The impossibility of restricting information in the Internet age, the impracticality of slowing down innovation in the computer age, and the futility of forbidding foreign investment in the international-banking age are the main themes that run through this wise and witty study of globalization and its consequences for our increasingly fast-paced, increasingly smaller planet.
Journalist Thomas L. Friedman's "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" uses a host of metaphors to housebreak international business, finance, culture, technology and the environment for his readers. Flows of capital are controlled by an "Electronic Herd" of investors who flow into lucrative markets (and slosh out just as quickly if they sense trouble, as several southeast Asian countries found to their chagrin in the 1990s). Friedman opines that a country has to have an advanced "operating system" (a predilection to capitalism) to increase its standard of living. The USA and Britian are at the top, followed closely by France and Germany. Korea is just below. These societies can put on the "Golden Straitjacket" of capitalist restraint and watch their economies zoom. But not, say, Russia. They've spend too long under a system by which the success of a bedframe factory is not profit, consumer satisfaction, quality or good shipped but amount of steel consumed, the most absurd, downside-up measure of success possible.
But any society--even one as free-market oriented as the USA's--can't leave tradition behind in the dust. Hence the tension between the "Lexus" (high-tech innovation) and the "olive tree" (tradition, pride, tribalism). Note well the current opposition to the WTO.
Our go-go technological climate even finds living application in this very book. In between the hardcover issue of "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" (1999) and the new paperback (spring 2000), computer maker Compaq lost its innovative edge to upstart Dell--Friedman explains why in the paperback.
This is fun, lively reading. It gives wonk subject matter like business & finance a good name. The amount of research is astonishing, most of it collected on-site, and surely generated enough frequent-flier mileage to get the author a free trip to Mars when the time comes. Friedman is a bit of a true believer--he is SURE that the American way is the right way--but he offers good arguments for his opinions. Time spend on this book will be time well spent.
