Product Description

A powerful and accessible account of globalization -- the new world order that has replaced the cold war -- by the award-winning author of From Beirut to Jerusalem. More than anything else, globalization is shaping world affairs today. We cannot interpret the day's news, or know where to invest our money, unless we understand this new system -- the defining force in international relations and domestic policies worldwide. The unprecedented integration of finance, markets, nation states and technology is driving change accross the globe at an ever-increasing speed. And while much of the world is intent on building a better Lexus, on streamlining their societies and economies for the global marketplace, many people feel their traditional identities threatened and are reverting to elemental struggles over who owns which olive tree, which strip of land. Thomas Friedman has a unique vantage point on this worldwide phenomenon. The New York Times foreign affairs columnist has travelled the globe, interviewing everyone from Brazilian peasants to new entrepreneurs in Indonesia, to Islamic students, to the financial wizards on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, to find out what globalization means for them, and for all of us. This ground-breaking book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how the world really works today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98742 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
One day in 1992, Thomas Friedman toured a Lexus factory in Japan and marvelled at the robots that put the luxury cars together. That evening, as he ate sushi on a Japanese bullet train, he read a story about yet another Middle East squabble between Palestinians and Israelis. And it hit him: half the world was lusting after those Lexuses, or at least the brilliant technology that made them possible, and the other half was fighting over who owned which olive tree.

Friedman, the well-travelled New York Times foreign-affairs columnist, peppers The Lexus and the Olive Tree with stories that illustrate his central theme: that globalisation--the Lexus--is the central organising principle of the post-cold war world, even though many individuals and nations resist by holding onto what has traditionally mattered to them--the olive tree. Problem is, few of us understand what exactly globalisation means. As Friedman sees it, the concept, at first glance, is all about American hegemony. But the reality, thank goodness, is far more complex than that, involving international relations, global markets and the rise of the power of individuals (Bill Gates, Osama Bin Laden) relative to the power of nations.

No one knows how all this will shake out, but The Lexus and the Olive Tree is as good an overview of this sometimes brave, sometimes fearful new world as you'll find. --Lou Schuler

Review
'Friedman provides an excellent bird's-eye view of globalization' Financial Times

About the Author
THOMAS FRIEDMAN was born in Minneapolis in 1943. He completed his post-graduate Middle-Eastern Studies at St Antony's College, Oxford, before becoming a journalist. From 1979 to 1981, he was UPI's Beirut correspondent. In 1982, he became the New York Times' Beirut bureau chief, moving south to Jerusalem in 1984 to become bureau chief there. In January 1989, he became the New York Times' chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, where he now lives with his wife and two daughters. Friedman has twice won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Middle East.

Customer Reviews

"No one is in charge!"
Those fearing this book is a treatise in economics, take heart. Lexus isn't about numbers or the arcane world of international banking - it's about attitude. If your attitude is open to global thinking, untrammelled by tradition or restrictive cultural ideas, you will surely succeed in improving your lifestyle. If you hold too tightly to traditional ideals, you will just as surely fail. Either way, you'd best buy, read, and understand this book. Friedman's analysis conveys the thinking of too many people. You cannot afford to ignore it.

With evangelical fervour, Friedman explains how the end of the Cold War unleashed American capitalism around the globe. While "free market" capitalism had been a weapon in those years of missile diplomacy, the breakup of the Soviet Union left the American economic model without a major opponent. The collapse of the Berlin Wall, coinciding with the rise of the high speed digital communications, led to a new era of global finance. Once, "the sun never set on the British Empire." Now the Internet allows investment activity continuously and without hindrance. The market is never closed as international financial transactions occur constantly, and at light speed. And the market is open to anyone wishing to participate. Anyone possessing the resources, that is.

Friedman argues that the American model of capitalism is the ideal version. Government must play a minimal role. "No one is in charge" simply means no overseer to represent the community's interests. Labour unions are to be quelled. No favours are to be shown to any not meeting the new performance standards. The "wounded" firm must be killed off to allow the successful to continue. There will be disruptions in peoples' lives, but emerging new businesses will pick up any slack. The reward will be growth and enhanced living standards. The system is so well established now, according to Friedman, that it can, is and will be exported successfully around the planet. Anyone it touches need only accept it without question.

Global acceptance, of course, is the rub. The world isn't [yet] American. Scattered around our planet are numerous cultures who either haven't seen the light or resist its premise. These are the peoples who cling to their "olive trees" in defiance of Americanization. Friedman recognizes their concern over losing what they feel is valuable. He should, his interviewees have told him so often enough. He doesn't want them subjugated to an American ideal, he wants them to buy into the system voluntarily. Many want what the new economic system offers, he stresses. They simply have to learn how to adjust their values enough to bring America's financial methods into their own culture. How are they to achieve this feat? Replace restrictive or unresponsive governments. How this is to be achieved in the face of the pace of globalization is left unexplained.

Friedman's eagerness is contagious. It seems cruel to refute a man who presents his case with such honesty and in such a readable style. He carries you along with finesse and you have no feeling of being duped by someone so forthright. He wants everybody to accept his assertions because he sincerely believes those who do will benefit from the new economics. He addresses every objection, meeting each head-on with convincing arguments. He admits, for example, that not everyone has access to the digital communications making globalization possible. Easily solved, he says. One cell 'phone per village is a good start. Even the environmental concerns are [very briefly] touched - conservationists adopting capitalist tactics will save the rain forest. I'm not making this up! He means what he says.

What he fails to recognize is that high speed communication, instantaneous finance and rapid economic growth carries an exacting price. Consumption at the American pace over the whole planet means production to meet the demand. That level of production is reflected in the inroads being made on the world's resources. The pace of growth is faster than "environmentalists" can cope with. Environmental issues are brought to view only when it's too late. If people sit back, allowing unfettered capitalism to buy off their future, there won't be a world left for enjoyment of that enhanced lifestyle. Friedman rejoices in the assertion that "no one is in charge" because it means no fetters to American capitalist ideals. That lack of control may sound the knell of the ideal. Capitalism, as a philosopher once noted, carries the seeds of its own destruction. Sprouts from those seeds may be found in Mark Hertsgaard's "Earth Odyssey." Read Friedman, then immediately take up Hertsgaard. Only then can you realistically assess your own attitude. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Light reading
Light reading, but ultimately anecdotal and written from one of the winners in a system creating many more realtive, if not absolute losers. Friedman is a bourgeois journalist writing up his day in the jetset, thats about it.
Worth reading along with Klein's No Logo since they are both emotive and polemical, choose a side, but if you want to even begin to understand Klein or Friedman are only starting points on a long journey.

entertaining, but too little substance
Friedmann sets out to portray the new world system of globalization, which he sees as replacing that of the Cold War. While he puts forward some interesting ideas about the change, too often does he take anecdotal evidence to be sufficient to prove his case. This is in keeping with the style of the book, which is very much geared towards a popular audience, with an insistence upon pointless metaphors for economic agents and actions (eg. "Electronic herd" and "long-horn cattle") for some of the most basic ideas. The overall effect of this to give the impression that Friedmann sees the readder as being incapable to understand the system without this inane dumbing down which while, at first amusing quickly becomes irritating as it is continued throughout the book.
In summation then, if you are looking for a readable and entertaining guide to the world today this is worth buying, as it is undenaibly well written, but it is more a collection of stories about a journalist's travels, than a rigourous explanation for the current global paradigm it claims to be.