the LBO's (left business observer :) doug henwood wrote about globalisation earlier this month in the nation:

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20031201&s=henwood

"Are globalized economies more unequal than nonglobalized ones? The consulting firm A.T. Kearney has been computing a yearly globalization index for Foreign Policy magazine. If you chart the relation of the index to country rankings for inequality, the results are not what a typical antiglobalization activist would expect.

"The relation is far from perfect, but if anything, more globalized countries are less unequal than less globalized ones. Western European social democracies are more globalized than the United States but less unequal--as is Canada, to a lesser degree. South Korea is much more globalized than Brazil but less unequal; so is Mexico. The point is not that promoting globalization would promote equality, but that the foregrounding of globalization as the cause of inequality isn't a simple case to make. Income distribution depends more on domestic institutions like unions and welfare states than on internationalization."

so not so much a defense of "global capitalism" per se (more so of the emerging brasília consensus: http://www.iht.com/articles/122604.htm :) as the "antiglobo" crowd reason's editors like to deride, i think present a false dichotomy and a little too convenient (and lazy) scapegoat for them to demonise.*

it's kind of a shame because it seems like the issue has never really been globo or antiglobo, but how to do globalisation right or better, and to detract from that distances participants unnecessarily across an ideological divide, when their policy positions and prescriptions may in actuality not be that far off.

e.g. in the norberg interview he advocates "free and open markets and the liberal political, economic, and social institutions that support them," and whereas reason would emphasise the former, i don't think they would disagree with the latter as espoused by such luminaries as hernando de soto or george soros, or anyone really, complete disavowals of externalities, imperfect information and inefficient market outcomes notwithstanding!

what's pretty interesting to me is i guess an almost "fractal" parallel one could draw between successful development on the national level, with similar initiatives on the municipal level:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html

as richard florida writes in the rise of the creative class, "in 1998, I met Gary Gates, then a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon. While I had been studying the location choices of high-tech industries and talented people, Gates had been exploring the location patterns of gay people. My list of the country's high-tech hot spots looked an awful lot like his list of the places with highest concentrations of gay people. When we compared these two lists with more statistical rigor, his Gay Index turned out to correlate very strongly to my own measures of high-tech growth. Other measures I came up with, like the Bohemian Index---a measure of artists, writers, and performers---produced similar results."

"Why do some places become destinations for the creative while others don't? Economists speak of the importance of industries having 'low entry barriers,' so that new firms can easily enter and keep the industry vital. Similarly, I think it's important for a place to have low entry barriers for people---that is, to be a place where newcomers are accepted quickly into all sorts of social and economic arrangements. All else being equal, they are likely to attract greater numbers of talented and creative people---the sort of people who power innovation and growth. Places that thrive in today's world tend to be plug-and-play communities where anyone can fit in quickly."

and while i'd hesitate to equate the gay index with the globalisation index in a 1:1 correspondence (globalisation is gay!) they do share an ethic of openess.

more tantalizing and speculative, moreso maybe from someone with deep reservations about "transnational progressivism,"** [ http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/08/Transnationalprogressivis.shtml ] is globalisation's connection with a so-called noospheric hive mind:

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/12/Superhumanintelligence.shtml

"With speech, the collaborative process of creation of knowledge expanded from the person to the tribe. With writing, it spread to the level of citystates. With printing it encompassed nations and even continents. With computer networking, everyone in the world is involved whether they like it or not. There's nowhere left to hide."

so it seems then there's even a historical inevitability to globalisation, that we're all technological determinists now :D but wait, there's more!***

* um, not that i don't like reason, but at times they can be reflexive, which comes across as hyperbolic (unreasonable!) and therefore unbecoming... and, i just thought, esp if it's just to pander to their target audience! and that's sort of why i prefer the economist :D

** and a newfound interest in anime to boot, altho an abiding interest in animation -- i.e. someone who would fiercely defend individualism (thru unapologetic pedantry, his favoured rhetorical weapon, but not above pulling out the provocative taunt from the arsenal :)

