The Great Convergence, de Richard Baldwin — Resumo

Sinopse

Baldwin’s central thesis is that globalization is best understood as the progressive unbundling of production from consumption, driven by falls in three distinct “separation costs” — the cost of moving goods, the cost of moving ideas, and the cost of moving people. The steam revolution cut the cost of moving goods and produced the first unbundling and the Great Divergence of the nineteenth century. The ICT revolution around 1990 cut the cost of moving ideas and produced the second unbundling, allowing firms in rich countries to slice supply chains across borders and to relocate stages of production — together with the know-how that makes them work — into a handful of developing economies. That movement of knowledge across borders, embedded inside global value chains, is what powers the Great Convergence: the rapid industrial rise of countries such as China, Korea, Poland, and Thailand, and the hollowing of G7 manufacturing.

The argument is built in two halves. The first is historical and theoretical: Baldwin retells the story of globalization as a three-cascading-constraints model (goods, ideas, people), then rebuilds it using comparative advantage, agglomeration economics, New Economic Geography, endogenous growth, and supply-chain economics. The “smile curve” — value concentrated in pre- and post-production services rather than fabrication — and cases like Apple, Dyson, and Honda in Vietnam do the heavy conceptual lifting. The second half is prescriptive: Baldwin takes his framework and rewrites development policy, G7 industrial policy, trade policy, and a forecast of what comes next. Thailand versus Malaysia, Korea’s chaebol model, Querétaro and Bombardier, and the “Industrializing Six” provide the empirical spine. The closing chapter pushes the logic forward into a speculative third unbundling, in which telepresence and telerobotics would let labor services cross borders without bodies crossing borders.

For this vault, Baldwin matters as one of the most rigorous accounts of the economic machinery behind the populist moment and the crisis of democratic capitalism. His framework explains the geography of the winners and losers that Martin Wolf, Didi Kuo, and Fukuyama describe politically: why middle-skill industrial workers in the G7 were hit by an abrupt, task-level shock rather than a sector-level shock, why the old national-competitiveness vocabulary failed, and why protecting workers rather than jobs became the only coherent social policy. It also matters for Brazilian political economy: Baldwin’s distinction between countries that joined global value chains and those that did not cuts directly across the Latin American trajectory, and his warning that fabrication employment is a poor measure of industrial strength reframes the Brazilian reindustrialization debate. Finally, his third-unbundling speculation — “remote intelligence” as a force comparable to artificial intelligence — connects straight into the AI / work / thymos axis already mapped in the vault.

Chapter 1 — Humanizing the Globe and the First Bundling

Baldwin pushes the history of globalization back to the moment Homo sapiens leaves Africa. In this very long first phase, survival drives people across the planet and production and consumption are spatially bundled in the most literal way possible: humans consume where they find food, and when a place can no longer sustain them, they move. Early long-distance exchange exists (obsidian in prehistoric Southwest Asia) but is marginal. The key fact is geographic dispersion, not commerce. This establishes his central analytical frame: globalization changes whenever the relationship between production and consumption changes.

The first transformation begins with the climate warming roughly twelve thousand years ago, which makes sustained agriculture possible and reverses the logic of mobility. Now food is cultivated where people live. Baldwin calls this the first bundling: production and consumption remain together, but now in fixed locations. Surpluses free a minority for war, religion, administration, and writing. Cities emerge because density itself becomes productive. The earliest production-consumption clusters appear in river valleys — Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Indus, the Yellow River — and Baldwin is explicit that Asia comes first. For most of this era, the economic and civilizational center of gravity lies in the Middle East, India, and China, not in Europe.

Eurasian integration follows, from around 200 BCE to 1350 CE, centered on the Silk Road. Baldwin qualifies this carefully: the Silk Road connected civilizations but did not create mass globalization. Transport was too primitive. Goods moved in tiny quantities, affecting courts and elites without remaking the consumption of ordinary people; but ideas, techniques, religions, and diseases did travel across continents. From 1350 to 1820, Europe rises. The Black Death restarts history on new terms — labor scarcity raises European wages and weakens feudalism, while the Islamic world suffers more lasting urban damage. Europe inherits knowledge from the Islamic world and China, the closure of the Silk Road pushes it toward maritime routes, and the Columbian Exchange — American crops sustaining European population growth, Old World diseases shattering the Americas — shifts the center of gravity toward northwestern Europe. Baldwin refuses any triumphalist Western narrative: Asia still dominates the world economy deep into the second millennium, and Europe’s rise rests on borrowed knowledge, historical shocks, and ecological luck.

