The World’s Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (and What Would Make It Right)

The economic globalization that accelerated dramatically in the 1990s was based on two premises: opening global markets would benefit everyone, and integrating China into the world economy would force Beijing to liberalize its political system. As Lynch recounts in this sweeping history of the subsequent quarter century, neither assumption held up. In the United States and other advanced economies, the so-called China shock—the tsunami of exports enabled by China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001—deindustrialized large parts of the American heartland and pushed significant swaths of the manufacturing workforce out of their jobs. Chinese leaders, meanwhile, were able to resist liberalizing reforms even as multinational firms, the Internet, and other forces of globalization entered their country. Lynch’s book, like many others on the subject, is better at recounting what went wrong than suggesting what would make it right. Still, if understanding the failures of globalization is a prerequisite for saving it, then this history is a start.