Yup, it’s the old game of “makes extravagant claims of success for neoliberal policies which on closer analysis are almost entirely dependent on economic growth in China”. Now one can debate this way and that the extent to which China is a success story and how much emphasis should be put on Chinese economic growth in the context of global inequality. But the fact is that the political and economic system of China is socialism with Chinese characteristics; it is not a liberal society in any way, shape or form (by the way, Cochrane appears to be about 400 million out in his estimate of the urban population of China). China has done very well out of managed opening of its markets and out of introducing capitalism into its domestic economy, but it hasn’t followed anything like the kind of policy agenda that’s described by neoliberalism, and it’s still a very unfree society in political terms.

And this isn’t just a cheap gotcha, because the question of the relationship between the capitalist mode of production and political freedom is pretty important if what we’re talking about is the intellectual legacy of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. As anyone who has google and can spell the word “Pinochet” will be able to tell you. If Cochrane is representative of the University of Chicago economics faculty (he says that he’s speaking purely for himself, but he seems to have gathered widespread endorsement), and we’re to take seriously the idea that the recent history of China is something that the proposed Milton Friedman Institute will be endorsing, analyzing, etc, then that’s quite a radical reassessment of the fundamental political basis of Chicago libertarianism.

Which, in turn, is something that I’d say is entirely worth studying more seriously; what is the intellectual journey that took the Davos crowd from laissez-faire via free trade and the WTO, to regarding China as a success story? And how does it tie in to whatever Friedman et al thought they were playing at in 1970s Chile? So perhaps the anti-MFI petitioners have a point in suggesting that the University of Chicago ought to match the creation of the Milton Friedman Institute with some money for alternative lines of research. I suggest that next door to the Milton Friedman Institute, they ought to set up the Thomas L Friedman Institute For The Study Of Globollocks.

[1] Which is not particularly well-written and I’ve no idea why so many people are calling it a “fantastic polemic” – you could click randomly on a list of right wing blogs and have at least a 50% chance of finding a better cliche-ridden philippic against those terrible left-wing academicessess. I suspect it’s the Milton Friedman Reality Distortion Field Generator, the same strange psychophysical device that makes people believe that Friedman was a principled opponent of the PATRIOT Act and never really knew what Pinochet was planning when he recommended that trade union rights should be removed. The MFRDFG is powered by fifty per cent fear of being redbaited and fifty per cent disdain for dirty fucking hippies, and I’d regard it as a harmless intellectual defence mechanism if it didn’t generate industrial pollution in the form of toxic criticisms of JK Galbraith and/or Paul Sweezy.

France … paralyzed by powerful interest groups … political elite … beholden … or … afraid … takes a brave outsider … precisely Sarkozy’s appeal … Reagan or a Thatcher … A “rupture” is what France needs … showing that his country is not doomed to decline … cadres of highly globalized managers … etc … etc

I don’t see the words “tough,” “clear-headed,” or “reform” anywhere, so it isn’t quite the full bob major, but it’s close. But is Sarkozy really the pro-globalization reformer that people like Emmott thinks he is? Two alternative points of view. First, Martin Wolf (behind the FT subscription wall), who’s strongly pro-globalization, but isn’t (at least in my opinion) a purveyor of globollocks.

For a modern politician of the right, such as Mr Sarkozy, it is [nationalism and the dominance of the state] that are most important. It leads him, both instinctively and as a matter of political expediency, in the direction of Colbertian mercantilism … If one adds to Colbertian mercantilism the need to gain power in a country with closely interwoven populist and Bonapartist traditions, a Mr Sarkozy emerges. … determined to inject dynamism into an ossified French domestic economy, while protecting industry against “unfair” foreign competition … Mr Sarkozy … wants a … Europe … in which his dirigiste approach is translated to the European level: an ECB under political control; a European industrial policy; and EU preference, by which he means greater protection against disruptive foreigners.

Even more interesting is this article on the sources of Sarkozy’s electoral support, via Max.

M. Sarkozy owes his victory to a “wrinkly” landslide with an overwhelming triumph among French voters in their sixties (61 per cent of the vote) and a jackpot among the over-seventies (68 per cent) … M. Sarkozy … picked up his largest scores – up to 68 per cent of the vote – in the former far-right bastions of Alsace and the Côte d’Azur. “Sarkoland” covers two thirds of France but its heartlands are the permanently reactionary and “grumpy” départements along France’s eastern borders. … M. Sarkozy won among private-sector employees, small businessmen, professionals, farmers and the managerial classes. He won an absolute landslide – 82 per cent – among shop-keepers and small tradespeople.

