Keep Calm and Maintain On

Against globalization apocalypticism

Two things are true when it comes to the apocalypse: It never seems to actually happen, and human beings are nevertheless haunted by visions of the end times. In the 19^th century, Americans were obsessed with comets. Edgar Allan Poe even wrote a science fiction story about a world-ending collision. Soon nuclear weapons and climate change took their place. In any event, we have seemingly always been on the precipice of cataclysm—that is, on the right side of the precipice. But perhaps we’ve only gotten lucky.

An 1857 cartoon of comet colliding with Earth. The moon seems oddly pleased with himself.

The first two installments of this series have examined the forces that are destabilizing a globalized society, the costs of planetary scale socioeconomic complexity. From one viewpoint, the gains in efficiency in trade and travel are a Faustian bargain. A more complex and tightly coupled world is not just prone to disruption, but creates novel emergent hazards, particularly in the form of pandemic diseases. The opposite view holds that this complexity manageable, but the solution means imposing more order on the often chaotic, decentralized self-organized global system. But that means empowering a supranational organization to get all nations to toe the line.

Does the choice need to be so stark? One possible future would be what I will call Enhanced International Pluralism. Why couldn’t nations pressure and negotiate with one another to encourage improve monitoring and build more resilience into their economic, trade, and healthcare systems? Must we really choose between a new international technocracy and effectively giving up on globalization? Perhaps, but even here we are in relatively uncharted waters. 

Enhanced International Pluralism entails reintroducing slack within globalization and reducing humanity’s exposure to pandemic risk by making coordination between countries more robust. For this option, we do not entrust pandemic risk to an ostensibly wise global organization or seek to mitigate it via a more inherently safe, but far less efficient, deglobalized system. Rather, we enhance the ability of nations to enforce greater compliance from each other. International actors need not actually vote in an official body in order to realize a more intelligently democratic global order but only induce each other to make adjustments in national policy and behavior.

This approach takes its cue from the decentralized coordination visible in everyday activities. Consider how motorists successfully navigate the chaotic streets of Mumbai, carefully perceiving and responding to the intentions of other drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.

Mumbai: Whoa Dude!

But decentralized coordination remains underused in the broader political realm as an explicit policy strategy. Edward Woodhouse argued that New Orleans would have been better prepared for Hurricane Katrina had local groups had better recognized and been empowered to act upon their own partisan interests: if black communities could protested in light of the fact that they would bear the brunt of superstorms; if local university presidents lobbied with the understanding that their campuses might never fully recover; and if civic leaders were pushed to see how a major hurricane would decimate their tax bases. Policymakers could have been forced to strengthen levees and improve evacuation procedures without ever putting those questions explicitly on the ballot.

It is hard to say what mechanism would better enable countries to better self-organize against emergent disruptions. Given that the growing normality of pandemic diseases and supply disruptions are partly the product of globalization, it might make sense to work through the World Trade Organization. The WTO has enforced compliance to a liberalized regime of global trade by functioning as a negotiating forum for nations, operating under a set of governing rules meant to foster free trade. One could imagine new rules, which enforce a minimum degree of slack and redundancy in trade networks or discourage virogenic economic activities, like concentrated chicken farms.

But that organization’s dispute settlement system is prone to collective action problems. Individual nations must be willing to bear the cost of litigation, which they are often reluctant to do so when the consequences are diffuse rather than limited a particular set of countries—like for a pandemic. And international power asymmetries, limit the ability of smaller nations to influence the behavior of countries like the United States, China, and Russia.

A global preparedness agreement is currently being negotiated via the WHO, but its yet to be seen what the requirements put on nations will be and how it would ensure compliance.

Even absent an international venue where nations could take their trade partners to task for failing to regulate concentrated farming operations, neglecting their port infrastructure, or contributing too little to an early warning system for emergent diseases, mutual adjustments toward a more resilient globalized system are already underway. Anticipating a future invasion of Taiwan by China, the United States has worked to reshore the manufacturing of chips and electric vehicle components. Many firms are looking to source their products from Mexico and Latin America rather than across the ocean.

Yet others argue that such actions leave the underlying driver of an increasingly instable global system untouched. According to journalist Peter Goodman, industries have become overly lean and specialized in part due to a corporate system that prioritizes “efficiency” over everything else. Private equity (or what used to be called “corporate raiders”) stage takeovers wherever they see excess slack. Their ruthless cost cutting often leaves acquired firms on life support, to the benefit of stockholders. Not only has this left a trail of dead firms (like Toys R’ Us) but also human suffering. Private equity ownership of dentistries and old folk’s homes has resulted in unnecessary root canals being performed on children and seniors being left to lay in their own excrement.

AI generated image of a corporate raider. Does this make private equity look better or worse? I’m not sure.

As Goodman explains, relentless cost cutting is also driven by the consultant class at firms like McKinsey. Making a company more attractive to investors often means improving their “return on assets” ratio. By trimming every last bit of slack, whether inventory or personnel, a business can make its books look good, even if it is teetering on the edge of disaster. The same logic leads many intensive farming operations to exist on the boundary of disease outbreaks and transportation systems to become ever less resilient.

As a result, the most important mutual adjustments may not be international but rather between national governments and the international class of investors and consultants. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has repeatedly introduced a Stop Wall Street Looting Act on the floor of Congress. It would extend business liabilities to private equity firms and close loopholes, which would make it harder for them to use leveraged buyouts to strip target companies to the bare bones and move on right before the ship sinks. Such legislation may be insufficient on its own, but what matters is that we pursue ongoing policy experiments that to make sure that profit making and efficiency don’t come at the cost of resilience.

This third way, neither abandoning globalization nor seeking out a new world order, can feel a bit deflating. But that is exactly its advantage, that it doesn’t try to offer a comprehensive and totalizing answer to the problem. Attending to a misfiring, leaky steam engine, it can be tempting to think we need to go back to the drawing board, that a clever and wholly new design will free us from all our current (and future) frustrations. But that tendency misunderstands the nature of most innovation, whether technical or political. Invention is often born out of the need to better maintain what we already have. They are small tweaks made to limit, avoid, or soothe our pains in the here and now. They are rarely the product of grand visions.

Comprehensiveness is extra tempting when the hazards look to be existential. In this way, anxieties over a floundering global system are little different the worries about climatic tipping points or a seemingly declining democracy. They suffer from the many pathologies of apocalypticism. But I think all these problems would be better solved if we listened far less to the various prophets and visionaries for alternative futures, and thought far more like maintainers. Work to right the ship and carry on.