Globalization sails uncharted course

In the United States, consumer confidence in the economy has just hit a 28-year high, according to the Conference Board Index. Year-end commentators across the media are talking about 1997 as having represented some "golden age" of high employment, low inflation and strong and sustainable growth. And in terms of future predictions, even the regular doomsayers are remarkable cheerful.

That is not to say everyone is enjoying the economic boom. There is no doubt many people with lower education, ill-equipped with skills for the information age, are suffering within the U.S. boom, slaving away at several minimum-wage jobs just to make ends meet. But they are still far away from the misery and fear gripping the Asian economies so recently known as Tigers, and even the once mighty and economically feared Japan. And the juxtaposition of that pain with the comfort of the U.S. economy poses some hard questions about the whole progress of the globalization of the world market about which we h hearing so much over the past few years.

If we are all indeed "in the one boat" in a single, global economy, is the huge gap between first class and steerage, the massive inequality first laid down in current patterns during the era of European expansion and colonialism, set to be continued or even magnified? Is globalization going to be what some parts of the world enjoy while it is a painful disease for millions and millions of others?

That's not to say that we want all nations of the world down in the economic depths together as that surely would not help anyone. But if the U.S. continues to enjoy fast-rising living standards and incomes, watching its firms spread and grow across the globe while citizens of many other nations slide from modest prosperity to poverty and disaster, then the whole globalization project will become politically, socially, morally and economically untenable. And that is without even mentioning the horrendous global environmental threat that continued expansion of the profligate U.S. lifestyle represents.

-- The Bangkok Post