This strongly suggests that Sarkozy’s political coalition is one that we’ve seen before in France, and one that, to put it mildly, wasn’t associated with any great appetite for widescale and sweeping changes to French economy and society. My objections to Sarkozy aren’t primarily to the threat that he’ll ‘reform’ France (I agree with the Emmotts of the commentariat that there are many things about the French polity and economy that could do with some reforming, although I obviously disagree about the ultimate direction in which these reforms should go). They’re to his barely concealed appeals to racism. This seems, however to dovetail neatly with a kind of neo-Poujadism, which would soften its objections to big business in favour of emphasizing the threats posed by the EU, international competition, Asians, folks from Algeria, Turkey, and other foreign parts taking your precious jobs and so on.

I’m not an academic expert on French politics, but from what I do know, I don’t see any good reason to believe that Sarkozy is a pro-globalizing reformer, or anything like it. On the contrary, I see plenty of reason to believe that Wolf is right; Sarkozy will likely seek to lower domestic taxes (especially on business), but do all he can to erect barriers against the outside world, to protect his constituents (small business in particular) against forms of deregulation that might hurt them, and to add a dollop of old-style xenophobia for good measure. This isn’t good news for the globollocks merchants, but it isn’t exactly great news for the rest of us either.

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

Amazing. Tom Friedman is a God. No, not a God so much as a moustachioed force of nature, pumped up on the steroids of globalization, a canary in the coalmine of an interconnected era whose tentacles are spreading over the face of a New Economy savannah where old lions are left standing at their waterholes, unaware that the young Turks—and Indians—have both hands on the wheel of fortune favors the brave face the music to their ears to the, uh, ground.

Most particularly, Friedman touches on one of my personal hobbyhorses:

” We have an administration that won’t lift a finger to prevent the expensing of stock options, which is going to inhibit the ability of U.S. high-tech firms to attract talent – at a time when China encourages its start-ups to grant stock options to young innovators.”

The latest front in the War for Innovation, apparently … It is, let us recall, legal in the USA to grant stock options. Nobody is proposing that it be made illegal. What Friedman is protesting against is that companies which issue stock options, should record the fact that they have done so, in the P&L account.

I’m in general in favour of this. As I said a year ago (Christ has it been that long?), if stock options really are all that and a bag of chips, why are people so reluctant to tell the truth about granting them? The school of thought which suggests that if you know you’re in the right, it’s OK to tell a few little white lies has taken enough bad defeats in the period between Enron and Abu Ghraib[1], but apparently Friedman’s the boy on the burning deck of this one.

The rest of the article is boilerplate Friedman stuff; the USA will become a Second Rate Power with the trade deficit and budget deficit at nightmare proportions, unless we subsidise the living hell out of a high-tech industry that appeared to be doing just fine on its own. If you like that sort of thing, well, I suppose that’s the sort of thing you like. But the closing paragraph is just a gem. I’ve no idea where the New York Times is outsourcing its subediting of Friedman’s column to, but presumably it’s somewhere where they like their moustaches swarthy and their metaphors mixed:

Economics is not like war. It can be win-win. But you need to be at a certain level to be able to claim your share of a global pie that is both expanding and becoming more complex.

Wow. That’s some fucking pie.

[1]If Friedman wants to use “From Enron to Abu Ghraib” as a title for one of his columns, I suppose I have no real way of stopping him.

Friedman believes that it would be a danger to the USA on a par with global terrorism if someone in India working for a US-owned firm were to invent something useful. Think I’m joking? Read the bugger. He actually uses the phrase “war for innovation”.

Apparently the USA isn’t bringing through enough research scientists. What’s the solution? Presumably the rush to global competition of the free market. Nope, sorry, wrong, the solution is massive amounts of government money. In the Airmiles world, agricultural subsidies are terrible, awful anticompetitive, protectionist. But massive subsidies to the science industry are imperative, because of globalisation or something.

Wretched analysis. Someone has told Airmiles that “basic research” is a phrase meaning “science that it’s OK to want a subsidy for”. And he’s taken it as the intellectual equivalent of a Sapphire Class Admiral’s Club pass to support the contention that we need to incentivise domestic private research to keep its facilities onshore. What about “Susie Smith at the pillow factory?”, who would also presumably like a say in how this tax-funded largesse is to be distributed? Scrwe her, apparently; her role in Friedman’s weightless globalised world is a source of funds and a punchline to jokes. What a piece of work.

On two previous occasions, I’ve caught Airmiles red-handed in possession of interesting facts about Mexico that weren’t true, so he’s gone onto the “always check” list. Which turned up the following little gem:

[life’s shit –dd] “… when you are an oil-rich country but you import energy from America because your constitution restricts foreign investment in the energy sector.”

Mexico imports energy from the USA? Do they? Do they really? Since the USA is a massive net energy importer from the world as a whole, it struck me as unlikely that the USA would be a net energy exporter bilaterally with one of its biggest trading partners.

Score one for me. As of 2000, when this handy guide was written, Mexico was the source of 9 per cent of the USA’s net energy imports.

