Globalization and Egalitarian Redistribution

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s scrambled the world in many ways. No longer would there be a First World (capitalist), a Second World (communist), and a Third World (the poor and anxious others). Suddenly, with no reason to take sides, the entire world would become one large free-trade zone. Globalization replaced the old with the new. Suddenly it was noticed that China had quietly been reforming its economy since 1978. If the early 1990s signaled the end of the world as a battleground of competing ideologies, those years also signaled the emergence of a new hegemonic ideology. Some will deny that globalization is an ideology—how can the axiomatic elegance of a refined Heckscher-Ohlin model be ideological?

Globalization is indeed the new ideology and there is much to say about it. From the constant cheerleading of Jagdish Bhagwati to...