As movie star Joan Crawford once said, “The only thing worse than talking is not talking.” In the converging global economy, things are not that different: in many ways, the only thing worse than opening borders is not opening them. Sure, there are downsides to the free exchange of goods, services, and money. But the advantages are enormous. And those countries that close their borders will remain at the back of the pack even in times of economic crisis.

“So what?” some may ask. “Who needs the problems, the disturbances, the pollution, and all the other side effects of a booming economy?” Well, the poor, for example. Obviously, the rich have benefited greatly from the explosion of the global economy, and the rich countries more than the poor, but aside from a languishing swath of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, almost all the developing countries of the world are better off today. than before a few years ago, when more than half of the world’s population was forced to live on less than $2 a day. What about them? Would a return to the sheltered and insular ways of the past help or hurt the world’s poor?

Let’s look at the Great Depression. We’ve all heard of the wealthy tycoons who lost their shirts when the stock market crashed in 1929. But it was the farmers and workers who suffered the most. And when the United States closed its borders to trade with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, it not only exported its recession to the rest of the world, it led other countries to close their borders in retaliation. Soon, an American recession turned into a global depression. The result? Most of those bigwigs who lost money in the stock market suffered, but many still had something in store or were able to find new jobs. However, it was the poor who were devastated by the depression.

Throughout history, it was the countries that opened their doors and traded that prospered the most: Greece, Rome, the Venetian Empire, Holland in the Golden Age, Imperial England, Japan, and the United States for most of the century. 20th century, and now a whole series of emerging market economies in the 21st century. China, for example, before opening its doors, however partially, to the world economy, was a poor, struggling and backward economy. It is now on its way to becoming the world’s largest economy. And several hundred million people have been lifted out of poverty in the process.

“But what’s in it for me?” many people in rich countries wonder. It is true that even rich countries have workers who need to be protected from the difficulties caused by the economic transition. The American middle class, for example, even during the “boom years” of the 1980s, saw real wages stagnate. Since then, the median income of American workers has risen just 17 percent. During that time, the income of the richest 0.1 percent of the population has quadrupled.

All over the world it is even worse. At the beginning of the 21st century, the world’s richest 65 million people earned more than 500 times more than the world’s poorest 65 million. Visitors to almost every city in the developing world are faced with gigantic slums teeming with people trying to make a living, sometimes in the most unsanitary conditions.

So what is the answer? Halt economic growth by ending globalization? How then will the poor in the slums of developing countries fare? And what about middle-class workers who saw their incomes stagnate even during the boom years? Will things get better for them during an economic downturn? Probably not. The modern global economy has to keep growing. Only then will it be able to create enough jobs to provide opportunities for growing populations.

Unfortunately, some people are against globalization for cultural reasons. French anti-globalist José Bové, for example, once used his tractor to destroy a McDonald’s restaurant near his sheep farm, denouncing the evils of multinational global domination and the proliferation of bad American food. But why was the restaurant being built there in the first place? Presumably because a certain segment of the population had found it useful, even desirable, to eat at McDonald’s.

Globalization, by definition, opens doors. It gives us new opportunities: buying, selling and traveling abroad. If that means some may lose their jobs, it also means many more will get jobs. Statistically, trade and exchange mean economic growth. Sure, the wealthy tend to benefit more when profits rise. But a growing company also means increased demand for labour, either in the form of direct employment or by increasing demand for a whole range of goods and services from outside the company, which creates jobs.

That doesn’t mean we have to blindly accept the inequalities that globalization exacerbates, but instead of blaming globalization for the unequal distribution of wealth, why not blame the governments that allow it to be distributed unequally? There is something that governments use, and have used for centuries, to redistribute taxes on wealth. And the way they work is simple: You take more money from the rich than from the poor. Then it provides programs that help everyone. But, in the end, the poor get more. And everyone is better.

Instead of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, why not distribute the eggs more fairly? In Sweden, for example, the government follows a policy of “protecting the worker, not the job.” This Scandinavian compromise allows a government to accept the failure of certain industries – shipbuilding, for example, which makes little economic sense in high-wage Sweden – and concentrate on helping newly unemployed workers by providing generous social services and subsidies for help them get through the crisis. difficult period after losing their jobs. The United States has a similar program called Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) that helps workers who have lost their jobs due to global competition. About a billion dollars a year are spent on retraining and unemployment benefits. Compared to the estimated hundreds of billions of dollars earned each year from free trade, it may not be much, but it’s a start.

Some estimates of the value of free trade, in the United States alone, are more than a trillion dollars a year. How is this possible? The way trading works is simple. You normally buy in other countries only if it is cheaper than it would be at home. The idea is to allow each country to sell what it produces most efficiently, and then allow it to import the rest. By allowing countries to export what they have a comparative advantage in producing, they can earn valuable foreign exchange, allowing them to import those goods and services that other countries make better.