The key to reading Yglesias is that everything Clinton is good, everything Bush is bad and he'll fudge facts over it. 1992-2000 is utopia, 2001-2008 is hell on earth. DeLong is similar. Usually the key maneuver is to leave relevant facts out of the narrative.

Yglesias on globalization:

It seemed to me both then and now that the big problem with the global justice movement of that era wasn’t that the issues it was grappling with were too complicated for the average person to understand, it’s that the movement’s analysis was mistaken. The late 1990s were a very prosperous time for America. And the analysis that the spread of global capitalism to what we used to call “the third world” would be immiserating for those countries was wrong. China has not been immiserated. Nor has India. Nor has Brazil. Nor has Turkey. Africa’s just wrapped up a very solid decade. It’s true, as Dani Rodrik will tell you, that none of the development success stories (except maybe Chile) has come from a carbon copy implementation of the full Washington Consensus. But it’s even more true that none of the development success stories have come from developing a radical alternative to participation in a globalized market economy.

By contrast, the main analytic points of Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots are correct. Policymakers promised us broadly shared prosperity and macroeconomic stability. We didn’t get the former, and now we can see that we didn’t get the latter either. Having failed to deliver prosperity or stability, the global elite pivoted to the claim that owing to the lack of past prosperity it would be irresponsible to return us to macroeconomic stability without first cutting pensions. It’s crap, and people shouldn’t stand for it. And in America, at least, it’s already working. Conservative politicians are expressly talking about inequality, and the Obama administration has gone back to talking about aggregate demand instead of grand bargains. There’s more to life than being right, but being right helps a lot. And that’s the main difference here.

The Battle in Seattle was in 1999. Ralph Nader's third party candidacy was in 2000. 9-11 and Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

The Greeks will agree with the anti-globalization protesters analysis of the IMF. (It was entirely predictable given that the IMF put Argentina through the ringer.) And global trade imbalances led to Bernanke's Global Savings Glut. Globalization and trade via corporate priorities on labor and the enivironment led us to where we are today.

I agree with Yglesias that trade is not the problem and capitalism has worked - sort of- in the BRIC countries like China, India and Brazil. But at what cost?

The anti-globalization protest movement, which was international also, was against corporate priorties at the expense of the 99 percent and the OWS movement is similar except its focus is Wall Street rather than the World Bank and IMF. All three are citadels of elite policy making.

I'll agree that the IMF has gotten better. Krugman has written about it. The IMF has done a 180 on capital controls and expansionary austerity. It's analyses are often reality based. Maybe the anti-globalization protests played some small part in the shift.