Microsoft's Bill Gates is amongst those who say the world is 'flatter'
Posted on 02/23/2006 10:09:13 PM PST by Coleus
"Globalisation" has become one of the great buzzwords of modern times.
It came to the fore during the 1990s, and the impact of globalisation looks set to play a prominent part in shaping our world during the first decades of this new century. To see the advocates of globalisation at work and play there is no better vantage point than the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Its members have probably all read columnist Tom Friedman's best-seller, The World Is Flat: A Brief History Of the Twenty First Century, many times over.
Friedman accepts that what he calls the "flat world" - measured, say, by comparing the more equal life-chances of a software engineer in Bangalore with those of another working in California's Silicon Valley - is a great all-simplifying metaphor. While it certainly contains a truth, it is not so much a flatter world as one with many more peaks and troughs. There are of course the success stories of Indian software engineers, but, as Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek International told me, the process of globalisation is leaving hundreds of millions on the margins - Chinese, Indian, Africans and, yes, even tens of millions of Americans and Europeans too.
Asset and vulnerability
But progress has always been unequal. Of greater concern is what might be called globalisation's "dark side" - the extent to which the new linkages in this increasingly borderless world are helping to promote crime, terrorism and the spread of pandemic disease.
Globalisation is really about flows of everything, from money to microbes. And the bad inevitably travels with the good. As Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief technical officer points out, criminals are among the earliest adopters of information technology. If you visit one of the great hubs of the just-in-time economy - for example, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railroad's huge container terminal outside Fort Worth in Texas - you gasp at the way the modern world is joined up.
You gasp at the way the modern world is joined up 
Here, giant, brightly-coloured steel boxes with goods from China, Taiwan, Europe, Israel - all computer-tracked - are routed on their way to consumers in American cities. But as the commentator Philip Bobbitt told me, these linkages illustrate both globalisation's "greatest asset and greatest vulnerability." At the giant control rooms that regulate the passage of container trains on BNSF's tracks, you see the potential weakness of the emerging globalised world: break any one link in the chain and the result could be disruption on a major scale. Pandemic disease has the capacity to bring our world to gridlock.
Eastward shift
The key thing to understand is that globalisation is not "unequivocally good." John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, says that "like any other large historical change rooted in technological development , globalisation will have both good and bad aspects". Globalisation is not simply about China or India punching their weight in the world economy; as the "Davos view" would have it, becoming more like "us".
It is also about a fundamental shift of economic power - perhaps eventually even political power - eastwards. Professor Niall Ferguson of Harvard University calls it "a resurgence of the Orient"; part of what he describes as a "great re-convergence".
Scams like phishing occur as criminals worldwide exploit IT
In our new series for BBC World Service radio we grapple with the complex world that is slowly emerging from the fog of aspirations prompted by the ending of the Cold War. It's a world, which, as Moises Naim, Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy magazine told me, is crying out for some form of global governance. But who is to set the new rules of the game? Will it be the international lawyers? Or will it be re-vitalised international institutions that will take charge? According to Niall Ferguson, the new rules of the international system will not be so very different from those of the past. "The forms of the global order are far more elaborate than they were a hundred years ago," he says.
"But the fundamental content of international relations is just the same as it always was."Welcome to the shock of the not so new! The New Rules of the Game is broadcast each Monday at 0905 on BBC World Service from 20 February 2006.
Nope, i would be long gone before the riots broke out. Trying to defend a home is a pointless exercise in any major city. I just thought the pic was funny.
Smart man.
Leave the cities for the fools.
Non illigitamus carborundum
Seems like a wise man was right when he said "we're only 6-7 meals away from chaos"
.....and what if those cities were full people who have no skills, can't speak English, could care less about this country and are almost totally dependent on gov't benefits to survive. In the event of a national economic disruption and the $ stop flowing to these people wonder what kind of mood they'll be in?.......ordo ab chao?
Iknow it wasn't polite of me to remind people of that fact. Most have been able to turn their heads away from it, so far.
Exactly.. The lonelyest phrase never heard asked as a question to ANY federal politician IS:
"ARE YOU A GLOBALIST OPEN TO SURRENDERING AMERICAS SOVERIGNTY?"
or are you a nationalist?..
You will never hear that spoken..
You will hear REMEMBER Ted Kennedys murder whitewash before that..
Come to think of it theres a plethora of questions that will NEVER BE ASKED...
Like: Howcome the Fort Marcy Park Rangers investigated a MURDER?...
or howcome Sandy Berger is not rotting in Levenworth like I would be if I did the same crime(s).. like that..
Foggy Bottom stinks, the smell of the skunk is penerating..
Either that or they suffer from inoperable rectal/cranial inversion.
Total "Mad Max in Mogadishu" anarchy in under 2 weeks, I'd guess.
And we're just strapped in and being taken along for the ride.
I feel a very big battle in the unending war Good vs Evil is about to begin and last for many years
Bumping the thread...
Reliance upon foreign nations for our food supplies, is criminal! Our nation wide daily food requirements could be interrupted so simply. With foreign ships refusing to unload at our foreign controlled ports this will bring America to her knees in ten days or less. …
Men and nations lay down to die. Why are we laying down? Are we just relaxing or are we sleeping while our President and the Congress sign our death certificates? …
To All Americans: Do you want to see this movie or would you prefer to live this one event to the end? Is it time to stop globalization or shall we continue walking to our graveyards? … B4Ranch
Thank you for asking the tough questions that so many people are either not informed enough, or too afraid, to ask. And I know that your own personal answers to those questions are well considered … and are the result of research, born of concern, born of knowledge.
