Stephen Roach, the ever insightful chief economist at Morgan Stanley, wrote a crisp piece on how unprepared the rich world is for the globalization it has brought to the poor world. Probably unsurprising, I would go further than Mr. Roach. He writes:

Over time, each major wave of innovation has hit its critical mass of penetration considerably faster than the wave that preceded it. For example, it took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million US households; similar levels of penetration for television were hit in 13 years, for cable-TV in 10 years, and for the Internet in only 5 years

While true, radio and TV did not bring about a wave of globalization. The two things that did, transportation and the internet, occurred with an order of magnitude difference in speed. Roach continues:

With the click of a mouse, the output of a wide range of knowledge workers residing in low-wage developing countries can now be exported to desktops on a real-time basis from anywhere in the world. This has led to an unprecedented wave of white-collar shock, as once sheltered knowledge workers in the rich countries face the tough pressures of international competition for the first time ever.

Roach spends this article considering the world from the standpoint of international relations. Alternatively, one can consider the narrative arc of a single nation. History books in the USA often describe an agricultural age, an industrial age and most recently an information age. With globalization, the USA will no longer have an advantage in any of those areas, and will enter a financial age. An argument could perhaps be for a medical or pharmaceutical age, but the heavy information dependency of those industries, their susceptibility to the same education and lower payscale "attacks" by the developing world, and their generally transportable processes rule them out. Money is the only thing left separating the developed from the developing countries, and superior deployment of capital will be the last, brief age before most of the world competes on a level field. Wages will drop for white collar workers in OECD nations during the "integration period", but I believe they will rise again as the world's standard of living rises.