THE LEXUS & THE OLIVE TREE.

• Author: Krugman, Paul
• Position: Review

THE LEXUS & THE OLIVE TREE by Thomas Friedman Farrar, Straus, and Giroux $27.50

Every few years a book comes along that perfectly expresses the moment's conventional wisdom--that says pretty much what everybody else in the chattering classes is saying, but does it in a way that manages to sound fresh and profound. Notable examples are Paul Kennedy's 1989 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, with its theme of "imperial overstretch", of a United States declining under the weight of its military commitments; or Lester Thurow's 1992 Head to Head, with its vision of a desperate commercial struggle among the advanced industrial nations, and of a United States unable to compete effectively because of its naive faith in free markets. It is already clear that Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree--which tells the story of the new global economy, and of a United States triumphant because it is the nation best suited to capitalize on that global economy--is the latest in the series. The question is whether Friedman's vision will date as quickly as those of his predecessors.

It's possible to summarize what Friedman has to say fairly quickly, mainly because it's what you read in just about every issue of Business Week. Information technology, he tells us, has made the world a small place, in which ideas and money can move almost instantly across borders. This smaller world richly rewards countries and societies that meet its needs--which is to say places that have strong property rights, open minds, and a flexible attitude; but it inflicts devastating punishment on those who fail to live up to global standards. Old-fashioned power politics is becoming increasingly obsolete because it conflicts with the imperatives of global capitalism. We are heading for a world that is basically democratic, because you can't keep `em down on the farm once they have Internet access, and basically peaceful, because George Soros will pull out his money if you rattle your saber.

This story is told via hundreds of anecdotes, most of them involving the author. (Someone once defined an intellectual as a person who can utter more than two consecutive sentences that do not mention himself or anyone he knows. This definition might have been specifically crafted to exclude Friedman; as a reader-reviewer at Amazon.com--hey, the Internet really can be a democratizing force!--puts it, he "uses the first person singular the way most writers use commas') But these...