2000 was a long time ago? Well yes. Because I’m more scrupulous than Airmiles, I checked up the very latest figures and crunched the numbers myself. Mexico was a net exporter of petroleum to the USA (1279k barrels/day) and a net importer of natural gas (261bn cubic feet in 2002). Mexico is a small net exporter of coal and net importer of electricity with respect to the USA, but the numbers are too small to be worth the Energy Information Authority writing down.

Using the quoted thermal conversion factors (1010 btu/cubic foot for natural gas exports and 5.865m btu/barrel for petroleum imports), I make that:

261×1,000,000,000×1010 = 263.61trn btu of natural gas net imported by Mexico from the USA during 2002

and

1279×1,000×365 x 5,865,000 = 2,737.99trn btu of petroleum exported by Mexico to the USA during 2002.

for

Net energy imported by the USA from Mexio of roughly two and a half quadrillion btus. Note that the only energy categories where Mexico is not a net exporter to the USA are electricity (in trivial amounts, I would guess most of which are attributable to the single town of Tijuana) and natural gas (where the amount imported from the USA about 20% of total demand). Mexico isn’t dependent on the USA to anything like the extent to which the USA is dependent on Mexico.

Cross-checking with the answers on page 283, I find that in 2001, in total, Mexico produced 9.35 qdrn btu of energy and consumed 6.00qdrn. This would imply that net exports to the USA in 2002 (c2.5qdrn btu for those keeping score) were about 73% of 2001 total net exports. Which seems ballpark.

So in other words, unless a) something utterly unusual happened in 2003 and b) Friedman has access to as yet unpublished statistics, his assertion that Mexico imported energy from the USA has to be regarded as “bollocks”.

But is it specifically Globollocks, or just the normal fear and hatred of the fact which characterises Airmiles’ work?

Yep, it’s Globollocks, on two counts. First up, we have “those poor capital-starved third-worlders”. Mexico is meant to be an energy importer “because its consitution restricts foreign investment in the energy sector”. In actual fact, the oil and natural gas fields in Mexico are owned by Pemex, the state oil and gas company. It’s the world’s eighth largest integrated oil and gas company, and a massive borrower on global capital markets. The idea that there are material energy resources going unexploited in Mexico because of a lack of capital is quite silly.

Second, since when did it prove anything that in order to be doing something properly, you have to be a net exporter? Once more, as with so many other Globollocks arguments, you see a mercantilist fallacy which is recognised as such if anyone tries to apply it to developed countries, but which is brought back in through the back door as a stick to beat developing countries with for being insufficiently neoliberal. So the fact that Pemex decides to pump its oil and leave its gas in the ground cannot possibly be evidence of anything other than a lack of foreign equity investment (foreign debt investment in the Mexican natural resources sector is huge).

It’s a nasty, patronising argument. And it’s based on a factual inaccuracy. And it has the effect of helping to create the idea in public debate that there is a crisis in Mexican energy policy which can only be solved by selling off their natural resource birthright. All of which makes me think that “Airmiles” Friedman might be something a little bit nastier than the harmless buffoon I had taken him for. Perhaps my words to him when I next see him in a lounge will have to be a little harsher than I had previously planned …

Footnotes:
[1] No, Thomas “Airmiles”[2] Friedman he now inescapably is, in my mind. Kristol will have to make do with the nickname “Slightly Fewer Airmiles”, or SFA for short.
[2] Crooked Timber is now sixth result in a Google search for “Airmiles”

“While China and India each send tens of thousands of students to be educated abroad every year in science and engineering, particularly in the U.S., Mexico sends just 10,000”

Could anyone tell me why this might be the case? Anyone? Bueller?

Population estimated as of June 2003, from the CIA Factbook:

Mexico: 104,907,991
China: 1,286,875,468
India: 1,049,700,118

In other words, taking Friedman’s assertions at face value and assuming that “tens of thousands” means “less than one hundred thousand”, it looks like Mexico sends a higher proportion of its population overseas to study than China or India. Quite why this might be considered an interesting statistic escapes me, by the way, apparently it’s also possible to learn engineering in Mexico these days. But in any case, what the hell does he think he’s playing at trying to argue on the basis of raw numbers for massively different population sizes, and why does the New York Times let him get away with it? Someone needs his lounge access gold card shreddded.
[1] Yes yes I know, the nickname “Airmiles” was originally coined for Kristof rather than Friedman[2]. But they’re more or less interchangeable anyway.
[2]Friedman was scheduled for the name “Even More Airmiles”.

Matt Welch once wrote a pretty good column about liberal pieties at alternative weeklies. I think I’ve found Exhibit A. I’d like to distance myself from this article before Lileks or somebody finds it.

The cover story of Houston’s alt-weekly, the Houston Press, is about a talented young boxer named Benjamin Flores. Flores was born in Mexico and came to the United States when he was eleven. Although he came here illegally, he has a work permit (but not permanent residency or citizenship.) The work permit doesn’t give him to the right to re-enter the country.

