A Future Perfect: The Challenge
and Hidden Promise of Globalization
By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Times Business
368 pages, $27.50
The problem with globalization is that it isn't global enough.
Why stop with global markets? Why not global trade unions and global
environmental laws? Why not turn the world into one big school district
and let Nike workers in Vietnam vote for property tax millages on
Phil Knight's mansion in Oregon? That would be indisputably global,
yet ideas like that never make it onto the agenda of globalization's
advocates.
The word "globalization," properly speaking, ought to apply to
any institution or
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TERRY LABAN
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mechanism that lets people in different countries coordinate their
efforts, to whatever end. But in practice it applies only to markets,
while other transnational legal and governmental arrangements that
might help people to bargain collectively or regulate pollution or
redistribute wealth are attacked as outright impediments to globalization.
Which means that globalization is really a code word for laissez-faire
capitalism.
Such, unfortunately, is the case with John Micklethwait and Adrian
Wooldridge's A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise
of Globalization. The authors, staffers at The Economist,
seem to promise a more expansive view, one that will "confront the
harsh questions concerning those people who lose on account of globalization,
not just economically but socially and culturally." The book never
lives up to this claim, which is not surprising, since they also
mean it as a "call to arms" for all of globalism's "faint-hearted"
defenders. By sticking with the usual narrow, ideologically loaded
conception of globalization, they've produced a self-contradictory
mess that does little to bolster confidence in free trade, even
as it demonstrates why business elites have adopted it as their
rallying cry. Micklethwait and Wooldridge want to make an "intellectual
case for globalization," so it's worthwhile to ask how strong this
really is.
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