How cute, Nick Timothy thinks it's all about politics

Politics affects the world, certainly, but does not determine it:

For globalisation – the treaties, processes and structures that have made the world more complex, inter-connected and inter-reliant – is the product of political choices. Those choices, such as the regulation and deregulation of labour markets, the regulation and taxation of capital, and the terms on which countries traded with one another, determined not only that globalisation proceeded apace, but the nature of change it brought.

Globalisation - that process which is on the verge of finally killing off absolute poverty among human beings - was not a policy choice. Technological change meant that it was almost, almost, inevitable. The policy changes that would have been required to stop it were such that only the most insane of polities did in fact stop it.

Air travel has become cheaper in real terms. International telecoms have declined in price to being, in effect, free. Goods transport has declined in cost to where - pace just this past 18 months - it’s possible to move 40 tonnes of goods from anywhere to anywhere for $5,000.

With those three globalisation was inevitable. If goods, people and information are trivially cheap to move around then globalisation is inevitable. It’s possible, as North Korea has shown, to unplug from this but it does have to be that extreme in order to do so.

Our favourite example of this point comes from the 19th century. In antebellum America it was the South, that agrarian, plantation, society that was against tariffs upon imports. The North, with its growing manufacturing base, tended to desire much higher tariffs. Post-bellum, tariffs rose, doubled in fact and more for the North had won and who cared what the South thought?

Trade continued to rise though, the American economy continued to integrate into the global one. For the barriers to trade are tariffs (and quotas, bans, other political things) plus the costs of doing the trade - transport, communications and so on. The steamship alone so lowered ocean transport costs that despite the doubling of tariffs the costs of trade fell.

Looking back over this past 80 years yes, tariffs have fallen and so on. But it is those larger influences of cargo, communication and carriage that have really driven the process. As with the 19th century political trade barriers would have had to double, triple and more in order to stop the process and even then would likely only have slowed it. If we still had the trade politics of 1950 (just to pick a date) we would still have a very much more globalised economy today than we did back then.

Mr. Timothy ascribes far too much influence to political choice - but then he always does, doesn’t he?