Today, for better or for worse, we live in an increasingly interconnected world. Goods may be cheaper worldwide, but outsourcing leaves some workers caught in the switches. What to make of the new international economy? And what damage to culture lies in its wake?
Bookmarks Staff Picks
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy
An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade
Pietra Rivoli (2005)
The author, an economics professor at Georgetown University, uses a $5 T-shirt to illustrate global market forces at work. In charting the T-shirt’s construction, she traveled from Texas cotton fields to Chinese factories and Tanzanian used-clothing vendors to shed light on the major political, ethical, social, and economic implications of unprotected global trade.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
John Perkins (2005)
In the 1970s, John Perkins worked for an international consulting firm. As he traveled around the globe, he became an "economic hit man" who helped the "corporatocracy" (the United States, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Agency for International Development) exploit developing nations—which then incurred enormous debts. While critics question the accuracy of some of Perkins’s claims, it is nonetheless a gripping account of the darker side of America’s global reach.
Foreign Babes in Beijing
Behind the Scenes of a New China
Rachel DeWoskin (2005)
When Rachel DeWoskin graduated from Columbia University in 1994, she went to Beijing as a PR consultant and was soon cast as a sexually liberated American girl on the popular Chinese soap opera Foreign Babes in Beijing (think Sex and the City). Her memoir captures her five years in Beijing, Sino-American culture clashes, the permeation of Western influence, and the loss of Chinese traditions.
The World Is Flat
A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Friedman
Globalization 3.0, ready or not. Friedman, the great explicator of globalization, uses "flatness" as a metaphor to describe our recent global landscape where individuals across the globe collaborate—and compete—on an entirely new scale. In untangling complex foreign policy and economic issues, he has this to say to his daughters: "Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs." ( )
One World, Ready or Not
The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism
William Greider (1997)
If Thomas Friedman advocates globalization while recognizing its complexities, William Greider, a former editor at Rolling Stone and a correspondent for The Nation, views globalization with more trepidation. In his exploration of capitalism run amok, Greider charts trends (i.e., toward multinational corporations) and then offers populist solutions (a "global humanism") to the world’s global economic problems.
Globalization and Its Discontents
Joseph E. Stiglitz (2002)
The Nobel Prize–winning Columbia University economics professor (and former chief economist at the World Bank and economist in the Clinton administration) dissects globalization’s potential in this classic survey of globalization’s structural flaws. He offers detailed analyses of the often ideologically driven, poor economic policies of the International Monetary Fund and other international organizations and offers a reform agenda. Making Globalization Work (2007) is a follow-up of sorts.
Paul Collier
Professor
Paul Collier is a professor at Oxford who has focused on the poorest countries of the world, especially Africa. His new book, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford, 2007), addresses the divergence of these poorest countries from the rest of humankind. According to The Economist, it is "set to be a classic."
Geography and Trade
Paul Krugman (1991)
This book is both lucidly written and pathbreaking. It introduced to a wide audience key ideas hitherto available only in complex form concerning the international location of manufacturing. The centerpiece is the analysis of why firms in a particular activity congregate together in one city, or "cluster," and the consequences for trade. The analysis is important for understanding both the explosive growth of export manufacturing in Asia and why some places get left behind.
In Defense of Globalization
Jagdish Bhagwati (2007)
A stunningly lucid sweep of the economic processes that add up to globalization by a master of the subject. The book is a comprehensive analysis. Don’t dare pass judgment on globalization until you have read it.
Why Cooperate?
The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods
Scott Barrett (2007)
Global public goods are the poor relation of globalization: the activities that depend upon cooperation between governments instead of private markets. Climate change is part of it, but the issues are much wider. Barrett provides an engaging and revealing analysis of why global public goods are so inadequately provided, as well as the scope for remedies. Barrett’s book is a vital complement to the analysis of the private mechanisms of globalization.
Jagdish Bhagwati
Professor, Columbia University
Jagdish Bhagwati is University Professor, Economics and Law, at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served as adviser to the United Nations on globalization. Among his more than 50 books is In Defense of Globalization (Oxford, 2004), just reissued in a new edition with an afterword.
Why Globalization Works
Martin Wolf (2004)
It’s a splendid book that makes a spirited and successful defense of globalization against its critics.
How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place
Edited by Bjørn Lomborg (2006)
Lomborg put together about 10 of the world’s leading economists to see how one might rank different issues in terms of cost-effectiveness. The book is a useful antidote to the optimism about the Millennium Goals by people like Jeffrey Sachs [author of The End of Poverty]: these goals need to be analyzed by economists, not embraced uncritically as if we were PR persons rather than scholars.
Financial Crisis, Contagion, and Containment
From Asia to Argentina
Padma Desai (2003)
Paul Krugman called this the "best book on financial crises today." It remains so to this day, and it has gained relevance as the world economy is poised at the edge of yet another financial crisis.
