A brief summary of globalization:

This was the essay that started it all; my interest in journalism, my forays into the subject, and my push to truly understand the economics of the world around me.

In this essay, I analyze globalization from several angles, and place into a summary both my thoughts and Thomas Friedman’s ideas in The World is Flat to create a comprehensive view of the phenomenon that shapes our 21st century:

Ajay Ganapathy

Lonna Upton

AP language and composition (4)

22 march 2009

Globalization and The World is Flat.

The enlightenment of the 1750s licensed the freedom of economic enterprise and political sovereignty to the bourgeoisie; the up-and-coming coffee-shop capitalists. However, when the flow of information, specifically the enlightenment ideals, subverted distanced totalitarian governments in favor of popular representation, monarchs and nobles who refused to identify with their constituents retrenched their rule with well-trained armies. By the mid 1800s, percussion cap rifles and other advanced firearms severed the independent flow of information in favor of state-controlled media. Propaganda pandered to constituents in what was coined nationalism, and reform came only with either the economic clout of vertically-oriented corporation hierarchies or the public threat of force. Because of cultural cohesion in their geographies, several western European countries and the USA responded to corporate and public demands with accommodation and because of cultural fragmentation, the countries of eastern europe tended to react to these same demands with force and terror. By 1918, the confluence of alliance systems, war, and socialist political philosophies in Eastern Europe created the modern dictatorship – a chimera of Stalinism, communism, and George Orwell’s 1984. During the 1920’s and 30’s, pieces and wholes of this model were exported to China, India, Vietnam, Korea, and other countries. By the years of the cold war, two paradigms existed: one of capitalism, freedom of information, and the unbridled enterprise of the human spirit; and another of socialism, government manipulation of information, and the suppression of the creative impulse. For thirty years the peoples of the developing world walked either one of these tricky paths to modernization with equal skepticism as to their projected success, and in 1989, a chorus of hammers against a cold concrete aggregate ended all skepticism in favor of capitalism.

On November eleventh, 1989, an impassioned western and eastern German crowd equipped with sledgehammers felled the decrepit Berlin wall, tore down the oxidized iron curtain, and ended the reign of communist governments across the world in favor of the capitalist humanity. The Soviet Union, (which disempowered its people by editing the information that entered an exited its borders), could no longer seek out and destroy the myriad of electronic telecommunications cables that brought the Russian people the true state of the world. The resulting free flow of information precipitated free enterprise and in a new contest of power, the flow of information once again defeated the machine gun.

The free flow of information that caused the fall of the communists had direct and indirect effects on the world economy, the confluence of which created globalization as we know it. When the Soviet Union imploded, India introspected as to the merits of the socialist economic system that it exported from the USSR. Similarly, the People’s Republic of China found President Nixon’s nudge towards the American market in the 1970s a new economic imperative. After the soviet implosion, these two states realized that they could not continue to sustain and grow their economy in a closed-border, socialist system. So, in 1991, India’s finance minister Manmohan Singh opened India’s borders to foreign trade, and China followed suit.

While radical economic changes gripped the largest nations of Asia, an equally large technological evolution gripped the united state, it was the confluence of these two factors that sparked globalization. IBM digitized information into strings of binary that could easily be exchanged at light speed when they created the first personal computer in 1981. And then the keyboard, mouse, and word processing application changed the entire world. The internet followed in the late 1980s and with such an empowering and low-cost technology, every business, every consumer who could afford one of these heralded machines could completely change the way they interacted across borders, time zones, and tariffs. At about the same time, governments and telecommunications corporations strung copper and later fiber optic wires across oceans, and with a computer and a modem, the rest of the world was just one electric pulse away.

In the hub of all digital technologies, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs had offices well furnished with computers and internet connections, but they had limited employees with whom to network. That changed in 1991. When India and China opened their borders to foreign enterprise, they created a new job market with an ample supply of educated workers. Their politics stable and talent abundant, the entrepreneurs back in Oakland simply plugged India and China into the network. Cables flashed in frenzy across the globe, and suddenly the connected world saw the light. Enter globalization.

