The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization

From the Publisher

"Required reading...No one gives a better explanation of [globalization] than New York Times correspondent Thomas L. Friedman....Impressive."—The Christian Science Monitor "Important…Friedman writes in straightforward language that should make globalization’s complexities comprehensible. There’s a great deal of wisdom in this book."—USA Today "Friedman gets the economics right. His book is a wellspring of economic common sense that will inoculate its readers against the ‘globaloney’ so prevalent in popular discussions of the subject."—Foreign Affairs "Friedman convincingly argues that what creates wealth has suddenly changed.…The Lexus and the Olive Tree makes alarmingly good sense; it educates and provokes."—The Baltimore Sun "A lively mix of anecdote and analysis…full of solid reporting…Friedman is eager, provocative, [and] often entertaining….Insightful."—The Boston Globe "There is hardly a page in The Lexus and the Olive Tree without an underlineable passage….Friedman has used his remarkable vantage point to provide a readable overview that no academic or narrow-beat reporter could have given us….A genuinely important book."—Salon

Ian S. McDonald

In Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman's analysis provides a superb introduction to his topic the equivalent of a Globalization 101 for the general reader. His writing is vivid and topical but it is never dull and Friedman's insights are often penetrating.
— Finance&Developement

Scott Whitney

This is an important book; not since Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital has a volume come along that so well explains the technical and financial ether we are all swimming through. Like fish oblivious to the surrounding water, we need a Negroponte or a Thomas Friedman to give us some instruction in basic hydrology — or, in the case of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, in globalization. Friedman sees globalization as the one big thing, the defining theory of the post-Cold War era. He cites the Lexus as the pinnacle of the high-quality production that the forces of globalization make possible, the olive tree as the symbol of wealth in pre-modern, "slow" economies.

By "globalization" Friedman means the cluster of trends and technologies — the Internet, fiber optics, digitalization, satellite communications — that have increased productivity and cranked up the speed of international business since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. During this period, the declining cost of communications has led to the "democratization" of finance, information and technology. If your company has replaced the switchboard operator with an automated phone menu, if you have ever received a FedEx package or sent an e-mail, you have felt the effects of globalization.

There is hardly a page in the book without an underlineable passage. (For example: "In the Cold War, the most frequently asked question was: 'How big is your missile?' In globalization, the most frequently asked question is: 'How fast is your modem?'") Globalization has created what Friedman calls the "Electronic Herd" — investors and speculators whose roving hot money "turns the whole world into a parliamentary system, in which every government lives under the fear of a no-confidence vote." Brazil knows the effects of such a vote all too well; so do Thailand and Indonesia.

Sometimes Friedman can be a rather grandiose name-dropper: "As I was traveling with Secretary of State Baker"; "when I interviewed former Indian Prime Minister I.K. Gujral"; "I ran this by James Cantalup, president of McDonald's International." But as foreign-affairs columnist for the New York Times, he really has talked to all these people. And he has used his remarkable vantage point to provide a readable overview that no academic or narrow-beat reporter could have given us. Occasionally, the habits he has developed as a columnist get in the way. His imaginary arguments between such people as Warren Christopher and Syrian President Hafez el-Assad are a little too cutesy-chatty, and his overly clever chapter titles ("DOScapital 6.0," "Microchip Immune Deficiency," "Globalution") can be annoying. Still, these are quibbles about a genuinely important book.

I have one reservation, though, that isn't a quibble: I would be embarrassed to lend this book to friends overseas. Friedman gets very rah-rah as an American apologist, and he poses no serious objections to the worldview that regards globalization as an international extension of Manifest Destiny. In the gushy tribute to American values he offers on his final pages, you can almost hear the Boston Pops swelling under the patriotic fireworks.

His message, though, can't be easily ignored. According to Friedman, there is no longer a first, a second and a third world; there are just the Fast World and the Slow World. And his message to the Slow World is simple and a bit chilling: Speed up or become road kill.
— Salon

Josef Joffe

A brilliant guide for the here and now....Friedman knows how to cut through the arcana of high tech and high finance with vivid images and compelling analogies...A delightfully readable book.
—The New York Times Book Review

Robert Wright

Friedman...doesn't love globalization; he just thinks it's largely a good thing and, in any event, a fact of life....If this book becomes a basic guide to globalization for American opinion makers, as it well may, that will be a good thing.
— WQ: The Wilson Quarterly

Michael Freedman

An American reading Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree would be hard pressed to feel anything less than exuberant about this nation's prospects.
— Brill's Content

Richard Eder

...[A] breathtaking tour, one that possesses the exhilarating qualities of flight and the stomach-hollowing ones of free fall....He can be eloquently outraged about the growing gap between rich and poor and the threat to the environment....For the most part...Mr. Friedman accepts the current version of the invisible hand: globalize, or the economic forces that be will condemn you to be left behind. —The New York Times

Gail Jaitlin

Thomas L. Friedman is scaring me. I am reading his new book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree , and suddenly I imagine I am in the middle of an IBM commercial, the kind with brightly colored images of Tibetan monks and African villagers tap-tapping away at laptops. I know that, in fact, Tibetan monks usually live meditative, ascetic lives, and that African villagers sometimes go hungry during times of drought. Yet I am swept up in these images, just as I am in Friedman's cheerful, optimistic book about the new global economy and how it will enrich all our lives.

