‘How Globalization turned its back on its key player’If we have to believe Thomas Friedman, our world has become ‘flat’ and dominated by technology and geo-economics, which have and will keep reshaping our lifes fundamentally. Total domination by the West, especially the United States is within the former ‘round’ world disappearing. The East, especially India is likely to become the new super region, with high knowledge of technology, and being specialised in backofficework which was prior done in and by Americans. The former socialistic country is expecting to built a whole new middleclass within 20 years, thanks to American companies, who find lower costs across the ocean. This brings hope and confidence to a country where poverty was a serious issue for many years, as to speak with Vikram Talwar (director of a callcenter in India); “ the twenty-first century will be an Asian one”. A century with good prospects on life and wealth for most of the Indian society. Off course there will still be poverty within India, however Vikram Talwar claims this is within every society, approximately fifteen percent of all citizens in a country fails in life for various reasons.
When thinking of poverty and who are mostly referred to as being poor in today’s society, I cannot help thinking of a music video. A video that I saw when I was just a little spoiled kid growing up in the eighties. It was the video ‘man in the mirror’ by the then great Michael Jackson. In this video, which was first aired in 1988, Michael and his director showed in no less than five minutes, footage of pictures and video material, which had to bring attention to poverty problems within the entire world. In that video poverty got illustrated as the shortage of food and the huge amounts of diseases among people within development countries. For most people this was and still is the common definition of poverty, as it also was for me, looking from a child perspective. The globalized world we live in nowadays, has shown in the case of India, that poverty issues can be overcome, if development countries participate the right way within the global economy and its open markets.
Of course a main reason for American companies to move departments to India is that Indian labour costs way less than American. But it’s also way cheaper than labour within other development countries, like for instance Africa. These high labour costs in Africa are one of the reasons why this region is way behind India on the global market.
However low labour costs aren’t the only reason for India’s recent succes. Another reason is the huge amount of young, highly educated citizens, willing to work for these salaries.
So low labour costs and a group of highly educated people willing to work, were the reasons for American companies to start the process of outsourcing in India, and offering India indirectly the chance to become a new efficient player in world business.
This story illustrates exactly the way global economy and open markets work, you do something for me, I do something for you. However there’s a dark side to the American-Indian ‘dream’ as illustrated above. A dark side that affects American society.
I believe that while creating a new middleclass in India, as a result from globalization and its aspect of outsourcing, at the same time a new underclass is being created in the United States.
An underclass with all the aspects of what the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells calls the ‘fourth world’. Within this world as a result from globalization, oppressed groups no longer only occur within third world countries, but also within first and former second world countries. In my opinion this world is currently rising in the United States. Instead of trying to shrink the gap between rich and poor, it keeps getting bigger. Highly educated Americans can benefit from our global world, but the lower-class has to work twice as hard. Since many jobs are disappearing overseas, and various technology devices can replace human labour within various fields, their future is no longer secured. It seems that the lower-class is disappearing in what Castells calls ‘black holes’, areas of social exclusion where people simply become useless, since they are not valuable producers or consumers for our global world. In other words, for neoliberalists, they are citizens with absolutely no use. But will not every neoliberalist have a human side, a side where he places brotherhood above money? I think he will. So what the United States government needs to do is dig into their own ‘backyard’ and try to pull the ‘lost’ citizens out of those black holes, where they’re currently living in. This can be done since they have all the basic economic and educational tools. American society should get reshaped, they should create a new technology wave, as they did during the sixties and seventies of last century in Silicon Valley. Earlier on I mentioned that when most people think of poverty, they think of third world countries. Countries where poverty mainly is measured by the lack of food and money, as also the high amounts of death related diseases. Since the world through the process of globalization became ‘one’, attention and action towards development within these countries on these topics expanded. However, while globalization contributed to making this ‘old’ definition op poverty world known and fighting it with proper results, for instance in India, new sorts of poverty seemed to expand as a direct result of globalization. As we saw, because of the outsourcing taking place, lots of Americans lost their job and got stuck within so called black holes. I consider these people to be poor! Not simply because no jobs leads to no money, which is needed to survive. No, because globalization and its reign of technology has placed them in a position where they alone cannot escape from. Global view has not only contributed to the attention of poverty throughout the entire world, it also created a new type of poverty among itself. A type of poverty where it no longer mainly concers, not only no access to food and money, but where in the line of Amartya Sen, poverty is described as; not being able to take part in human society, because of a lack of choice or capability rather than simply material living standards. Now the time has come to battle this new form of poverty. It has been shown that open markets and the growth of technology offer chances of improval for development countries, however the sad thing is, it also shows that it cannot function without interference of the government. As in the example of the United States, by helping the Indian government, for various reasons (social and economic), it directly hurts their own citizens. Here the government needs to step in and needs to reduce the power of the open market. It should look at their citizens from a humanitarian point of view and not from an economic point of view. If this will not happen, we can expect in the near future a comeback of Michael Jackson, where he will be singing his renewed ‘man in the mirror’, with pictures and video material of the latest poor people of the world, the American lower- and middleclass. And do we really want that to happen? I don’t think so!
