Culture shock (and fun with globalization)

I thought being at Bowdoin was culture shock to me because I was acutely aware that I was one of the least wealthy people there. I felt that I had an entirely different perspective and frame of reference. In hindsight I must say that at least most people that I met there seemed inquisitive and open minded and not openly malicious in any way. I may have still had a chip on my shoulder at times but most people's priorities (or at least the ones I surrounded myself with) had their priorities in the right place.

Fast forward to today. I'm now taking a class in the political science department that is simply called "Globalization." I could certainly expect that there would be a fair number of economically minded folk in the class but I assumed, also, that there would be some social science minded people who brought a balancing perspective to the class.

Today we talked in class about why most economists think that free trade and globalization are a very good thing and why public opinion has been against them and is only growing more opposed to them. Most seemed to be either puzzled by or dismissive of the fact. I didn't think it was too hard to figure out (hell we've been reading about it) that American workers are becoming more skilled in general so it does not benefit our economy to doing mass amounts of unskilled labor when other countries can be doing that while we are doing more technical tasks. Low skill workers are the ones losing their jobs and a lot of them can't easily transistion to other jobs and our country is shitty about job retraining programs. And since healthcare is tied to jobs in America, unemployment is much more perilous here than in the rest of the developed world.

Basically, globalization is good for our 'economy' but bad for a fair amount of our people. And those who haven't lost their jobs may either fear that they will or know someone who has. Add this to the fact that our jobs are rapidly transitioning from manufacturing to service (often a hard transition to make) and that many manufacturing jobs were unionized and provided good pay and good benefits and most lower level service jobs (think Wal Mart) have shitty pay and few benefits.

I think it was put very well by one of my classmates that the benefits of globalization (lower prices) are distributed evenly to everyone whereas the losses are more concentrated (job loss of mostly lower and middle class).

I don't know. Maybe I'm a marxist but there was an overwhelming feel of "yeah, I wonder why they don't get it." I agree that globalization is a good idea and, if done properly, will be very good for our country and others but we have to acknowledge that we're bad at it right now.

We set up these falls (in our country and in others) by creating artificial markets and protecting industries and distort the markets. Instead of protecting everyone by trying futilely to make sure that no one loses their current job, we need to make it easier to find new jobs, get trained for career shifts, and make unemployment not so devasting and stigmatized. I think most developed countries have done a better job of this than we have. Also underemployment is a huge problem in our country (although I've found it hard to find numbers on this for other countries)