The subtitle of this book is "Understanding Globalization." It's about the radical shift that the world has undergone in the past decade since the end of the Cold War, not just politically, but economically, technologically, and socially.
Friedman is a senior reporter for The New York Times, and seems to have spent about 90% of the time in the past 4 years travelling the world, witnessing globalization first-hand. He has tales from people he's interviewed in a rain forest restoration project in Brazil, the Thai banking industry, the Chinese government, the Israeli foreign minister, Russian diplomats, and Malaysian shopkeepers. The guy is damn smart, too, with a brilliant ability to synthesize all these parts into a coherent whole.
The thesis is: It really IS different now, and we're not going back. The protectionist walls of the Cold War are melting down, giving everyone a unique opportunity to play and win on the world stage-- and also threatening those who are too slow or too corrupt to get with the program. Globalization is not something to debate. It's a FACT. It came about from three key democratizations: the democratization of technology, finance, and information. We have to live with both its good and bad traits, and the sooner we accept that, the better we will be able to manage it and avoid some of the financial blips we've seen recently (Malaysia, Russia, Thailand, and Mexico, anyone?).
The whole book is worth it for Friedman's brilliant metaphors. He calls the increasingly powerful group of global investors "The Electronic Herd," led of course by the bulls of Wall Street-- but don't be fooled, this is an international herd. (And more now than ever, it contains a motley crew of individual investors, small companies, large companies, and governments).
Even better, Friedman explains how the Cold War was a battle between the US and the USSR over what "operating system" each country would install on its "hardware"-- communism or capitalism. (The hardware itself didn't matter much, and we hardly worried whether the OS would be compatible with the hardware; we just wanted not to lose market share). But in globalization, that battle is over-- there is only one kind of hardware and one operating system that will work anymore: liberal capitalism running "DOScapital." (I love that!!!! groan...). Friedman does differentiate, however, between countries running DOScapital 1.0- 4.0 (Africa, most of China and South America, most of the Middle East, etc), countries running DOScapital 5.0 (most of Western Europe), and the countries running DOScapital6.0-- the United States, Britain, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. (OK, HK's not a country).
The process of plugging into The Electronic Herd in order to benefit from its shower of inflowing finance requires adhering to certain rules, however, such as maintaining open bank books and having a decent legal system to prosecute corrupt money launderers. You should also have a system that quickly punishes the weak businesses, shutting them down in favor of stronger ones instead of propping them up like Japan did for decades. The process of converting to this system-- which is quite alien to many countries-- is called putting on The Golden Straightjacket.
Friedman goes on to discuss the implications of wearing The Golden Straightjacket, the backlash against globalization (particularly sobering is the section on Super-Empowered Angry Men, such as Osama Bin Laden, who can attack an entire country as an individual), and the possible instabilities in the system.
He concludes with a moving section on how we need to reshape politics in America to take account of globalization instead of living back in the Cold War world of The One Big Enemy. There is no doubt that America is leading the globalization movement, and is its primary benefactor. That also gives us inordinate responsibility to maintain the system, which Frieman fears we haven't really come to terms with culturally.
Overall, this book is a great read. Some people on Amazon claim that it "changed their whole outlook," but I found many of the conclusions to be intuitively true. I think that has to do with being young enough that I didn't get totally steeped in Cold War culture before discovering the Internet. Globalization is a much more challenging concept for people over 40. I also disagreed with a few of his more passionate points, but that didn't happen too often. Overall, Friedman is a gifted writer and thinker.
An solid "+."
Copyright © Kim Allen 2000
