🌐 Globalization is dead. Long live globalization.

Also: 5 Quick Questions for … Alec Stapp on accelerating progress through public policy

In This Issue

The Essay: Globalization is dead. Long live globalization.

5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … Alec Stapp on accelerating progress through public policy

Micro Reads: robotics as a service, Washington and nuclear fusion, the industrialization of AI, and more …

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Quote of the Issue

“The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of [a London resident’s] daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.” - John Maynard Keynes on pre-WWI globalization.

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The Essay

🌐 Globalization is dead. Long live globalization.

Throughout the Great Pandemic, I’ve been baseline skeptical of the notion that “cities are over.” Kind of a silly idea when you seriously think about it. Yes, countless news stories, columns, and hot takes on social media have explored the issue. But little of this speculation — including mine — concluded there would be some historic hollowing out of the world’s great urban centers. And “historic” is an apt descriptor. Even a cursory examination of world history suggests how unlikely it would be for cities to be over. As macro trends go, 5,000 years of urbanization qualifies as an awfully persistent one.

I start at a similar place when thinking about “globalization is over.” Nothing new about global flows of people, ideas, and goods. Another persistent macro trend. There’s been trade between cities, for as long as there have been cities. In the 2021 paper “Risks and global supply chains: What we know and what we need to know,” economists Richard Baldwin (Graduate Institute, Geneva) and Rebecca Freeman (Bank of England) observe that “internationalized production” is hardly a modern phenomenon. Archaeologists have found “stone tools in the Levant made of volcanic rock quarried in Turkey and long-distance trade in tin was common during the Bronze Age.”

An over/not-over framing is as unhelpful for thinking about the state and near future of globalization as it is for cities. Globalization is not over in any substantial way. Example: The value of global trade reached a record $28.5 trillion last year, according to a recent UN report. That’s a 25 percent increase over 2020 and 13 percent higher than the pre-pandemic 2019 number. A widespread embrace of North Korea-like autarky isn’t happening.