jimf

Certainly true if these things keep on getting worse:

climate change, ocean pollution, desertification, diversity loss

Alan2005

It's that capitulation that makes them incompetent. It's not necessarily the deregulation, it's the not making industries accept the consequences of said deregulation when they screw up.

Oakvillian

No apology necessary - I didn't take it as ad hominem, more as a dig at companies like the one I work for, with its globally mobile workforce and global outlook on doing business where it's most cost-effective to do so while maintaining quality

why thank you, Sir

Looks interesting. I shall digest at leisure...
Granted. The mobility of labour (i.e. people) is not high; however, at least in my industry, the mobility of work (i.e. the projects those people carry out) has never been higher. It's a sort of Mohamed and the Mountain scenario - you can't move the people to where the work is, due to immigration laws etc, so you move the work to where the people are. When that work involves building stuff and shipping it back and forth across the world, there's undoubtedly an environmental consequence. In the case of information, bits & bytes of data travelling across the world, it can actually reduce the environmental impact. Some of our clients are actually considering using the green-ness of our buildings in India and Latin America as part of their carbon-offsetting policy (don't ask for details, I have none, just the fact that it has been a subject of discussion).

that's quite a logical leap. I'm not actually an advocate of complete laissez faire. I think there are some circumstances (banking, energy production & distribution, exploitation of natural resources) where government oversight and regulation has been pathetically weak and the world is suffering deeply as a result.

And it's difficult to argue against urbanisation (although easy to agree that "megacity urbanization" is a Bad Thing) without acknowledging that it is the industrialization of economies such as those in South and East Asia that have done so much to alleviate poverty in those countries. Sure, there is still a huge way to go there, but more has been done by the private sector than ever would have been achieved by large-scale Government intervention.

Well, aside from Alan's contention that the bubble hasn't actually burst but is being artificially sustained by governments throwing money at it, I don't argue that globalization is sensible. I think it's inevitable, and it needs to be addressed and managed with that in mind. As I heard one economist say, when addressing an audience of Canadian execs on the subject of the growth of the BRIC nations: "You need to have a strategy for India, China, Russia and Brazil. Even if that strategy is that you will not engage, will draw in your horns, and will play only in the domestic marketplace, you need to have that discussion and be prepared to justify your decision to your shareholders. Not to have addressed the issue is inexcusable."

Sorry for the long response all in one go. It's been one of those afternoons; I've had enough and I'm off home as soon as I can be. Have a lovely weekend, everyone, and don't forget to wake up an hour earlier on Sunday to watch the globalised, environmentally irresponsible, money-burning circus that is the Bahrain Grand Prix.

Novocastrian

No, you (not personally of course) move the work to where the people are cheaper. Not the same thing. And as a result, the people who used to do the job are SOL. This means that everybody else in a responsible country is faced with increased social costs. But so what? The profit is bigger for the multinational.

True enough on the environment. A bit mealy mouthed on the bits & bytes. When the Breton Woods system came under assault, the internet wasn't even on the horizon. Please don't suggest that off-shoring is environmentally friendly. It's not.

There you go again Mr. President.

Oink

If globalization makes the world smaller, how come a flight back the UK costs nearly double than ten years ago? I bet all the clever clogs with their unsupported theoretically barren wobbly gibberish can’t answer that, eh?

Novocastrian

A rapier thrust between the ribs.

Bali2010

A masterpiece in tautology - luv it.

jimf

12,000 miles to peel a prawn

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/n...nd/6189870.stm

Alan2005

This is the paradox of the free market. Corporations want to drive costs down and so ultimately mechanise or offshore all their activities; however they then have no customers left to sell to.

Where it falls down is the assumption that there is some fixed number of jobs and that everyone works for big corporations - neither is the case.

Alan2005

Actually....

My first flight to Vancouver was in '93 and that cost 800 GBP in economy.

Oink

You was right royally ripped off. I paid $750 return including tax in 2000 and last year the flight was nearly $1600.

Alan2005

Tell me about it. This was in the day before budget airlines and proper competition - you had a choice of either BA or Air Canada and no doubt they were colluding. I wouldn't put it past them given the shenanigans BA got up to with Freddie Laker and latterly Virgin.

Steve_P

In 1967 I paid $600 return to the UK and at that time a new car would have cost me $3,500, a new house $15,000.

Today even if I pay $1,600 return to the UK a new car similar to what I was looking at in 1967 would cost about $25,000 and a new home in a similar neighborhood would likely cost $400,000 or more.

Makes the $1,600 airfare sound like a helluva good deal in comparison.

People constantly complain about airfares when in actual fact they maybe the one thing that has not risen anywhere close to inflation.

It's really quite amazing the efficiencies the aviation industry has come up with over the years, much more efficient aircraft being the main one.

Novocastrian

Ah thanks for that. Earlier I was searching for a link to a similar case in Germany a few years ago. There's a thriving shrimping fleet on the North Sea Coast of Friesland and up until a while ago many local women were employed in the peeling sheds. But then the multinational involved in providing peeled shrimps to market figured out it would be more profitable to load them into refrigerated trucks and drive them via Spain to Morocco where the labour costs where cheaper.

Then they drove them back to Germany for sale.

MNC's bottom line up a smidgen, so A-OK. Environmental costs and social costs resulting from a bunch of unemployed Friesians not their problem of course.

Way to go globalizers.

Edit: I shall be very annoyed if anyone tries to be funny about local women employed in peeling shops.

dbd33

What I do, that is what provides my primary income, is to write, or "employ" people to write, software products and sell them around the world. The producers are British, American, South African and Canadian, though their parents hold a greater diversity of passports. It is a matter of supreme importance to us that they all be fluent, properly fluent, not acceptable fluent if you accept their idioms, in English.

The clients are large organizations, typically in the west, though some, especially telephone companies, are in less affluent parts of the world. The saleability of the products depends upon their falling into a niche not (yet) filled by the large software companies. Price, though always a consideration, is a secondary one. Our revenue stream is about maintenance money and that means quality support, long term customer satisfaction. And that means fixing any problems this morning, not today morning.

I suppose you'd dispute the characterisation but my understanding of what you do is to sell offshoring; the replacement of a service provided by people in the west by a similar, though I would say inferior, service provided by cheaper bodies in another country. Those not in the software business might want to consider, as an example, the relative quality of local and offshore telephone support from banks or utility companies. In my experience this relocation is not about quality, nor directly about labour costs, but about the elimination of benefits.

As you know we are both involved with a large (sometimes the largest) US multinational. This provides the perfect example of the mechanics of outsourcing. The typical case there is that the provision of a computer related service is contracted out to an Indian firm on the basis of a reverse online auction, the cheapest bidder wins. The Indian firms typically don't have expertise in the subject technologies so what they do is to subcontract the very people made redundant by their winning the bid to do the work. The individuals are paid more as subcontractors than they were as employees. The whole thing works because the client is off the hook for the healthcare cost associated with having employees.

It's obviously not illegal to sell such a service and one can argue that in some metaphysical sense the world benefits from the displacement of jobs from one's neighbours to the emerging middle class somewhere else in the world. However, employing people in the west to create something new is not the same as deriving an income from displacing jobs from one place to another.

I'm amused at the idea that one of us falls into the same social category as a lawyer. Granted, I do some contracting, but I hope no one thinks I should not be invited to dinner for fear that I take home the silverware.