Low labour cost, along with flexibility in labour use, has become a key — Globalization

"As recently as 2005, Britain’s centrist prime minister Tony Blair could declare that to argue about globalization made as much sense as arguing about whether autumn should follow summer. By 2020, both globalization and the seasons were very much in question. The economy had morphed from being the answer to being the question. The obvious retort to “It’s the economy, stupid,” was “Whose economy?” or “Which economy?” or even “What’s the economy?” A series of deep crises beginning in Asia in the late 1990s and moving to the Atlantic financial system in 2008, the eurozone in 2010, and global commodity producers in 2014 had shaken confidence in market economics. All those crises had been overcome, but by government spending and central bank interventions that drove a coach and horses through firmly held precepts about “small government” and “independent” central banks. And who benefited? Whereas profits were private, losses were socialized. The crises had been brought on by speculation. The scale of the interventions necessary to stabilize them had been historic. Yet the wealth of the global elite continued to expand. Who could be surprised, it was now commonplace to ask, if surging inequality led to populist disruption? What many Brexit and Trump voters wanted was “their” national economy back."

"On globalization’s parallel track, demarcated by markets rather than territorial boundaries, corporations and firms have displaced nation-states as the key players on the international scene. They more often use the political institutions created by nation-states to work their will than they are used by those states to enact sovereign political objectives. Even philanthropies such as the Clinton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Ford Foundation have become weighty actors in the international marketplace, boasting an economic clout that many nation-states cannot begin to exercise."

"Recruits who sign up to die [in the Russo-Ukrainian war] shooting Soviet-era rifles at Russian battle tanks are not defending “world peace” or democracy or freedom or anything like that. They are sacrificing themselves to convenience some peripheral interests of western globalism, which is responsible for all manner of armed conflict around the world, and which could not be less interested in these quaint liberal abstractions. We are in the end stage of liberalism now, an end stage in which most liberal political forms have been set aside in favour of a naked if distributed autocracy."

"Is that never before in the history of the world have so many people been able to learn about so many other people’s lives, products and ideas."

"Globalization is a horrible term, in the sense that it encompasses all kinds of things; its used very widely and vaguely."

"Today, no country can ever truly cut itself off from the global media or from external sources of information; trends that start in one corner of the world are rapidly replicated thousands of miles away... A country trying to opt out of the global economy by cutting itself off from external trade and capital flows will still have to deal with the fact that the expectations of its population are shaped by their awareness of living standards and cultural products emerging from the outside world."