Thomas Friedman vs. Bill McKibben on the global economy Print E-mail
Written by Laryn   
Tuesday, 06 March 2007 19:37
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mckibben_friedman.jpg I finished reading the recent edition of Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat" a few weeks ago and I just found an interesting article by Bill McKibben which, although it doesn't mention the book directly, makes a nice counterpoint to it.

"The World Is Flat" is Friedman's take on the global economy and the ways in which it is "flattening" the world by giving access and opportunity to more and more people. It contains some interesting anecdotes but Friedman comes across as wide-eyed and infatuated as he gushes about his discoveries of corporate supply-chaining and work flow software. The particular lens through which he views the world is heavy on corporations and brand names, and he doesn't ask many probing questions. His working assumption seems to be that the economy and globalization are enormous, dumb machines that will keep on churning along towards flatness, producing an ever-expanding pie, and that this is a very good thing. (ie. It can't be -- or shouldn't be -- greatly restricted from doing that.)

Towards the end of the book, he tacks on a few pages about the environment. There is one very brief mention of global warming -- in name only, with no data or description of what it is or why it's a problem. Six pages out of 569 deal with the environment in more general terms such as consumption of oil or pollution; an additional six deal with the problem of China's economic growth in terms of the environment without much discussion of what western countries need to do about their own consumption.

Contrast this incredible expanding economic pie with McKibben's analysis in "Reversal of Fortune." He sees some of the same type of statistics that contribute to what Friedman calls the "flat world" but for him it begs the question: so why aren't we--quantitatively--happier?

The environmentalist Alan Durning found that in 1991 the average American family owned twice as many cars as it did in 1950, drove 2.5 times as far, used 21 times as much plastic, and traveled 25 times farther by air. Gross national product per capita tripled during that period. Our houses are bigger than ever and stuffed to the rafters with belongings (which is why the storage-locker industry has doubled in size in the past decade). We have all sorts of other new delights and powers—we can send email from our cars, watch 200 channels, consume food from every corner of the world. Some people have taken much more than their share, but on average, all of us in the West are living lives materially more abundant than most people a generation ago. What's odd is, none of it appears to have made us happier.
...
If happiness was our goal, then the unbelievable amount of effort and resources expended in its pursuit since 1950 has been largely a waste.

He examines concepts largely absent from Friedman's book, from sustainability to individualism and community, and he gives environmental concerns a much deeper role, weaving them throughout the piece. As a result, he calls for a very different approach to food production, for example. He favors smaller producers practicing sustainable techniques and claims that the yield would actually be greater than industrialized farming would produce. In other areas, there are some similarities in what Friedman and McKibben suggest -- such as the need to push for alternative energy sources using government policy, or the power of the internet for individuals in a global context. But even here McKibben's suggestions run at slight cross-purposes to much of Friedman's "flat world" sensibilities. McKibben suggests tariffs on items that travel great distances as part of a series of policies to encourage local economies--something that would surely raise Friedman's hackles. In the same vein, he also suggests using modern technology (from solar panels to the internet) to assist in localizing economies and bringing local organization and protest global--an idea that starts off sounding similar to what Friedman calls the "globalization of the local" but ends in a very different place.

On this match-up, I'm going to have to give the point to McKibben, who gives more time to considering the negatives of the global economy and suggests changes that could be made to counteract them. Friedman seems content to push more or less blindly ahead in the direction of inertia.

 

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