[simonh]

In terms of driving down third world poverty and lifting hundreds of thousands of people out of hand-to-mouth existences globalization is unbelievably effective. A large fraction of the rural poor in China are now skilled workers. Factory laborer wages in China have rocketed in the last 15 years just as the number of such laborers has also shot up. The massive expansion of IT companies in India is sucking huge amounts of money into the Indian economy while driving down the costs of services in the West.

So it depends on what you think is most important. Yes many manufacturing jobs have moved out of the West, yet overall unemployment in the Western world is not particularly high. In the US it's fallen by half in the last 5 years to historically fairly low levels and job vacancies are at an all time high because businesses are having difficulty finding skilled or experienced workers. the real problem in the actual jobs market is training and education, not de-industrialization.

The anti-globalization narrative is utter claptrap peddled by a 70's soviet-era industrialist view of the world where all we had to do was put everybody in factories and we'd everything would be fine. Actually, it wasn't true back then either, hence the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The globalization equation has nothing to do with transfers of wealth from Western world labour to Western world fat cats. It's mainly about transfers of wealth from Western world labour to eastern world labour. The solution isn't to reverse that trend and impoverish foreigners. It's to climb our economies up the value chain and capture more global wealth. We have been doing that, but we're just not doing it fast enough.