m
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54
FOREIGN POLICY
r
Will
Globalization
Make You
a
.
Thanks to globalization, human beingsare wealthier andfreer than at any time
during our long climbfrom the top of the evolutionaryfood chain to the hghest
rung of the corporate ladder. But are we happier ? Put down that cellphone, gnore
that incominge-mail, and considerthe evidence. By Robert Wright
F
or all the discord over globalization,
virtually everyone agrees on two of
its properties. First, globalization is
very hard to stop. Ever since card-carrying progressive William Greider titled his 1997
book One World, Ready or Not, even the left has
increasingly viewed globalization as something to be
tamed, not killed. Second, globalization makes the
w o r l d - - o n balance, at least--more prosperous.
The critique of globalization isn't that it fails to
churn out ever more stuff, but that churning out
more stuff has lots of drawbacks, especially given
the way the stuff gets distributed.
These two properties are related: Globalization is
almost unstoppable precisely because it is driven by
lots of people hellbent on increasing their prosperity.
Nike stockholders want to boost profits by holding
down production costs, which means manufacturing
overseas. Indonesian workers want to elevate their
income by moving from farm fields to Nike factories.
Robert Wright is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Moral Animal (New York:
Vintage Books, 1995) and Nonzero: The Logic of Humman
an
Destroy (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000).
Nike customers want, well, they want a shoe that has
not just the generic "Air Sole" (old hat) but a "Tuned
Air unit in the heel and Zoom Air in the forefoot"-not to mention "Optimal Motion flex grooves."
As all these people try to upgrade their standard
of living, the invisible hand obliges by enmeshing
them in an ever larger, ever denser web of investment
and production. Human nature itself--the deep desire
to amass resources, to keep up with the Joneses,
and, if possible, to leave them in the dust--drives the
engine that is transforming the world.
Unfortunately, human nature has a spotty record
in the driver's seat. The one realm where even a
cynic might think human nature excels--helping
people selfishly pursue their own well-being--is an
area of frequent failure. Humanity is famous for pursuing things, such as power and riches, that don't
bring lasting happiness. Are those Nike stockholders
really happier behind the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz
s u v than they would be driving a Hyundai Accent?
Might some Indonesian factory workers be better off
if they had never left the farm and the time-tested
folkways that govern life there? Couldn't a weekend
athlete find enduring contentment even without
Optimal Motion flex grooves?
SEPTIMBLR OCTOB ER 2000 5 5
Will GlobalizaUon Make You Happy?
]
This question--Does globalization bring happiness?--is the $64,000 question. Although it underlies
much of the globalization debate and is sometimes
tossed out rhetorically, it is seldom seriously addressed,
perhaps because of its presumed elusiveness. But psychologistsactuallyhave amassed a lot of data about what
does and doesn't make people happy. This data doesn't
come just from undergraduate volunteers on U.S. campuses: Severalmassive cross-cultural surveys have been
completed over the past two decades. And it is becoming clearer which economicand political circumstances
lead people to feel satisfied with their lot in life.
When you combine this data with what we know
about globalization's economic and political effects,
it becomes possible to take a preliminary shot at the
big question: Is globalization good or bad? If you
were God (and a utilitarian), would you adopt a
hands-off policy, leaving transnational capitalism
on autopilot, or would you intervene? And what
form might intervention take? How, if at all, should
globalization be governed? Psychology's happiness
database doesn't answer these questions, but it helps
us ponder them. In the process, it also helps overturn
some conventional wisdom about who benefits and
who suffers under globalization's advance.
THE GLOBAL PURSUIT
OF H A P P I N E S S
Does money bring happiness? Psychologistshave gone
to dozens of nations, rich and poor, and asked people
how satisfied they are with their lives. The upshot is
that, while poor nations seem to breed unhappiness,
very rich nations don't necessarily breed happiness.
There is, on the one hand, a clear connection between
a nation's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and
the average happiness of its citizens. But the strength
of that connection--in most studies, at least--comes
almost entirely from nations in the bottom three
fourths of the income scale. Once your nation attains
a fairly comfortable standard of living, more income
brings little, if any, additional happiness. In the United
States between 1975 and 1995, real per capita GDP
grew by 43 percent, but the average happiness of
Americans didn't budge.
The point where more wealth ceases to imply more
happiness is around $10,000 per capita annually-roughly where Greece, Portugal, and South Korea are
now. Above that point, additional dollars don't seem
to cheer up nations, and national differences in happiness hinge on the intangibles of culture. The Irish are
appreciably happier than the Germans, the Japanese,
56 FOREIGN
POLICY
and the British, though less wealthy than all of them.
