Question

As the nation moved into the twenty-first century, globalization has played an important role in the US economy.
Directions: Please complete a journal entry based on the following statements:
Explain why economic connections and interdependence with other countries has become important.
What are some examples of how the US economy relies on other nations?

Answer 1

Globalization has its pros and cons. On one hand, it ideally wants to open up trade among nations to accelerate economic growth through opportunities in engaging the rest of the world like one big global marketplace. What you can get in Los Angeles should be easily available thousands of miles away in India, Japan, or Kenya without restrictions.

On the negative side, I guess one of the things you can look at is how globalization has also accelerated the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs as corporations seek to shave the costs associated with making products. There's a reason why a lot of things are made in places like Mexico and China -- cheap labor.

Answer 2

That's not negative if you're a Mexican or Chinese worker, Cap.

Answer 3

I beg to differ. NAFTA zones are notoriously rife with problems such as the drug cartels that have moved in to exploit the better paid workers and managers not to mention the lax environmental standards in both countries. The families of those that have committed suicide at Foxconn plants in China might also not see it as a positive along with the environmental disaster turning villages into dumping grounds for the rest of the First World's CRTs and circuit boards.

Though the well off in those countries might not regard it as a negative since they are enjoying the business opportunities globalization has given them, those that slave to support our need for cheap stuff might disagree.

Answer 4

Oh nonsense. If people did not absolutely hunger for those jobs, they wouldn't take them. It may certainly be a drag working at a Foxconn plant, grinding conditions for miserable pay -- if your comparison is working at a Starbucks in the Bay Area or interning for the Deutsche Bank between your Wanderjahr and B-school:

http://www.quickmeme.com/First-World-Problems/

But if your comparison is slow starvation and regular beatings in the Chinese countryside, it's a sweet sweet opportunity. That's why those jobs are enormously popular with the people who take them -- because they are far better than what else is available. Do keep in mind that your use of the word "slave" here is entirely rhetorical hyperbole. In fact, nobody has to force people to take those jobs -- they fight to get them and keep them. That tells you all you need to know about what their other opportunities look like -- the only opportunities they'd have if barriers to trade kept those "slave" jobs from appearing at all.

You can certainly imagine that they could be even better jobs -- but the route to that happy world is still freer markets, such that (for example), Indochinese, South Korean, and Indian consumers spend so much on smartphones assembled in China that some clever Chinese entrepreneur realizes he can double the offered wages, steal all the best workers from Apple's contractors, and still undercut Apple's retail prices in those countries. Great wages come from strong competition for labor by profitable companies, and the more competition -- the lower trade barriers are -- the better it is for labor. I mean, the idea that working conditions for Chinese laborers will be *improved* if the number of companies competing to hire them is *reduced* defies common sense, let alone the past half century of economics.

I have no idea what you mean by drug cartels moving into NAFTA areas, but that sounds silly. Smuggling 100kg bricks of cocaine into the United States from Mexico is extremely illegal, and if you're caught you can expect a 20-year stretch in Quentin, assuming the DEA agents don't just shoot you in the field. I hardly see how the elimination of tariffs sponsored by NAFTA changes the economics of drug smuggling.