He’s beaten the No. 1 amateur featherweight fighter in the United States and the No. 1 from Mexico. But that means nothing, because Benjamin Flores belongs neither here nor there. He can’t fight for the United States because he’s not a citizen. He could fight for Mexico, but there’s no guarantee the U.S. would let him back in this country once he crossed the border.

He is a fighter without a country—a pugilist caught in the gears of globalization.

Tonight, as he takes his first step into the professional ranks at the International Ballroom, he will also take home a modest cash prize. The money will seal him off from ever competing on an Olympic stage.

I guess that this is where the infinite flood of compassion is supposed to kick in, but it’s not happening. Flores isn’t doing too badly; he’s got a work permit and a promising career ahead of him. It’s entirely reasonable to restrict a country’s Olympic athletes to its citizens- it prevents rich countries from athlete-shopping all over the world. It’s isn’t Flores’ fault that his birthplace disqualifies him from boxing for the U.S. But it isn’t my fault that I hit like a ten-year old, either. If he had been one or two years younger, he probably wouldn’t have waited until 2008 to start his pro career. Plenty of successful boxers have gone to the Olympics, but plenty haven’t, including Buster Douglas, Mike Tyson, and Matthew Saad Muhammad.

Also, it’s really Daniel’s gig, but I call “globollocks” on “a pugilist caught in the gears of globalization,” for reasons that should be obvious.

Flores comes across as a decent guy; my perception is that the wheedling tone comes from the reporter. Wouldn’t be the first time.

“Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo remarked to me: “I don’t think I would have been successful in political reform without the decent economic growth we had [spurred by Nafta] from 1996 to 2000. Those five years, we had average growth of 5 percent.”

Who can tell me what might be considered by harsh judges to be perhaps a leetle bit misleading about this quotation?

Answer below the fold.

NAFTA wasn’t passed in 1996. It came into effect on January 1, 1994 (Zedillo was elected in August of that year). Not only that, but Mexican GDP fell by 6.3% in 1995 as a result of the currency collapse (a currency collapse that had as one of its main causes the massive inflows of loose capital which went into Mexico post-NAFTA). The economy didn’t recover it’s 1994 level of GDP until 1997. The growth in GDP between 1996 and 2000 was therefore at least partly a result of returning to trend after a shock. If you take the average 1994-2000, then you get an average growth rate of 3.4%. By the way, the real compound average growth rate of the Mexican economy, 1996-2000 is 4.3%, not 5% – I think Friedman or Zedillo is using an arithmetic mean of annual growth rates, a method of averaging which is not only clearly wrong, but exacerbates the problem of choice of base year.

None of which speaks to the question of whether NAFTA was a good thing or not, but it’s just another example of what I don’t like about Friedman.

Things that are Globollocks

“Sweatshop” as a category This may be a result of the short Op-Ed length, but Kristof says a number of things which seem outright weird. Is he trying to imply that construction workers want to get jobs doing stitching on shoes? What kind of toxic sweaters-o-doom might a garment factory be making that generate tons of effluent to dump into rivers? Or is Airmiles trying to suggest to us that “sweatshops” form a homogeneous class of capital assets? This matters, because labour standards are radically different in many industries, and the garment industry has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the worst. It also obviously matters because it makes a difference to the gender profile of industrialisation.
Points: 1 (it’s annoying rather than pernicious, and editing may be to blame)

The Smokey Mountain Myth This whole article is another version of a particular line of Globollocks argument that I trace back to this Krugman article. It’s basically an argument based on the implied assertion that there are no causes of unemployment in Third World countries other than protectionism. It’s not particularly coherent, to be honest, or even internally consistent. People scavenge on dumps because they have nothing better to do. This is because they are unemployed. However (as neoliberals are often keen to remind us when the context is the First World), trade policy does not actually have that much impact on the overall level of employment in a society; it can affect the level of income, but that’s not the same thing. It is not the case that Cambodia would achieve full employment overnight if its trade and labour policies changed to whatever prescription Airmiles is writing, so the fact that there are people scavenging on a dump in Phnom Penh is not actually something which can really be laid at the door of domestic protectionists. The idea that “jobs would be shifted” if this or that happened is a pure example of the lump-of-labour fallacy; Kristof would not say that “jobs were shifted” to Cambodia as a result of liberalisation and therefore shouldn’t make the symmetric claim.
Points: 5 (this is both an example of the “you just want to keep poor countries poor”, and an utterly spurious piece of economics)

Sweatshops that don’t sweat Kristof appears to make the assertion that it is possible to work in a shed full of sewing machines in a Southeast Asian country without perspiring. This is, to be honest, just bizarre. The problem here appears to be that his main quoted source for what conditions are like in factories is people who don’t work in them. He could, if he’d wanted to (and, IIRC, did, on his visit to Vietnam) compound the error by visiting the local Nike factory and taking it to be representative of the industry. Garment factories subcontracting for Nike, as a result of the highly successful company-specific campaign run against Nike in the 1990s, are in general very good at providing breaks, air-conditioning and a harassment-free environment for their workers. However, these improvements have not diffused to the rest of the industry at all, which is why the antiglobo lot place much less emphasis on company-specific campaigns these days.
Points: 3 (quite pernicious and quite misleading; Airmiles doesn’t appear to have done anything like the research needed to make such sweeping statements about labour conditions).

