Who Killed Globalization?

Books Discussed In The Essay:

The End of Poverty:
Economic Possibilities for Our Time
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Penguin Press (2005)
396 pp., $40

The Collapse of Globalism:
And the Reinvention of the World
by John Ralston Saul
Viking Canada (2005)
224 pp., $36

The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
by John C. Bogle
Yale University Press (2005)
224 pp., $30

In his book The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs cites a 2004 World Bank estimate that there are 1.1 billion extreme poor in the world, people who make an average of 77 cents (US) a day. One of the testimonials on the back of the book is from George Soros, who is identified as “financier and philantropist.” Unmentioned in the book is perhaps Soro’s best-known moment in his past role of currency speculator, when he made $1 billion in a single day in 1992 betting against the British pound. On that day, he made considerably more than the world’s 1.1 billion poorest combined. As a snapshot of globalization, this is skewed but instructive. Soros, who has since renounced globalization, also appears in John Ralston Saul’s book The Collapse of Globalism, and is quoted as saying: “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything.” One of the failures of globalization is that it hasn’t, in fact, created much. The vast majority of trade between countries has been in the form of currency, stock, and bond speculation, rather than new investment in concrete projects.