“Foreign visitors were horrified” that the women in Guatemala were wearing contemporary dress instead of traditional dress, he said. When asked why the women chose not to wear the traditional clothes, their reply was that traditional clothes were too expensive.

“For the first time in history,” he said, “the labor of an Indian woman has increased in value.”

It is better for the women to produce traditional clothes for sale abroad, from which they earn enough to buy five modern outfits and new things such as eyeglasses and medicine.

“The group that has been worse off [from globalization],” he said, “are the poverty tourists.”

Palmer cited evidence to draw a correlation between openness to trade and freedom.

He said that according to Freedom House statistics, 90 percent of those living in the top 40 percent of countries in terms of economic opennesswere classified as free, and not one was unfree.

In the lowest quintile, however, fewer than 20 percent were rated as free, while over 50 percent were rated as unfree.

“Every time you add more people engaging in exchange,” he said, “you create more incentives for peace.”