I didn't like this book at all...infact one of those rare books that I decided to leave without finishing.
The biggest problem with the book is the condescending tone of the author; rather than treating his readers as mature well informed adults, he writes as if his reader base is made up of school going kids. The analogies that he uses insults the intelligence of his readers.
There is too much name dropping, like Manmohan Singh said this to me, or the Shah of Iran told me that; Friedman seems to like thinking that all the world leaders are cozy with him and confiding their innermost thoughts to him, rather than them granting him interviews, one of the many reporters that they would be granting interviews to.
The other thing that put me off is Friedman's rabid free market support; I had expected this book to a balanced and objective analysis of globalization and its impact, but it reads like propaganda for open market capitalization. All closed market economies and their administrators are projected as idiots and no honest intent has been shown to understand how globalization is impacting the less developed economies and why they are hesitant to open up.
This looked like a one sided point of view and I did not enjoy it at all.

An olive tree lives between 500 and 1500 years. A Lexus loses 30% of its value as soon as you drive it off the lot and will be trade in in 6.8 years. There is the problem with Tom Friedman’s comparisons, and his book.

“The Lexus and the Olive Tree” is Friedman’s book, written about globalization at the turn of the millennium. Friedman declares himself a ‘globalist’; which I don’t think had the same baggage 25 years ago as it does today. Back then the term conjured hope and wonder and curiosity. Nowadays instead it suggests deaths of despair, pollution, and the tyranny of crappy stuff.

Globalism was seen as an unchallengeable truth. Like it or not, we’re gonna globalize. For the elites, this means you will have more in common with others from the “Archipelagos of the Winners” (my term: Tokyo and Hong Kong and New York and The Capital in Hunger Games) than you do with people from Appalachia, from Maiduguri or from District 12. And we did, what Friedman described was a global process of market consolidation that has absolutely happened. Securitization, the overwhelming power of the information revolution and how it changed every society. What didn’t change was human nature. Friedman quotes Fukuyama a lot, the prophet of the in-between times — the man who couldn’t see what was right in front of him or right around the corner. Friedman also bought in, though he says he didn’t. He was convinced that the world would democratize. He was convinced China’s CCP would fall away. He was convinced, in short, of humanity’s capacity for progress.

I’ve been reading a lot about debt these days. In 1950 global debt was about T100$. These days it just passed T300$. That is $37,500 debt for every man, woman and child on the planet right now. That might not seem that much to you in the Archipelagos, but ‘globalism’ left 90% of the world behind. In DRC (just as an example, I could easily have used Nigeria or Pakistan or Ethiopia or Sudan or India or Honduras), per capita income has never arrived at $700 per year (and it peaked in 1980). This means that my food distribution manager from Idjwi Island who had nine children owes $412,000; and since he’s the only breadwinner it would take him 589 years of work using all his salary to pay off that debt. Even if he put his nine children into sweat shops (something increasingly common) it would take all of them together working 53 years and giving all their money to pay back their debt. But what would they live on? And what about the trillions in new debt every year? The dramatic rise in debt since 1950 isn’t even government debt, that came out of WWII already quite high. It is personal and corporate debt. Personal debt went from essentially 0 in 1960 to T100$ in those years.

Globalism is a loan shark.

But even more than debt, it’s the toxic mix of inequality and inter-generational inelasticity that is causing the stress. Debt causes us to malinvest. I think the creation of the FED might have been the worst decision in American history. FED gives money to governments to do as they wish without responsibility and restraint. It encourages emergencies, which allows money to move more freely. And it borrows from the future — my child’s future. But also, those who get earliest access to the fake money become the most powerful. Consider this, bankers get the first grab. Then companies; then people with good credit. By the time the poor get their hands on it, a 5% interest rate on a T note has become a 23% credit card rate. Debt is a tax on the poor. This causes the inequality. Meanwhile, our rapidly changing world favors those in stable homes, in good zip codes, with a lot of time to learn and adapt and send their kids to extra STEM courses. Which leads to, as Angus Deaton said, people “Raising the ladders as they ascend”. Inter-generational elasticity, the change in how children do compared to parents, is at its lowest point in America. Our children will do worse than we will, except for a lucky few. There’s just too much churn; things are too expensive (inflation is also a tax on the poor, and it’s also caused by the FED). And this says nothing about people lost in Africa or Central America who never really had a chance in the first place.

