Neither sin nor salvation

IN DEFENSE OF GLOBALIZATION

Jagdish Bhagwati

Oxford University Press, $28, 296 pages

Jagdish Bhagwati’s “In Defense of Globalization” is the kind of book that only an economist could love. But then, what’s love got to do with it?

Perhaps a great deal … if you care about the kind of world that globalization is bringing about.

Mr. Bhagwati is university professor of economics at Columbia University. He favors globalization, the process of creating a world in which anything can be made anywhere and sold anywhere, and giga-zillions of dollars can circumnavigate the planet with the merest of clicks.

However, only the first part — the making and selling of products and services — concerns us here. Capital flows, the author suggests, although volatile and capable of occasional tsunami-like destruction, matter less.

Mr. Bhagwati spends relatively little time refuting the usual suspect opponents of globalization, whom he considers to be: 1) overly young; 2) overly idealistic; 3) overly socialistic and 4) all of the above. The majority he dismisses as anarchists, ignoramuses and denizens of an NGO (non-governmental organization) world that, while capable of doing considerable good, usually gets it all mucked up.

This takes a chapter or two. Most of the rest of the book he devotes to proving that, although globalization isn’t perfect, it’s certainly better than the alternatives. To follow his reasoning, it helps to have a Ph.D. in economics (or at least to get somebody to lend you one). Those research studies he favors, and they are many, we non-economists must take on faith.

Likewise, the arguments of globalization’s academic critics he generally dismisses as “unconvincing” or “not persuasive” or words to that effect. Once again, if he says it, then it must be so.

It could be so. Personally, I’m much in agreement with him. But I’m no economist. And I have issues whenever I navigate the usual economics goulash of over-cited, under-explained studies and over-assumed postulates.

But of greater interest than what the author puts in is what he leaves out. He elides three critical items.

The first is economics’ Other Great Axiom. If it’s true that the invisible hand guides self-interested actors to produce the common good, it’s also true that in economics, everything is bad news for somebody. Mortgage rates go up: good for lenders, bad for borrowers. Mortgage rates go down: bad for lenders, good for borrowers.

Much of this endless disruption he dismisses as mere “micro-level” problems that sort themselves out over time. But he never even mentions the absolutely important and non-temporary problem of American job loss and immigrant influx. More people than Pat Buchanan’s Amen Corner are fretting this one.

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