So, you've heard this term globalization. Everybody talks about it, whether they're for it or against it. What exactly is it? And that's what we're going to talk about right now. So, first, it's a period. We can think of globalization as a period in history that begins in the 1950s, let's say, and really accelerates after 1989. So, globalization—you can think of globalization as a stage of capitalism. All right? So, globalization refers to—if we're talking the age of globalization, we might say it begins, some people would say it begins after the end of World War II. Some say it might begin with decolonization, let's say 1960. And others say that it really begins with the collapse of Communism in 1989. And we've seen this globalization shape our world. And we're trying to understand what this globalization is. And let me give you a few ways of trying to understand it. First of all, it's not new. I mean, yes, it is new in the sense that the speed and the level of interaction is new, and we're going to talk about that, but if you really think about it, globalization has been going on since the very conquest of the planet by Homo sapiens. And this gets adjusted every once in a while. But let's say about 50,000 years ago with the migration out of Africa. And you probably have seen this in many—in many TV shows, et cetera, how there's a movement out of Africa going into Asia. There's a second movement out of Africa that heads west in Europe. These movements across Asia continue all the way to Oceania. And obviously also go north, then cross, again, a date that's really, really up into, in argument. Okay? Let's say 20-25,000 years ago, they cross and they come down. So, the first—the first instance of globalization is the population of the planet. We've always lived in a globalized world. We don't divide, for example—there isn't a difference in human species across the world. We're all the same. We are all human. We share this world. We've always been globalized. But, again, as we will see, things have happened in the last 45 years that have made a difference. So, what is new? I want you to think about the space that is involved. Okay? If you're trying to study a phenomena, if you're trying to study an event, if you're trying to study a moment in time, and think about the relevant amount of space that you have to cover, so let's say in 5,000, or 4,000 BC, your space might have been that you have to study that you have to understand might have been a city. Okay? A city bounded by a wall, taking up at most maybe a square mile, a population of 20, 30, 40,000. Okay? So, you're talking about relatively small amounts of space. You might then move to the one previous time where you've had this kind of aggregate, which is in the Roman Empire. And so we can talk about, yes, that in order to study the Roman Empire, already it's pretty hard, because you have to understand the entire Mediterranean Basin. We then might move to a city, which might not be much larger, let's say, than it was back here. Let's say probably in the 14th century, you might be talking about cities of 100,000, 150,000. All right, but already, more complicated. Your ability to map out what's going on is certainly going to be much harder than it was here when you were looking at a simple city. This increases into nation states. So, all of a sudden, you're no longer looking at this walled space. You're no longer looking at the city. Now you're looking at hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of square miles. And these expand obviously into empires. So, beginning in the 16th century, and certainly through the 19th and 20th century, you have to expand your point of view not just to Britain or France or the United States or Russia, now you have to understand whole empires. And by empire, simply—I don't mean anything derogatory, I mean simply large expanses of territorial control. Well, today we've moved to the blue dot. Okay? We have to understand, we've gone from studying Ur, let's say, and the square mile that it might have occupied, to now studying the entire planet, because any part of the planet can affect every other part of the planet. But it's not just that the space has expanded. It's not just that the territory has expanded. At the same time that the space that we're studying is much larger, in some ways, it's become smaller. How's that? Because our interactions have become so much faster. We can communicate, we can travel much, much, much faster. The level of integration of economies and the speed and the force which, which previously isolated events, crossed borders. Where you might have had a famine in one part of the world, in another part of the world would not even hear of it. Or let's say a disease, some kind of pandemic in one part of the world. Another part of the world would not, would not feel it. Now, in the time it takes for one jet to leave one airport and arrive in the other, all of a sudden the world can be linked through those diseases. And you can just see it by thinking about a horse-drawn carriage. So, imagine a society where the speed of contact is a horse-drawn carriage. Or, if you will, the sound of a church bell. Okay? As opposed to a steam locomotive or steamship or a telegraph. And then moving into the 1950s to propellor aircraft and radio and telephone. And now with jet passenger and the internet, almost instantaneous communication. So, even though the world, in a sense, has gotten larger, the relevant world has gotten larger, it's also gotten smaller. Simply because our ability to communicate with each other, to visit each other, to sell things to each other, has, has dramatically changed. We all live next door of each other, much more so than we ever did. And speaking of selling, a big part of globalization is simply the share of the world economy that is accounted for by—by trade. The value of experts as a share of global GDP is unprecedented. What does this mean? It's a fictitious number. Global GDP is an even more fictitious number than national GDP. But it's a rough way of counting how much we're producing. Well, it used to be, way back in the 19th century, that what we produce was pretty independent of each other. And we only traded—roughly, again, this is, this is metaphorically more than anything else— we only traded about 5% of what we made. All right? So, we could exist autarchically. Now, we see an increase in this throughout the 19th century, as you get the new technology of the steamship, et cetera. And then we see a collapse because of World War I, and then the Great Depression, and World War II. But then notice after 1945 how increases almost linearly, and particularly after 1990, you see this—almost this straight line up. That means that more and more of what we make, more and more of what we sell, we're selling or we're making it or we're buying it from