Globalization

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Whether globalization is a force of good or evil has become a highly contested issue throughout the world. The proliferation of economic globalization has been advocated for with the claim that a greater socioeconomic integration and collaboration among countries will increase the living standards of both the rich and the poor. However, as Stiglitz indicates in the book Making Globalization Work, while it is true that globalization has enormous potential to make the world a better place, what is problematic is the amalgam between politics and economics that has shaped globalization resulting many losers and few winners. This paper will aim to show that on the one hand economic and corporate globalization are not the great evil portrayed by Wayne Ellwood in The No-Nonsense Guide to Gobalization, but neither can globalization and free trade be equated with increased living standards for all. Instead, the potential of globalization must be acknowledged, though one must take into account the negative impact it has had on the world and look for ways in which it can be improved as argued by Joseph Stiglitz.
On the one hand, Philippe Legrain claims in the book Open World: The Truth About Globalization that globalization is not just about the increased ease of transportation of resources and capital, but rather about increasing knowledge and technology, lowering costs, increasing trade, and bringing new opportunities and jobs to both the developed and developing world. Nevertheless, with the United States as the hegemonic power of the past century, it has often implicated what Stiglitz calls American Unilateralism, which claims to be spreading ideas of democracy and the American Dream, while imposing policies that undermine it. The Unit...

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...ed to the promotion of tyrannical governments and the reduction of social welfare programs. In order to mitigate these negative consequences of the profit making ideology, global governance and treaties that aim at helping developing countries advance without undermining their democratic principles are needed. Finally, as all three authors mention that politics and economics must be separated in such way as to not give corporations power over the government.
In this paper, it was shown that globalization has the potential to raise living standards and to spread knowledge that allows for faster development of both the wealthy and the poor. However, the way in which it has been managed has resulted in the opposite, many people are worse off due to globalization because it has been attached to policies that undermine the very democratic principles they claim to uphold.

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