Us vs. Them summary

Marine Le Pen’s rhetoric on immigration didn’t just target the threat to jobs and pensions, or the impact on public services. She also warned of a dilution of France’s cultural identity amid an influx of foreigners.

In many countries, concerns about immigration are driving frustration and huge political upheaval.

Few governments are as effective as the Chinese when it comes to suppressing protest. But according to official state figures, the number of protests in China nonetheless rose from 8,700 in 1993 to over 127,000 in 2010. At that point, the state stopped publishing the numbers.

These protests were driven by a mixture of economic, environmental and political concerns either caused by or made worse by globalization.

In the United States, the top 1 percent of adults earned 27 times what the bottom 50 percent earned in 1981. That’s already a big divide. But come 2016, the 1 percent earned a massive 81 times more than the bottom half of the population. Thousands of miles away, it only takes the richest man in Nigeria one day to earn more than 8,000 times what a poor Nigerian spends on their basic needs in a whole year.

Economic inequality is present around the world, even in countries that have experienced significant growth.

It took half a century for the world’s first million industrial robots to be installed. It will only take eight years to install the second million.

Robots, machine learning and other tech innovations are happening fast, and they are making more and more people’s jobs obsolete.

United Nations forecasts show that 47 percent of jobs in the United States are at risk from machine learning and automation. But if that sounds bad, consider the figures for emerging countries. In Nigeria, 65 percent are threatened. In India, it’s 69 percent, and in China, 77 percent.

Now consider the total populations of these and other developing countries. Nigeria has 180 million, Indonesia 260 million, and China 1.4 billion. That’s a lot of people whose livelihoods are at risk.

Governments across the globe are grappling with the challenges created by globalism, from demand for infrastructure to cultural anxiety. How are they responding?

Very often, governments are reacting against globalism’s openness, erecting new barriers to manage the flow of goods, information and people.

What do you expect from your government in return for paying taxes and obeying the law? Law and order? Job opportunities? High-quality broadband access?

The US Declaration of Independence promises all citizens the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But many people today have higher expectations of their social contract, or the expectations they can have of their government. They expect the right to education, transport infrastructure, safe drinking water, medical care and the ability to access the internet among other things.