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3.37 AVERAGE
3.37 AVERAGE
A little 'thinner' than I would have liked, especially in light of its recommendations and the challenges to their implementation.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
My interview with [a:Ian Bremmer|72136|Ian Bremmer|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png]:
IF THE SIX AND A HALF decades that followed the end of World War II were a triumph of globalism, an era of prosperity and peace as the world grew increasingly interconnected, the second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a new populism that has pushed back.
Convulsions of anger – at corrupt government elites, at the floods of refugees fleeing sectarian conflict, at the loss of jobs as workers are increasingly replaced by automation and artificial intelligence – culminated in the pair of 2016 events, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, that turned conventional wisdom on its head.
In his new book, "Us Vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism," political scientist and Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer warns that the reckoning against globalism has only just begun. U.S. News recently spoke with Bremmer about the impending battle that will have enormous implications for the future of the global society. Excerpts:
You describe movements in recent years that you say are an "attempt to reverse the flow of globalization." What would that look like in five years? Ten? Fifty?
The biggest piece, I think, has already happened. When globalism started, after World War II was over, the United States recognized that we never want to have a flight like that again, so we've got to do something about it. We're going to rebuild our former enemies – the Germans, the Japanese – and we're going to build the United Nations.
We really believed that free trade and open borders and American bases – all of the world trying to keep the world safe and stable was what we would want to do. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, we didn't even consider a Marshall Plan. We didn't even consider rebuilding our vanquished enemies to make them succeed and become a part of our global system. I would argue that was the beginning of the end of globalism as an ideology.
More broadly, as it continues, it's going to be a lot of opposition to the United States sending troops fighting in other people's battles, like we've seen in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria. It's going to be a lot less support for immigration into the U.S., unless you've got a skill set or a lot of money, and we're already seeing that start to happen. And it's possibly going to lead to more trade disputes, certainly in terms of big technology, where, instead of having one global free market, we end up having much more fragmentation of a marketplace with more strategic sectors. And some of that is because the United States is not willing to promote free multilateral trade organizations, but some of it is because the Chinese are building an alternative system that has no global free trade at all. It's all just going to be linked to Beijing. So when you put that all together, you start to see what the future of this world will look like.
Globalization can turn a virtuous cycle into a vicious one – where globalization improves people's lives, only to raise their expectations. That, in turn, raises frustrations when those expectations are met. In China, the growing middle class and the rising wages risk threatening the very economic engine – cheap labor – that made that progress possible. Can developing countries avoid this trap?
Certainly, you see all sorts of leaders in developing markets that are trying to do more.
But the bigger trend – and the reason I'm concerned – is we see that globalization, while it hollowed out working classes in manufacturing and some services as well in the developed world, it really benefited the emerging markets. You saw this extraordinary growth of the global middle class. And now that we have automation and artificial intelligence that is supplanting precisely that labor force, which has become more expensive in manufacturing and services, the danger is that these emerging markets are nowhere near as wealthy as the developed world. Their political institutions are nowhere near as resilient and as strong, their social safety net is much more porous. You could potentially get a much worse outcome in those countries than you have in the United States and Europe, where there's a lot of populism, where people are voting for things that feel illiberal, but the fundamental systems still seem quite stable.
I feel differently about Hungary or Turkey, where those institutions are newer. They are not as rooted in the culture of the population. The societies in that regard are more fundamentally divided. They're not as fundamentally aligned with the kind of values that we have heretofore ascribed to Western industrialized advanced democracies.
Read the rest of the interview here.
IF THE SIX AND A HALF decades that followed the end of World War II were a triumph of globalism, an era of prosperity and peace as the world grew increasingly interconnected, the second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a new populism that has pushed back.
Convulsions of anger – at corrupt government elites, at the floods of refugees fleeing sectarian conflict, at the loss of jobs as workers are increasingly replaced by automation and artificial intelligence – culminated in the pair of 2016 events, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, that turned conventional wisdom on its head.
