Steven E. Landsburg outlines a few simple ways to wrap your mind around the concept of free trade and outsourcing in the New York Times op-ed, What to Expect When You're Free Trading.

Even if you’ve just lost your job, there’s something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that’s elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?

Internally torn about free trade vs. protectionism? Well worth the read.

Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz paints a grim picture of the global economic outlook for 2008. Stiglitz warns that this is likely to trigger a backlash against the forces of globalization and that:

For those who think that a well-managed globalization has the potential to benefit both developed and developing countries, and who believe in global social justice and the importance of democracy (and the vibrant middle class that supports it), all of this is bad news.

In the end, Stiglitz believes that central banks will be able to restore order after a global slowdown in which the inflationary pressure is wrung out of the system.

The Economist has a correspondent traveling in rural Thailand to view the impacts of globalization there. Recently visiting a rural market to see whether the traders are feeling the pinch from the opening of a Tesco a few miles away, the correspondent reports:

Are these local traders feeling the heat from the giant superstore down the road? Not really, say the handful that we talk to: Tesco’s opening doesn’t seem to have had much effect on the market’s trade at all. As the retailer itself points out, even the supposedly threatened “mom and pop” stores are often benefiting from Tesco’s spread, because they can buy their supplies from the nearest superstore and sell it on at a small mark-up, rather than having to rely on inefficient and expensive wholesalers, as before. It is probably much the same as we found with the fishermen on the Mun river: those who are suffering make a big noise about it while those who are unaffected or actually benefiting from the change remain quiet.