How Globalization Went Pop, What It Means for Workers

Concepts of entropy may assist in understanding globalization’s ways and its rate of speed, suggests attorney Charles Davi in the Atlantic. Entropy, as law of physics, suggests that nature and energy are in flux – orderly concentrations spread into disorder. Information entropy is a method for measuring diffusion. By analyzing global GDP among nations in 1990 – and nations’ specific contributions – and comparing results two decades later, one can determine how economic growth has spread around the globe. Developments in communication and transportation have minimized the primacy of geography and national boundaries, thus spreading sources for manufacturing, trade and capital. In researching codes that rely on minimal information, mathematician Claude Shannon discovered connections between diffusion and information. “His fundamental observation is straightforward,” Davi writes. “[W]idely distributed data points require more information to communicate, and have higher entropy. More concentrated data points require less information, and have lower entropy.” Technology and automation spur the spread of manufacturing, adding downward pressure on wages for the low skilled. – YaleGlobal