Don't get me wrong — it's a terrific book. As in his columns for The New York Times, Friedman's writing is illustrative and clear. He uses catchphrases and stories to make clear otherwise complex ideas. For instance, the "Golden Straitjacket" is his term for what a country dons when it accepts the rules of a free-market economy — it accepts the promise of a rising standard of living (the gold) by tossing out old-fashioned ideologies like communism and socialism and accepting the rules (the straitjacket) of capitalism. A country can refuse to put on the Golden Straitjacket, and retain its old systems and values, and try to protect itself from the outside world. But the outside world gets in somehow, through the Internet and cable TV, and more and more citizens find themselves clamoring for the straitjacket. Eventually, the country must put it on, or risk having its citizens fall far behind the rest of the world (or worse, revolt, as happened recently in Indonesia).

Friedman's travel stories (he calls himself a "tourist with an attitude") are wonderful — they leave the reader hungering for a whole bookful — and his optimism about the new global economy is infectious. The central metaphor of the book, which gives the book its title, is the "Lexus and the Olive Tree." The Lexus, the luxury car, represents globalization. The olive tree stands for local concerns, cultural pride, and nationalism. With that pairing, Friedman has done a very neat job of explaining world politics as they now exist. The Cold War determined world politics until very recently; globalization determines them now. The relaxation of trade barriers and taxes, the accessibility of international markets through the Internet and Federal Express, the global stock market — all of these have made it possible for people to become more prosperous than ever before, no matter where they live. What this has done, however, is to make some people very nervous about losing their national or cultural identity. There is a tension now between people's desire for world culture and increased profits, and their desire to remain unique beings in localized cultures and traditions. Friedman illustrates his point by mentioning a few recent news events and telling us whether the Lexus or the olive tree was the winner. (The current war in Yugoslavia would certainly be an example of the olive tree winning out — despite all pressures from the U.S. and the world economy, the Serbs insist on fighting for Kosovo, their olive tree.) The pressures of the global economy seem to demand peace (you can't very well do business with India, for example, if your country is at war with it); Friedman is excited about globalization because he believes it will eventually bring world peace, as soon as the Lexus and the olive tree can be brought into co-existence.

It all sounds rosy, but... And now I come to my one big problem with Friedman's enthusiasm for this faster, barrier-free world. While I think his theories are sound, I am worried (as he does not seem to be) for those who get left behind. Not everyone in the Brazilian rain forest can afford a laptop computer; not everyone in East Lansing, Michigan, is young and supple enough to go through hours and hours of retraining to learn how to use the Net to their advantage. Friedman, who calls these people "turtles" because of their inability or unwillingness to move apace of the quickening world, seems to be saying, "So what? Too bad." The safety nets, such as welfare and unemployment insurance, are falling away, and to them Friedman says good riddance. He uses a jungle metaphor to illustrate the new world order: Everyone is either a lion or a gazelle. The lion wakes up every morning hoping he can catch the slowest gazelle; the gazelle wakes up every morning hoping that she can outrun the fastest lion. In other words, kill or be killed is the rule of the new global economy.

But do we really want our civilization to be run according to the law of the jungle? Friedman thinks so. "[T]he centrally planned, nondemocratic alternatives...communism, socialism, and fascism — helped to abort the first era of globalization [the industrial revolution]...[and] they didn't work." But Friedman is forgetting some of the other responses to dehumanizing industrialization — stunt journalism and labor unions, which banded together in the early 1900s to fight for shorter workdays, higher wages, less life-threatening working conditions, and an end to child labor. Friedman has a very short memory if he believes that pure, unfettered capitalism is necessarily a good thing.

Gail Jaitin is a writer living in Jersey City.

