Everything You Thought About Free Trade Is Wrong
In his book Crack-Up Capitalism, an historian looks at special economic zones from Dubai to Shenzhen to question the conventional view of globalization.
Quinn Slobodian in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Photographer: Kayana Szymczak for Bloomberg Markets
The standard story of globalization taught in business schools and assumed in boardrooms hails the success of free trade: It erased borders and freed capital, ushering in three decades of unprecedented prosperity that lifted billions of people out of poverty. Thomas Friedman’s 2005 bestseller, The World Is Flat, described a technology-enabled leveling of the economic playing field where all countries could compete.
Ever since, researchers from a variety of fields have challenged that optimistic narrative. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist, documented how globalization exacerbates inequality. Ha-Joon Chang, a development economist and adviser to the World Bank, found that so-called free trade actually required a lot of state intervention. University of California at Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown examined how globalization-related anxiety led to the construction of physical barriers—most recently, the extension of the wall between the US and Mexico—that stymie trade and immigration.