And Scandinavia's extraordinary happiness (Who
would have guessed?) isn't traceable to any economic
edge over other developed countries. (One possible
explanation: Nations with high levels of trust tend to
be happier, and Scandinavians,according to surveys, are
inordinately trusting.)
This fact alone--that making poor nations less
poor seems to raise the level of happiness, but making
rich nations richer doesn't--is worth contemplating in
light of globalization. Before contemplating it, we
have to ask whether this fact is really as methodologically sturdy as it sounds.
First, all these studies rely on self-reported sarisfaction with life. You could debate for weeks whether
that is a reliable index of true happiness without
exhausting all related psychological, sociological,
and epistemological conundrums. Is there any other
kind of evidence that lends credence to these reports?
Yes. Consider, for example, the extraordinary
gloom pervading the former Soviet bloc. In 1994,
when the World Values Study Group published a
ranking of 41 nations' self-reported "life satisfaction," the least satisfied nations were, in order: Bulgaria, Russia, Belarus, Latvia, Romania, Estonia,
Lithuania, and Hungary. But couldn't this just be a
Communist-induced measurement error? Could
decades of official denunciations of selfishness have
discouraged people from admitting to being happy?
As it happens, psychologists Martin Seligman
and Gabriele Oettingen shed light on this question
during the 1980s. They observed West and East
Berliners as they went about their everyday lives.
West Berliners smiled and laughed more often than
East Berliners and had more upright and open postures. Clearly, East Germans didn't suffer merely
from a culturally ingrained reluctance to admit their
gaiety to pollsters. What's more, studies in various
nations have shown that self-reported happiness correlates well not just with this objectively observed
demeanor, but with the evaluations of friends and relatives and with survey questions that get at happiness
more obliquely (for example, by determining how
many pleasant memories a person can summon).
The second big methodological question is whether
economic output masks other variables that are the real
source of happiness. Are the keys to happiness really
just things that money can buy--more food, cleaner
drinking water, better healthcare, more comfortable
housing? As William Easterly of the World Bank
showed in a study published last year, richer nations,
compared to poor ones, tend to have "more democracy,
less corruption.., more rule of law, and higher bureauthe problem. As economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew
cratic quality.., more ciwl liberties, less abuse of human
Warner showed years ago, and as other economists
rights." Indeed, if you just forget about G D P and plot
have since confirmed, developing nations with the most
national happiness levels against various indexes of
open economies--the nations most thoroughly plugged
freedom, you'll see a clear relationship. Ed Diener, one
into the global market system--grow the fastest. The
of psychology's leading happiness researchers, notes that
most stubbornly poor nations, it seems, are so poor
it will take further, more focused study to separate the
because they are underglobalized. This theory helps
effect of wealth from the effect of
human rights and democracy. The
correlation between economic and
political variables is so strong, and the
Once your nation attains a fairly comfortable
number of data points so small, that
statistically disentangling the influstandard of living, more income brings little,
ences isn't yet possible.
Then again, the very strength
if any, additional happiness.
of this correlation may render the
question moot. If, indeed, economic
development not only improves diet, medicine, and
explain why East and Southeast Asia, with their embrace
of global markets, have massively reduced poverty,
shelter, but also goes hand in hand with more
while sub-Saharan Africa, featuring more statist
democracy and human rights, then one way or
another, economic development will probably make
economies and an unappetizing political environment
people in poor nauons happier. And judging by
for foreign investment, has been less successful.
recent anecdotal evidence from Mexico, South
Some would claim that the rising level of prosperity
Korea, and Taiwan, economic development does
among the more open developing nations is misleading because their poorer citizens are being left behind.
indeed improve political life. (Although, as Easterly
Certainly, nations sometimes do grow more economnotes, the end of the Cold War has also seen democically stratified as they get richer. But notwithstanding
racy come to poorer nations.)
the confident assertions of Mazur and Wallach,
economists have found no general tendency for ecoTHE RICH (AND THE POOR)
nomic growth to exacerbate income inequality. And
GET RICHER
this past spring, World Bank economists David Dollar
and Aart Kraay released a study that looked not just
The potential for prosperity--one way or another--to
at the effects of economic growth but specifically at
markedly increase the happiness of poor nations may
seem to cast the current era m an ironic light. After all, the impact of globalization. Tracking nations with
according to one common view, globalization showers
the most open, most globalized economies over the
last several decades, they found that, as national
prosperity on rich nations, often at the expense of
income grew, the fraction of the economic pie going
poor nations. Union leader Jay Mazur has written that
to the bottom fifth of the income scale didn't shrink.
