Globalization Influences on Modern Society

Globalization Influences on Modern Society Globalization is killing the globe. Globalization is a way of interaction between the people, transnational agencies, organizations, and governments of different nations. Globalization is not new. Thousands of years ago, people began commercial activity between lands separate by vast distances. The Silk Road was the most famous line that brought music, culture, ideas, foods and routes connecting East and West. Fischer’s article “Globalization and Its Challenges” shows economic globalization grew up in the period before 1914, but was set back by the two World Wars and the Great Depression. The international financial order that was established at the end of World War II sought to restore the volume of world trade, and by 1973, world trade as a percentage of world GDP was back to its 1913 level – and it has continued to grow almost every year (44). Rifkin describes that “globalization as we know it may be traced to a 1944 meeting in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, at which representatives from forty-five nations sketched out of a plan for post-World War II economic recovery” (qtd. in Rifkin 171). In “Globalization and Its Challenges” Fischer states that while the founders of the Bretton Woods system saw the restoration of trade in goods and services as necessary to the recovery of the global economy, they did not have the same optimistic of capital flows. Nonetheless, capital flows among the industrialized countries did recover during the 1950s, and became stronger in the 1960s. Rapidly they became too powerful for the pegged exchange rate system to survive, and by 1973, the Bretton Woods adjustable peg system issued flexible exchange rates among the major countries (89). Rifkin’s article “Spiritual Perspectives on Globalization”, shows globalization is a ongoing process of greater economic interdependence among countries, is reflected in the increasing amount of cross-border trade in goods and services, the

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