Is it great or not? The most annoying thing in this piece is that the actual economy of Cambodia doesn’t have a role in Kristof’s argument, other than as a provider of scenery. If Krugman were writing this article (or rather, when Krugman was writing almost exactly this article five years ago, linked above), he’d have made the argument that actually appears to be made here; that Cambodia’s labour standards and fair trade system cause unemployment to be higher, so they are responsible for people scavenging on dumps, so they are Bad Things. This argument is spurious, as argued above, but it’s at least an argument. Kristof, on the other hand, says “Cambodia has a fair trade system and promotes itself as an enlightened garment producer. That’s great.”, seemingly without realising that this has reversed the entire position he appeared to be arguing for. If Cambodia’s labour standards already meet the proposed minimum standards for trade, then you can’t use Cambodia as an example for why those minimum standards are a bad idea, unless you’re prepared to also criticise the Cambodians. At its root is one of the fundamental theorems of Globollocs; that the points of the antiglobo lobby are purely the opinions of the First World’s middle class. The reason why Airmiles gets into this logical convolution is that he wants to paint the issue as a black-and-white one of do-gooding Westerners attempting to impose their own standards (like the standard that it’s incredibly bad to have to scavenge rubbish?) on Third World countries where those standards aren’t appropriate. In conceding that the Cambodians at least, want exactly the protections that Gephardt wants for them, Kristof is giving away a lot of the rhetorical force of his argument
Points: 2, and I think I’m being lenient

“For the fundamental problem in the poor countries of Africa and Asia is not that sweatshops exploit too many workers; it’s that they don’t exploit enough” This ludicrous false dichotomy was presumably meant as a sonorous-sounding cliche rather than a serious piece of analysis, and will be scored as such
Points: 1

Things that aren’t Globollocks

Minimum labour standards are basically back-door tariffs: Of course they are, and it’s rather shameful for First World unions to support them, and Kristof is right to point this out.
Points: Positive 4.

Overall assessment: Net of the four points won back, Kristof scores eight Globollocks points for this one. I think that’s about right. The central argument (that minimum labour standards are disguised tariffs and bad for the Third World) is a decent one to make; I personally don’t think the case is conclusive, but it’s not actively bad. But the “product liability” aspect of Globollocks is important here I hold Kristol responsible not just for his central thesis, but for the cumulative effect on the debate of all the argumentation he uses in support of it. And this cumulative effect is quite bad. It’s not fair to portray all opponents of neoliberalism as not caring about the Third World; neither is it fair to portray them all as being ignorant either of conditions in Third World economies of of economic theory. And the Smokey Mountain Myth is one that really needs to be laid to rest. So, Kristof sets the benchmark for the new system (points probably not commensurable with the old one); 8 points is what you get for writing a pretty crapulous but basically well-intentioned piece of Globollocks. The nickname “Airmiles” has been awarded to him by me for cumulative lifetime achievement rather than for this specific piece, btw.

Scoring

(for detail on scoring, see here

HEALTH WARNING: The “Globollocks” scale is meant to rate pieces of journalism, not whole ouvres and certainly not people. This is an important qualification as Globollocks pieces are usually produced by people who actually understand the issues quite well and often by people who have written other works on the subject which are not Globollocks. It is particularly important to observe the distinction in this case, as this is an interview with Reason magazine, and it is thus wholly unfair to pin the whole Globollocks score on Norberg; a lot of the Globollocks in this interview appears to me to be responses to leading questions. But anyway, on with the show ….

Misleading characterisation of economies as “Globalisers”

Two points straight out of the box for saying that “Take just about any statistic, any indicator of living standards in the world, and you can see the progress that has been made over the exact period that worries globalization critics. In the last 30 years we’ve seen chronic hunger and the extent of child labor being halved. In the last 40 years, we’ve seen life expectancy going up to 64 years in developing countries […]”. This is exactly the sort of thing that my category “Reproduces ‘falling inequality’ results from Sala-i-Martin or similar without emphasising dependence on China and India” was meant to pick up.

I’ve worried about whether “Mentions Korea or Malaysia without qualification” was really such an awful sin as to merit 3 points, but as you’ll see below, there are enough unpunished offences in this piece that I’m happy to let it stand. After all, they got Al Capone for tax evasion, and his discussion of the Vietnamese doi moi program is misleading enough to justify this score on its own ….