"globahzation has dramatically increased inequality
between and within nations," and Lori Wallach, the oft- The rising tide indeed seemed to lift all boats.
There is one final reason that plaints about growquoted antiglobalization activist, concurs. Even Laura
ing income inequality among nations are misleading.
D'Andrea Tyson, former national economic adviser
Nations differ in size, and those stubbornly poor,
to President Bill Clinton, wrote recently that "as globunderglobalized nations that account for the growing
ahzation has intensified, the gap between per capita
incomes in rich and poor countries has widened."
gap between rich and poor nations tend to be small,
These observations are misleading at best. First, m
while some of the poor nations that are getting richer
(such as China) are quite large. If you look at the
absolute terms, poor nations have become less poor.
world as a utilitarian God would--just ignore politEven if some of them have shown alarming stagnation,
the economic output of the average poor nation has
ical boundaries and focus on the total number of
grown in recent decades. Of court, Mazur and Wallach souls--the picture looks brighter. Bernard Wasow of
and Tyson are talking about relative income--and it's
the Century Foundation has calculated that between
true that the gap between the richest and poorest nations
1965 and 1997, the poorest 10 percent of the world's
has grown. But it's hard to argue that globalization is population increased its share of world income from
S~r',L.~.:R IOc,o.r.. 2000 57
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[
Will Globalization Make You Happy?
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0.3 percent to 0.5 percent. Of course, 0.5
percent seems pathetically low--especially
given that the richest 10 percent meanwhile expanded its share from 50.6 percent
to 59.6 percent. Still, the fact remains that
in 1965 the average income of the top 10
percent was 160 times the average income
of the bottom 10 percent, and by 1997
that ratio had fallen to 127 times. And
that calculation includes those poor nations
with closed, underglobalized economies.
To put the progress against poverty in
slightly less abstract terms, according to a
report issued in June by a squadron of
multilateral agencies--the United Nations,
the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Shoppingsprees may not lift her spirits...
and the International Monetary Fund-the number of people who live on less than a dollar a
alization, at least to judge by its effect on income and
day dropped by 100 million between 1990 and 1998.
the effect of income on happiness, is good for the
The number remains astoundingly high--1.2 billion-poor and, if anything, bad for the rich.
but bear in mind that the drop came even as the population of poor nations grew by hundreds of millions.
F A S T E R , J O H N Q. P U B L I C - In short, the rule of thumb for the world's poor
CONSUME! CONSUME! CONSUME!
people seems to be that they're getting less poor in
absolute terms and, by some measures, less poor
It makes you wonder: Why do the rich work so hard
in relative terms. And the more globalized that
at getting richer if it isn't making them any happier and
poor nations become, the better their people do in
is making a few of them crazier? In a sense, their behavboth absolute and relative terms.
ior is not as irrational as it sounds. Understanding this
If you put these findings together with the hapfact is the first step to fathoming the paradoxical engine
piness data, the implication is a bit perverse. A
that drives globalization. It is also the first step to decidc o m m o n stereotype of globalization is that it's
ing whether globalization, given its manifest benefits to
something done by the rich, for the rich, and to the
the pooh should simply be left on autopilot.
poor. It's certainly true that the world's affluent
Within nations, as among them, there is a link
peoples make the big decisions about how capital
between income and happiness. The link is not terriis deployed and make lots of money off globalizably strong--and certainly not as strong as we make
tion. Yet, in terms of psychological payoff in terms
ourselves believe. Most if not all of the thrill of a pay
of actual happiness--the benefits of globalization
raise we worked hard for wears off quickly, leaving
would seem to go overwhelmingly to the world's
us hungry for more. What's more, as with national
lower classes, to nations with a per capita annual
happiness, there is a per capita income level beyond
income under $10,000. Only at that level of national
which more money brings declining utilitarian bang
income does money reliably bring happiness.
per buck. (In the United States, the point is a bit shy
Indeed, richer nations not only fail to get happier
of $20,000.) Still, the bang per buck doesn't quite level
as national income grows; even as their average level
off to zero. Affluent Americans are a bit happier than
of happiness stays constant, the small fraction of the
their middle-class compatriots, and much happier
population suffering from serious psychopathology
than the poor. Of course, this link between money and
expands. More people become chronically depressed,
happiness could just mean that upbeat people are
and the suicide rate often rises.
more likely to make money than perennially sad peoThus, it appears that what is now a major chunk
ple. But almost no one who has studied the question
of conventional wisdom in some political circles--that
thinks that the causality works only in that direction.
globalization is good for the rich, bad for the p o o r - Making more money stands a good chance of making
is not just wrong, but wrong by 180 degrees. Globpeople at least somewhat happier.