people farther and farther and farther away. And this is probably the standard version of what globalization is. But as we will see, it's much more than simply making and selling things. It's not just goods. It's also services. So, where before you would go to a doctor in your town, and that would be it, that would be the extent of your relationship. Now that doctor may be communicating her notes to a transcript service 5,000 miles away. Or a doctor might be taking your x-ray and sending it to a specialist several thousand miles away. Or where you previously would go to a lawyer and that would be it, you'd go to the small town lawyer, now that lawyer may consult with lawyers, again, thousands of miles away. Or you may contract that lawyer, or you may contract— Think about the kinds of services that are available on the web, they're not just your hometown services, you can contract for things, or you can contract for services from further and further parts of the world. What is also new is the cost of sending that stuff, or communicating. This is the decline in the cost of transport and communication. Okay, relative to 1930. So, you see sea freight. Sea freight, again, it's sort of the opposite of that trade line. It's going way down. Passenger air transport. And then, of course, international phone calling. Those of you who are over 40, let's say, or over 45, can remember, and those, certainly those of you over 50 or 60, can remember when making a long distance line was a very complicated procedure. You had to reserve a time. It was very, very expensive. The quality of the call would be bad. Half of the time you'd be shouting at each other. Now, each one of our cell phones can reach any other cell phone across the planet for almost no marginal cost with a very, very clear signal going through. And, again, this gives you a sense of how quick that has been. This is beginning in 1998 through 2017. So, a 95% decline in the cost of personal computers. An 80% decline just in these 20 years, okay, in telephone hardware. Internet services have become cheaper. So, not only do we have this technology that allows to communicate and transport things, but we can do so without really thinking about it. We can get on a plane, we can make a phone call, we can access some service without too much forethought, without too much planning. The transport capacity, and this is particularly important for the sea trade. About 80 to 85% of global trade still occurs by water. And what we see is the growth of the global merchant fleet. Okay? Notice it's grown in absolute terms. Okay? From about 600 million tons in 1980 to nearly 1,200 million tons. So, almost doubling in the space of 40 years. We've doubled our capacity to send stuff. You'll also notice that there is a very big shift in the kinds of shipping. Container ships are now the main element by which we transport things. We no longer have these ships where you load things with ropes, et cetera. Now what we have is an, and I'm sure you've seen hundreds of them, we have these massive ships with these truck or railway car ends stacked on each other. So, our shipping capacity has increased, and the ease with which we ship has also increased. The volume that is being transported, simply how much stuff is crossing the ocean, is increasing every day and has remarkably increased since 1980. The same thing with air transport and freight. Again, where before it was a luxury to be able to send some good on a plane, now it's becoming increasingly cheap. And actually for some goods, for example, some pharmaceutical goods, some medical goods, it can only be transported via plane. And you, again, see this is the amount by the world. And notice what has grown the most, East Asia and Pacific. And this is a story we're going to see over and over again. So, again, not only is trade a larger part of our world, but that trade is moving faster and using new technology. Let's just take a look of globalization in the 20th century and now, just so you can appreciate how 21st century globalization is really different. So, in the 20th century, we'd have tangible flows of physical goods. In the 21st century, you can have flows of information. In the 20th century, you'd have flows mainly between the rich countries. Now you can have flows from all parts of the world, including the poor countries. You used to really depend on capital and labor. Now it's more and more knowledge. It used to be completely controlled by multinational corporations. Now you've got some small enterprises that can enter into it, although, again, we're seeing a new rise of giant corporations in the tech sector. Ideas used to diffuse slowly across borders. It would take a long time for an idea to cross a border. Now it's almost constant, instant information. So, the 21st century, even if we were being, again, we were being globalized, 50,000 BC, we've been globalized at other stages, we were globalized in the 20th century, but the 21st century really represents a new frontier, as it were. And that frontier is very much, in a sense, it's projected, it's prophesied by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. And what we see with globalization is the fusion, okay, and the entrenchment of two institutions, of property and markets. That is that part of what globalization means, it's not just that we're sending more stuff to each other in these new ways, but rather that there is now much more of a common ideology, or a common set of beliefs, that are based on the centrality of private property and the centrality of markets. So, think of globalization not only as a physical act, but almost also as a cognitive or cultural creation, where not only are we sending things to each other, but increasingly, and, again, I don't want to overemphasize this, because there are major differences that remain between cultures and between countries, but a sharing of a set of common set of principles, particularly around the notion of property and the notion of markets. Now, the expansion of the market logic is the defining nexus of modern life. You know, if someone asked you what modern life was about, you might say it's about the market. This is not necessarily that you're in favor of the market or against the market, but that sense of market logic. What have you got to sell me? What is it worth? What can I buy from you? What I'm willing to pay for it. That has become, in a sense, the central idea, the central way around which we relate with each other. Some might see this as a positive sign. Some might see it as a negative. I'm not taking a stance on this. I'm merely saying that globalization is defined by this new hegemony of a certain kind of idea, and by this worldwide consensus. Now, globalization is much more than that. It's also about human beings moving. And that's what we're going to go to next.