We also have a case of “Identifies (Botswana) Hong Kong, Singapore as a development model”. Some commenters in the original Globollocks thread disagreed with me over specific questions of the economic history of Singapore, but I remain of the opinion that 1) you can’t argue from small dense populations to large diffuse populations and 2) the investment capital put into Singapore by the British was material to its development and it is not realistic for any other economy to expect this level of foreign investment. So two points here.

7 points

Equivocation between capital and goods market openness

I see here that the Globollocks scorecard unfairly discriminates against articles which engage with the technical issues. Norberg appears to be full of it on this one, but doesn’t make any really specific claims.

“General failure to distinguish between capital and goods openness” only gets you one Globollocks point, but “particularly egregious examples” has a tariff of up to 3 points, and I think the full 3 are appropriate here. Norberg has written a book about free trade and called it “In Defence of Global Capitalism”. The equivocation is right there in the title, and is ruthlessly exploited throughout the interview. Maybe this is the fault of the Reason interviewer (my past experience in this matters is the Ronald Coase/lighthouses affair, which certainly involved someone making claims in a Reason interview that he didn’t care to defend elsewhere), but I didn’t give Doug Henwood the benefit of the doubt, so I’m damned if Norberg’s gonna get it.

3 points

Conflation of WTO agenda with “openness”

I’m gonna give 1 point here for the sliding scale of “In general, argues back and forth between general statements about trade and specific statements about currently live negotiations” for the discussion of genetically modified food. This is probably a bit harsh, as Norberg does actually argue lower down for unilateral free trade.

1 point

World Bank and IMF apologia

None.

Europhobia and miscellaneous

I didn’t think I’d ever catch anyone with “Specifically in the case of Vietnam, says or implies that children working in Nike factories would not alternatively have been going to school”, but five points it is. Norberg apparently carried out some interview in Vietnam, but he’s equivocating madly between the adult workers in the Nike plants (young women whose alternative employment is probably agriculture) and the school-age workers (who would otherwise be in a government-run school).

There are also a few passages on “economic liberalism” which look like they “talk about privatisation of domestic industries as if it was relevant to ‘globalisation’”, but since the context is global capitalism rather than globalisation per se, I’m gonna let it ride.

5 points

Cliche points

One single paragraph just racks up the points here like a stuck pinball. Within a few sentences, Norberg “Says or implies that there is no anti-globalisation movement in developing countries” (2 points), “Says or implies that developed world antiglobalisation movement is opposed to trade (1 point) and “wants poor countries to stay poor” (1 point)” I’m also going to make an ad hoc award of two cliche points for what JohN Quiggin has correctly identifed as a “Sunday School conversion story“.

Final score

This piece manages to rack up a staggering 16 Globollocks points and 6 cliche points! I draw readers’ attention to the disclaimer at the top of the piece, however.

Full disclosure: Although DH and I have never met, we’ve corresponded for quite a while and I consider him a mate. For this reason, I’ve decided that integrity requires me to be extra harsh in applying the patent Crooked Timber “Globollocks Scale”. I repeat my earlier point that the Globollocks ratings apply to individual pieces, not to entire ouevres and certainly not to people. The purpose of the scale is at least partly to point out how difficult it is for anyone, no matter how solid their command of the issues, to write anything short about neoliberal policy which doesn’t end up materially oversimplifying. Since I’ve never knowingly lit a candle while cursing the darkness was an option, don’t expect me to subject any of my own work to this scale any time soon.

I award “Collapse in Cancun” 8 Globollocks points and 2 cliche points. The breakdown is as follows:

Globollocks points:

Mention of Korea “without qualification”—3 points. This is probably harsh – as I say, I’m intentionally erring on the side of harshness – as there are a lot of nuances to the analysis. However, the central point this was meant to pick up is that Korea owes a lot of its success to ignoring the WTO agenda, and in the opinion of the judges, this point was not made. To be honest, 3 points seems a bit much for this, so I might rejig the scores a bit.

A single sentence in the final paragraph – “The most troubled part of the world is Africa, a continent that is substantially underrepresented in global trade and capital flows” – picked up two points; one for “reference to capital flows in abstract without reference to actual capital flows” and one for “general equivocation between trade and capital flows”. I tend to operate a harsh standard on this, because I do think it’s terribly important that trade and capital issues be kept distinct. By rights, at least one of these points should be won back for getting the reason for the collapse of the talks (the G22 refusal to accept discussion of the Singapore issues), but I didn’t make any provision for that.

I awarded 2 points for “argues back and forth between general statements about trade and specific statements about currently live negotiations” (out of a possible 4); I discuss this in more detail below, because it’s the crux of my disagreement with Doug on this one.

