Yet the anti-globalization movement never made a comeback. Even a decade after the attacks, it has failed to recapture the attentions of the masses. For instance: When Bruce Rich published Mortgaging the Earth, a seminal 1994 book on the environmental wrongs of the World Bank, it got two writeups in the New York Times, plus mentions in The Economist, National Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He released a follow-up, Foreclosing the Future, earlier this month with minimal fanfare. It’s just as deeply-researched and filled with heretofore publicly unavailable Bank documents as its predecessor, yet it’s received fairly little attention.

Some argue that the reason protests have cooled is that the World Bank and other globalizing institutions have rectified their policies. In the past year the Bank has created and implemented accountability programs and its president Jim Kim has called for new “high-risk/high-reward” approaches to alleviating poverty. Maybe things have changed enough to shake the heat.

Rich doesn’t think so. His book argues thoroughly and methodically that the Bank’s permissive attitude towards environmental destruction has continued, if not worsened, in the past decade, through a combination of project corruption and “institutional amnesia.” In the case of a climate change treaty in 2011, for example, the Bank cut funding for coal plants—except in the world’s poorest countries, which, by its logic, needed the cheapest sources of energy available. But “since the Bank, along with many other agencies, had reiterated that the poorest countries would suffer the most from climate change,” Rich writes, these groups must know that policies like this help underdeveloped nations “contribute to their own future climatic calamities, whether from drought or inundation.” Such internal contradictions are the same ones that led to anti-globalization ire in the first place. And besides, even if policies have changed, they haven’t improved so drastically as to account for the near-total disappearance of the movement.

A more likely explanation is that the American domestic situation has hit the fan. Many of the World Bank scholars, critics, and activists I spoke to highlighted the decline of the global and domestic economy as reasons for the decline of anti-globalization activism. Compared to the late '90s, the economy is in shambles, and it can be difficult to think of trade policy before one's own employment. In that light, globalization becomes something of an abstraction. Young people both in the United States and abroad have largely focused their protest efforts on internal problems: Thus far, the strongest uprising of this American generation is Occupy Wall Street, which mobilized youth to an unprecedented degree and which immediately drew comparisons to the anti-globalization protests of years past.