David S. Landes

...Friedman believes in, approves of, and enthuses for globalization....A purely material account of economics is hardly the whole story....We can and must find sweeter, more winning ways.
—New Republic

Publishers Weekly

"In the Cold War, the most frequently asked question was 'How big is your missile?' In globalization, the most frequently asked question is 'How fast is your modem?' " So writes New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist Friedman (author of the NBA-winning From Beirut to Jerusalem), who here looks at geopolitics through the lens of the international economy and boils the complexities of globalization down to pithy essentials. Sometimes, his pithiness slips into simplicity. There's a jaunty innocence in the way he observes that "no two countries that both had a McDonald's had fought a war against each other, since each got its McDonald's." For the most part, however, Friedman is a terrific explainer. He presents a clear picture of how the investment decisions of what he calls the "Electronic Herd" — a combination of institutions, such as mutual funds, and individuals, whether George Soros or your uncle Max trading on his PC — affect the fortunes of nations. The book's title, in its reference to both the global economy (the Lexus) and specific national aspirations and cultural identity (the olive tree), echoes Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld. Like Barber, Friedman takes note of what may be lost, as well as gained, in the brave new world: "globalization enriches the consumer in us, but it can also shrink the citizen and the space for individual cultural and political expression." The animating spirit of his book, however, is one of excitement rather than fear. Some of the excitement is the joy a good lecturer feels in making the complex digestible. Writing with great clarity and broad understanding, Friedman has set the standard for books purporting to teach Globalization 101.

Library Journal

A two-time Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter and current New York Times columnist, Friedman believes that with the end of the Cold War we are now in the era of the international globalization system. He defines globalization as the integration of finance, stock markets, nations, and technology and explains its dependence on computers, the Internet, transaction speed, and innovation. Friedman catalogs the benefits and pitfalls of globalization in a text so clearly written and with so many examples that one easily forgets that this is a book about economics. He makes a compelling case that international economics is changing and that globalization is inevitable and calls for both the United States and global business to pursue responsible capitalism that would make globalization more effective and fair. He ends with a call for businesses to understand that U.S. military and economic strength provide essential stability. Readers of Friedmans column will recognize many of these concepts. Well written, cogently argued, thought-provoking, and very highly recommended.
— Patrick J. Brunet, Western Wisconsin Technical College Library, La Crosse

David S. Landes

...Friedman believes in, approves of, and enthuses for globalization....A purely material account of economics is hardly the whole story....We can and must find sweeter, more winning ways.
— The New Republic

Paul Krugman

Every few years a book comes along that perfectly expresses the moment's conventional wisdom — that says pretty much what everybody else in the chattering classes is saying, but does it in a way that manages to sound fresh and profound.....[This is] the latest in the series.
— The Washington Monthly

Stephen Humphries

...Friedman deftly accomplishes the impressive task of encapsulating the complex economic, cultural, and environmental challenges of globalization with the sort of hindsight that future historians will bring to bear upon the subject.
— The Christian Science Monitor

Nicholas Lemann

...Friedman has escaped the most serious occupational hazard for a writer on world affairs: the studiously airy, condescending, patrician tone. He may by hanging out with Them these days, but he's still on Our side. He has a born reporter's inextinguishble interest in everyhting, and a great sense of the telling details. His experience of the world's societies may be broad and thin, yet he quite often finds a fresh, memorable nugget inservice of his view that globalization is the "One Big Thing" in the world today.
— The New Yorker

Kirkus Reviews

A brilliant guidebook to the new world of "globalization" by Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist Friedman (From Beirut to Jerusalem, 1988). Like El Niño, globalization is blamed for anything and everything, but few understand just what it really is. In simplest terms, Friedman defines globalization as the world integration of finance markets, nation states, and technologies within a free-market capitalism on a scale never before experienced. Driving it all is what he calls the "Electronic Herd," the faceless buyers and sellers of stocks, bonds, and currencies, and multinational corporations investing wherever and whenever the best opportunity presents itself. It is a pitiless system—richly rewarding winners, harshly punishing losers—but contradictory as well. For nations and individuals willing to take the risk, globalization offers untold opportunity, yet in the process, as the "Electronic Herd" scavenges the world like locusts in the search for profit, globalization threatens to destroy both cultural heterogeneity and environmental diversity. The human drive for enrichment (the Lexus) confronts the human need for identity and community (the olive tree). The success of globalization, Friedman contends, depends on how well these goals can be satisfied at one and the same time. He believes they can be, but dangers abound. If nation states sacrifice too much of their identity to the dictates of the "Electronic Herd," a backlash, a nihilistic rejection of globalization, can occur. If nation states ignore these dictates, they face impoverishment; there simply is no other game in town. Friedman's discussion is wonderfully accessible, clarifying the complex withenlightening stories that simplify but are never simplistic. There are flaws, to be sure. He is perhaps overly optimistic on the ability of the market forces of globalization to correct their own excesses, such as environmental degradation. Overall, though, he avoids the Panglossian overtones that mar so much of the literature on globalization. Artful and opinionated, complex and cantankerous; simply the best book yet written on globalization. (First printing 100,000) (Author tour)