Chapter 2 — Steam and Globalization’s First Unbundling

Steam power dramatically lowered transport costs and broke the old geography of economic life. Once it became economical to move goods over long distances, production no longer had to sit next to consumers. Baldwin organizes the chapter as a three-act drama. Act I, 1820–1913: falling trade costs drive trade, industrialization, urbanization, and growth. Act II, 1914–1945: war and protectionism partially force production and consumption back together. Act III, 1946–1990: liberalization and new transport technologies restart and deepen the unbundling. Steam does not act alone — the gold standard, better shipping, inland waterways, railways, and later internal combustion all matter — but it is the initiating shock.

Act I transforms the nineteenth century. Pax Britannica and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 create a relatively stable framework; the continent oscillates between liberalization and protectionism, but the fall in transport costs is so dramatic that it overwhelms many barriers. Industry spreads from Britain to Belgium, France, Germany, the United States, and Japan. Agglomeration matters: once factories, skilled workers, investors, and inventors cluster in the same places, innovation accelerates and industry becomes self-reinforcing. The North industrializes; India and China deindustrialize. Baldwin ties this to the Great Divergence. Growth takeoffs happen almost everywhere, but they come sooner and faster in the G7, and small annual growth differences, compounded over decades, produce enormous income gaps. The decisive mechanism is the uneven distribution of productive know-how: goods crossed borders more easily than before, but the tacit knowledge embedded in industrial districts, engineers, and institutions remained stubbornly local.

Act II is the reversal. World War I, the interwar collapse, and World War II reimposed geography. Protectionism returned (Smoot-Hawley as symbol, though not the only cause); the gold standard limited room to adjust. Production and consumption rebundled locally. Act III explains the postwar resumption. The real break comes with the rules-based trade order under GATT: most-favored-nation treatment, national treatment, transparency, reciprocity, consensus decisions. Reciprocity mobilizes exporters against domestic protectionists, producing a “juggernaut effect” in favor of liberalization. Containerization slashes shipping costs further. By 1990 the first unbundling has built a modern world of booming trade and rich industrial cores — but not yet a world in which productive know-how itself is mobile. That asymmetry sets up the second unbundling.

Chapter 3 — ICT and Globalization’s Second Unbundling

Baldwin opens with Querétaro, Mexico, and Bombardier as a concrete example of the new globalization: a city rising by receiving sophisticated slices of production from foreign firms, not just factories but the productive knowledge that comes with them. The enabling force is the ICT revolution — a true revolution, because the costs of storing, processing, and transmitting information collapsed with unusual speed. Email, digital files, telecommunications networks, and later internet-based coordination systems made it possible to manage complex production chains across long distances in near real time. Air cargo mattered too, not because it was cheap but because it was fast and reliable enough to rescue time-sensitive production systems.

This enables the second unbundling: different stages of production themselves can be separated and placed in different countries. The G7 loses manufacturing share; a small set of developing economies gains it rapidly. Baldwin highlights the “Industrializing Six” — China, Korea, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Poland — with China as the overwhelmingly dominant case. He is explicit that the gains were not evenly spread: a narrow group of “Rising Eleven” economies absorbed most of the global GDP share lost by the G7 after 1990, some via manufacturing, others via commodities, with India standing out for services. Trade itself changes character: North-South trade begins to resemble the back-and-forth, parts-and-components trade long seen among rich countries. Value-added statistics matter more than gross exports because they show where the actual contribution is created inside a chain.

Policy in developing countries adapts. From the late 1980s into the 1990s, many governments liberalized trade, welcomed foreign investment, signed bilateral investment treaties, and accepted deeper agreements reaching inside the border into regulation, services, capital flows, and intellectual property. These were not ideological conversions — they were attempts to attract slices of global production networks, which required legal protections and reliable business conditions. The chapter closes on poverty reduction with a sharp qualification. The great fall in poverty from the early 1990s happens mainly in upper-middle-income countries plugged into offshoring and the commodity super-cycle. The poorest countries, outside these networks, did not experience the same turnaround. The deepest effect of the second unbundling was not simply more trade, but the international movement of know-how.

Chapter 4 — A Three-Cascading-Constraints View of Globalization

This chapter presents the book’s central analytical model. Baldwin argues that globalization is easier to understand if we stop thinking of “distance” as a single obstacle and instead distinguish three costs: moving goods, moving ideas, and moving people. These fell in sequence. First goods, then ideas, while the cost of moving people — especially for the face-to-face contact needed to transmit tacit knowledge — remains comparatively high. From that sequence he builds a three-stage framework: pre-steam (three binding constraints), the first unbundling (two constraints), and the second unbundling (one constraint).

