58 pages • 1 hour read
Thomas L. FriedmanThe Lexus and the Olive Tree
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Demolition Man”
Globalization is creating a single marketplace, which rewards businesses for selling the same product all over the world instead of locally. This is a culturally homogenizing environment, and thus globalization poses a risk of wiping out ecological and cultural diversity. Just as countries need to develop protections when associating with the Electronic Herd, they need to develop protections for their environments and cultures. The hope is that technology will emerge that helps preserve the environment faster than the herd can trample it, but we can’t rely on technological breakthroughs alone, and conservationists need to learn to move faster to build globalized networks. However, it is also unrealistic to believe that conservationists can move fast enough in all areas, and so the only solution is to show the herd that capitalism can benefit from going green.
The only way to “green” globalization is to demonstrate to corporations that profits and share prices will increase if they adopt environmentally-sound production methods. Companies are learning that poor environmental performance means wasted profits and potential expense later. When profit isn’t enough motivation, the last strategy is for activists to learn “how to use globalization against itself.” (288). People in environmentally-threatened lands can do this by selling ecotourism and green products to those consumers globally who are willing to pay a premium for eco-friendly products. Globalization also creates empowered environmentalists who can fight back against both the electronic herd and governments by using the internet. Companies and countries will then have to be environmentally responsible to protect their reputation and their brand.
Saving culture is even more complex than saving the environment. Cultures are now more global and open than they have been ever before, and this threatens the survival of local culture. The first step is to understand that cultural globalization is not just the push of multinational companies, but also the pull of countries who want in on globalization. Western, and particularly American, brands have an association with being modern and hip, and it is arrogant and naïve to tell developing countries they can’t have these brands to preserve their culture. The strategy here is then to hope that countries will develop filters to preserve their cultures.
The most important culture filter is the ability to “glocalize:” to absorb influences that enrich your culture, resist those things that are alien to your culture, and to compartmentalize the things that can be celebrated as different. However, glocalization alone is not enough to protect culture, and hard filters, like protected areas, culture laws, and educational programs, are also needed.
Developing these environmental and cultural filters is necessary because without the environment there is no sustainable culture, and without sustainable culture there is no sustainable globalization.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Winner Take All”
One of the most serious problems of the globalization system is the widening of income gaps in industrialized countries. The reason for the widening gaps is that in globalization, winners in any field win bigger because they are dominating a massive global market. In other words, the market for any good or service is now global, and only one firm can be the winner. Those who are only slightly worse than the winner will make much less, and those who are worse will do very poorly; “[t]herefore, the gap between first place and second place grows larger, and the gap between first place and last place becomes staggering.” (309)
Growing income inequality presents a central dilemma for the globalization system: free markets, the golden straitjacket, and the electronic herd produce greater incomes for society as a whole, but this income is increasingly unequally distributed, which is socially disruptive. On the other hand, sticking with a closed-off economy will impoverish a country, which will be even more socially disruptive. This backlash against globalization, and the backlash against the backlash (the groundswell), is covered in the next section of the book.
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Backlash”
Since the mid-1990s, the backlash against globalization has become more apparent and widespread because, while it generates wealth and innovation, globalization also entails rapid changes: “Markets generate both capital and chaos; the more powerful markets become as a result of globalization, the more widespread and diverse their disruptions.” (329) There is a wide variety of groups who are a part of this backlash, which is a broad phenomenon driven by anxieties that present in different ways in different people in different places. These backlashers need to be taken seriously because one day the backlash might be strong enough to destabilize globalization.
The first group of backlashers are the “turtles”: the many people around the world who feel threatened by globalization because they don’t have the skills or energy to make it in the fast world. Their jobs are changing or made obsolete and, because the straitjacket is forcing governments to streamline, many have no safety net to catch them. In the Cold War era, these turtles could access the American dream, but globalization means that good jobs for turtles are increasingly rare. However, unlike the disruptions of the first era of globalization, this era is unlikely to produce an ideological alternative to capitalism because these alternatives have already been discredited and the backlash involves so many disparate groups.
The second group of backlashers are the “wounded gazelle:” those who tried globalization and failed, but instead of doing what it took to get back into the fast world, now shut themselves off from it. The third group are the fundamentalists who hate the way globalization homogenizes people and cultures and want to protect their local culture from the global.
