I bought the 2000 paperback edition of Thomas L. Friedman’s book on globalization The Lexus and the Olive Tree on an acquaintance’s garage sale, as she was getting ready to head back to the United States and wanted to sell a bunch of books she felt would be too expensive to carry back.
The book consists of a series of examples of how what globalization is and how it’s changing the world, drawn out of both public news and Friedman’s own anecdotal evidence. I got it originally expecting it to be a semi-light description I could point my globalization-fearing friends towards - those that don’t understand that, to quote Eddie Izzard, their choices are or death - and while his focus on anecdotes make the book rather readable, they also infect it with a lack of depth that I find somewhat grating. That might make it a good fit for my friends, though, who are probably more interested in anecdotes they can quote that they are in nice crunchy numbers.
I’m only a third of the way through so far. While Friedman’s style is hardly heavy and easy to get into, the book’s relatively lack of depth makes my mind wander towards other books. Until now he has provided a balanced view, and while he cheers capitalism - he makes no bones about thinking that’s the best approach - he presents a clear picture that globalization isn’t some kind of Evil Mastermind Plot By U.S. Corporations, but that actually U.S. corporations are as afraid of the process (and as much a slave to it) as are third-world countries. Either you align yourself with the free-market, or you get crushed under the throng of people who did. Like Anatoly Chubais tells Friedman:
The Duma was also regularly denouncing Chubais as a traitor and foreign agent for submitting to IMF demands that Russia radically reform its economy along real free-market lines. I asked Chubais how he answered his critics, and he told me: “‘OK, I tell them, ‘Chubais is a spy for the CIA and IMF. But what is your substitute? Do you have any alternative workable ideas?’” Chubais said he never get any coherent answer, because the communists have no alternative.
Or as Friedman himself says while referring to communism, socialism and fascism,
There is only one thing to say for those alternatives: They didn’t work. And the people who rendered that judgment where the people who lived under them. So with the collapse of communism in Europe, the Soviet Union and China - and all the walls that protected these systems - the people who are unhappy with the Darwinian brutality of free-market capitalism don have any ready ideological alternative now. When it comes to the question of which system today is the most effective at generating rising standards of living, the historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.
It was half-amusing, half-annoying to watch a friend’s armchair socialist girlfriend (from a rich family, of course) attempt to dispute that fact in front of my girlfriend, who actually grew up under a communist regime. Ignorance is bold indeed.
More details to come in the next days, as I finish the next two sections.