Offshoring: Should America be impoverished in order to help other populations become better off?

[antigone382]

43. Those standards of living will go down drastically with the rapid overuse of resources.

And I'm not so sure that standards of living have increased that much, overall. Sure, the GDP and even the life expectancy of a country as a whole might go up, but I'm not sure that reflects improvements in each country as a whole, or if that's driven by improvements only among the upper strata of that country. Look at India, one of the countries that is perceived as benefiting the most from globalization: with about a billion people, there are 300 million whose lifestyles range from wealthy to what we would consider middle class, 300 million in an impoverished working class, and about 300 million who live on a dollar a day or less. The per capita income is skyrocketing, for sure, but only among those who were already well off enough to secure an education and the social capital necessary to benefit from globalization

In the mean time, huge swaths of land are being flooded to erect new dams (electricity generation being deemed a higher use for the water than its role in sustaining the local population and ecology), and the residents not sufficiently compensated for the loss of their lands. The Green Revolution that was heralded as a triumph of science and globalization is resulting in a decline in the water table, and huge economic risks for farmers who must now pay annually for seeds instead of saving them, as well as for the expensive pesticides and fertilizers, and maintenance for heavy farm equipment, in the hopes that they will not be swallowed by debt. Diversity, both cultural and biological, is being swallowed--and even the supposed benefits of such loss, such as increasing opportunity for women, are mostly among the upper classes, and not necessarily an antidote to sexual violence or domestic abuse.

And what happens when the fossil fuels that power this system become too expensive, or when global warming from the use of those fuels makes the planet uninhabitable for billions (as it is already doing in the African Sahel, for example)? I don't forswear global commerce as a whole--I can't imagine a world that functions in the way I would like it to without some degree of transnational economic activity. However, I don't hold much hope for an equitable "global village" to arise out of globalization as it is currently operating. On the contrary, I foresee large scale ecological catastrophes that may only equalize us in the least desirable of ways.