Global problems and new globalization: Is COVID-19 distracting us?

(Spanish version)

The world Economic Forum published an article about the most important threats that the world economy will face, not only right now, but in the next years.

The matter related to the spread of diseases is the number two of the ranking, as it was expected, displacing other problems that in the past were very important like nuclear proliferation, refugee migration, poverty, cyber security, biodiversity loss and, of course, climate change.

Is the pandemic driving us away from these big challenges? I think so. However, in the future, we will have more pandemics, I am sure about that, so it is important to learn as much as we can from this one.

The new globalization.

 The globalization is being substantially transformed. According to “Elcano Institute”, it exists a “huge growth of the information flow component. Globalization, then, continues to advance, but the traditional flows of trade, capital and people have been replaced in their dynamism by the globalization of ideas, data and knowledge”.

Cheap labor  is not as important anymore, or at least not like it was years ago. Automatization and A.I are making that companies substitute workers with technology and, therefore, aspire to guide their production with new goals.

Nowadays, it is important to be near the final consumer, in order to adapt the production better to the changes in the demand. So, we are watching trends like reshoring and nearshoring. The first one means coming back to the original country. On the other hand, nearshoring seek to approach the consumer, but it does not have to involved being in the same country. For instance, some American companies are based in Mexico. In Europe, the trend would be to find a place in the north of Africa.

Not only are companies coming back to their countries of origin thanks to lower costs due to  technology; countries like China are increasing their salaries and making it less attractive to be there. However, the Asian giant is boosting its domestic market to the detriment of exports. It is still a market of more than a billion people.

What does this new Globalization mean? What kind of challenges are we facing?

Twitter: headlines and news.

 

Spanish version

Twitter launched an experiment that encourages people to read the news before retweeting it. They discovered that many people retweeted news without reading what  they were sending.  The result of the experiment was that a larger percentage of users were opening the links before retweeting. If they really  read the news deeply we will never know. 

I like twitter to learn about current affairs in real time and, especially, using Hootsuite that organizes the news for me.  However, the loud noise, metaphorically speaking, is often quite deafening. This competition of trying to post  the greatest toxic original tweet is exhausting to keep up with, but if you keep  out of it, It is a really interesting social network. There is a reflection published by Enrique Dans that I would like to share with you:

 

“The fact that a prompt was required to get users to open articles before sharing them should make us think: what do we do in social networks? Share what we think reinforces our points of view, even if we haven’t gone beyond the headline and the image that illustrates it? Do we share what we want people to think we have read? Or both? Is it any wonder that social networks have become a breeding ground for spreading rumors, fake news and campaigns of manipulation or misinformation?”.

If we share some information without checking its reliability , or not even reading it, something is wrong. According to Dans, it is  that attitude that makes it easier to spread fake news to the danger point.

 

And you, do you read the news before retweeting?