Years of Poems and Spirits

The book: In Defense of Globalization by Jagdish Bhagwati

About the author:
Jagdish Bhagwati has a distinguished academic career. On the short list of Nobel Award. He is the teacher of my Econ471 professor, Kar-yiu Wong, in Columbia.

About the book:
Why would any one who profited from Globalization bother to defend it? If he gains legit, why bother? If he profits unorthodoxly, why go public? After all, globalization is not a ponzi scheme like Amway or stock promotion, where the promoter has a personal interest in seeing more people participating. On the contrary, if all your competitors are outsourcing to India, you can’t underbid them anymore.

So who would bother to defend globalization? That is where the discussion is getting interesting. Because Bhawati speaks as if he is paying tribute to globalization on behalf of the folks on the receiving end of it.

Bhagwati was born in a colonized India and spent at least the early part of his career fighting wide spread poverty. In the book, he expresses deep sympathy for the poor. Although he discusses the impact global trade has on culture, women, democracy, wage and environment, inevitably, he circulates back to the subject of poverty. For women, it is about finding a job if she has to “walk out on her husband” (p240). For democracy, it is about gradually building up a substantial middle class (p94). To understand Bhagwati, one has to imagine oneself looking out from an apartment in New Delhi.

But for at least some of the polemicists Bhagwati tries to convert, they are looking out from a library or a Starbucks. Their concern is more likely about the alienating nature of capitalism: the spirited pursuit of material progress that is so essential to any social development in Bhagwati’s world is exactly what is giving them grief. And I would argue that such grief is just as valid as Bhagwati’s conviction, not some surplus sympathy or sentiment.

Recently, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times wrote a book (Enrique’s Journey) about a Central American boy’s journey to search for his illegal immigrant mother in America. His mother left him when he was still a toddler so even in his late teens he had never met his mother. After seven attempts and having endured unspeakable sufferings, he finally located her in North Carolina and settled down nearby. This may likely be another success story in Bhagwati’s account. However, this “all is well that ends well” attitude is rather limited. If one thinks of the boy’s journey as a whole, and as a pixel in the snapshot of humanity today, the irony starts to assert itself: before globalization, a poor child looking for his mother had to travel on foot, but would suffer no harsher humiliation than having to beg for food. Today, a poor child can travel by bus or train. At the same time, however, he must face the possibility of being attacked, robbed, raped and killed. One has to ponder not only the worthiness of such “success” but the value coordinates by which it is measured. Is consumable materialistic gain the only yardstick of man’s welfare? To what degree can we accept the degradation of humanity in exchange for utility improvement?

Having failed to acknowledge this non-material aspect of the globalization debate, Bhagwati is going to have to work extra hard to change the critics’ minds.

A quick and nasty comment on his prose–pompous, pretentious: like a servant becomes a master, schools his servant on how to wait on him then tip gratuitously. Yuk!

Read Jeffrey Goldberg’s profile on Brent Scowcroft.

Some quotes:
Scowcroft is a protégé of Henry Kissinger.

Like Kissinger, he is a purveyor of a “realist” approach to foreign policy: the idea that America should be guided by strategic self-interest, and that moral considerations are secondary at best.

Scowcroft said, he would not let his feelings about good and evil dictate the advice he gave the President.

Lewis, Scowcroft said, fed a feeling in the White House that the United States must assert itself. “It’s that idea that we’ve got to hit somebody hard,” Scowcroft said. “And Bernard Lewis says, ‘I believe that one of the things you’ve got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power.’ ”

“The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney,” Scowcroft said. “I consider Cheney a good friend—I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.”

According to friends of the elder Bush, the estrangement of his son and his best friend has been an abiding source of unhappiness, not only for Bush but for Barbara Bush as well. George Bush, the forty-first President, has tried several times to arrange meetings between his son. (One example of politics, personal connections and family gang interact)

When Scowcroft published his Wall Street Journal article, Rice telephoned him, according to several people with knowledge of the call. “She said, ‘How could you do this to us?’ ” a Scowcroft friend recalled. (Condi Rice is the Jose Padilla of the neo-cons: a mutated niche player parlayed into a large significance)

“I’m a realist in the sense that I’m a cynic about human nature.” (Recall the offensive realism by John J. Mearsheimer)

Scowcroft said he was influenced first and foremost by Hans Morgenthau, who witnessed his gentile neigbhors voting Hilter into power.

I have heard the saying that stock picking is as good as flipping coins. Now a book, reviewed in the New Yorker, is saying “Expert Political Judgment” is just as scientific as stock picking.

Book reviewed, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It?”. The article is by Louis Menad, Dec. 5, 2005 issue.