Over the course of 2024, roughly half of the world’s population will participate in national elections. 

On this episode, we take a closer look at two of them: this summer’s elections in the United Kingdom and France. 

In the U.K., the center-left Labour Party won in a landslide in July, ending 14 years of Conservative Party rule. In France, an alliance of left-leaning parties banded together to defeat the right-wing National Rally Party, led by Marine Le Pen.  

But as political economist and Watson Professor Mark Blyth explains, neither was as resounding a victory for the center-left as the topline results suggest. Furthermore, if these new governments fail to address the social and economic distress so many people in their countries are experiencing, the far-right may not be sidelined for long. 

Mark Blyth is the director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute. He’s also host of the Rhodes Center Podcast, another podcast from the Watson Institute. On this episode, he spoke with Dan Richards about what these two elections can tell us about the political fault lines running through European politics today and what they can also tell us about right-wing populism in the U.S. ahead of our own election in November. 

Subscribe to the Rhodes Center Podcast, hosted by Mark Blyth

DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. Over the course of Twenty Twenty-Four, roughly half of the world's population will participate in national elections. We've already looked at a few of those elections on Trending Globally this year, and we'll be looking at one in particular. That is November's election in the United States, much more closely over the next few months.

But on this episode, we're going to take a look at two elections that occurred this summer in two of the largest countries in Europe, two of the world's biggest economies, the United Kingdom and France.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

In the UK, the centre-left Labour Party won in a landslide, ending 14 years of Conservative Party rule. In France, an alliance of left-leaning parties banded together to defeat the nationalist right-wing National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen. But as our guest on this episode explains, the story of these elections is much more complicated than the top-line results let on. And if these new governments can't address the distress that so many people in their countries are experiencing, they may not stay in power for long.

MARK BLYTH: And what you will get coming back in will be something far more reactionary.

DAN RICHARDS: That's Mark Blyth. He is a political economist at Brown's Rhodes Center for International Economics and finance at the Watson Institute. He's also host of the Rhodes Center Podcast. If you know this show, you probably know Mark Blyth, and there is no one better to help explain the political and economic fault lines that exist in Europe today. On this episode, we talked about these two elections and why, despite these victories on the left, the right-wing in those countries, and in many parts of the rest of the world, is as powerful as ever.

MARK BLYTH: It's very similar to Trumpism. It's very easy to sit back and pooh-pooh the whole things and they're the deplorables, et cetera. And then you've got to ask yourself the question, if they're so deplorable and so stupid, why do they keep doing it?

DAN RICHARDS: We started with the UK and the long-running confluence of factors that shaped Labour's landslide victory this year, from the fallout of austerity politics and Brexit to the remarkably tumultuous and short reign of Prime Minister Liz Truss. Here's our conversation.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Mark Blythe, Thank you so much for coming back on to Trending Globally.

MARK BLYTH: It's always a pleasure to trend globally.

DAN RICHARDS: We like to trend globally here. I want to talk about this election that was held on July 4th this year in the UK. And so let's start with the Labour Party, which won a ton of seats. They gained over 200 seats. They have 2/3 of the seats in parliament now. Do they have as widespread support in the UK as that majority suggests? Like, did they somehow take the country by storm in the last five years?

MARK BLYTH: No, no, they did not. It was very much a vote against rather than a vote for. And to put this in perspective, there's two things going on here. One is a first-past-the-post voting system with individual member constituencies. That means that once you win it, all the votes that other people cast in that constituency don't count for anything, right? So if you have a strong position and a constituency level, you can rack these things up way out of proportion to the number of people who are actually voting. That brings us to participation. This is actually a pretty low-participation election. Labour won a huge majority with about 2 million less than Jeremy Corbyn lost won in Twenty Nineteen.

DAN RICHARDS: Wow, so when Labour lost in Twenty Nineteen, they actually got more votes than they did in this election.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, so what's behind that? Basically, the Tories were hated.