58
FOREIGN POLICY
8
... but they will raise her income.
So if individual Americans get happier as they get
riche~;why doesn't the United States collectively get happier as it gets richer? The answer favored by some
psychologists and championed by the economist Robert
Frank in his book Luxury Fever is simple: Much of
what gratifies people about higher income is that it
boosts their relative standing in society.To the extent that
this is true--that our happiness comes from comparing
our station in life with that of other people--then within a society, one person's gain is another person's loss.
Consider the late Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who insisted that the faucets on his yacht
be made of solid gold, and that the yacht's bar stools be
covered with the ultrasoft foreskin of a whale's penis (I'm
not making this up). Let us stipulate, for thought-experiment purposes, that Onassis impressed people enough
to raise his social status, his serotonin level, and his sense
of well-being. To the extent that he succeeded, he lowered the relative social standing of rival shipping magnate and yachtsman Stavros Niarchos. (And, needless
to say, the whale's well-being suffered, too.) In Greek
society as a whole, there was no net utilitarian gain.
This theory makes sense in light of evolutionary
psychology. As Frank notes, the human mind was
designed by natural selection in the context of small
hunter-gatherer societies back when social status was
correlated with reproductive success. One's goal, in
Darwinian terms, was to be higher on the totem pole
than one's competitors--that is, one's neighbors. Of
course, there is only one top spot on the totem pole,
and one number two spot, and so on; social status is
a finite resource, and anyone's gain must come at
someone else's expense. The modern legacy of our
brains' having been built to play this game is that,
within the United States or Japan or France,
pursuing happiness through monetary gain
is essentially a zero-sum game. That's why
riches can elevate the level of happiness for
a given American while failing to do so for
the United States as a whole.
Within poor nations, by contrast, this
game is partly non-zero-sum. To be sure, the
link between individual income and individual happiness that is found in rich
nations also holds within poor nations--if
anything, it is stronger there. And no doubt
some of that happiness comes from oneupmanship. Still, because a poor nation's
growing G D P does bring markedly more
happiness, the game among citizens is not
entirely zero-sum. As people struggle to
raise their standard of living, they are attaining things--decent nutrition, healthcare--that raise
their happiness level without reducing anyone else's.
Moreover, these upwardly mobile citizens are moving
the nation as a whole :oward more human rights,
more political freedom, even more democracy--the
political ingredients of national happiness.
For that matter, the relationship between the poor
nations and the rich nations is non-zero-sum. Upper-middle-class Americans, in scrapping for income and status,
in working overtime to afford that forest-green Ford
Explorer, may be jostling for pieces of a more-or-less
finite happiness pie. But at least some of that car was
built in a developing country, so some of the dollars they
paid for it went to a place where money actually can buy
more national happiness. Net happiness is created by
U.S. status seeking--even if none of the happiness
winds up in the United States. A utilitarian God, indifferent to national boundaries, would be pleased.
Or would he (or she)? It is wonderful that globalization brings happiness by reducing poverty. But
reducing poverty isn't all that globalization does, and
income isn't the only ingredient of happiness. Globalization also affects the texture of life, sometimes
the very structure of life, and on these things much
of our happiness depends.
Bear in mind that those cross-national correlations between happiness and G D P tell us nothing
about the "real-time" effects of modernization. The
nations at the high-income, high-happiness end of the
spectrum are mostly nations--in North America and
Western Europe--that underwent the transition from
agrarian to industrial society long ago and have had
time to catch their breath. To be sure, it's auspicious
that more recent modernizers, such as South Korea and
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Will Globalization
Make
You Happy? ]
Taiwan, show pretty high levels of happiness, too.
Still, for all we know, the current pace of transition
may give many modernizing nations a degree of disorientation that neutralizes much of the happiness
brought by growing income.
