Of course, all change produces winners and losers, but considerable evidence suggests that economic growth is facilitated by a society in which income is relatively equally distributed. As Dani Rodrik argues, the lack of large-scale inequalities and the high levels of education of the East Asian economies helped them to grow. The massive inequalities in some Latin American economies seem to have made growth more difficult. The old view that countries must become more unequal in order to grow has been undermined by the very globalization that Lowi discusses. No longer must a country generate investment funds internally through forced savings.
Investment funds can flow in from outside, and a key to growth is broad-based popular support.
Growth and inequality need not go hand in hand. To be sure, some countries have followed policies that produced a large pool of losers, but many of these policies were simply mistaken. Argentina and Hong Kong, for example, have tried to increase confidence in their currencies by tying them to the United States dollar. If this strategy does not produce growth, the result may be overpriced exports, slow growth, and widespread unemployment. The costs on those at the bottom are severe, but that is the fault of a flawed policy, not the global capitalist system itself.