[INSTRUMENT PLAYING]

DAN RICHARDS: This animosity towards the Conservative Party, in Mark's view, begins all the way back when they gained control of the UK's government 14 years ago. Back in Twenty Ten, the Tories--

MARK BLYTH: Came in with David Cameron and Osborne and instituted austerity programs in the country, which basically took the number of foodbanks in the United Kingdom from close to zero to being a fixture of the lives of around 15% of the population. Child poverty has soared to a point that ex-Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is now making a one-man national campaign about it. And a few years ago in Manchester United, footballer called Marcus Rashford basically made childhood poverty in the summer-- because of the lack of school meals --into a national sort of incident. We then lived through the chaos of Boris and the whole Boris administration--

DAN RICHARDS: Which included the inaction of Brexit in Twenty Twenty and then the global pandemic--

MARK BLYTH: Telling everyone they can't go to their parents' funerals while he's living it up at parties in Downing Street. And then, of course, through Trussonomics--

DAN RICHARDS: Trussonomics being the nickname for an extremely conservative, some would say radical, budget put forth by Boris Johnson's successor, Liz Truss, that would have led to the biggest tax cuts in the UK since Nineteen Seventy-Two. It was widely criticized, caused instability within the financial markets, and contributed to Truss stepping down shortly thereafter.

MARK BLYTH: So it's just been a legacy of incompetence and insider dealing, which the British public got totally fed up of. Where they also got surprised, though, was the re-emergence of Farage, the guy who was behind Brexit, coming up with his own party, the Reform Party, which split the Tory vote. And when you stick that in that first-past-the-post constituency system, that magnifies the Tory losses and makes the Liberal Democrats and the Labour gains all that much bigger.

DAN RICHARDS: That last thing you mentioned is really similar for listeners in the United States to how a third party in the US could really negatively affect the outcome of another party.

MARK BLYTH: Totally.

DAN RICHARDS: So you have this break between the Conservative Party and the real Brexit hardcore, led by Nigel Farage, that played a big role in the Tory loss. And then, like you said, they were also just really unpopular by the time this election came around. My question is, if the Tories were so hated-- or maybe hated is a strong word--

MARK BLYTH: No, no, they were absolutely hated. I mean, literally look at the approval figures and it's just catastrophic.

DAN RICHARDS: So why did they stay in power for as long as they did in that case? Because 14 years-- that's a long run by UK standards for one party to be in power.

MARK BLYTH: Well, the thing is, historically, it just alternates between Conservative and Labour, and they tend to get multiple terms. So the Conservatives come in Twenty Nineteen on the back of the financial crisis and successfully spun this as it's all the fault of Labour spending too much, which, despite the fact that it was a global financial crisis, obviously was not really true. They may have spent much, but that was not what was the problem. Nonetheless, they managed to weaponize this into a drive against poorer members in society. They licensed television programs that were called Benefit Street that made a mockery of people on social welfare programs. They really polarized the country for political effect, and then they promised that it would be an economic nirvana by cutting all this public spending. And they basically never recovered from the Two Thousand Eight crisis.

Productivity collapse, it's been flatlined since then. Median real wages in Britain are about 13% lower than they were before the financial crisis. I mean, it's an absolute catastrophe. Now, how do they get to stay in? Because you have an opposition party led by Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn was painted first as a radical leftist, which he may be by American standards, but then more successfully as a generic anti-Semite. And that's basically got him tarred with that brush, and then his party was discredited. They won the Twenty Fifteen election on the back of this.

Then you go up to Twenty Nineteen, the Tories nearly lose it with the new leader, May, but they manage to hold on to power and then they stagger from that into the pandemic with Boris and then on to Trussonomics. And then you get the quote unquote, "adults back in the room," which is Sunak, and they are unable to change anything. We have a complete dearth of public investment. As I mentioned earlier, child poverty hasn't been this high in 50 years. The place is screaming out for change.