In his new book, "Us Vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism," political scientist and Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer warns that the reckoning against globalism has only just begun. U.S. News recently spoke with Bremmer about the impending battle that will have enormous implications for the future of the global society. Excerpts:
You describe movements in recent years that you say are an "attempt to reverse the flow of globalization." What would that look like in five years? Ten? Fifty?
The biggest piece, I think, has already happened. When globalism started, after World War II was over, the United States recognized that we never want to have a flight like that again, so we've got to do something about it. We're going to rebuild our former enemies – the Germans, the Japanese – and we're going to build the United Nations.
We really believed that free trade and open borders and American bases – all of the world trying to keep the world safe and stable was what we would want to do. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, we didn't even consider a Marshall Plan. We didn't even consider rebuilding our vanquished enemies to make them succeed and become a part of our global system. I would argue that was the beginning of the end of globalism as an ideology.
More broadly, as it continues, it's going to be a lot of opposition to the United States sending troops fighting in other people's battles, like we've seen in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria. It's going to be a lot less support for immigration into the U.S., unless you've got a skill set or a lot of money, and we're already seeing that start to happen. And it's possibly going to lead to more trade disputes, certainly in terms of big technology, where, instead of having one global free market, we end up having much more fragmentation of a marketplace with more strategic sectors. And some of that is because the United States is not willing to promote free multilateral trade organizations, but some of it is because the Chinese are building an alternative system that has no global free trade at all. It's all just going to be linked to Beijing. So when you put that all together, you start to see what the future of this world will look like.
Globalization can turn a virtuous cycle into a vicious one – where globalization improves people's lives, only to raise their expectations. That, in turn, raises frustrations when those expectations are met. In China, the growing middle class and the rising wages risk threatening the very economic engine – cheap labor – that made that progress possible. Can developing countries avoid this trap?
Certainly, you see all sorts of leaders in developing markets that are trying to do more.
But the bigger trend – and the reason I'm concerned – is we see that globalization, while it hollowed out working classes in manufacturing and some services as well in the developed world, it really benefited the emerging markets. You saw this extraordinary growth of the global middle class. And now that we have automation and artificial intelligence that is supplanting precisely that labor force, which has become more expensive in manufacturing and services, the danger is that these emerging markets are nowhere near as wealthy as the developed world. Their political institutions are nowhere near as resilient and as strong, their social safety net is much more porous. You could potentially get a much worse outcome in those countries than you have in the United States and Europe, where there's a lot of populism, where people are voting for things that feel illiberal, but the fundamental systems still seem quite stable.
I feel differently about Hungary or Turkey, where those institutions are newer. They are not as rooted in the culture of the population. The societies in that regard are more fundamentally divided. They're not as fundamentally aligned with the kind of values that we have heretofore ascribed to Western industrialized advanced democracies.
Read the rest of the interview here.
Ian Bremmer is a very good speaker; however, this books full of broken, superficial ideas. It does not offer alternatives as it claims to in the problem statement. Disappointing.
For a short bird's eye view of the entire geopolitical landscape, it's quite impressive. From Brazil to Russia to Hungary to China, Bremmer shows the politics of the Us vs. Them. This is not a detailed analysis of anything; it's a telegram. The book also manages to cover the imminent changes in economy, i. e., the advent of artificial intelligence and the disruptions that will follow. I was interested in what seemed to be a (typically American) optimistic last chapter, "How to Solve This", but, no, Bremmer is bleak, despite himself. "It's getting worse before it can get better" is the best he can muster.
A certainly topical book, but I felt a bit unnerved regarding the tone within the first several pages. It let up later on, but having since read a handful of texts on globalism and its respective inequalities, this work does not seem particularly out of the ordinary (in other words, the topics explored here are significant, but their explanation and handling is not particularly remarkable and for me, at least, this text was more of a segway for other texts on the matter).
If you follow the news and global current events with any relative frequency there is not much new content in this book. Disappointing compared to other works by Bremmer. It lacks insights, a cohesive story and feels rushed. Not enough to cause me to never pick up another work by Bremmer, but certainly gives pause - focus should be on quality, not frequency of content!