory capture, tax and accounting, the need to drum up sales and do marketing - these are all things that prevent normal folks from bothering at all, because the juice doesn't feel worth the squeeze.
You can't just do things. You need permission from all kinds of folks to do anything anymore. We've strung ourselves up on that for good reasons - to prevent environmental catastrophes, labour exploitation, etc - but it does also serve to make the "free market" sort of an anachronism. Free for whom? Not for you and me, and honestly I don't want to go back to buckets of white paint being sold as milk, so I'm okay with a little less freedom there.
“Wilt thou call again thy peoples, wilt thou craze anew thy Kings?
“Lo! my lightnings pass before thee, and their whistling servant brings,
“Ere the drowsy street hath stirred—
“Every masked and midnight word,
“And the nations break their fast upon these things.
“So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space.
“The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place,
“Where the anxious traders know
“Each is surety for his foe,
“And none may thrive without his fellows’ grace.
“Now this is all my subtlety and this is all my wit,
“God give thee good enlightenment, My Master in the Pit.
“But behold all Earth is laid
“In the Peace which I have made,
“And behold I wait on thee to trouble it!”
How'd you get that from what I wrote? I literally said the problem is that the wealth created was not redistributed. The issue is that the masses suffer and elect people who are ill-suited to solve their problems.
The problem in my view is, once dirt poor countries that work for nothing in horrible sweatshops to make cheap trinkets skill finally up and entire region moves from horribly poor to just poorish, the not en-vogue parts of the rich world will suffer some decline if they dont adapt and refocus on whats needed now and in near future.
Sounds like it matches those 2 regions although I am not that familiar with Toledo story. Also, from poor countries perspective it certainly looks like first world 'problems' they wish they had.
If we lift whole world from poverty then our western wages wont buy us much. You can see this in more egalitarian societies like nordics or Switzerland, there are no dirt poor, big middle class but you pay a lot for stuff and services and dont hoard tons of wealth. State picks up the tab for healthcare and whole education though. Thats the price for well functioning modern society (nothing to do with socialism), it has benefits but this is the cost and it cant be avoided.
I personally like living and raising kids in such system a lot, way more than US one for example.
I agree with your comment regarding fairer distribution, but I think when we look at globalisation's impact on war, I'm not sure this is really playing out.
Iran has not benefitted hugely from globalisation (unless I'm missing something), however because of globalisation and their ability to impact the global economy, they have an outsized hand to play relative to their GDP.
Did Iran as a country participate in the global economy outside of trading their commodities? Commodity trading existed well before the global economy and was often a cause for wars. I was under the impression Iran was fairly shut down from the rest of the world economically and culturally.
This is ignoring the concept of "cultures" entirely. Other cultures are not the same as mine. They do not hold the same values, morals, beliefs or language. These are all important for societies to function.
Societies that are split along these lines are doomed to fail. Take a simple example of a new neighbor moving next door to you. If they don't speak the same language, do you think you'll form much of a relationship? Possible, yes, but more likely no. Now add religion, tradition, etc into the mix.
If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.