Lester Thurow recalls a recent story in the Boston newspapers that bemoaned the closing of two small metal-bending plants and blamed the loss of jobs on globalization. But only a few years ago, the same papers lauded the decision by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novaritis to open a $250 million research center in Cambridge, Mass., that ultimately may employ 1,000s. Nowhere was the word globalization even mentioned.

		If you go Economist Lester Thurow will discuss his latest book, "Fortune Favors the Bold," at The Drue Heinz Lectures series Monday at 7:30 p.m. at the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland.

That, in a nutshell, reflects society's misunderstanding of what living and working in a truly global economy means, the noted economist and former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor said via telephone last week. Americans, and the media, are quick to highlight stories of plant closings and job losses and blame them on imports and foreign trade. They are less willing to credit much of the job growth that does occur here to global forces.

It's not hard to understand why. Finding examples of job losses that can be pinned on the shift of work to lower-wage countries are everywhere and second-nature to many, particularly in Western Pennsylvania, where foreign imports, off-shore outsourcing and other global forces have been blamed for everything from Big Steel's collapse to the exodus of Fortune 500 headquarters to the Steelers, inability to win Super Bowls anymore (OK, maybe not the last one).

The media hasn't helped much. It's easy to detail the plight of the down-on-his-luck rail worker or telemarketer whose livelihood left on the last train to Mexico or plane to India -- and it makes for compelling story-telling. Every time a plant closes or there's a mass layoff, it has to be reported to the state, which turns around and tells the media, which turns around tells the public -- "This just in -- another local plant closing because of cheap foreign labor. Details at 11."

It's much harder to find those companies whose existence and growth rely on foreign trade -- but not all that hard. Just drive out the Parkway West, and you'll see Germany's Bayer AG's sprawling U.S. headquarters and chemicals, polymers and services complex in Robinson that employ 2,300. Then there's British-based GlaxoSmithKline's Consumer Healthcare North American headquarters in Moon that employs nearly 600.

Head east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and you'll see a sprawling Sony TV-making complex that, depending on seasonal demand and the time of the year, employs up to 3,500. Or drive north to Marshall where British-based Marconi employs roughly 800 at the former Fore Systems computer networking complex. Overall, a Carnegie Mellon University study a few years back estimated that foreign-owned firms spent more than $1.4 billion annually on wages in the region in jobs that averaged $51,441 a year.

Even old-line manufacturing stalwart U.S. Steel has gotten religion on the global front. True, it favored tariffs that the Bush administration imposed for nearly two years on some foreign steel imports before lifting them late last year. But at the same time, it pumped capital into Slovakian and Serbian operations that are money makers for the steel giant, solidifying its overall financial health and creating a more stable future for the 5,200 workers it still employs in this region.

Americans who worry that low-wage countries and global forces are undermining this nation's health are misguided, and not just because the globalization cat is out of the bag and there's no way to rein it back in. This country benefits greatly from global trade, sometimes because of the investments foreign companies make here, and sometimes because American corporations are able to use lower-cost resources of other countries and then redeploy profits into higher-paying, more brain-intensive jobs at home.

Anti-trade beatniks may protest such talk, accusing American companies of exploiting foreign workers, discarding this society's less-skilled workers and disregarding the environment. And there's some truth to all of that. But the funny thing about this two-way trade equation is that, over time, the wages in the countries receiving American dollars and business rise, too, improving their living standards and, in a way, ours, too.

For the United States, the key is to continue to invest in new technologies, industries and more efficient ways of doing business and for the country as whole to do a better job of education, training and retraining children as well as adults. The United States isn't very good at propping up maturing industries, as the 1980s showed, Thurow said. But it excels at creating new ones, as the Internet boom of the '90s illustrated. It's worth noting, he said, that the first sale made over the Internet didn't occur until 1994 or 1995.

It's true that, as a society, we pay a cost for innovations and efficiency. The recent recovery, for all its statistical strength, has laid an egg on the job front, in part because U.S. companies are outsourcing some work and reaping the benefits of investing in all that technology in '90s, driving productivity to such heights -- 4.2 percent last year and 4.9 percent in 2002 -- that the economy has to grow faster than that just to create jobs.

It's also true that, in this global economy, American firms and consumers have grown accustomed to importing a lot more products and services than they have been exporting, causing the trade deficit -- the dollar-denominated difference between what we sell to foreign buyers and what we buy from foreign sellers -- to soar. It hit a record $418 billion in 2002 and achieve a new record of nearly $500 billion for last year when the final figures in.

Such deficits can't continue forever -- at some point, with all those dollars floating around the world, the dollar must fall in value. Just how fast that happens is the issue. Too fast, and the nation could plunge into a disastrous round of soaring inflation and interest rates as import prices surge and foreign investors demand higher returns.

But Thurow, noting "forever is very long time," doesn't expect a big fallout anytime soon and is more hopeful a sort of self-correcting process -- as the dollar declines in value, imports become more expensive and slow while exports become less expensive and grow -- will eliminate such dangers.

In the meantime, running a trade deficit isn't all bad and, for the world's far and away largest economy, may even be desirable. Countries receiving all those dollars use them to grow, to raise their living standards and, in many cases, to pump them back into the United States, either indirectly by buying U.S. bonds and securities or directly by building modern plants and offices here.

Foreign purchases of Treasury securities help finance our huge, and continually growing, budget deficits. And as the Japanese auto transplants that sprung up throughout the Midwest and South in the 1980s illustrate and the Sony TV complex illustrates here, some of those foreign companies holding dollars tend to come here, build -- and grow.