Protesters against globalization have no idea what they are talking about. At least that is the verdict of the mainstream press.
Nobody asks whether the moral of the story is really as clear-cut as it seems.
Quick to dismiss the protesters' views as uninformed and illegitimate, Krugman would have done better to fact-check the mainstream media, which was itself guilty of recycling data uncritically and accepting as gospel the conclusions of the institutional powers themselves. A.T. Kearney Co. itself is a for-profit research company with corporations for customers. Opponents of free trade have not endorsed isolation from the world economy as a development strategy since the early days of dependency theory some three decades ago. The Kearney globalization ledger fails to distinguish between these two different strategies for economic development in today's international economy. In one way or another, seven of the ten variables in its globalization index measure a country's degree of engagement with the world economy, but say little about the policies determining the manner of engagement.