Hi, I'm John Green.
This is Crash Course World History.
And today is the penultimate
episode of Crash Course.
We're gonna talk about globalization.
This was going to be the last episode, but
I just can't quit you, World Historians.
So, today we're going
to talk about globalization,
and in doing so, we're going to
talk about why we study history at all.
[Jobs program for the Harris Tweed set?]
Ooh ooh, Mr. Green!
Yes, Me from the Past?
We study history to get a good grade
to go to a good college to get a good job--
--so you can make more money than you would
otherwise make and be a slightly larger cog
among the seven billion gears that turn
the planet's economic engine. Right?
And that's fine,
but if that's why you really study history,
then you need to understand all the ways
that the t-shirt you're wearing is
both the cause and result of your ambition.
This t-shirt contains the global economy:
Its efficiency; its massive surplus;
its hyperconnectedness;
and its unsustainability.
This t-shirt tells
one story of globalization.
So let's follow it.
[BEST]
[intro music]
[intro music]
[intro music]
[intro music]
[EVAR]
So, globalization is a cultural phenomenon.
It's reflected in contemporary artwork
and population migration
and linguistic changes,
but we're going to focus, as we so often
have during Crash Course, on trade.
So the world today, as symbolized by our
international felt melange,
[how's your SAT vocab retention doing?]
experiences widespread
global economic interdependence.
Now, of course economic interdependence
and the accompanying cultural borrowing
are nothing new, you'll remember that
we found trade documents from
the Indus Valley civilization
all the way in Mesopotamia.
[home of the Mesopotamians]
But for a few reasons, the scale
of this trade has increased dramatically.
1. Multinational corporations
have global reach and increasing power.
2.
Travel and shipping are cheap and safe.
It took about two months
to cross the Atlantic in 1800.
Today it takes about five hours by plane,
and less than a week by ship.
[nothing beats a TARDIS, however.
TARDISes (TARDI?) are cool.]
3. Governments have decreased tariffs
and regulations on international trade,
leading to what is sometimes called
euphemistically "free trade."
To which I say, if this trade is so free,
how come BBC America is in
the premium tier of my cable package?
To understand the role that
governments play in international trade,
let's look again at this t-shirt.
[which is exceptional, you'll agree]
This t-shirt, like most t-shirts made in
the world, contains 100% American cotton.
And that's not because the U.S. makes the
best cotton or the most efficient cotton,
it's because the U.S. government
subsidizes cotton production.
And that's what makes this cotton
cheaper than cotton of similar quality
from Brazil or India.
But in the last 30 years, the US's share
of
cotton exports has gone down as Brazil,
India, and Africa's cotton exports go up.
And that trend will likely continue
as the US moves away from
its expensive cotton subsidies.
In fact, these days it's
already possible to find t-shirts
with Brazilian, Indian, or Ugandan cotton,
or a mixture of cottons
from all around the world.
But because the American government
doesn't subsidize industry in
the way it does agricultural production,
the actual spinning and weaving of the
cotton takes place in lower wage countries:
Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, China, India,
China, China, sometimes even China.
And then the finished shirts,
called blanks,
are usually sent to Europe or the United
States for screenprinting, and then sold.
You would think the most expensive part
of this process is the part where
we ship this across the Pacific Ocean,
turn it into this, and then ship
it back across the Pacific Ocean,
but you'd be wrong.
Wholesale t-shirt blanks can cost as little
as $3; the expense is in the printing,
the retail side of things,
and paying the designer at Thought Bubble
who was tasked with the difficult job
of creating a Mongol who is
at once cute and terrifying.
So contemporary global trade
is pretty anarchic and unregulated,
at least by international
institutions and national governments.
Much of this has to do with academic
economists, mostly in the U.S. and Europe
who have argued with great success
that governmental regulation diminishes
prosperity by limiting growth.
Now, some nations--
in Latin America, the Caribbean,
and Africa--
haven't been particularly
keen to pursue free trade
but they've been bullied
into it by larger economies
with whom they desperately need to trade.
So in the past 30 years,
we've seen all these emerging
markets lowering their tariffs,
getting rid of regulation, and privatizing
formerly state run businesses.
And they often do that to appease
the International Monetary Fund,
which offers low interest loans
to developing world economies
with the motto:
Many Strings Attached.