Pre-steam, all three constraints were severe and production had to stay close to consumption. Local self-sufficiency dominated; innovation was weak. Steam relaxed the goods constraint while leaving ideas and people largely stuck, producing the first unbundling and the Great Divergence: lower trade costs globalized markets, but high communication costs kept the gains from innovation national. To explain why industry clustered so intensely, Baldwin adds agglomeration dynamics to the Ricardian story. The old globalization did not flatten the world; it made it dramatically spikier.

The second break came when ICT slashed the cost of moving ideas. Communication became cheap enough for firms to separate stages of production internationally without losing control. But the world still did not become fully flat, because moving people remained expensive. That is why production dispersed regionally rather than universally: Factory Asia, Factory Europe, Factory North America. Baldwin resolves the apparent paradox — why cities keep attracting people as production fragments — by noting that cheaper digital communication raises rather than lowers the value of in-person contact, because tacit knowledge, trust, and complex coordination still need it. The chapter’s most important substantive claim is that second-unbundling growth came from moving know-how across borders inside global value chains. In the nineteenth century, mass migration moved labor toward land-rich regions; in the late twentieth, ICT moved G7 know-how toward labor-abundant economies. Unlike migration, these knowledge flows are tightly controlled by firms, which is why the gains were geographically concentrated.

Chapter 5 — What’s Really New?

Baldwin cuts through the “world is flat” rhetoric. What changed around 1990 was not simply that countries traded more, but that production itself was reorganized across borders. Firms in advanced economies stopped treating the factory as a single nationally bounded unit and began separating production into stages, relocating some abroad while keeping others at home. This is the core institutional fact behind the New Globalization, and it alters the meaning of competition: instead of national production systems competing, cross-border production networks compete. Comparative advantage is “denationalized” — a Vietnamese supplier linked to Honda does not merely use local labor more efficiently; it absorbs foreign know-how, management methods, quality control, and organizational discipline, and is thereby changed in what it can competitively produce.

From that follows one of the book’s hardest claims: the classical reassurance that all nations necessarily gain from globalization becomes much less secure. Once knowledge and production stages move internationally, a country can lose advantages that once belonged to its own production system while another acquires them without having independently developed them. Trade itself also changes character: twenty-first-century trade is more tangled, goods crossing borders repeatedly as parts and components, with services, investment, engineers, designs, intellectual property, software, logistics, and managerial routines traveling alongside them. This is especially visible in North-South integration: developing economies gained new routes into world markets through exports of parts and components rather than only final goods.

Baldwin’s smile curve does the central conceptual work: the second unbundling shifted value away from fabrication and toward pre- and post-production functions — design, R&D, branding, financing, logistics, software, distribution, after-sales services. Apple is the brutal illustration: assembly in China, disproportionate value capture in California and in service-heavy activities around the product. At the economy-wide level this becomes servicification: manufactured exports depend increasingly on service inputs, and the border between manufacturing and services becomes meaningless. The chapter closes on labor market polarization. The new winners are owners of technology, brands, and organizational know-how, plus the highly skilled workers who complement them. The new losers are middle-skill manufacturing workers whose tasks can be automated or offshored. Low-wage local service jobs are often less exposed because they must be performed in person. Because competition now strikes at the level of tasks and stages rather than whole sectors, shocks arrive faster, hit narrower groups more selectively, and are harder for governments to manage with old tools.

Chapter 6 — Quintessential Globalization Economics

This chapter provides the analytical backbone of the book. Baldwin argues that the biggest historical facts of globalization can be understood through four frameworks: Ricardian comparative advantage, economies of scale and market structure, New Economic Geography, and endogenous growth combined with the economics of offshoring. He is isolating the minimum set of ideas needed to explain why the first unbundling produced the Great Divergence and the second unbundling the Great Convergence.

Ricardo remains the foundation. Trade works as arbitrage: when relative prices differ across countries, both sides can gain by exchanging what is cheap for them for what is expensive for them. Meiji Japan is the historical illustration. But gains from trade are never painless — price changes reallocate labor and capital, producing winners and losers even when the country as a whole gains. Ricardo alone cannot explain clustering, so Baldwin turns to scale economies and New Economic Geography. Trade integration enlarges effective markets, intensifies competition, and concentrates production where it can serve demand most efficiently. Agglomeration forces — big markets, supplier networks, thick labor pools, knowledge spillovers — pull firms together; wages, congestion, and local competition push them apart. One consequence is the home-market magnification effect: as trade costs fall, firms can become more rather than less footloose, triggering bigger geographic shifts than intuition suggests.