Now, you would think that Labour would have a mandate and would capitalize upon this. Labour are absolutely terrified of not being seen as credible by the financial markets. I think they massively overplay this and overestimate it. The tragedy being if they basically produce Austerity Lite, more of the same with a human face, then they will be out, and what you will get coming back in will be something far more reactionary. So the next five years are incredibly important in terms of how British politics works out.

DAN RICHARDS: Do you expect that it will be something like Austerity Lite under this new Labour Party, or might there be a different direction entirely with regards to those policies?

MARK BLYTH: I think they want a different direction. I think they know that they have to have a different direction. The debate in the party is about how different can we be. There's a lot of talk about the low-hanging fruit that you can do. A lot of this goes through housing. There's a huge shortage of housing in the United Kingdom, and that means rents are unbelievably expensive, particularly in London, which is the main growth area. It used to be three times income when we started in the Nineteen Eighties to get a house in London. Now it's 10 to 11 times income. You can be earning 50,000 pounds a year, $80,000 a year, and you'll never stand a chance of getting a mortgage if you want to live in London, is that dire straits?

So a lot of this is you need to build houses now. One way of doing this is you keep them on the state's balance sheet. We used to call these council houses. These are properties that have a net present asset value, and they also have an income generated from them called rents. So if you do this right, you build up your asset side of the balance sheet and you also have income coming in, which means that you reduce your debt.

That's true, but that's also a scary proposition for the real sort of small-C conservatives in the party, who be like, no, it'll just be seen as more debt, and then the financial markets will do to us what they did to Truss. So Labour is looking around for ways to be credible in a different way. They do have real sort of finance and constraints. I think they overplay it a little bit, but I think there's a desire to do much more and they know that they have to because the country is in a terrible, terrible state.

DAN RICHARDS: How much of an effect do you think Brexit and the ensuing chaos and drama that came from Brexit affected the second half of this time of the Tories being in power? And just generally affected this election. Like, how big an effect do you think this had? Did it scramble politics in a way that just was new?

MARK BLYTH: So, we tend to think about Brexit in terms of the economic effects, which while there have been large-- you export volumes are down, imports are still up, balance of trades in worse shape, et cetera --hasn't been catastrophic, right? So, you can't say there was no obvious Brexit bonus, but you can't say there was a Brexit collapse.

But what Brexit did was to show that the country's not serious. That you can basically get caught up in these political infighting memes, that if only we were independent from the largest free trade zone in the world, we could have more access to free trad, that literally makes no sense. But that was the core of the argument.

So then, when you basically have a bunch of people who will do this to their own economy and there were real casualties. For example, the Scottish seafood industry was entirely dependent on refrigerated trucks, seamless transport and get into continental Europe. That died overnight, along with thousands of jobs in that industry. So there were real costs.

And what it showed in this lack of seriousness is what you'll put politics and theater above the actual good of the economy. And that's when the rot starts to get in, because when you then double down on this with what we need is more migration restrictions-- now, maybe the United Kingdom does, maybe it doesn't --but there was no actual debate about this. It was just this insistence that we're going to send everyone who's not coming by normal channels to Rwanda.

DAN RICHARDS: This, for listeners who might have missed, was a very real proposal put forth by the Conservative government. It was passed by Parliament earlier in Twenty Twenty-Four, although the plan has since been scrapped by the incoming Labour government. This law would essentially have allowed the UK to deport migrants who entered the country illegally to Rwanda. In the years that it wound its way through the UK's government, the plan was widely criticized around the world as inhumane and just generally unfeasible.

MARK BLYTH: So this huge disruption with the Rwanda scheme, et cetera, then what actually happens is they figure out that their universities are close to bankruptcy. Now, close to bankruptcy because they said to them, you can increase fees to 9,000 pounds a year, but beyond that, you're on their own. The university is anticipating endless Chinese students coming to the United Kingdom for the next 20 years, engage in a series of massive projects of building houses, all those houses being student accommodations. And then the Chinese stopped coming. Plus, they got hit by Brexit, so all their balance sheets are knackered.

