Preface

Summary

This book is written from a perspective shared with Thomas Pogge:

We, the affluent countries and their citizens, continue to impose a global economic order under which millions avoidably die each year from poverty-related causes. We would regard it as a grave injustice if such an economic order were imposed within a national society. We must regard our imposition of the present global order as a grave injustice unless we have a plausible rationale for a suitable double standard. We do not have such a plausible rationale.

(T. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Polity Press, Oxford, 2002))

This book is the result of an investigation into a phenomenon that I found extremely puzzling: the fact that kind-hearted, intelligent, well-informed people could be found taking diametrically opposed views on the issues of international trade and the global economy and the operation of companies within that system. Take just one example: a firm believer in the ‘trickle-down effect’, Moore (in World Without Walls (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 146) encourages the ‘race to the bottom’ as an instrument for improvement. If jobs are shifted from Korea and Indonesia to China because wages are lower, so much the better – ‘I hope I live long enough to see wages in China rise so high that those jobs go to Ethiopia’. But an opponent of ‘trickle down’ notes that in China ‘at least 30 million city dwellers are jobless, up to 200 million peasants have no real work and up to 200 million more subsist as day labourers … Enormous wealth is being created, but too much is being pocketed by too few’ (R. Righter, The Times, 30 September 2003).