Combined with endogenous growth theory, this explains the bridge from divergence to convergence. In the nineteenth century, lower trade costs reinforced the clustering of industry and innovation in the North, helping generate the Great Divergence. In the late twentieth, ICT reduced the cost of transmitting know-how across distance, weakening the old geographic monopoly of rich-country production. The last part of the chapter turns to supply-chain economics. Baldwin distinguishes fractionalization — slicing production into finer stages — from dispersion — placing stages in different locations. Specialization pays only until coordination costs overwhelm the gains. ICT is double-edged: some of it promotes fragmentation by lowering coordination costs, some of it works against fragmentation by automating tasks. Offshoring adds a spatial decision on top: firms relocate stages when wage savings exceed separation costs (shipping, delays, quality control, contract enforcement, managerial oversight). These costs are non-linear — each extra foreign stage can multiply the relationships that must be managed — which produces tipping-point behavior. Firms keep activities at home longer than simple wage comparisons would suggest, and then, once coordination technology improves enough, several stages move in rapid succession. That is one reason the second unbundling felt sudden. Finally, Baldwin notes that jobs are bundles of tasks, and globalization now acts on those bundles rather than on whole industries: within the same factory, one worker’s codifiable tasks are offshorable while another’s troubleshooting and coordination tasks are not. This is the toolkit for the rest of the book.

Chapter 7 — Accounting for Globalization’s Changed Impact

Baldwin uses this chapter synthetically, connecting theory to history. For the first unbundling, falling trade costs help explain Northern industrialization and Southern deindustrialization. Drawing on Krugman and Venables, he shows how lower transport costs encouraged industrial specialization, and how industrial concentration in the North reinforced itself through circular causality. But he insists the abstract model is insufficient: Asia began the nineteenth century much larger than Europe in aggregate output. To explain why the smaller North became the industrial core he adds political factors (imperial power), economic factors (per capita income and market composition), and geographic factors (market access and the proximity of North Atlantic economies).

Industrial concentration mattered not only because factories clustered in the North, but because innovation clustered there as well. Once knowledge creation concentrated in Northern industry, the North gained a self-reinforcing advantage: industrialization accelerated innovation, innovation raised productivity, higher productivity made the North an even better place for industry. The South suffered the reverse process. That is the mechanism of the Great Divergence — not a single event, but compounding growth differences built on the localized nature of knowledge spillovers during the first age of globalization. Urbanization fits the same logic: cities grew because they reduce communication costs the way factories reduce coordination costs. Urbanization is not a side effect of globalization but part of its internal logic.

The chapter then turns to the second unbundling. Once ICT lowered the cost of moving ideas, knowledge spillovers stopped being only an agglomeration force and became a dispersion force. G7 firms could combine proprietary know-how with low wages in selected developing countries. This was not a generalized industrial renaissance across the developing world; it favored a handful of countries that could plug into global value chains, especially those close enough to major knowledge centers for face-to-face coordination to remain feasible. In this framework, offshoring, Northern deindustrialization, rapid Southern industrialization, commodity super-cycles, and the Great Convergence all become connected outcomes of the same transformation. Countries that joined global value chains did so not by reproducing the old national supply chain model but by entering international production networks and deepening their role. That required openness to trade, investment, services, and stronger IP protections. But policy reform alone was not enough — because moving people remains costly, distance still matters decisively. Firms concentrated production in nearby countries where managers, engineers, and technicians could travel easily, which is why Asia, Central America, and Central Europe benefited more than South America and Africa.

Chapter 8 — Rethinking G7 Globalization Policies

Baldwin opens politically: advanced-country governments cannot sustain support for openness unless citizens believe the gains and losses are shared fairly. The old promise of progress has weakened because the new globalization produces visible disruption while making its benefits harder to locate within national borders. His first target is the old language of national competitiveness. The 1990s obsession with competitiveness was misleading because it framed nations as if they were firms in a zero-sum contest. What policymakers should care about is growth in domestic living standards. In the world of the second unbundling, that means distinguishing between factors that are internationally mobile and those that are sticky, and between investments that generate large spillovers and those that do not. Mobile capital and even some forms of knowledge can be subsidized at home and used abroad — governments may bear the cost while capturing only part of the benefit. By contrast, highly skilled labor, tacit knowledge, and social capital are both harder to move and more likely to generate local spillovers. Conclusion: human capital is the best core target for competitiveness policy.

