such an airport (Incheon) is nearby and easily reached via a 12-mile-long bridge. This is in contrast to the usual situation where the airport (e.g., Reagan National in Washington, D.C.; LAX in Los Angeles; Heathrow in London) is built within or very close to a city center. Traditional airports are typically too small and too difficult to reach, create too much noise for city residents, and cannot expand much beyond their current confines.
• The European Union (EU), founded in 1993, is an example of a social structure that serves to ease the flow of citizens among member nations (but not of people living outside the EU). Border restrictions were reduced or eliminated among the 27 EU member nations, although some of them have been reinstituted in recent years because of concern about the flow of undocumented immigrants. Similarly, the launch of the euro in 1999 greatly simplified economic transactions among the 18 EU countries that accept it as their currency.
• The continuing free flow of information on the internet is made possible by an organization called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). It handles the net’s underlying infrastructure.
There are also structures that impede various kinds of global flows. National borders, passports and passport controls (Robertson 2010; Torpey 2000), security checks, and customs controls limit the movement of people throughout the world. Such restrictions were greatly increased in many parts of the world after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. This made global travel and border crossing more difficult and time-consuming. Then there are the even more obvious structures designed to limit the movement of people across borders. Examples include the fences between Israel and the West Bank, as well as one between Israel and Egypt completed in 2013. Even more recent are border fences under construction or completed in several European countries (e.g., Hungary, Slovenia), which are designed to limit, direct, or stop the flow of migrants from Syria and elsewhere (Surk 2015). During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to turn the existing barriers between the United States and Mexico into a wall, at least for part of the length of the distance required. In the early days of his presidency, Trump encountered opposition to the wall because of its high cost and environmental concerns. From late 2018 to early 2019, the U.S. government endured a partial shutdown because of Trump’s insistence on building the wall and congressional resistance to funding it. It remains to be seen how much of the wall will actually be built.
The existing fences across the Mexican border, and increased border police and patrols, have already led unauthorized migrants to take longer and riskier routes into the United States. There are more than 200 immigration detention centers in the United States (see Figure 1.2), and Human Rights Watch found that 18 immigrants died in them from 2012 to 2015 due to negligent medical care (Jula and Preston 2016). A crisis arose at the Mexican border in mid-2014 when tens of thousands of children from Central America flooded the area and overwhelmed detention centers (Archibold 2014). Another occurred in late 2018 when Trump exaggerated the risks posed by a “caravan” of immigrants from Central America and sought to counter it by sending thousands of U.S. troops to guard the border. There are, of course, many other structural barriers in the world, most notably trade barriers and tariffs, which limit the free movement of goods and services of many kinds.
Figure 1.2 U.S. Immigration Detention Facilities, 2017
Source: U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, Detention Facility Locator, March 2017 (www.ice.gov/detention-facilities).
In sum, globalization is defined by increasingly fluid global flows and the structures that expedite and impede those flows. Globalization is certainly increasing, and it brings with it a variety of both positive and negative developments (Ritzer and Dean 2019). On one side, most people throughout the world now have far greater access to goods, services, and information from around the globe than did people during the industrial age. On the other side, a variety of highly undesirable things also flow more easily around the world, including diseases such as Zika, HIV/AIDS, and Ebola, and pollution released primarily by industrialized countries that worsens the adverse effects of climate change (including global warming). Also on the negative side are the flows of such forms of “deviant globalization” as terrorism, sex trafficking, and the black markets for human organs and drugs (Gilman, Goldhammer, and Weber 2011; Marmo and Chazel 2016).
Consumption
While consumption has been a central feature of societies for centuries, it is only in recent years that we can think in terms of a “world of consumers” (Trentmann 2016). Beginning in the 1950s, the center of many capitalist economies began to shift from production and work to consumption, or the process by which people obtain and use goods and services. During that period, the center of the U.S. economy shifted from the factory and the office to the shopping mall (Baudrillard [1970] 1998; Wiedenhoft Murphy 2017a). For many, work and production became less important than consumption.
The dramatic rise in consumption was made possible by, among other things, the growing affluence of the population. A more specific factor was the introduction (in the 1950s and 1960s) and increasing availability of credit cards. The use of credit cards has now become widespread at shopping malls, on the internet, and in many other settings. One indicator of the increase in consumption in the United States is the increase in credit card debt. As you can see in Figure 1.3, credit card debt per household grew astronomically in the early years of credit card use (the figure begins with $37 in 1969). Credit card debt reached its high point, $8,729, in 2008 and steadily declined after the Great Recession to an average of $5,946 per household. However, credit card debt increased by almost 3 percent from 2016 to 2017 to an average of $6,375 per household.
Figure 1.3 U.S. Credit Card Debt per Capita, 1969–2017
Source: Data from the U.S. Federal Reserve and U.S. Census Bureau and Jessica Dickler, 2018. “Credit Card Debt Hits a Record High.” CNBC. January 23.
Ask Yourself
Have your consumption habits or credit card use changed over the last six months? The last three years? Do you anticipate that your habits will change in the next three years? If so, how and why? Will you consume more or less?
Consumption is certainly significant economically, but it is significant in other ways as well. For example, culture is very much shaped by consumption, and various aspects of consumption become cultural phenomena. A good example is the iPhone, which is used in many ways to consume but more generally has revolutionized culture in innumerable ways. Billions of people have bought iPhones and similar smartphones as well as the ever-increasing number of apps associated with them. These phones have altered how and where people meet to socialize and the ways in which they socialize. In addition, the media and people in general spend so much time discussing the implications of the latest iPhone and similar products that these devices have become central to the larger culture in which we live. Rumors about the characteristics and release date of the next version of the iPhone continually add to the excitement.
Consumption and globalization are also deeply intertwined. Much of what we consume in the developed world comes from other countries. In 2017 alone, the United States imported more than $505 billion worth of goods from China; the comparable figure in 1985 was only $4 million in goods (U.S. Census Bureau 2018a). Furthermore, the speed and convenience of internet commerce tend to make global realities and distances irrelevant to consumers. Finally, travel to other parts of the world—a form of consumption itself—is increasingly affordable and common. A major objective of tourists is often the sampling of the foods of foreign lands, as well as the purchasing of souvenirs (Chambers 2010; Gmelch 2010; Mak, Lumbers, and Eves 2012). Medical tourism is less common, but it is estimated that globally it is a $100-billion-per-year industry