One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, by William Greider, New York: Simon & Schuster, 512 pages, $25.00
Unfortunately, William Greider's One World, Ready or Not is the best-written book on the global economy I have yet read. It is a panoramic work: Greider tells the stories of businessmen, financiers, government officials, workers, and activists from around the world, and then combines this flesh-and-blood detail with broad and sweeping historical generalizations. The prose is clear and sharp, and energized by Greider's passionate political sympathies.
Greider does a particularly good job of conveying the dizzying, wonderful strangeness of the phenomenon he analyzes. In one well-drawn anecdote, he describes a Motorola semiconductor plant in Malaysia. The workers -- young Muslim women in ankle-length dresses, heads and shoulders swathed in scarves -- file into the factory, walk down a hallway hung with Norman Rockwell prints and festooned with goofy slogans like "You'll Be Prepared for Anything with Enthusiasm," and then proceed into the changing room, from which they emerge in white jumpsuits and surgical masks, ready to operate some of the most complicated machinery human beings have ever devised. Here Greider summarizes the scene:
"The spectacle of cultural transformation was quite routine -- three times a day, seven days a week -- but it conveyed the high human drama of globalization: a fantastic leap across time and place, an exchange that was banal and revolutionary, vaguely imperial and exploitative, yet also profoundly liberating."
As someone who has witnessed his fair share of similar scenes, I can attest to how vividly jumbled the human condition is where the Third World meets the Third Wave. Leave it to a critic of the global economy to do a better job than its friends in bringing to life this sometimes breathtaking, sometimes comical complexity.
The virtues of this book are unfortunate, however, because its vices are so colossal. At virtually every turn, Greider's economic and political analysis could not be more drastically wrongheaded. He completely misunderstands how new wealth is generated and spread by market competition; as a result he sees ruin where in fact there is promise, and then proposes "solutions" that would be ruinous if adopted. The fact that the book is well- written will only ensure that it gains readership and influence it does not deserve.
Over the past 10 to 15 years, the web of marketplace relationships that connect people across political boundaries has expanded into vast new frontier areas. Most dramatically, the communist bloc collapsed; the Soviet empire dissolved and China, while remaining under Communist Party control, has tied its economy to capitalist countries. And throughout the developing world, fear of exploitation by rich nations has given way to a desire to sell to their markets and court their investment. The international capitalist economy has thus added billions of potential new producers and consumers.
International market relationships have grown not only in geographic scope but in complexity as well. Economic growth in developing countries has changed them from mere commodity suppliers into increasingly sophisticated manufacturing bases. This process has been accelerated by investment from multinational corporations: Improvements in transportation and communication have allowed these corporations to integrate their operations on a global basis, locating facilities wherever costs are lowest. Goods and capital are thus flowing across more borders, in greater volume, along increasingly complicated routes.
With all the hype about the global economy, it is important to maintain one's perspective. After all, billions of people still live in isolated agricultural villages, where economic activity remains decidedly local. And even in developed countries, most of us work in service industries that are not traded across borders.
Nevertheless, the changes that have occurred over the past couple of decades -- and those that the next decades portend -- are nothing short of revolutionary. The wealth-creating powers of free people have now been unleashed to an unprecedented extent. As a result, it is possible to picture seriously, for the first time in human history, a world in which affluence and opportunity replace poverty and ignorance as the normal lot of mankind. Putting it mildly, that's pretty great stuff.
Greider, though, doesn't see it that way. Rather, he believes the new global system is hurtling toward self-destruction. According to Greider, the global economy is beset by "inherent contradictions" that are "propelling the world toward some new version of breakdown, the prospect of an economic or political cataclysm of unknowable dimensions."
What is the source of instability in Greider's view? In a word, oversupply. First, the "global overabundance of cheaper labor" is dragging down wages and living standards in rich countries. Second, global overcapacity in major manufacturing industries -- only to be exacerbated by continued rapid growth in developing countries -- threatens "some source of decisive breakdown, a financial crisis or an implosion of global commerce" à la the Great Depression.
In other words, the world is suffering from an excess of wealth-creating power. The opening up of the old communist bloc and Third World has made too many productive workers available to commercial enterprise; the development of competitive industries in these countries has burdened the economy with too many productive assets. According to Greider, "Shipping high-wage jobs to low-wage economies has obvious, immediate economic benefits. But, roughly speaking, it also replaces high-wage consumers with low- wage ones. That exchange is debilitating for the entire system."
Greider thus sees the emerging global economy as a zero-sum game: "The history of industrial development has taught societies everywhere to think of the economic order as a ladder. The new dynamic of globalization plants a different metaphor in people's minds -- a seesaw -- in which some people must fall in order that others may rise."
Greider looks with particular fear at China, which if it continues to develop "could underbid almost everyone in the world on wages and prices." Although he does not welcome this outcome, Greider speculates that "the global system will be spared its nightmare" only if "some sort of disaster will befall the Chinese." For China, Greider states, "it is difficult to know not only what to expect, but also what to wish for."
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