The olive trees have been fighting back, sort of like the Ents in Middle Earth. They see the aberrations that Saruman’s globalism brought and have decided it must end. Sure, they are patient and slow but when they put their mind to destruction, the Orcs had better watch out. Dictatorship survived the surge of libertarian chaos in the ’90s. Sure lots of countries became nominal ‘democracies’ (though only in function not really in form) but as the tidal waves of euphoria began to recede the olive trees proved to be the only life that was not washed away. In places that have not reverted to totalitarianism, criminal gangs filled the void. Latin America is essentially controlled by powerful gangs who move drugs and people and slaves. In the Sahel, people join ISIS and Boko Haram and Al Qaida. In Somalia they join Al Shabbab. In Lebanon they join Hezbollah. Democracy made a terrible mistake, in the late ’90s. It linked its governing ideology to ‘liberalism’; it became overly technocratic; it became missionary, exclusionary, and utopian — and it ceased to understand tragedy. It forgot that the olive tree mattered, and even sought to chop them all down.

We can mass produce olives, after all. They may not taste the same and in my heart of hearts I may know that these are no longer the olives that my ancestors ate, but they are 99 cents at the Dollar Store — so who cares, the promise of ‘liberalism’; the democratization of crappy stuff purchased by debt, is alive and well. Except that the world seems to have woken up. I wonder if it’s too late.

Globalization reminds me of compound interest, those who understand it, earn it; those who don't, pay it. It's something that affects individuals, neighborhoods, cities and for sure countries. Businesses could grow by embracing it and the same time could close by ignoring it. We take it for granted nowadays, we just open our phones and talk live with our cousin living thousands of kilometres away and we can buy a stock in our favourite online broker. We need to be cautious though, it's a hard game.

“It’s not fair that we are a hundred years behind the Israelis and they just got here.”

Mostly hollow and repetitive.

Remember being impressed by this book. Do not know if I finished it; same with "The World is Flat." Have since read serious criticisms of both. At least he got me thinking.

I don't know if my rating of this book is really fair, because 20 years after publication the things it got right have largely become accepted wisdom and now seem obvious, whereas the things it got wrong seem hopelessly optimistic or naive. New technologies and political realities have dated it, but there's still a lot of good stuff here.

Outstanding book that keeps one engaged with by being well written and full of valuable insights into our global economy. What is truly amazing is that the book was written 17 years ago and yet the vast majority of the information is still highly relevant. This one is a must read. Key excerpts below:

- …the defining measurement of the globalization system is speed – speed of commerce, travel, communication, and innovation.
- … only the paranoid, only those who are constantly looking over their shoulders to see who is creating something new that will destroy them and then staying one step ahead of them, will survive.
- … there is no more First World, Second World, or Third World. There’s now just the Fast World…and the Slow World.
- It has been said of America that it is a system designed by geniuses so that it could be run by idiots.
- I would suggest to you that the single most important innovation shaping that capital market was the idea of generally accepted accounting principles.
- … nations are moved to war for one of three reasons – “honor, fear and interest”
- … globalization is going to sharpen civil wars within countries between localizers and globalizers…
- Airpower alone couldn’t work in Vietnam because a people who were already in the Stone Age couldn’t be bombed back into it.
- That’s why I may be poor, but I’m not weak. I can’t afford to be weak, and my people don’t want me to be weak. They appreciate the stability that my iron fist brings.
- I will make peace with the Jews only in a way that establishes me as the one Arab leader who knows how to make peace with dignity.
- Anyone who has the smarts and energy to build a raft out of milk cartons and then sail across the Atlantic to America’s shores is someone I want as a new immigrant.
- … in the knowledge economy you don’t earn a living, you “learn a living.”

