“Globalization tends to benefit the privileged sections of society and further marginalized those who are already disadvantaged.”

The case for the statement.

• Within-country inequality has risen almost everywhere. Capital is mobile and labour is not, so bargaining power shifted to capital and the wage share of national income fell across the industrialised world.
• Milanovic's elephant curve shows the gains between 1988 and 2008 going to the emerging Asian middle class and the global top one per cent, with near-stagnation for the lower-middle deciles of rich countries.
• Conditionality. Structural adjustment imposed deflation, privatisation and subsidy cuts on countries with no bargaining power — Stiglitz's criticism from inside the institutions.
• Asymmetric rules. Agriculture and labour mobility, where developing countries hold the advantage, stayed protected; capital and intellectual property were liberalised.

The case against. The same period saw the fastest fall in absolute poverty on record, the share of the world's people in extreme poverty dropping from around 36 per cent in 1990 to about 10 per cent by 2015, concentrated in the countries that integrated most.

The reconciling distinction. Globalization reduced inequality between countries while increasing it within them. Both are true, and the backlash comes from the second even though the first is the larger humanitarian fact. The tendency is real but not automatic — outcomes depended on whether states kept the capacity to redistribute and invest in skills.