The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 394 pages. $27.50.

Have you ever read a book that's such a collection of cliches, generalizations, and superficial observations that you felt like you would choke? If you want to indulge in this masochistic exercise, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's paean to globalization--much of it a rehash of his columns--is a good place to start.

Friedman uses his title imagery far past the point of exhaustion. He has the Lexus car represent the modernizing free market global economy, which, in his view, will inevitably deliver a higher standard of living to the planetary masses. The Olive Tree, by contrast, represents a sense of identity and of place that is so important to people all over the world. For Friedman, globalization is the interaction and tension between these two.

He tries to fit almost everything that has happened in the past few years into his Lexus and Olive Tree paradigm, so much so that he sometimes slips from the inappropriate into the insensitive: "Rwanda was all Olive Trees and no Lexuses, a country that was all gnarled roots choking one another, and no flowering branches," with "Tutsi and Hutu tribesmen taking turns downsizing each other." Not only is this crass language for describing one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, but it is also inaccurate. As Philip Gourevitch points out in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), a sharp decline in the Rwandan economy in the late 1980s exacerbated tensions between the Hutus and the Tutsis. The collapse in the world market of Rwanda's principal exports--coffee and tea--and a subsequent structural adjustment program pushed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund added economic hardship to ethnic strife. So it wasn't all Olive Trees.

Friedman lauds the supposed democratizations of technology, information, and finance, which have apparently brought the benefits of globalization to more people than ever before. But how democratic are these processes? Consider finance. Even in the United States--at the top of the global economic order--shareholdings are disproportionately distributed. As for global information and technology, in most instances, such as television programming, motion pictures, and publishing, these media are controlled by a small clique of Western...