*** well, there's an aside on the impossibility of digital "intelligence," the argument being:

"Digital simulations of analog systems always include small initial errors, and as digital calculations iterate ever more deeply, that error grows until the error swamps the signal, at which point the digital simulation will have no greater than a random chance of being the same as the analog system it is trying to simulate."

hence, his assertion that "Networking of computers won't do it [achieve superhuman intelligence], but networking of humans might." and while i find his suppositions on the nature and origins of hive minds rather conservative and frankly unoriginal, even his conceptual leaps to their possible characterization (hello? hyperion?), it's this bit i find fascinating.

i've kind of wondered about how information is "lost." like for iterative chaotic systems, i think the reason they're chaotic isn't necessarily because they're "sensitive to initial conditions," but more fundamentally because when they run (on a computer:) the nth digit eventually gets rounded -- and then you get the perturbations. it's because of approximations that you get novelty! like maybe since it takes an infinite amount of time to run something exactly, it's only at the planck scale that you have perfect information [ http://www.nature.com/nsu/030106/030106-6.html ], sort of like information black holes. and since they're inaccessible we have what seems to be a probabilistic universe, because of rounding errors :D voila!

but even if the universe and life and intelligence is analog [ http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson_ad/dyson_ad_index.html ] and resistant to digital approximation [ http://sylloge.typepad.com/x/2003/11/concepts_like_c.html ] and we're stuck with chaitin's random truths from the consequences of algorithmic information theory, we can still asymptotically approach omega! (and blur the lines :)

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/kirchberg.html

"According to Leibniz, the integers are human, the discrete is at the level of Man. But the continuum transcends Man and brings us closer to God. Indeed, Ω is transcendent, and may be regarded as the concentrated essence of mathematical creativity. In a note on the Kabbalah, which regards Man as perfectable and evolving towards God, Leibniz [33, pp. 112-115] observes that with time we shall know all interesting theorems with proofs of up to any given fixed size, and this can be used to measure human progress.

"If the axioms and rules of inference are fixed, then this kind of progress can be achieved mechanically by brute force, which is not very interesting. The interesting case is allowing new axioms and concepts. So I would propose instead that human progress---purely intellectual, not moral progress---be measured by the number of bits of Ω that we have been able to determine up to any given time."

i wonder, tho, if [these bits of] new evidence or information can be made available and admissible by going through hypothetical situations!? cuz if it can, then wouldn't that make the world (or the interpretation of it :) more bayesian, as opposed to frequentist? (deductive v inductive?) i.e. by raising hypotheticals to update background knowledge or frames of reference, must the process inherently act within the realm of belief?

or perhaps one doesn't have to reserve a frequentist interpretation of probability--holding for a class or population--if the principle of (belief in!) maximum entropy is adhered to: "When one has only partial information about the possible outcomes one should choose the probabilities so as to maximize the uncertainty about the missing information."

of course, there are also different interpretations of entropy and paradoxes and half-truths that can confound logic, so thankfully we have computers to enable our subjunctive thinking habits :D

I agree, and would add a third group, who also oppose a project, but not modernism -- alienation, a project that probably goes back to the first time that someone justified some murder or theft as being "right" rather than as a desparate act in desparate circumstances.

You can tell the difference between the anti-modernists and the anti-alienationists because the anti-alienationists are happy to have modern technologies and systems that actually contribute to our lives. They are just more focused than others on finding any benefits without the cost of the extreme levels of people's alienation* in societies, which we pay today.

* people who haven't seen a square mile of living ground in their lives, addiction to money etc., disintegrated families, depression, violence, etc.

All of this misses the point of the anti- globalization movement. Individuals and small businesses having access to the global market is a truly positive step (my livelihood depends upon it). But when multinational corporations dictate trade law, it perpetuates a race to the bottom where all but the richest starve.

IMHO, globalization is one of those terms the ruling asses of the world have stolen from progressives----a word they've used as a noble cover to justify what's really happening today---CORPORATE IMPERIALISM.

It is that we must struggle against----abd the ONLY way to do that is through the globalization of worker's libreation---unionization.