(I posted the following comment on Tom Friedman’s Sunday column, Saturday at 8:45 p.m. EST when no comments were showing. At 8:00 a.m. and still no comments showing, it said no more comments were being accepted. I’ll be interested to see if it appears.)
I can understand why you’re so excited by what globalization has done abroad. All well and good for rural India, but what about the rest of us? Unfortunately, our problem is not how to farm our small plots of land, it is a landless urban proletariat made redundant by technology. In a world with seven billion people, the last thing we need is more productivity improvement that puts people out of work and benefits only the proprietary class.
What we are confronted with today is the unintended consequences of supply side economics. Years of productivity improvements that shifted the supply curve outward, also necessitated a shift in the demand curve through higher wages to absorb supply. That did not happen. Instead, we shifted the demand curve with credit bubbles and the wealth effect of asset price inflation. We built a sand castle economy that washed away with that rising tide that was supposed to lift all the boats.