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“In the last quarter-century far more people have been pulled out of poverty than ever before in the history of the world. Largely that’s because of the economic success of Asia, and it should give pause to critics of globalization,” writes Nicholas Kristof in the New York Review of Books. “In fact, it’s precisely because of globalization that hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, and Malaysians are moving into the middle class. … the part of the world that has most withstood the forces of globalization (or simply been ignored) is Africa, where the number of poor people doubled.”
“It’s the old Marxist-Leninist horror story about how capitalism and international trade supposedly worked already, giving workers just enough to subsist upon and continue producing, but never enough to permit them to get in the game themselves as competitors. So, to recap, now that we know capitalism doesn’t actually function in the way described in Marx’s dire predictions, The Nation demands a national industrial policy to make it work that way.”
