Works by Jeff Rubin
Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization (2009) 284 copies, 10 reviews
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Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1954-08-24
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Canada
- Places of residence
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Education
- McGill University
University of Toronto - Occupations
- economist
- Organizations
- CIBC World Markets
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- 8
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- 558
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- #44,766
- Rating
- 3.6
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In fact, we can go back to William Greider’s 1997 classic “One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism” to hear many of the same complaints about globalization.
Yes, China and other low-cost producers have sucked manufacturing jobs out of OECD countries.
Rubin updates the argument with his take on why Donald Trump and other crypto-fascist world leaders represent the forgotten middle-class.
Rubin hails Trump as the only president to really go against the grain to bring back manufacturing jobs to America since the inception of this round of globalization, except when you factor in the pandemic that isn’t actually the case.
For a more frank and entertaining take on how the middle-class has lost out I recommend the Instagram feed of former labour secretary and egghead Robert Reich. I also recommend Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why it Matters, by Anthea Roberts et al.
With regard to Canadian economics, Rubin understates the long term decline of the Canadian resource sector on government revenues.
For a discussion on the increased influence of the financial services industry on the economy I’d refer you Mariana Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy.”
Rubin ignores the research of Thomas Piketty which clearly showed how the rich vacuumed capital in his landmark “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.”
For a discussion of sustainable and equitable global economic development I recommend Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist.”
And for a longer term view of why the US economy has stalled read Robert J. Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US standard of Living Since the Civil War.” From 1870-1940 things got way better at a pace that was unlikely to continue, regardless of globalization.
Where Rubin gets my attention, however, is on his brief discussion of migration. Rubin suggests that if the World Trade Organization (WTO) was really serious about free trade its members would allow the free flow of migrant workers from low wage localities to the higher wage centres like the US, Canada, and Australia. That way wages and opportunities would eventually equalize around the world.
The European Union and one could also say that the United States have been experiments on this model. But as long as there’s a booby hatch — as Brexit demonstrated recently — such experiments are bound to fail.
The United States put down its own rebellion in a bloody contest of will in the Civil War 1861-1865.
I’ve long held that this story of migrant workers is long from over, and that if migrant workers were given equal political standing in their adopted countries the political landscape would be much different than it is today.… (more)