Chapter 23 Capitalism and Culture

World Economy Transforming (1138)

• "...the decades between the two world wards, witnessed a deep contraction of global economic linkages as the aftermath of World War 1 and ... the Great Depression wreaked havoc on the world economy" (1138)
• However, after World War 2, capitalist victors were very determined to avoid repeating the same mistake from the Great Depression. "At a conference n Bretton Woods, New Hampshire" there was  the establishment of the international Monterary Fund and the World Bank. This laid a "..foundation for postwar globalization" (1139)
• Page 1,139 also teaches that technology influenced the acceleration of economic globalization. "Containerized shipping, huge oil tankers, and air express services dramatically loweredtransportation costs, while fiber-optic cables and later the Internet provided the communcation infrastructure for global economic interaction."

Reglobalization (1140)

• Strayer mentions that reglobalization was a "significant process that was expressed in the accelerating circulation of goods, capital and people."
• As an example, Strayer mentions the world trade and how it "..skyrocketed from a value of some $57 billion in 1947 to about $16 trillion in 2009. In 2005, about 70 percent of Walmart products reportedly included components from China. ...the following year, Toyota replaced General Motors as the World's largest automaker with manufacturing facilities in at least eighteen countires."
• Money became a global mobility tool in (3) ways. Personal funds by individuals, foreign direct investment, and .."a second form of money in motion has been the short-term movement of capital, in which investors annually spent trillions of follars purchasing foreign currencies ... to increase in value..".

Growth, Instability, and Inequality (1143)

• In page 1143, world wide, total world value output grew from a value of 7 trillion in 1950 to 73 trillion in 2009. This meant that there was an increased speed in producing wealth.
• "...nothing since the Great Depression more clearly illustrated the unsettling consequences of global connectedness in the absence of global regulation than the world wide economic contraction that began in 2008."