This leads directly to industrial policy. Rich countries should stop treating factory employment as the primary measure of industrial strength. In the age of global value chains, fabrication can be offshored and commoditized while the highest value remains in design, engineering, branding, logistics, management, and other pre- and post-fabrication services. The smile curve means a country can lose assembly jobs yet retain or even expand its best manufacturing-related jobs. His Dyson example shows that offshoring can destroy some factory employment while preserving or enlarging higher-value domestic work. G7 governments should worry less about preserving fabrication for its own sake and more about building the dense service ecosystems that make advanced manufacturing possible. That argument culminates in cities. Cities are the twenty-first-century equivalent of factories: the places where dense interaction, matching, experimentation, and idea exchange raise productivity. Policymakers should stop thinking in terms of “good sectors” and start thinking in terms of “good jobs,” many of which will be service jobs linked to manufacturing.

Baldwin argues that the new globalization has broken the old social compact between national labor and national technology. In the earlier era, domestic workers could expect to benefit from advances in domestic technology because production remained nationally bundled. Now the same technology can be paired with lower-cost labor abroad, so workers in rich countries increasingly face competition from combinations such as American know-how plus Mexican wages. That is why governments must protect workers rather than jobs. Social policy has to provide security, retraining, and adaptability, because demanding flexibility from workers without cushioning the shocks is politically and socially unsustainable. The chapter ends by redefining trade policy itself. Exports and imports are now bundles of many countries’ labor, capital, knowledge, and services. Trade policy therefore has to support the functioning of global value chains, not merely lower tariffs on finished goods: deeper rules covering investment, intellectual property, competition policy, capital flows, infrastructure services, and the temporary movement of managers and technicians. Since global value chains are only weakly governed at the global level, Baldwin sees deep regional agreements and complex rule networks as the attempt to build the institutional framework that twenty-first-century trade requires.

Chapter 9 — Rethinking Development Policy

Baldwin starts from a stark contrast: in 1990 roughly two out of three people in the world lived below the World Bank’s $3.10-a-day line; by 2012 that share had fallen to about one in three. He treats that shift as evidence that something structurally new happened in the world economy. The decisive change was the second unbundling: firms in advanced economies stopped needing entire production systems in one place and began slicing supply chains across borders. That created a new route to development. Instead of first building a full national industrial base and then becoming competitive internationally, poorer countries could enter existing global value chains and borrow capabilities — technology, managerial systems, quality control, and market access — that previously took decades to develop domestically.

He then revisits the older schools of development thinking. Import-substitution industrialization assumed governments had to force a “big push” by protecting domestic markets until scale and spillovers made local firms competitive. The Washington Consensus reacted against that approach but did not really solve the central puzzle. Baldwin’s auto case study shows why the old logic failed: assembly using imported kits was easy, but building a competitive domestic parts industry was much harder because markets were too small, technology was embedded in specialized components, and scale economies were indispensable. Korea is the exceptional success story — state direction, chaebol-led investment, and export expansion built a national auto industry — but after the 1997 Asian crisis even Korea had to liberalize, accept foreign investment, and become part of international supply chains. Thailand versus Malaysia sharpens the point. Thailand used a “join” strategy, inducing Japanese assemblers and suppliers to make it a production platform inside a larger regional network; it gained scale, export discipline, supplier learning, and industrial employment. Malaysia tried to imitate the older Korean route through Proton and a nationally integrated auto strategy, and ended up trapped in chronic small-scale production with weak exports.

The chapter’s theoretical core reframes industrialization as a multiple-equilibria problem. In the old world, moving from an agrarian to an industrial equilibrium required a massive “minimum critical effort,” because production was lumpy: firms needed broad domestic capabilities, large markets, and dense supporting networks before they could compete. The second unbundling reduced lumpiness and turned one giant leap into many smaller steps. It also magnified comparative advantage by letting nations specialize at a finer level of resolution — a country that could not build a whole car competitively might still be highly competitive in wire harnesses, seat covers, or a narrow manufacturing stage. The traditional “development ladder” from textiles to machinery to advanced industry became less relevant once the question shifted from “which sector?” to “which segment of which chain?” Baldwin closes soberly. The new policy questions are threefold: how a country enters global value chains, how it expands and densifies its participation once in, and how it makes that participation socially sustainable. Entry requires credible property rights, reliable logistics, world-class business services, and smooth cross-border movement of people, inputs, and outputs. Expansion requires deeper domestic linkages so foreign-led production does not remain an isolated enclave. Sustainability requires labor standards, social upgrading, and institutions capable of distributing gains broadly enough to preserve political support. Global value chains are a powerful new door into industrialization, but they do not eliminate the old burdens of development.