When thinking of poverty and who are mostly referred to as being poor in today’s society, I cannot help thinking of a music video. A video that I saw when I was just a little spoiled kid growing up in the eighties. It was the video ‘man in the mirror’ by the then great Michael Jackson. In this video, which was first aired in 1988, Michael and his director showed in no less than five minutes, footage of pictures and video material, which had to bring attention to poverty problems within the entire world. In that video poverty got illustrated as the shortage of food and the huge amounts of diseases among people within development countries. For most people this was and still is the common definition of poverty, as it also was for me, looking from a child perspective. The globalized world we live in nowadays, has shown in the case of India, that poverty issues can be overcome, if development countries participate the right way within the global economy and its open markets.
Of course a main reason for American companies to move departments to India is that Indian labour costs way less than American. But it’s also way cheaper than labour within other development countries, like for instance Africa. These high labour costs in Africa are one of the reasons why this region is way behind India on the global market.
However low labour costs aren’t the only reason for India’s recent succes. Another reason is the huge amount of young, highly educated citizens, willing to work for these salaries.
So low labour costs and a group of highly educated people willing to work, were the reasons for American companies to start the process of outsourcing in India, and offering India indirectly the chance to become a new efficient player in world business.
This story illustrates exactly the way global economy and open markets work, you do something for me, I do something for you. However there’s a dark side to the American-Indian ‘dream’ as illustrated above. A dark side that affects American society.
I believe that while creating a new middleclass in India, as a result from globalization and its aspect of outsourcing, at the same time a new underclass is being created in the United States.
An underclass with all the aspects of what the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells calls the ‘fourth world’. Within this world as a result from globalization, oppressed groups no longer only occur within third world countries, but also within first and former second world countries. In my opinion this world is currently rising in the United States. Instead of trying to shrink the gap between rich and poor, it keeps getting bigger. Highly educated Americans can benefit from our global world, but the lower-class has to work twice as hard. Since many jobs are disappearing overseas, and various technology devices can replace human labour within various fields, their future is no longer secured. It seems that the lower-class is disappearing in what Castells calls ‘black holes’, areas of social exclusion where people simply become useless, since they are not valuable producers or consumers for our global world. In other words, for neoliberalists, they are citizens with absolutely no use. But will not every neoliberalist have a human side, a side where he places brotherhood above money? I think he will. So what the United States government needs to do is dig into their own ‘backyard’ and try to pull the ‘lost’ citizens out of those black holes, where they’re currently living in. This can be done since they have all the basic economic and educational tools. American society should get reshaped, they should create a new technology wave, as they did during the sixties and seventies of last century in Silicon Valley. Earlier on I mentioned that when most people think of poverty, they think of third world countries. Countries where poverty mainly is measured by the lack of food and money, as also the high amounts of death related diseases. Since the world through the process of globalization became ‘one’, attention and action towards development within these countries on these topics expanded. However, while globalization contributed to making this ‘old’ definition op poverty world known and fighting it with proper results, for instance in India, new sorts of poverty seemed to expand as a direct result of globalization. As we saw, because of the outsourcing taking place, lots of Americans lost their job and got stuck within so called black holes. I consider these people to be poor! Not simply because no jobs leads to no money, which is needed to survive. No, because globalization and its reign of technology has placed them in a position where they alone cannot escape from. Global view has not only contributed to the attention of poverty throughout the entire world, it also created a new type of poverty among itself. A type of poverty where it no longer mainly concers, not only no access to food and money, but where in the line of Amartya Sen, poverty is described as; not being able to take part in human society, because of a lack of choice or capability rather than simply material living standards. Now the time has come to battle this new form of poverty. It has been shown that open markets and the growth of technology offer chances of improval for development countries, however the sad thing is, it also shows that it cannot function without interference of the government. As in the example of the United States, by helping the Indian government, for various reasons (social and economic), it directly hurts their own citizens. Here the government needs to step in and needs to reduce the power of the open market. It should look at their citizens from a humanitarian point of view and not from an economic point of view. If this will not happen, we can expect in the near future a comeback of Michael Jackson, where he will be singing his renewed ‘man in the mirror’, with pictures and video material of the latest poor people of the world, the American lower- and middleclass. And do we really want that to happen? I don’t think so!
