What do most scholars agree is the most significant component of globalization?

Question

What do most scholars agree is the most significant component of globalization?

Answer 1

Globalization is making the world one big, boring shopping mall. You can travel from Bangkok to Brussels and not find a decent locally-made souvenier. It's all c**p from China.

A Yahoo! member recently wrote me about how nothing authentic remains in England. There used to be charming pubs on every corner, with long traditions and a local flavor. Now they are all mass-marketed chains, bland, and predictable. Is this what we want? Nothing unique left in the world? I was just in Dubai (part of the United Arab Emirates), and the stores were practically the same as those in the Europe.

Globalization also seems to hurt the poor, indigenous populations the most. The poor in places like Peru have not benefitted from capitalism. If anything, they have become largely landless and without any means of making money in the new economy.

Why do people hate McDonalds? Because they prey on peoples' worst tendencies: convenience over substance, predictability over innovation. McDonalds often acts like a vulture. It targets properties that have financial problems, and snatches them up, replacing the original use of a beautiful, historic building with their garish plastic nightmare. In places like Paris, people still have leisurely lunches, but as the temptation grows for French companies to squeeze more work out of their employees, those respectable lunches may be shortened as employers point out that they can eat fast food.

Let's stick with examples from France. One thing the French excel at is producing relatively small quantities of a product with very high quality. In the globalized market, these companies cannot compete. A small, private French dairy making high quality cheeses has far greater costs than some massive dairy corporation in Argentina. With globalization, the distributors can't be bothered to stock these small quantities, so no matter where you travel, you always get the same mass-marketed products.

Answer 2

An Open Market economy.