This doesn’t mean all that much in terms of globalisation. Globalisation is ill-defined, but surely it doesn’t mean that you are as likely to have close contacts 1000 miles away as 100 or even 10 miles away. A useful reference point would be how many calls in the US are across state boundaries. The US is home to the most mobile population on the planet, so interstate calls within the US would offer a ceiling. I would be very surprised if 30% of calls in the US would cross state boundaries. Heck, I’ld be surprised if it was 15%.

Much the same goes for the immigration issue. That “(j)ust 3% of the world’s population are first-generation immigrants” should come as no surprise. According to the Economist (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-mobility), less than 3% of Americans live outside the state they were born in.

I conclude that readers of the Harvard Business Review are – statistically speaking – less than knowledgeable about the world they inhabit.

“only 2% of university students are studying in countries where they are not citizens”.

Yet the same mistake, doubled up with the fact that university tends to cost more for non-citizens, language fluency is often demanded (and in any case necessary) and foreign high school diplomas may not be recognized at all. Again you can reference the US to see what full integration might mean here, and you find that less than 14% of students at public universities are from out of state. This is in a country where it is easy to get cross-state financing, and where your high school diploma is recognized everywhere. Add in language barriers, and I’m stunned that the number of out-of-country students is already 2%.

So while I wholeheartedly agree with the speaker that facts on globalisation are often lost under a pile of rhetoric and emotions, I would also say that he forgets that statistics without context are meaningless.