And a final 1 point for “mentions farm subsidies in an article without mentioning textile subsidies”. This could also be seen as a fundamentally misdesigned criterion, since the original point of it was to pick up closet Europhobia. However, I went ahead and awarded it anyway, partly to demonstrate scrupulous fairness, and partly because there seems to be a pretty straightforward equivocation in the paragraph on Korea between arable farming (which is probably a silly thing to do on high, cold inhospitable land) and livestock farming (which is not necessarily such a silly thing to do in such an area; consider Welsh lamb).

Cliche points:

Both of these enormously unfair in the context of DH’s entire work, but as I say above, these points are awarded on a piece-by-piece basis because you never know what kind of use will be made of something once it’s cast on the waters. One point for “the antiglobalisation movement is better at saying what it’s against than what it’s for”, and one for “is it OK to put a Brazilian steelworker out of work to preserve an American job?”, which looks too much like a species of “keeping poor countries poor” to avoid the points.

Judges’ comments: An exceptionally harsh score under the circumstances. If I were to reduce the tariff on Korea to equal “unqualified mention of India/China” at 1 point, and allow one of the capital/goods equivocation points to be won back for getting the point right elsewhere, that would take the score to 5 Globollocks points.

Assessment

Doug does have a valid point here; it’s just that I disagree with it, or more specifically, I disagree with the wisdom of expressing it in this way. The WTO is much less virulent than the IMF or World Bank. I personally don’t take the egalitarianism of its “one-country-one-vote” convention particularly seriously, but there is room for differing opinions here too. As I indicated above, the crux of the matter for me is whether it’s possible to be in favour of free-trade in the current environment without, to coin a phrase, objectively being on the side of the whole neoliberal bill of goods.

The thing is, nobody in their right mind who understood the issues could be against free trade in goods, in principle and in good faith. I simply can’t think of any legimitate reasons why one might be against “free trade”. The trouble is, as I mentioned earlier, nobody seems to be interested in free trade at the moment. Although I don’t doubt that there are a lot of sincere and well-meaning people who support the neoliberal cause, there are also a lot of the other kind; people who are only interested in things like the extrajudicial enforcement of patents and copyrights, and in gaining treaty protection for their overseas investment strategies. Neither of these have anything to do with the interests of developing countries, and it looks very much to me as if the Evil wing of the neoliberal movement is firmly in the driving seat. (If you doubt this, consider how quickly TRIPS was passed, compared to farm subsidy and textile tariff reforms).

This makes it a lot more difficult to know what to do. Are the neoliberal institutions (broadly, the IMF, World Bank and WTO) so far gone that the only thing to be done is to campaign for their destruction, or can something be salvaged from them? There’s surprisingly little disagreement on this question when it comes to the IMF and World Bank; pretty much everyone to the left of Joseph Stiglitz or to the right of George Bush agrees that they’ve never done any good that couldn’t be done without them at much lower cost. (I’ve always liked Jude Wanniski’s advice that you could dispense with the CIA and just follow the general rule of thumb that any country where the IMF has put a program in place will have a significant anti-American movement within five years of signing). But the WTO is a much more ambiguous call. Doug (I think, after talking to Jagdish Bhagwati) is apparently of the opinion that it’s potentially an arena in which something worthwhile could be achieved.

It’s a judgement call; I’m less sure after the Cancun/Singapore debacle that there’s anything worth keeping there myself, but I could be wrong. But the reason I’m worried about the uses to which this piece is already being put is that, whether or not we want to keep the WTO, we should always, always, make sure that the bastards can smell the grapeshot while they’re holding their meetings.

The history seems plain to me; the TRIPS draft on the table in Seattle would have made it illegal for South Africa and Brazil to provide generic AIDS drugs to their populations, this draft would most likely have passed if the Seattle talks hadn’t collapsed, and the fact that the Seattle talks collapsed allowed the developing countries to develop a negotiating strategy that resulted in a much better deal. Ergo, the Seattle rioters can be thanked by a grateful world for breaking up the Seattle round of talks. I don’t necessarily condone every brick that was thrown in Seattle, nor do I necessarily agree with the agenda of everyone at the protests. But I think it can be established beyond doubt that the presence of the protestors at every WTO round has an entirely salutary effect on the debate, because it emboldens the developing countries and makes the developed negotiators nervous. It’s true that a lot of anti-WTO rhetoric is the most fearful AntiGlobollocks, and also true that the WTO cops a lot of flak from ill-informed people which should more rightly be directed at the IMF and WB. But the importance of the protestors is not so much what they say as the fact that they’re there. What we need is a WTO that’s effective enough to stop the US and EU from abandoning it in favour of a divide-and-conquer strategy of bilateral deals, but not cocky enough to push the Singapore agenda. And I’m, for the moment, not convinced that the pendulum’s swung so far that the protestors aren’t still a progressive force.

I’ll be scoring things which catch my attention using the following scorecard (note; this is a first draft and suggestions would be welcome).

