How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

by Vaclav Smil

Questioning and criticizing globalization has gone beyond narrowly ideological arguments, and the COVID-19 pandemic provided additional powerful arguments based on irrefutable concerns about the state’s fundamental role in protecting the lives of its citizens. That role is hard to play when 70 percent of the world’s rubber gloves are made in a single factory, and when similar or even higher shares of not just other pieces of personal protective equipment but also of principal drug components and common medications (antibiotics, antihypertensive drugs) come from a very small number of suppliers in China and India.100 Such dependence might fulfill an economist’s dream of mass output at the lowest possible unit cost, but it makes for extremely irresponsible—if not criminal—governance when doctors and nurses have to face a pandemic without adequate PPE, when states dependent on foreign production engage in dismaying competition for limited supplies, and when patients around the world cannot renew their prescriptions because of the slowdowns or closures in Asian factories.