autocratic for the people.

Flat, and uncertain.

While on vacation, I finally had time to start on the post-Christmas stack of reading. I picked two of medium difficuly from the pile (sorry, The Confusion, but you're just not beach material) which provided an interesting view of the world when read back-to-back. The first was Friedman's The World is Flat, a meditation on globalization. It summarizes the current state of the business-optimization art, discusses what global competition for jobs means for the long out-of-school workforce in the U.S., and attempts to provide insights into how individuals can ride the global economy to greater success. I'd say it succeeded at the first two goals, and did about as good a job as can be expected on the last one (summary: be paid for your creativity and adaptability, not your knowledge). On the whole, a highly recommended read.

The second, What's the Matter With Kansas?, is ostensibly a discussion of how the Republican Party uses emotional issues to advance their economic agenda, and how that leads to millions of Americans voting against their own success. To be fair, it covers precisely that for the first hundred pages or so, but it then moves on to cover broader topics -- like the impact of globalization on blue-collar workers in post-industrial America.

The author of Kansas, Thomas Frank, is a bit more emotionally attached to his work than Friedman was, but rightly so, as Kansas is largely written as an opinion piece. Frank's attitude towards globalization is similar to how it's presented by Lou Dobbs and other America-first commentators: as an insidious, growing force, one best controlled through legislation and boycotting those dastardly outsourcing companies. By contrast, Friedman sees it as the inevitable and entirely unemotional market-driven response to new skills, workers, and types of work. If Frank's recommendation is opposition, Friedman's is acceptance. He thinks early action and reeducation are more realistic courses of action for the displaced than reactionary trade embargoes, and eventually he will be right.

In any event, I found the most interesting comparison point between the books to be how they present their case studies. Frank discusses a particularly poor Kansas county in a generalized way:

"What seems to enrage Kiowa County is the government power that has kept them afloat through their hardship. Nearly 29 percent of the county's total personal income comes in the form of government benefits and other transfer payments; in crop subsidies alone Kiowa County farmers have received $40 million since 1995. And yet what Kiowa County wants -- desperately, urgently, if the art of M.T. Liggett is any indication -- is for the liberals to pack up their communist EPA and their fascist feminism and their "anti-Christian" evolution and leave them alone. Al Gore received only 18 percent of the vote out here, and in 1992 the county actually voted to secede from Kansas, to be done once and for all with the high-handed ways of those city slickers in Topeka."

Friedman, on the other hand, takes as case studies his interviewees and contributors, using them as concrete (albeit statistically unusual) examples of successful adaptation to a changing business world. Friedman's subjects are as adept at riding the outsourcing wave as Frank's are awkward, but one finds Friedman's examples more resonant as they're actual people. Frank's aggergations lose some credibility by comparison.

Which brings us to the collision that originally inspired this post: Friedman discusses, in Flat's final pages, how various national and international conflicts will help or hinder the transformation of the global economy. About extremism in the Middle East, he writes:


"(...) Humiliation is the key. It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money. It is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence. When you take the economic and political backwardness of much of the Arab-Muslim world today, add its past grandeur and self-image of religious superiority, and combine it with the discrimination and alienation these Arab-Muslim males face when they leave home and move to Europe, or when they grow up in Europe, you have one powerful cocktail of rage. As my friend the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem said of the 9/11 hijackers, they 'are walking down the streets of life, searching for tall buildings --for towers to bring down, because they are not able to be tall like them.' "

Which is really an elaborate restatement of Kansas' thesis, that emotional and moral issues resonate so strongly with conservative Christian voters that they lash out against the perceived enemy (Democrats) when in fact they're tightening their own nooses.

Perhaps the United States and Middle East have more in common than we'd like to admit.

posted by avixe @ 1:37 AM