At this point in time, The only way they keep things going is by importing foreign students. They didn't get Chinese, so they were still doing Americans. Then they started to do Indians and they started to do Nigerians. Guess what? Two years after Brexit, you start to get higher net migration than you had prior to Brexit, despite the Conservatives promising that they're going to do something about it.

And rather than focus on any of this stuff-- because it's actually, education is essentially the fourth or fifth biggest industry in the United Kingdom when you consider it as a services export --so when you consider you've got a strategic industry that's going down, unless you do this, what you do is you start pointing the finger at all these little boats in the Channel is a national crisis. And it's just more of this politics of theater and distraction and self-harm. So Brexit is one part of that rather than the center of it.

DAN RICHARDS: Talking about Brexit in the context of all these other issues, some of which are really serious and some of which sound almost preposterous or unserious. And then, as well, looking at the parade of Conservative prime ministers, it all just made me think of a line I read from Sam Knight, who covers politics in the UK for The New Yorker, an American publication. He said, and I'm probably getting the exact wording wrong, but that covering the UK can sometimes feel like trying to remember and explain a very convoluted and ultimately boring dream.

MARK BLYTH: [LAUGHS] That's brilliant. I think that's actually brilliant. That's a-- yeah. There's a great phrase for this that Brits use, which is, when things are bad and if it used to be good, and now they're bad, which is a lot of things, whether it's the health service, whether it's the state of infrastructure or railroads, whatever, right? And I'll say someone sent this to the Department of Making Things Crappier. Has this been to the Department? I think we should resend this to the Department of Making Things Crappier. And it's for many people, it seems as if the past sort of 14 years has just been an endless set of trips to the Department of Making Things Crappier.

DAN RICHARDS: So, I guess I wonder if you have thoughts about where is the energy and excitement in British politics. Does it exist? Is it in smaller parties or more local movements, or is it really all this exasperated malaise?

MARK BLYTH: There is, and it's basically on the right in the Reform Party. In the sense that what you've got there is a bunch of people who think rightly or wrongly-- and I think that some of the things that they think are right are actually --that you do have, to a certain extent, the classic populist critique, which doesn't mean it's wrong, that you have a political class, which is largely self-serving, absolutely true under the Tories, remains to be seen about Labour.

People who handed out contracts to their friends worth hundreds of millions of pounds during the pandemic, with nobody ever goes to jail for this stuff-- self-serving double dealing. They care more about stuff that's miles away from home than what's going on just now, and an absolute refusal amongst both parties to act well, particularly the Labour Party, but to a certain extent the conservatives. Well, to do something about that they care about, which are those voters care about, which is immigration.

And what we mean by this is the distributive effects of immigration, because when you live in a top 20% in London and you live in a nice neighborhood, immigration to you means essentially lots of cosmopolitan restaurants to go to. And the people who are coming in who are from vastly different backgrounds, with vastly different experiences, don't live near you because your house costs too much. And for everybody else who actually sees their local high streets transform, displaced, et cetera, and for them, it's an uncomfortable feeling. You can't talk about that because if you talk about that are a racist, right?

And when you create that type of Nassim Taleb, and I wrote about this years ago in a piece in Foreign Affairs, we call it a volatility constraint. That basically once you just push down on these things and keep pushing down on, it and saying that you can't talk about things, when it finally explodes, it's going to be much bigger than you think. And Brexit was one of those eruptions, right? And what you saw with the reaction against the consistent failure of the Tories has been one of those eruptions. If Labour doesn't do something serious to change the trajectory, then this is when people like Reform get the energy because they're saying these people will never solve your problems. They don't care. That's where the energy comes from.

DAN RICHARDS: And the Reform Party is the party led by Nigel Farage.

MARK BLYTH: Nigel Farage. And like personally, I wouldn't let Nigel Farage lead me to the pub, right? But what he's got, and what he's got with him, is a bunch of people who really have lost faith in the governing classes of the United Kingdom. And there's a lot of people in the public who share that opinion, and that can be channeled into a positive direction or it can be charged in a negative direction. So far, it seems to be pretty negative, but the jury's out.

