One From the Many

The title of Christopher Meissner’s book on globalization is brilliantly appropriate: One From the Many. It’s a deliberate reference to the Latin phrase familiar to all users of dollar bills, “E pluribus unum,” traditionally translated as “out of many, one.” Yet the unification that Meissner identifies isn’t political; it’s economic. It’s the unification of the peoples of many different nations—of many different cultures, creeds, conditions, and callings—into one society, a society that transcends political boundaries and language differences. It’s the global economy. Its whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.

In this economy today, each person benefits from the creativity and work effort of literally billions of his or her fellow human beings, just as this person promotes—through his or her own creativity and work effort—the well-being of these billions. Today’s globe-spanning market order encourages and directs a division of labor that generates annual global output now worth about $106 trillion, or just over $13,000 for every man, woman, and child. If this output were spread evenly, every person on earth in 2025 would enjoy access to roughly ten times—measured in monetary value—the amount of material goods and services that was available to the typical human being for nearly all of human history until the Industrial Revolution.

But, of course, this output isn’t distributed evenly. Individuals in “developing” countries have much fewer of these riches than do individuals in developed countries. The annual output of the 38 OECD countries today totals $64.1 trillion. With a population of 1.38 billion, that’s an average of about $46,500 per OECD denizen. In just one of those OECD countries—the United States—per-capita annual income is now north of $80,000.

I need not dwell on these income differences; modern sensibilities being what they are, hordes of other scholars and pundits rush to do so, eager to tell a simple morality tale of the powerful haves mistreating the hapless have-nots. And that’s a shame, not least because the big economic story of the past few centuries is the tremendous increase in the material standard of living for the masses—most of whom are descended from long lines of have-nots—who live in market-oriented economies. The fact that some individuals’ gains were larger than those of other individuals shrinks—or should shrink—into insignificance when put alongside the stupendous enormity of the gains enjoyed by the masses in market-oriented societies.

International trade did not alone create what the historian Stephen Davies aptly calls “the wealth explosion” (The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity, Edward Everett Root, 2019). If Deirdre McCloskey (Bourgeois Equality, University of Chicago Press, 2016) is correct (as I believe her to be), the main catalyst for this glorious explosion was a change in a more favorable direction of attitudes toward commerce, economic innovation, and creative destruction. Yet globalization both supercharged the wealth explosion and was itself supercharged by the attitudes that make modern prosperity possible.

Meissner—a professor of economics at UC-Davis—accurately subtitled his book The Global Economy Since 1850. After being treated to a quick survey of trade during the many millennia before the modern age, the reader is then immersed in the historical, political, and economic details of the past two hundred years. The reader learns that globalization—of people (through immigration), as well as of goods, services, and capital—is generally a force for good. Meissner reports on how the first great wave of globalization, which crested in the early twentieth century, differs from the second great wave, which we in 2025 are still riding. One key difference is that much more of what’s internationally traded today are component parts. Compared to the past, countries today have far fewer comparative advantages (and disadvantages) at producing whole products—automobiles, kitchen appliances, machine tools—and far more comparative advantages (and disadvantages) at performing the various highly specialized and quite narrow tasks that, when coordinated together by the price system, result in whole products. Very many of today’s imports and exports contain intermediate inputs—including human work effort and creativity—from several different countries. Today, very many goods (and, increasingly, also services) are best described as “Made on Earth” (Daniel J. Ikenson, “Made on Earth: How Global Economic Integration Renders Trade Policy Obsolete,” Trade Policy Analysis No. 42, Cato Institute, December 2, 2009).

Although he himself never puts the matter this way, Meissner makes clear that the incessant references that we now hear to “supply chains” are highly misleading. Today’s global economy is not a collection of supply chains lying side by side but detached from each other. It is, instead, one gigantic supply web. In the global economy of the twenty-first century, nearly everything is economically connected in some fashion to nearly everything else. One implication of this reality is that attempts by government officials to “repatriate the supply chain” for this, that, or the other kind of good will tug on far more economic cords than these officials can comprehend. This tugging will inevitably disrupt economic relationships unknown and practically unknowable to the tugging officials. And these disruptions might themselves tighten other cords, loosen yet others, and thus cause further disruptions that work their way back to the home country in a manner that harms the home country economically and perhaps even militarily.