Globalization as an economic, cultural, and political phenomenon:

The dictionary definition of globalization is “to make a trend global.” However the true definition of the word is much more complex. It is the worldwide spread of a single capitalist economy through the growth of communications technology. It is the exportation of political philosophies and debate concerning regulation in a new capitalist world. It is the universal empowerment of the individual to self-employance, and the ubiquity of software and hardware that makes this possible. It is also the fortunate and unfortunate exportation of western cultural triumphs and evils to even the most conservative nations such as the absolutely conservative Iran and Saudi Arabia, the uneasily-transitioning India, and the now-liberal United Arab Emirates. Globalization has given consumers the electronics and job opportunities that enable them to join in the ever-quickening cycle of technological development and world improvement, and enjoy greater recreation and an overall better quality of life. Finally and most importantly globalization has created the prosumer; an individual who on his one-thousand dollar budget can purchase a camera, a laptop, a microphone, and an internet connection to become an independent “New York Times” with the freedom to publish and podcast his articles and thoughts on the internet and thus unleash his creativity on the blogosphere; essentially, globalization has conferred upon the white-collar worker a license to humanity. The enlightenment is happening again.

The world of equal opportunity:

As Thomas Friedman so aptly coins it, the world is flat. This phrase is not a simple provocation, but rather emphasizes the concept of equitability among all of the world’s people. Concisely, anyone with a decent computer and an internet connection faces no uphill battle in empowering himself or herself into the new, technologically-based world economy. Opportunity is roughly equal and therefore, everyone can compete on a new, more level playing field. Case in point: because technology has bridged geographies and economic pressure has destroyed the nation’s socialist protectionist measures, a reasonably educated Indian man or woman can now score a job at one of the nation’s several information technology firms. As work and money pour into these firms from corporations based in America or Europe, these new workers appear on the same payroll as the corporations’ full-time workers and thus, the consultants have reached equality with the company men. This case is not limited to India. Because of changing economics, the ever-broadening reach of the internet, and an abundance of new jobs with various firms across the entire spectrum of technology, no longer do economic or technological barriers stand in the way of self-empowerment. Anyone with initiative can grow.

The flat world is also a statement to the change that technology has created in modes of cooperation; the decrease in height of towering pyramids of vertical collaboration exclusively within a single corporation in favor of consulting, resource-sharing, cross licensing, and other forms of more level, horizontal collaboration among corporations. Where fifteen years ago, IBM and Microsoft created software and hardware that would work only on their proprietary operating, hardware, and network systems, the same two corporations today agree to common protocols in processor architecture, input and output devices, and internet services in a sort of horizontal collaboration. They consult with the same research institutions to develop the common computing technology platforms, outsource research and development to the same companies, and openly share their intellectual property to keep their technologies in compliance with one another. The result of this flattened cooperation: an internet that we can all use, and an ideal, universally-compatible computing platform that boosts both of their sales and the world economy at large. The benefits of their collaboration extend to all corners of the flattened, networked world. For example; Infosys and Wipro, two of India’s largest information technology contracting companies, sell their research and development services on demand to multinational giants such as the aforementioned on a flexible basis, thus augmenting their workforce in the most efficient manner to accelerate technological development as a whole. Figuratively and literally, companies have left the heights and disparities of their skyscrapers for the level rooftops of the suburban office parks.

The shift from disparity to parity between individuals and companies:

As I talk about the shift from disparity to parity, I will also shift to a more personal tone, specifically because this is one area of globalization that has greatly affected my life. So, I will speak with example. On February 7^th, 2009, I purchased a Canon digital rebel XS DSLR camera from a website based in the Midwest. I also purchased on that day an Acer Aspire One netbook from another website based in New York. I paid standard, UPS 5-day shipping rates and waited. I expected my purchases to arrive the next Friday, but by Tuesday, February 10^th of the following week both of my purchases arrived at my doorstep at approximately the same time. I unboxed my new technologies with a palpitating heart and within the hour set up my own newsroom. I had acquired within the span of just three days a laptop from which I could post my writings and photos to the blogosphere, and a digital SLR camera rivaling those of professional photographers. I was now an amateur equipped with a camera to produce great pictures, a PC to edit those pictures, a photo printer to develop those pictures, an ultraportable laptop that would serve as my connection to the web wherever I went, and a blog from which any of my friends and the general public could see the media I created. Essentially, within a weekend I had gone global.

I speak just as an amateur; however, several people like me have managed not only full-time jobs in research and development, but also side jobs in media creation and equipped with new technologies, they are able to compress all of the functions of a photographic company, from the photographers, to the colorists and printing technicians into an affordable desktop solution. Similarly, across industries, new advances in technology - be it chemical, artistic, acoustic, or physical - have equipped the educated man with the tools to compress a full-time enterprise, complete with overhead, employment costs, and astronomic maintenance into a hobbyist’s afternoon.