Now,
whether these decreased regulations
have been a net positive
for these developing world economies
is a subject of much debate,
we we will wade into it.
But not until next week.
First, we need to understand more
about the nature of this trade.
So you'll remember from the
Industrial Revolution episode
that industrial western powers
produced most of the manufactured goods,
which were then sold
in international markets,
but you'll also remember that domestic
consumption was extremely important.
I mean, almost all early
Model T's were built by Americans,
and bought by Americans.
But since the 1960s, and especially today,
former non-industrialized
parts of the world had
been manufacturing consumer goods--
for domestic markets, yes,
but primarily for foreign ones.
This t-shirt,
made in China and the Dominican Republic
before being imported to Mexico
and then to the United States, is a primary
example of what I'm talking about,
but so is the computer that
you're watching me on.
Your computer was probably
manufactured in China,
but with parts from all over the world,
especially Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.
And this international manufacturing is
always finding, like, new markets too.
Like, Brazil, for instance,
has a huge technology sector.
They make iPads there, actually.
Sorry, I'm trying to play Angry Birds.
[way to set an example for the kids, John]
But,
what all these countries have in common is
that while there is a domestic market
for things like iPads and t-shirts,
the foreign markets are much, much bigger.
Oh, it's time for the Open Letter?
An Open Letter to Cookie Monster.
[from Sesame St. or death metal vocalists?]
But first, let's see what's
in the secret compartment today.
Oh,
it's a cookie dough flavored Balance Bar.
For people who love cookies
AND pretending to be healthy.
Dear Cookie Monster,
Here's the thing, man.
You don't have a stomach.
That's why when you
put a cookie in your mouth,
it crumbles up and
then it just falls out of your mouth.
But here's what fascinates me,
Cookie Monster.
I believe you
when you say you love cookies.
It doesn't matter that
you can't actually eat cookies
because where you would have a stomach,
you instead have someone's arm.
[awesome. John Green just ruined
Cookie Monster for me. like, forever.]
And that, Cookie Monster,
is what makes you a beautiful symbol
for contemporary consumption.
You just keep eating.
Even though you can't eat.
[profundity FTW]
Cookie Monster,
you are the best and the worst of us.
Best Wishes,
John Green
So, although die-hard Marxists
might still resist this,
by 2012 it's become pretty obvious that
global capitalism has been good
for a lot of people.
It certainly increased
worldwide economic output.
And while American autoworkers
may suffer job loss,
moving manufacturing jobs from
high wage to lower wage countries allows
a greater number of people
to live better than they did
when the First and Second Worlds
monopolized manufacturing.
And while I don't want to
conflate correlation and causation,
some 600 million people have
emerged from poverty in the last 30 years,
at least according to the
World Bank's definition of poverty,
which is living on less than $1.25 a day.
[roughly the cost of a Clif Bar]
Americans can argue about whether absurdly
inexpensive clothes, shoes and televisions
are worth the domestic
economic and social dislocation,
but for the Vietnamese worker
stitching a pair of sneakers,
that job represents an opportunity for
a longer, healthier and more secure life
than she would have had if
those shoes were made in the U.S.A.
But, before we jump on the
celebratory globalization bandwagon,
let's acknowledge that this
brave new world has some side effects.
For instance,
it maybe hasn't been so good for families,
it definitely has not been
good for the environment,
and also there's a chance
that globalization will spark, like,
the end of the human species.
[thanks for the doomy reminder, Sandy]
But,
we're gonna talk about all that next week.
For today, let's bring on the bandwagon
and ride straight for the Thought Bubble.
So these days, people move more
than they ever have.
21% of people living in
Canada were born somewhere else,
as was an astonishing 69% of
Kuwait's current population.
Migration has become easier because
1. air travel is pretty cheap,
especially if you only take
a few plane trips in your life,
and 2.
it's relatively easy and inexpensive to
stay in touch with relatives living far
away thanks to Skype, mobile phones,
and inexpensive calling cards,
also 3. even with increased
industrialization in the developing world,
economic opportunities are often
much better in wealthy countries.
Remittances--
money sent home by people working abroad--
are now a huge driver of
economic growth in the developing world.