There is a lot that is annoying in the way Friedman writes (his analogies that are no doubt intended to be very smart but after the third or fourth repetition just make me want to roll my eyes, his telling about all these trips he has taken and people he has met and what they told him as support for what he is writing), and of course the book is very dated. But what actually made it more interesting than it otherwise might have been was the fact that it was so dated, to consider how much things have changed in the past twenty or so years, many things in ways that he said they would, but not all. It's not the book I'd recommend to someone wanting to learn about economics and globalization, but there is plenty to think about.

Friedman's main thesis is that globalization is the dominant force shaping the modern world, and it brings both opportunities and challenges. He argues that globalizationcharacterized by the integration of economies, cultures, and societies through technology, trade, and the movement of capital has transformed the way nations and individuals interact with one another. A must read for all the pro-globalization people.

Phù. Cuối cùng cũng kết thúc quyển sách được đúng deadline.
Hay. Quá hay.
Mình đọc quyển này khi nó ra đời khéo phải gần 20 năm. Và những gì trong sách đúng với tiến trình phát triển của VN mà mình chứng kiến. Nhớ hồi đầu những năm 2000, khi mà Internet với tràn vào tỉnh lẻ nhà mình - nó như mở ra cả một thế giới to lớn với con bé chưa từng đi đâu xa quá HN. Tới giờ là gần 20 năm qua rồi và Internet thành một phần của cuộc sống. Nhờ nó mà tầm mắt của mình mở rộng hơn - ước mơ cũng lớn hơn nhiều nhiều.
Mình cực thích quyển sách này còn bởi nó được viết do một người được đi khắp thế giới và được tiếp xúc với những người có tầm nhìn nhất thế giới. Như thể được đứng trên 1 tòa tháp cao ngất và nhìn vào từng quốc gia. Đột nhiên cảm thấy trái đất thu bé lại và hoàn toàn có thể hiểu được. Những ảo tưởng về phương Tây cũng bớt đi và ánh mắt thực tế hơn.
Mình cũng rất thích cách hiểu về Cành Oliu. Đối với thế hệ trẻ lớn lên trong giao thời như mình, cái gắn bó với gốc rễ phong tục có gì đó rất mờ nhạt và đôi khi còn tỏ ra khinh thường nữa. Lớp trẻ ở tỉnh mình được gọi là " một chốn bốn quê": quê bố, quê mẹ, nơi sinh ra và nơi đi làm. Có đôi khi cảm thấy bản thân chả thuộc về một nơi chốn nào hết. Phong tục tập quán cũng chả có gì để mà hiểu sâu hay cần phải tiếp tục duy trì. Nhưng đứng trong cả một thế giới đang toàn cầu hóa mạnh mẽ thì cành oliu của VN mới hiện rõ ràng và gần gũi. Nhờ đó mà mình cũng hiểu hơn tại sao Việt Kiều thường hướng về văn hóa dân tộc còn lớp trẻ mới lớn thì hay sùng bái phương Tây và chê bai gốc Việt.
Sẽ còn tìm đọc các tác phẩm khác của Friedman!

i couldn’t finish this. this book was just not for me, i got so excruciatingly bored like a quarter of the way through waiting for it to get interesting bc mr friedman does not stop reinforcing the same idea: globalization. i don’t really know what i was expecting because that’s literally what the book is about. regardless, i got very very bored and could not continue reading the same idea bc re proven 1000 more times with slightly different evidence. i wanted action, i wanted sauce, and i got The Golden Straitjacket and The Electronic Herd. I got economics. I got Thai banks. No thank you Mr. Friedman. i wanted politics and i got money. i guess that’s the main point of globalization isn’t it Mr. Friedman? oh well Mr. Friedman.

just be grateful i attempted this book Mr. Friedman- the last time someone checked you out from the school library was 2009.