•    Globalization is progressive and has occurred in bursts that define globalization eras. The first era was the post-Bretton-Woods era (1971-1991), starting when the US dollar was decoupled from gold. End results of the post-Bretton-Woods era were: the systematic relative loss of middle-class economic status, and palpable social misery in the West, such as the emergence of urban homelessness in the 1980s, associated with a predictable major Western recession (1982 crash, from Third World debt defaults that were written down via Brady bonds.)¹

•    The second globalization era started immediately after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. It was a period of extended and accelerated globalization. The close targets were traditional USA-allied markets: Canada and Mexico (NAFTA), and Europe (mega-mergers). Europe somewhat resisted by forming the European economic union. Investment returns went into the stratosphere, as did CEO salaries. The USA industrial working class was decimated. China was brought into the capitalist orbit. The “deplorables versus bobos-and-elites” divide was created, as a major socio-geographic consequence in the West.

•    Measured human consequences synchronous with the post-1991 acceleration of globalization, mainly affecting the lower-income classes, in the West, include: loss of welfare safety net, increase of number of single-parent families, threefold increase in rate of confrontational litigation in the courts, between parents and between individuals and with the state (“crisis in access to justice”), increased low-income household basic-need incidence (housing, health, safety, work, finance), increased rates of both suicide and suicide attempt, increased rate of opioid overdose (preceding the opioid epidemic of the 2010s), and increased rates of chronic asthma emergencies, and asthma prevalence, in both children and adults.

•    Increased leniency in food and drug regulation, and a dramatic increase in the global use of the herbicide glyphosate starting in 1993 in the USA, were concurrent with post-1991 upsurges of diseases and chronic ailments: death from intestinal infections; incidence of thyroid cancer; death from Parkinson’s disease; prevalence of diabetes; autism in children of different age groups; and phobia, anxiety disorder, panic disorder.

1. “Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy”, by Michael Hudson, Lightning Source Inc., August 2015. https://michaelhudson.com/2015/09/killing-the-host-the-book/ — And see the two-part video interview with Michael Hudson: “Days of Revolt: How We Got to Junk Economics”, https://youtu.be/m4ylSG54i-A ; “Days of Revolt: Junk Economics and the Future”, https://youtu.be/cMuIoIidVWI . ↩︎