And that's why that's where the interesting part of politics is. It's very similar to Trumpism, right? It's very easy to sit back and pooh-pooh the whole things and they're the deplorables, et cetera. And then you've got to ask yourself the question, if they're so deplorable and so stupid, why do they keep doing it? Maybe they don't believe you. Maybe they think what you're doing is pretty deplorable because all you seem to care about is guaranteeing your 501(c)(3) or your 403(b) plan, or all the stuff that makes your nice upper-middle-class livelihood possible. Meanwhile, they're just told to adjust.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to talk more about Trump and Trumpism maybe a little bit later. But for now, let's just stick with Europe for a little bit more because I want to talk about the election that happened in France this summer where President Macron held this snap election in June. And it was expected that the right-wing nationalist National Rally party was going to do very well. They ended up doing worse than I think a lot of people expected. And this sort of left-led coalition ended up doing best getting the plurality of seats. Do you see any parallels between the elections in France and the elections in the UK?

MARK BLYTH: Not the elections in the UK. But I see the parallel with the elections that they used to have in Italy and they still have in Germany. And let me explain. What happened there was nobody likes Macron. Nobody believes in Macron. He hasn't actually done that bad, in fairness. But whatever, it's just messaging, or he just doesn't really look good to most people, or he looks too slick or whatever. But what he did was he created a centrist populism when lots of parties collapsed around Twenty Fifteen, Twenty Sixteen. And he said, I'm the radical center, and he got a lot of support for that. And it was a transformative agenda. And then they ran into what's called the Gilet Jaune movement, right? This is the Yellow Jackets.

DAN RICHARDS: The Yellow Jackets, or the Yellow Jacket protests or Yellow Vest protests, was a movement in France that started in Twenty Eighteen in response to, among other things, a green tax that would increase the price of fuel. Many saw it as a proposal that would disproportionately affect the poor and working classes in France.

MARK BLYTH: Essentially, what it was originally meant to be was a tax on companies to decarbonize. They ended up being a tax on people because it's easier to push them around than it is to push around corporations.

DAN RICHARDS: The Yellow Jackets, which got their name because they wore yellow high-visibility vests while protesting, came from across the political spectrum and largely from the working classes and more rural parts of the country.

MARK BLYTH: And what those people would say about was a classic example of disconnect for the elites. The elites don't drive diesel cars into Paris. The elites live in Paris. The people who serviced them are the ones that live in the burbs and have to basically pay this tax that they put on diesel.

DAN RICHARDS: It added to the sense that Macron's radical center was out of touch with much of his country.

MARK BLYTH: And it all blew up in his face, and he's never really recovered from that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So this snap election was basically the right kept getting more and more powerful. He said, right, fine, you deal with it, have your fantasy, go and vote for the right and see what happens. He's the kind of threw his toys out of the pram to a certain extent. Now what happens, and this is what happened the last time in France, and what happens in Germany is essentially the Germans call this a grand coalition because they've got their right-wing party called the EFT, and nobody touches them.

And what happens here is you got the left coalition, all of which who hate each other, basically come together and then vote tactically with the center to keep out the right. Here's the problem with that. You're basically saying to one third of the population, 34%, your votes don't count, your voice is illegitimate, you will never be represented. We will block, but you're not creating, you're not offering, you're not transforming. You're just blocking. When democracy becomes nothing more than a blocking coalition, that's when it's in trouble. So I worry about Germany. I worry about France much more than I worry about the United Kingdom and even the United States.

DAN RICHARDS: So, as we start to wrap up, I want to turn to the US a little bit, which will, of course, be having its own election in November, where right-wing populism is very much on the ballot. But four years ago a center-left leader defeated a right-wing populist in the United States. And I wonder if there's anything that countries like France and the UK today can learn from how the Biden administration has or has not attempted to address the anger and frustration and inequality that can drive right-wing populist movements.

