The Flatteners and Non Flatteners

Here is a video feed of a talk Tom Friedman gave recently at the International Finance Corporation, partly to plug the book. If you like Friedman's arguments, watch it.
PS: Siddharth Varadarajan, deputy editor of The Hindu, has a critique of Friedman's book on his new blog.

My Review:

Contrary to my expectations, I liked Tom Friedman's speech. I have read his lexus and blah blah, but then I didnt find it impressive.I also read Siddharth's Blog, which through a series of anecdotes pin pointed the flaws in Tom's argument. But overall I had a feel he was just nitpicking and not abstracting with clarity, the impending consequences of globalization.

The main objections of the anti globalization brigade are

1. Globalization based progress is too unplanned and hence destroys the environment irreversibly.
2. Globalization increases the inequality divide.

In this blogpost I will be lookin the latter. There has always been inequalities and will continue to be. During Pre globalization there was a different kind of inequality. It can be defined thus.

1. All countries had rich and poor.
2. There were poor countries and rich countries.

This equilibrium state was maintained because there were many impediments because of geography, culture, language as a result work couldnt flow and hence wealth couldnt freely flow between these countries. Now that these are slowly being taken apart due to the technological advancements in the past few decades, the old equilibrium is disturbed and we are in a continuous journey of finding the new equilibrium in this new John Lennon world.

Now the new equilibrium will read as:

1. There are no countries.
2. There are rich and poor.

The rich and poor divide in the new globalized world will be higher than the old non globalized world. The new equilibrium is attained by a lot of people (middle class and poor) in USA getting poorer and the lot of people (middle class and poor) in say India, getting little richer. Obviously there is difference between the amount of the increase in riches and the amount of decrease in riches of the middle class and poor.

This difference goes into the pockets of the common rich of the world, whether it be an Indian or an American.But then this a dangerous game where there are a lot of unhappy people, suddenly getting robbed off their existing standard of living though there are also an equal number of happy people who got benefited because of the equilibrium shift.

This is not only about money. Not only money is flowing, so is culture, language. We are heading towards a monoculture where the identities like "Nation" and "Religion" becomes little fuzzy. The people who are successful in this kind of atmosphere, would be ok with fuzziness and move ahead. But those unsuccesful and those who are not able to adapt themselves to the changing world order, will try to resist this change through blogs and bombs.A survival war between the adapters and resistors, is bound to happen and is happening as we speak. What my gut feel is the adapters will prevail in this war.

But then the adapters are very opportunistic and pragmatic, but not necessarily visionaries. So they think short term. This short term thinking will lead to long term consequences to the ecological balance of the world. I am not talking about the social ecology's balance as that will be acheived to an extent after the above war. I am talking about earth's ecological balance. This might lead to destruction of our race if we arent brilliant enough by then to control the ecological behaviour of earth or invade other planets and make it habitable or make our physical body adpatable to changing ecological conditions of earth through breakthroughs in genetics and science.

Gobalization is continoulsly evolving starting with the neolithic man as opposed to a recent demarcation between pre-globalized world and post-globalized world. It has something, which has been happening for ages. Yet even in a continuous evolution process there are the Cambrian periods, where the speed of change will happen in a frenetic pace like say, 1900-1930 in the evolution of modern physics where the basic structure of physics was being modified by Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and other stalwarts on a daily basis. One can draw feeble parallel to Mandelbrot’s fractal trading time where the there are moments in stock market where a lot of activity happens in a very limited time window, while there are other periods where very less activity happens in a elongated period of time. So if we need to actually understand the stock price variation, one needs to plot it against trading time instead of real time. (Yet I am not sure whether his fractal scaling process works with the financial markets.)I feel we are living in very interesting times, these are times of packed time, as Andy Grove would call it, inflection points. In that sense, I feel there is a difference in the speed of evolution of globalization which was present during the times of Alexander and now (Tholkapiyam a tamil epic written 3000 years ago has talked about trade between Tamilnadu and Greece). The difference is in the order of intensity, but when intensity reaches a different order, sometimes there is a possibility of incurring a qualitative difference in the consequences. In that sense I feel this is the Cambrian era for globalization.

We have to wait and see if the humans can adapt faster and control the impending destruction.