DRAFT: Notes on Human Division-of-Labor Globalization from Stone Tools to the Assembly Line: -750000 to 1945
I’m going to be giving a guest lecture in Harvard’s GenEd 1120 “The Political Economy of Globalization”, taught by Robert Lawrence and Lawrence Summers. The topic they gave me was “Globalization from Adam to the Great Depression”, which is not small. Here is one first cut at what I might say. Behind he paywall as it is, after all, only an early draft…
Humanity’s unique superpower is its twin abilities to collaborate in the creation and development of knowledge on the one hand and of the division of labor on the other. And this has then led rapidly to globalization—vast networks of trade and cooperation that transcend any single political authority’s span of control or legal system’s span of jurisdiction. The benefits of global integration are and have always been distributed profoundly unequally. And since 1848 the rapid innovation and industrialization that have driven unprecedented wealth and social change have also greatly widened global inequality and risks from globalization gone wrong, or gone smash.
I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to accept the invitation. I am not sure it is kind to have the topic be “Globalization from Adam to the Great Depression”, but while we are not such as move heaven and earth, what we are, we are; and we will do what we can.
I want to run through a dozen or so slides. And then we—or rather you—will try to decide whether I have in fact made an argument, and, if I have, whether you believe it.