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Truong Thanh Chung

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What basis/stats can properly measure the degree of globalization

One said stats can be artfully used to present a convincing argument for any side of any issue. Ghemawat's talk is lack of the most important point, that is what basis/stats to properly measure the degree of globalization.

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Topics: globalization science society statistics
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  • george lockwood 30+

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    Oct 25 2012: Wait let's leave the college of Liberal Arts and consider science, too. Herman Kahn and Tom have also suggested that such subjects cannot always be ignored. Sad to say Man may not merely be a minor problem now.

  • george lockwood 30+

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    Oct 25 2012: The economist in the cited talk did a pretty good job. I too have been having problems with some of Tom Friedman's conclusions. Tom talks to the top men and hears their opinions. What about other viewpoints. I think the cited talk should encourage the rest of us to explore other issues. Ravi Batra's The pooring of America and Taki Sakiya the Knowledge Based Revolution should give us thought. I believe Ricardo and Thomas Malthus are very helpful and unfortunately miss-read and ignored. Finally, the least read but should be read award should go to Hernando Desoto of Peru. I never realized the importance of Justice Tawney until looking at his book.

  • John Smith 30+

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    Oct 24 2012: "What basis/stats can properly measure the degree of globalization"

    Air travel, foreign revenues of multinational corporations (relative to total revenue), international rade volume (relative to GDP), number of countries visited by production processes (for example: designed in Germany, resources mined in Australia, components build in China, assembled in Poland, marketed in the US, sold everywhere), number of expats, number of international marriages, etc...

  • Barry Palmer 50+

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    Oct 24 2012: Pankaj Ghemawat mentioned telephone traffic. Instead of comparing total international traffic to total traffic, first subtract out all calls of 100 km or less, whether or not they are international calls. I think that would be a better measure of globalization. If the local calls are included then countries that are geographically large will always have a smaller percentage. Another statistic that might be useful is the number of international calls per capita.

    Another statistic that would be useful for trends is the total tonnage of international shipping. The dollar values of international trade are usually used, and I think that can be misleading.

    In the USA, the number of people learning a foreign language would be a good measure for trends, especially because most of us have no reason to learn a second language.
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