A Future Perfect - The Challenge and Promise of Globalization

Zusatztext “A tremendous book.” — Newsweek “It is not just that Micklethwait and Wooldridge . . . write gloriously. . . . The book’s substance is what really makes it stand out. . . . Judged in its entirety! with all its ambition and achievement! the book is a spectacular success.” — Foreign Affairs “[A] compelling! witty discourse . . . To explain how globalization works! and how it came to pass! Micklethwait and Wooldridge take us on an extended world tour.”— Fast Company “[The authors’] style is familiar to readers of The Economist : smooth! witty! erudite. . . . Their book merits an A.”— USA Today Informationen zum Autor John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge Klappentext A Future Perfect is the first comprehensive examination of the most important revolution of our time—globalization—and how it will continue to change our lives. Do businesses benefit from going global? Are we creating winner-take-all societies? Will globalization seal the triumph of junk culture? What will happen to individual careers? Gathering evidence worldwide! from the shantytowns of São Paolo to the boardrooms of General Electric! from the troubled Russia-Estonia border to the booming San Fernando Valley sex industry! John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge deliver an illuminating tour of the global economy and a fascinating assessment of its potential impact. 1 The Fall and Rise of Globalization In March 1906, a twenty-two-year-old Englishman who was to become one of the titans of the twentieth century took his first foreign holiday unencumbered by his parents. The trip was spent largely in Italy, a country whose food he praised but whose youth he regarded, perhaps hypocritically, as “physically repulsive.” For the young traveler, the journey was a revelation of the joys of globalization. He needed no passport to visit foreign countries, and his gold sovereigns were universally convertible into local currencies at fixed rates of exchange. He found that the world was knit together by railways and steamships and that he could find comfortable hotels wherever he wanted to stay and post offices whenever he wanted to get a message back home. At the time, Great Britain occupied much the same position in the world that the United States occupies today: that of commercial leviathan, military giant, and cultural arbiter. British goods dominated the world’s markets. British money irrigated the world’s businesses. British military might protected the world’s trading routes. British culture was so powerful that foreigners even took to playing that most idiosyncratic of games, cricket. And most of the world accepted the British gospel of free trade and globalization. There was no sterner defender of this creed than the young traveler, John Maynard Keynes, one of the most gilded members of one of the most gilded generations in English history. The son of a noted university administrator, he had won scholarships first to Eton and then to King’s College, Cambridge. He had tried, rather precociously, to win a fellowship at King’s soon after graduating, but he had been told to wait. Yet while Keynes was a child of the establishment, he was certainly not a creature of it. A homosexual in an age when such a trait was not always appreciated, he also belonged to a generation–or rather to a clique within a generation, the Bloomsbury group–that was in more or less open revolt against the certainties of Victorian civilization. As Keynes’s biographer, Robert Skidelsky, records, he spent time with the painter Duncan Grant in Paris on his way to Italy, and then with Lytton Strachey in Genoa, where the two men passed the hours, in Keynes’s words, “eating omelettes and discussing ethics and sodomy.”1 Strachey later wrote the definitive Victorian-bashing book, Eminent Victorians. You might imagine that Keynes rebelled against Vict...

Product details

• Authors: John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 11.03.2003
• EAN: 9780812966800
• ISBN: 978-0-8129-6680-0
• No. of pages: 381
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 204 mm x 21 mm
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Business > General, dictionaries