Multinationals And Globalism

(Last of two parts): Is globalism as relentlessly evil and corrupt a force as all those nasty demonstrations in Seattle and Milan would suggest? Anti-globalists sometimes seem to confuse corporatism with globalism, lumping in all sorts of issues under one term. There are plenty of economists and social scientists who maintain that globalization -- including the spread of new information and business technologies -- can not only be a great force for good, but in some forms represents the only feasible cure for global poverty and inequality. They also argue that political leaders have to meet more, not less, about these problems.

Many anti-globalization interests, Jay Walljasper writes in the latest Utne Reader, have coalesced in the belief that growing poverty, environmental destruction and social breakdown, with continuing bloodshed seen around the world, are the direct results of an international political and economic system that places most of the world's wealth and power in the hands of unaccountable and powerful corporations. "To these activists," writes Walljasper, "a new era of global peace and justice can be achieved by reinvigorating local communities and creating a new international system that promotes cooperation over competition."

Sounds great. In fact, it sounds like the early Wired Magazine manifestos about the Net, some of which I wrote. But would such a system work? Even if it did, who would pay for it and maintain it? And who will curb those corporations whose economic, lobbying and political power far outstrips any of those groups protesting their existence? Why would citizens in the west pay to "reinvigorate" local communities elsewhere and create a new international system? Globalism thrives on the contributions of corporations who want to profit from it, not from the efforts of governments or civic groups advancing democratic ideals.

The idea that globalism could even bolster those ideals is a view not widely held by fundamentalists or by certain educated elites in Europe and the United States. The institutions that to most minds represent the global economy -- the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization -- have become reviled and distrusted in these circles, their meetings developing into bloody standoffs. Political leaders in economically-advanced countries can no longer meet to talk about trade or economic issues without sparking riots.

The protesters opposing them represent a variety of causes, from the loss of good domestic jobs to the lowering of global wages to denouncing sweatshops to decrying environmental desctruction. They have quieter allies, too; even in prosperous Western economies, support for trade liberalization has declined and governments are accused of caving in to business interests. Liberal politicians from Bill Clinton to Britain's Tony Blair have expressed puzzlement and frustration at this sometimes anarchic, unthinking political fury; they claim such organizations are vital if wealth, technology and economic opportunity ever gets equitably distributed around the world.

Moreover, an editorial in the Economist magazine argues that anti-business protesters have their arguments upside down -- with genuinely dangerous consequences for the sometimes just causes they hope to advance. On the whole, says the Economist, stricter regulation of international business won't reduce profits. "What it may well do, though, by disabling markets in their civilizing role, is to give companies new opportunities to make even bigger profits at the expense of society at large." Companies pressured to increase wages will simply move, close overseas plants or charge more, thus make more profits. Afterwards, "The companies, having shafted their third world competition and protected their domestic markets, count their bigger profits (higher wage costs notwithstanding). And the third world workers displaced from locally-owned factories explain to their children why the West's new deal for the victims of capitalism requires them to starve."

If you follow these violent and confusing protests -- many now organized online -- you get the impression that some of these demonstrators confuse globalism with corporatism, since large companies are among the most vocal advocates of globalism and so far are its primary beneficiaries. The trappings of corporatism -- using technologies to create low wages and new markets, while suppressing individual enterprise and distinctive cultures -- have already encircled the world. McDonald's is much more symbolic of globalism than a small village in India getting wired for the Net, even though the latter may ultimately be more significant. And many political scientists equate Afghanistan's poverty, political extremism and instability to the fact that globalization hasn't yet reached the country.

The world's biggest companies sometimes appear more powerful than the world's biggest governments. (Microsoft's long and successful battle with the U.S. Justice Department is a good case in point). In the United States, they control our media and popular culture and are the primary contributors to the political system. Their lobbyists are the single most influential political force in Washington.

It's not surprising that many people feel instrinsically uncomfortable with globalism. Humanists aren't the spokespeople for globalization -- economic interests are. Corporations appear to be unchecked, and corporations have little inate social responsibility. They exist to generate profits, not advance social agendas or protect the environment, so they inevitably spark enormous resentment in foreign cultures whose citizens want jobs but are then puzzled by their own resulting lack of prosperity. These foreign workers also find that new globalizing technologies undermine their own national identities and religious and political values, all increasingly subsumed by the homogenized Disneyfication and Wal-Marting of the world that has swallowed up U.S. popular culture and countless small business, from pharmacies to family farms. The U.S. comes to seem like a remote, sometimes monstrous, always greedy and insensitive force.

But Giddens argues that democracy -- and the globalism inextricably linked with it -- is the most powerful emerging idea of the 21st century. Few states in the world don't call themselves democratic now, even when they aren't, like China and North Korea. In fact, the only countries are explicitly refer to themselves as non-democratic are the remaining semi-feudal monarchies or fundamentalist entities -- Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria.

Democracy's spread has now in fact created a bloody confrontation with fundamentalism, a holy war. Both sides refer to one another in evil blasphemers. Lost in this confrontation is the idea that Democracy isn't only about multi-national markets, cheap labor and business opportunities. It's about the liberation of information, freedom of religious and cultural choice, and a brorader value system with a complex civic structure. Yet another good reason why multinationals ought not to appear more powerful than governments (they aren't) and become the sole face and voice of globalization.

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MOD PARENT UP!

[volpe]

Because it's funny, and it might just piss the author off even more!