The early 20th century American sociologist William
Ogburn had this type of problem in mind when he
coined the term "cultural lag." Cultural lag happens
and the beginning of the 20th, as young men and
women moved from farm to city and workplaces
became larger and more impersonal, there was a palpable sense of social crisis. The examples from Brazil
and India are reminiscent of the United States' turnof-the-century working-class slums, where rural
migrants, remote from their families, tried to scratch
out a living amid disease, corruption, and new forms
of temptation. Yet by World War II,
Americans had at least partly succeeded in weaving a new social
f a b r i c - - b u i l d i n g stable urban
Consultants and lawyers and corporate execs
neighborhoods and founding social
clubs and civic groups.
spread their time among so many nations that they
Still, today's developing nations
are
facing
this adjustment in fast foralmost cease to have a homeland.
ward: Some are starting out more
agrarian than the United States was in
when material culture changes so fast that immaterial
the late 19th century and are being asked to move not
culture (government, social norms, moral strictures)
just into the industrial age, but into the electronic
fills dangerously behind. Some of globalization's examage--an age that even "modem" nations are struggling
ples of cultural lag are vivid and much discussed. For
to cope with. In the United States, television has been
example, the pollution that envelops a Mexico City or a
famously blamed by political scientist Robert Putnam
Bangkok can race ahead of the government's capacity
(author of Bowling Alone) for helping to fray that
or will to solve the problem. Other aspects of "cultural
recently woven industrial-age social fabric and eroding
lag" are less tangible, but at least as important.
everything from civic participation to picnic attenTake family and friends. Strong and intimate social dance. (People who watch lots of TV, by the way, are
bonds are deeply conducive to happiness. In a U.S. surunusually unhappy, though that could be because
vey, respondents who could list at least five people with
unhappiness leads people to watch TV.)
whom they had discussed matters of personal signifOn paper, the newer electronic technologies-icance within the last six months were 60 percent
microcomputers, modems--might seem just what
more likely to say they felt "very happy" than people
the doctor ordered. Unlike TV, they are tools of
who could list none. People with close friends and kin
communication, even long-distance friendship. But
also handle stress, illness, and career setbacks better.
there are reasons to doubt that they will bring wideMoving from an agrarian to an industrial society spread bliss to any part of the world at any time soon.
can upset the social structures in which social bonds
One reason is that cybercafes were not part of the
are embedded, a fact now evident across the developing environment in which Homo sapiens evolved. We most
world. In Brazil, a worker in the "informal sector" gets
naturally get social gratification from face-to-face conup each day, takes a bus out to an industrial area,
tact, not from sentences on a computer screen. What's
more, we seem to have evolved in a context of small and
then starts walking back toward his slum, stopping
intimate communities that offered the chance for longat work sites along the way in hopes of landing a few
hours of labor. If he succeeds, he may spend the day
term social bonds; what we need isn't just "friends" in
among strangers; if he fails, he spends it alone. In
the sense of "acquaintances" or even "colleagues," but
India, journalist Robert Kaplan writes of "polluted,
actual friends. (To an evolutionary psychologist, it is no
grimy factory encampments" where tens of millions
surprise that U.S. soldiers placed in 12-person teams with
stable membership wind up mentally healthier and
of migrants, no longer tethered to the norms of the
rural village, are "assaulted by the temptations of the
happier about their jobs than soldiers assigned to large
pseudo-Western city--luxury cars, night clubs,
groups with fluid membership.) And information techgangs, pornographic movies."
nology, while offering the potential for intimate comOf course, the modernized nations underwent a
munication, often fails to deliver.
roughly comparable transition---and lived to tell about
Just look at all the names in your e-mail address
it. In the United States at the end of the 19th century
book. My, but you're well connected! But "well
~0
FOREIGN POI.ICY
connected" doesn't mean "deeply connected." It means
widely and shallowly connected. You communicate
with many people along narrow channels of common
interest, and you get to know few of them well. Of
course, different people use technology differently, and
your mileage may vary. But for many people, at least,
e-mail only sustains the trendmwhich David Riesman
described in his 1950 book The Lonely Crowd--away
from a solid grounding in kin and trusted friends and
toward the superficiality of broad and efficient social
networks. It is in the world described by Riesman that
rates of depression and suicide have grown.
Information technology also abets the much-noted
transience of the modern workplace. Deft communication makes it easier for companies to find temporary
workers, easier for slightly underpaid executives to
find their full market value at another finn--easier, in
general, for economic efficiency to trump social stability.
According to a study published by the consulting firm
McKinsey & Company, the number of companies the
average executive has worked for grew over the last
decade from three to five. And many people don't
work for companies in the traditional sense at all--they
just contract with them. The resulting "free-agent"
culture has made many people richer (especially
people at income levels where money doesn't make
you much happier anyway) by making their social
environment less solid.
