Globalization and “Decivilization”

-- Ileana Writes

Our modern economy is based on efficiency, specialization, and globalization. Economists define efficiency as “the absence of waste when an economy wastes none of its available resources and produces the maximum amount of output that its technology permits.”

Globalization has driven the modern economy of the last four decades

When a country leans heavily on specialization, it devotes resources to only a small proportion of the world’s productive activities. How does the country satisfy its other needs? Enter globalization.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines globalization as: “the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.”

Manufacturing, production, and supply chains in the U.S. were moved to China, Vietnam, and Mexico because of cheap labor and less regulations.

Economists argued in textbooks that everybody is better off in globalization, but that is not true, ask the Rust Belt workers who lost their jobs in the quest for globalization. Ask engineers and other professionals in the U.S. who had to train their replacements from India after they were fired from their jobs.

Globalization has driven the modern economy of the last four decades. We no longer manufacture goods that are essential to the existence of our domestic market. It was painfully clear when, during the Covid-19 pandemic, there were severe shortages of goods resulting from interrupted supply chains coming from China and other countries who manufactured goods that we no longer produce in our own country because we were following the globalization’s economies of scale and cheap labor abroad.

Globalization has provided advances in the standard of living, infrastructure, in health care, education, and population growth in less developed countries.

In the case of a pandemic, a natural disaster, and war, countries will be forced to look at ways to produce domestically what their needs are.

We need food, medicine, clean water, gasoline, natural gas, and electricity

In the developed world, the population no longer knows how to grow a garden, how to plant a sufficient crop to feed everyone, how to preserve their own food, sew, make necessary repairs in the home, hunt, or fish. In our economy, goods are discarded and replaced, seldom repaired.

In the absence of other specialized countries providing what we need daily, “Decivilization” will follow. “Decivilization” as defined by Peter Zeihan is “a cascade of reinforcing breakdowns that do not simply damage, but destroy, the bedrock of what makes the modern world function.” With so many skills that we have lost, it is easy to see how such breakdowns can occur in a large economy.

We cannot eat technology, gadgets, or other things that drive our modern lives. We need food, medicine, clean water, gasoline, natural gas, and electricity.

We have become incompetent at tasks that are necessary for survival. We saw what happened to Zimbabwe when the population was forced to survive on subsistence farming.

Venezuela imported two-thirds of its necessary food before the economy collapsed and the population was forced to eat animals from the zoo. Their oil production crashed so much that farmers did not have enough fuel to plant crops. It was “the worst famine in the history of the Western Hemisphere.” (Peter Zeihan, Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, 2022, p. 64)

Moving cheap labor into Europe and the U.S., disguised as migration, may seem as a fix, but most of these economic migrants become welfare burdens to the taxpaying population

The more recent developments in Italy showed how dependent the southern population was on the delivery of food trucked from other parts of the country. Their grocery stores were empty for weeks as the truckers went on strike on Italy’s highways to protest the soaring prices of Diesel. Europe’s fuel prices have always been higher than in the U.S., but the wars in Ukraine and Iran have driven prices even higher.

The United States is sufficiently diverse in resources that it can make the economy work by being inventive. But most countries could be severely impacted if the flow of goods and services obtained globally is interrupted. In such a case, the political and economic map of the world will change. The urban areas will suffer the most.

Another variable that can also interfere with the global flow of goods and services between countries and continents is a natural disaster on an unprecedented scale, i.e., mega volcanic eruption, mega tsunami, earthquakes, solar flares.

The supply and demand in a globalized economy will be impacted if development slows due to the lower birth rate which in western nations is already below replacement value.

Moving cheap labor into Europe and the U.S., disguised as migration, may seem as a fix, but most of these economic migrants become welfare burdens to the taxpaying population.

Shortages of goods and services globally will force populations to take care of the needs of their own countries, the global flow of goods will stagnate, and the bedrock of our civilization will unravel.