Where the backlash is most destabilizing is when the economic backlash merges with the cultural backlash, and societies ignore this at their peril. Every country that has put on the golden straitjacket has a populist party or candidate that campaigns against globalization. These populists appeal to people’s past, instead of their futures, by telling them they can have the same standard of living as before by putting up walls. This backlash doesn’t just come from the poorest, but also the formerly-middle class who had a great deal of security under the protected system. Finally, while it is important to have olive trees that anchor your society, the backlash against the Lexus often descends into sectarianism, violence, and exclusivity. And the more non-inclusive you are, the more you fall behind in the globalization system, making countries want to be even more exclusive.
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Groundswell”
Globalization is the product of the three democratizations, but what drives it is the human desire for a better life with more choices. This explains why, along with the backlash against globalization, there is also a groundswell of people demanding more globalization. These are people might initially fail in globalization but get right back into the game and are willing to make great sacrifices to get into the fast world. Even though the gap between rich and poor is getting wider, the poor are less poor than ever before, and those places most open to globalization have grown their middle classes. In other words, the backlash against globalization is constantly being tempered by the groundswell of support for more globalization from people who want into the system.
Critics of globalization need to stop thinking about how to tear down the system and realize what regular people already have: “that globalization can create as many solutions and opportunities as it can problems.” (356) The argument that globalization does nothing for the poorest of the poor (those living on a dollar a day or less) is wrong; internet connections will soon be available even to the poorest people, and this technology will combat poverty. Poor countries have fallen behind not because globalization has failed them, but because they have not chosen prosperity by putting in place the infrastructure to take advantage of globalization. Not only does the internet alleviate poverty in ways that other technological advancements have not by giving the poor the same opportunity to be shapers as the rich, it also helps the poorest invent their way out of poverty.
These factors explain why the backlash against globalization hasn’t been big enough to disrupt the new system: “too many people in developing countries understand that globalization is a tool to make them better off, faster, than anything they have ever had before.” (363)
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
In this section, Friedman addresses some of the potential adverse effects of globalization, and how these generate backlashes that have the possibility to destabilize the system. These backlashes take many forms: political, economic, environmental, and cultural, but while Friedman argues that they cannot be ignored, he ultimately believes that these backlashes are overshadowed by the groundswell of support for globalization by those who would rather choose prosperity and work within the system rather than engage in the futile backlash.
It’s important to understand the context within which Friedman was operating. As he points out in the opening chapter of the novel, the early-1990s was an exciting and challenging new time for political thinkers, as the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War ushered in a new era in global politics, but no one was quite sure that this new era would look like. Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist argued in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, that with the collapse of the USSR ,humanity had reached the “end of history” where there would no longer be any further ideological, political, or economic conflict because mankind had recognized the universal superiority of western liberal democracy combined with free-market capitalism.
In contrast, Samuel Huntington argued in his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations, which was a direct response to Fukuyama, that the temporary conflict between ideologies as represented by the Cold War was shifting back to the ancient conflict between civilizations—particularly singling out a conflict between the West and Islam. To put this debate in Friedman’s language, Fukuyama believed that the post-Cold War world be solely dominated by the Lexus, whereas to Huntington that conflicts over olive trees would dominate the post-Cold War world.
Friedman approvingly cites both authors, but clearly is closer to Fukuyama than Huntington as evidenced by his arguments in this section. Like Fukuyama, he believes that there is no alternative than liberal democracy combined with free markets, though he acknowledges how the disruptions caused by the speed of globalization have the potential to threaten the system. Friedman is sympathetic to the grievances of backlashers, though he believes that their efforts to avoid adapting to the globalized world means that they are not choosing prosperity and are acting in a counterproductive fashion.
Friedman also uses this section to address how people should respond to the challenges created by globalization, particularly when it comes to the environment and culture. Broadly speaking, and continuing his computer metaphor, Friedman argues that countries need to create filters and surge protectors to protect them when they plug into the electronic herd, a process which he calls glocalization. Friedman argues for a market-driven response to these challenges in which activists emphasize their role as consumers. While he acknowledges that activists can take advantage of the new networks created by globalization to become global rather than local activists, he believes that the most effective way to respond to challenges is by using the herd’s overarching search for profit against it. For instance, by communicating to multinationals that consumers are willing to pay slightly more for their goods if they are environmentally conscious.
Because of the transparency created by globalization, multinational companies must produce goods in an ethical way because consumers will increasingly demand it. An example of this kind of market-driven activism can be seen in the Fair Trade movement (and the many similar standards that companies have adopted) that attempts to ensure that farmers receive a fair wage for their commodities by selling Fair Trade-certified products at a higher price.
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