The [busted] pipe dream of Globalization

When you go to college, you read your textbooks and listen to your lectures, and learn many things.  And your profs, the EXPERTS, would tell you what is and what is not, and you are tested on your ability to memorize the shit.  Define XYZ and show its application in this or that context.  Sound familiar?  No doubt.

But what if the thing you're learning is actually full of shit?  Does the prof tell you that?  Take the product life cycle, for instance.  It's a given that it is taught in every single Marketing class (except MINE!).  And the consumer decision-making process.  Same shit.

Well, here's another one.  Globalization.  Yep.  Remember?  Every.  Single.  Business.  Student. has been taught that.  I hope you realize by now that it's all bullshit.

For decades, most of us have been sold this snake oil called Globalization.  According to Ted Levitt, who made the term popular circa 1983 with his "The Globalization of Markets" article in HBR, nation-states are on the wane, and the world is one big market serviced by manufacturing products where cost is lowest, and made efficient by supply chains that know no national boundaries.

"The products and methods of the industrialized world play a single tune for all the world, and all the world eagerly dances to it."  So wrote Levitt.  And since then, indeed companies have followed that creed and drank the Kool Aid.

As you all know, if you tell yourself the same shit enough times, you'd start believing it, too.  Sure enough, it's almost taken as a truth that this Globalization shit is for real, and is REALLY the best thing since sliced bread.  Many a business guru book has been published since then, all singing from the same song sheet.  Kenichi Ohmae's The Borderless World, for instance, set the business community on fire in 1990.  And if you are a business major, you have no doubt been told that Globalization is it.

Only it isn't, is it?

Sure, we can all buy cheap shit from China courtesy of Walmart and Amazon, and in the process add to the pile of land fill crap because that shit doesn't last.  You know what I mean?  Remember how a Made in US t-shirt could last you through college and beyond?  Now you can buy some poorly made garbage from that evil empire and it lasts two months, tops.  Not only are we adding to the landfill problem, we are also enabling the use of slave labour and encouraging human rights violations.  Enough said.

But this is really brought into focus with the fucking Covid.  Remember how there was this lack of N95 surgical masks?  There still is, apparently.  The damn thing was developed by 3M, yes?  Out in good old Minnesota.  Hey, but we make them in places that are cheaper, no?  And when the shit hit the fan, guess what?  There's none to be found here.  And then we have counterfeits to boot.

In Canada, the government (and here don't blame Trudeau and the Liberals, because this agenda was set during the Harper Conservative years) decided in their infinite wisdom that we don't need a vaccine making capability anymore.  We can rely on other countries to supply us as long as we pay.  Globalization, you see.  And look at what happens now.  We can't make any vaccines, and the new facility won't be ready till at least 2022.  Great.  So we are at the mercy of countries that actually make the thing.  And of course they look after their own first.  Who can blame them?  So we signed contracts to buy tens of millions of doses, only to be told now that shipments are delayed and we won't get them that quickly.  Yeah, we bought enough to vaccinate everyone in Canada, but without the actual shipments, that's gonna take a while.  According to (optimistic) estimates, even though yours truly is over 65, I won't get vaccinated till maybe June or July.  If you're in your 20s, fuck, maybe 2036?

This lamentation is not only about Canada.  You can thank Levitt and gang for a lot of the ills of society.  The income gap, for example.  Remember the GINI index?  Let's not even go there.

Nation states are the most important players in the world.  Period.  Rumours of their death have been greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain.  Just consider the uselessness of the UN, for example.  Countries violate treaties they subscribed to, and then simply say fuck off to the UN.  Sure, I signed the UN Declaration of Human Rights, but if I violate it, what are you going to do about it?  Invade me?  I'd like to see you try!  Oh, you want to try my officials in the International Court of Justice, sorry, but I don't recognize your jurisdiction.  Seriously, as Mao once said, power is derived from the barrel of the gun.  Indeed.  Might, unfortunately, is right in the real world.

Yeah, nation states don't matter until they matter.  Borderless worlds indeed.  Remember that big debacle about a new NAFTA last year?  Most of you ain't old enough to actually remember the whole point of NAFTA back when Reagan/Bush and Mulroney signed it.  The idea was we would eventually be like the EU (sorta, though not completely).  Like hell.  That ideal, my friends, was as much PR as was driven by shitheads like Levitt and company.  Globalization was the way of the future, after all.  The whole world was going to dance to it.  Only when they don't.