Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

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>Globalization is inevitable.

Globalization is a choice.

Globalization - the contemporary concept as we understand it in this thread[1] - didn't exist before technology that enabled modern transportation and information networks. Like any sort of geopolitical arrangement there are tradeoffs, and one of which with globalization is of course labor cost arbitrage (that other people have mentioned in the thread). A lot of ink can and has been spilled on what these tradeoffs are, and whether cheaper toothpaste or plastic disposable goods all made in China actually do make things better off long term - for the Chinese or for everyone else. The "resistance is futile" crowd seem to always index on the economic calculation (not saying you are doing this), and seem to always ignore that there are intangible, qualitative aspects to this political arrangement that not everyone - even or perhaps especially in the United States - is happy with.

[1] There's a pedantic argument about older "global" empire, religious or otherwise, but let's all sidestep that, shall we? It's not the same thing and I think we all know it.

globalization is a spectrum.

Many of the biggest nations today are bigger than the entire known world in the past.

It is thus possible to "stop" and put a boundary over the world and yet achieve almost all the benefits of "globalization" if your country has 300M people and spans the width of a continent.

Historically, there was little trade outside of empires, due to poor transportation routes and lack of refrigeration, or canning, so trade was in goods that could last the journey and were high value enough to be profitable. Dry goods, household items, textiles.

But, most countries did not have vast trade --economies were local and regional. So, yes, humanity can survive and even prosper without "globalization" but progress may be slowed and progress may be less uniform, among other things.

One could also argue it might accelerate progress. We chose to ban China from the ISS under spurious rationale. And this ultimately drove China to shrug and create their own space station, which they've just recently completed. If they had been allowed on the ISS it's very possible, if not exceptionally likely, that today that Chinese space station would not exist. And it's unlikely the ISS would have been marketedly improved by Chinese presence.

So excluding China from the ISS ultimately worked to expand the overall reach of humanity into space. I would predict the exact same will happen in various other venues, from semiconductors to movies. Necessity is the mother of invention, and globalism minimizes necessity. Minimizing necessity is good from a comfort/stability point of view, but not necessarily good from a progress point of view.

Another great example would be the space race. If the US and USSR had been on friendly and positive terms, it's extremely likely that the space race (which was not only a cultural battle, but a weaponization proxy) would not have happened. In other words if we'd been a more global society in the past, it's very possible man would yet to walk on the moon.

I've tried to make this same argument before, but you did it way more eloquently than I've been able to do. So, hat tip.

Globalization doesn't necessarily make people lazy, but it does reduce some competitive technology pressures that get concerning after a while. Ironically, now that there's a pseudo cold war with China and a war in Ukraine there's lots of tech news about new defense tech. Given the Chinese space station (which I applaud them for, seriously space is hard and what they did is genuinely cool and innovative), hopefully we get another space race.

As with many things, a good balance is usually the best choice. Closing the borders and becoming another North Korea won't bring prosperity. Having a brittle economy by striving the optimal production allocation in a non-uniform political landscape is also probably not a stable solution.

> It is thus possible to "stop" and put a boundary over the world and yet achieve almost all the benefits of "globalization" if your country has 300M people and spans the width of a continent.

Very interesting comment. Could you point to me some article that supported this?

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