One World

"This is a relatively small book but with a very big idea. I like to use it to test my students’ intuition about the ethical basis for globalisation. Singer makes a simple and, on the face of it, very plausible point which is that the extent to which we care for other human beings shouldn’t depend on what side of the border they live. Taken to its logical limit, it has very powerful implications about how we should conduct our own lives as well our domestic policy – what kind of ends domestic government policies should pursue. It’s a very good book in terms of laying out an extremely cosmopolitan view of justice and ethics. I don’t subscribe to much of what he says, but I do think that he lays out a challenge to those of us who, like me, are sceptics to be clearer as to our reasoning. For a number of reasons. It does make a difference, even from an ethical standpoint, that the world is organised under different political institutions. I would agree with him that, as part of a common humanity, we all have a responsibility to help in cases of extreme humanitarian distress. But where I would disagree with him is on whether we have an equal responsibility to try to help in cases where economic disadvantage results largely from the workings of domestic political institutions or the failures thereof. To explain this a little bit more: to Singer it is fairly obvious that if a child in, let’s say, Bangladesh is poor and deprived then it’s incumbent on us to transfer a reasonable share of our wealth to Bangladesh for the use of that child and his or her family. I think this question is not so straightforward. The presumption that by simply transferring wealth we are making that child, in some sustainable way, better off makes a lot of empirical assumptions – none of which might hold in the real world. Without having a solid, empirically-based understanding of why the child is poor in the first place, we cannot know how best we can actually help. Simply sending money over may even make things worse. Think of aid dependency, or food aid that undercuts local producers, for example. What this child requires is true development – economic and political development of his or her society, and it’s not at all clear to me that a transfer of money/wealth helps do that in any particular way. And, therefore, I think the solutions of the type he proposes, even though they seem appealing – after all we’re wealthy, why not transfer some of our money over there? – are neither necessarily effective nor the best solutions in the medium-term. We have a responsibility to ensure that we are not part of the problem, that we are not supporting regimes that are responsible for that child’s poverty. But once you realise that your ability to make a lasting contribution to that child is actually quite limited as an empirical matter, then I think the simple impulse of just transferring part of your wealth isn’t a particularly productive one. But there are some areas where my instincts would coincide with Singer’s, because I see a greater likelihood of practical impact. You mentioned the difficulty of obtaining a work permit. This is probably one area where globalisation is both most unjust and most inefficient. On the basis of efficiency – economic efficiency – the greatest unexplored frontier of economic globalisation is mobility of workers around the world. Trade is substantially free, finance and capital are substantially free – but try to leave Bangladesh and go to work in the US. It’s impossible. “We’ve substantially liberalised trade since the 1950s to the point where, quite frankly, it’s worthless to expend much effort to get the Doha Round going: we’ve eked as much as we can from the economic benefits of trade liberalisation.” If you wanted to both increase the efficiency of resource utilisation in the world economy and at the same time do something for the world’s poorest, there is nothing we could do that would have as big an impact as allowing some of the Bangladeshi workers to take up jobs in the advanced countries of the world. Now I wouldn’t go so far as to say you should allow complete mobility of labour, because I do think it’s appropriate for rich societies to put some weight on the consequences for their own workers. But I think we’re so far in the other corner, that certainly a smallish relaxation of these visa restrictions to allow more workers from poor countries to come and work in the rich countries would definitely be a good idea. That’s right. But I would say that with labour mobility we are where we were with trade in the 1950s. We’ve substantially liberalised trade since the 1950s to the point where, quite frankly, it’s worthless to expend much effort to get the Doha Round going: we’ve eked as much as we can from the economic benefits of trade liberalisation. Except in a few areas, trade barriers are so low that it’s really hardly worth it any more. So I would redirect all that effort to try to construct domestic political bargains that might get us a little bit more labour mobility around the world."