Thoughts on globalisation

Reflections after reading The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel

A quick discussion of the book

I just finished the ebook version of The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel. The Goodreads introduction to his book is here. The book is very American, but many topics ring true from a Singaporean or even pan-developed-world perspective; it deals with neoliberal globalisation, deindustrialisation, elite education built on narratives of meritocracy and being deserving of the good things you get in life, and understandings of success that distribute dignity and stable life prospects to different sectors of society. Beyond narratives that celebrate globalisation and immigration as good vs rightwing nationalism as bad, Sandel dives into how the era of neoliberal globalisation actually increased socioeconomic polarisation and class divides in America. I was reminded of a dinner table conversation at a wedding where I talked to a journalist from Ohio, who had grown up watching deindustrialisation happen to the community the same way I did in heartland Singapore. The economic disenfranchisement sowed the seeds of polarisation and anger that chews up social solidarity and the fabric of community. Deindustrialisation - which I have discussed previously in this Substack - made me intrigued about the structure of engineering education and implicit knowledge, as well as what makes a company offshorable or not. Companies that create long-term, high-quality value are not easy to replace with cheaper production chains because the value of their output is not fungible, which I have written about in my article on job fragility.

Relevance to Singapore and related parts of the world

Rethinking success and education is not a new topic in the Singaporean public sphere. PM Lawrence Wong has spoken up before about diversifying narratives around what success ought to look like, trying to reduce toxic levels of anxiety and stress in the competition for material and academic achievement. However, a good deal of that Singapore dream is still locked away from the majority of the population by dint of being stuck behind the gatekeeping of who gets to obtain a university degree. How about the dignity of electricians, plumbers, kindergarten teachers, or nurses? Do our systems of resource allocation remunerate them fairly so that they can hold their head up high and not constantly worry about being outcompeted by the next enterprising Malaysian willing to be paid 30% to 50% less because they’re buying houses in Malaysia in ringgit rather than minuscule HDB flats in Singdollar?

The problems that technological disruption and social change have created won’t disappear just because we don’t look at them. With technology automating a lot of jobs and transforming how individuals look at love, intimacy, relationships, and marriage (thanks Khuyen for the insightful reflections!), I find that families and traditional communities, or even nation-states, may not be the best guide for how one can live well and intentionally and with values that are serving one’s long-term good. There is a lot of agency that can come with being a good architect of one’s life and options, and rich life experiences to be had along the way, be it eating tapas on the beach in Spain or cooking fusion interpretations of Indian chola together for a family dinner in Singapore.

Rambling thoughts about the multipolar world order and tech/globalisation

The question of globalisation is one that I won’t let rest. Are developed economies going to be demographically reliant on selective acceptance of immigration, with different countries specialising in producing different skill sets among their nationals, like Indians in software engineering or Filipinas in nursing and domestic work?Regionally and on a bigger scale, I’m interested in the environmental challenges created by rare earth mining, which feeds the tech industry, taking place in Myanmar and affecting rivers in Thailand and Vietnam. I’m also interested in the environmental impact of data centres across the hinterlands of many tech hubs in the Anglosphere, and soon, also Malaysia and Singapore.

Will the multipolar world order simply create many islands of wealth in each of the major regions in the world? (Based on what Immanuel Wallerstein described in his work on world-systems theory, where instead of some countries being high-profit centres and other countries being raw material extraction zones, this time every part of the world has its own core and its own periphery of extraction.)

In that sense, one already arising phenomenon is that instead of elites gathering in coastal cities in the United States, which was more characteristic of the 1970s to early 2010s, the 2020s and coming decades are likely to see a prosperous but more anchored cosmopolitanism that can unite cities like Dubai, Mumbai, Bangalore, Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai, where takeaways are convenient and affordable ways to sample wide ranges of cuisines, tech jobs pay well if you can get them, and gated communities keep the unwashed poor out of sight and out of mind.

However, at the same time, the pollution and suffering of living near resource extraction zones could unite rural Bangladesh, rural Indonesia (Batam, just an hour from Singapore, is regularly choked by plastic waste), rural Thailand, and rural China (most notoriously in zones where electronic waste is dumped). Chinese international organisations like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank would play a bigger role similar to what the United Nations or World Bank plays today (though this may still take years before they catch up in scale and impact). Will this make it much harder to enforce environmental laws like extended producer responsibility or decarbonisation and net zero goals? Only time will tell.

Globalisation that isn’t about resource accumulation

Going back to the book by Sandel, what could education and politics look like in a world that is still globalised, but not organised on principles of maximum profit?

One interesting group that is not capitalist in essence, and which has attuned itself to global solidarity movements (with indigenous people in other parts of the world) and international law, is Orang Laut SG, helmed by Firdaus Sani. (Their social media recently featured Orang Suku Laut in Bintan, Indonesia, who are being displaced by Chinese bauxite mining that has taken over their ancestral graveyards and fishing grounds. They raised both funds and awareness, and appealed for legal aid recommendations, which I thought was a nuanced way of tapping on the potential for civil society solidarity across the Internet.)

I hope more groups like Orang Laut SG start to form so that the space once occupied by NGOs and street protests can become more representative of different groups in societies and countries where urban, tech-savvy, literate elites have historically enjoyed privileged access to decision-making. If we could hear for ourselves the voices of Mekong rural communities who rely on the river for agriculture and oppose hydropower dams and rare earth mining, would that change how we look at the way we buy rice or think about the energy transition? If we could see for ourselves the effects of fast fashion on dumping grounds in countries like Ghana, where pollution can harm the health of locals when clothes slowly break down instead of being “properly” recycled, how might that change extended producer responsibility legislation leveled on companies like Shein? If a voice is not heard, and if a harm cannot be seen, does it still exist and is it still important?

A plurality of visions of progress is what I’m advocating for, with a global commons and increased access to democratic platforms that allow for more voices to be heard. Otherwise, the multipolar world order will deflate to be just a plurality of nation-states squashing their natural resources and populations to take part in the same old structures of late industrial capitalist rat race.

Without a plurality of visions articulated in the public sphere, we cannot have a morally imaginative or environmentally sustainable future. Only then can progress and prosperity really be inclusive rather than displacing, and nourishing instead of stale and cold.

What futures do you aim to bring into existence?