Do you ever think about the future?
I think about whether I'll be able to pay my bills. Obviously, I think about the future. I just don't think I can do much about it.
It's funny how everyone says that, but the future is made by people all the time. Everything you do can have some unknown effect on the future. One seemingly small action could touch millions of people.
Sure, but without knowing which actions those are, it's pointless to speculate about it.
Right, so I want to talk about some broader trends. In a lot of ways, it's easier to hop aboard a train that's already moving and to try to influence that than to build the train yourself, so to speak.
Nice metaphor, I guess.
I try. You have to look at trends. Over the second half of the twentieth century and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, the big trend was interdependence. Instead of being isolated and self-sufficient, economies became more integrated. But that's just another way of saying that a lot of countries stopped focusing on industries they were less competent in and instead focused on what they did best. In the case of natural resources, the focus went on whatever they had the most of, since those were the easiest things to turn into lots of money by extracting and exporting them. There are two kinds of countries this had the worst effect on.
Oil-rich countries got a double-edged sword out of it. When oil prices were high, they benefited mightily. When oil prices were low, it would devastate their economies. Imagine trying to set a national budget knowing the amount of money you'll have to spend could swing by orders of magnitude, year by year. It's next to impossible. Now, there are ways to make it work, if you can accept certain definitions of "work." If you use that money to support your people with social programs, that doesn't work very well because their needs are fairly constant but the revenue isn't. You're dancing on the edge of a blade with that. The smart oil-rich countries are autocracies that keep the money at the top and use it to train and equip a world-class military. Your own people don't get too many ideas; they were poor before, they stay poor, and now there's a lot of tanks and guns between them and you. This is clearly not humane. I'm just saying, this is a way to stay in power. My point is, if you are rich in oil that you then primarily export, you can't have any kind of stable, freely democratic country. The oil is a liability.
But countries that mainly export food have it worse, and it's for the same reason oil exporters have trouble with stability. The market for oil is global, but so is the market for food. If the price of bread is up 50% on the global market, it's up 50% at home, too, even if you're the country growing the wheat. You could have 90% of your economy be growing wheat and your people could be starving because you need to sell that wheat on the global market for more than your people can afford. The farmers might get rich; then again, it's not like wheat sells for that much, even when the price is up. There's that whole purchasing power parity thing to worry about. A dollar isn't much to you; it could be a day's wages elsewhere. But you get what I'm saying, right? Participating in the global economy means you have no real control over prices, so if you depend on one or two major exports, your entire economy is tied to the price volatility of those goods.
Even worse, you can't just say "I'm not going to export my wheat." The trade agreements you signed that give you access to the global market specifically say you can't do that. You might think, OK, I just won't sign those agreements. Well, now nobody will let you import anything. And you only make wheat, remember. You have to import everything else. See the dilemma?
You don't have to convince me the global economy is a fuck.
Yeah, well, what I'm getting at is that's reversing now. It started with countries like the UK scapegoating immigrants for the economic woes caused by their economy being... what do you call it? Over-financialized. If you aren't in finance and you just work for a living, you're screwed. It's great if you're a trader in London, but if you're a dock worker in Cardiff, meh. I won't justify it, but I can see why you'd think the Polish guy who works next to you for 20% less an hour is the problem, rather than the structure of the global economy that kept him in poverty back home and so moving to another country and making a lot less than you is still a better deal. Anyway, we know what came of all that. I don't think anyone would argue it's been all that good for the UK, though. Decoupling from the EU cuts off a lot of opportunities. It's not the same as cutting yourself off from the entire global economy, but it's definitely detrimental to remove yourself from the sweetest deal you've got.
Was Brexit a success? Most Brits now regret it, so I guess that speaks for itself.
The rest of the EU is holding together so far, but globally there's a lot more movement away from interdependence, in the sense that many countries don't want to depend on others in order to survive, realizing that when times are tough this becomes an economic suicide pact rather than a lifeline. American Presidents always go on about "energy independence," which is just a way of saying "we don't want to be dependent on oil from volatile Middle Eastern monarchies." China, Russia, India, Brazil, and so on have all made moves toward not having their critical needs dependent on the cooperation of others. Russia is handling this in the most brute force kind of way, obviously. It remains to be seen whether that will be successful.
Don't you know?
Yeah, but you think I'm going to just say it? I could change the outcome!
Now, I'm not trying to imply that Brexit set an example for other countries, because it didn't. Nobody particularly likes how that played out, least of all the people who voted for it. But I suspect you know what's behind the more recent trend.
The pandemic, obviously.
Yup. The global supply chain breakdowns that happened with that really shocked the global system. I think everyone operated under this assumption that the global supply chain was pretty durable and that even some countries doing temporary lockdowns wouldn't have especially deleterious effects around the world. Boy, were those people wrong! You had shortages of almost everything. It's miraculous that there wasn't widespread starvation or a general breakdown in social order, but it still scared everybody that things got so close to the edge.
I think it was a wake-up call that maybe a deeply entangled global economy wasn't good for everybody. It's good for big, wealthy countries because they can take advantage of market arbitrage to seek out sweet deals, but they're so diversified already that they don't really need everyone else, it's just an ancillary market you can squeeze a bit more money out of. Meanwhile, if your economy is built on one or two major exports, well, market conditions are life and death, and this whole "global market" thing is a knife at your throat.
I thought this was supposed to be about the future.
Well, my point is that this trend is going to continue, and it goes hand-in-hand with right-wing autocrats pursuing and obtaining power. After all, if your economic power isn't diffused into the global economy, it's kept at home, and then it's all the more attractive for some strongman to want to control it personally. And those two processes can reinforce each other, so it's not like one has to come before the other.
What's interesting to me about this is that local action becomes a lot more important. One of the major reasons a global economy tends to moderate local behavior is that the rest of the world can literally punish you if you act up--such as by violently oppressing your own people in ways that make world news. If you're already economically isolated, what can anyone really do about it? Few have the appetite to invade unless they have an ulterior motive, which is never "we must stop these human rights abuses." Nobody goes to war over that, comforting propaganda notwithstanding.
Isolated countries are also weaker. Despots are notoriously fragile, their power based mainly on image rather than a practical reality of their capabilities. A good way to think of it is that a dictator is only as strong as the military that backs him up, and the military backing him up isn't guaranteed. You're virtually never going to convince a dictator to stop doing evil shit or to step down on his own, but a military turned against him, threatening his life? That works pretty well! Of course, now you're dealing with a coup, and you have to hope the military doesn't just seize power for themselves. A lot of this is cultural, though.
I think you see where I'm going. In an increasingly fragmented world, local action and local influence have a lot more potential to spread into more national channels and have a greater impact. With less influence from the global system propping up the national edifice and smoothing out the rough edges of civil discontent, you've got both more potential for government abuse and more potential for direct action against it. I mean, how do you think that fragmentation I talked about happened? Countries didn't disintegrate overnight. The world system didn't break up all at once. It took decades and happened a little bit at a time.
But like you've said, isn't all that a foregone conclusion? Doesn't it all lead to the War?
It might and it might not. I've been around long enough to know nothing is certain. But I want you to think about all that. What can you do, right here, right now, to change what might come? You might just be one voice now. All you need is to get another person to agree with you and to speak together. And then you get another, and another, and another... now you've got a movement. Now you've got power. Now you've got something you can wield.