John Ralston Saul makes me smile

And somewhere, the Moustache of Understanding is weeping:

MJ: Your general argument runs counter to the conventional wisdom, which is that globalization is on balance a good thing. Witness some recent books—say Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, Martin Wolf’s Why Globalization Works and Jagdish Bhagwati’s In Defense of Globalization—which all take a much rosier view than you do.

JRS: First of all, Friedman is barely worth considering. It's basically one of those 'How to succeed' books; it's very embarrassing, frankly. On the other hand, when you read people like Baghwati—who are very intelligent—when he says he thinks it's a great success, you read the book and you find that 50 percent of it says the opposite. He thinks the inclusion of intellectual property in the WTO was a terrible mistake and could well bring down the international trade system. And he says the deregulation, willy nilly, of international money markets is a terrible mistake. He feels he's on the side of globalization, but when you really get to what he means by globalization, it's very very narrow. [Joseph] Stiglitz is a bit further along that road. He says that globalization obviously isn't working very well, but there's no way out. John Williamson, the author of the ‘Washington Consensus’ [essentially, the policy advice being addressed by the IMF and World Bank to Latin American countries in the 1980s and 90s, emphasizing open markets] regularly says, “Well, that's not what I meant....”

via Tiny Revolution. The whole interview is worth reading.