Globalism as an Evolutionary Strategy

[Baldrson]

We take, as the primary condition, the "spatial-structure" of the non- iterated case of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) which as been shown by M. Oliphant in "Evolving cooperation in the non-iterated prisoner's dilemma: The importance of spatial organization" to be necessary for the evolution of C as well as for Saussurean communication (cooperative communication) in "The Dilemma of Saussurean Communication" -- the more complex iterated version of the PD being necessary only for environments in which TFT is the only strategy under which C can emerge as a stable strategy (environments in which kin-selection is not operative do to a high probability of interaction with non-kin).

What Oliphant means by "spatial structure" is that interaction, including mating, occurs only with individuals who were born near each other. This is a realistic first-order approximation of the structure of evolutionary history in most species -- allowing for Saussurean Communication as well as C to become stable within inbreeding groups.

PRIMORDIAL HYPOCRISY AND MIGRATION

Given the presence of Saussurean communication evolved in the presence of kin, the potential arises for successful mutations that combine D with signals that impute kinship thereby eliciting C from the recipients.

This is the primordial origin of the H strategy, and the C thereby elicited is first-order extended phenotypic cooperation.

However, given Oliphant's assumption of spatial structure, H quickly dies out as Saussurean communication and C are selected out of its environment and H individuals are interacting with other H individuals so frequently that the payoff for D sinks below the average payoffs of neighboring inbreeding groups not exhibiting H.

H, therefore, becomes stable only with ongoing migration to unexploited inbreeding groups.

Migratory behavior makes H persist.

Migration and H can therefore be considered codependent evolutionary strategies.

SYCOPHANT HYPOCRISY AND XENOPHOBIC TIT-FOR-TAT

Once migratory behavior has arisen (giving persistence to H) the complexity introduced by the iterated PD becomes necessary to explain global demographic stability. Global demographic stability can persist (even if Saussauran communication is globally sacrificed as a defensive measure against H signals) only if repeat encounters allow a TFT strategy to emerge based on recognition of individuals who have previously exhibited D behavior. Moreover, if the TFT must be xenophobic -- that is, the TFT must presume an unknown immigrant to be H and therefore initially exhibit D toward any unknown immigrant. The H immigrant must, therefore, evolve toward initial sycophantry: in the initial encounter, the immigrant H must unconditionally exhibit C despite the expectation of a non-reciprocal exploitative initial response.

This initial investment for H can pay off only if sufficient C is elicited in the host population to provide enough exploitable individuals to make up for the cost of initial sycophantry . Stable Saussarian communication in the host inbreeding group is crucial for this condition to be met -- otherwise all individuals of the host inbreeding group will D in their first interaction with the H immigrant, causing the H strategy to fail in that environment. Therefore, reputational Saussurean communication, elicited by initial sycophantry, is crucial to the persistence of H in the presence of xenophobic TFT.

The C elicited by reputational Saussurean communication in response to sycophantic H is second-order extended phenotypic cooperation.

Such second-order extended phenotypics is the origin of biologically pathogenic memes as weapons in genetic arms races and are, in the most primitive form, "recommendation" memes.

The existence of such second-order extended phenotypics means it is inevitable that the H individuals will evolve to emit false recommendation signals for themselves and "defamation" signals for members of the host population. Since it takes longer to receive TFT responses to a defamation (or false recommendation) signal than it does to actually exploit (or be exploited), the defamation signals will target individuals that are reacting to exploitation or are passing on warning memes from those who have been exploited. Defamation memes targeting the members of the host population that react to exploitation is a third-order extended phenotype, attacking the host population's TFT response and generating the equivalent of an extended phenotypic auto-immune deficiency within the host population.

Having stabilized enough of the nonkin inbreeding group in C- exhibiting TFT, H individuals will then exhibit D toward nonkin to recoup the costs of initial sycophantry and then continue to D so as to reap the primary benefits of the H strategy. Mass emigration ensues as the exploitable population diminishes to the point that the costs imposed by D-responses from the host population's TFT strategy (enhanced by reputational Sassurean communication which is also inhibited by second and third order extended phenotypes as described above) exceed the benefits of further exploitation.

HYPOCRITICAL PROMOTION OF GLOBAL MIGRATIONS

To this stage of evolution, only H populations are migrating, and the exploited populations are homogeneous inbreeding groups. As the genetic arms race continues, and the H strategy advances beyond the sycophant adaptations to extended phenotypic promotion of C and inhibition of TFT, there comes a point where it is advantageous to H individuals to promote random migrations in non-H populations.

The reason for this is that non-H populations, being dependent on spatial structure (kin selection) for the primary stability of C within their populations, as described above, become dependent on the extended phenotypic promotion of C provided by H individuals. The H individuals thereby remove the ability of non-H populations to sustain C within themselves in the absence of H extended phenotypic influence. This has the effect of extending time during which H populations can reap the benefits of their strategy subsequent to losses due to initial sycophantry. The tolerance of non-H populations for being exploited by H individuals dramatically increases since they are under the threat of other nonkin populations whose ability to invoke TFT to stabilize C with nonkin has been suppressed by the general suppression of their TFT phenotypes by the extended phenotypes of the H population.

CONCLUSION

Thus we can see that in addition to the theory that heterogenous populations make hypocrite populations less visible to an otherwise homogeneous population that may be preparing to expell them in a tit- for-tat reaction subsequent to hypocritical exploitation, there is an selective pressure for evolutionarily advanced hypocrite populations to promote immigration to homogeneous host populations subsequent to or in conjunction with defection against those populations: to create dependence on the presence of the hypocrite population, and its evolved (extended phenotypic) ability to elicit cooperative behavior in non-kin, thereby extending the time during which the pay off subsequent to initial defection may be reaped beyond the recovery of losses due to initial sycophantry.