This phenomenon in which a single person with the right tools can perform the functions of five or ten un-equipped workers has created both hobbyist celebrities and serious full-time consultants. Need a postdoc in chemical engineering for your latest product, but don’t have enough money to hire him or her full time? No problem, just pull a consultant from the internet. Because, equipped with the new tools, a single consultant can amass enough capital necessary to create a one-man corporation.

Health insurance: the bane of horizontal collaboration.

The above scenarios seem ideal for the future’s, healthy capitalist society but sadly stretch beyond today’s reality. Today, vertical collaboration still rules the economic playing field and pressures individual consulting to the brink of economic inefficiency. At the center of that collaboration is health insurance. Today, people have the freedom of purchasing health insurance independent of their employer – however this insurance is often more expensive and has scant benefits. On the other hand, insurance for those workers employed at businesses with five-hundred people or more tend to get great benefits with no more cost than a nominal co-pay at the corner pharmacy. Actuaries seem not to have developed new formulas and systems for risk management because today’s insurance is stuck in decades past.

Insurance, its brokerage, and its various esoteric and sometimes byzantine workings give a great window into the fundamental principle behind vertical collaboration: economic clout. To a consumer, General Electric makes the light bulbs, power meters, and various other components in household electronics. To a shareholder, GE creates global value by negotiating advantageous political changes in Washington and Beijing, and by negotiating sales of turbines with Boeing, Georgia Power, and Reliance Energy ltd. To stockbrokers, GE flutters the value of the dollar in Wall street and floats the world economy. However, to an insurance provider, GE is a calculated risk. GE customers buy their products, GE shareholders buy their enterprises, but insurance companies buy their people. Simply put, GE is both an economic flywheel, and a great labor pool in need of insurance.

Inevitably, the fight between insurance companies for various shares of their workforce is vicious. GE is an enormous company with huge capital and can thus negotiate among various insurance companies to drive benefits up and drive policy costs down. The insurance companies battle and bid against GE’s economic clout in a sort of flustered financial dance, and the least of their worries is the self-employed consultant whose economic value is but a drop in the bucket. Thus, the system is stacked in favor of companies who vertically collaborate and thus accumulate risk for insurance companies, and then use their economic might to bully negotiations in their favor. In this system of economic hardball, the individual consultant, albeit a more efficient economic entity than an underworked full-time employee, loses out. Benefits trickle to a company’s loyal workers, and the horizontal collaboration that is the flat world loses as a whole.

Globalization and cultural exportation

Today, America is a country with a growing fascination for Japanese videogames and television series, Korean technology, Bollywood films, and Chinese food – no, not the 1950’s era Americanized chow mein – I mean real, ethnic Chinese cuisine. Essentially, not only has our American culture radiated along fiber optic cables, their cultures have returned the connection. To illustrate my point, today, a new generation of web-enabled American citizens can tour the forbidden palace at Beijing, traverse the entirety of the Great Wall of China, and located an upscale restaurant with authentic Chinese cuisine – all from the touch screens of their iphones within the time trappings of a lunch hour. Illustration aside, we have opened ourselves to a whole new form of global exploration through Google and YouTube. We Americans have imported the world’s cultures, or rather; the countries of the world have exported their cultures to us.

Exposition to new media goes far beyond realm of novelty. When any geographic location joins a global network with services increasingly financed by advertisements for consumer goods, and when the location’s people decide to integrate into the global economy, they are bombarded with liberal, global values created by global advertising campaigns. The resulting cultural shifts can be radical. Example: when I visited India in 1999, few of my acquaintances had a household computer, let alone an internet connection, and even fewer had cars of their own. Hand-drawn billboard spreads advertised dishwashing soap, Bourn vita (a British version of ovaltine), and little else. When I returned in 2006, most youth carried cell phones; most families had at least one computer; and the hand-drawn Bourn vita spread of seven years ago was covered by photoshopped spread of a semi-nude woman of Indian ethnicity and a slogan above her that proclaimed “every woman should be a s** symbol” to the chagrin of the many elderly who happened to walk under her teasing gaze. Not only had India upgraded its technology, but it had also absorbed a western promiscuity to the extent that it internalized it into its own cover girl. Mission accomplished, culture exported. This billboard, in conjunction with easy internet access to websites with objectionable content and other forms of media have changed the moral values of many Indian youth. In 1999, a girlfriend was a scandal and a dishonor to the family, but in 2006 she became a reluctant inevitability. In parallel, in 1999 youth deferred to their elders on pain of a beating, but in 2006, parents deferred to their youth in resignation. With technology comes culture, and culture is no mere novelty, it is morality.

