Bestselling author and renowned economist Lester Thurow argues forcefully that globalization is not a done deal and we must seize the moment now if we are to create a new global economy in which all can prosper.
In this new book, Thurow examines the newly–forming global economy, with a special focus on the role of the US and the dangers to our own national well–being. He examines such questions as: What's at stake for us in the global economy? Why is it important that the system be equitable and that other countries prosper along with us? What should our goals as a nation be – long term and short term? What are the tough choices that need to be made in our relationship with other countries and world regulatory bodies? What role should we be playing globally? What are the political, economic, social choices / tradeoffs we will have to confront?
Thurow contends that the huge and growing US trade deficit poses grave dangers to the value of the dollar and is putting our own economy in jeopardy.
As the world economy leaps national boundaries, its hallmark seems to be a rising instability and a growing inequality between the first and third worlds. Financial crises in the third world come ever more frequently and seem to be ever more severe. The first world economies seem to be in ever more frantic boom and bust cycles. Globalization causes riots throughout the world and is one factor in the rise of terrorism against the West.
Thurow shows how some nations, including Ireland and China, have embraced the concept of globalization and placed themselves into a position to prosper with growing and productive national economies. He contrasts their positive actions with Japan, whose leaders have allowed the nation to drift into stagnation and have destroyed its prosperity.
He argues that this is the time to choose globalization or be left behind, the time to "build a global economy that eliminates the defects," and he provides plenty of ideas for corporations, governments, economists, and citizens to act upon.
In this insightful and forward-looking study, MIT economist Thurow draws uncompromising conclusions: only a bold embrace of globalization will bring prosperity, and nations that fail to engage in global economics will fall behind the world’s dominant powers.
“Thurow deserves credit for spotlighting some unconventional but increasingly compelling explanations for America’s international deficits, like the little-noticed recent transformation of U.S. multinational companies from superstar exporters to superstar importers from all the factories they have moved abroad. He also usefully reminds readers that the imbalances result significantly from public-sector decisions, not simply from the impersonal workings of technological progress or free markets. Globalization’s course, in other words, can be usefully shaped by policy.”
-The Washington Post
Lester C. Thurow is the Lemelson Professor of Management and Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1968. From 1987 through 1993 he was dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management. His previous books include the New York Times bestsellers The Zero-Sum Society and The Future of Capitalism.
