Manifestations of the new global economy are everywhere. From the jeans you buy at your favorite shopping mall to the place mats you purchase at Target, most of the items we consume here in the United States are made somewhere else. Global production networks link consumers of fresh green beans in Britain with horticulturalists, pickers, and exporters in Zambia. And it isn't only products that move around the globe; so do people. Thanks to immense economic inequalities, upper and even middle class families in Europe, Japan, Canada and the U.S. enjoy the cheap and plentiful labor of Eastern European, Filipino, and Honduran nannies, housecleaners, and gardeners. Even diverse forms of "waste" associated with consumption and production from metal scrap to plastics to discarded electronics to a city's garbage have become global commodities as giant container ships make it economical to transport items unwanted in richer countries for use as raw materials in poorer ones, albeit at a high cost to human health and the environment.
How did this new global economy come to be, what forces are responsible for these changes, how has it impacted working people, consumers and ecosystems, and with what ethical and political implications?
In this course, we will focus on the changes that have taken place in the global economy over the last half-century (and occasionally more) in the realms of labor, consumption, and the environment. We will examine the economic theories, institutional changes, technological developments and practices that have undergirded them. We will focus heavily on transformations in forms of work, as well as ecological implications of global capitalism. Our mode of exploration will be both historical and contemporary. We will examine the movement away from the relatively regulated national economies of the 1940s-1960s to a more fully integrated global economy; changing patterns and organization of production, distribution, consumption, and waste disposal; the rise of neoliberalism; and the shift in the U.S. from "managerial capitalism to shareholder capitalism". Some of the substantive topics we will explore include the globalization of mass consumption and the rise of new middle classes in Turkey, China, India, and elsewhere; the culture of the "new" capitalism; the growing "precarity" and insecurity of work at all levels; the environmental changes global capitalism has wrought; recent economic and political crises in Europe and the United States; and alternatives to the "business-as-usual" economy.