Such a jarring moral shift carries with it great ramifications. In the middle east, volatile anti-American sentiments combined with the shock of cultural shift have triggered radical resurgence of an old, more conservative morality which in turn has also triggered terrorist activity, specifically suicide bombings, and overall regional instability. The reason is simple: shell-shocked when their mosques are shadowed by western debauchery, terrorists channel their resulting loathing into a call for a guerrilla attempt at holy war. The political consequences speak for themselves.

The new empires; how multinational corporations connect the globe:

The sun never sets on Microsoft, UPS, and Wal-mart, and all have lobbyists that speak softly and carry a large stick with economic mass and therefore political clout. These companies use technological innovations such as workflow software, outsourcing, off shoring, and supply-chaining to run product development, creation, and shipping twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. These multinational financial behemoths never sleep but instead bridge nations and continents as they aggregate the efforts of full time workers and outside consultants alike to create new consumable and durable goods, consumer and industrial technologies, and web 2.0 as we know it. They also lobby to knock down immigration quotas, protectionist measures, regional political instability, tariffs, and all other economic barriers that keep them out of a country’s potential workforce. They are the pastors of a forced marriage between the world’s developed and developing countries and they unite the world’s people under a single global economy – ergo they globalize the world. It seems that only fifty years after the British Empire disintegrated, a new empire – one of unarmed enterprise - has supplanted its reign.

The paradigm shift from total war to total globalization:

In 1947 both the United states and the Soviet Union took sides in the puppetry that was the Chinese civil war. The US poured its full surplus of tanks, artillery, and aircraft into Chiang-Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang army, and simultaneously, the USSR equipped Mao Zedong’s communists with a vast array of confiscated Japanese armaments. The resulting theatre featured a déjà vu of world war two – the just use of American-built tanks against the evils of the Japanese land rovers. However, underneath these metal-plated facades was a whole new mode of operation. American capitalism faced Soviet Communism, and with nuclear warheads poising vast populations of the globe at death, both governments staged their tensions under guise of civil wars that erupted sporadically across the world.

Post 1947, the two superpowers began to practice a new form of imperialism, a form based not on securing trade and creating economic dependencies, but rather, a form based on using political machinations to secure alliances and create economic and military affinities that tended either towards communism backed by Mig-23s or capitalism backed by F-4 phantoms. At home, this new form of “political engineering” either encouraged or forced through educational bias a pro US or pro Soviet culture, respectively. Abroad, this political engineering empowered central African and Asian dictators, and radical Muslims in the middle east, with arms and the power to abuse them – all in the complementing crusades for or against communism. Paramount though, was technological change, for during this time period, both the US and Soviet governments geared their nations into a state of total war by motivating the creation of new technologies - from satellites, to nuclear weapons, to Velcro - for military purpose.

The baby boomers of the fifties no longer feared the redskins that blocked their predecessors western expansion one century past (pardon the racial term), instead they feared the reds who blocked capitalism’s inevitable expansion across the world. Schoolchildren of the time period participated in their great society, and at frequent punctuated intervals, cowered under their desks in nuclear explosion drills, after which, they returned to their great society. The exercise had no logical backing – the children would be irradiated whether or not they assumed fetal position in face of a truly nonexistent threat – and that was the point, the carefully crafted exercise used fear of a supposedly-legitimate danger to frighten society into the guidance of a benevolent government.

And then there was sputnik. When the Russian orb pulsed a radio wave across the earth in 1958, president Eisenhower – a man adept at “political engineering” – used the resulting societal pandemonium to prompt the creation of a new core of scientists who would spearhead government efforts to create new technologies to guard both the citizens of the United States, and the rest of the world from the evils of communism. Essentially, he renewed the country into a state of total war.

