Good News - It's a Small World

Book: A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization
Authors: John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Publisher: Crown Business
Price: $27.50

Who can doubt that globalization is upon us? Hell, it has engulfed us. It's not just that our fresh sea bass arrives daily from Chile, or that Leonardo DiCaprio has arrived everywhere. Globalization has become ingrained in our assumptions and in our behavior. Who knows where our cars, our computers, or our clothes are made? Brazil? Indonesia? Who cares? Capital flows to Asia in a heartbeat, and the Internet just as readily brings us a glut of international news, shopping, and pornography. An expatriate from India runs McKinsey & Co. An Australian of Lebanese descent heads Ford Motor Co. And a one-minute phone call to the UK costs 10 cents.

Whether all of this represents a good thing is a somewhat more contentious question. Last December's "Battle of Seattle" served as evidence, if we needed any, that a minority -- albeit a large, vocal, and potent one -- views globalization as a less-than-optimal phenomenon. That group's resentment has been echoed, with varying levels of volume and antagonism, by "slow food" protesters in Europe; striking autoworkers in Flint, Michigan; and terrorist bombers from Saudi Arabia.

Globalization, it turns out, is a trend sorely in need of some good PR. To the rescue comes "A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization," written by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, both of whom are correspondents for the Economist. That pedigree is worth noting: This is the work of two Brits working in America, published by a German-owned company, typed (as the authors note) on an IBM laptop made in Mexico, and most likely printed on Canadian paper with ink from who-knows-where. Readers can anticipate that "A Future Perfect" will not be one to knock global connectedness.

In fact, it doesn't. "Of course globalization makes sense," Micklethwait and Wooldridge aver at the start of their compelling, witty discourse. In the basest terms, "it leads to a more efficient use of resources." But they're smart enough to argue that globalization's benefits are more profound than simple economic efficiency -- and to admit that the trend is not all roses, all the time. "Globalization is often a brutal and chaotic process," the authors concede. "The list of perceived losers is a long one."

To explain how globalization works, and how it came to pass, Micklethwait and Wooldridge take us on an extended world tour -- from the slums of Sao Paulo to the executive suite at General Electric. We meet Jackson Thubela, 20, a phone-shop entrepreneur in Soweto, South Africa, who's operating out of "that quintessential symbol of globalization, an old shipping container"; Sergei Orelsky, a jaunty young manager navigating Russia's decline amid a global financial domino effect; and Greg Power and Victoria Lam, two foreign-born MBAs getting married in New York.

We enter Toytown, a gritty section of downtown Los Angeles that's packed with somewhere around 400 toy companies and wholesalers. The architect of this phenomenon is an immigrant from Hong Kong named Charlie Woo, who, more than 20 years ago, began buying moderately priced playthings from the Far East and selling them to Mexican retailers. Now Woo and his neighbors, many of whom are also immigrant entrepreneurs, make more than $1 billion in toy sales a year, with half of those sales occurring outside the United States.

At times, this impressively far-flung reporting (the frequent-flier miles that the authors accumulated along the way must be considerable) gets off the point. What does the proliferation of an underclass in the heart of Silicon Valley have to do with the global economy? (Answer: not much.) Ultimately, though, the cavalcade of exotic postcards brings life to what Micklethwait and Wooldridge call the "three engines" driving globalization today.

The first of those three engines is technology -- a messy marvel that's chaotic and unpredictable in its spread throughout the world and that's, in short, subversive. "Technology gives entrepreneurs ... the freedom to challenge giant companies and to break up concentrations of power," write Micklethwait and Wooldridge. "Technology gives people the power to weave connections all over the world."

Technology frees people from tyranny of place. Consumers, of course, can surf the Internet at any time for the best deals on the best products available anywhere. Thanks to global telecommunications networks, workers in India are accomplishing some surprising things: processing insurance forms, running Swissair's back office, talking to General Electric's American credit-card users, even viewing security pictures sent by satellite to "guard" office buildings in California. Television, of course, beams news and culture to the world's most remote living rooms.