Misleading characterisation of economies as “Globalisers”

Mentions India as “globaliser” without qualification—1 point
Mentions China as “globaliser” without qualification—3 points
Mentions Korea or Malaysia without qualification—3 points
Reproduces “falling inequality” results from Sala-i-Martin or similar without emphasising dependence on China and India – 2 points
Refers to Botswana, Singapore or Hong Kong as if they provided development models—2 points
Mentions Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute Economic Freedom indices—1 point, with possibility of 0 points in truly mitigating circumstances

Equivocation between capital and goods market openness

Refers to capital controls as “protectionism”—3 points
Refers to “capital flows to developing countries” in abstract without reference to actual net capital flows—1 point
General failure to distinguish between capital and goods openness – 1 points
Particularly egregious or mendacious examples of above—2 points, 3 in extreme cases
Ludicrously overstated estimates of the benefits of capital market openness – 2 points

Conflation of WTO agenda with “openness”

Uses % of trade in GDP as measure of “globalisation” when context is specific advocacy of WTO agenda items – 2 points
Talks about TRIPS agreement as if it increased economic freedom – 3 points
In general, argues back and forth between general statements about trade and specific statements about currently live negotiations – 1-4 points on a sliding scale

IMF/ World Bank apologia

Claims that IMF does not interfere with national sovereignty – 2 points
Blames failure of IMF programmes on “corruption”, “failure to liberalise” or any other factors which did not change during the program—2 points
Pretends that World Bank is not responsible for projects financed with World Bank loans – 1 point
Refers to “moral hazard” as if it was a problem for developing countries – 2 points (any article which contains the phrase “bail-outs” will be prima facie assumed guilty on this count)
Talks about “market access” of countries with no non-official creditors in discussions of debt relief – 4 points
Pretends that IMF programmes did not make things worse in cases when they did – 2 points
Pretends that IMF did not “endorse” economic policies which were contained in programmes which they signed off on – 1 point

Europhobia and miscellaneous

Claims or implies that the European Union is anti-globalisation—1 point
Blames the French without making specific allegations – 2 points
Mentions farm subsidies in an article without mentioning textile subsidies – 1 point
Talks about “devastating impact” of cheap food imports on domestic agricultural sector in article which also refers to positive impact of cheap manufactured imports – 2 points
Specifically in the case of Vietnam, says or implies that children working in Nike factories would not alternatively have been going to school—5 points
Refers to “corruption” in countries without meaningful corruption problems—4 points
Refers to Phillippines post-1998 without mentioning Indonesia – 1 point
Talks about privatisation of domestic industries as if it was relevant to “globalisation” – 2 points

Cliche

Refers to “basic economic theory” – 1 point
Refers to “Economics 101” – 1 point (American commentators) or 3 points (European or UK commentators for whom the reference is meaningless as well as cliched)
Says or implies that there is no anti-globalisation movement in developing countries – 2 points
Says or implies that developed world antiglobalisation movement is entirely middle class – 1 point
Says or implies that developed world antiglobalisation movement “has no idea of what it is in favour of”, “is opposed to trade” or “wants poor countries to stay poor”—1 point each
Says or implies that protests at IMF, WTO or World Bank summits are “irrelevant” – 1 point
Refers to “rigour” of not particularly rigorous arguments (What kind of rigour do neoclassical economists have? Analytical rigour) – 1 point.
Refers to collapses of negotiations as “a tragedy for the Third World” – 2 points, plus 1 point if said “tragedy” is blamed on someone whose fault it wasn’t
References to Swiss bank accounts, Mercedes, etc – sliding scale of 0-3 points depending on offensiveness and/or accuracy of charge

I’ll be keeping two scores – a general “Globollocks” score and a separate “Cliche” score, because I suspect that unless kept under tight control the Cliche category will end up dominating the whole thing. By way of example, I award this Oliver Kamm post 10 points for Globollocks (4 for unqualified mentions of China and India, 4 for capital/goods equivocation and 2 for use of “exposure to global economy” as a proxy for “globalisation”) and 3 cliche points (“analytical rigour”, “wants poor countries to stay poor” and “basic economic theory”). I’ve no idea whether that’s a low or a high score until I start scoring a few more. If you see an example that looks like it might be worth scoring, give me a shout.

[EDIT]: Just for clarity, I’m scoring individual pieces, not entire ouevres and certainly not people. Oliver Kamm in general writes a lot of stuff on globalisation and by no means all of it is Globollocks. In general, in fact, most Globollocks is written by people who actually do understand the issues they’re talking about, but oversimplify them. I think that Globollocks has its roots in the way in which various flavours of antiglobo abused Paul Krugman’s work on strategic trade. Anyone at the time who saw how badly and egregiously this was used in the service of out-and-out protectionism could possibly be forgiven for deciding to never again make anything that might possibly be seen as a concession.