Not only are our economy and our trade policies no longer free, but what we have chosen as the focus of both is potentially deadly.
Frequently, during Alan Greenspan's testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, he would lecture -- condescendingly -- that we Americans need to get used to the fact that our 'new economy' is a 'cerebral economy’. He went on to explain that we have progressed to the point where we no longer have to rely on manufacturing tangible, nuts-and-bolts products in order to thrive as a society.
My reaction to that statement always bordered on terror. I had always considered this man to be simply inept. But then I grew to suspect that he was much more cunning -- and agenda-driven. And his agenda was not focused on benefiting America.
I am sick of so-called economic 'pundits' applauding the fact that we have evolved -- a term that generally connotes progress, or movement to a higher plane -- into a 'service-based' economy. They condescendingly make note of the fact that we no longer really have to manufacture or produce -- or compete in the manufacture or production -- of such mundane 'things' as food, steel, farm machinery, automobiles, construction equipment, heating/cooling equipment, electronics, and the like (i.e., nuts and bolts).
They are right about the fact that we have become a service-based economy. They are dead wrong about the fact that we should be proud (not to mention secure) about the fact that we produce/manufacture fewer and fewer of the necessities of life .... and liberty.
We have become a society focused on communication, retail and wholesale trade, finance, real estate, education, health and welfare, recreation, personal services, and accommodations. We talk, write, schedule, transfer money, bureaucratize, push paper, and arrange things.
We design and build very little anymore.
Yet we live in a world in which terrorism -- and the emergence, and increasing power, of serious ideological enemies -- is a real and present danger, and threatens to be so for the foreseeable future. We need to say to the average American: Imagine your own terrorist scenario -- i.e., What do you see as a horrific act, with long-term catastrophic effects, that could be perpetrated on this country? Now ask yourself, what would be needed in order to (1) recover from the attack, and (2) see to it that a recurrence is inconceivable?
Will talking, writing, scheduling, transferring money, bureaucratizing, pushing paper, and arranging things go a long way toward defending and protecting our liberties .... when the world finally acknowledges the fact that 'weapons of mass destruction' is not simply a political phrase of convenience -- and that regimes led by evil men will continue to barter with one another to obtain them?
Or will sophisticated technology, weaponry/intelligence/aircraft electronics, methods of transportation, methods of heating and cooling our homes, the means to repair infrastructure, the wherewithal to grow, harvest, and preserve our food, the means of transporting ourselves from one place to another, water purification methods, health/lifesaving devices, and communications equipment prove to be far more valuable in preparing ourselves to defend against (and recover from potential attacks by) the Kim Jong Ils/Osama bin Ladens/Ali Khameneis of this world (and their future ideological progeny)?
If the answer to the above is ‘yes’ .... and we are forced to depend on the likes of China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Brazil (or any of the endless list of other less-than-America-friendly countries that have wisely decided that a manufacturing economy is essential to survival in these troubling times) to provide us with the necessities of life (in the absolute literal sense) ... our glorious service-based economy will be the death of us (in the absolute literal sense).
We can survive economically for a time (England and Germany have), but our days of economic greatness are past. We have apathetically subscribed to the message of the elite leftist economic Pied Pipers, and sold our once thriving birthright in the process.
If the global credit system implodes, the world will turn to tangibles. After all, paper is only worth what one believes its future portends. A check from a rich man and a check from a homeless person can have the same amount printed on them, but who would value both of them equally? However, if the homeless man offers you gold (or another tangible commodity), how would your view of your two debtors change?
I have never felt more pessimistic about the economic (and therefore political/security) future of our republic. The fact that behind-the-scenes bankers, monetary policymakers, and power brokers have surreptitiously called the shots for decades used to keep me awake at night. It no longer does. It is an unfortunate fact of life that I, personally, now accept as such. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to try to do what is within our power to change that state of affairs – even if what is within our power finds itself daily more limited by those same powers that be.
A nation gets the kind of behavior it tolerates and encourages .... The idea the game will one day end is beyond our comprehension. The foreigners are watching. The foreigners see our 44 trillion in government liabilities. They see our 700 billion dollar trade deficit. They see our 1.7 trillion dollars in personal credit card debt, our trillions in home mortgages, our weakening dollar, our Imperial arrogance and they make judgments. It is their judgment, not ours, which will decide the exact day the illusion called the United States economy will end. The day will come like a tidal wave on a beach full of sunbathing fools. The fundamentals of economic reality are not mocked forever. Consequences are coming .... Doug McIntosh
~ joanie ....
Or will sophisticated technology, weaponry/intelligence/aircraft electronics, methods of transportation, methods of heating and cooling our homes, the means to repair infrastructure, the wherewithal to grow, harvest, and preserve our food, the means of transporting ourselves from one place to another, water purification methods, health/lifesaving devices, and communications equipment prove to be far more valuable in preparing ourselves to defend against (and recover from potential attacks by) the Kim Jong Ils/Osama bin Ladens/Ali Khameneis of this world (and their future ideological progeny)?
That's the $64 million question. It's too bad, like you said about B4ranch above, most people aren't informed enough, to too afraid, to ask it.
Good stuff here.
Yep, that cascading effect can make recovery very difficult.
Same here. The problems are just too large and ingrained to be avoided.
One way to gauge the robustness of a system is to observe what happens when a little pressure is applied. Look at what happened after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Can you imagine what the response would be to a long-term event spread over most of the nation, as opposed to short-term events in concentrated regions?
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