Like, in Tajikistan, for instance,
remittances are 35% of the
country's total gross domestic product.
With all these people
moving around the world,
it's not surprising that globalization
also means cultural blending.
When people move,
they don't just give up their literary,
culinary, artistic, and musical traditions.
Globalized culture is a bit of a paradox,
though, because some people see culture
today as increasingly Americanized, right?
Like, FRIENDS is currently
broadcast in over 100 countries;
you can find Diet Coke for sale deep
in the jungles of Madagascar;
the NBA is huge in China.
There are fewer languages spoken today,
and probably less cultural diversity.
But on the other hand,
an individual's access to diverse
cultural experience has never been greater.
Bollywood movies, Swedish hip hop,
[oh you, Petey Van Houten!]
Brazilian soap operas, highlights
from Congolese football matches.
These are all available to us.
Culinary cultural fusion is all the rage;
more novels are translated
from languages than ever before,
although few are actually read;
and in the surest sign of cultural
globalization, futbol, the world's game,
has finally reached America,
where broadcasts of the
greatest collective enterprise humanity
has ever known, Liverpool Football Club,
got record ratings in 2012.
[oh you, John Green]
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
Hey, one last request:
Could you put me in a Liverpool jersey?
On the pitch at Anfield?
Raising the premier league trophy?
WITH STEVEN GERRARD HUGGING ME?
YES, JUST LIKE THAT.
OH, THOUGHT BUBBLE I LOVE YOU SO MUCH.
[who knew ThoughtBubblers were streakers?]
Okay, so this all brings us
to how globalization has changed us,
and whether it's for the better.
Assuming you make the minimum wage
here in the United States,
this t-shirt, purchased at your
friendly neighborhood e-tailer dftba.com,
[way to Lastufka a plug in there]
will cost you about
three hours worth of work--
and yes, that does include shipping. [zing]
By the time it arrives at your door,
the cotton within that t-shirt
will have traveled by truck, train,
ship, possibly even airplane
if you opt for priority shipping.
And it will probably have travelled
further than Magellan did during
his famous circumnavigation of the globe.
You get all of that for
THREE HOURS of work;
by contrast, a far less comfortable
garment several hundred years ago
would have cost you ten times as much work.
But these improvements have been
accompanied by change so radical
that we struggle to contextualize it.
Like, the human population of our
planet over time looks like this.
Dang.
Like, in 1800, there were
a billion human beings on this planet.
And that was more than
had ever been seen before.
And we live more than
twice as long on average
as humans did just two centuries ago,
largely due to improved health care for
women in childbirth and their infants,
but also thanks to antibiotics
and the second agricultural revolution
that began in the 1950s,
the so-called "green revolution" that
saw
increased use of chemical fertilizers
lead to dramatically higher crop yields.
Of course, these gains haven't been
evenly distributed around the world,
but chances are if you're watching this,
you A.
survived childbirth
and B. feel reasonably confident
that your children will as well.
That's a new feeling for humans.
And as a parent, I can assure you,
it's a miracle, and one to be celebrated.
We study history so that we
can understand these changes,
and so that we can remember both what we've
gained and lost in getting to where we are.
Next week, our last week,
[i know, right? tear.]
we'll look at the many facets
of globalization
that aren't causes for celebration.
But for today, let's just pause
to consider how we got from here
to here,
how the relentless and unquenchable
ambition of humans led to a world
where the entire contents of the Library
of Alexandria would fit on my iPhone
along with recordings of
everything Mozart ever composed.
In such a world, it's easy to feel
that we are big and powerful,
maybe even invincible.
It's easy to feel that...
and also dangerous.
Thanks for watching I'll see you next week.
Crash Course is produced and directed
by Stan Muller.
Our script supervisor is
Meredith Danko.
Associate producer,
Danica Johnson.
And the show is written by my high school
history teacher, Raoul Meyer, and myself.
Our graphics team is Thought Bubble.
Last week's phrase of the week was
"Crush Those Rebels."
If you want to suggest future phrases
of the week or guess at this week's,
you can do so in comments where you can
also ask questions about today's video that
will be answered by our team of historians.
Thanks for watching Crash Course
and as we say in my hometown,
Don't Forget To VOTE. SRSLY. Participating
in your democracy is important + awesome.
[outro]