Chapter 10 — Future Globalization

This is Baldwin’s speculative finale. Globalization has always been driven by reductions in three separation costs: the cost of moving goods, the cost of moving ideas, and the cost of moving people. The first unbundling followed the dramatic fall in shipping costs; the second followed the dramatic fall in the cost of transmitting ideas. The next big transformation will happen only if the cost of moving people falls in an equivalent sense — not literal migration suddenly becoming cheap, but the emergence of technologies that create close substitutes for physical presence. If workers in poor countries can sell labor services inside rich countries without crossing borders, globalization will enter a new phase with consequences at least as dramatic as the manufacturing revolution of the late twentieth century.

Baldwin walks through the likely trajectory of each separation cost. Trade costs are unlikely to rise sharply, because cross-border production networks have transformed the politics of protection: when supply chains straddle borders, shutting them no longer “protects” domestic industry in the old way and can instead destroy domestic jobs. Communication costs will continue to fall as digital technologies improve, though states can still interfere through censorship. The most interesting change concerns face-to-face costs. High-end telepresence systems, richer audio-video environments, remote sensing, and telerobotics point toward a world in which more and more interaction can occur without physical travel. Production unbundling is unlikely to stop, though not necessarily in the same places or for the same reasons. Existing industrial clusters retain enormous power because of agglomeration economies, but as wages rise in successful manufacturing centers such as China, some of the logic that originally drew factories there weakens. As developing countries get richer, trade between them and advanced economies will look less like simple North-South exchange based on cheap labor and more like dense two-way supply-chain trade.

The chapter’s boldest idea is the third unbundling. Baldwin redefines offshoring as arbitrage between high-wage economies with advanced know-how and low-wage economies with abundant labor. In manufacturing, that worked by moving parts of the factory abroad. But many services could not be offshored the same way because the labor service and the laborer had to be in the same place at the same time. Telepresence and telerobotics could break that constraint. High-skill “brain services” might be delivered through immersive remote interaction; manual services might be delivered through remotely operated machines. That would amount to a kind of virtual immigration: instead of workers crossing borders physically, their labor would cross borders electronically. For Baldwin, that would do for large parts of the service economy what the second unbundling did for manufacturing. On the positive side, better telepresence and telerobotics could spread industrialization and know-how transfer to many more developing countries than the current set of global value chain winners — parts of Africa and South America could gain new access. On the disruptive side, service workers in rich countries could find themselves in direct competition with remote workers in poorer countries across sectors previously sheltered by non-tradability. Since services account for the majority of employment in advanced economies, the labor-market shock could exceed what manufacturing offshoring produced. Baldwin suggests remote intelligence may become at least as important a force as artificial intelligence in reshaping work. Goods drove the first era of globalization, ideas drove the second, and virtual presence may drive the third. Governments and firms that continue to think in the categories of the old globalization will be blindsided by what comes next.

Ver também

• wolf_crisis_of_democratic_capitalism — Martin Wolf descreve politicamente o que Baldwin descreve economicamente: a crise do contrato social nos países ricos depois que o segundo unbundling hollowed out a classe trabalhadora industrial.
• resumo_the_great_retreat_didi_kuo — Didi Kuo explica o recuo dos partidos de centro-esquerda como resposta ao choque da globalização; Baldwin fornece a mecânica econômica do choque que produziu esse recuo.
• neoliberalism — o vocabulário de competitividade nacional e reforma pró-mercado que Baldwin quer aposentar é o núcleo do consenso neoliberal dos anos 1990.
• fukuyama_political_order_decay_resumo — Fukuyama mostra como instituições se degradam quando elites capturam ganhos; Baldwin explica por que, no mundo das global value chains, as elites ganham fácil e a classe média industrial perde rápido.
• harari — Harari olha o mesmo horizonte tecnológico pelo lado da IA e do fim do trabalho; Baldwin chega ao mesmo lugar pelo lado da telepresença e telerrobótica (“remote intelligence”).
• sociedade_rede — Castells descreve a infraestrutura informacional que tornou possível o segundo unbundling; Baldwin mostra o que a infraestrutura fez com a geografia da produção.