WorldCity Business Magazine

The globalization quartet

by Ken Roberts

Four contemporary thinkers take a close look at globalization, exposing both the beauty and the beast.

Which best describes your line of thought?

1. Globalization is unleashing a world of opportunities for all, from the most affluent and educated to the least, from the teeming, bustling “world cities” to the most remote and desolate of locations.

2. Globalization is unleashing a world of criminal enterprises. That includes terrorist enterprises but extends far beyond into identity theft, bio-terrorism and new high-tech mafias.

3.Globalization carries with it the moral imperative that we invest the trifling amount of money required to curb the daily death toll from preventable diseases. Today, 12,000 people die every 24 hours from ailments that are easy to prevent.

4.Globalization is giving rise to a new leadership in China and India. That rise comes at the expense of the United States, which has lost its edge in education and innovation and faces financial peril due to trade and budget deficits that have swollen to unsustainable levels.

Each of those four choices could have come from the dust jackets of four books I have read within the last several months. All are books worth picking up for your next long flight or for a holiday gift.

If you haven’t heard of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, don’t admit it. There are three factors propelling the global economy, according to this Pulitzer-prize winning columnist for the New York Times. Friedman, the closest thing to a Pied Piper for globalization, says those moments are 11/9 (not to be confused with 9/11), that day in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the former Soviet bloc opened; the decision by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to embrace the West’s money-grubbing ways er, free-market economy; and the rise of the Internet.

Many of the areas that Friedman largely ignores are addressed in Moises Naim’s book, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.This is a tome that could be subtitled Welcome to the Seedy Side of Town.Naim is Venezuela’s former trade minister, an ex-World Bank director and current editor of the weighty journal Foreign Policy. In his latest book, he takes a look at the dark side, examining the forces that give us all pause, despite the largely positive benefits of a greater transparency in global affairs.

A perhaps more hopeful view comes from Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. The Columbia University professor, who Time magazine lists as one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People, has been called upon by governments in Bolivia, Poland and in Africa to help them adjust to the new global economy and deal with deep-seated structural problems. He concludes that the world can eliminate what he calls extreme poverty the1.1 billionpeople living on less than $1a day in a generation’s time. Further, he says we are morally compelled to do so. Sachs, closely associated with both rock star Bono and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, delivers a book that is part travelogue, part disturbing statistics and part thoughtful analysis.

The final entry in my reading quartet is Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East, by Clyde Prestowitz. Although he was a Commerce Department official under the Reagan administration and a businessman with global experience, Prestowitz doesn’t exactly eschew the laissez-faire line most often associated with GOP theorists (if not practitioners). Like Friedman, he uses as a jumping-off point the fall of the Berlin Wall and China’s new love affair with free markets (which, he notes, comes with a muzzle on personal freedom). Along with the billion-plus citizens of India, the Chinese are the bulk of the 3 billion new capitalists in the book’s title.