The intro and the first chapter felt pretty straight forward to me. Globalization can mean many different things from the economy to technology to immigration. Globalization also affects people in many different ways, some good and some bad. Globalization isn’t inherently either one, it is more what you do with the globalization that affects people than just what globalization is. An example Lechner makes is that the WTO is just as much an example of globalization as FIFA is. These things are inherently two incredibly different things but share globalization in common. This just goes to show how large of a topic globalization is and how complex it can get.
With the second chapter I appreciated the acknowledgement that there are a lot of issues with globalization that are directly related to imperialism. In the same vein, this chapter talks a lot about the inequalities that happen when globalization happens. Once again this isn’t inherently because of globalization but because of how the benefits of globalization are dispersed among people and places. There is a heavy emphasis in this chapter about giving a fair share and opportunity to everyone within the global market and when that doesn’t happen is how inequalities form.
Chapter eight is when neoliberalism is explained. I found this chapter a bit harder to get through as I do not have a strong background in this topic or similar topics but I think I was able to understand a majority of the information. Neoliberalism is the idea of having a free market and that a free market is the best way to keep a stable market. It is believed that any type of government involvement will hurt the market. The book specifically talks about Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. Both succeed in privatizing some parts of their respective countries and I believe overall in the current day are looked down upon for a lot of the things they both did in office even though those things were in line with neoliberalism ideals.
3 comments:
I definitely also found Chapter 8 more confusing than the others because the whole concept of ‘neoliberalism’ was something I found more difficult to get my head around. I think my current overall view of globalisation is that there really is no outright issue with globalisation itself but with how it is managed like Sen mentioned in chapter 2. I think these readings really ranged from using clear and concise explanations as well as more complex ideas to wrap our heads around such as Neoliberalism and the other factors that come into play in order to balance everything out.
After reading about all the cons of globalization, I started to think that it wasn’t so great as it sounded. Explaining that the issue is about institutional reform definitely cleared things up for me.
I also felt this with chapter 8, neoliberalism is a concept I have not really been informed about. With chapter 2, I agree that acknowleding the downsides of globlization with imperialism was very important and something that needed to be explained.
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