The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999)

For me this book was a very slow read. Alot of facts and interesting surmises on behalf of the author. I thought he was very insightful in picking Osama Bin Laden as one of the top three most dangerous people in world. The author's theories about the electronic herd are very interesting. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about the information/internet age. ( )

Babble. [personal note: I started to read this because I think it would help me talk to Dennis, and finished it because it is an important & common viewpoint.] It is a hard book to take seriously. I don't know that it is particularly wrong but the tone is so gosh-y and gush-y. He makes up terms and phrases for everything...the turtles...the gazelles...Capitalism 6.0.... He repeats the received wisdom about the victory of Capitalism and he loves the US of A in all its wonder. He is a "liberal" and wants some kinds of welfare services while sneering at the French. He has some idea that the US can provide basic human services but stay viable and competitive, because the U.S. has such great experience at the rule of law and the primacy of ethics. 10 years adds a lot of detail to the story of the U.S. in this era. One thing the book does is highlight to the reader what devastation to the US system has been wrought over these past 10 years, even when it seemed like Reagan had done it all. And why the business world, or at least the business education world, is so hot on ethics; if (that) the US has lost its ethical standing it has lost a lot. Some of what I dislike about this book is the journalistic writing, it seems to lack much humanity. I don't know, TMQ was going on recently about the rise in the standard of living around the world and that this is the best of times for the most people...and I am certainly not a person who wishes to cling to a time when things are only better for US workers. I just wonder if this is the worst of times for the most people as well, and how those things can be balanced. But I stick with my understanding that Capitalism won't stay stable and the crashes will get crazier.

"Globalization" might be the mother of all buzzwords, a catch-all explanation for anything that's happened in the last thirty or so years that's grown nearly meaningless from overuse. In "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," Thomas Freidman does a pretty good job of framing this pheonomenon in a social, historical, and economic context that the average reader can relate to. Freidman obviously thinks of himself as something of a Rennaisance man, a polymath of the old school, and in a sense, this is where the strengths of his book lie. His generalist approach and strong grasp of Cold War-era politics serve him very well when he explains why globalization is the inevitable result of a post-Soviet, unipolar world. He also deserves some credit for mentioning, if not fully exploring, the various downsides to a globalized world. He acknowledges that globalization has its victims and that some people's misgivings about it are probably well-founded. He's still a booster, of course, and, perhaps because he's a newspaper columnist, can't help but try to make a case every time he sets pen to paper, but he's more aware of his argument's weaknesses than many free-traders out there.

My objections to "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" are due, perhaps, to the tempremental differences between myself and Mr. Freidman. Freidman, a midwesterner, seems to be a born optimist, something my Yankee constitution just can't abide. As a lefty, I'm much more likely to see unbridled capitalism's downsides than its promieses, and while Freidman moved me to reconsider some of my positions, I don't know if he's convinced me. His enthusiasm for technology hasn't aged well, either, considering that "Lexus" was written ten years ago and the internet has since been done to death in about a trillion uninspired trend pieces. The Friedman of the late nineties would doubtless be disappointed to know that these days it's used mostly as a conduit for pictures of cute cats and scads of hardcore pornography. Friedman's America-centric, which I can forgive, and an inveterate name-dropper, which is somewhat less forgivable. What really worries me, though, is that even though Friedman's a tolerable writer with a clear, friendly tone, he's awful at coining phrases and drawing visual comparisons in his arguments, even though it's clear that he very much enjoys doing both of these things. George Orwell would argue that this is a sign of a disordered mind or a lousy argument. I am betting that Freidman's just a writer whose arguments are better than his metaphors. "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" is, despite its faults, recommended to those who want to know what to say the next time the G-word comes up in conversation. ( )

Friedman does take the "big picture" of globalization and brings it down to the small conclaves of Africa and other lower levels of the economic system. Perhaps this is most interesting as a book for periodic rereading to trace how globalization is proceeding and Friedman admits it is not standing still. Writing the month of the World Cup in South Africa it is instructive to check out his personal experience in India when a former shoe shine boy in 1998 has 27 channels from 6 different countries illegally accessed at his house (where his wife is learning English from the TV). Friedman, himself a part of the information business, focuses on the democratization of information, not just the spread of goods and capital. In the last 12 years how information exchange has exploded with more to come. ( )