Globalization gets a bad press.
People concentrate (understandably) on the downsides, but they are less quick to complain about being able to buy a 55" LCD TV for £300, or an electric drill from Aldi for £15. Let alone frozen lamb from New Zealand or french beans from peru.
If you multiply all of this across the basket of what people spend their money on, every week, every month, every year, then the net effect is that every household is hundreds (at least) and often thousands or tens of thousands of pounds better off, every year.
Now we could forego all of this, and go back to buying locally produced goods and services. There's nothing wrong with that ideology and in fact it offers many benefits for the environment, for local wages and employment and for lesser exploitation in other countries. But doing so would come at a huge financial cost. It is a choice. Do people want to have more disposable income, more trappings and more choice, or less of the above in order to reap the benefits I describe? You cannot expect to pay the same for your brussel sprouts if we don't have cheap labour picking them cheaply.
Seems to me people are quick to criticise globalization and yet not quick to put their hands in their pockets to go with the alternative. People cannot have their cake and eat it. And the sums involved are far from trivial.