There might be defensible reasons—more precisely, national-defensible reasons—for arranging for greater domestic production of, say, steel or semiconductors. Nevertheless, let’s not pretend that doing so is a simple matter without risk of unforeseen collateral damage to the economy or even to the industries that are sought to be protected.

Beyond his workmanlike demonstration of the differences that separate today’s global economy from that of 120 years ago, Meissner offers chapters that focus on (among other topics) the international gold standard, the Great Depression, and the Bretton Woods agreement and other post-WWII efforts to prevent the destructive economic nationalism that reigned during the interwar years. Especially for the reader who isn’t specialized in international economics, there’s much that will be learned in these pages. Important empirical findings are presented as well as explanations of key international-economics concepts. An example of the former is Figure 3.11 showing that the international dispersion of real-wage differences declined from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century as economic integration increased. An example of the latter is Meissner’s clear description of the “new trade theory” developed in the 1970s and 1980s by, among other theorists, Paul Krugman.

As a survey of key events and trends in the global economy of the past two centuries, Meissner’s book performs admirably (with some exceptions to be mentioned below). Likewise for his presentation of the main theories used to analyze and explain these events and trends. But as I studied the text I was never sure who Meissner had in mind as his intended audience. For much of the time the book seems pitched to an intelligent audience curious about globalization but not specialized in economics. Yet at other times Meissner writes as if he’s communicating only with other professional economists. I doubt that many readers not specialized in international economics or finance will follow, for example, his discussion of the instability of the interwar gold-exchange standard.

Writing often for a non-specialized audience, yet on several occasions, and without warning, shifting his pitch to his fellow specialists, gives Meissner’s text an uneven feel.

While the bulk of the book is useful, it’s marred by several head-scratchers, such as this line that appears in Meissner’s discussion of the Greek debt crises of 2009–2010: “After the fact, the European banks, which were all too willing to lend, ostensibly expected a bailout should trouble occur. This type of moral hazard is clearly a market failure” (p. 295). I don’t think that I’m being excessively persnickety to insist that there is no market failure at work when a government gives individuals or companies reason to believe that it will bail them out if they get into financial trouble.

Another curiosity, given his obvious chops as a trade economist, is Meissner’s uncritical treatment of Dani Rodrik’s notion of “hyperglobalization” (see, for example, Dani Rodrik, “Globalization’s Wrong Turn and How It Hurt America,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2019, pp. 26–33). This neologism is obviously designed to elicit emotion rather than to further rational thought. What, exactly, distinguishes hyperglobalization from mere globalization? Are we Americans hyperintegrated with each other when we would be merely “integrated” with each other were the courts not so insistent that the U.S. Constitution prohibits state governments from erecting trade barriers? Whatever hyperglobalization is, we learn that it has the approval of “many mainstream economists and other ‘globalists’” (p. 287).

If Meissner is writing for a non-specialized audience, he’d do the cause of sound economics—and public policy—a good service by not lending credence to the charge that mainstream economists’ support for free trade springs from their being “globalists.” “Globalists,” of course, is another muddy term used by protectionists to smear proponents of free trade. Its use is intended to cast free traders as unpatriotic and out-of-touch elites who are cold-heartedly willing to sacrifice the well-being of their fellow citizens in order to promote that of foreigners. But, of course, nearly every argument advanced by economists in support of free trade shows that such trade, contrary to popular belief, is a boon to people in the home country. It’s bad enough that economically uninformed protectionists call supporters of free trade “globalists”; a skilled and serious economist such as Meissner shouldn’t join them.

There is much of value in One From the Many, but readers should be aware that it has more than its share of quirks.