Professor Dani Rodrik of Harvard is not a blind admirer of globalization and free trade. Although he was born outside the US, holds dual nationality and travels all over the world, he feels that a citizen has to be part of a polity or a commonwealth. "Countries have such polities; the world does not," he writes. "Real citizenship entails interacting and deliberating with other citizens in a shared political community. It means holding decision makers to account and participating in politics to shape the policy outcomes," he says. "Global citizens do not have similar rights or responsibilities. No one is is accountable to them and there is no one to whom they must justify themselves." Which means they can and do make a lot of noise without caring for consequences. However, politicians do not get elected by the world, but by citizens of their own country and will enact policies that the people want, which will get them elected. Another Harvard professor, Ricardo Hausmann says that all politicians lie to get elected but when they act on their lies they cause real damage. Donald Trump got elected by promising to renegotiate Nafta but this trade deal may have created 333,000 jobs in the US. Free trade agreements are not as good as they are made out to be, writes Rodrik. Small countries have no bargaining power while governments of rich countries are influenced by lobbyists of powerful industries. This was evident after the financial crisis of 2008 when central banks lowered interest rates to near zero and bought bonds, known as quantitative easing, to increase lending and weaken their currencies. The previous Governor of the Reserve Bank, Raghuram Rajan repeatedly complained about this competitive devaluation by rich countries which resulted in a flood of money into emerging market economies, making their currencies overvalued and putting their them in danger of sudden fall if the current reversed. This happened to the rupee in September 2013 , when Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke talked of tapering off quantitative easing, known as 'taper tantrum'. What has globalization achieved? Just 8 billionaires hold as much wealth as the poorer half of the entire world population, that is 3.6 billion people. The difference in earnings between white and black in the US has reached a level not seen in 1950. While condemning central banks for their "global monetary non-system", why do people criticize Donald Trump for wanting to ring fence the US economy? Jochen Bittner wrote that citizens of the US and Europe are angry because of the unfair system. Advising the poor to eat cake is very unwise.
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