Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Wal-Mart and McDonald's don't need to displace that many people to build their stuff. Rather, it's in their interests to "move people into the middle class" to build their markets. Poor, developing-world people don't buy from McD's & Wal-Mart. 'Elevate' them into (a developed-world vision of) the middle class, and they become part of the McD's/Wal-Mart target market; the market gets bigger. So they need to bump a few people out of the way, but they want to make many people better off (assuming they see the "enlightened self interest" angle the same way I do, which I'm betting they do since there's so much potential money there).

So he may or may not be trying to kid anyone.

Of course, there's a west-centric notion of the meaning of "better off" here, which may be correctly applied but I'm a little too enmeshed in it to instantly shift gears and assess that ... er, maybe "objectively" isn't quite the right word, so let's try "metasubjectively". And there's the question of how much worse off the people hurt by globalization are, and how few: even if the moral calculus there is comfortable (which for many people it will be), are the gains to the larger number enough to justify the harm if you subtract the gains-to-Wal-Mart from the equation?

How do you quantify the harm done by loss of (or probably, in most cases, just some dramatic changes to) a culture in the good:harm calculation? I'm thinking that it requires finding out what the folks in each altered culture think about it, because assuming that westernizing their culture by making them rich enough to be targets and sending in the megacapitalists is "harm" is just as blindly patronizing as assuming that making them 'more like us' is an unequivocal good.

So what I see in Greenspan's statement is that he's pointing out that in addition to the losers there are potential winners other than the big winners at the top who are driving this thing; at the same time is see the creation of those small-winners as ultimately being part of the big-winners win, and I see a lot of unquestioned (or at least un-discussed that night) assumptions about values and change.