So if you are looking for systemic breakdown, I believe you have to think today in terms of social breakdown. But another side to the story clearly exists. Open markets and free trade have slashed poverty in East Asia, and a few countries in Africa have also begun to respond to this recipe of economic opening. In states like Argentina, the dismantling of local oligarchies caused by open markets has had a tremendous liberating effect. In a place like Haiti, subsistence wages may be undignified, but they are better than starvation.
Globalization can also be a very fertile process.
Much has been made of the Americanization of the world, but cultural currents are more mixed than that, and the United States has also been Europeanized, from its coffee to its eating habits. In some areas, such as data privacy, stricter European standards seem likely to prevail, to Ameridcans' benefit. Yet the president of the World Bank warns of a social breakdown because of the very global economic system he is deemed to personify. So there is clearly a problem, and a growing one. Its nature is economic and political.