On the cusp of globalization is the ultimate in
high-tech transience--the consultants and lawyers
and corporate execs who spread their time among so
many nations that they almost cease to have a homeland. This is the class dubbed "the cosmocrats" in
A FuUtrePer[ect, the recent book on globalization by
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. I have
always had trouble working up sympathy for people
who seldom fly coach, and reading this book's
description of the cosmocrats---"an anxious elite"
who face "the perils of placelessness"~failed to
wrench a single tear from my eye. Stdl, it is true that
many cosmocrats live in a vast and fluid web of
facile connections. We don't yet know whether this
can bring long-term happiness, but we do know that
this isn't the way human beings were designed to live.
It is important to guard against overextrapolating from these information-age trends. In many
cases, there is little point in extrapolating at all.
The information age and globalization are still
young. As the World Wide Web goes broadband,
makmg real-time video more practical, rendering
"tele-presence" more and more realistic, the Web
could well become a more gratifying medium, allow-
ing even "placeless" elites to stay deeply in touch
with a core of intimates.
But there is one rule about evolving information
technology that is sure to hold, however broad the
band---and this rule underscores the perils of "cultural
lag." As more and more powerful means of communication become cheaper and cheaper, groups of people
with common interests will find it easier and easier to
organize. In most cases this will be wonderfulmor, at
least, not bad. But in an age when rapid social transformation is giving some groups deep grievances, this
new capacity for mobilization will also lead to trouble.
In fact, leave aside the many new and coming grievances. There are enough groups with long-simmering
grievances--Kurds, Basques, Chinese Muslims, various
Indonesian minorities--for real havoc to ensue, given
the growing access to potent technologies of organization and potent munitions. When you add in the
backlashes fomented by globalization--among militias
in the U.S. heartland, rabid nationalists in Russia and
Germany, and alienated religious fundamentalists
worldwide--the picture only gets spookier.
To be sure, the threat that information technologies pose to entrenched, centralized powers very
often serves just causes, notably freedom and democracy. But even political improvement can be deeply
unsettling when it is sudden. The lowest national
happiness level ever recorded anywhere was in the
Dominican Republic in 1962, not long after the
assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo--which,
in retrospect, was the first in a series of steps toward
democracy. And, leaving survey data aside, when
political turmoil brings widespread death, as it often
does, lots of people forever cease to be happy.
T A K E IT D O W N
A NOTCH
The author Dorothy Parker, when asked if she enjoyed
writing, supposedly replied, "No. I enjoy having written." So it sometimes is with historical progress. It
could well turn out that having globalized is more fun
than globalizing. Though the ends of globalization
are fundamentally goodmreducing poverty, nurturing
democracy and freedom--the process of globalizing
can be quite costly in human terms, especially when
it moves at high velocity.
How to proceed when the destination is good but
the journey dicey? One approach is to just get it over
with. Certainly a good piece of advice to Parker would
have been: Sit down and get the thing written and quit
wallowing in the agony of creativity! But there is a difference. Writing isn't massively more painful when fast
S~P,k. BERIOcTo.CR 2000 61
Will Globalization Make You Happy?
]
than when slow. But globalizing can be. With technological and social change, there can be discontinuities of consequence; above a critical velocity, the negative fallout may grow by orders of magnitude.
One reason is the growing access to catastrophic
technologies, most notably biological and nuclear
weapons. But even past eras with lower-tech forms of
slaughter attest to the toll that history can take when
it's on fast forward. As the Industrial Revolution,
having matured fairly gradually in westernmost
Europe, swept rapidly eastward in the late 19th century, it brought extreme social dislocation to German
lands and to Russia. It is not crazy, indeed, to see both
the virulent German nationalism of the 20th century
and Stalin's reign of terror as long-run consequences
of this disruptive change. By extension, it is not crazy
to see the current suffering in the former Soviet blocm
the unhappiest place on Earth--as the stubborn legacy
of overly rapid 19th-century globalization.
So what would a utilitarian God advise? I doubt
that the advice would be to systematically slow down
globalization. Trying to fine-tune the velocity of history seems beyond our mortal capacity. Still, maybe we
should look with increased sympathy on policy ideas
that have plausible internal logic and may have the side
effect of slightly slowing down globalization.
Consider Robert Frank's plan for dampening hxury fever. By Frank's analysis, remember, people in
affluent nations who pursue happiness via money and
status are playing a zero-sum game. But that doesn't
mean that pursuing happiness by any means would be
zero-sum; if you spend more time with friends, you and
the friends feel better and no one need suffer.