MARK BLYTH: So, let's think about what Biden actually did. His signature achievement was the Inflation Reduction Act, which was originally Build Back Better, which had been even bigger and bolder. And what was that? That was the recognition among certain parts of the Democratic Party that the strategy of essentially endless globalism and corporate welfare was ultimately going to cost them their existence as a party. And there was only so many coalitions of suburban women and African-Americans you can put together on a regular basis, and when the material basis is falling out of the working class. So Build Back Better, especially, but largely the Inflation Reduction Act is, in a sense, an attempt to reindustrialize the United States. And what you're doing there is you're basically trying to give people a stake in the game that they feel they no longer have and give them jobs and employment that actually has a future, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, let's take Biden out of the equation. Let's assume that the Democrats win the next time. Let's assume that Harris continues those policies. Is that going to work? Well, it's not clear that this is a sustainable strategy on its own, but it is something they're trying to do. Most countries don't have that option, right? They don't have the dollar. They don't have the global reserve asset. They can't just do unlimited tax credits to bribe companies from all over the world. The fact that loads of European companies and Korean companies have come to the United States to take advantage of these credits and to build here, France can't do the reverse, right? It's just not going to happen. So it's limited in what the response is.

And if you think about the world over the past 30 years, yes, it's generated tremendous wealth and prosperity on a global basis. But in the core OECD countries, it has created basically a lack of public investment, a rundown of public services, a rising inequality, and a rise in what sociologists call precarious work, which is extremely stressful. Which basically impacts on family structures, fertility, and a whole host of things, which we are, this is the sending things to the Department to Make Things Crappier.

So if you're the US and you want to do something about that, you can probably give it a shot. It's not clear that's going to work. Everybody else, I'm not quite sure what you do. Now, that's not a counsel of despair because I could actually tell you lots of things you could do that would be pretty easy. You could build citizens' wealth funds. You could actually enforce taxes on corporations. There's lots of things you could do, right? You could build houses. There with houses you get skills, with skills you get jobs, all this sort of stuff. You don't build chip factories. It'll be far too expensive. Just build houses with HVAC that are green and therefore you train people to be electricians. It's pretty straightforward stuff.

But that's not the way the conversation is structured. The conversation is now structured about we need to capture the gains from AI. Spoiler alert, we've been through this before, it was called the blockchain revolution. Yeah, so anyway, we keep chasing profits and banking them while the country gets more and more unequal, and the people who are not banking those profits get more and more angry. It's not a great mix.

DAN RICHARDS: The examples I feel like you were just throwing out feel so straightforward and simple. Build houses with HVAC, trained people in skills in building things. Are people talking like that to go back to the UK in the Labour Party these days?

MARK BLYTH: Yeah.

DAN RICHARDS: They are.

MARK BLYTH: They are. But here's the problem. Let's put this in a US context because we live here and this is what we're familiar with, right? Where do we get skilled labor from in the United States?

DAN RICHARDS: A lot of other countries?

MARK BLYTH: Yes. Problem number one. Number two, what exactly are our labor training institutions?

DAN RICHARDS: Universities?

MARK BLYTH: OK. So that's for the people who can basically wallop themselves with $100,000 of debt

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: And then you get a job whereby pretty much a lot of the stuff you did at university, unless you're in a technical field, doesn't really apply and you got on-the-job training. The fastest-growing job in the United States by volume is elder care nurse.

DAN RICHARDS: Right.

MARK BLYTH: Right? That's a good example of that, right? So where do you get elder care nurses from? You get them from abroad. They're called immigrants. We don't like immigrants anymore. You can see what I'm going with this, right? We have a huge labor skills mismatch problem. We train people to do things that they're never actually don't need to do on the job. Even when you get a job in finance, they're like, can you count? Can you count? Do you know what a spreadsheet is? We will take it from there. You're not learning this in university, right.

So what are the training institutions that do HVAC, electrician, so on and so forth? We allowed them to atrophy, and a huge part of that used to be a feeder complex that went from the military to technical colleges and then out into manufacturing. We sent the manufacturing abroad, we let the technical colleges die and we still got the army. So that's your skill supply. Now you want to build a chip factory in the middle of Kansas. Where do you get the labor from? It doesn't exist.

