Why do so many protestors in the anti-globalization movement seem to have such a big appetite for the products of companies such as Nokia, Seiko, Nissan, Volvo, Toshiba, and the like? Maybe it’s because, as Anthony Bradley writes, their paternalistic views about the poor and the developing world blind them to the reality of the global economy.
Bradley uses Japan as an example of how international trade can boost a relatively weak economy and speed up the process of becoming an advanced nation. Bradley writes:
This is exactly what happened when Japan connected its economy to the rest of the world. Japan’s isolation from the West rendered it technologically and economically weedy. After opening trade with the West in 1854, Japanese leaders and scholars of the Meiji era studied the United States and its key formative figures like Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin. In the span of three generations, Japan went from an isolated, agrarian economy, to the second largest economy in the world—on an island with relatively few natural resources.