Ah, Frank asks, but where does the ardent happiness maximizer find the time to spend with Mends? After
all, if you cut back on your work hours, your income
and status might slip; you could lose an increment of
happiness to a rival. That is the paradox: If everyone in
an affluent society cut back on their work so their relative incomes didn't change, they could all spend more
Over It
B y C. P a s c a l Z a c h a r y
ear sells, and we are forever marketing it. The suspicion that an apocalypse
awaits around the next corner
shapes our awareness of everything from the AIDS epidemic,
genetically modified foods, and
global warming to the more prosaic reality of deepening and proliferating links between people
and places around the world.
While fearmongers understandably exploit the specter of runaway epidemics, monster mushrooms, and worsening weather, it
is less obvious why globalization
inspires so much worry. Indeed, a
quick review of the chief global-
F
ization-inspired phobias suggests
there are fewer reasons for worry
than many think:
• National identities are dead
This proposition is so terrifyingm
and widely accepted--that nearly
every debate about globalization
begins by fretting over it. We fear
the homogenizing effects of global
culture. We worry that immigrants
will swamp the natives and doom
efforts to protect traditions. But
globalization can energize national identity. More people in more
parts of the world are expressing
their distinct social and cultural
traditions than at any time since
the dawn of European colonialism 500 years ago. In short, defining a local identity against a globG. Pascal Zachary ~s a foreign corre- al one sharpens the former.
spondent for the Wall Street Journal National identities have always
and author of The Global Me: New been elusive, by the way, so having
Cosmopolitans and the Competitive an international nemesis helps.
Edge(New York: Public,Affairs, 2000). Look at the way French cultural
62
~oRc,c~
POL,CV
activists have infused vitality into
their traditions by repeatedly
assailing Disney and McDonald's.
I Strangers all
This is the flip side of the first fear:
Won't immigrants--encouraged
by the ability to hold multiple passports and plural allegiances to farflung countries--lose sight of their
own identities? Hardly. For the
same reason that U.S. Midwesterners or Singaporean "heartlanders" can open themselves to
the world without sacrificing their
roots, immigrants too can add
"wings," sustaining original ways
of thinking and acting while
adopting the practices of their new
homes. Such is life when roots are
portable and wings aren't the
enemy of distinctiveness. The ease
of travel and communication,
coupled with less government
resistance to citizens' maintaining
close ties with their countries of
time with friends--and the society's overall happiness
would grow. Yet it may not be in the best interest of any
one person to take the initiative. What we need, says
Frank, is a way to halt the individually rational but collectively futile status-seeking arms race and use the time
to pursue happiness more wisely. He proposes a progressive consumption tax that would, among other
virtues, discourage 60-hour workweeks.
No doubt such a tax would cut demand for some
products made in the developing world. It would, in that
sense, subdue globalization. But when giobalization is
already moving at a mildly scary pace, this slowdown
is not necessarily an indictment of the proposal.
So too with various initiatives that. might otherwise be shouted down because they slightly slow
the wheels of commerce. If a fossil fuel tax designed
to fight global warming has the side effect of dampening demand for cars, that needn't be considered a
flaw. You could say much the same about putting
environmental and labor accords in trade agree-
origin, means that a growing number of people can focus on their
traditions when they want and
participate in international society
when that suits them; a Nigerian
family can read local newspapers,
listen to local radio, consume local
foods--all from their home in
London. Rather than a symptom
of schizophrenia or hypocrisy, this
capacity to juggle cultural frames
represents a stunning advance.
•
Kosovo is
coming
to your neighborhood
The same people who worry
about too much sameness are
also spooked by too much difference. These alarmists view
nations, and indeed the world, as
being on the brink of tribal war
even as they decry the relentless
spread of uniformity. How do
these two contradictory forces
coexist? They don't. Tribalism
flourishes in places that have had
too little contact with the outside
world (Serbia and Rwanda), not
.ments. On the one hand, we shouldn't pretend that
such accords won't slightly reduce the rate at which
globahzation boosts the standard of living in developing countries. But neither should we ignore the possibility that, given globalization's eerie velocity, this
sedative effect would have an upside. If such accords
help solve environmental problems or help soften the
resentment toward globalization felt by low-wage
workers in affluent nations, so much the better.
If you find yourself losing sleep over the idled Sri
Lankan factory workers that a slightly slowed globalization implies, there are ways to ease your anxiety:
Donate money to charities that provide food and medicine to the world's poorest. Unless you are yourself
poor, you weren't getting much joy out of those few dollars anyway. Besides, one psychologist found that performing altruistic acts gives people a psychological lift.
And another found that teenagers who were especially
concerned with the welfare of others were especially
happy. Apparently, giving things to people can be a non-
too much. The intermingling of
peoples is the antithesis of tribalism, and it provides the best
defense against social conflict.
