How, then, can globalization’s advocates claim that everybody will be better off? What the theory says is that everybody could be better off. That is, the winners could compensate the losers. But it doesn’t say that they will—and they usually don’t. In fact, globalization’s advocates often claim that globalization means that they can’t and shouldn’t do this. The taxes that would have to be levied to help the losers would, they claim, make the country less competitive, and in our highly competitive globalized world countries simply can’t afford that. In effect, globalization hurts those at the
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