I actually think globalisation is a good idea. It's unethical to have 90% of the world's wealth enjoyed by only 10% of the population. Also war is bad for business and extremely expensive. If the entire world is economically interlocked by free trade with the world's wealth more fairly distributed then war becomes less likely. However as Alcaray astutely implied, there's a startup transient when the world goes from a tarif based economy to globalized free trade. That transient is currently kicking America in the ass and putting a lot of us out of work. We (America) need to be playing it smart.

The key to having globalization AND retaining our standard of living is in having a rapidly advancing technology that creates new products and markets. Case in point was my example of the third world engineers in India using FLUENT to design automobile engine combustion chambers. FLUENT is a commerically available Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program based upon algorithms developed at the CFD Branch at NASA Ames. I actually worked as a Ph.D. student at the CFD branch when the staff scientists were discovering many of the basic CFD algorithms. In the mid 1980s, America had a near monopoly on CFD because we had developed the new methods. Unfortunately do to a plotical SNAFU, the NASA Ames CFD branch was terminated and its experts scattered to the four winds. After that, CFD advanced much more slowly and the knowledge that was once the monopoly of NASA Ames began to diffuse world wide. It became possible for people to write canned packages like FLUENT and start marketing it. After that, CFD became a commodity.

I must emphasize that CFD is NOT a solved problem. People still don't know how to model turbulence properly and only have a glimmer of a clue how to do CFD in parallel on big computer clusters. Had the Ames CFD branch survived, the United States would still control the cutting edge technology while the rest of the world made due with the obsolete technology of 20 years ago. Controlling the state-of-the-art technology is the way it must be if we are to maintain our standard of living. However we are doing exactly the opposite. The engines producing new technology are being shutdown due to lack of R&D funding and poor management. In essence we are eating our seed corn. Soon all of our high tech will be commodities. After that, we'll be competing toe-to-toe with the third world at third world wages.

Gary