The more diverse a society, the
safer it is. Increasingly, the best
measure of a society is how it
deals with difference. On this,
globalizers and localizers ought
to agree: Securing difference
should be their chief end.
• Big fish eat the little fish
The very same technologies of
production and delivery that
empower rootless multinational
corporations also make possible
the spread of small producers
who can sell to wider markets.
Small nations benefit in much the
same way as entrepreneurs;
indeed, after centuries of lagging,
small countries now often outperform large countries economically. How else does one explain
why Ireland has one of the fastest
growth rates in Europe, Iceland
has the lowest unemployment
rate in Europe, and Finland has
become a world leader in information technology?
• Unaccountable global institutions wield supreme power
Excuse me. The World Trade
Organization may be elitist, but its
inept management has stalled trade
liberalization--not created a "New
World Order." The International
Monetary Fund dares not intervene on a global scale after its
uneven handling of the Asian and
Russian financial crises. United
Nations peacekeepers have flopped
spectacularly in one country after
another. If national governments
are losing power, it isn't because of
the rise of secretive superstates; it is
because local politicians (and
activists) are gaining clout.
Put these five fears into perspective, and globalization doesn't
seem so scary. Worrying is fine.
But as a prod for improvement,
anxiety works best when directed
at the right things.
SEPT~MBr,R JOCtO.E~
2ooo
63
Will Globallzation Make You Happy? ]
zero-sum game. Human nature is full of ironies.
Globalization, given enough time, could itself bring
one final irony. Suppose that, as technology continues
to shrink distances, the world truly becomes a "global
village," and a sense of common belonging suffuses all
humankind. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Maybe not.
To the extent that happiness depends on how your
social station compares with that of your neighbors,
the happiness of poor nations might suffer. Upon seeing rich nations up close and personal, people in the
developing world could start using them as a reference
point and then feel deflated by the comparison.
Indeed, one psychologist, Michael Hagerty, has
speculated that the global telecommunications web
is already becoming dense enough for these "comparison effects" to take a toll. And telecommunications aside, as more cosmocrats conspicuously roam
more cities in more developing nations, the toll
could grow. The world's poor may soon acquire a
strong--and increasingly collective--sense of envy
and resentment toward the world's collective rich.
On the other hand, as economic development
proceeds, and both the poor and the rich in devel-
oping nations become better off, this very sort of
transnational class consciousness could begin to
deter war among nations. One effective antiwar
activity is networking among national elites-from the United States to China to Botswana. A
similar connectedness among the world's lower
socioeconomic classes could have the same effect;
the more people have m common with kindred
spirits abroad, and the more conscious of this commonahty they become, the less prone they will be
to a purely nationalist fervor.
Such a supranational class conflict would always
hold the threat of turning violent. But assuming the
world's upper classes have the presence of mind to
minimize resentment with ameliorative economic and
social policies, any such warfare is unlikely to be as
destructive as the 20th century's wars among nations
were. It is also unlikely to match the horrors of current ethnically based civil wars (which, you will note,
tend to afflict nations not deeply and richly embedded in the global economy). Given the alternatives,
a certain degree of class conflict on a global scale is a
problem we should be happy to face. I ~
Want to Know More? ],
The state-of-the-art volume on the study of happiness is Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic
Psychology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), edited by Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener,
and Norbert Schwarz. A less academic but still reliable treatment is The Pursuit of Happiness: Who
is Haplry--and Wiry (New York: W. Morrow, 1992) by David G. Myers. In Modernization and
Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), Ronald Inglehart presents findings from the World Values Surveys and
summarizes his theory that modernization fosters "post-materialist values."
Among the recent books that examine the failure of money to make affluent societies happier
are Robert H. Frank's Luxury Fever: Wiry Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (New York:
Free Press, 1999), and Robert E. Lane's The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2000). A recent book that touches intermittently on the psychological rewards
and burdens of globalization is A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (New York: Times Books, 2000). William
Greider's One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1997) focuses at length on globalization's dislocating effects.
David Dollar and Aart Kraay challenge the widely held belief that economic growth exacerbates
income inequality in their report "Growth Is Good for the Poor" (Washington: World Bank, 2000).
Ruut Veenhoven, editor of the new Journal of Happiness Studies, has started a database on comparative national levels of happiness.
))For links to relevant Web sites, as well as a comprehensive index of related FOREIGN POLICY
articles, access www.foreignpolicy.com.
64
I'~.)IIt:IGN POI IC~