DAN RICHARDS: Right.

MARK BLYTH: So these are-- once you outsource everything and insource your labor, when those constraints are suddenly back on and you have to do it yourself, suddenly you realize what you've done.

DAN RICHARDS: And getting out of that is--

MARK BLYTH: A multi-year process. But it's not impossible, right? The logic behind Build Back Better, although-- or Inflation Reduction Act. Personally, I think we should just let China make all the green tech that we want and encourage them to actually consume more of it themselves. So there's not a glut in the market, an oversupply, rather than America trying to make solar panels with a polysilicon they're going to get from China anyway, literally makes no sense.

But should we be training people? Oh, yeah. Because the great thing about training is it's multi-option. You might be trained as an electrician to do X, but then you can be an electrician in Y and Z. Same with plumbing. Everyone thinks plumbing is getting the bad stuff out of your house. No, it's not. It's hydraulic engineering. It's a whole bunch of things, right? So there's loads of things that we can do, and it's not that difficult to do. We just really need to actually have a better imaginary about how to do these things. We've got the resources, we've got the people, let's make it happen.

DAN RICHARDS: And for countries that maybe don't have the options of the United States for whatever reason, like the UK or France, can that type of investment and training be a path forward for those countries, or would they need to do something else?

MARK BLYTH: One of the attractions of deglobalization is the notion that it strengthens the national economy. So let's go back to a world in the Nineteen Sixties, whereby you had countries that basically made the same things as each other, traded a little bit with each other, but consumed a lot of the stuff they made themselves. So the Brits made cars, the Swedes made cars for Swedes and others, and occasionally sold them to Germans, that sort of thing.

When you live in that economy, London is important, but so is Birmingham and so is Manchester. And then when you internationalize and globalize, what happens is London becomes super important and specialized in finance, and then Paris becomes more important to London than Manchester. And Birmingham, once it stops doing manufacturing, is a big city that doesn't really have that much going on. So unless you're going to basically reindustrialize in some project, they shift into low productivity services. You get this big productivity differential across the cities, and then people move to London, and more people move to London. More wealth, more energy, more talent, more entrepreneurship goes in London. And at that point, London and LA have more in common, or London and New York have more in common than New York and LA have with their regional cities, right?

So when you think of it in this spatial geography of wealth terms, the world that we've created-- a global world --has loads of upsides, particularly if you're able to take advantage of it. But the number of people who are unable to take advantage of that actually outweighs those who are able to. And you can say, but they get cheaper goods in Walmart. Yeah, but they also have much crappier wages to buy them.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Whenever you build a system which is extremely complex, as we have, then accidents happen. Years ago, a sociologist called these things normal accidents. It's just a question of time until they happen, given the nature of the system. And when you push wages down in core countries, eventually people are going to bite back, right? When you stall productivity growth and wages stagnate, there's going to be a consequence.

The job of politicians is to then be engineers. First, identify the problem. Second, figure out the parameters. Third, fix it. And what we've had is people who over the past 20 years think that the job is to show up and manage success, and now we're not in that world. So you need a different type of politics.

And what you get with the energy of the right is at least a recognition, even if it's a misrecognition of some of these problems. And the really dangerous version of this is when you get complacency in the center, and all they can do is say, no, we need to keep these people out, thereby deeming a third of their own citizens illegitimate in their own voice. That's what you want to avoid.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DAN RICHARDS: Mark Blythe, thank you so much for coming back on to Trending Globally.

MARK BLYTH: It is my pleasure.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Zach Hirsch. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. If you liked this episode, you should definitely subscribe to the Rhodes Center Podcast. It's hosted by Mark Blyth, and on each episode, he explores some of the biggest and most important questions in the worlds of political economy and international finance with the world's leading experts.

And if you haven't subscribed to our show, please do that too. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for guests or topics for us, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word, trendingglobally@brown.edu. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks for listening.

[MUSIC PLAYING]