The Hindu Business Line : Globalisation 3.0 isn't about `empowered individuals'

"Globalisation 3.0 is about transnational corporations being totally deregulated, above the control of any nation-state, and being able to exploit poor people in developing countries and, in the process, bringing down the wages of individuals in developed countries," write Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo in The World is Flat?

Globalisation is the greatest reorganisation of the world since the Industrial Revolution, but you need to "go beyond the media hype and the metaphors to fully understand the global forces shaping the twenty-first century." Thus write Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo in The World is Flat? from Meghan-Kiffer Press (www.mkpress.com). The book is `a critical analysis' of Thomas L. Friedman's bestseller by the same name without the question mark.

"The notion of globalisation has been around for centuries, and has taken many forms: Political, economic, cultural, and technological, to name a few. But the 21st century-style globalisation that Friedman writes about is unique. It has a name: `Corporate' globalisation," begin the authors.

They urge those who got awed by Friedman's book to think again. Because his personal anecdotes may `make for good tales at cocktail parties,' but it is what gets left out that makes Friedman's book so dangerous, caution Aronica and Mtetwa, before launching into a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the book.

Friedman, you may remember, shares with his wife his `discovery' on Infosys premises, whispering: "Honey, I think the world is flat." Parodying this, the authors suggest `a more accurate opening', as follows: "Honey, I really don't mean the world is flat, I just meant the exclusive golf course on which I am playing here in Bangalore... I'll tell everyone how all these young Zippies in India are now `empowered individuals' ready to take over the world's economy, just like how the multinational corporations of Globalisation 2.0 before them, grabbed power."

Globalisation 3.0 is not about `empowered individuals' as Friedman asserts, Aronica and Mtetwa fret. "It's about transnational corporations being totally deregulated, above the control of any nation-state, and being able to exploit poor people in developing countries and, in the process, bringing down the wages of individuals in developed countries."

Was the fall of the Berlin Wall on September 11, 1989 the first flattener, as Friedman wrote? "All it did was to flatten individuals and put more Soviets than ever into extreme poverty," rue the authors. The move from communism to capitalism has had its many victims. For instance, in Russia, "By the time of the rouble crisis of August 1998, output had fallen by almost half and poverty had increased from 2 per cent of the population to over 40 per cent," as Joseph Stiglitz wrote in a 2003 article in Guardian.

The tipping point for opening up socialist economies to capitalism occurred, not in 1989, but in 1979, the authors argue; the watershed was Deng Xiaoping's embrace of capitalism, saying, "Whether a cat is black or white makes no difference. As long as it catches mice, it is a good cat."

The book also questions the other flatteners of Friedman. Accordingly, Netscape going public in 1995 was not as much a flattener as worldwide connectivity over the Net. So too, workflow software, which dates back to the mid-1970s, just made big companies more powerful, rather than make the world flat, say the authors; what you need for the current century is BPM or business process management. And more...

Slim but forceful protest.

Growth is failing the poor

Income distribution at the world level may be ambiguously increasing but income inequality has worsened in most countries, rues Flat World, Big Gaps edited by Jomo K. S. and Jacques Baudot (www.orientlongman.com). The book brings together about a dozen essays on "how economic liberalisation has actually affected inequality, poverty and development in recent decades."

Growth is failing the poor, declare David Woodward and Andrew Simms, in a chapter on the unbalanced distribution of the benefits and costs of global economic growth. The authors decry the economic growth fixation, and "a growing obsession with quantifiable indicators of policy performance and a failure to make what is important measurable, rather than making what is measurable important."

Global economic growth is an extremely inefficient and environmentally dangerous way of achieving poverty reduction, observe Woodward and Simms.

"Between 1990 and 2001, for every $100 worth of growth in the world's income per person, just $0.60 contributed to reducing poverty below the $1-a-day line, 73 per cent less even than in the lost decade for development, the 1980s."

To reduce poverty by $1, we therefore would need "$166 additional global production and consumption, with all its associated environmental impacts which affect the poorest most."

A book that can fill the gaps in globalisation gyan.

India's openness and accessibility

Timur or Tamerlane is often remembered as "a bloodthirsty tyrant," whose conquests were "an echo of the great Mongol empire forged by Genghis Khan and his sons," but John Darwin's After Tamerlane (www.landmarkonthenet.com) looks at how the terrifying ruler's era was "a long phase in global history".

The end of Timur in 1405 coincided with the first signs of a change in the existing pattern of long-distance trade, the East-West route that he had fought to control, narrates Darwin. "Within a few decades of his death, the idea of a world empire ruled from Samarkand had become fantastic. The discovery of the sea as a global commons offering maritime access to every part of the world transformed the economics and geopolitics of empire. It was to take three centuries before that new world order became plainly visible... "

The opening chapter describes how, around 1400, China's wealth and power were pre-eminent, even as Islamic societies remained the most dynamic and expansionist element in Eurasia. "China assembled the basic components of a market economy earlier, and on a much larger scale, than any other part of Eurasia... Before 1300, a range of innovations in both agriculture and manufacture had been widely adopted, and a culture of invention favoured the diffusion of new techniques." Sadly, though, China became a victim of its own success, and the country's economic trajectory went awry.

Darwin studies major empire-building efforts, including that of the British in India. "Why was India conquered earlier and more completely than almost any other part of Afro-Asia? And why were the British willing and able to assume the large risks and heavy costs of its rule?" To these questions, a frequent answer is that the British triumphed owing to `the chaos and lethargy of native India'. Darwin differs from such a view. "The key to British power could be found not in India's backwardness and indolence, but in its openness and accessibility, and in the sophistication of its financial and commercial life."

Ideal read that can help you revisit your history lessons.

Two eccentric geniuses

Here is a book that knocked J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown off the bestseller lists, selling more than 6 lakh copies in Germany: Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann (www.crosswordbookstores.com), translated from German by Carol Brown Janeway. The book is about `two eccentric geniuses' Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, who set out to measure the world, towards the end of the eighteenth century.

Humboldt was a `meter' man who liked to measure everything. He had bought `the most expensive arsenal of measuring instruments' from a trip to Salzburg. What were these gadgets? "Two barometers for air pressure, a hypsometer to measure the boiling point of water, a theodolite for measuring land, a sextant with an artificial horizon, a foldable pocket sextant, a dipping magnetic needle to establish the force of earth's magnetism, a hydrometer for the relative dampness in the air, a eudiometer for measuring the oxygen levels in the air, a Leydan jar to capture electrical charges, a cyanometer to measure the blue of the sky." Also, two `pricelessly costly clocks' that marked seconds not with pendulum but with `invisibly with regularly moving springs inside'.

You would run into young Gauss, as a student who found ideas come crowding in. "Numbers didn't seduce one away from reality, they brought reality closer, made it clearer and more meaningful," he knew. "Numbers were his constant companions... . even when he was visiting whores."

Good escape.

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D. Murali