Thomas friedman the lexus and the olive tree pdf

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BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Global Village Is Here. Resist at Your Peril Author: Richard Eder Date: Apr. 26, 1999 From: The New York Times Publisher: The New York Times Company Document Type: Article Length: 1,152 words Lexile Measure: 1440L

Full Text: THE LEXUS AND THE OLIVE TREE

By Thomas L. Friedman

Illustrated. 394 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.50.

Although he wrote an absorbing book 10 years ago about the Middle East, Thomas L. Friedman is mainly known to readers first as a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times and, in recent years, a foreign affairs columnist. He made the shift as if he had been not so much born to it as born from it. He hunts out ideas as voraciously as an investigative reporter hunts out facts. When trapped and brought in, they bear the markings of unfamiliar subspecies.

Mr. Friedman seems to lack a receptor for received opinions. Conversely, when the nonreceived opinion provokes your disagreement, this is less apt to be a knee-jerk. On the contrary, you hobble a ways with him before turning back, and then with some reluctance since not only are the ideas provocative, even when you disagree with them, but also the entertainment -- the anecdotes and the ''ding'' of a phrase -- is first-rate.

The reader's brains are agitated like dice. The throw may turn out differently than Mr. Friedman intended; he has provided facts and arguments that allow it to. In ''The Lexus and the Olive Tree,'' a spirited and imaginative exploration of our new order of economic globalization, and the instant technological and financial networks that have brought it about, the author is upbeat. Inevitable is his word, and his exuberance sometimes seems like tub-thumping. Yet the word is less that of an advocate than of a prophet who, not long after you mark him down as John the Baptist, gives occasional glimpses of what seems to be an Inner Jeremiah.

It is quite possible for readers to reverse this Inner into their Outer, reading, for example, a line Mr. Friedman offers from Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Board chairman, a major global as well as national player. Referring to an environment of international mergers, scurrying currency traders, the instantaneous Internet-provided efficiency with which vast shifts of capital are decided and accomplished, Mr. Greenspan acknowledged that the older order of slower change and more security, though less efficient, was ''more tranquil and certainly less threatening to those with only moderate or lesser skills.'' God must have loved the common people, having made so many, but apparently He was not as smart as the artificers of the new global order.

The Lexus of the title, built in a process of superautomation, is Mr. Friedman's symbol for this order, with its advantages and also -- I'm not sure if the author intends it -- an availability mainly to the rich. (Mr. Friedman says his is secondhand.) The olive tree, rooted, taking generations to mature and deeply prized, stands for tradition with its constraints and also its humane values. Mr. Friedman prizes these as well; his book, successful in so much, never manages fully to confront the two, let alone reconcile them, though it would like to.

The author uses his skills as reporter and analyst to conduct a breathtaking tour, one that possesses the exhilarating qualities of flight and the stomach-hollowing ones of free fall. Bond markets, currency fluctuations, the operations of hedge funds, finance ministries and Groups of Five, Seven or Whatever, all page turners for many of us (an excellent thing in a book, the reverse in a newspaper) are made clear. Not only clear but interesting, not only interesting but necessary to us, as war news becomes necessary when we know we are at war. (The writer is certain we are, though he is hopeful of a profitable victory.)

He does it by his insistence on making connections: politics, finance, military policy, culture, the operations of a small business, a

hedge trader, and the National Basketball Association, and a brilliantly imagined speech by Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, explaining why he doesn't keep a telephone on his desk.

Leave that one for a moment. Mr. Friedman sets the historical shift he is expounding. He dates it from the fall of the Berlin wall. From the artifact of a divided world we have moved to that of a world united: the World Wide Web. It is a striking image though neither did the wall, porous from the start, completely divide, nor does nor can the Web completely unite. In fact, it may come to divide the haves and have-nots even more drastically than before, as Mr. Friedman allows and Mr. Greenspan concedes.

Superpowers are being partly superseded by the financial markets or, as he puts it, the supermarkets. The United States can destroy by dropping bombs, the supermarkets by downgrading bonds. ''Don't congratulate me,'' a newly named Indian finance minister told a friend, ''I am only half a minister. The other half is in Washington.''

His reference was to what Mr. Friedman usefully labels the ''golden straitjacket'': the detailed set of fiscal and policy requirements imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and -- more and more important -- by the bond rating agencies that determine whether a country will receive credit. When President Clinton visited Canada some years ago, Mr. Friedman writes, he got second place in the headlines to ''the man from Moody's'' who was conducting a rating check. And so back to Mr. Rubin's nonexistent telephone. No use calling me, Mr. Friedman imagines him telling a foreign finance minister entreating for a gout of fiscal oxygen. The American Government itself lives in fear of the credit raters.

Mr. Friedman's faith in the transforming and boat-lifting potential of globalization -- he argues that it can, oddly, encourage democracy -- and his sheer delight in tracing out its connections, do not preclude doubts. He can be eloquently outraged about the growing gap between rich and poor and the threat to the environment. He might have done more justice to his own shrewd explorations had he brought his pluses and minuses together more closely and scrappily instead of laying them out so far apart.

He quotes an Israeli political thinker, Yaron Ezrahi: ''The most arbitrary powers in history always hid under the claim of some impersonal logic -- God, the laws of nature, the laws of the market.'' Mr. Ezrahi continues: ''The same could happen with globalization. Many will see it as little more than a mask used by certain economic elites for taking away the voice of the individual citizen.'' For the most part, though, Mr. Friedman accepts the current version of the invisible hand: globalize, or the economic forces that be will condemn you to be left behind.

Just to toss into Friedman's capacious pot, though, there is also the King of Persia demanding of a beggar why he too claimed to be king. Official king: ''Where is your treasury then?'' Beggar: ''Where, oh king, are my needs?'' Not an answer that Moody's would rate.

CAPTION(S):

Photo: Thomas L. Friedman (Naum Kazhdan/The New York Times)

By RICHARD EDER

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Eder, Richard. "BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Global Village Is Here. Resist at Your Peril." New York Times, 26 Apr. 1999.

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