In the years during and shortly after the space race, science fiction romanticized science fact and created a society in which engineering – particularly electric and aeronautical engineering – was a job with fierce competition. Eisenhower, and subsequently Kennedy had motivated Americans to space, and Reagan renewed his formers’ political engineering to once again spend massive amounts of domestic and foreign currency on arms production. However, between these presidents was a visionary. His name was Richard Nixon.

We often know the man better for the Watergate scandal and his very un-presidential ethic than for his prophecy: that if he initiated capitalist economics in China, then the country would one day transform to a capitalist state, no weaponry required. He was right. After he negotiated US-Chinese ties in Beijing, China narrowly opened its borders to off shored US factories and geared its middle class towards a sound education in math and science. When the Soviets collapsed in 1989 and communism died, many of these newly-trained Chinese scientists competed not for jobs in their country’s arsenal, but in the growing private sector created by globalization. Despite Reaganomics, a similar shift occurred in the United states when former NASA engineers enterprised their own innovations and broke from the grips of the propaganda of total war. Without popular support or rather, popular fear, the political engineering of the cold war faded away. Propaganda was dead, but those engineers who had vivified the machine still lived, and they geared their potential into creating the global economy that we have today.

Shift to today. The engineers and prospective engineers of year 2009 run on adrenaline and a new form of propaganda: Harvard. Only the top one-thousand in the nation make it, and only the top one-million compete. For the other 999,000 growing American engineers, their entrance into the global economy promises ever-faster growth and prosperity in a plethora of budding industries. Competition in China, Japan, and India is just as intense. Today’s youth have been imbibed with a drive to enterprise, a compulsion to achieve and a penchant for competition. Accolades speak for the victor and stellar academic and extracurricular activity is the new golden calf. Engineers already employed are seeing decreasing vacation time and increasing workdays and workweeks because of the accelerating pace of globalization. When the corporation outsources, they must work harder to preserve their jobs, and when the corporation uses global connection to establish as 24-7-365 vitality, they must work longer and smarter to keep pace. Delusion or dedication, the new generation has entered the frenzy of total globalization. Everyone competes harder to keep pace with the changing economic paradigm.

Globalization, Technology, and the nature of warfare:

Media today tends to exaggerate the scale and ramifications of middle-eastern and African conflicts; because according to CNN and other large news networks, Muslim Jihadists are the bane of world peace and Osama Bin Laden is the demon lurking behind every patriot’s barbecue pit. Surprisingly however, Osama Bin Laden is not in Joe-the-Republican’s backyard, but is instead suffering dialysis in an unknown location in Afghanistan. Compared to the bloodbaths of world war one and world war two, the casualties in the Iraq war number around four-thousand, not four-million. Furthermore, since the USSR collapsed into the disarmed Russia of today, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il is under the pressure of the entire capitalist world to disarm his nuclear program, and Mamoud Ahmedinejad is a delusional demagogue without support. (Media also forgets to mention the prevalence of Microsoft and UPS in a very conservative Iran.) China has largely dropped the oppression of its poorer citizens, and rising standards of living have put to rest the radical demands of most economic reformists’ agendas. A new middle class enjoys a general satisfaction across all developing nations, and thus only the embers of past large scale conflicts remain.

This olive branch and growing peace between nations comes from the courtesy of Microsoft corporation, no purchase of Windows Vista required. Granted, warfare is a condition of humanity, but because multinational corporations encourage post-communist nations towards political stability and capitalism (China is a great example), the societies of these nations enjoy better living conditions, greater growth opportunity, and thus feel no compulsion to upset the new power balance.

This is not to prophecy the obsolescence of warfare – as long as humans exist there will be conflict. Conflict, however is not war. The former tends to exacerbate into the latter as wounds between people turn gangrenous and violent, and if we humans can only find an “economic and social” penicillin, we can prevent such deadly, viral militarism. Today we seem to have chanced upon it.

Often, a wound between people occurs from a scarcity of resources – not simply tangible resources, but also the pieces of the human experience on Maslow’s pyramid. Whenever people do not have food, water, shelter, safety, or a right to self expression, wounds, conflicts eventually result. Today, we use waning militarism and diplomacy to rupture and suture these wounds in various places, causing collateral damage and nipping open future wounds. Today, despite such political maneuvers, we leave open resentments that fester into delusional cries for Jihad. With technology, we might just change that.

