Whether Individuals or Countries: The Rich Become Richer

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The same day Forbes magazine revealed that you had to be a billionaire to make this year’s list of the 400 richest Americans and that the number and the assets of super-rich people in this country increased once again, I learned from listening to an interview with Nobel Prize Winner Joseph Stiglitz that the income of regular Americans did not increase in the last five years. Earlier news reports pointed to growing poverty right here at home. But in his conversation with Tom Ashbrock in NPR’s program “On Point”  Stiglitz was mostly concerned with the negative consequences of globalization and said that “inequality [in incomes] is the most serious problem of globalization.” As I listened to his remarks, it became crystal clear: Just as there are big winners and big losers in the domestic economic arena, the same is true for the larger setting in that globalization has benefited some countries and regions but left behind others. I am neither an economist nor an expert on free trade/globalization regulations but the issues addressed by Stiglitz should be of interest to everyone reasonably attentive to the pressing problems of our time. We are all interconnected now. What happens--or does not happen--in some far-away places will touch our lives sooner or later.

While agreeing with Stiglitz on some points Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist was far more optimistic about the present globalization regimes’ ability to incrementally correct the lop-sided consequences of globalization. Stiglitz is actually not against but very much in favor of globalization provided “it is managed well.”

One wonders, whether there is a chance that a Nobel Prize Winner or perhaps activists on behalf of real people left behind can bring about changes that would correct what may be—or may not be--unintended consequences of globalization.