...Far from being the sunny face of an inevitable and always forward-marching progress, globalization has been revealed as a façade concealing the greatest transfer of wealth and income in human history, with but marginal benefit to consumers and, for workers — except the 1 percent and their enablers — untold economic devastation and personal misery.
...In [Dr. Dani Rodrik's] books such as “Has Globalization Gone Too Far” (1997) and “The Globalization Paradox” (2011), he details how globalization not only destroyed millions of jobs held by a once prosperous Western working class but also did even greater damage to poor countries in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, in some of which economic output collapsed entirely.
...Guilluy [author of
Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France] persuasively asserts that the old dichotomy of liberal v. conservative is no longer relevant. Instead, he sees a new chasm in society dividing those who are winners in globalization’s “New Economic Order” and those who are losers. The elites are not just the traditional upper classes but also the professional classes that support them, without whom this social and economic transformation could not have occurred. The elites “capture most of the benefits of offshore production and free trade” while the working classes are excluded and “condemned to live out their lives as second-class citizens,” Guilluy contends.
...The stunning growth of income inequality, and the historically unprecedented transfer of wealth it entailed can be seen most graphically by examining income distribution data for the United States from 1970 to 2007, the same period in which globalization was fastening a grip on the world economy. In 1970, the income share of the top 1 percent of households was 9 percent; in 2007, it was 24 percent. In a similar vein, the average income of the top 1 percent in 1978 was 10 times that of the remaining 99 percent; in 2007, it was 30 times greater....