Tomorrow, we may use technology to engineer new high-yield grains and tap deep-water wells to prevent food and water riots. Tomorrow, we may use the one-laptop-per-child to allow children an education that will immunize them from delusional militant beliefs and will instead prepare them for success and security in the new global world. Tomorrow, multinational corporations may sponsor post-secondary education in war-torn regions such as Palestine and Jordan, Pakistan and Baluchistan and then employ these educated workers before various government agencies can “politically engineer” their relatively small conflicts into “wars on terror.” Tomorrow, we may use new technologies to empower disenfranchised people to creation before warlords can disempower them to meaningless fighting and suicide bombings.

All of this is to say that conflicts do and will exist, but with technology and a greater influence by global corporations and NGOs, rather than by domineering governments, we may be able to find creative, rather than destructive solutions to current and future problems.

Not your father’s dollar – how we need to respond to Globalization:

There is a certain danger that lurks behind Joe-the-republican’s barbecue pit – not Osama Bin Laden, not Al Qaeda – but rather a capitalist reality. Gone are the decades of guaranteed employment and Chevy suburbans – they have been replaced by a post Y2K decade of global competition and Honda pilots. In times of yore, America was the world. Today, the world is the world.

In the late 1980s, IBM suffered a decline in sales. It had enormous R&D capabilities and an equally hungry market but much of its workforce lacked a drive to innovate. Because of its guarantee of lifetime employment IBM employees subscribed to a culture of complacency. So, in 1989, the executives changed the paradigm. IBM supplanted lifetime employment with a new instrument of lifetime employability. Ergo IBM would insure a worker’s job – so long as that worker continued to channel his or her talent into the company. IBM proved a microcosm for the world – in laymen’s terms – we’re no longer alone.

Because Americans compete for the same jobs as foreigners, and because we buy goods and services with currencies linked to the value of multinational juggernauts, we can no longer use protectionist measures to “keep jobs in America.” For example, when the 2005 republican congress constricted visas for foreign workers to immigrate to the states, technology giant Intel simply exported its growing operations to Russia. Politicians can prevent people from immigrating into the US but cannot prevent jobs from emigrating from the country. Therefore “American jobs for Americans” became “Russian jobs for Russians” because Microsoft, Intel, GE and other companies are no longer dependencies of the American economy and American workforce. They are instead the arbiters of the global economy and global workforce.

The globe has given us an economic ultimatum: compete on the flattened playing field or lose our standard of living. However, it seems that not all of us have responded to the message. Until President Obama’s resolution to improve US education in 2009, several members of the republican-dominated congress have used September 11^th and “terrorist threats” to divert the focus from this changing economy to the “war on terror.” And so trillions of taxpayer dollars have funneled into this sideshow while the rest of the globe accelerates their youth into the new world of opportunity.

In the literal and figurative sense, our dollar is not our fathers’ dollar. George Washington is no longer backed by gold and is less backed by corporations who have extended their stocks to foreign stock markets, and value their goods as much in the RNB and rupee as they do the dollar. We have come face-to-face with the law of supply and demand for now, our currency is only worth our buying power – it is only worth what we supply to the world, and what we can in turn, demand from it. Where our fathers’ could trust in the Government to regulate their cash, we can only trust ourselves.

Such a radical shift warrants an equal shift in education and culture. As Thomas Friedman sums; “In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears, in America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. And that is our problem.” So he asserts that the America of today, like the IBM of the 1980s has grown into a culture of complacency rather than one of innovation. A majority of kids today point to sports figures or pop stars rather than scientists. The United states’ decentralized educational model bound only by no-child-left- behind fails to keep pace with the centralized educational system of China and Japan. And finally, independent of economic environment, because America’s kids have grown up as consumers of cheap technology, rather than its creators, many do not see the necessity of a scientific knowledge. The statistics follow: today, the pool of prospective engineers is shrinking rather than growing, and a certain syndrome has affected many American schools such that a majority of 8^th graders lag behind their foreign peers in math and science. Many of America’s kids may have long eschewed the quintessential nerd or techie, but if we want to remain at the top of the world economy when the nerds take over, we must dawn our helicopter caps and become those conquerors.

In Conclusion:

Globalization is an economic shift akin to the industrial revolution due to its massive political, economic, and social effects and implications. It is at once equitability but not equality, employability, but not employment, and beyond the novelties of cultural exportation and technological growth lies an ultimatum: either we adapt to the new global economy or we sink beneath it. In this new global platform, the doors of free enterprise are open to us, but we must take the effort to keep on moving forward.