Chapter 23 (to page 1149)

It was interesting first of all, to read the story on how China produced both Barbie and Dara (the Muslim version of a doll). It was interesting because they were practically complete opposites and it seemed more united that the Muslim community would want a doll like Dara since even i agree Barbie's lifestyle is a little too crazy if not completely unbelievable and unrealistic. It also caught my attention that they would make Dara an 8 year old instead of a woman solving problems because they still wanted that male dominance, but if it was a child it would be OK to them. The fact that China's connected to both the U.S. and Iran shows how much the economy has globalized. After World War II, the world got connected on a much higher level and that has a lot to do with the effects of creating things like a world bank, the IMF, technology allowing for cheaper transportation, and other such factors. Economic globalization in the 1970's was called neoliberalism. The world was beginning to be viewed as one huge market instead of individual ones. Many companies began to take advantage of poorer countries and their loose regulations and cheap labor and made a lot of money without having to do any more colonizing. The second new form of making money was buying and selling foreign currency. Lastly there was a new form in personal investments of individuals. Companies like Nike have taken advantage of cheap labor and close factories when there gets to be too many regulations and open them elsewhere thousands of miles apart. The problem when countries economies are so tightly linked in this way comes when one fails, the others will most likely fail to a certain degree also. This was recently seen when many countries in 2008 when many businesses failed because they could no longer operate with those they were operating from over seas. The chart describing how long people will live based on the average income of their country was also astonishing. The lower income making below $995 lived only between 58/60 in contrast to the above $12,196 lived between 77/83. This is a big difference and it only gets bigger if you go down the table, such as deaths per year, cars per 1,000 people, even the literacy rate ha a 33% difference.