Is Globalization a Lost Cause?

How an idea that promised a brave new world seemingly delivered dystopia instead.

Bill Clinton looks up as he speaks in front of a WTO globe backdrop. October 3, 2025, 2:40 PM Comment icon View Comments ( )

In The World’s Worst Bet , David Lynch sets out to explain what went wrong with globalization—an idea that was once the hope of a post-Cold War world for growth, prosperity, and peace, but instead became a vehicle for displacement, division, and polarized politics.

The problem, as Lynch, a veteran economics reporter, makes clear in a trip through more than three decades of recent history, is that so very much went wrong: the China shock, or the sudden explosion of low-cost exports beginning a quarter-century ago that shattered many wo

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