What kind of stories do we tell ourselves about economic globalization, about how countries interact and compete with each other? That is a question Anthea Roberts has spent years thinking about. She is a lawyer by training and now a professor at the Australian National University. She’s also the co-author, with Nicolas Lamp, of a book called Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters. Their main point is simple, but also profound: we all tell stories about our economic lives — we as individuals and countries too — but we don’t all tell the same story. Maybe you prefer the story about how “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Or the story about how China is stealing America’s jobs. Or maybe the one about how our planet is on an unsustainable trajectory, and that G.D.P. is a terrible measure of prosperity. Most of us, when we subscribe to one of these stories, we tend to discount or ignore the others. Yours, surely, is the right story; the others must be wrong. But, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Anthea Roberts is able to hold six opposing ideas in mind. Today on Freakonomics Radio, we unpack all these stories in order to answer a big question: has economic globalization been a failure?